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Photos that give voice to the animal kingdom | {0: "Frans Lanting is one of the greatest nature photographers of our time. His work has been featured in National Geographic, Audubon andTime, as well as numerous award-winning books. Lanting's recent exhibition, The LIFE Project, offers a lyrical interpretation of the history of life on Earth."} | TED2014 | Humanity takes center stage at TED, but I would like to add a voice for the animals, whose bodies and minds and spirits shaped us. Some years ago, it was my good fortune to meet a tribal elder on an island not far from Vancouver. His name is Jimmy Smith, and he shared a story with me that is told among his people, who call themselves the Kwikwasut'inuxw. Once upon a time, he told me, all animals on Earth were one. Even though they look different on the outside, inside, they're all the same, and from time to time they would gather at a sacred cave deep inside the forest to celebrate their unity. When they arrived, they would all take off their skins. Raven shed his feathers, bear his fur, and salmon her scales, and then, they would dance. But one day, a human made it to the cave and laughed at what he saw because he did not understand. Embarrassed, the animals fled, and that was the last time they revealed themselves this way. The ancient understanding that underneath their separate identities, all animals are one, has been a powerful inspiration to me. I like to get past the fur, the feathers and the scales. I want to get under the skin. No matter whether I'm facing a giant elephant or a tiny tree frog, my goal is to connect us with them, eye to eye. You may wonder, do I ever photograph people? Sure. People are always present in my photos, no matter whether they appear to portray tortoises or cougars or lions. You just have to learn how to look past their disguise. As a photographer, I try to reach beyond the differences in our genetic makeup to appreciate all we have in common with every other living thing. When I use my camera, I drop my skin like the animals at that cave so I can show who they really are. As animals blessed with the power of rational thought, we can marvel at the intricacies of life. As citizens of a planet in trouble, it is our moral responsibility to deal with the dramatic loss in diversity of life. But as humans with hearts, we can all rejoice in the unity of life, and perhaps we can change what once happened in that sacred cave. Let's find a way to join the dance. Thank you. (Applause) |
Yes, I survived cancer. But that doesn't define me | {0: "Debra Jarvis isn't your typical hospital chaplain. With wry wit, she aims to comfort patients -- and also challenge them."} | TEDMED 2014 | I just met you on a bus, and we would really like to get to know each other, but I've got to get off at the next stop, so you're going to tell me three things about yourself that just define you as a person, three things about yourself that will help me understand who you are, three things that just get to your very essence. And what I'm wondering is, of those three things, is any one of them surviving some kind of trauma? Cancer survivor, rape survivor, Holocaust survivor, incest survivor. Ever notice how we tend to identify ourselves by our wounds? And where I have seen this survivor identity have the most consequences is in the cancer community. And I've been around this community for a long time, because I've been a hospice and a hospital chaplain for almost 30 years. And in 2005, I was working at a big cancer center when I received the news that my mother had breast cancer. And then five days later, I received the news that I had breast cancer. My mother and I can be competitive — (Laughter) — but I was really not trying to compete with her on this one. And in fact, I thought, well, if you have to have cancer, it's pretty convenient to be working at a place that treats it. But this is what I heard from a lot of outraged people. What? You're the chaplain. You should be immune. Like, maybe I should have just gotten off with a warning instead of an actual ticket, because I'm on the force. So I did get my treatment at the cancer center where I worked, which was amazingly convenient, and I had chemotherapy and a mastectomy, and a saline implant put in, and so before I say another word, let me just say right now, this is the fake one. (Laughter) I have found that I need to get that out of the way, because I'll see somebody go "Oh, I know it's this one." And then I'll move or I'll gesture and they'll go, "No, it's that one." So now you know. I learned a lot being a patient, and one of the surprising things was that only a small part of the cancer experience is about medicine. Most of it is about feelings and faith and losing and finding your identity and discovering strength and flexibility you never even knew you had. It's about realizing that the most important things in life are not things at all, but relationships, and it's about laughing in the face of uncertainty and learning that the way to get out of almost anything is to say, "I have cancer." So the other thing I learned was that I don't have to take on "cancer survivor" as my identity, but, boy, are there powerful forces pushing me to do just that. Now, don't, please, misunderstand me. Cancer organizations and the drive for early screening and cancer awareness and cancer research have normalized cancer, and this is a wonderful thing. We can now talk about cancer without whispering. We can talk about cancer and we can support one another. But sometimes, it feels like people go a little overboard and they start telling us how we're going to feel. So about a week after my surgery, we had a houseguest. That was probably our first mistake. And keep in mind that at this point in my life I had been a chaplain for over 20 years, and issues like dying and death and the meaning of life, these are all things I'd been yakking about forever. So at dinner that night, our houseguest proceeds to stretch his arms up over his head, and say, "You know, Deb, now you're really going to learn what's important. Yes, you are going to make some big changes in your life, and now you're going to start thinking about your death. Yep, this cancer is your wakeup call." Now, these are golden words coming from someone who is speaking about their own experience, but when someone is telling you how you are going to feel, it's instant crap. The only reason I did not kill him with my bare hands was because I could not lift my right arm. But I did say a really bad word to him, followed by a regular word, that — (Laughter) — made my husband say, "She's on narcotics." (Laughter) And then after my treatment, it just felt like everyone was telling me what my experience was going to mean. "Oh, this means you're going to be doing the walk." "Oh, this means you're coming to the luncheon." "This means you're going to be wearing the pink ribbon and the pink t-shirt and the headband and the earrings and the bracelet and the panties." Panties. No, seriously, google it. (Laughter) How is that raising awareness? Only my husband should be seeing my panties. (Laughter) He's pretty aware of cancer already. It was at that point where I felt like, oh my God, this is just taking over my life. And that's when I told myself, claim your experience. Don't let it claim you. We all know that the way to cope with trauma, with loss, with any life-changing experience, is to find meaning. But here's the thing: No one can tell us what our experience means. We have to decide what it means. And it doesn't have to be some gigantic, extroverted meaning. We don't all have to start a foundation or an organization or write a book or make a documentary. Meaning can be quiet and introverted. Maybe we make one small decision about our lives that can bring about big change. Many years ago, I had a patient, just a wonderful young man who was loved by the staff, and so it was something of a shock to us to realize that he had no friends. He lived by himself, he would come in for chemotherapy by himself, he would receive his treatment, and then he'd walk home alone. And I even asked him. I said, "Hey, how come you never bring a friend with you?" And he said, "I don't really have any friends." But he had tons of friends on the infusion floor. We all loved him, and people were going in and out of his room all the time. So at his last chemo, we sang him the song and we put the crown on his head and we blew the bubbles, and then I asked him, I said, "So what are you going to do now?" And he answered, "Make friends." And he did. He started volunteering and he made friends there, and he began going to a church and he made friends there, and at Christmas he invited my husband and me to a party in his apartment, and the place was filled with his friends. Claim your experience. Don't let it claim you. He decided that the meaning of his experience was to know the joy of friendship, and then learn to make friends. So what about you? How are you going to find meaning in your crappy experience? It could be a recent one, or it could be one that you've been carrying around for a really long time. It's never too late to change what it means, because meaning is dynamic. What it means today may not be what it means a year from now, or 10 years from now. It's never too late to become someone other than simply a survivor. Hear how static that word sounds? Survivor. No movement, no growth. Claim your experience. Don't let it claim you, because if you do, I believe you will become trapped, you will not grow, you will not evolve. But of course, sometimes it's not outside pressures that cause us to take on that identity of survivor. Sometimes we just like the perks. Sometimes there's a payoff. But then we get stuck. Now, one of the first things I learned as a chaplain intern was the three C's of the chaplain's job: Comfort, clarify and, when necessary, confront or challenge. Now, we all pretty much love the comforting and the clarifying. The confronting, not so much. One of the other things that I loved about being a chaplain was seeing patients a year, or even several years after their treatment, because it was just really cool to see how they had changed and how their lives had evolved and what had happened to them. So I was thrilled one day to get a page down into the lobby of the clinic from a patient who I had seen the year before, and she was there with her two adult daughters, who I also knew, for her one year follow-up exam. So I got down to the lobby, and they were ecstatic because she had just gotten all of her test results back and she was NED: No Evidence of Disease. Which I used to think meant Not Entirely Dead. So they were ecstatic, we sat down to visit, and it was so weird, because within two minutes, she started retelling me the story of her diagnosis and her surgery and her chemo, even though, as her chaplain, I saw her every week, and so I knew this story. And she was using words like suffering, agony, struggle. And she ended her story with, "I felt crucified." And at that point, her two daughters got up and said, "We're going to go get coffee." And they left. Tell me three things about yourself before the next stop. People were leaving the bus before she even got to number two or number three. So I handed her a tissue, and I gave her a hug, and then, because I really cared for this woman, I said, "Get down off your cross." And she said, "What?" And I repeated, "Get down off your cross." And to her credit, she could talk about her reasons for embracing and then clinging to this identity. It got her a lot of attention. People were taking care of her for a change. But now, it was having the opposite effect. It was pushing people away. People kept leaving to get coffee. She felt crucified by her experience, but she didn't want to let that crucified self die. Now, perhaps you are thinking I was a little harsh with her, so I must tell you that I was speaking out of my own experience. Many, many years before, I had been fired from a job that I loved, and I would not stop talking about my innocence and the injustice and the betrayal and the deceipt, until finally, just like this woman, people were walking away from me, until I finally realized I wasn't just processing my feelings, I was feeding them. I didn't want to let that crucified self die. But we all know that with any resurrection story, you have to die first. The Christian story, Jesus was dead a whole day in the tomb before he was resurrected. And I believe that for us, being in the tomb means doing our own deep inner work around our wounds and allowing ourselves to be healed. We have to let that crucified self die so that a new self, a truer self, is born. We have to let that old story go so that a new story, a truer story, can be told. Claim your experience. Don't let it claim you. What if there were no survivors, meaning, what if people decided to just claim their trauma as an experience instead of taking it on as an identity? Maybe it would be the end of being trapped in our wounds and the beginning of amazing self-exploration and discovery and growth. Maybe it would be the start of defining ourselves by who we have become and who we are becoming. So perhaps survivor was not one of the three things that you would tell me. No matter. I just want you all to know that I am really glad that we are on this bus together, and this is my stop. (Applause) |
What new power looks like | {0: 'At Purpose, Jeremy Heimans strategizes how to harness new social, economic and technological models to build movements with impact.'} | TEDSalon Berlin 2014 | So this is Anna Hazare, and Anna Hazare may well be the most cutting-edge digital activist in the world today. And you wouldn't know it by looking at him. Hazare is a 77-year-old Indian anticorruption and social justice activist. And in 2011, he was running a big campaign to address everyday corruption in India, a topic that Indian elites love to ignore. So as part of this campaign, he was using all of the traditional tactics that a good Gandhian organizer would use. So he was on a hunger strike, and Hazare realized through his hunger that actually maybe this time, in the 21st century, a hunger strike wouldn't be enough. So he started playing around with mobile activism. So the first thing he did is he said to people, "Okay, why don't you send me a text message if you support my campaign against corruption?" So he does this, he gives people a short code, and about 80,000 people do it. Okay, that's pretty respectable. But then he decides, "Let me tweak my tactics a little bit." He says, "Why don't you leave me a missed call?" Now, for those of you who have lived in the global South, you'll know that missed calls are a really critical part of global mobile culture. I see people nodding. People leave missed calls all the time: If you're running late for a meeting and you just want to let them know that you're on the way, you leave them a missed call. If you're dating someone and you just want to say "I miss you" you leave them a missed call. So a note for a dating tip here, in some cultures, if you want to please your lover, you call them and hang up. (Laughter) So why do people leave missed calls? Well, the reason of course is that they're trying to avoid charges associated with making calls and sending texts. So when Hazare asked people to leave him a missed call, let's have a little guess how many people actually did this? Thirty-five million. So this is one of the largest coordinated actions in human history. It's remarkable. And this reflects the extraordinary strength of the emerging Indian middle class and the power that their mobile phones bring. But he used that, Hazare ended up with this massive CSV file of mobile phone numbers, and he used that to deploy real people power on the ground to get hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets in Delhi to make a national point of everyday corruption in India. It's a really striking story. So this is me when I was 12 years old. I hope you see the resemblance. And I was also an activist, and I have been an activist all my life. I had this really funny childhood where I traipsed around the world meeting world leaders and Noble prize winners, talking about Third World debt, as it was then called, and demilitarization. I was a very, very serious child. (Laughter) And back then, in the early '90s, I had a very cutting-edge tech tool of my own: the fax. And the fax was the tool of my activism. And at that time, it was the best way to get a message to a lot of people all at once. I'll give you one example of a fax campaign that I ran. It was the eve of the Gulf War and I organized a global campaign to flood the hotel, the Intercontinental in Geneva, where James Baker and Tariq Aziz were meeting on the eve of the war, and I thought if I could flood them with faxes, we'll stop the war. Well, unsurprisingly, that campaign was wholly unsuccessful. There are lots of reasons for that, but there's no doubt that one sputtering fax machine in Geneva was a little bit of a bandwidth constraint in terms of the ability to get a message to lots of people. And so, I went on to discover some better tools. I cofounded Avaaz, which uses the Internet to mobilize people and now has almost 40 million members, and I now run Purpose, which is a home for these kinds of technology-powered movements. So what's the moral of this story? Is the moral of this story, you know what, the fax is kind of eclipsed by the mobile phone? This is another story of tech-determinism? Well, I would argue that there's actually more to it than that. I'd argue that in the last 20 years, something more fundamental has changed than just new tech. I would argue that there has been a fundamental shift in the balance of power in the world. You ask any activist how to understand the world, and they'll say, "Look at where the power is, who has it, how it's shifting." And I think we all sense that something big is happening. So Henry Timms and I — Henry's a fellow movement builder — got talking one day and we started to think, how can we make sense of this new world? How can we describe it and give it a framework that makes it more useful? Because we realized that many of the lessons that we were discovering in movements actually applied all over the world in many sectors of our society. So I want to introduce you to this framework: Old power, meet new power. And I want to talk to you about what new power is today. New power is the deployment of mass participation and peer coordination — these are the two key elements — to create change and shift outcomes. And we see new power all around us. This is Beppe Grillo he was a populist Italian blogger who, with a minimal political apparatus and only some online tools, won more than 25 percent of the vote in recent Italian elections. This is Airbnb, which in just a few years has radically disrupted the hotel industry without owning a single square foot of real estate. This is Kickstarter, which we know has raised over a billion dollars from more than five million people. Now, we're familiar with all of these models. But what's striking is the commonalities, the structural features of these new models and how they differ from old power. Let's look a little bit at this. Old power is held like a currency. New power works like a current. Old power is held by a few. New power isn't held by a few, it's made by many. Old power is all about download, and new power uploads. And you see a whole set of characteristics that you can trace, whether it's in media or politics or education. So we've talked a little bit about what new power is. Let's, for a second, talk about what new power isn't. New power is not your Facebook page. I assure you that having a social media strategy can enable you to do just as much download as you used to do when you had the radio. Just ask Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, I assure you that his Facebook page has not embraced the power of participation. New power is not inherently positive. In fact, this isn't an normative argument that we're making, there are many good things about new power, but it can produce bad outcomes. More participation, more peer coordination, sometimes distorts outcomes and there are some things, like things, for example, in the medical profession that we want new power to get nowhere near. And thirdly, new power is not the inevitable victor. In fact, unsurprisingly, as many of these new power models get to scale, what you see is this massive pushback from the forces of old power. Just look at this really interesting epic struggle going on right now between Edward Snowden and the NSA. You'll note that only one of the two people on this slide is currently in exile. And so, it's not at all clear that new power will be the inevitable victor. That said, keep one thing in mind: We're at the beginning of a very steep curve. So you think about some of these new power models, right? These were just like someone's garage idea a few years ago, and now they're disrupting entire industries. And so, what's interesting about new power, is the way it feeds on itself. Once you have an experience of new power, you tend to expect and want more of it. So let's say you've used a peer-to-peer lending platform like Lending Tree or Prosper, then you've figured out that you don't need the bank, and who wants the bank, right? And so, that experience tends to embolden you it tends to make you want more participation across more aspects of your life. And what this gives rise to is a set of values. We talked about the models that new power has engendered — the Airbnbs, the Kickstarters. What about the values? And this is an early sketch at what new power values look like. New power values prize transparency above all else. It's almost a religious belief in transparency, a belief that if you shine a light on something, it will be better. And remember that in the 20th century, this was not at all true. People thought that gentlemen should sit behind closed doors and make comfortable agreements. New power values of informal, networked governance. New power folks would never have invented the U.N. today, for better or worse. New power values participation, and new power is all about do-it-yourself. In fact, what's interesting about new power is that it eschews some of the professionalization and specialization that was all the rage in the 20th century. So what's interesting about these new power values and these new power models is what they mean for organizations. So we've spent a bit of time thinking, how can we plot organizations on a two-by-two where, essentially, we look at new power values and new power models and see where different people sit? We started with a U.S. analysis, and let me show you some interesting findings. So the first is Apple. In this framework, we actually described Apple as an old power company. That's because the ideology, the governing ideology of Apple is the ideology of the perfectionist product designer in Cupertino. It's absolutely about that beautiful, perfect thing descending upon us in perfection. And it does not value, as a company, transparency. In fact, it's very secretive. Now, Apple is one of the most succesful companies in the world. So this shows that you can still pursue a successful old power strategy. But one can argue that there's real vulnerabilites in that model. I think another interesting comparison is that of the Obama campaign versus the Obama presidency. (Applause) Now, I like President Obama, but he ran with new power at his back, right? And he said to people, we are the ones we've been waiting for. And he used crowdfunding to power a campaign. But when he got into office, he governed like more or less all the other presidents did. And this is a really interesting trend, is when new power gets powerful, what happens? So this is a framework you should look at and think about where your own organization sits on it. And think about where it should be in five or 10 years. So what do you do if you're old power? Well, if you're there thinking, in old power, this won't happen to us. Then just look at the Wikipedia entry for Encyclopædia Britannica. Let me tell you, it's a very sad read. But if you are old power, the most important thing you can do is to occupy yourself before others occupy you, before you are occupied. Imagine that a group of your biggest skeptics are camped in the heart of your organization asking the toughest questions and they can see everything inside of your organization. And ask them, would they like what they see and should our model change? What about if you're new power? Is new power kind of just riding the wave to glory? I would argue no. I would argue that there are some very real challenges to new power in this nascent phase. Let's stick with the Occupy Wall Street example for a moment. Occupy was this incredible example of new power, the purest example of new power. And yet, it failed to consolidate. So the energy that it created was great for the meme phase, but they were so committed to participation, that they never got anything done. And in fact that model means that the challenge for new power is: how do you use institutional power without being institutionalized? One the other end of the spectra is Uber. Uber is an amazing, highly scalable new power model. That network is getting denser and denser by the day. But what's really interesting about Uber is it hasn't really adopted new power values. This is a real quote from the Uber CEO recently: He says, "Once we get rid of the dude in the car" — he means drivers — "Uber will be cheaper." Now, new power models live and die by the strength of their networks. By whether the drivers and the consumers who use the service actually believe in it. Because they're not an exercise of top-down perfectionism, they are about the network. And so, the challenge, and this is why it's in no way surprising, is that Uber's drivers are now unionizing. It's extraordinary. Uber's drivers are turning on Uber. And the challenge for Uber — this isn't an easy situation for them — is that they are locked into a broader superstrcuture that is really old power. They've raised more than a billion dollars in the capital markets. Those markets expect a financial return, and they way you get a financial return is by squeezing and squeezing your users and your drivers for more and more value and giving that value to your investors. So the big question about the future of new power, in my view, is: Will that old power just emerge? So will new power elites just become old power and squeeze? Or will that new power base bite back? Will the next big Uber be co-owned by Uber drivers? And I think this going to be a very interesting structural question. Finally, think about new power being more than just an entity that scales things that make us have slightly better consumer experiences. My call to action for new power is to not be an island. We have major structural problems in the world today that could benefit enormously from the kinds of mass participation and peer coordination that these new power players know so well how to generate. And we badly need them to turn their energies and their power to big, what economists might call public goods problems, that are often beyond markets where investors can easily be found. And I think if we can do that, we might be able to fundamentally change not only human beings' sense of their own agency and power — because I think that's the most wonderful thing about new power, is that people feel more powerful — but we might also be able to change the way we relate to each other and the way we relate to authority and institutions. And to me, that's absolutely worth trying for. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
It’s our city. Let’s fix it | {0: 'Alessandra Orofino founded Meu Rio, Rio de Janeiro’s largest mobilization network.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | Fifty-four percent of the world's population lives in our cities. In developing countries, one third of that population is living in slums. Seventy-five percent of global energy consumption occurs in our cities, and 80 percent of gas emissions that cause global warming come from our cities. So things that you and I might think about as global problems, like climate change, the energy crisis or poverty, are really, in many ways, city problems. They will not be solved unless people who live in cities, like most of us, actually start doing a better job, because right now, we are not doing a very good one. And that becomes very clear when we look into three aspects of city life: first, our citizens' willingness to engage with democratic institutions; second, our cities' ability to really include all of their residents; and lastly, our own ability to live fulfilling and happy lives. When it comes to engagement, the data is very clear. Voter turnout around the world peaked in the late '80s, and it has been declining at a pace that we have never seen before, and if those numbers are bad at the national level, at the level of our cities, they are just dismal. In the last two years, two of the world's most consolidated, oldest democracies, the U.S. and France, held nationwide municipal elections. In France, voter turnout hit a record low. Almost 40 percent of voters decided not to show up. In the U.S., the numbers were even scarier. In some American cities, voter turnout was close to five percent. I'll let that sink in for a second. We're talking about democratic cities in which 95 percent of people decided that it was not important to elect their leaders. The city of L.A., a city of four million people, elected its mayor with just a bit over 200,000 votes. That was the lowest turnout the city had seen in 100 years. Right here, in my city of Rio, in spite of mandatory voting, almost 30 percent of the voting population chose to either annul their votes or stay home and pay a fine in the last mayoral elections. When it comes to inclusiveness, our cities are not the best cases of success either, and again, you don't need to look very far in order to find proof of that. The city of Rio is incredibly unequal. This is Leblon. Leblon is the city's richest neighborhood. And this is Complexo do Alemão. This is where over 70,000 of the city's poorest residents live. Leblon has an HDI, a Human Development Index, of .967. That is higher than Norway, Switzerland or Sweden. Complexo do Alemão has an HDI of .711. It sits somewhere in between the HDI of Algeria and Gabon. So Rio, like so many cities across the global South, is a place where you can go from northern Europe to sub-Saharan Africa in the space of 30 minutes. If you drive, that is. If you take public transit, it's about two hours. And lastly, perhaps most importantly, cities, with the incredible wealth of relations that they enable, could be the ideal places for human happiness to flourish. We like being around people. We are social animals. Instead, countries where urbanization has already peaked seem to be the very countries in which cities have stopped making us happy. The United States population has suffered from a general decrease in happiness for the past three decades, and the main reason is this. The American way of building cities has caused good quality public spaces to virtually disappear in many, many American cities, and as a result, they have seen a decline of relations, of the things that make us happy. Many studies show an increase in solitude and a decrease in solidarity, honesty, and social and civic participation. So how do we start building cities that make us care? Cities that value their most important asset: the incredible diversity of the people who live in them? Cities that make us happy? Well, I believe that if we want to change what our cities look like, then we really have to change the decision-making processes that have given us the results that we have right now. We need a participation revolution, and we need it fast. The idea of voting as our only exercise in citizenship does not make sense anymore. People are tired of only being treated as empowered individuals every few years when it's time to delegate that power to someone else. If the protests that swept Brazil in June 2013 have taught us anything, it's that every time we try to exercise our power outside of an electoral context, we are beaten up, humiliated or arrested. And this needs to change, because when it does, not only will people re-engage with the structures of representation, but also complement these structures with direct, effective, and collective decision making, decision making of the kind that attacks inequality by its very inclusive nature, decision making of the kind that can change our cities into better places for us to live. But there is a catch, obviously: Enabling widespread participation and redistributing power can be a logistical nightmare, and there's where technology can play an incredibly helpful role, by making it easier for people to organize, communicate and make decisions without having to be in the same room at the same time. Unfortunately for us, when it comes to fostering democratic processes, our city governments have not used technology to its full potential. So far, most city governments have been effective at using tech to turn citizens into human sensors who serve authorities with data on the city: potholes, fallen trees or broken lamps. They have also, to a lesser extent, invited people to participate in improving the outcome of decisions that were already made for them, just like my mom when I was eight and she told me that I had a choice: I had to be in bed by 8 p.m., but I could choose my pink pajamas or my blue pajamas. That's not participation, and in fact, governments have not been very good at using technology to enable participation on what matters — the way we allocate our budget, the way we occupy our land, and the way we manage our natural resources. Those are the kinds of decisions that can actually impact global problems that manifest themselves in our cities. The good news is, and I do have good news to share with you, we don't need to wait for governments to do this. I have reason to believe that it's possible for citizens to build their own structures of participation. Three years ago, I cofounded an organization called Meu Rio, and we make it easier for people in the city of Rio to organize around causes and places that they care about in their own city, and have an impact on those causes and places every day. In these past three years, Meu Rio grew to a network of 160,000 citizens of Rio. About 40 percent of those members are young people aged 20 to 29. That is one in every 15 young people of that age in Rio today. Amongst our members is this adorable little girl, Bia, to your right, and Bia was just 11 years old when she started a campaign using one of our tools to save her model public school from demolition. Her school actually ranks among the best public schools in the country, and it was going to be demolished by the Rio de Janeiro state government to build, I kid you not, a parking lot for the World Cup right before the event happened. Bia started a campaign, and we even watched her school 24/7 through webcam monitoring, and many months afterwards, the government changed their minds. Bia's school stayed in place. There's also Jovita. She's an amazing woman whose daughter went missing about 10 years ago, and since then, she has been looking for her daughter. In that process, she found out that first, she was not alone. In the last year alone, 2013, 6,000 people disappeared in the state of Rio. But she also found out that in spite of that, Rio had no centralized intelligence system for solving missing persons cases. In other Brazilian cities, those systems have helped solve up to 80 percent of missing persons cases. She started a campaign, and after the secretary of security got 16,000 emails from people asking him to do this, he responded, and started to build a police unit specializing in those cases. It was open to the public at the end of last month, and Jovita was there giving interviews and being very fancy. And then, there is Leandro. Leandro is an amazing guy in a slum in Rio, and he created a recycling project in the slum. At the end of last year, December 16, he received an eviction order by the Rio de Janeiro state government giving him two weeks to leave the space that he had been using for two years. The plan was to hand it over to a developer, who planned to turn it into a construction site. Leandro started a campaign using one of our tools, the Pressure Cooker, the same one that Bia and Jovita used, and the state government changed their minds before Christmas Eve. These stories make me happy, but not just because they have happy endings. They make me happy because they are happy beginnings. The teacher and parent community at Bia's school is looking for other ways they could improve that space even further. Leandro has ambitious plans to take his model to other low-income communities in Rio, and Jovita is volunteering at the police unit that she helped created. Bia, Jovita and Leandro are living examples of something that citizens and city governments around the world need to know: We are ready. As citizens, we are ready to decide on our common destinies, because we know that the way we distribute power says a lot about how we actually value everyone, and because we know that enabling and participating in local politics is a sign that we truly care about our relations to one another, and we are ready to do this in cities around the world right now. With the Our Cities network, the Meu Rio team hopes to share what we have learned with other people who want to create similar initiatives in their own cities. We have already started doing it in São Paulo with incredible results, and want to take it to cities around the world through a network of citizen-centric, citizen-led organizations that can inspire us, challenge us, and remind us to demand real participation in our city lives. It is up to us to decide whether we want schools or parking lots, community-driven recycling projects or construction sites, loneliness or solidarity, cars or buses, and it is our responsibility to do that now, for ourselves, for our families, for the people who make our lives worth living, and for the incredible creativity, beauty, and wonder that make our cities, in spite of all of their problems, the greatest invention of our time. Obrigado. Thank you. (Applause) |
Humble plants that hide surprising secrets | {0: 'Ameenah Gurib-Fakim was a university professor and entrepreneur before her election as the first female Head of State of Mauritius.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | You know, it's a big privilege for me to be working in one of the biodiversity hotspots in the world: the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean. These islands — Mauritius, Rodrigues, and Réunion — along with the island of Madagascar, they are blessed with unique plants found nowhere else in the world. And today I will tell you about five of them and their particular features and why these plants are so unique. Take a look at this plant. I call it benjoin in the local vernacular, and the botanical name is Terminalia bentzoe, subspecies bentzoe. This subspecies is endemic to Mauritius, and its particular feature is its heterophylly. What do I mean by heterophylly? It's that the same plant has got leaves that are different shapes and sizes. Now, these plants have evolved very far away from the mainland, and within specific ecosystems. Often, these particular features have evolved as a response to the threat presented by the local fauna, in this case, grazing tortoises. Tortoises are known to have poor eyesight, and as such, they tend to avoid the plants they don't recognize. So this evolutionary foil safeguards the plant against these rather cute animals, and protects it and of course ensures its survival. Now the question you're probably asking yourself is, why is she telling us all these stories? The reason for that is that we tend to overlook the diversity and the variety of the natural world. These particular habitats are unique and they are host to a whole lot of plants. We don't realize how valuable and how precious these resources are, and yet, through our insouciance, we keep on destroying them. We're all familiar with the macro impact of urbanization, climate change, resource exploitation, but when that one last plant — or animal for that matter — when that very last specimen has disappeared from the face of this Earth, we would have lost an entire subset of the Earth's biology, and with it, important plants with medicinal potential or which could have ingredients that would speak to the cosmetic, nutrition, pharma, and even the ethno-veterinary sectors, be gone forever. And here we have a very prime example of the iconic dodo, which comes from Mauritius, and, of course, we know is now a symbol of extinction. We know plants have a fundamental role to play. Well, first of all, they feed us and they also give us the oxygen we breathe, but plants are also the source of important, biologically active ingredients that we should be studying very carefully, because human societies over the millennia, they have developed important knowledge, cultural traditions, and important plant-based medicinal resources. Here's a data point: 1.4 percent of the entire land surface is home to 40 percent of the species of higher plants, 35 percent of the species of vertebrates, and this 1.4 percent represents the 25 biodiversity hotspots in the world, and this 1.4 percent of the entire land surface already provides for 35 percent of the ecosystem services that vulnerable people depend on. And as you can see, the island of Mauritius where I work and where I live, belongs to one such biodiversity hotspot, and I study the unique plants on the island for their biomedical applications. Now, let's go back again to that first plant I showed you, the one, of course, with different-shaped leaves and different sizes, Terminalia bentzoe, subspecies bentzoe, a plant only found in Mauritius. Now, the local people, they used a decoction of the leaves against infectious diseases. Now our work, that is, the scientific validation of this traditional information, has shown that precisely that leaf extract shows activity, potent activity, against a wide range of bacteria that could be pathogenic to humans. Now, could this plant be the answer to antibiotic resistance? You know, antibiotic resistance is proving to be a big challenge globally. While we may not be sure, one thing is certain: we will not want this plant to disappear. But the harsh reality is that this particular plant is in fact considered to be vulnerable in its natural habitat. This brings me to another example. This bush here is known as baume de l'ile plate in the local vernacular. The botanical name is Psiadia arguta. It's a plant which is rare, which is endemic to Mauritius. It used to grow on the mainland, but through the sheer pressures of urbanization has been pushed out of the mainland, and we've managed to bring it back from the brink of extinction by developing in vitro plants which are now growing in the wild. Now, one thing I must point out straightaway is that not all plants can be developed in vitro. While we humans, we are happy in our comfort zone, these plants also need their ecosystem to be preserved, and they don't react — endemic plants don't react to very harsh changes in their ecosystem, and yet we know what are the challenges that climate change, for example, is posing to these plants. Now, the local people again use the leaves in traditional medicine against respiratory problems. Now, our preliminary labwork on the leaf extract has shown that precisely these leaves contain ingredients that are very close, in terms of structures, chemical structures, to those medicines which are sold in the chemist's shop against asthma. So who knows what humanity will benefit from should this plant decide to reveal all its secrets. Now, I come from the developing world where we are forever being challenged with this issue of population explosion. Africa is the continent which is getting younger, and whenever one talks about population explosion, one talks about the issue of food security as being the other side of the same coin. Now this plant here, the baobab, could be part of the answer. It's an underutilized, neglected food plant. It defines the landscape of West Africa, where it is known as the tree of life, and later on I will tell you why the Africans consider it to be the tree of life. Now interestingly, there are many legends which are associated with this plant. Because of its sheer size, it was meant to be lording over lesser plants, so God didn't like this arrogance, uprooted it, and planted it upside down, hence its particular shape. And if you look at this tree again within the African context, in West Africa, it's known as the palaver tree, because it performs great social functions. Now if you have a problem in the community, meeting under the palaver tree with the chiefs or the tribesmen would be synonymous to trying to find a solution to that particular problem, and also to reinforce trust and respect among members of the community. From the scientific point of view, there are eight species of baobab in the world. There's one from Africa, one from Australia, and six are endemic to the island of Madagascar. The one I have showed you is the one from Africa, Adansonia digitata. Now, the flower, this beautiful white flower, it opens at night, is pollinated by bats, and it gives rise to the fruit which is curiously known as the monkey apple. The monkeys are not stupid animals. They know what's good for them. Now, if you open the fruit of the baobab, you'll see a white, floury pulp, which is very rich in nutrients and has got protein, more protein than in human milk. Yes, you heard right: more protein than in human milk. And this is one of the reasons why the nutrition companies of this world, they are looking for this fruit to provide what we know as reinforced food. The seeds give an oil, a very stable oil which is sought after by the cosmetic industry to give to produce body lotions, for example. And if you look at the trunk, the trunk, of course, safeguards water, which is often harvested by a thirsty traveler, and the leaves are used in traditional medicine against infectious disease. Now, you can see now why the Africans consider it to be the tree of life. It's a complete plant, and in fact, the sheer size of these trees is hiding a massive potential, not only for the pharma, nutrition, and the cosmetic industry. What I have showed you here is only the species from Africa, Adansonia digitata. We have six species yet in Madagascar, and we don't know what is the potential of this plant, but one thing we know is that the flora is considered to be threatened with extinction. Let me take you to Africa again, and introduce you to one of my very favorite, the resurrection plant. Now here you'll find that even Jesus has competition. (Laughter) Now, this plant here has developed remarkable tolerance to drought, which enables it to withstand up to 98 percent dehydration over the period of a year without damage, and yet it can regenerate itself almost completely overnight, over 24 hours, and flower. Now, us human beings, we're always on the lookout for the elixir of youth. We don't want to get old, and rightly so. Why should we, especially if you can afford it? And this gives you an indication of what the plant looks like before. Now, if you are an inexperienced gardener, the first thing you'll do when you visit the garden is to uproot this plant because it's dead. But if you water it, this is what you get. Absolutely amazing. Now, if you look at our aging process, the aging process is in fact the loss of water from the upper epidermis, resulting in wrinkling as we know it, especially women, we are so conscious of this. And this plant, in fact, is giving the cosmetic chemists very important ingredients that are actually finding ways to slow down the aging process and at the same time reinforce the cells against the onslaught of environmental toxins. Now, these four examples I have just given you are just a very tiny reminder as to how our health and our survival are closely linked to the health and the resilience of our ecosystem, and why we should be very careful about preserving biodiversity. Every time a forest is cut down, every time a marsh is filled in, it is a potential lab that goes with it, and which we will never, ever recover. And I know what I'm talking about, coming from Mauritius and missing the dodo. Let me finish with just one last example. Conservation issues are normally guided towards rare, endemic plants, but what we call exotic plants, that is, the ones which grow in many different habitats across the world, they also need to be considered. You know why? Because the environment plays a very important role in modifying the composition of that plant. So let's take a look at this plant here, Centella asiatica. It's a weed. We call it a weed. Now, Centella asiatica grows across the world in many different habitats — in Africa, in Asia — and this plant has been instrumental in providing a solution to that dreadful disease called leprosy in Madagascar in the 1940s. Now, while Centella grows across the world — in Africa, in Asia — the best quality Centella comes from Madagascar, because that Centella contains the three vital ingredients which are sought after by the pharma and the cosmetic companies. And the cosmetic companies are already using it to make regenerating cream. Now, there is an ancient saying that for every disease known to mankind, there is a plant to cure it. Now, you may not believe in ancient sayings. You may think they're obsolete now that our science and technology are so powerful. So you may look on Centella as being an insignificant, humble weed, which, if destroyed, won't be missed. But you know, there is no such thing as a weed. It's a plant. It's a living biological lab that may well have answers to the question that we may have, but we have to ensure that it has the right to live. Thank you. (Applause) |
Be an opportunity maker | {0: 'A columnist for Forbes, Kare Anderson writes on behavioral research-based ways to become more deeply connected.'} | TED@IBM | I grew up diagnosed as phobically shy, and, like at least 20 other people in a room of this size, I was a stutterer. Do you dare raise your hand? And it sticks with us. It really does stick with us, because when we are treated that way, we feel invisible sometimes, or talked around and at. And as I started to look at people, which is mostly all I did, I noticed that some people really wanted attention and recognition. Remember, I was young then. So what did they do? What we still do perhaps too often. We talk about ourselves. And yet there are other people I observed who had what I called a mutuality mindset. In each situation, they found a way to talk about us and create that "us" idea. So my idea to reimagine the world is to see it one where we all become greater opportunity-makers with and for others. There's no greater opportunity or call for action for us now than to become opportunity-makers who use best talents together more often for the greater good and accomplish things we couldn't have done on our own. And I want to talk to you about that, because even more than giving, even more than giving, is the capacity for us to do something smarter together for the greater good that lifts us both up and that can scale. That's why I'm sitting here. But I also want to point something else out: Each one of you is better than anybody else at something. That disproves that popular notion that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. (Laughter) So let me tell you about a Hollywood party I went to a couple years back, and I met this up-and-coming actress, and we were soon talking about something that we both felt passionately about: public art. And she had the fervent belief that every new building in Los Angeles should have public art in it. She wanted a regulation for it, and she fervently started — who is here from Chicago? — she fervently started talking about these bean-shaped reflective sculptures in Millennium Park, and people would walk up to it and they'd smile in the reflection of it, and they'd pose and they'd vamp and they'd take selfies together, and they'd laugh. And as she was talking, a thought came to my mind. I said, "I know someone you ought to meet. He's getting out of San Quentin in a couple of weeks" — (Laughter) — "and he shares your fervent desire that art should engage and enable people to connect." He spent five years in solitary, and I met him because I gave a speech at San Quentin, and he's articulate and he's rather easy on the eyes because he's buff. He had workout regime he did every day. (Laughter) I think she was following me at that point. I said, "He'd be an unexpected ally." And not just that. There's James. He's an architect and he's a professor, and he loves place-making, and place-making is when you have those mini-plazas and those urban walkways and where they're dotted with art, where people draw and come up and talk sometimes. I think they'd make good allies. And indeed they were. They met together. They prepared. They spoke in front of the Los Angeles City Council. And the council members not only passed the regulation, half of them came down and asked to pose with them afterwards. They were startling, compelling and credible. You can't buy that. What I'm asking you to consider is what kind of opportunity- makers we might become, because more than wealth or fancy titles or a lot of contacts, it's our capacity to connect around each other's better side and bring it out. And I'm not saying this is easy, and I'm sure many of you have made the wrong moves too about who you wanted to connect with, but what I want to suggest is, this is an opportunity. I started thinking about it way back when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter and I was in Europe and I was supposed to cover trends and trends that transcended business or politics or lifestyle. So I had to have contacts in different worlds very different than mine, because otherwise you couldn't spot the trends. And third, I had to write the story in a way stepping into the reader's shoes, so they could see how these trends could affect their lives. That's what opportunity-makers do. And here's a strange thing: Unlike an increasing number of Americans who are working and living and playing with people who think exactly like them because we then become more rigid and extreme, opportunity-makers are actively seeking situations with people unlike them, and they're building relationships, and because they do that, they have trusted relationships where they can bring the right team in and recruit them to solve a problem better and faster and seize more opportunities. They're not affronted by differences, they're fascinated by them, and that is a huge shift in mindset, and once you feel it, you want it to happen a lot more. This world is calling out for us to have a collective mindset, and I believe in doing that. It's especially important now. Why is it important now? Because things can be devised like drones and drugs and data collection, and they can be devised by more people and cheaper ways for beneficial purposes and then, as we know from the news every day, they can be used for dangerous ones. It calls on us, each of us, to a higher calling. But here's the icing on the cake: It's not just the first opportunity that you do with somebody else that's probably your greatest, as an institution or an individual. It's after you've had that experience and you trust each other. It's the unexpected things that you devise later on you never could have predicted. For example, Marty is the husband of that actress I mentioned, and he watched them when they were practicing, and he was soon talking to Wally, my friend the ex-con, about that exercise regime. And he thought, I have a set of racquetball courts. That guy could teach it. A lot of people who work there are members at my courts. They're frequent travelers. They could practice in their hotel room, no equipment provided. That's how Wally got hired. Not only that, years later he was also teaching racquetball. Years after that, he was teaching the racquetball teachers. What I'm suggesting is, when you connect with people around a shared interest and action, you're accustomed to serendipitous things happening into the future, and I think that's what we're looking at. We open ourselves up to those opportunities, and in this room are key players in technology, key players who are uniquely positioned to do this, to scale systems and projects together. So here's what I'm calling for you to do. Remember the three traits of opportunity-makers. Opportunity-makers keep honing their top strength and they become pattern seekers. They get involved in different worlds than their worlds so they're trusted and they can see those patterns, and they communicate to connect around sweet spots of shared interest. So what I'm asking you is, the world is hungry. I truly believe, in my firsthand experience, the world is hungry for us to unite together as opportunity-makers and to emulate those behaviors as so many of you already do — I know that firsthand — and to reimagine a world where we use our best talents together more often to accomplish greater things together than we could on our own. Just remember, as Dave Liniger once said, "You can't succeed coming to the potluck with only a fork." (Laughter) Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) |
My architectural philosophy? Bring the community into the process | {0: 'Alejandro Aravena works inside paradoxes, seeing space and flexibility in public housing, clarity in economic scarcity, and the keys to rebuilding in the causes of natural disasters. He '} | TEDGlobal 2014 | If there's any power in design, that's the power of synthesis. The more complex the problem, the more the need for simplicity. So allow me to share three cases where we tried to apply design's power of synthesis. Let's start with the global challenge of urbanization. It's a fact that people are moving towards cities. and even if counterintuitive, it's good news. Evidence shows that people are better off in cities. But there's a problem that I would call the "3S" menace: The scale, speed, and scarcity of means with which we will have to respond to this phenomenon has no precedence in history. For you to have an idea, out of the three billion people living in cities today, one billion are under the line of poverty. By 2030, out of the five billion people that will be living in cities, two billion are going to be under the line of poverty. That means that we will have to build a one million-person city per week with 10,000 dollars per family during the next 15 years. A one million-person city per week with 10,000 dollars per family. If we don't solve this equation, it is not that people will stop coming to cities. They will come anyhow, but they will live in slums, favelas and informal settlements. So what to do? Well, an answer may come from favelas and slums themselves. A clue could be in this question we were asked 10 years ago. We were asked to accommodate 100 families that had been occupying illegally half a hectare in the center of the city of Iquique in the north of Chile using a $10,000 subsidy with which we had to buy the land, provide the infrastructure, and build the houses that, in the best of the cases, would be of around 40 square meters. And by the way, they said, the cost of the land, because it's in the center of the city, is three times more than what social housing can normally afford. Due to the difficulty of the question, we decided to include the families in the process of understanding the constraints, and we started a participatory design process, and testing what was available there in the market. Detached houses, 30 families could be accommodated. Row houses, 60 families. ["100 families"] The only way to accommodate all of them was by building in height, and they threatened us to go on a hunger strike if we even dared to offer this as a solution, because they could not make the tiny apartments expand. So the conclusion with the families — and this is important, not our conclusion — with the families, was that we had a problem. We had to innovate. So what did we do? Well, a middle-class family lives reasonably well in around 80 square meters, but when there's no money, what the market does is to reduce the size of the house to 40 square meters. What we said was, what if, instead of thinking of 40 square meters as a small house, why don't we consider it half of a good one? When you rephrase the problem as half of a good house instead of a small one, the key question is, which half do we do? And we thought we had to do with public money the half that families won't be able to do individually. We identified five design conditions that belonged to the hard half of a house, and we went back to the families to do two things: join forces and split tasks. Our design was something in between a building and a house. As a building, it could pay for expensive, well-located land, and as a house, it could expand. If, in the process of not being expelled to the periphery while getting a house, families kept their network and their jobs, we knew that the expansion would begin right away. So we went from this initial social housing to a middle-class unit achieved by families themselves within a couple of weeks. This was our first project in Iquique 10 years ago. This is our last project in Chile. Different designs, same principle: You provide the frame, and from then on, families take over. So the purpose of design, trying to understand and trying to give an answer to the "3S" menace, scale, speed, and scarcity, is to channel people's own building capacity. We won't solve the one million people per week equation unless we use people's own power for building. So, with the right design, slums and favelas may not be the problem but actually the only possible solution. The second case is how design can contribute to sustainability. In 2012, we entered the competition for the Angelini Innovation Center, and the aim was to build the right environment for knowledge creation. It is accepted that for such an aim, knowledge creation, interaction among people, face-to-face contact, it's important, and we agreed on that. But for us, the question of the right environment was a very literal question. We wanted to have a working space with the right light, with the right temperature, with the right air. So we asked ourselves: Does the typical office building help us in that sense? Well, how does that building look, typically? It's a collection of floors, one on top of each other, with a core in the center with elevators, stairs, pipes, wires, everything, and then a glass skin on the outside that, due to direct sun radiation, creates a huge greenhouse effect inside. In addition to that, let's say a guy working on the seventh floor goes every single day through the third floor, but has no idea what the guy on that floor is working on. So we thought, well, maybe we have to turn this scheme inside out. And what we did was, let's have an open atrium, a hollowed core, the same collection of floors, but have the walls and the mass in the perimeter, so that when the sun hits, it's not impacting directly glass, but a wall. When you have an open atrium inside, you are able to see what others are doing from within the building, and you have a better way to control light, and when you place the mass and the walls in the perimeter, then you are preventing direct sun radiation. You may also open those windows and get cross-ventilation. We just made those openings of such a scale that they could work as elevated squares, outdoor spaces throughout the entire height of the building. None of this is rocket science. You don't require sophisticated programming. It's not about technology. This is just archaic, primitive common sense, and by using common sense, we went from 120 kilowatts per square meter per year, which is the typical energy consumption for cooling a glass tower, to 40 kilowatts per square meter per year. So with the right design, sustainability is nothing but the rigorous use of common sense. Last case I would like to share is how design can provide more comprehensive answers against natural disasters. You may know that Chile, in 2010, was hit by an 8.8 Richter scale earthquake and tsunami, and we were called to work in the reconstruction of the Constitución, in the southern part of the country. We were given 100 days, three months, to design almost everything, from public buildings to public space, street grid, transportation, housing, and mainly how to protect the city against future tsunamis. This was new in Chilean urban design, and there were in the air a couple of alternatives. First one: Forbid installation on ground zero. Thirty million dollars spent mainly in land expropriation. This is exactly what's being discussed in Japan nowadays, and if you have a disciplined population like the Japanese, this may work, but we know that in Chile, this land is going to be occupied illegally anyhow, so this alternative was unrealistic and undesirable. Second alternative: build a big wall, heavy infrastructure to resist the energy of the waves. This alternative was conveniently lobbied by big building companies, because it meant 42 million dollars in contracts, and was also politically preferred, because it required no land expropriation. But Japan proved that trying to resist the force of nature is useless. So this alternative was irresponsible. As in the housing process, we had to include the community in the way of finding a solution for this, and we started a participatory design process. (Video) [In Spanish] Loudspeaker: What kind of city do you want? Vote for Constitución. Go to the Open House and express your options. Participate! Fisherman: I am a fisherman. Twenty-five fishermen work for me. Where should I take them? To the forest? Man: So why can't we have a concrete defense? Done well, of course. Man 2: I am the history of Constitución. And you come here to tell me that I cannot keep on living here? My whole family has lived here, I raised my children here, and my children will also raise their children here. and my grandchildren and everyone else will. But why are you imposing this on me? You! You are imposing this on me! In danger zone I am not authorized to build. He himself is saying that. Man 3: No, no, no, Nieves... Alejandro Aravena: I don't know if you were able to read the subtitles, but you can tell from the body language that participatory design is not a hippie, romantic, let's-all-dream-together-about- the-future-of-the-city kind of thing. It is actually — (Applause) It is actually not even with the families trying to find the right answer. It is mainly trying to identify with precision what is the right question. There is nothing worse than answering well the wrong question. So it was pretty obvious after this process that, well, we chicken out here and go away because it's too tense, or we go even further in asking, what else is bothering you? What other problems do you have and you want us to take care of now that the city will have to be rethought from scratch? And what they said was, look, fine to protect the city against future tsunamis, we really appreciate, but the next one is going to come in, what, 20 years? But every single year, we have problems of flooding due to rain. In addition, we are in the middle of the forest region of the country, and our public space sucks. It's poor and it's scarce. And the origin of the city, our identity, is not really connected to the buildings that fell, it is connected to the river, but the river cannot be accessed publicly, because its shores are privately owned. So we thought that we had to produce a third alternative, and our approach was against geographical threats, have geographical answers. What if, in between the city and the sea we have a forest, a forest that doesn't try to resist the energy of nature, but dissipates it by introducing friction? A forest that may be able to laminate the water and prevent the flooding? That may pay the historical debt of public space, and that may provide, finally, democratic access to the river. So as a conclusion of the participatory design, the alternative was validated politically and socially, but there was still the problem of the cost: 48 million dollars. So what we did was a survey in the public investment system, and found out that there were three ministries with three projects in the exact same place, not knowing of the existence of the other projects. The sum of them: 52 million dollars. So design's power of synthesis is trying to make a more efficient use of the scarcest resource in cities, which is not money but coordination. By doing so, we were able to save four million dollars, and that is why the forest is today under construction. (Applause) So be it the force of self construction, the force of common sense, or the force of nature, all these forces need to be translated into form, and what that form is modeling and shaping is not cement, bricks, or wood. It is life itself. Design's power of synthesis is just an attempt to put at the innermost core of architecture the force of life. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
How painting can transform communities | {0: 'Working as Haas&Hahn, artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn splash color onto urban walls -- and train young painters in the process.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | Dre Urhahn: This theater is built on Copacabana, which is the most famous beach in the world, but 25 kilometers away from here in the North Zone of Rio lies a community called Vila Cruzeiro, and roughly 60,000 people live there. Now, the people here in Rio mostly know Vila Cruzeiro from the news, and unfortunately, news from Vila Cruzeiro often is not good news. But Vila Cruzeiro is also the place where our story begins. Jeroen Koolhaas: Ten years ago, we first came to Rio to shoot a documentary about life in the favelas. Now, we learned that favelas are informal communities. They emerged over the years when immigrants from the countryside came to the cities looking for work, like cities within the cities, known for problems like crime, poverty, and the violent drug war between police and the drug gangs. So what struck us was that these were communities that the people who lived there had built with their own hands, without a master plan and like a giant work in progress. Where we're from, in Holland, everything is planned. We even have rules for how to follow the rules. (Laughter) DU: So the last day of filming, we ended up in Vila Cruzeiro, and we were sitting down and we had a drink, and we were overlooking this hill with all these houses, and most of these houses looked unfinished, and they had walls of bare brick, but we saw some of these houses which were plastered and painted, and suddenly we had this idea: what would it look like if all these houses would be plastered and painted? And then we imagined one big design, one big work of art. Who would expect something like that in a place like this? So we thought, would that even be possible? So first we started to count the houses, but we soon lost count. But somehow the idea stuck. JK: We had a friend. He ran an NGO in Vila Cruzeiro. His name was Nanko, and he also liked the idea. He said, "You know, everybody here would pretty much love to have their houses plastered and painted. It's when a house is finished." So he introduced us to the right people, and Vitor and Maurinho became our crew. We picked three houses in the center of the community and we start here. We made a few designs, and everybody liked this design of a boy flying a kite the best. So we started painting, and the first thing we did was to paint everything blue, and we thought that looked already pretty good. But they hated it. The people who lived there really hated it. They said, "What did you do? You painted our house in exactly the same color as the police station." (Laughter) In a favela, that is not a good thing. Also the same color as the prison cell. So we quickly went ahead and we painted the boy, and then we thought we were finished, we were really happy, but still, it wasn't good because the little kids started coming up to us, and they said, "You know, there's a boy flying the kite, but where is his kite?" We said, "Uh, it's art. You know, you have to imagine the kite." (Laughter) And they said, "No, no, no, we want to see the kite." So we quickly installed a kite way up high on the hill, so that you could see the boy flying the kite and you could actually see a kite. So the local news started writing about it, which was great, and then even The Guardian wrote about it: "Notorious slum becomes open-air gallery." JK: So, encouraged by this success, we went back to Rio for a second project, and we stumbled upon this street. It was covered in concrete to prevent mudslides, and somehow we saw a sort of river in it, and we imagined this river to be a river in Japanese style with koi carp swimming upstream. So we decided to paint that river, and we invited Rob Admiraal, who is a tattoo artist, and he specialized in the Japanese style. So little did we know that we would spend almost an entire year painting that river, together with Geovani and Robinho and Vitor, who lived nearby. And we even moved into the neighborhood when one of the guys that lived on the street, Elias, told us that we could come and live in his house, together with his family, which was fantastic. Unfortunately, during that time, another war broke out between the police and the drug gangs. (Video) (Gunfire) We learned that during those times, people in communities really stick together during these times of hardship, but we also learned a very important element, the importance of barbecues. (Laughter) Because, when you throw a barbecue, it turns you from a guest into a host, so we decided to throw one almost every other week, and we got to know everybody in the neighborhood. JK: We still had this idea of the hill, though. DU: Yeah, yeah, we were talking about the scale of this, because this painting was incredibly big, and it was insanely detailed, and this process almost drove us completely insane ourselves. But we figured that maybe, during this process, all the time that we had spent in the neighborhood was maybe actually even more important than the painting itself. JK: So after all that time, this hill, this idea was still there, and we started to make sketches, models, and we figured something out. We figured that our ideas, our designs had to be a little bit more simple than that last project so that we could paint with more people and cover more houses at the same time. And we had an opportunity to try that out in a community in the central part of Rio, which is called Santa Marta, and we made a design for this place which looked like this, and then we got people to go along with it because turns out that if your idea is ridiculously big, it's easier to get people to go along with this. (Laughter) And the people of Santa Marta got together and in a little over a month they turned that square into this. (Applause) And this image somehow went all over the world. DU: So then we received an unexpected phone call from the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, and they had this question if this idea, our approach, if this would actually work in North Philly, which is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States. So we immediately said yes. We had no idea how, but it seemed like a very interesting challenge, so we did exactly the same as we did in Rio, and we moved into the neighborhood and started barbecuing. (Laughter) So the project took almost two years to complete, and we made individual designs for every single house on the avenue that we painted, and we made these designs together with the local store owners, the building owners, and a team of about a dozen young men and women. They were hired, and then they were trained as painters, and together they transformed their own neighborhood, the whole street, into a giant patchwork of color. (Applause) And at the end, the city of Philadelphia thanked every single one of them and gave them a merit for their accomplishment. JK: So now we had painted a whole street. How about we do this whole hill now? We started looking for funding, but instead, we just ran into questions, like, how many houses are you going to paint? How many square meters is that? How much paint are you going to use, and how many people are you going to employ? And we did try for years to write plans for the funding and answer all those questions, but then we thought, in order to answer all those questions, you have to know exactly what you're going to do before you actually get there and start. And maybe it's a mistake to think like that. It would lose some of the magic that we had learned about that if you go somewhere and you spend time there, you can let the project grow organically and have a life of its own. DU: So what we did is we decided to take this plan and strip it away from all the numbers and all the ideas and presumptions and just go back to the base idea, which was to transform this hill into a giant work of art. And instead of looking for funding, we started a crowdfunding campaign, and in a little over a month, more than 1,500 people put together and donated over 100,000 dollars. So for us, this was an amazing moment, because now — (Applause) — because now we finally had the freedom to use all the lessons that we had learned and create a project that was built the same way that the favela was built, from the ground on up, bottom up, with no master plan. JK: So we went back, and we employed Angelo, and he's a local artist from Vila Cruzeiro, very talented guy, and he knows almost everybody there, and then we employed Elias, our former landlord who invited us into his house, and he's a master of construction. Together with them, we decided where to start. We picked this spot in Vila Cruzeiro, and houses are being plastered as we speak. And the good thing about them is that they are deciding which houses go next. They're even printing t-shirts, they're putting up banners explaining everything to everybody, and talking to the press. This article about Angelo appeared. DU: So while this is happening, we are bringing this idea all over the world. So, like the project we did in Philadelphia, we are also invited to do workshops, for instance in Curaçao, and right now we're planning a huge project in Haiti. JK: So the favela was not only the place where this idea started: it was also the place that made it possible to work without a master plan, because these communities are informal — this was the inspiration — and in a communal effort, together with the people, you can almost work like in an orchestra, where you can have a hundred instruments playing together to create a symphony. DU: So we want to thank everybody who wanted to become part of this dream and supported us along the way, and we are looking at continuing. JK: Yeah. And so one day pretty soon, when the colors start going up on these walls, we hope more people will join us, and join this big dream, and maybe one day, the whole of Vila Cruzeiro will be painted. DU: Thank you. (Applause) |
The coming crisis in antibiotics | {0: 'At the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, economist Ramanan Laxminarayan looks at big-picture issues of global health.'} | TEDMED 2014 | The first patient to ever be treated with an antibiotic was a policeman in Oxford. On his day off from work, he was scratched by a rose thorn while working in the garden. That small scratch became infected. Over the next few days, his head was swollen with abscesses, and in fact his eye was so infected that they had to take it out, and by February of 1941, this poor man was on the verge of dying. He was at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, and fortunately for him, a small team of doctors led by a Dr. Howard Florey had managed to synthesize a very small amount of penicillin, a drug that had been discovered 12 years before by Alexander Fleming but had never actually been used to treat a human, and indeed no one even knew if the drug would work, if it was full of impurities that would kill the patient, but Florey and his team figured if they had to use it, they might as well use it on someone who was going to die anyway. So they gave Albert Alexander, this Oxford policeman, the drug, and within 24 hours, he started getting better. His fever went down, his appetite came back. Second day, he was doing much better. They were starting to run out of penicillin, so what they would do was run with his urine across the road to re-synthesize the penicillin from his urine and give it back to him, and that worked. Day four, well on the way to recovery. This was a miracle. Day five, they ran out of penicillin, and the poor man died. So that story didn't end that well, but fortunately for millions of other people, like this child who was treated again in the early 1940s, who was again dying of a sepsis, and within just six days, you can see, recovered thanks to this wonder drug, penicillin. Millions have lived, and global health has been transformed. Now, antibiotics have been used for patients like this, but they've also been used rather frivolously in some instances, for treating someone with just a cold or the flu, which they might not have responded to an antibiotic, and they've also been used in large quantities sub-therapeutically, which means in small concentrations, to make chicken and hogs grow faster. Just to save a few pennies on the price of meat, we've spent a lot of antibiotics on animals, not for treatment, not for sick animals, but primarily for growth promotion. Now, what did that lead us to? Basically, the massive use of antibiotics around the world has imposed such large selection pressure on bacteria that resistance is now a problem, because we've now selected for just the resistant bacteria. And I'm sure you've all read about this in the newspapers, you've seen this in every magazine that you come across, but I really want you to appreciate the significance of this problem. This is serious. The next slide I'm about to show you is of carbapenem resistance in acinetobacter. Acinetobacter is a nasty hospital bug, and carbapenem is pretty much the strongest class of antibiotics that we can throw at this bug. And you can see in 1999 this is the pattern of resistance, mostly under about 10 percent across the United States. Now watch what happens when we play the video. So I don't know where you live, but wherever it is, it certainly is a lot worse now than it was in 1999, and that is the problem of antibiotic resistance. It's a global issue affecting both rich and poor countries, and at the heart of it, you might say, well, isn't this really just a medical issue? If we taught doctors how not to use antibiotics as much, if we taught patients how not to demand antibiotics, perhaps this really wouldn't be an issue, and maybe the pharmaceutical companies should be working harder to develop more antibiotics. Now, it turns out that there's something fundamental about antibiotics which makes it different from other drugs, which is that if I misuse antibiotics or I use antibiotics, not only am I affected but others are affected as well, in the same way as if I choose to drive to work or take a plane to go somewhere, that the costs I impose on others through global climate change go everywhere, and I don't necessarily take these costs into consideration. This is what economists might call a problem of the commons, and the problem of the commons is exactly what we face in the case of antibiotics as well: that we don't consider — and we, including individuals, patients, hospitals, entire health systems — do not consider the costs that they impose on others by the way antibiotics are actually used. Now, that's a problem that's similar to another area that we all know about, which is of fuel use and energy, and of course energy use both depletes energy as well as leads to local pollution and climate change. And typically, in the case of energy, there are two ways in which you can deal with the problem. One is, we can make better use of the oil that we have, and that's analogous to making better use of existing antibiotics, and we can do this in a number of ways that we'll talk about in a second, but the other option is the "drill, baby, drill" option, which in the case of antibiotics is to go find new antibiotics. Now, these are not separate. They're related, because if we invest heavily in new oil wells, we reduce the incentives for conservation of oil in the same way that's going to happen for antibiotics. The reverse is also going to happen, which is that if we use our antibiotics appropriately, we don't necessarily have to make the investments in new drug development. And if you thought that these two were entirely, fully balanced between these two options, you might consider the fact that this is really a game that we're playing. The game is really one of coevolution, and coevolution is, in this particular picture, between cheetahs and gazelles. Cheetahs have evolved to run faster, because if they didn't run faster, they wouldn't get any lunch. Gazelles have evolved to run faster because if they don't run faster, they would be lunch. Now, this is the game we're playing against the bacteria, except we're not the cheetahs, we're the gazelles, and the bacteria would, just in the course of this little talk, would have had kids and grandkids and figured out how to be resistant just by selection and trial and error, trying it over and over again. Whereas how do we stay ahead of the bacteria? We have drug discovery processes, screening molecules, we have clinical trials, and then, when we think we have a drug, then we have the FDA regulatory process. And once we go through all of that, then we try to stay one step ahead of the bacteria. Now, this is clearly not a game that can be sustained, or one that we can win by simply innovating to stay ahead. We've got to slow the pace of coevolution down, and there are ideas that we can borrow from energy that are helpful in thinking about how we might want to do this in the case of antibiotics as well. Now, if you think about how we deal with energy pricing, for instance, we consider emissions taxes, which means we're imposing the costs of pollution on people who actually use that energy. We might consider doing that for antibiotics as well, and perhaps that would make sure that antibiotics actually get used appropriately. There are clean energy subsidies, which are to switch to fuels which don't pollute as much or perhaps don't need fossil fuels. Now, the analogy here is, perhaps we need to move away from using antibiotics, and if you think about it, what are good substitutes for antibiotics? Well, turns out that anything that reduces the need for the antibiotic would really work, so that could include improving hospital infection control or vaccinating people, particularly against the seasonal influenza. And the seasonal flu is probably the biggest driver of antibiotic use, both in this country as well as in many other countries, and that could really help. A third option might include something like tradeable permits. And these seem like faraway scenarios, but if you consider the fact that we might not have antibiotics for many people who have infections, we might consider the fact that we might want to allocate who actually gets to use some of these antibiotics over others, and some of these might have to be on the basis of clinical need, but also on the basis of pricing. And certainly consumer education works. Very often, people overuse antibiotics or prescribe too much without necessarily knowing that they do so, and feedback mechanisms have been found to be useful, both on energy — When you tell someone that they're using a lot of energy during peak hour, they tend to cut back, and the same sort of example has been performed even in the case of antibiotics. A hospital in St. Louis basically would put up on a chart the names of surgeons in the ordering of how much antibiotics they'd used in the previous month, and this was purely an informational feedback, there was no shaming, but essentially that provided some information back to surgeons that maybe they could rethink how they were using antibiotics. Now, there's a lot that can be done on the supply side as well. If you look at the price of penicillin, the cost per day is about 10 cents. It's a fairly cheap drug. If you take drugs that have been introduced since then — linezolid or daptomycin — those are significantly more expensive, so to a world that has been used to paying 10 cents a day for antibiotics, the idea of paying 180 dollars per day seems like a lot. But what is that really telling us? That price is telling us that we should no longer take cheap, effective antibiotics as a given into the foreseeable future, and that price is a signal to us that perhaps we need to be paying much more attention to conservation. That price is also a signal that maybe we need to start looking at other technologies, in the same way that gasoline prices are a signal and an impetus, to, say, the development of electric cars. Prices are important signals and we need to pay attention, but we also need to consider the fact that although these high prices seem unusual for antibiotics, they're nothing compared to the price per day of some cancer drugs, which might save a patient's life only for a few months or perhaps a year, whereas antibiotics would potentially save a patient's life forever. So this is going to involve a whole new paradigm shift, and it's also a scary shift because in many parts of this country, in many parts of the world, the idea of paying 200 dollars for a day of antibiotic treatment is simply unimaginable. So we need to think about that. Now, there are backstop options, which is other alternative technologies that people are working on. It includes bacteriophages, probiotics, quorum sensing, synbiotics. Now, all of these are useful avenues to pursue, and they will become even more lucrative when the price of new antibiotics starts going higher, and we've seen that the market does actually respond, and the government is now considering ways of subsidizing new antibiotics and development. But there are challenges here. We don't want to just throw money at a problem. What we want to be able to do is invest in new antibiotics in ways that actually encourage appropriate use and sales of those antibiotics, and that really is the challenge here. Now, going back to these technologies, you all remember the line from that famous dinosaur film, "Nature will find a way." So it's not as if these are permanent solutions. We really have to remember that, whatever the technology might be, that nature will find some way to work around it. You might think, well, this is just a problem just with antibiotics and with bacteria, but it turns out that we have the exact same identical problem in many other fields as well, with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, which is a serious problem in India and South Africa. Thousands of patients are dying because the second-line drugs are so expensive, and in some instances, even those don't work and you have XDR TB. Viruses are becoming resistant. Agricultural pests. Malaria parasites. Right now, much of the world depends on one drug, artemisinin drugs, essentially to treat malaria. Resistance to artemisinin has already emerged, and if this were to become widespread, that puts at risk the single drug that we have to treat malaria around the world in a way that's currently safe and efficacious. Mosquitos develop resistance. If you have kids, you probably know about head lice, and if you're from New York City, I understand that the specialty there is bedbugs. So those are also resistant. And we have to bring an example from across the pond. Turns out that rats are also resistant to poisons. Now, what's common to all of these things is the idea that we've had these technologies to control nature only for the last 70, 80 or 100 years and essentially in a blink, we have squandered our ability to control, because we have not recognized that natural selection and evolution was going to find a way to get back, and we need to completely rethink how we're going to use measures to control biological organisms, and rethink how we incentivize the development, introduction, in the case of antibiotics prescription, and use of these valuable resources. And we really now need to start thinking about them as natural resources. And so we stand at a crossroads. An option is to go through that rethinking and carefully consider incentives to change how we do business. The alternative is a world in which even a blade of grass is a potentially lethal weapon. Thank you. (Applause) |
What the Social Progress Index can reveal about your country | {0: 'Michael Green is part of the team that has created the Social Progress Index, a standard to rank societies based on how they meet the needs of citizens.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | On January 4, 1934, a young man delivered a report to the United States Congress that 80 years on, still shapes the lives of everyone in this room today, still shapes the lives of everyone on this planet. That young man wasn't a politician, he wasn't a businessman, a civil rights activist or a faith leader. He was that most unlikely of heroes, an economist. His name was Simon Kuznets and the report that he delivered was called "National Income, 1929-1932." Now, you might think this is a rather dry and dull report. And you're absolutely right. It's dry as a bone. But this report is the foundation of how, today, we judge the success of countries: what we know best as Gross Domestic Product, GDP. GDP has defined and shaped our lives for the last 80 years. And today I want to talk about a different way to measure the success of countries, a different way to define and shape our lives for the next 80 years. But first, we have to understand how GDP came to dominate our lives. Kuznets' report was delivered at a moment of crisis. The U.S. economy was plummeting into the Great Depression and policy makers were struggling to respond. Struggling because they didn't know what was going on. They didn't have data and statistics. So what Kuznet's report gave them was reliable data on what the U.S. economy was producing, updated year by year. And armed with this information, policy makers were, eventually, able to find a way out of the slump. And because Kuznets' invention was found to be so useful, it spread around the world. And now today, every country produces GDP statistics. But, in that first report, Kuznets himself delivered a warning. It's in the introductory chapter. On page seven he says, "The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above." It's not the greatest sound bite in the world, and it's dressed up in the cautious language of the economist. But his message was clear: GDP is a tool to help us measure economic performance. It's not a measure of our well-being. And it shouldn't be a guide to all decision making. But we have ignored Kuznets' warning. We live in a world where GDP is the benchmark of success in a global economy. Our politicians boast when GDP goes up. Markets move and trillions of dollars of capital move around the world based on which countries are going up and which countries are going down, all measured in GDP. Our societies have become engines to create more GDP. But we know that GDP is flawed. It ignores the environment. It counts bombs and prisons as progress. It can't count happiness or community. And it has nothing to say about fairness or justice. Is it any surprise that our world, marching to the drumbeat of GDP, is teetering on the brink of environmental disaster and filled with anger and conflict? We need a better way to measure our societies, a measure based on the real things that matter to real people. Do I have enough to eat? Can I read and write? Am I safe? Do I have rights? Do I live in a society where I'm not discriminated against? Is my future and the future of my children prevented from environmental destruction? These are questions that GDP does not and cannot answer. There have, of course, been efforts in the past to move beyond GDP. But I believe that we're living in a moment when we are ready for a measurement revolution. We're ready because we've seen, in the financial crisis of 2008, how our fetish for economic growth led us so far astray. We've seen, in the Arab Spring, how countries like Tunisia were supposedly economic superstars, but they were societies that were seething with discontentment. We're ready, because today we have the technology to gather and analyze data in ways that would have been unimaginable to Kuznets. Today, I'd like to introduce you to the Social Progress Index. It's a measure of the well-being of society, completely separate from GDP. It's a whole new way of looking at the world. The Social Progress Index begins by defining what it means to be a good society based around three dimensions. The first is, does everyone have the basic needs for survival: food, water, shelter, safety? Secondly, does everyone have access to the building blocks to improve their lives: education, information, health and sustainable environment? And then third, does every individual have access to a chance to pursue their goals and dreams and ambitions free from obstacles? Do they have rights, freedom of choice, freedom from discrimination and access to the the world's most advanced knowledge? Together, these 12 components form the Social Progress framework. And for each of these 12 components, we have indicators to measure how countries are performing. Not indicators of effort or intention, but real achievement. We don't measure how much a country spends on healthcare, we measure the length and quality of people's lives. We don't measure whether governments pass laws against discrimination, we measure whether people experience discrimination. But what you want to know is who's top, don't you? (Laughter) I knew that, I knew that, I knew that. Okay, I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you on this chart. So here we are, what I've done here is put on the vertical axis social progress. Higher is better. And then, just for comparison, just for fun, on the horizontal axis is GDP per capita. Further to the right is more. So the country in the world with the highest social progress, the number one country on social progress is New Zealand. (Applause) Well done! Never been; must go. (Laughter) The country with the least social progress, I'm sorry to say, is Chad. I've never been; maybe next year. (Laughter) Or maybe the year after. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Aha, but New Zealand has a higher GDP than Chad!" It's a good point, well made. But let me show you two other countries. Here's the United States — considerably richer than New Zealand, but with a lower level of social progress. And then here's Senegal — it's got a higher level of social progress than Chad, but the same level of GDP. So what's going on? Well, look. Let me bring in the rest of the countries of the world, the 132 we've been able to measure, each one represented by a dot. There we go. Lots of dots. Now, obviously I can't do all of them, so a few highlights for you: The highest ranked G7 country is Canada. My country, the United Kingdom, is sort of middling, sort of dull, but who cares — at least we beat the French. (Laughter) And then looking at the emerging economies, top of the BRICS, pleased to say, is Brazil. (Applause) Come on, cheer! Go, Brazil! Beating South Africa, then Russia, then China and then India. Tucked away on the right-hand side, you will see a dot of a country with a lot of GDP but not a huge amount of social progress — that's Kuwait. Just above Brazil is a social progress superpower — that's Costa Rica. It's got a level of social progress the same as some Western European countries, with a much lower GDP. Now, my slide is getting a little cluttered and I'd like to step back a bit. So let me take away these countries, and then pop in the regression line. So this shows the average relationship between GDP and social progress. The first thing to notice, is that there's lots of noise around the trend line. And what this shows, what this empirically demonstrates, is that GDP is not destiny. At every level of GDP per capita, there are opportunities for more social progress, risks of less. The second thing to notice is that for poor countries, the curve is really steep. So what this tells us is that if poor countries can get a little bit of extra GDP, and if they reinvest that in doctors, nurses, water supplies, sanitation, etc., there's a lot of social progress bang for your GDP buck. And that's good news, and that's what we've seen over the last 20, 30 years, with a lot of people lifted out of poverty by economic growth and good policies in poorer countries. But go on a bit further up the curve, and then we see it flattening out. Each extra dollar of GDP is buying less and less social progress. And with more and more of the world's population living on this part of the curve, it means GDP is becoming less and less useful as a guide to our development. I'll show you an example of Brazil. Here's Brazil: social progress of about 70 out of 100, GDP per capita about 14,000 dollars a year. And look, Brazil's above the line. Brazil is doing a reasonably good job of turning GDP into social progress. But where does Brazil go next? Let's say that Brazil adopts a bold economic plan to double GDP in the next decade. But that is only half a plan. It's less than half a plan, because where does Brazil want to go on social progress? Brazil, it's possible to increase your growth, increase your GDP, while stagnating or going backwards on social progress. We don't want Brazil to become like Russia. What you really want is for Brazil to get ever more efficient at creating social progress from its GDP, so it becomes more like New Zealand. And what that means is that Brazil needs to prioritize social progress in its development plan and see that it's not just growth alone, it's growth with social progress. And that's what the Social Progress Index does: It reframes the debate about development, not just about GDP alone, but inclusive, sustainable growth that brings real improvements in people's lives. And it's not just about countries. Earlier this year, with our friends from the Imazon nonprofit here in Brazil, we launched the first subnational Social Progress Index. We did it for the Amazon region. It's an area the size of Europe, 24 million people, one of the most deprived parts of the country. And here are the results, and this is broken down into nearly 800 different municipalities. And with this detailed information about the real quality of life in this part of the country, Imazon and other partners from government, business and civil society can work together to construct a development plan that will help really improve people's lives, while protecting that precious global asset that is the Amazon Rainforest. And this is just the beginning, You can create a Social Progress Index for any state, region, city or municipality. We all know and love TEDx; this is Social Pogress-x. This is a tool for anyone to come and use. Contrary to the way we sometimes talk about it, GDP was not handed down from God on tablets of stone. (Laughter) It's a measurement tool invented in the 20th century to address the challenges of the 20th century. In the 21st century, we face new challenges: aging, obesity, climate change, and so on. To face those challenges, we need new tools of measurement, new ways of valuing progress. Imagine if we could measure what nonprofits, charities, volunteers, civil society organizations really contribute to our society. Imagine if businesses competed not just on the basis of their economic contribution, but on their contribution to social progress. Imagine if we could hold politicians to account for really improving people's lives. Imagine if we could work together — government, business, civil society, me, you — and make this century the century of social progress. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why we need to end the War on Drugs | {0: 'Ethan Nadelmann has ushered the once-marginal issue of drug legalization onto the center stage of US political debate.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | What has the War on Drugs done to the world? Look at the murder and mayhem in Mexico, Central America, so many other parts of the planet, the global black market estimated at 300 billion dollars a year, prisons packed in the United States and elsewhere, police and military drawn into an unwinnable war that violates basic rights, and ordinary citizens just hope they don't get caught in the crossfire, and meanwhile, more people using more drugs than ever. It's my country's history with alcohol prohibition and Al Capone, times 50. Which is why it's particularly galling to me as an American that we've been the driving force behind this global drug war. Ask why so many countries criminalize drugs they'd never heard of, why the U.N. drug treaties emphasize criminalization over health, even why most of the money worldwide for dealing with drug abuse goes not to helping agencies but those that punish, and you'll find the good old U.S. of A. Why did we do this? Some people, especially in Latin America, think it's not really about drugs. It's just a subterfuge for advancing the realpolitik interests of the U.S. But by and large, that's not it. We don't want gangsters and guerrillas funded with illegal drug money terrorizing and taking over other nations. No, the fact is, America really is crazy when it comes to drugs. I mean, don't forget, we're the ones who thought that we could prohibit alcohol. So think about our global drug war not as any sort of rational policy, but as the international projection of a domestic psychosis. (Applause) But here's the good news. Now it's the Russians leading the Drug War and not us. Most politicians in my country want to roll back the Drug War now, put fewer people behind bars, not more, and I'm proud to say as an American that we now lead the world in reforming marijuana policies. It's now legal for medical purposes in almost half our 50 states, millions of people can purchase their marijuana, their medicine, in government- licensed dispensaries, and over half my fellow citizens now say it's time to legally regulate and tax marijuana more or less like alcohol. That's what Colorado and Washington are doing, and Uruguay, and others are sure to follow. So that's what I do: work to end the Drug War. I think it all started growing up in a fairly religious, moral family, eldest son of a rabbi, going off to university where I smoked some marijuana and I liked it. (Laughter) And I liked drinking too, but it was obvious that alcohol was really the more dangerous of the two, but my friends and I could get busted for smoking a joint. Now, that hypocrisy kept bugging me, so I wrote my Ph.D dissertation on international drug control. I talked my way into the State Department. I got a security clearance. I interviewed hundreds of DEA and other law enforcement agents all around Europe and the Americas, and I'd ask them, "What do you think the answer is?" Well, in Latin America, they'd say to me, "You can't really cut off the supply. The answer lies back in the U.S., in cutting off the demand." So then I go back home and I talk to people involved in anti-drug efforts there, and they'd say, "You know, Ethan, you can't really cut off the demand. The answer lies over there. You've got to cut off the supply." Then I'd go and talk to the guys in customs trying to stop drugs at the borders, and they'd say, "You're not going to stop it here. The answer lies over there, in cutting off supply and demand." And it hit me: Everybody involved in this thought the answer lay in that area about which they knew the least. So that's when I started reading everything I could about psychoactive drugs: the history, the science, the politics, all of it, and the more one read, the more it hit you how a thoughtful, enlightened, intelligent approach took you over here, whereas the politics and laws of my country were taking you over here. And that disparity struck me as this incredible intellectual and moral puzzle. There's probably never been a drug-free society. Virtually every society has ingested psychoactive substances to deal with pain, increase our energy, socialize, even commune with God. Our desire to alter our consciousness may be as fundamental as our desires for food, companionship and sex. So our true challenge is to learn how to live with drugs so they cause the least possible harm and in some cases the greatest possible benefit. I'll tell you something else I learned, that the reason some drugs are legal and others not has almost nothing to do with science or health or the relative risk of drugs, and almost everything to do with who uses and who is perceived to use particular drugs. In the late 19th century, when most of the drugs that are now illegal were legal, the principal consumers of opiates in my country and others were middle-aged white women, using them to alleviate aches and pains when few other analgesics were available. And nobody thought about criminalizing it back then because nobody wanted to put Grandma behind bars. But when hundreds of thousands of Chinese started showing up in my country, working hard on the railroads and the mines and then kicking back in the evening just like they had in the old country with a few puffs on that opium pipe, that's when you saw the first drug prohibition laws in California and Nevada, driven by racist fears of Chinese transforming white women into opium-addicted sex slaves. The first cocaine prohibition laws, similarly prompted by racist fears of black men sniffing that white powder and forgetting their proper place in Southern society. And the first marijuana prohibition laws, all about fears of Mexican migrants in the West and the Southwest. And what was true in my country, is true in so many others as well, with both the origins of these laws and their implementation. Put it this way, and I exaggerate only slightly: If the principal smokers of cocaine were affluent older white men and the principal consumers of Viagra were poor young black men, then smokable cocaine would be easy to get with a prescription from your doctor and selling Viagra would get you five to 10 years behind bars. (Applause) I used to be a professor teaching about this. Now I'm an activist, a human rights activist, and what drives me is my shame at living in an otherwise great nation that has less than five percent of the world's population but almost 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. It's the people I meet who have lost someone they love to drug-related violence or prison or overdose or AIDS because our drug policies emphasize criminalization over health. It's good people who have lost their jobs, their homes, their freedom, even their children to the state, not because they hurt anyone but solely because they chose to use one drug instead of another. So is legalization the answer? On that, I'm torn: three days a week I think yes, three days a week I think no, and on Sundays I'm agnostic. But since today is Tuesday, let me just say that legally regulating and taxing most of the drugs that are now criminalized would radically reduce the crime, violence, corruption and black markets, and the problems of adulterated and unregulated drugs, and improve public safety, and allow taxpayer resources to be developed to more useful purposes. I mean, look, the markets in marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine are global commodities markets just like the global markets in alcohol, tobacco, coffee, sugar, and so many other things. Where there is a demand, there will be a supply. Knock out one source and another inevitably emerges. People tend to think of prohibition as the ultimate form of regulation when in fact it represents the abdication of regulation with criminals filling the void. Which is why putting criminal laws and police front and center in trying to control a dynamic global commodities market is a recipe for disaster. And what we really need to do is to bring the underground drug markets as much as possible aboveground and regulate them as intelligently as we can to minimize both the harms of drugs and the harms of prohibitionist policies. Now, with marijuana, that obviously means legally regulating and taxing it like alcohol. The benefits of doing so are enormous, the risks minimal. Will more people use marijuana? Maybe, but it's not going to be young people, because it's not going to be legalized for them, and quite frankly, they already have the best access to marijuana. I think it's going to be older people. It's going to be people in their 40s and 60s and 80s who find they prefer a little marijuana to that drink in the evening or the sleeping pill or that it helps with their arthritis or diabetes or maybe helps spice up a long-term marriage. (Laughter) And that just might be a net public health benefit. As for the other drugs, look at Portugal, where nobody goes to jail for possessing drugs, and the government's made a serious commitment to treating addiction as a health issue. Look at Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, England, where people who have been addicted to heroin for many years and repeatedly tried to quit and failed can get pharmaceutical heroin and helping services in medical clinics, and the results are in: Illegal drug abuse and disease and overdoses and crime and arrests all go down, health and well-being improve, taxpayers benefit, and many drug users even put their addictions behind them. Look at New Zealand, which recently enacted a law allowing certain recreational drugs to be sold legally provided their safety had been established. Look here in Brazil, and some other countries, where a remarkable psychoactive substance, ayahuasca, can be legally bought and consumed provided it's done so within a religious context. Look in Bolivia and Peru, where all sorts of products made from the coca leaf, the source of cocaine, are sold legally over the counter with no apparent harm to people's public health. I mean, don't forget, Coca-Cola had cocaine in it until 1900, and so far as we know was no more addictive than Coca-Cola is today. Conversely, think about cigarettes: Nothing can both hook you and kill you like cigarettes. When researchers ask heroin addicts what's the toughest drug to quit, most say cigarettes. Yet in my country and many others, half of all the people who were ever addicted to cigarettes have quit without anyone being arrested or put in jail or sent to a "treatment program" by a prosecutor or a judge. What did it were higher taxes and time and place restrictions on sale and use and effective anti-smoking campaigns. Now, could we reduce smoking even more by making it totally illegal? Probably. But just imagine the drug war nightmare that would result. So the challenges we face today are twofold. The first is the policy challenge of designing and implementing alternatives to ineffective prohibitionist policies, even as we need to get better at regulating and living with the drugs that are now legal. But the second challenge is tougher, because it's about us. The obstacles to reform lie not just out there in the power of the prison industrial complex or other vested interests that want to keep things the way they are, but within each and every one of us. It's our fears and our lack of knowledge and imagination that stands in the way of real reform. And ultimately, I think that boils down to the kids, and to every parent's desire to put our baby in a bubble, and the fear that somehow drugs will pierce that bubble and put our young ones at risk. In fact, sometimes it seems like the entire War on Drugs gets justified as one great big child protection act, which any young person can tell you it's not. So here's what I say to teenagers. First, don't do drugs. Second, don't do drugs. Third, if you do do drugs, there's some things I want you to know, because my bottom line as your parent is, come home safely at the end of the night and grow up and lead a healthy and good adulthood. That's my drug education mantra: Safety first. So this is what I've dedicated my life to, to building an organization and a movement of people who believe we need to turn our backs on the failed prohibitions of the past and embrace new drug policies grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights, where people who come from across the political spectrum and every other spectrum as well, where people who love our drugs, people who hate drugs, and people who don't give a damn about drugs, but every one of us believes that this War on Drugs, this backward, heartless, disastrous War on Drugs, has got to end. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Chris Anderson: Ethan, congrats — quite the reaction. That was a powerful talk. Not quite a complete standing O, though, and I'm guessing that some people here and maybe a few watching online, maybe someone knows a teenager or a friend or whatever who got sick, maybe died from some drug overdose. I'm sure you've had these people approach you before. What do you say to them? Ethan Nadelmann: Chris, the most amazing thing that's happened of late is that I've met a growing number of people who have actually lost a sibling or a child to a drug overdose, and 10 years ago, those people just wanted to say, let's line up all the drug dealers and shoot them and that will solve it. And what they've come to understand is that the Drug War did nothing to protect their kids. If anything, it made it more likely that those kids were put at risk. And so they're now becoming part of this drug policy reform movement. There's other people who have kids, one's addicted to alcohol, the other one's addicted to cocaine or heroin, and they ask themselves the question: Why does this kid get to take one step at a time and try to get better and that one's got to deal with jail and police and criminals all the time? So everybody's understanding, the Drug War's not protecting anybody. CA: Certainly in the U.S., you've got political gridlock on most issues. Is there any realistic chance of anything actually shifting on this issue in the next five years? EN: I'd say it's quite remarkable. I'm getting all these calls from journalists now who are saying to me, "Ethan, it seems like the only two issues advancing politically in America right now are marijuana law reform and gay marriage. What are you doing right?" And then you're looking at bipartisanship breaking out with, actually, Republicans in the Congress and state legislatures allowing bills to be enacted with majority Democratic support, so we've gone from being sort of the third rail, the most fearful issue of American politics, to becoming one of the most successful. CA: Ethan, thank you so much for coming to TEDGlobal. EN: Chris, thanks so much. CA: Thank you. EN: Thank you. (Applause) |
What your doctor won’t disclose | {0: "Dr. Leana Wen is Baltimore City's Health Commissioner."} | TEDMED 2014 | They told me that I'm a traitor to my own profession, that I should be fired, have my medical license taken away, that I should go back to my own country. My email got hacked. In a discussion forum for other doctors, someone took credit for "Twitter-bombing" my account. Now, I didn't know if this was a good or bad thing, but then came the response: "Too bad it wasn't a real bomb." I never thought that I would do something that would provoke this level of anger among other doctors. Becoming a doctor was my dream. I grew up in China, and my earliest memories are of being rushed to the hospital because I had such bad asthma that I was there nearly every week. I had this one doctor, Dr. Sam, who always took care of me. She was about the same age as my mother. She had this wild, curly hair, and she always wore these bright yellow flowery dresses. She was one of those doctors who, if you fell and you broke your arm, she would ask you why you weren't laughing because it's your humerus. Get it? See, you'd groan, but she'd always make you feel better after having seen her. Well, we all have that childhood hero that we want to grow up to be just like, right? Well, I wanted to be just like Dr. Sam. When I was eight, my parents and I moved to the U.S., and ours became the typical immigrant narrative. My parents cleaned hotel rooms and washed dishes and pumped gas so that I could pursue my dream. Well, eventually I learned enough English, and my parents were so happy the day that I got into medical school and took my oath of healing and service. But then one day, everything changed. My mother called me to tell me that she wasn't feeling well, she had a cough that wouldn't go away, she was short of breath and tired. Well, I knew that my mother was someone who never complained about anything. For her to tell me that something was the matter, I knew something had to be really wrong. And it was: We found out that she had stage IV breast cancer, cancer that by then had spread to her lungs, her bones, and her brain. My mother was brave, though, and she had hope. She went through surgery and radiation, and was on her third round of chemotherapy when she lost her address book. She tried to look up her oncologist's phone number on the Internet and she found it, but she found something else too. On several websites, he was listed as a highly paid speaker to a drug company, and in fact often spoke on behalf of the same chemo regimen that he had prescribed her. She called me in a panic, and I didn't know what to believe. Maybe this was the right chemo regimen for her, but maybe it wasn't. It made her scared and it made her doubt. When it comes to medicine, having that trust is a must, and when that trust is gone, then all that's left is fear. There's another side to this fear. As a medical student, I was taking care of this 19-year-old who was biking back to his dorm when he got struck and hit, run over by an SUV. He had seven broken ribs, shattered hip bones, and he was bleeding inside his belly and inside his brain. Now, imagine being his parents who flew in from Seattle, 2,000 miles away, to find their son in a coma. I mean, you'd want to find out what's going on with him, right? They asked to attend our bedside rounds where we discussed his condition and his plan, which I thought was a reasonable request, and also would give us a chance to show them how much we were trying and how much we cared. The head doctor, though, said no. He gave all kinds of reasons. Maybe they'll get in the nurse's way. Maybe they'll stop students from asking questions. He even said, "What if they see mistakes and sue us?" What I saw behind every excuse was deep fear, and what I learned was that to become a doctor, we have to put on our white coats, put up a wall, and hide behind it. There's a hidden epidemic in medicine. Of course, patients are scared when they come to the doctor. Imagine you wake up with this terrible bellyache, you go to the hospital, you're lying in this strange place, you're on this hospital gurney, you're wearing this flimsy gown, strangers are coming to poke and prod at you. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't even know if you're going to get the blanket you asked for 30 minutes ago. But it's not just patients who are scared; doctors are scared too. We're scared of patients finding out who we are and what medicine is all about. And so what do we do? We put on our white coats and we hide behind them. Of course, the more we hide, the more people want to know what it is that we're hiding. The more fear then spirals into mistrust and poor medical care. We don't just have a fear of sickness, we have a sickness of fear. Can we bridge this disconnect between what patients need and what doctors do? Can we overcome the sickness of fear? Let me ask you differently: If hiding isn't the answer, what if we did the opposite? What if doctors were to become totally transparent with their patients? Last fall, I conducted a research study to find out what it is that people want to know about their healthcare. I didn't just want to study patients in a hospital, but everyday people. So my two medical students, Suhavi Tucker and Laura Johns, literally took their research to the streets. They went to banks, coffee shops, senior centers, Chinese restaurants and train stations. What did they find? Well, when we asked people, "What do you want to know about your healthcare?" people responded with what they want to know about their doctors, because people understand health care to be the individual interaction between them and their doctors. When we asked, "What do you want to know about your doctors?" people gave three different answers. Some want to know that their doctor is competent and certified to practice medicine. Some want to be sure that their doctor is unbiased and is making decisions based on evidence and science, not on who pays them. Surprisingly to us, many people want to know something else about their doctors. Jonathan, a 28-year-old law student, says he wants to find someone who is comfortable with LGBTQ patients and specializes in LGBT health. Serena, a 32-year-old accountant, says that it's important to her for her doctor to share her values when it comes to reproductive choice and women's rights. Frank, a 59-year-old hardware store owner, doesn't even like going to the doctor and wants to find someone who believes in prevention first, but who is comfortable with alternative treatments. One after another, our respondents told us that that doctor-patient relationship is a deeply intimate one — that to show their doctors their bodies and tell them their deepest secrets, they want to first understand their doctor's values. Just because doctors have to see every patient doesn't mean that patients have to see every doctor. People want to know about their doctors first so that they can make an informed choice. As a result of this, I formed a campaign, Who's My Doctor? that calls for total transparency in medicine. Participating doctors voluntarily disclose on a public website not just information about where we went to medical school and what specialty we're in, but also our conflicts of interest. We go beyond the Government in the Sunshine Act about drug company affiliations, and we talk about how we're paid. Incentives matter. If you go to your doctor because of back pain, you might want to know he's getting paid 5,000 dollars to perform spine surgery versus 25 dollars to refer you to see a physical therapist, or if he's getting paid the same thing no matter what he recommends. Then, we go one step further. We add our values when it comes to women's health, LGBT health, alternative medicine, preventive health, and end-of-life decisions. We pledge to our patients that we are here to serve you, so you have a right to know who we are. We believe that transparency can be the cure for fear. I thought some doctors would sign on and others wouldn't, but I had no idea of the huge backlash that would ensue. Within one week of starting Who's My Doctor? Medscape's public forum and several online doctors' communities had thousands of posts about this topic. Here are a few. From a gastroenterologist in Portland: "I devoted 12 years of my life to being a slave. I have loans and mortgages. I depend on lunches from drug companies to serve patients." Well, times may be hard for everyone, but try telling your patient making 35,000 dollars a year to serve a family of four that you need the free lunch. From an orthopedic surgeon in Charlotte: "I find it an invasion of my privacy to disclose where my income comes from. My patients don't disclose their incomes to me." But your patients' sources of income don't affect your health. From a psychiatrist in New York City: "Pretty soon we will have to disclose whether we prefer cats to dogs, what model of car we drive, and what toilet paper we use." Well, how you feel about Toyotas or Cottonelle won't affect your patients' health, but your views on a woman's right to choose and preventive medicine and end-of-life decisions just might. And my favorite, from a Kansas City cardiologist: "More government-mandated stuff? Dr. Wen needs to move back to her own country." Well, two pieces of good news. First of all, this is meant to be voluntary and not mandatory, and second of all, I'm American and I'm already here. (Laughter) (Applause) Within a month, my employers were getting calls asking for me to be fired. I received mail at my undisclosed home address with threats to contact the medical board to sanction me. My friends and family urged me to quit this campaign. After the bomb threat, I was done. But then I heard from patients. Over social media, a TweetChat, which I'd learned what that was by then, generated 4.3 million impressions, and thousands of people wrote to encourage me to continue. They wrote with things like, "If doctors are doing something they're that ashamed of, they shouldn't be doing it." "Elected officials have to disclose campaign contributions. Lawyers have to disclose conflicts of interests. Why shouldn't doctors?" And finally, many people wrote and said, "Let us patients decide what's important when we're choosing a doctor." In our initial trial, over 300 doctors have taken the total transparency pledge. What a crazy new idea, right? But actually, this is not that new of a concept at all. Remember Dr. Sam, my doctor in China, with the goofy jokes and the wild hair? Well, she was my doctor, but she was also our neighbor who lived in the building across the street. I went to the same school as her daughter. My parents and I trusted her because we knew who she was and what she stood for, and she had no need to hide from us. Just one generation ago, this was the norm in the U.S. as well. You knew that your family doctor was the father of two teenage boys, that he quit smoking a few years ago, that he says he's a regular churchgoer, but you see him twice a year: once at Easter and once when his mother-in-law comes to town. You knew what he was about, and he had no need to hide from you. But the sickness of fear has taken over, and patients suffer the consequences. I know this firsthand. My mother fought her cancer for eight years. She was a planner, and she thought a lot about how she wanted to live and how she wanted to die. Not only did she sign advance directives, she wrote a 12-page document about how she had suffered enough, how it was time for her to go. One day, when I was a resident physician, I got a call to say that she was in the intensive care unit. By the time I got there, she was about to be intubated and put on a breathing machine. "But this is not what she wants," I said, "and we have documents." The ICU doctor looked at me in the eye, pointed at my then 16-year-old sister, and said, "Do you remember when you were that age? How would you have liked to grow up without your mother?" Her oncologist was there too, and said, "This is your mother. Can you really face yourself for the rest of your life if you don't do everything for her?" I knew my mother so well. I understood what her directives meant so well, but I was a physician. That was the single hardest decision I ever made, to let her die in peace, and I carry those words of those doctors with me every single day. We can bridge the disconnect between what doctors do and what patients need. We can get there, because we've been there before, and we know that transparency gets us to that trust. Research has shown us that openness also helps doctors, that having open medical records, being willing to talk about medical errors, will increase patient trust, improve health outcomes, and reduce malpractice. That openness, that trust, is only going to be more important as we move from the infectious to the behavioral model of disease. Bacteria may not care so much about trust and intimacy, but for people to tackle the hard lifestyle choices, to address issues like smoking cessation, blood-pressure management and diabetes control, well, that requires us to establish trust. Here's what other transparent doctors have said. Brandon Combs, an internist in Denver: "This has brought me closer to my patients. The type of relationship I've developed — that's why I entered medicine." Aaron Stupple, an internist in Denver: "I tell my patients that I am totally open with them. I don't hide anything from them. This is me. Now tell me about you. We're in this together." May Nguyen, a family physician in Houston: "My colleagues are astounded by what I'm doing. They ask me how I could be so brave. I said, I'm not being brave, it's my job." I leave you today with a final thought. Being totally transparent is scary. You feel naked, exposed and vulnerable, but that vulnerability, that humility, it can be an extraordinary benefit to the practice of medicine. When doctors are willing to step off our pedestals, take off our white coats, and show our patients who we are and what medicine is all about, that's when we begin to overcome the sickness of fear. That's when we establish trust. That's when we change the paradigm of medicine from one of secrecy and hiding to one that is fully open and engaged for our patients. Thank you. (Applause) |
Hidden music rituals around the world | {0: 'A jazz icon since the late 1960s, Naná Vasconcelos contributed Latin percussion to some of the world’s most cerebral, soulful music. ', 1: 'Global wanderer Vincent Moon explores and documents vanishing traditions with his evocative ethnomusical films. '} | TEDGlobal 2014 | Vincent Moon: How can we use computers, cameras, microphones to represent the world in an alternative way, as much as possible? How, maybe, is it possible to use the Internet to create a new form of cinema? And actually, why do we record? Well, it is with such simple questions in mind that I started to make films 10 years ago, first with a friend, Christophe Abric. He had a website, La Blogothèque, dedicated to independent music. We were crazy about music. We wanted to represent music in a different way, to film the music we love, the musicians we admired, as much as possible, far from the music industry and far from the cliches attached to it. We started to publish every week sessions on the Internet. We are going to see a few extracts now. From Grizzly Bear in the shower to Sigur Ros playing in a Parisian cafe. From Phoenix playing by the Eiffel Tower to Tom Jones in his hotel room in New York. From Arcade Fire in an elevator in the Olympia to Beirut going down a staircase in Brooklyn. From R.E.M. in a car to The National around a table at night in the south of France. From Bon Iver playing with some friends in an apartment in Montmartre to Yeasayer having a long night, and many, many, many more unknown or very famous bands. We published all those films for free on the Internet, and we wanted to share all those films and represent music in a different way. We wanted to create another type of intimacy using all those new technologies. At the time, 10 years ago actually, there was no such project on the Internet, and I guess that's why the project we were making, the Take Away Shows, got quite successful, reaching millions of viewers. After a while, I got a bit — I wanted to go somewhere else. I felt the need to travel and to discover some other music, to explore the world, going to other corners, and actually it was also this idea of nomadic cinema, sort of, that I had in mind. How could the use of new technologies and the road fit together? How could I edit my films in a bus crossing the Andes? So I went on five-year travels around the globe. I started at the time in the digital film and music label collection Petites Planètes, which was also an homage to French filmmaker Chris Marker. We're going to see now a few more extracts of those new films. From the tecno brega diva of northern Brazil, Gaby Amarantos to a female ensemble in Chechnya. From experimental electronic music in Singapore with One Man Nation to Brazilian icon Tom Zé singing on his rooftop in São Paolo. From The Bambir, the great rock band from Armenia to some traditional songs in a restaurant in Tbilisi, Georgia. From White Shoes, a great retro pop band from Jakarta, Indonesia to DakhaBrakha, the revolutionary band from Kiev, Ukraine. From Tomi Lebrero and his bandoneon and his friends in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to many other places and musicians around the world. My desire was to make it as a trek. To do all those films, it would have been impossible with a big company behind me, with a structure or anything. I was traveling alone with a backpack — computer, camera, microphones in it. Alone, actually, but just with local people, meeting my team, which was absolutely not professional people, on the spot there, going from one place to another and to make cinema as a trek. I really believed that cinema could be this very simple thing: I want to make a film and you're going to give me a place to stay for the night. I give you a moment of cinema and you offer me a capirinha. Well, or other drinks, depending on where you are. In Peru, they drink pisco sour. Well, when I arrived in Peru, actually, I had no idea about what I would do there. And I just had one phone number, actually, of one person. Three months later, after traveling all around the country, I had recorded 33 films, only with the help of local people, only with the help of people that I was asking all the time the same question: What is important to record here today? By living in such a way, by working without any structure, I was able to react to the moment and to decide, oh, this is important to make now. This is important to record that whole person. This is important to create this exchange. When I went to Chechnya, the first person I met looked at me and was like, "What are you doing here? Are you a journalist? NGO? Politics? What kind of problems are you going to study?" Well, I was there to research on Sufi rituals in Chechnya, actually — incredible culture of Sufism in Chechnya, which is absolutely unknown outside of the region. As soon as people understood that I would give them those films — I would publish them online for free under a Creative Commons license, but I would also really give them to the people and I would let them do what they want with it. I just want to represent them in a beautiful light. I just want to portray them in a way that their grandchildren are going to look at their grandfather, and they're going to be like, "Whoa, my grandfather is as cool as Beyoncé." (Laughter) It's a really important thing. (Applause) It's really important, because that's the way people are going to look differently at their own culture, at their own land. They're going to think about it differently. It may be a way to maintain a certain diversity. Why you will record? Hmm. There's a really good quote by American thinker Hakim Bey which says, "Every recording is a tombstone of a live performance." It's a really good sentence to keep in mind nowadays in an era saturated by images. What's the point of that? Where do we go with it? I was researching. I was still keeping this idea in mind: What's the point? I was researching on music, trying to pull, trying to get closer to a certain origin of it. Where is this all coming from? I am French. I had no idea about what I would discover, which is a very simple thing: Everything was sacred, at first, and music was spiritual healing. How could I use my camera, my little tool, to get closer and maybe not only capture the trance but find an equivalent, a cine-trance, maybe, something in complete harmony with the people? That is now my new research I'm doing on spirituality, on new spirits around the world. Maybe a few more extracts now. From the Tana Toraja funeral ritual in Indonesia to an Easter ceremony in the north of Ethiopia. From jathilan, a popular trance ritual on the island of Java, to Umbanda in the north of Brazil. The Sufi rituals of Chechnya to a mass in the holiest church of Armenia. Some Sufi songs in Harar, the holy city of Ethiopia, to an ayahuasca ceremony deep in the Amazon of Peru with the Shipibo. Then to my new project, the one I'm doing now here in Brazil, named "Híbridos." I'm doing it with Priscilla Telmon. It's research on the new spiritualities all around the country. This is my quest, my own little quest of what I call experimental ethnography, trying to hybrid all those different genres, trying to regain a certain complexity. Why do we record? I was still there. I really believe cinema teaches us to see. The way we show the world is going to change the way we see this world, and we live in a moment where the mass media are doing a terrible, terrible job at representing the world: violence, extremists, only spectacular events, only simplifications of everyday life. I think we are recording to regain a certain complexity. To reinvent life today, we have to make new forms of images. And it's very simple. Muito obrigado. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Vincent, Vincent, Vincent. Merci. We have to prepare for the following performance, and I have a question for you, and the question is this: You show up in places like the ones you just have shown us, and you are carrying a camera and I assume that you are welcome but you are not always absolutely welcome. You walk into sacred rituals, private moments in a village, a town, a group of people. How do you break the barrier when you show up with a lens? VM: I think you break it with your body, more than with your knowledge. That's what it taught me to travel, to trust the memory of the body more than the memory of the brain. The respect is stepping forward, not stepping backward, and I really think that by engaging your body in the moment, in the ceremony, in the places, people welcome you and understand your energy. BG: You told me that most of the videos you have made are actually one single shot. You don't do much editing. I mean, you edited the ones for us at the beginning of the sessions because of the length, etc. Otherwise, you just go in and capture whatever happens in front of your eyes without much planning, and so is that the case? It's correct? VM: My idea is that I think that as long as we don't cut, in a way, as long as we let the viewer watch, more and more viewers are going to feel closer, are going to get closer to the moment, to that moment and to that place. I really think of that as a matter of respecting the viewer, to not cut all the time from one place to another, to just let the time go. BG: Tell me in a few words about your new project, "Híbridos," here in Brazil. Just before coming to TEDGlobal, you have actually been traveling around the country for that. Tell us a couple of things. VM: "Híbridos" is — I really believe Brazil, far from the cliches, is the greatest religious country in the world, the greatest country in terms of spirituality and in experimentations in spiritualities. And it's a big project I'm doing over this year, which is researching in very different regions of Brazil, in very different forms of cults, and trying to understand how people live together with spirituality nowadays. BG: The man who is going to appear onstage momentarily, and Vincent's going to introduce him, is one of the subjects of one of his past videos. When did you do a video with him? VM: I guess four years ago, four years in my first travel. BG: So it was one of your first ones in Brazil. VM: It was amongst the first ones in Brazil, yeah. I shot the film in Recife, in the place where he is from. BG: So let's introduce him. Who are we waiting for? VM: I'll just make it very short. It's a very great honor for me to welcome onstage one of the greatest Brazilian musicians of all time. Please welcome Naná Vasconcelos. BG: Naná Vasconcelos! (Applause) (Music) Naná Vasconcelos: Let's go to the jungle. (Applause) |
How to save the world (or at least yourself) from bad meetings | {0: 'David Grady is on a crusade to help you take back your calendar.'} | TED@State Street Boston | Picture this: It's Monday morning, you're at the office, you're settling in for the day at work, and this guy that you sort of recognize from down the hall, walks right into your cubicle and he steals your chair. Doesn't say a word — just rolls away with it. Doesn't give you any information about why he took your chair out of all the other chairs that are out there. Doesn't acknowledge the fact that you might need your chair to get some work done today. You wouldn't stand for it. You'd make a stink. You'd follow that guy back to his cubicle and you'd say, "Why my chair?" Okay, so now it's Tuesday morning and you're at the office, and a meeting invitation pops up in your calendar. (Laughter) And it's from this woman who you kind of know from down the hall, and the subject line references some project that you heard a little bit about. But there's no agenda. There's no information about why you were invited to the meeting. And yet you accept the meeting invitation, and you go. And when this highly unproductive session is over, you go back to your desk, and you stand at your desk and you say, "Boy, I wish I had those two hours back, like I wish I had my chair back." (Laughter) Every day, we allow our coworkers, who are otherwise very, very nice people, to steal from us. And I'm talking about something far more valuable than office furniture. I'm talking about time. Your time. In fact, I believe that we are in the middle of a global epidemic of a terrible new illness known as MAS: Mindless Accept Syndrome. (Laughter) The primary symptom of Mindless Accept Syndrome is just accepting a meeting invitation the minute it pops up in your calendar. (Laughter) It's an involuntary reflex — ding, click, bing — it's in your calendar, "Gotta go, I'm already late for a meeting." (Laughter) Meetings are important, right? And collaboration is key to the success of any enterprise. And a well-run meeting can yield really positive, actionable results. But between globalization and pervasive information technology, the way that we work has really changed dramatically over the last few years. And we're miserable. (Laughter) And we're miserable not because the other guy can't run a good meeting, it's because of MAS, our Mindless Accept Syndrome, which is a self-inflicted wound. Actually, I have evidence to prove that MAS is a global epidemic. Let me tell you why. A couple of years ago, I put a video on Youtube, and in the video, I acted out every terrible conference call you've ever been on. It goes on for about five minutes, and it has all the things that we hate about really bad meetings. There's the moderator who has no idea how to run the meeting. There are the participants who have no idea why they're there. The whole thing kind of collapses into this collaborative train wreck. And everybody leaves very angry. It's kind of funny. (Laughter) Let's take a quick look. (Video) Our goal today is to come to an agreement on a very important proposal. As a group, we need to decide if — bloop bloop — Hi, who just joined? Hi, it's Joe. I'm working from home today. (Laughter) Hi, Joe. Thanks for joining us today, great. I was just saying, we have a lot of people on the call we'd like to get through, so let's skip the roll call and I'm gonna dive right in. Our goal today is to come to an agreement on a very important proposal. As a group, we need to decide if — bloop bloop — (Laughter) Hi, who just joined? No? I thought I heard a beep. (Laughter) Sound familiar? Yeah, it sounds familiar to me, too. A couple of weeks after I put that online, 500,000 people in dozens of countries, I mean dozens of countries, watched this video. And three years later, it's still getting thousands of views every month. It's close to about a million right now. And in fact, some of the biggest companies in the world, companies that you've heard of but I won't name, have asked for my permission to use this video in their new-hire training to teach their new employees how not to run a meeting at their company. And if the numbers — there are a million views and it's being used by all these companies — aren't enough proof that we have a global problem with meetings, there are the many, many thousands of comments posted online after the video went up. Thousands of people wrote things like, "OMG, that was my day today!" "That was my day every day!" "This is my life." One guy wrote, "It's funny because it's true. Eerily, sadly, depressingly true. It made me laugh until I cried. And cried. And I cried some more." (Laughter) This poor guy said, "My daily life until retirement or death, sigh." These are real quotes and it's real sad. A common theme running through all of these comments online is this fundamental belief that we are powerless to do anything other than go to meetings and suffer through these poorly run meetings and live to meet another day. But the truth is, we're not powerless at all. In fact, the cure for MAS is right here in our hands. It's right at our fingertips, literally. It's something that I call ¡No MAS! (Laughter) Which, if I remember my high school Spanish, means something like, "Enough already, make it stop!" Here's how No MAS works. It's very simple. First of all, the next time you get a meeting invitation that doesn't have a lot of information in it at all, click the tentative button! It's okay, you're allowed, that's why it's there. It's right next to the accept button. Or the maybe button, or whatever button is there for you not to accept immediately. Then, get in touch with the person who asked you to the meeting. Tell them you're very excited to support their work, ask them what the goal of the meeting is, and tell them you're interested in learning how you can help them achieve their goal. And if we do this often enough, and we do it respectfully, people might start to be a little bit more thoughtful about the way they put together meeting invitations. And you can make more thoughtful decisions about accepting it. People might actually start sending out agendas. Imagine! Or they might not have a conference call with 12 people to talk about a status when they could just do a quick email and get it done with. People just might start to change their behavior because you changed yours. And they just might bring your chair back, too. (Laughter) No MAS! Thank you. (Applause). |
Tiny satellites show us the Earth as it changes in near-real-time | {0: 'At Planet, Will Marshall leads overall strategy for commercializing new geospatial data and analytics that are disrupting agriculture, mapping, energy, the environment and other vertical markets.'} | TED2014 | The Earth needs no introduction. It needs no introduction in part because the Apollo 17 astronauts, when they were hurtling around the moon in 1972, took this iconic image. It galvanized a whole generation of human beings to realize that we're on Spaceship Earth, fragile and finite as it is, and that we need to take care of it. But while this picture is beautiful, it's static, and the Earth is constantly changing. It's changing on days' time scales with human activity. And the satellite imagery we have of it today is old. Typically, years old. And that's important because you can't fix what you can't see. What we'd ideally want is images of the whole planet every day. So, what's standing in our way? What's the problem? This is the problem: Satellites are big, expensive and they're slow. This one weighs three tons. It's six meters tall, four meters wide. It took up the entire fairing of a rocket just to launch it. One satellite, one rocket. It cost 855 million dollars. Satellites like these have done an amazing job at helping us to understand our planet. But if we want to understand it much more regularly, we need lots of satellites, and this model isn't scalable. So me and my friends, we started Planet Labs to make satellites ultra-compact and small and highly capable. I'm going to show you what our satellite looks like: This is our satellite. This is not a scale model, this is the real size. It's 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters, it weighs four kilograms, and we've stuffed the latest and greatest electronics and sensor systems into this little package so that even though this is really small, this can take pictures 10 times the resolution of the big satellite here, even though it weighs one thousandth of the mass. And we call this satellite "Dove" — Thank you. (Applause) We call this satellite "Dove," and we call it "Dove" because satellites are typically named after birds, but normally birds of prey: like Eagle, Hawk, Swoop, Kill, I don't know, Kestrel, these sort of things. But ours have a humanitarian mission, so we wanted to call them Doves. And we haven't just built them, though. We've launched them. And not just one, but many. It all started in our garage. Yes, we built our first satellite prototype in our garage. Now, this is pretty normal for a Silicon Valley company that we are, but we believe it's the first time for a space company. And that's not the only trick we learned from Silicon Valley. We rapidly prototype our satellites. We use "release early, release often" on our software. And we take a different risk approach. We take them outside and test them. We even put satellites in space just to test the satellites, and we've learned to manufacture our satellites at scale. We've used modern production techniques so we can build large numbers of them, I think for the first time. We call it agile aerospace, and that's what's enabled us to put so much capability into this little box. Now, what has bonded our team over the years is the idea of democratizing access to satellite information. In fact, the founders of our company, Chris, Robbie and I, we met over 15 years ago at the United Nations when they were hosting a conference about exactly that question: How do you use satellites to help humanity? How do you use satellites to help people in developing countries or with climate change? And this is what has bonded us. Our entire team is passionate about using satellites to help humanity. You could say we're space geeks, but not only do we care about what's up there, we care about what's down here, too. I'm going to show you a video from just four weeks ago of two of our satellites being launched from the International Space Station. This is not an animation, this is a video taken by the astronaut looking out of the window. It gives you a bit of a sense of scale of our two satellites. It's like some of the smallest satellites ever are being launched from the biggest satellite ever. And right at the end, the solar array glints in the sun. It's really cool. Wait for it. Boom! Yeah. It's the money shot. (Laughter) So we didn't just launch two of them like this, we launched 28 of them. It's the largest constellation of Earth-imaging satellites in human history, and it's going to provide a completely radical new data set about our changing planet. But that's just the beginning. You see, we're going to launch more than 100 of these satellites like these over the course of the next year. It's going to be the largest constellation of satellites in human history. And this is what it's going to do: Acting in a single-orbit plane that stays fixed with respect to the sun, the Earth rotates underneath. They're all cameras pointed down, and they slowly scan across as the Earth rotates underneath. The Earth rotates every 24 hours, so we scan every point on the planet every 24 hours. It's a line scanner for the planet. We don't take a picture of anywhere on the planet every day, we take a picture of every single place on the planet every day. Even though we launched these just a couple of weeks ago, we've already got some initial imagery from the satellites and I'm going to show it publicly for the first time right now. This is the very first picture taken by our satellite. It happened to be over UC-Davis' campus in California when we turned the camera on. But what's even cooler is when we compare it to the previous latest image of that area, which was taken many months ago. And the image on the left is from our satellite, and we see buildings are being built. The general point is that we will be able to track urban growth as it happens around the whole world in all cities, every day. Water as well. Thank you. (Applause) We'll be able to see the extent of all water bodies around the whole world every day and help water security. From water security to food security. We'll see crops as they grow in all the fields in every farmer's field around the planet every day. and help them to improve crop yield. This is a beautiful image that was taken just a few hours ago when the satellite was flying over Argentina. The general point is there are probably hundreds and thousands of applications of this data, I've mentioned a few, but there's others: deforestation, the ice caps melting. We can track all of these things, every tree on the planet every day. If you took the difference between today's image and yesterday's image, you'd see much of the world news — you'd see floods and fires and earthquakes. And we have decided, therefore, that the best thing that we could do with our data is to ensure universal access to it. We want to ensure everyone can see it. Thank you. (Applause) We want to empower NGOs and companies and scientists and journalists to be able to answer the questions that they have about the planet. We want to enable the developer community to run their apps on our data. In short, we want to democratize access to information about our planet. Which brings me back to this. You see, this will be an entirely new global data set. And we believe that together, we can help to take care of our Spaceship Earth. And what I would like to leave you with is the following question: If you had access to imagery of the whole planet every single day, what would you do with that data? What problems would you solve? What exploration would you do? Well, I invite you to come and explore with us. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Meet the mom who started the Ice Bucket Challenge | {0: 'Nancy Frates and her family have raised a projected $160 million for ALS research in 2014. How? They kicked off the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge to honor 29-year-old Pete Frates.'} | TEDxBoston | Well, good afternoon. How many of you took the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge? (Applause) Woo hoo! Well, I have to tell you, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you so very, very much. Do you know to date the ALS Association has raised 125 million dollars? Woo hoo! (Applause) It takes me back to the summer of 2011. My family, my kids had all grown up. We were officially empty nesters, and we decided, let's go on a family vacation. Jenn, my daughter, and my son-in-law came down from New York. My youngest, Andrew, he came down from his home in Charlestown where he was working in Boston, and my son Pete, who had played at Boston College, baseball, had played baseball professionally in Europe, and had now come home and was selling group insurance, he also joined us. And one night, I found myself having a beer with Pete, and Pete was looking at me and he just said, "You know, Mom, I don't know, selling group insurance is just not my passion." He said, "I just don't feel I'm living up to my potential. I don't feel this is my mission in life." And he said, "You know, oh by the way, Mom, I have to leave early from vacation because my inter-city league team that I play for made the playoffs, and I have to get back to Boston because I can't let my team down. I'm just not as passionate about my job as I am about baseball." So off Pete went, and left the family vacation — break a mother's heart — and he went, and we followed four days later to see the next playoff game. We're at the playoff game, Pete's at the plate, and a fastball's coming in, and it hits him on the wrist. Oh, Pete. His wrist went completely limp, like this. So for the next six months, Pete went back to his home in Southie, kept working that unpassionate job, and was going to doctors to see what was wrong with this wrist that never came back. Six months later, in March, he called my husband and me, and he said, "Oh, Mom and Dad, we have a doctor that found a diagnosis for that wrist. Do you want to come with the doctor's appointment with me?" I said, "Sure, we'll come in." That morning, Pete, John and I all got up, got dressed, got in our cars — three separate cars because we were going to go to work after the doctor's appointment to find out what happened to the wrist. We walked into the neurologist's office, sat down, four doctors walk in, and the head neurologist sits down. And he says, "Well, Pete, we've been looking at all the tests, and I have to tell you, it's not a sprained wrist, it's not a broken wrist, it's not nerve damage in the wrist, it's not an infection, it's not Lyme disease." And there was this deliberate elimination going up, and I was thinking to myself, where is he going with this? Then he put his hands on his knees, he looked right at my 27-year-old kid, and said, "I don't know how to tell a 27-year-old this: Pete, you have ALS." ALS? I had had a friend whose 80-year-old father had ALS. I looked at my husband, he looked at me, and then we looked at the doctor, and we said, "ALS? Okay, what treatment? Let's go. What do we do? Let's go." And he looked at us, and he said, "Mr. and Mrs. Frates, I'm sorry to tell you this, but there's no treatment and there's no cure." We were the worst culprits. We didn't even understand that it had been 75 years since Lou Gehrig and nothing had been done in the progress against ALS. So we all went home, and Jenn and Dan flew home from Wall Street, Andrew came home from Charlestown, and Pete went to B.C. to pick up his then-girlfriend Julie and brought her home, and six hours later after diagnosis, we're sitting around having a family dinner, and we're having small chat. I don't even remember cooking dinner that night. But then our leader, Pete, set the vision, and talked to us just like we were his new team. He said, "There will be no wallowing, people." He goes, "We're not looking back, we're looking forward. What an amazing opportunity we have to change the world. I'm going to change the face of this unacceptable situation of ALS. We're going to move the needle, and I'm going to get it in front of philanthropists like Bill Gates." And that was it. We were given our directive. So in the days and months that followed, within a week, we had our brothers and sisters and our family come to us, that they were already creating Team Frate Train. Uncle Dave, he was the webmaster; Uncle Artie, he was the accountant; Auntie Dana, she was the graphic artist; and my youngest son, Andrew, quit his job, left his apartment in Charlestown and says, "I'm going to take care of Pete and be his caregiver." Then all those people, classmates, teammates, coworkers that Pete had inspired throughout his whole life, the circles of Pete all started intersecting with one another, and made Team Frate Train. Six months after diagnosis, Pete was given an award at a research summit for advocacy. He got up and gave a very eloquent speech, and at the end of the speech, there was a panel, and on the panel were these pharmaceutical executives and biochemists and clinicians and I'm sitting there and I'm listening to them and most of the content went straight over my head. I avoided every science class I ever could. But I was watching these people, and I was listening to them, and they were saying, "I, I do this, I do that," and there was a real unfamiliarity between them. So at the end of their talk, the panel, they had questions and answers, and boom, my hand went right up, and I get the microphone, and I look at them and I say, "Thank you. Thank you so much for working in ALS. It means so very much to us." I said, "But I do have to tell you that I'm watching your body language and I'm listening to what you're saying. It just doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of collaboration going on here. And not only that, where's the flip chart with the action items and the follow-up and the accountability? What are you going to do after you leave this room?" And then I turned around and there was about 200 pairs of eyes just staring at me. And it was that point that I realized that I had talked about the elephant in the room. Thus my mission had begun. So over the next couple of years, Pete — we've had our highs and our lows. Pete was put on a compassionate use drug. It was hope in a bottle for the whole ALS community. It was in a phase III trial. Then six months later, the data comes back: no efficacy. We were supposed to have therapies overseas, and the rug was pulled out from under us. So for the next two years, we just watched my son be taken away from me, little by little every day. Two and a half years ago, Pete was hitting home runs at baseball fields. Today, Pete's completely paralyzed. He can't hold his head up any longer. He's confined to a motorized wheelchair. He can no longer swallow or eat. He has a feeding tube. He can't speak. He talks with eye gaze technology and a speech generating device, and we're watching his lungs, because his diaphragm eventually is going to give out and then the decision will be made to put him on a ventilator or not. ALS robs the human of all their physical parts, but the brain stays intact. So July 4th, 2014, 75th year of Lou Gehrig's inspirational speech comes, and Pete is asked by MLB.com to write an article in the Bleacher Report. And it was very significant, because he wrote it using his eye gaze technology. Twenty days later, the ice started to fall. On July 27th, Pete's roommate in New York City, wearing a Quinn For The Win shirt, signifying Pat Quinn, another ALS patient known in New York, and B.C. shorts said, "I'm taking the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge," picked up the ice, put it over his head. "And I'm nominating ..." And he sent it up to Boston. And that was on July 27th. Over the next couple of days, our news feed was full of family and friends. If you haven't gone back, the nice thing about Facebook is that you have the dates, you can go back. You've got to see Uncle Artie's human Bloody Mary. I'm telling you, it's one of the best ones, and that was probably in day two. By about day four, Uncle Dave, the webmaster, he isn't on Facebook, and I get a text from him, and it says, "Nancy, what the hell is going on?" Uncle Dave gets a hit every time Pete's website is gone onto, and his phone was blowing up. So we all sat down and we realized, money is coming in — how amazing. So we knew awareness would lead to funding, we just didn't know it would only take a couple of days. So we got together, put our best 501(c)(3)s on Pete's website, and off we went. So week one, Boston media. Week two, national media. It was during week two that our neighbor next door opened up our door and threw a pizza across the kitchen floor, saying, "I think you people might need food in there." (Laughter) Week three, celebrities — Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood. Week four, global — BBC, Irish Radio. Did anyone see "Lost In Translation"? My husband did Japanese television. It was interesting. (Laughter) And those videos, the popular ones. Paul Bissonnette's glacier video, incredible. How about the redemption nuns of Dublin? Who's seen that one? It's absolutely fantastic. J.T., Justin Timberlake. That's when we knew, that was a real A-list celebrity. I go back on my texts, and I can see "JT! JT!" My sister texting me. Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany. Incredible. And the ALS patients, you know what their favorite ones are, and their families'? All of them. Because this misunderstood and underfunded "rare" disease, they just sat and watched people saying it over and over: "ALS, ALS." It was unbelievable. And those naysayers, let's just talk a couple of stats, shall we? Okay, so the ALS Association, they think by year end, it'll be 160 million dollars. ALS TDI in Cambridge, they raised three million dollars. Well, guess what? They had a clinical trial for a drug that they've been developing. It was on a three-year track for funding. Two months. It's coming out starting in two months. (Applause) And YouTube has reported that over 150 countries have posted Ice Bucket Challenges for ALS. And Facebook, 2.5 million videos, and I had the awesome adventure visiting the Facebook campus last week, and I said to them, "I know what it was like in my house. I can't imagine what it was like around here." All she said was, "Jaw-dropping." And my family's favorite video? Bill Gates. Because the night Pete was diagnosed, he told us that he was going to get ALS in front of philanthropists like Bill Gates, and he did it. Goal number one, check. Now on to the treatment and cure. (Applause) So okay, after all of this ice, we know that it was much more than just pouring buckets of ice water over your head, and I really would like to leave you with a couple of things that I'd like you to remember. The first thing is, every morning when you wake up, you can choose to live your day in positivity. Would any of you blame me if I just was in the fetal position and pulled the covers over my head every day? No, I don't think anybody would blame me, but Pete has inspired us to wake up every morning and be positive and proactive. I actually had to ditch support groups because everybody was in there saying that spraying their lawns with chemicals, that's why they got ALS, and I was like, "I don't think so," but I had to get away from the negativity. The second thing I want to leave you with is the person at the middle of the challenge has to be willing to have the mental toughness to put themselves out there. Pete still goes to baseball games and he still sits with his teammates in the dugout, and he hangs his gravity feed bag right on the cages. You'll see the kids, they're up there hanging it up. "Pete, is that okay?" "Yup." And then they put it right into his stomach. Because he wants them to see what the reality of this is, and how he's never, ever going to give up. And the third thing I want to leave you with: If you ever come across a situation that you see as so unacceptable, I want you to dig down as deep as you can and find your best mother bear and go after it. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) I know that I'm running over, but I've got to leave you with this: the gifts that my son has given me. I have had 29 years of having the honor of being the mother of Pete Frates. Pete Frates has been inspiring and leading his whole life. He's thrown out kindness, and all that kindness has come back to him. He walks the face of the Earth right now and knows why he's here. What a gift. The second thing that my son has given me is he's given me my mission in life. Now I know why I'm here. I'm going to save my son, and if it doesn't happen in time for him, I'm going to work so that no other mother has to go through what I'm going through. And the third thing, and last but not least gift that my son has given me, as an exclamation point to the miraculous month of August 2014: That girlfriend that he went to get on the night of diagnosis is now his wife, and Pete and Julie have given me my granddaughter, Lucy Fitzgerald Frates. Lucy Fitzgerald Frates came two weeks early as the exclamation point on August 31st, 2014. And so — (Applause) — And so let me leave you with Pete's words of inspiration that he would use to classmates, coworkers and teammates. Be passionate. Be genuine. Be hardworking. And don't forget to be great. Thank you. (Applause) |
This gel can make you stop bleeding instantly | {0: 'Joe Landolina is a TED Fellow and the inventor of VETI-GEL.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | I want you guys to imagine that you're a soldier running through the battlefield. Now, you're shot in the leg with a bullet, which severs your femoral artery. Now, this bleed is extremely traumatic and can kill you in less than three minutes. Unfortunately, by the time that a medic actually gets to you, what the medic has on his or her belt can take five minutes or more, with the application of pressure, to stop that type of bleed. Now, this problem is not only a huge problem for the military, but it's also a huge problem that's epidemic throughout the entire medical field, which is how do we actually look at wounds and how do we stop them quickly in a way that can work with the body? So now, what I've been working on for the last four years is to develop smart biomaterials, which are actually materials that will work with the body, helping it to heal and helping it to allow the wounds to heal normally. So now, before we do this, we have to take a much closer look at actually how does the body work. So now, everybody here knows that the body is made up of cells. So the cell is the most basic unit of life. But not many people know what else. But it actually turns out that your cells sit in this mesh of complicated fibers, proteins and sugars known as the extracellular matrix. So now, the ECM is actually this mesh that holds the cells in place, provides structure for your tissues, but it also gives the cells a home. It allows them to feel what they're doing, where they are, and tells them how to act and how to behave. And it actually turns out that the extracellular matrix is different from every single part of the body. So the ECM in my skin is different than the ECM in my liver, and the ECM in different parts of the same organ actually vary, so it's very difficult to be able to have a product that will react to the local extracellular matrix, which is exactly what we're trying to do. So now, for example, think of the rainforest. You have the canopy, you have the understory, and you have the forest floor. Now, all of these parts of the forest are made up of different plants, and different animals call them home. So just like that, the extracellular matrix is incredibly diverse in three dimensions. On top of that, the extracellular matrix is responsible for all wound healing, so if you imagine cutting the body, you actually have to rebuild this very complex ECM in order to get it to form again, and a scar, in fact, is actually poorly formed extracellular matrix. So now, behind me is an animation of the extracellular matrix. So as you see, your cells sit in this complicated mesh and as you move throughout the tissue, the extracellular matrix changes. So now every other piece of technology on the market can only manage a two- dimensional approximation of the extracellular matrix, which means that it doesn't fit in with the tissue itself. So when I was a freshman at NYU, what I discovered was you could actually take small pieces of plant-derived polymers and reassemble them onto the wound. So if you have a bleeding wound like the one behind me, you can actually put our material onto this, and just like Lego blocks, it'll reassemble into the local tissue. So that means if you put it onto liver, it turns into something that looks like liver, and if you put it onto skin, it turns into something that looks just like skin. So when you put the gel on, it actually reassembles into this local tissue. So now, this has a whole bunch of applications, but basically the idea is, wherever you put this product, you're able to reassemble into it immediately. Now, this is a simulated arterial bleed — blood warning — at twice human artery pressure. So now, this type of bleed is incredibly traumatic, and like I said before, would actually take five minutes or more with pressure to be able to stop. Now, in the time that it takes me to introduce the bleed itself, our material is able to stop that bleed, and it's because it actually goes on and works with the body to heal, so it reassembles into this piece of meat, and then the blood actually recognizes that that's happening, and produces fibrin, producing a very fast clot in less than 10 seconds. So now this technology — Thank you. (Applause) So now this technology, by January, will be in the hands of veterinarians, and we're working very diligently to try to get it into the hands of doctors, hopefully within the next year. But really, once again, I want you guys to imagine that you are a soldier running through a battlefield. Now, you get hit in the leg with a bullet, and instead of bleeding out in three minutes, you pull a small pack of gel out of your belt, and with the press of a button, you're able to stop your own bleed and you're on your way to recovery. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How autism freed me to be myself | {0: 'Rosie King challenges stereotypes of people with autism and contextualizes the issue by asking us, “Why be normal?”'} | TEDMED 2014 | I haven't told many people this, but in my head, I've got thousands of secret worlds all going on all at the same time. I am also autistic. People tend to diagnose autism with really specific check-box descriptions, but in reality, it's a whole variation as to what we're like. For instance, my little brother, he's very severely autistic. He's nonverbal. He can't talk at all. But I love to talk. People often associate autism with liking maths and science and nothing else, but I know so many autistic people who love being creative. But that is a stereotype, and the stereotypes of things are often, if not always, wrong. For instance, a lot of people think autism and think "Rain Man" immediately. That's the common belief, that every single autistic person is Dustin Hoffman, and that's not true. But that's not just with autistic people, either. I've seen it with LGBTQ people, with women, with POC people. People are so afraid of variety that they try to fit everything into a tiny little box with really specific labels. This is something that actually happened to me in real life: I googled "autistic people are ..." and it comes up with suggestions as to what you're going to type. I googled "autistic people are ..." and the top result was "demons." That is the first thing that people think when they think autism. They know. (Laughter) One of the things I can do because I'm autistic — it's an ability rather than a disability — is I've got a very, very vivid imagination. Let me explain it to you a bit. It's like I'm walking in two worlds most of the time. There's the real world, the world that we all share, and there's the world in my mind, and the world in my mind is often so much more real than the real world. Like, it's very easy for me to let my mind loose because I don't try and fit myself into a tiny little box. That's one of the best things about being autistic. You don't have the urge to do that. You find what you want to do, you find a way to do it, and you get on with it. If I was trying to fit myself into a box, I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't have achieved half the things that I have now. There are problems, though. There are problems with being autistic, and there are problems with having too much imagination. School can be a problem in general, but having also to explain to a teacher on a daily basis that their lesson is inexplicably dull and you are secretly taking refuge in a world inside your head in which you are not in that lesson, that adds to your list of problems. (Laughter) Also, when my imagination takes hold, my body takes on a life of its own. When something very exciting happens in my inner world, I've just got to run. I've got to rock backwards and forwards, or sometimes scream. This gives me so much energy, and I've got to have an outlet for all that energy. But I've done that ever since I was a child, ever since I was a tiny little girl. And my parents thought it was cute, so they didn't bring it up, but when I got into school, they didn't really agree that it was cute. It can be that people don't want to be friends with the girl that starts screaming in an algebra lesson. And this doesn't normally happen in this day and age, but it can be that people don't want to be friends with the autistic girl. It can be that people don't want to associate with anyone who won't or can't fit themselves into a box that's labeled normal. But that's fine with me, because it sorts the wheat from the chaff, and I can find which people are genuine and true and I can pick these people as my friends. But if you think about it, what is normal? What does it mean? Imagine if that was the best compliment you ever received. "Wow, you are really normal." (Laughter) But compliments are, "you are extraordinary" or "you step outside the box." It's "you're amazing." So if people want to be these things, why are so many people striving to be normal? Why are people pouring their brilliant individual light into a mold? People are so afraid of variety that they try and force everyone, even people who don't want to or can't, to become normal. There are camps for LGBTQ people or autistic people to try and make them this "normal," and that's terrifying that people would do that in this day and age. All in all, I wouldn't trade my autism and my imagination for the world. Because I am autistic, I've presented documentaries to the BBC, I'm in the midst of writing a book, I'm doing this — this is fantastic — and one of the best things that I've achieved, that I consider to have achieved, is I've found ways of communicating with my little brother and sister, who as I've said are nonverbal. They can't speak. And people would often write off someone who's nonverbal, but that's silly, because my little brother and sister are the best siblings that you could ever hope for. They're just the best, and I love them so much and I care about them more than anything else. I'm going to leave you with one question: If we can't get inside the person's minds, no matter if they're autistic or not, instead of punishing anything that strays from normal, why not celebrate uniqueness and cheer every time someone unleashes their imagination? Thank you. (Applause) |
What the people of the Amazon know that you don't | {0: 'As fast as the rainforest is disappearing -- the people of the rainforest are disappearing even faster. Mark Plotkin works to preserve generations of knowledge.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | Now, I'm an ethnobotanist. That's a scientist who works in the rainforest to document how people use local plants. I've been doing this for a long time, and I want to tell you, these people know these forests and these medicinal treasures better than we do and better than we ever will. But also, these cultures, these indigenous cultures, are disappearing much faster than the forests themselves. And the greatest and most endangered species in the Amazon Rainforest is not the jaguar, it's not the harpy eagle, it's the isolated and uncontacted tribes. Now four years ago, I injured my foot in a climbing accident and I went to the doctor. She gave me heat, she gave me cold, aspirin, narcotic painkillers, anti-inflammatories, cortisone shots. It didn't work. Several months later, I was in the northeast Amazon, walked into a village, and the shaman said, "You're limping." And I'll never forget this as long as I live. He looked me in the face and he said, "Take off your shoe and give me your machete." (Laughter) He walked over to a palm tree and carved off a fern, threw it in the fire, applied it to my foot, threw it in a pot of water, and had me drink the tea. The pain disappeared for seven months. When it came back, I went to see the shaman again. He gave me the same treatment, and I've been cured for three years now. Who would you rather be treated by? (Applause) Now, make no mistake — Western medicine is the most successful system of healing ever devised, but there's plenty of holes in it. Where's the cure for breast cancer? Where's the cure for schizophrenia? Where's the cure for acid reflux? Where's the cure for insomnia? The fact is that these people can sometimes, sometimes, sometimes cure things we cannot. Here you see a medicine man in the northeast Amazon treating leishmaniasis, a really nasty protozoal disease that afflicts 12 million people around the world. Western treatment are injections of antimony. They're painful, they're expensive, and they're probably not good for your heart; it's a heavy metal. This man cures it with three plants from the Amazon Rainforest. This is the magic frog. My colleague, the late great Loren McIntyre, discoverer of the source lake of the Amazon, Laguna McIntyre in the Peruvian Andes, was lost on the Peru-Brazil border about 30 years ago. He was rescued by a group of isolated Indians called the Matsés. They beckoned for him to follow them into the forest, which he did. There, they took out palm leaf baskets. There, they took out these green monkey frogs — these are big suckers, they're like this — and they began licking them. It turns out, they're highly hallucinogenic. McIntyre wrote about this and it was read by the editor of High Times magazine. You see that ethnobotanists have friends in all sorts of strange cultures. This guy decided he would go down to the Amazon and give it a whirl, or give it a lick, and he did, and he wrote, "My blood pressure went through the roof, I lost full control of my bodily functions, I passed out in a heap, I woke up in a hammock six hours later, felt like God for two days." (Laughter) An Italian chemist read this and said, "I'm not really interested in the theological aspects of the green monkey frog. What's this about the change in blood pressure?" Now, this is an Italian chemist who's working on a new treatment for high blood pressure based on peptides in the skin of the green monkey frog, and other scientists are looking at a cure for drug-resistant Staph aureus. How ironic if these isolated Indians and their magic frog prove to be one of the cures. Here's an ayahuasca shaman in the northwest Amazon, in the middle of a yage ceremony. I took him to Los Angeles to meet a foundation officer looking for support for monies to protect their culture. This fellow looked at the medicine man, and he said, "You didn't go to medical school, did you?" The shaman said, "No, I did not." He said, "Well, then what can you know about healing?" The shaman looked at him and he said, "You know what? If you have an infection, go to a doctor. But many human afflictions are diseases of the heart, the mind and the spirit. Western medicine can't touch those. I cure them." (Applause) But all is not rosy in learning from nature about new medicines. This is a viper from Brazil, the venom of which was studied at the Universidade de São Paulo here. It was later developed into ACE inhibitors. This is a frontline treatment for hypertension. Hypertension causes over 10 percent of all deaths on the planet every day. This is a $4 billion industry based on venom from a Brazilian snake, and the Brazilians did not get a nickel. This is not an acceptable way of doing business. The rainforest has been called the greatest expression of life on Earth. There's a saying in Suriname that I dearly love: "The rainforests hold answers to questions we have yet to ask." But as you all know, it's rapidly disappearing. Here in Brazil, in the Amazon, around the world. I took this picture from a small plane flying over the eastern border of the Xingu indigenous reserve in the state of Mato Grosso to the northwest of here. The top half of the picture, you see where the Indians live. The line through the middle is the eastern border of the reserve. Top half Indians, bottom half white guys. Top half wonder drugs, bottom half just a bunch of skinny-ass cows. Top half carbon sequestered in the forest where it belongs, bottom half carbon in the atmosphere where it's driving climate change. In fact, the number two cause of carbon being released into the atmosphere is forest destruction. But in talking about destruction, it's important to keep in mind that the Amazon is the mightiest landscape of all. It's a place of beauty and wonder. The biggest anteater in the world lives in the rain forest, tips the scale at 90 pounds. The goliath bird-eating spider is the world's largest spider. It's found in the Amazon as well. The harpy eagle wingspan is over seven feet. And the black cayman — these monsters can tip the scale at over half a ton. They're known to be man-eaters. The anaconda, the largest snake, the capybara, the largest rodent. A specimen from here in Brazil tipped the scale at 201 pounds. Let's visit where these creatures live, the northeast Amazon, home to the Akuriyo tribe. Uncontacted peoples hold a mystical and iconic role in our imagination. These are the people who know nature best. These are the people who truly live in total harmony with nature. By our standards, some would dismiss these people as primitive. "They don't know how to make fire, or they didn't when they were first contacted." But they know the forest far better than we do. The Akuriyos have 35 words for honey, and other Indians look up to them as being the true masters of the emerald realm. Here you see the face of my friend Pohnay. When I was a teenager rocking out to the Rolling Stones in my hometown of New Orleans, Pohnay was a forest nomad roaming the jungles of the northeast Amazon in a small band, looking for game, looking for medicinal plants, looking for a wife, in other small nomadic bands. But it's people like these that know things that we don't, and they have lots of lessons to teach us. However, if you go into most of the forests of the Amazon, there are no indigenous peoples. This is what you find: rock carvings which indigenous peoples, uncontacted peoples, used to sharpen the edge of the stone axe. These cultures that once danced, made love, sang to the gods, worshipped the forest, all that's left is an imprint in stone, as you see here. Let's move to the western Amazon, which is really the epicenter of isolated peoples. Each of these dots represents a small, uncontacted tribe, and the big reveal today is we believe there are 14 or 15 isolated groups in the Colombian Amazon alone. Why are these people isolated? They know we exist, they know there's an outside world. This is a form of resistance. They have chosen to remain isolated, and I think it is their human right to remain so. Why are these the tribes that hide from man? Here's why. Obviously, some of this was set off in 1492. But at the turn of the last century was the rubber trade. The demand for natural rubber, which came from the Amazon, set off the botanical equivalent of a gold rush. Rubber for bicycle tires, rubber for automobile tires, rubber for zeppelins. It was a mad race to get that rubber, and the man on the left, Julio Arana, is one of the true thugs of the story. His people, his company, and other companies like them killed, massacred, tortured, butchered Indians like the Witotos you see on the right hand side of the slide. Even today, when people come out of the forest, the story seldom has a happy ending. These are Nukaks. They were contacted in the '80s. Within a year, everybody over 40 was dead. And remember, these are preliterate societies. The elders are the libraries. Every time a shaman dies, it's as if a library has burned down. They have been forced off their lands. The drug traffickers have taken over the Nukak lands, and the Nukaks live as beggars in public parks in eastern Colombia. From the Nukak lands, I want to take you to the southwest, to the most spectacular landscape in the world: Chiribiquete National Park. It was surrounded by three isolated tribes and thanks to the Colombian government and Colombian colleagues, it has now expanded. It's bigger than the state of Maryland. It is a treasure trove of botanical diversity. It was first explored botanically in 1943 by my mentor, Richard Schultes, seen here atop the Bell Mountain, the sacred mountains of the Karijonas. And let me show you what it looks like today. Flying over Chiribiquete, realize that these lost world mountains are still lost. No scientist has been atop them. In fact, nobody has been atop the Bell Mountain since Schultes in '43. And we'll end up here with the Bell Mountain just to the east of the picture. Let me show you what it looks like today. Not only is this a treasure trove of botanical diversity, not only is it home to three isolated tribes, but it's the greatest treasure trove of pre-Colombian art in the world: over 200,000 paintings. The Dutch scientist Thomas van der Hammen described this as the Sistine Chapel of the Amazon Rainforest. But move from Chiribiquete down to the southeast, again in the Colombian Amazon. Remember, the Colombian Amazon is bigger than New England. The Amazon's a big forest, and Brazil's got a big part of it, but not all of it. Moving down to these two national parks, Cahuinari and Puré in the Colombian Amazon — that's the Brazilian border to the right — it's home to several groups of isolated and uncontacted peoples. To the trained eye, you can look at the roofs of these malocas, these longhouses, and see that there's cultural diversity. These are, in fact, different tribes. As isolated as these areas are, let me show you how the outside world is crowding in. Here we see trade and transport increased in Putumayo. With the diminishment of the Civil War in Colombia, the outside world is showing up. To the north, we have illegal gold mining, also from the east, from Brazil. There's increased hunting and fishing for commercial purposes. We see illegal logging coming from the south, and drug runners are trying to move through the park and get into Brazil. This, in the past, is why you didn't mess with isolated Indians. And if it looks like this picture is out of focus because it was taken in a hurry, here's why. (Laughter) This looks like — (Applause) This looks like a hangar from the Brazilian Amazon. This is an art exhibit in Havana, Cuba. A group called Los Carpinteros. This is their perception of why you shouldn't mess with uncontacted Indians. But the world is changing. These are Mashco-Piros on the Brazil-Peru border who stumbled out of the jungle because they were essentially chased out by drug runners and timber people. And in Peru, there's a very nasty business. It's called human safaris. They will take you in to isolated groups to take their picture. Of course, when you give them clothes, when you give them tools, you also give them diseases. We call these "inhuman safaris." These are Indians again on the Peru border, who were overflown by flights sponsored by missionaries. They want to get in there and turn them into Christians. We know how that turns out. What's to be done? Introduce technology to the contacted tribes, not the uncontacted tribes, in a culturally sensitive way. This is the perfect marriage of ancient shamanic wisdom and 21st century technology. We've done this now with over 30 tribes, mapped, managed and increased protection of over 70 million acres of ancestral rainforest. (Applause) So this allows the Indians to take control of their environmental and cultural destiny. They also then set up guard houses to keep outsiders out. These are Indians, trained as indigenous park rangers, patrolling the borders and keeping the outside world at bay. This is a picture of actual contact. These are Chitonahua Indians on the Brazil-Peru border. They've come out of the jungle asking for help. They were shot at, their malocas, their longhouses, were burned. Some of them were massacred. Using automatic weapons to slaughter uncontacted peoples is the single most despicable and disgusting human rights abuse on our planet today, and it has to stop. (Applause) But let me conclude by saying, this work can be spiritually rewarding, but it's difficult and it can be dangerous. Two colleagues of mine passed away recently in the crash of a small plane. They were serving the forest to protect those uncontacted tribes. So the question is, in conclusion, is what the future holds. These are the Uray people in Brazil. What does the future hold for them, and what does the future hold for us? Let's think differently. Let's make a better world. If the climate's going to change, let's have a climate that changes for the better rather than the worse. Let's live on a planet full of luxuriant vegetation, in which isolated peoples can remain in isolation, can maintain that mystery and that knowledge if they so choose. Let's live in a world where the shamans live in these forests and heal themselves and us with their mystical plants and their sacred frogs. Thanks again. (Applause) |
Why some people find exercise harder than others | {0: 'Social psychologist Emily Balcetis explores perception, motivation, goal-setting and decision-making from conscious and nonconscious levels.'} | TEDxNewYork | Vision is the most important and prioritized sense that we have. We are constantly looking at the world around us, and quickly we identify and make sense of what it is that we see. Let's just start with an example of that very fact. I'm going to show you a photograph of a person, just for a second or two, and I'd like for you to identify what emotion is on his face. Ready? Here you go. Go with your gut reaction. Okay. What did you see? Well, we actually surveyed over 120 individuals, and the results were mixed. People did not agree on what emotion they saw on his face. Maybe you saw discomfort. That was the most frequent response that we received. But if you asked the person on your left, they might have said regret or skepticism, and if you asked somebody on your right, they might have said something entirely different, like hope or empathy. So we are all looking at the very same face again. We might see something entirely different, because perception is subjective. What we think we see is actually filtered through our own mind's eye. Of course, there are many other examples of how we see the world through own mind's eye. I'm going to give you just a few. So dieters, for instance, see apples as larger than people who are not counting calories. Softball players see the ball as smaller if they've just come out of a slump, compared to people who had a hot night at the plate. And actually, our political beliefs also can affect the way we see other people, including politicians. So my research team and I decided to test this question. In 2008, Barack Obama was running for president for the very first time, and we surveyed hundreds of Americans one month before the election. What we found in this survey was that some people, some Americans, think photographs like these best reflect how Obama really looks. Of these people, 75 percent voted for Obama in the actual election. Other people, though, thought photographs like these best reflect how Obama really looks. 89 percent of these people voted for McCain. We presented many photographs of Obama one at a time, so people did not realize that what we were changing from one photograph to the next was whether we had artificially lightened or darkened his skin tone. So how is that possible? How could it be that when I look at a person, an object, or an event, I see something very different than somebody else does? Well, the reasons are many, but one reason requires that we understand a little bit more about how our eyes work. So vision scientists know that the amount of information that we can see at any given point in time, what we can focus on, is actually relatively small. What we can see with great sharpness and clarity and accuracy is the equivalent of the surface area of our thumb on our outstretched arm. Everything else around that is blurry, rendering much of what is presented to our eyes as ambiguous. But we have to clarify and make sense of what it is that we see, and it's our mind that helps us fill in that gap. As a result, perception is a subjective experience, and that's how we end up seeing through our own mind's eye. So, I'm a social psychologist, and it's questions like these that really intrigue me. I am fascinated by those times when people do not see eye to eye. Why is it that somebody might literally see the glass as half full, and somebody literally sees it as half empty? What is it about what one person is thinking and feeling that leads them to see the world in an entirely different way? And does that even matter? So to begin to tackle these questions, my research team and I decided to delve deeply into an issue that has received international attention: our health and fitness. Across the world, people are struggling to manage their weight, and there is a variety of strategies that we have to help us keep the pounds off. For instance, we set the best of intentions to exercise after the holidays, but actually, the majority of Americans find that their New Year's resolutions are broken by Valentine's Day. We talk to ourselves in very encouraging ways, telling ourselves this is our year to get back into shape, but that is not enough to bring us back to our ideal weight. So why? Of course, there is no simple answer, but one reason, I argue, is that our mind's eye might work against us. Some people may literally see exercise as more difficult, and some people might literally see exercise as easier. So, as a first step to testing these questions, we gathered objective measurements of individuals' physical fitness. We measured the circumference of their waist, compared to the circumference of their hips. A higher waist-to-hip ratio is an indicator of being less physically fit than a lower waist-to-hip ratio. After gathering these measurements, we told our participants that they would walk to a finish line while carrying extra weight in a sort of race. But before they did that, we asked them to estimate the distance to the finish line. We thought that the physical states of their body might change how they perceived the distance. So what did we find? Well, waist-to-hip ratio predicted perceptions of distance. People who were out of shape and unfit actually saw the distance to the finish line as significantly greater than people who were in better shape. People's states of their own body changed how they perceived the environment. But so too can our mind. In fact, our bodies and our minds work in tandem to change how we see the world around us. That led us to think that maybe people with strong motivations and strong goals to exercise might actually see the finish line as closer than people who have weaker motivations. So to test whether motivations affect our perceptual experiences in this way, we conducted a second study. Again, we gathered objective measurements of people's physical fitness, measuring the circumference of their waist and the circumference of their hips, and we had them do a few other tests of fitness. Based on feedback that we gave them, some of our participants told us they're not motivated to exercise any more. They felt like they already met their fitness goals and they weren't going to do anything else. These people were not motivated. Other people, though, based on our feedback, told us they were highly motivated to exercise. They had a strong goal to make it to the finish line. But again, before we had them walk to the finish line, we had them estimate the distance. How far away was the finish line? And again, like the previous study, we found that waist-to-hip ratio predicted perceptions of distance. Unfit individuals saw the distance as farther, saw the finish line as farther away, than people who were in better shape. Importantly, though, this only happened for people who were not motivated to exercise. On the other hand, people who were highly motivated to exercise saw the distance as short. Even the most out of shape individuals saw the finish line as just as close, if not slightly closer, than people who were in better shape. So our bodies can change how far away that finish line looks, but people who had committed to a manageable goal that they could accomplish in the near future and who believed that they were capable of meeting that goal actually saw the exercise as easier. That led us to wonder, is there a strategy that we could use and teach people that would help change their perceptions of the distance, help them make exercise look easier? So we turned to the vision science literature to figure out what should we do, and based on what we read, we came up with a strategy that we called, "Keep your eyes on the prize." So this is not the slogan from an inspirational poster. It's an actual directive for how to look around your environment. People that we trained in this strategy, we told them to focus their attention on the finish line, to avoid looking around, to imagine a spotlight was shining on that goal, and that everything around it was blurry and perhaps difficult to see. We thought that this strategy would help make the exercise look easier. We compared this group to a baseline group. To this group we said, just look around the environment as you naturally would. You will notice the finish line, but you might also notice the garbage can off to the right, or the people and the lamp post off to the left. We thought that people who used this strategy would see the distance as farther. So what did we find? When we had them estimate the distance, was this strategy successful for changing their perceptual experience? Yes. People who kept their eyes on the prize saw the finish line as 30 percent closer than people who looked around as they naturally would. We thought this was great. We were really excited because it meant that this strategy helped make the exercise look easier, but the big question was, could this help make exercise actually better? Could it improve the quality of exercise as well? So next, we told our participants, you are going to walk to the finish line while wearing extra weight. We added weights to their ankles that amounted to 15 percent of their body weight. We told them to lift their knees up high and walk to the finish line quickly. We designed this exercise in particular to be moderately challenging but not impossible, like most exercises that actually improve our fitness. So the big question, then: Did keeping your eyes on the prize and narrowly focusing on the finish line change their experience of the exercise? It did. People who kept their eyes on the prize told us afterward that it required 17 percent less exertion for them to do this exercise than people who looked around naturally. It changed their subjective experience of the exercise. It also changed the objective nature of their exercise. People who kept their eyes on the prize actually moved 23 percent faster than people who looked around naturally. To put that in perspective, a 23 percent increase is like trading in your 1980 Chevy Citation for a 1980 Chevrolet Corvette. We were so excited by this, because this meant that a strategy that costs nothing, that is easy for people to use, regardless of whether they're in shape or struggling to get there, had a big effect. Keeping your eyes on the prize made the exercise look and feel easier even when people were working harder because they were moving faster. Now, I know there's more to good health than walking a little bit faster, but keeping your eyes on the prize might be one additional strategy that you can use to help promote a healthy lifestyle. If you're not convinced yet that we all see the world through our own mind's eye, let me leave you with one final example. Here's a photograph of a beautiful street in Stockholm, with two cars. The car in the back looks much larger than the car in the front. However, in reality, these cars are the same size, but that's not how we see it. So does this mean that our eyes have gone haywire and that our brains are a mess? No, it doesn't mean that at all. It's just how our eyes work. We might see the world in a different way, and sometimes that might not line up with reality, but it doesn't mean that one of us is right and one of us is wrong. We all see the world through our mind's eye, but we can teach ourselves to see it differently. So I can think of days that have gone horribly wrong for me. I'm fed up, I'm grumpy, I'm tired, and I'm so behind, and there's a big black cloud hanging over my head, and on days like these, it looks like everyone around me is down in the dumps too. My colleague at work looks annoyed when I ask for an extension on a deadline, and my friend looks frustrated when I show up late for lunch because a meeting ran long, and at the end of the day, my husband looks disappointed because I'd rather go to bed than go to the movies. And on days like these, when everybody looks upset and angry to me, I try to remind myself that there are other ways of seeing them. Perhaps my colleague was confused, perhaps my friend was concerned, and perhaps my husband was feeling empathy instead. So we all see the world through our own mind's eye, and on some days, it might look like the world is a dangerous and challenging and insurmountable place, but it doesn't have to look that way all the time. We can teach ourselves to see it differently, and when we find a way to make the world look nicer and easier, it might actually become so. Thank you. (Applause) |
The art of stillness | {0: 'Novelist and nonfiction author Pico Iyer writes on subjects ranging from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism, from Graham Greene to forgotten nations and the 21st-century global order.'} | TEDSalon NY2014 | I'm a lifelong traveler. Even as a little kid, I was actually working out that it would be cheaper to go to boarding school in England than just to the best school down the road from my parents' house in California. So, from the time I was nine years old I was flying alone several times a year over the North Pole, just to go to school. And of course the more I flew the more I came to love to fly, so the very week after I graduated from high school, I got a job mopping tables so that I could spend every season of my 18th year on a different continent. And then, almost inevitably, I became a travel writer so my job and my joy could become one. And I really began to feel that if you were lucky enough to walk around the candlelit temples of Tibet or to wander along the seafronts in Havana with music passing all around you, you could bring those sounds and the high cobalt skies and the flash of the blue ocean back to your friends at home, and really bring some magic and clarity to your own life. Except, as you all know, one of the first things you learn when you travel is that nowhere is magical unless you can bring the right eyes to it. You take an angry man to the Himalayas, he just starts complaining about the food. And I found that the best way that I could develop more attentive and more appreciative eyes was, oddly, by going nowhere, just by sitting still. And of course sitting still is how many of us get what we most crave and need in our accelerated lives, a break. But it was also the only way that I could find to sift through the slideshow of my experience and make sense of the future and the past. And so, to my great surprise, I found that going nowhere was at least as exciting as going to Tibet or to Cuba. And by going nowhere, I mean nothing more intimidating than taking a few minutes out of every day or a few days out of every season, or even, as some people do, a few years out of a life in order to sit still long enough to find out what moves you most, to recall where your truest happiness lies and to remember that sometimes making a living and making a life point in opposite directions. And of course, this is what wise beings through the centuries from every tradition have been telling us. It's an old idea. More than 2,000 years ago, the Stoics were reminding us it's not our experience that makes our lives, it's what we do with it. Imagine a hurricane suddenly sweeps through your town and reduces every last thing to rubble. One man is traumatized for life. But another, maybe even his brother, almost feels liberated, and decides this is a great chance to start his life anew. It's exactly the same event, but radically different responses. There is nothing either good or bad, as Shakespeare told us in "Hamlet," but thinking makes it so. And this has certainly been my experience as a traveler. Twenty-four years ago I took the most mind-bending trip across North Korea. But the trip lasted a few days. What I've done with it sitting still, going back to it in my head, trying to understand it, finding a place for it in my thinking, that's lasted 24 years already and will probably last a lifetime. The trip, in other words, gave me some amazing sights, but it's only sitting still that allows me to turn those into lasting insights. And I sometimes think that so much of our life takes place inside our heads, in memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation, that if I really want to change my life I might best begin by changing my mind. Again, none of this is new; that's why Shakespeare and the Stoics were telling us this centuries ago, but Shakespeare never had to face 200 emails in a day. (Laughter) The Stoics, as far as I know, were not on Facebook. We all know that in our on-demand lives, one of the things that's most on demand is ourselves. Wherever we are, any time of night or day, our bosses, junk-mailers, our parents can get to us. Sociologists have actually found that in recent years Americans are working fewer hours than 50 years ago, but we feel as if we're working more. We have more and more time-saving devices, but sometimes, it seems, less and less time. We can more and more easily make contact with people on the furthest corners of the planet, but sometimes in that process we lose contact with ourselves. And one of my biggest surprises as a traveler has been to find that often it's exactly the people who have most enabled us to get anywhere who are intent on going nowhere. In other words, precisely those beings who have created the technologies that override so many of the limits of old, are the ones wisest about the need for limits, even when it comes to technology. I once went to the Google headquarters and I saw all the things many of you have heard about; the indoor tree houses, the trampolines, workers at that time enjoying 20 percent of their paid time free so that they could just let their imaginations go wandering. But what impressed me even more was that as I was waiting for my digital I.D., one Googler was telling me about the program that he was about to start to teach the many, many Googlers who practice yoga to become trainers in it, and the other Googler was telling me about the book that he was about to write on the inner search engine, and the ways in which science has empirically shown that sitting still, or meditation, can lead not just to better health or to clearer thinking, but even to emotional intelligence. I have another friend in Silicon Valley who is really one of the most eloquent spokesmen for the latest technologies, and in fact was one of the founders of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly. And Kevin wrote his last book on fresh technologies without a smartphone or a laptop or a TV in his home. And like many in Silicon Valley, he tries really hard to observe what they call an Internet sabbath, whereby for 24 or 48 hours every week they go completely offline in order to gather the sense of direction and proportion they'll need when they go online again. The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology. And when you speak of the sabbath, look at the Ten Commandments — there's only one word there for which the adjective "holy" is used, and that's the Sabbath. I pick up the Jewish holy book of the Torah — its longest chapter, it's on the Sabbath. And we all know that it's really one of our greatest luxuries, the empty space. In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I as a writer will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe. Now, in the physical domain, of course, many people, if they have the resources, will try to get a place in the country, a second home. I've never begun to have those resources, but I sometimes remember that any time I want, I can get a second home in time, if not in space, just by taking a day off. And it's never easy because, of course, whenever I do I spend much of it worried about all the extra stuff that's going to crash down on me the following day. I sometimes think I'd rather give up meat or sex or wine than the chance to check on my emails. (Laughter) And every season I do try to take three days off on retreat but a part of me still feels guilty to be leaving my poor wife behind and to be ignoring all those seemingly urgent emails from my bosses and maybe to be missing a friend's birthday party. But as soon as I get to a place of real quiet, I realize that it's only by going there that I'll have anything fresh or creative or joyful to share with my wife or bosses or friends. Otherwise, really, I'm just foisting on them my exhaustion or my distractedness, which is no blessing at all. And so when I was 29, I decided to remake my entire life in the light of going nowhere. One evening I was coming back from the office, it was after midnight, I was in a taxi driving through Times Square, and I suddenly realized that I was racing around so much I could never catch up with my life. And my life then, as it happened, was pretty much the one I might have dreamed of as a little boy. I had really interesting friends and colleagues, I had a nice apartment on Park Avenue and 20th Street. I had, to me, a fascinating job writing about world affairs, but I could never separate myself enough from them to hear myself think — or really, to understand if I was truly happy. And so, I abandoned my dream life for a single room on the backstreets of Kyoto, Japan, which was the place that had long exerted a strong, really mysterious gravitational pull on me. Even as a child I would just look at a painting of Kyoto and feel I recognized it; I knew it before I ever laid eyes on it. But it's also, as you all know, a beautiful city encircled by hills, filled with more than 2,000 temples and shrines, where people have been sitting still for 800 years or more. And quite soon after I moved there, I ended up where I still am with my wife, formerly our kids, in a two-room apartment in the middle of nowhere where we have no bicycle, no car, no TV I can understand, and I still have to support my loved ones as a travel writer and a journalist, so clearly this is not ideal for job advancement or for cultural excitement or for social diversion. But I realized that it gives me what I prize most, which is days and hours. I have never once had to use a cell phone there. I almost never have to look at the time, and every morning when I wake up, really the day stretches in front of me like an open meadow. And when life throws up one of its nasty surprises, as it will, more than once, when a doctor comes into my room wearing a grave expression, or a car suddenly veers in front of mine on the freeway, I know, in my bones, that it's the time I've spent going nowhere that is going to sustain me much more than all the time I've spent racing around to Bhutan or Easter Island. I'll always be a traveler — my livelihood depends on it — but one of the beauties of travel is that it allows you to bring stillness into the motion and the commotion of the world. I once got on a plane in Frankfurt, Germany, and a young German woman came down and sat next to me and engaged me in a very friendly conversation for about 30 minutes, and then she just turned around and sat still for 12 hours. She didn't once turn on her video monitor, she never pulled out a book, she didn't even go to sleep, she just sat still, and something of her clarity and calm really imparted itself to me. I've noticed more and more people taking conscious measures these days to try to open up a space inside their lives. Some people go to black-hole resorts where they'll spend hundreds of dollars a night in order to hand over their cell phone and their laptop to the front desk on arrival. Some people I know, just before they go to sleep, instead of scrolling through their messages or checking out YouTube, just turn out the lights and listen to some music, and notice that they sleep much better and wake up much refreshed. I was once fortunate enough to drive into the high, dark mountains behind Los Angeles, where the great poet and singer and international heartthrob Leonard Cohen was living and working for many years as a full-time monk in the Mount Baldy Zen Center. And I wasn't entirely surprised when the record that he released at the age of 77, to which he gave the deliberately unsexy title of "Old Ideas," went to number one in the charts in 17 nations in the world, hit the top five in nine others. Something in us, I think, is crying out for the sense of intimacy and depth that we get from people like that. who take the time and trouble to sit still. And I think many of us have the sensation, I certainly do, that we're standing about two inches away from a huge screen, and it's noisy and it's crowded and it's changing with every second, and that screen is our lives. And it's only by stepping back, and then further back, and holding still, that we can begin to see what the canvas means and to catch the larger picture. And a few people do that for us by going nowhere. So, in an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still. So you can go on your next vacation to Paris or Hawaii, or New Orleans; I bet you'll have a wonderful time. But, if you want to come back home alive and full of fresh hope, in love with the world, I think you might want to try considering going nowhere. Thank you. (Applause) |
Hidden cameras that film injustice in the world’s most dangerous places | {0: 'Videre co-founder Oren Yakobovich wields the latest covert recording technology to expose and subvert violent oppression.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | I would like to start with the story of Mary, a woman from an African village. Her first memories are of her family fleeing violent riots orchestrated by the ruling political party. Her brother was murdered by the state-sponsored militia, and she was raped more than once just because she belonged to the wrong party. One morning, a month before the election, Mary's village was called to another intimidation meeting. In this meeting, there is a man standing in front of them, telling them, "We know who you are, we know who you will vote for, and if you're not going to drop the right paper, we're going to take revenge." But for Mary, this meeting is different. She feels different. This time, she's waiting for this meeting, because this time, she's carrying a small hidden camera in her dress, a camera that nobody else can see. Nobody is allowed to film in these meetings. You risk your life if you do. Mary knows that, but she also knows that the only way to stop them and to protect herself and her community is to expose their intimidation, to make sure they understand somebody is following them, to break the impunity they feel. Mary and her friends were filming for months, undercover, the intimidation of the ruling political party. (Video) ["Filmed with hidden cameras"] Man: We are now going to speak about the upcoming elections. Nothing can stop us from doing what we want. If we hear you are with [The Opposition] we will not forgive you. ["Militia intimidation rally"] [The Party] can torture you at any time. The youth can beat you. ["Disruption of political meeting"] For those who lie, saying they are back with [The Party], your time is running out. ["Party youth militia"] Some have died because they rebelled. Some have lost their homes. If you don't work together with [The Party], you will lead a very bad life. Oren Yakobovich: These images were broadcast all over the world, but more importantly, they have been broadcast back to the community. The perpetrators saw them too. They understood somebody is following them. They got scared. Impunity was broken. Mary and her friends forced the ruling political party not to use violence during the election, and saved hundreds of lives. Mary is just one of hundreds of people that my organization had helped to document human rights violations using cameras. My background should have led me to a different direction. I was born in Israel to a right-wing family, and as long as I remember myself, I wanted to join the Israeli army to serve my country and prove what I believed was our right for the whole land. I joined the Israeli army just after the first intifada, the first Palestinian uprising, and I served in one of the hard-minded, toughest, aggressive infantry units, and I got the biggest gun in my platoon. Quite fast, I became an officer and got soldiers under my command, and as time passed, I started serving in the West Bank, and I saw these images. I didn't like what I saw. It took me a while, but eventually I refused to serve in the West Bank and had to spend time in jail. It was a bit — (Applause) — It was not that bad, I have to say. It was a bit like being in a hotel, but with very shitty food. (Laughter) In jail, I kept thinking that I need people to know. I need people to understand what the reality in the West Bank looks like. I need them to hear what I heard, I need them to see what I saw, but I also understood, we need the Palestinians themselves, the people that are suffering, to be able to tell their own stories, not journalists or filmmakers that are coming outside of the situation. I joined a human rights organization, an Israeli human rights organization called B'Tselem. Together, we analyzed the West Bank and picked 100 families that are living in the most risky places: close to checkpoints, near army bases, side by side with settlers. We gave them cameras and training. Quite fast, we started getting very disturbing images about how the settlers and the soldiers are abusing them. I would like to share with you two clips from this project. Both of them were broadcast in Israel, and it created a massive debate. And I have to warn you, some of you might find them quite explicit. The masked men you will see in the first clips are Jewish settlers. Minutes before the camera was turned on, they approached a Palestinian family that was working their land and told them that they have to leave the land, because this land belongs to the Jewish settlers. The Palestinians refused. Let's see what happened. The masked men that are approaching are Jewish settlers. They are approaching the Palestinian family. This is a demonstration in the West Bank. The guy in green is Palestinian. He will be arrested in a second. Here you see him blindfolded and handcuffed. In a few seconds, he regrets he came to this demonstration. He's been shot in the foot with a rubber bullet. He is okay. Not all the settlers and the soldiers are acting this way. We're talking about a tiny minority, but they have to be brought to justice. These clips, and others like them, forced the army and the police to start investigations. They've been shown in Israel, of course, and the Israeli public was exposed to them also. This project redefined the struggle for human rights in the occupied territories, and we managed to reduce the number of violent attacks in the West Bank. The success of this project got me thinking how I can take the same methodology to other places in the world. Now, we tend to believe that today, with all of the technology, the smartphones and the Internet, we are able to see and understand most of what's happening in the world, and people are able to tell their story — but it's only partly true. Still today, with all the technology we have, less than half of the world's population has access to the Internet, and more than three billion people — I'm repeating the number — three billion people are consuming news that is censored by those in power. More or less around the same time, I'm approached by a great guy named Uri Fruchtmann. He's a filmmaker and an activist. We understood we were thinking along the same lines, and we decided to establish Videre, our organization, together. While building the organization in London, we've been traveling undercover to places where a community was suffering from abuses, where mass atrocities were happening, and there was a lack of reporting. We tried to understand how we can help. There were four things that I learned. The first thing is that we have to engage with communities that are living in rural areas, where violations are happening far from the public eye. We need to partner with them, and we need to understand which images are not making it out there and help them to document them. The second thing I learned is that we have to enable them to film in a safe way. Security has to be the priority. Where I used to work before, in the West Bank, one can take a camera out, most likely not going to get shot, but in places we wanted to work, just try to pull a phone out, and you're dead — literally dead. This is why we decided to take the operation undercover when necessary, and use mostly hidden cameras. Unfortunately, I can't show you the hidden cameras we're using today — for obvious reasons — but these are cameras we used before. You can buy them off the shelf. Today, we're building a custom-made hidden camera, like the one that Mary was wearing in her dress to film the intimidation meeting of the ruling political party. It's a camera that nobody can see, that blends into the environment, into the surroundings. Now, filming securities go beyond using hidden cameras. Being secure starts way before the activist is turning the camera on. To keep our partners safe, we work to understand the risk of every location and of every shot before it's happened, building a backup plan if something goes wrong, and making sure we have everything in place before our operations start. The third thing I learned is the importance of verification. You can have an amazing shot of atrocity, but if you can't verify it, it's worth nothing. Recently, like in the ongoing war in Syria or the war in Gaza, we've seen images that are staged or brought from a different conflict. This misinformation destroyed the credibility of the source, and it's harmed the credibility of other reliable and trustworthy sources. We use a variety of ways to make sure we can verify the information and we can trust the material. It starts with vetting the partners, understanding who they are, and working with them very intensively. How do you film a location? You film road signs, you film watches, you film newspapers. We are checking maps, looking at maps, double-checking the information, and looking also at the metadata of the material. Now, the fourth and the most important thing I learned is how you use images to create a positive change. To have an effect, the key thing is how you use the material. Today, we're working with hundreds of activists filming undercover. We work with them both to understand the situation on the ground and which images are missing to describe it, who are the ones that are influencing the situation, and when to release the material to advance the struggle. Sometimes, it's about putting it in the media, mostly local ones, to create awareness. Sometimes it's working with decision makers, to change laws. Sometimes, it's working with lawyers to use as evidence in court. But more than often, the most effective way to create a social change is to work within the community. I want to give you one example. Fatuma is part of a network of women that are fighting abuses in Kenya. Women in her community have been harassed constantly on their way to school and on their way to work. They are trying to change the behavior of the community from inside. In the next clip, Fatuma is taking us with her on her journey to work. Her voice is superimposed on images that she filmed herself using hidden cameras. (Video) Fatuma Chiusiku: My name is Fatuma Chiusiku. I'm 32 years old, a mother, And Ziwa La Ng'Ombe is my home. Each morning, I ride the mini-bus Number 11. But instead of a peaceful journey to work, each day begins with fear. Come with me now and use my eyes to feel what I feel. As I walk, I think to myself: Will I be touched? Grabbed? Violated by this conductor again? Even the men inside the way they look at me touch my body, rub against me, grab me, and now, as I sit in my seat I only wish my mind was full of thoughts for my day, my dreams, my children at school, but instead I worry about the moment when we will arrive and I will be violated again. OY: Today, there is a new front in the fight for human rights. I used to carry a big gun. Now, I am carrying this. This is a much more powerful and much, much more effective weapon. But we have to use its power wisely. By putting the right images in the right hands at the right time, we can truly create an impact. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
To the South Pole and back — the hardest 105 days of my life | {0: 'In 2004, Ben Saunders became the youngest person ever to ski solo to the North Pole. In 2013, he set out on another record-breaking expedition, this time to retrace Captain Scott’s ill-fated journey to the South Pole on foot.'} | TED2014 | So in the oasis of intelligentsia that is TED, I stand here before you this evening as an expert in dragging heavy stuff around cold places. I've been leading polar expeditions for most of my adult life, and last month, my teammate Tarka L'Herpiniere and I finished the most ambitious expedition I've ever attempted. In fact, it feels like I've been transported straight here from four months in the middle of nowhere, mostly grunting and swearing, straight to the TED stage. So you can imagine that's a transition that hasn't been entirely seamless. One of the interesting side effects seems to be that my short-term memory is entirely shot. So I've had to write some notes to avoid too much grunting and swearing in the next 17 minutes. This is the first talk I've given about this expedition, and while we weren't sequencing genomes or building space telescopes, this is a story about giving everything we had to achieve something that hadn't been done before. So I hope in that you might find some food for thought. It was a journey, an expedition in Antarctica, the coldest, windiest, driest and highest altitude continent on Earth. It's a fascinating place. It's a huge place. It's twice the size of Australia, a continent that is the same size as China and India put together. As an aside, I have experienced an interesting phenomenon in the last few days, something that I expect Chris Hadfield may get at TED in a few years' time, conversations that go something like this: "Oh, Antarctica. Awesome. My husband and I did Antarctica with Lindblad for our anniversary." Or, "Oh cool, did you go there for the marathon?" (Laughter) Our journey was, in fact, 69 marathons back to back in 105 days, an 1,800-mile round trip on foot from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back again. In the process, we broke the record for the longest human-powered polar journey in history by more than 400 miles. (Applause) For those of you from the Bay Area, it was the same as walking from here to San Francisco, then turning around and walking back again. So as camping trips go, it was a long one, and one I've seen summarized most succinctly here on the hallowed pages of Business Insider Malaysia. ["Two Explorers Just Completed A Polar Expedition That Killed Everyone The Last Time It Was Attempted"] Chris Hadfield talked so eloquently about fear and about the odds of success, and indeed the odds of survival. Of the nine people in history that had attempted this journey before us, none had made it to the pole and back, and five had died in the process. This is Captain Robert Falcon Scott. He led the last team to attempt this expedition. Scott and his rival Sir Ernest Shackleton, over the space of a decade, both led expeditions battling to become the first to reach the South Pole, to chart and map the interior of Antarctica, a place we knew less about, at the time, than the surface of the moon, because we could see the moon through telescopes. Antarctica was, for the most part, a century ago, uncharted. Some of you may know the story. Scott's last expedition, the Terra Nova Expedition in 1910, started as a giant siege-style approach. He had a big team using ponies, using dogs, using petrol-driven tractors, dropping multiple, pre-positioned depots of food and fuel through which Scott's final team of five would travel to the Pole, where they would turn around and ski back to the coast again on foot. Scott and his final team of five arrived at the South Pole in January 1912 to find they had been beaten to it by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen, who rode on dogsled. Scott's team ended up on foot. And for more than a century this journey has remained unfinished. Scott's team of five died on the return journey. And for the last decade, I've been asking myself why that is. How come this has remained the high-water mark? Scott's team covered 1,600 miles on foot. No one's come close to that ever since. So this is the high-water mark of human endurance, human endeavor, human athletic achievement in arguably the harshest climate on Earth. It was as if the marathon record has remained unbroken since 1912. And of course some strange and predictable combination of curiosity, stubbornness, and probably hubris led me to thinking I might be the man to try to finish the job. Unlike Scott's expedition, there were just two of us, and we set off from the coast of Antarctica in October last year, dragging everything ourselves, a process Scott called "man-hauling." When I say it was like walking from here to San Francisco and back, I actually mean it was like dragging something that weighs a shade more than the heaviest ever NFL player. Our sledges weighed 200 kilos, or 440 pounds each at the start, the same weights that the weakest of Scott's ponies pulled. Early on, we averaged 0.5 miles per hour. Perhaps the reason no one had attempted this journey until now, in more than a century, was that no one had been quite stupid enough to try. And while I can't claim we were exploring in the genuine Edwardian sense of the word — we weren't naming any mountains or mapping any uncharted valleys — I think we were stepping into uncharted territory in a human sense. Certainly, if in the future we learn there is an area of the human brain that lights up when one curses oneself, I won't be at all surprised. You've heard that the average American spends 90 percent of their time indoors. We didn't go indoors for nearly four months. We didn't see a sunset either. It was 24-hour daylight. Living conditions were quite spartan. I changed my underwear three times in 105 days and Tarka and I shared 30 square feet on the canvas. Though we did have some technology that Scott could never have imagined. And we blogged live every evening from the tent via a laptop and a custom-made satellite transmitter, all of which were solar-powered: we had a flexible photovoltaic panel over the tent. And the writing was important to me. As a kid, I was inspired by the literature of adventure and exploration, and I think we've all seen here this week the importance and the power of storytelling. So we had some 21st-century gear, but the reality is that the challenges that Scott faced were the same that we faced: those of the weather and of what Scott called glide, the amount of friction between the sledges and the snow. The lowest wind chill we experienced was in the -70s, and we had zero visibility, what's called white-out, for much of our journey. We traveled up and down one of the largest and most dangerous glaciers in the world, the Beardmore glacier. It's 110 miles long; most of its surface is what's called blue ice. You can see it's a beautiful, shimmering steel-hard blue surface covered with thousands and thousands of crevasses, these deep cracks in the glacial ice up to 200 feet deep. Planes can't land here, so we were at the most risk, technically, when we had the slimmest chance of being rescued. We got to the South Pole after 61 days on foot, with one day off for bad weather, and I'm sad to say, it was something of an anticlimax. There's a permanent American base, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at the South Pole. They have an airstrip, they have a canteen, they have hot showers, they have a post office, a tourist shop, a basketball court that doubles as a movie theater. So it's a bit different these days, and there are also acres of junk. I think it's a marvelous thing that humans can exist 365 days of the year with hamburgers and hot showers and movie theaters, but it does seem to produce a lot of empty cardboard boxes. You can see on the left of this photograph, several square acres of junk waiting to be flown out from the South Pole. But there is also a pole at the South Pole, and we got there on foot, unassisted, unsupported, by the hardest route, 900 miles in record time, dragging more weight than anyone in history. And if we'd stopped there and flown home, which would have been the eminently sensible thing to do, then my talk would end here and it would end something like this. If you have the right team around you, the right tools, the right technology, and if you have enough self-belief and enough determination, then anything is possible. But then we turned around, and this is where things get interesting. High on the Antarctic plateau, over 10,000 feet, it's very windy, very cold, very dry, we were exhausted. We'd covered 35 marathons, we were only halfway, and we had a safety net, of course, of ski planes and satellite phones and live, 24-hour tracking beacons that didn't exist for Scott, but in hindsight, rather than making our lives easier, the safety net actually allowed us to cut things very fine indeed, to sail very close to our absolute limits as human beings. And it is an exquisite form of torture to exhaust yourself to the point of starvation day after day while dragging a sledge full of food. For years, I'd been writing glib lines in sponsorship proposals about pushing the limits of human endurance, but in reality, that was a very frightening place to be indeed. We had, before we'd got to the Pole, two weeks of almost permanent headwind, which slowed us down. As a result, we'd had several days of eating half rations. We had a finite amount of food in the sledges to make this journey, so we were trying to string that out by reducing our intake to half the calories we should have been eating. As a result, we both became increasingly hypoglycemic — we had low blood sugar levels day after day — and increasingly susceptible to the extreme cold. Tarka took this photo of me one evening after I'd nearly passed out with hypothermia. We both had repeated bouts of hypothermia, something I hadn't experienced before, and it was very humbling indeed. As much as you might like to think, as I do, that you're the kind of person who doesn't quit, that you'll go down swinging, hypothermia doesn't leave you much choice. You become utterly incapacitated. It's like being a drunk toddler. You become pathetic. I remember just wanting to lie down and quit. It was a peculiar, peculiar feeling, and a real surprise to me to be debilitated to that degree. And then we ran out of food completely, 46 miles short of the first of the depots that we'd laid on our outward journey. We'd laid 10 depots of food, literally burying food and fuel, for our return journey — the fuel was for a cooker so you could melt snow to get water — and I was forced to make the decision to call for a resupply flight, a ski plane carrying eight days of food to tide us over that gap. They took 12 hours to reach us from the other side of Antarctica. Calling for that plane was one of the toughest decisions of my life. And I sound like a bit of a fraud standing here now with a sort of belly. I've put on 30 pounds in the last three weeks. Being that hungry has left an interesting mental scar, which is that I've been hoovering up every hotel buffet that I can find. (Laughter) But we were genuinely quite hungry, and in quite a bad way. I don't regret calling for that plane for a second, because I'm still standing here alive, with all digits intact, telling this story. But getting external assistance like that was never part of the plan, and it's something my ego is still struggling with. This was the biggest dream I've ever had, and it was so nearly perfect. On the way back down to the coast, our crampons — they're the spikes on our boots that we have for traveling over this blue ice on the glacier — broke on the top of the Beardmore. We still had 100 miles to go downhill on very slippery rock-hard blue ice. They needed repairing almost every hour. To give you an idea of scale, this is looking down towards the mouth of the Beardmore Glacier. You could fit the entirety of Manhattan in the gap on the horizon. That's 20 miles between Mount Hope and Mount Kiffin. I've never felt as small as I did in Antarctica. When we got down to the mouth of the glacier, we found fresh snow had obscured the dozens of deep crevasses. One of Shackleton's men described crossing this sort of terrain as like walking over the glass roof of a railway station. We fell through more times than I can remember, usually just putting a ski or a boot through the snow. Occasionally we went in all the way up to our armpits, but thankfully never deeper than that. And less than five weeks ago, after 105 days, we crossed this oddly inauspicious finish line, the coast of Ross Island on the New Zealand side of Antarctica. You can see the ice in the foreground and the sort of rubbly rock behind that. Behind us lay an unbroken ski trail of nearly 1,800 miles. We'd made the longest ever polar journey on foot, something I'd been dreaming of doing for a decade. And looking back, I still stand by all the things I've been saying for years about the importance of goals and determination and self-belief, but I'll also admit that I hadn't given much thought to what happens when you reach the all-consuming goal that you've dedicated most of your adult life to, and the reality is that I'm still figuring that bit out. As I said, there are very few superficial signs that I've been away. I've put on 30 pounds. I've got some very faint, probably covered in makeup now, frostbite scars. I've got one on my nose, one on each cheek, from where the goggles are, but inside I am a very different person indeed. If I'm honest, Antarctica challenged me and humbled me so deeply that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to put it into words. I'm still struggling to piece together my thoughts. That I'm standing here telling this story is proof that we all can accomplish great things, through ambition, through passion, through sheer stubbornness, by refusing to quit, that if you dream something hard enough, as Sting said, it does indeed come to pass. But I'm also standing here saying, you know what, that cliche about the journey being more important than the destination? There's something in that. The closer I got to my finish line, that rubbly, rocky coast of Ross Island, the more I started to realize that the biggest lesson that this very long, very hard walk might be teaching me is that happiness is not a finish line, that for us humans, the perfection that so many of us seem to dream of might not ever be truly attainable, and that if we can't feel content here, today, now, on our journeys amidst the mess and the striving that we all inhabit, the open loops, the half-finished to-do lists, the could-do-better-next-times, then we might never feel it. A lot of people have asked me, what next? Right now, I am very happy just recovering and in front of hotel buffets. But as Bob Hope put it, I feel very humble, but I think I have the strength of character to fight it. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
The workforce crisis of 2030 -- and how to start solving it now | {0: 'BCG\'s Rainer Strack advocates for companies to adopt a "people advantage" -- because employee-centered thinking can go a long way.'} | TED@BCG Berlin | 2014 is a very special year for me: 20 years as a consultant, 20 years of marriage, and I'm turning 50 in one month. That means I was born in 1964 in a small town in Germany. It was a gray November day, and I was overdue. The hospital's maternity ward was really stressed out because a lot of babies were born on this gray November day. As a matter of fact, 1964 was the year with the highest birth rate ever in Germany: more than 1.3 million. Last year, we just hit over 600,000, so half of my number. What you can see here is the German age pyramid, and there, the small black point at the top, that's me. (Laughter) (Applause) In red, you can see the potential working-age population, so people over 15 and under 65, and I'm actually only interested in this red area. Now, let's do a simple simulation of how this age structure will develop over the next couple of years. As you can see, the peak is moving to the right, and I, with many other baby boomers, will retire in 2030. By the way, I don't need any forecasts of birth rates for predicting this red area. The red area, so the potential working-age population in 2030, is already set in stone today, except for much higher migration rates. And if you compare this red area in 2030 with the red area in 2014, it is much, much smaller. So before I show you the rest of the world, what does this mean for Germany? So what we know from this picture is that the labor supply, so people who provide labor, will go down in Germany, and will go down significantly. Now, what about labor demand? That's where it gets tricky. As you might know, the consultant's favorite answer to any question is, "It depends." So I would say it depends. We didn't want to forecast the future. Highly speculative. We did something else. We looked at the GDP and productivity growth of Germany over the last 20 years, and calculated the following scenario: if Germany wants to continue this GDP and productivity growth, we could directly calculate how many people Germany would need to support this growth. And this is the green line: labor demand. So Germany will run into a major talent shortage very quickly. Eight million people are missing, which is more than 20 percent of our current workforce, so big numbers, really big numbers. And we calculated several scenarios, and the picture always looked like this. Now, to close the gap, Germany has to significantly increase migration, get many more women in the workforce, increase retirement age — by the way, we just lowered it this year — and all these measures at once. If Germany fails here, Germany will stagnate. We won't grow anymore. Why? Because the workers are not there who can generate this growth. And companies will look for talents somewhere else. But where? Now, we simulated labor supply and labor demand for the largest 15 economies in the world, representing more than 70 percent of world GDP, and the overall picture looks like this by 2020. Blue indicates a labor surplus, red indicates a labor shortfall, and gray are those countries which are borderline. So by 2020, we still see a labor surplus in some countries, like Italy, France, the U.S., but this picture will change dramatically by 2030. By 2030, we will face a global workforce crisis in most of our largest economies, including three out of the four BRIC countries. China, with its former one-child policy, will be hit, as well as Brazil and Russia. Now, to tell the truth, in reality, the situation will be even more challenging. What you can see here are average numbers. We de-averaged them and broke them down into different skill levels, and what we found were even higher shortfalls for high-skilled people and a partial surplus for low-skilled workers. So on top of an overall labor shortage, we will face a big skill mismatch in the future, and this means huge challenges in terms of education, qualification, upskilling for governments and companies. Now, the next thing we looked into was robots, automation, technology. Will technology change this picture and boost productivity? Now, the short answer would be that our numbers already include a significant growth in productivity driven by technology. A long answer would go like this. Let's take Germany again. The Germans have a certain reputation in the world when it comes to productivity. In the '90s, I worked in our Boston office for almost two years, and when I left, an old senior partner told me, literally, "Send me more of these Germans, they work like machines." (Laughter) That was 1998. Sixteen years later, you'd probably say the opposite. "Send me more of these machines. They work like Germans." (Laughter) (Applause) Technology will replace a lot of jobs, regular jobs. Not only in the production industry, but even office workers are in jeopardy and might be replaced by robots, artificial intelligence, big data, or automation. So the key question is not if technology replaces some of these jobs, but when, how fast, and to what extent? Or in other words, will technology help us to solve this global workforce crisis? Yes and no. This is a more sophisticated version of "it depends." (Laughter) Let's take the automotive industry as an example, because there, more than 40 percent of industrial robots are already working and automation has already taken place. In 1980, less than 10 percent of the production cost of a car was caused by electronic parts. Today, this number is more than 30 percent and it will grow to more than 50 percent by 2030. And these new electronic parts and applications require new skills and have created a lot of new jobs, like the cognitive systems engineer who optimizes the interaction between driver and electronic system. In 1980, no one had the slightest clue that such a job would ever exist. As a matter of fact, the overall number of people involved in the production of a car has only changed slightly in the last decades, in spite of robots and automation. So what does this mean? Yes, technology will replace a lot of jobs, but we will also see a lot of new jobs and new skills on the horizon, and that means technology will worsen our overall skill mismatch. And this kind of de-averaging reveals the crucial challenge for governments and businesses. So people, high-skilled people, talents, will be the big thing in the next decade. If they are the scarce resource, we have to understand them much better. Are they actually willing to work abroad? What are their job preferences? To find out, this year we conducted a global survey among more than 200,000 job seekers from 189 countries. Migration is certainly one key measure to close a gap, at least in the short term, so we asked about mobility. More than 60 percent of these 200,000 job seekers are willing to work abroad. For me, a surprisingly high number. If you look at the employees aged 21 to 30, this number is even higher. If you split this number up by country, yes, the world is mobile, but only partly. The least mobile countries are Russia, Germany and the U.S. Now where would these people like to move? Number seven is Australia, where 28 percent could imagine moving. Then France, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, U.K., and the top choice worldwide is the U.S. Now, what are the job preferences of these 200,000 people? So, what are they looking for? Out of a list of 26 topics, salary is only number eight. The top four topics are all around culture. Number four, having a great relationship with the boss; three, enjoying a great work-life balance; two, having a great relationship with colleagues; and the top priority worldwide is being appreciated for your work. So, do I get a thank you? Not only once a year with the annual bonus payment, but every day. And now, our global workforce crisis becomes very personal. People are looking for recognition. Aren't we all looking for recognition in our jobs? Now, let me connect the dots. We will face a global workforce crisis which consists of an overall labor shortage plus a huge skill mismatch, plus a big cultural challenge. And this global workforce crisis is approaching very fast. Right now, we are just at the turning point. So what can we, what can governments, what can companies do? Every company, but also every country, needs a people strategy, and to act on it immediately, and such a people strategy consists of four parts. Number one, a plan for how to forecast supply and demand for different jobs and different skills. Workforce planning will become more important than financial planning. Two, a plan for how to attract great people: generation Y, women, but also retirees. Three, a plan for how to educate and upskill them. There's a huge upskilling challenge ahead of us. And four, for how to retain the best people, or in other words, how to realize an appreciation and relationship culture. However, one crucial underlying factor is to change our attitudes. Employees are resources, are assets, not costs, not head counts, not machines, not even the Germans. Thank you. (Applause) |
What veterinarians know that physicians don't | {0: "Barbara Natterson-Horowitz is a cardiologist and visiting professor at Harvard University's department of human evolutionary biology who turns to the natural world for insights into human well being."} | TEDMED 2014 | Ten years ago, I got a phone call that changed my life. At the time, I was cardiologist at UCLA, specializing in cardiac imaging techniques. The call came from a veterinarian at the Los Angeles Zoo. An elderly female chimpanzee had woken up with a facial droop and the veterinarians were worried that she'd had a stroke. They asked if I'd come to the zoo and image the animal's heart to look for a possible cardiac cause. Now, to be clear, North American zoos are staffed by highly qualified, board-certified veterinarians who take outstanding care of their animal patients. But occasionally, they do reach into the human medical community, particularly for some speciality consultation, and I was one of the lucky physicians who was invited in to help. I had a chance to rule out a stroke in this chimpanzee and make sure that this gorilla didn't have a torn aorta, evaluate this macaw for a heart murmur, make sure that this California sea lion's paricardium wasn't inflamed, and in this picture, I'm listening to the heart of a lion after a lifesaving, collaborative procedure with veterinarians and physicians where we drained 700 cc's of fluid from the sac in which this lion's heart was contained. And this procedure, which I have done on many human patients, was identical, with the exception of that paw and that tail. Now most of the time, I was working at UCLA Medical Center with physicians, discussing symptoms and diagnoses and treatments for my human patients, but some of the time, I was working at the Los Angeles Zoo with veterinarians, discussing symptoms and diagnoses and treatments for their animal patients. And occasionally, on the very same day, I went on rounds at UCLA Medical Center and at the Los Angeles Zoo. And here's what started coming into very clear focus for me. Physicians and veterinarians were essentially taking care of the same disorders in their animal and human patients: congestive heart failure, brain tumors, leukemia, diabetes, arthritis, ALS, breast cancer, even psychiatric syndromes like depression, anxiety, compulsions, eating disorders and self-injury. Now, I've got a confession to make. Even though I studied comparative physiology and evolutionary biology as an undergrad — I had even written my senior thesis on Darwinian theory — learning about the significant overlap between the disorders of animals and humans, it came as a much needed wake-up call for me. So I started wondering, with all of these overlaps, how was it that I had never thought to ask a veterinarian, or consult the veterinary literature, for insights into one of my human patients? Why had I never, nor had any of my physician friends and colleagues whom I asked, ever attended a veterinary conference? For that matter, why was any of this a surprise? I mean, look, every single physician accepts some biological connection between animals and humans. Every medication that we prescribe or that we've taken ourselves or we've given to our families has first been tested on an animal. But there's something very different about giving an animal a medication or a human disease and the animal developing congestive heart failure or diabetes or breast cancer on their own. Now, maybe some of the surprise comes from the increasing separation in our world between the urban and the nonurban. You know, we hear about these city kids who think that wool grows on trees or that cheese comes from a plant. Well, today's human hospitals, increasingly, are turning into these gleaming cathedrals of technology. And this creates a psychological distance between the human patients who are being treated there and animal patients who are living in oceans and farms and jungles. But I think there's an even deeper reason. Physicians and scientists, we accept intellectually that our species, Homo sapiens, is merely one species, no more unique or special than any other. But in our hearts, we don't completely believe that. I feel it myself when I'm listening to Mozart or looking at pictures of the Mars Rover on my MacBook. I feel that tug of human exceptionalism, even as I recognize the scientifically isolating cost of seeing ourselves as a superior species, apart. Well, I'm trying these days. When I see a human patient now, I always ask, what do the animal doctors know about this problem that I don't know? And, might I be taking better care of my human patient if I saw them as a human animal patient? Here are a few examples of the kind of exciting connections that this kind of thinking has led me to. Fear-induced heart failure. Around the year 2000, human cardiologists "discovered" emotionally induced heart failure. It was described in a gambling father who had lost his life's savings with a roll of the dice, in a bride who'd been left at the alter. But it turns out, this "new" human diagnosis was neither new, nor was it uniquely human. Veterinarians had been diagnosing, treating and even preventing emotionally induced symptoms in animals ranging from monkeys to flamingos, from to deer to rabbits, since the 1970s. How many human lives might have been saved if this veterinary knowledge had been put into the hands of E.R. docs and cardiologists? Self-injury. Some human patients harm themselves. Some pluck out patches of hair, others actually cut themselves. Some animal patients also harm themselves. There are birds that pluck out feathers. There are stallions that repetitively bite their flanks until they bleed. But veterinarians have very specific and very effective ways of treating and even preventing self-injury in their self-injuring animals. Shouldn't this veterinary knowledge be put into the hands of psychotherapists and parents and patients struggling with self-injury? Postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. Sometimes, soon after giving birth, some women become depressed, and sometimes they become seriously depressed and even psychotic. They may neglect their newborn, and in some extreme cases, even harm the child. Equine veterinarians also know that occasionally, a mare, soon after giving birth, will neglect the foal, refusing to nurse, and in some instances, kick the foal, even to death. But veterinarians have devised an intervention to deal with this foal rejection syndrome that involves increasing oxytocin in the mare. Oxytocin is the bonding hormone, and this leads to renewed interest, on the part of the mare, in her foal. Shouldn't this information be put into the hands of ob/gyn's and family doctors and patients who are struggling with postpartum depression and psychosis? Well, despite all of this promise, unfortunately the gulf between our fields remains large. To explain it, I'm afraid I'm going to have to air some dirty laundry. Some physicians can be real snobs about doctors who are not M.D.'s. I'm talking about dentists and optometrists and psychologists, but maybe especially animal doctors. Of course, most physicians don't realize that it is harder to get into vet school these days than medical school, and that when we go to medical school, we learn everything there is to know about one species, Homo sapiens, but veterinarians need to learn about health and disease in mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish and birds. So I don't blame the vets for feeling annoyed by my profession's condescension and ignorance. But here's one from the vets: What do you call a veterinarian who can only take care of one species? A physician. (Laughter) Closing the gap has become a passion for me, and I'm doing this through programs like Darwin on Rounds at UCLA, where we're bringing animal experts and evolutionary biologists and embedding them on our medical teams with our interns and our residents. And through Zoobiquity conferences, where we bring medical schools together with veterinary schools for collabortive discussions of the shared diseases and disorders of animal and human patients. At Zoobiquity conferences, participants learn how treating breast cancer in a tiger can help us better treat breast cancer in a kindergarten teacher; how understanding polycystic overies in a Holstein cow can help us better take care of a dance instructor with painful periods; and how better understanding the treatment of separation anxiety in a high-strung Sheltie can help an anxious young child struggling with his first days of school. In the United States and now internationally, at Zoobiquity conferences physicians and veterinarians check their attitudes and their preconceptions at the door and come together as colleagues, as peers, as doctors. After all, we humans are animals, too, and it's time for us physicians to embrace our patients' and our own animal natures and join veterinarians in a species-spanning approach to health. Because it turns out, some of the best and most humanistic medicine is being practiced by doctors whose patients aren't human. And one of the best ways we can take care of the human patient is by paying close attention to how all the other patients on the planet live, grow, get sick and heal. Thank you. (Applause). |
A dance in a hurricane of paper, wind and light | {0: 'Aakash Odedra sets raw ancient dance forms from India within the modern global context.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | (Music) (Applause) |
How Christmas lights helped guerrillas put down their guns | {0: "Ad exec Jose Miguel Sokoloff has led a multi-year marketing campaign that's helped Colombian guerrillas realize that they are wanted back home."} | TEDGlobal 2014 | So, I thought a lot about the first word I'd say today, and I decided to say "Colombia." And the reason, I don't know how many of you have visited Colombia, but Colombia is just north of the border with Brazil. It's a beautiful country with extraordinary people, like me and others — (Laughter) — and it's populated with incredible fauna, flora. It's got water; it's got everything to be the perfect place. But we have a few problems. You may have heard of some of them. We have the oldest standing guerrilla in the world. It's been around for over 50 years, which means that in my lifetime, I have never lived one day of peace in my country. This guerrilla — and the main group is the FARC guerrillas, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — they have financed their war by kidnapping, by extortion, by getting into the drug trade, by illegal mining. There has been terrorism. There have been random bombs. So it's not good. It's not really good. And if you look at the human cost of this war over 50 years, we have had more than 5.7 million displaced population. It's one of the biggest displaced populations in the world, and this conflict has cost over 220,000 lives. So it's a little bit like the Bolívar wars again. It's a lot of people who have died unnecessarily. We are now in the middle of peace talks, and we've been trying to help resolve this problem peacefully, and as part of that, we decided to try something completely lateral and different: Christmas lights. So Christmas lights, and you're saying, what the hell is this guy going to talk about? I am going to talk about gigantic trees that we put in nine strategic pathways in the jungle covered with Christmas lights. These trees helped us demobilize 331 guerrillas, roughly five percent of the guerrilla force at the time. These trees were lit up at night, and they had a sign beside them that said, "If Christmas can come to the jungle, you can come home. Demobilize. At Christmas, everything is possible." So how do we know these trees worked? Well, we got 331, which is okay, but we also know that not a lot of guerrillas saw them, but we know that a lot of guerrillas heard about them, and we know this because we are constantly talking to demobilized guerrillas. So let me take you back four years before the trees. Four years before the trees, we were approached by the government to help them come up with a communications strategy to get as many guerrillas as we could out of the jungle. The government had a military strategy, it had a legal strategy, it had a political strategy, but it said, "We don't really have a communications strategy, and it probably would be a good thing to have," so we decided to immediately jump into this, because it is an opportunity to affect the outcome of the conflict with the things that we do, with the tools that we have. But we didn't know very much about it. We didn't understand in Colombia, if you live in the cities, you're very far away from where the war is actually happening, so you don't really understand it, and we asked the government to give us access to as many demobilized guerrillas as possible. And we talked to about 60 of them before we felt we fully understood the problem. We talked about — they told us why they had joined the guerrillas, why the left the guerrillas, what their dreams were, what their frustrations were, and from those conversations came the underlying insight that has guided this whole campaign, which is that guerrillas are as much prisoners of their organizations as the people they hold hostage. And at the beginning, we were so touched by these stories, we were so amazed by these stories, that we thought that maybe the best way to talk to the guerrillas was to have them talk to themselves, so we recorded about a hundred different stories during the first year, and we put them on the radio and television so that the guerrillas in the jungle could hear stories, their stories, or stories similar to theirs, and when they heard them, they decided to go out. I want to tell you one of these stories. This person you see here is Giovanni Andres. Giovanni Andres is 25 when we took that picture. He had been seven years in the guerrilla, and he had demobilized very recently. His story is the following: He was recruited when he was 17, and sometime later, in his squadron, if you will, this beautiful girl was recruited, and they fell in love. Their conversations were about what their family was going to be like, what their kids' names would be, how their life would be when they left the guerrilla. But it turns out that love is very strictly forbidden in the lower ranks of the guerrilla, so their romance was discovered and they were separated. He was sent very far away, and she was left behind. She was very familiar with the territory, so one night, when she was on guard, she just left, and she went to the army, she demobilized, and she was one of the persons that we had the fortune to talk to, and we were really touched by this story, so we made a radio spot, and it turns out, by chance, that far away, many, many kilometers north, he heard her on the radio, and when he heard her on the radio, he said, "What am I doing here? She had the balls to get out. I need to do the same thing." And he did. He walked for two days and two nights, and he risked his life and he got out, and the only thing he wanted was to see her. The only thing that was in his mind was to see her. The story was, they did meet. I know you're wondering if they did meet. They did meet. She had been recruited when she was 15, and she left when she was 17, so there were a lot of other complications, but they did eventually meet. I don't know if they're together now, but I can find out. (Laughter) But what I can tell you is that our radio strategy was working. The problem is that it was working in the lower ranks of the guerrilla. It was not working with the commanders, the people that are more difficult to replace, because you can easily recruit but you can't get the older commanders. So we thought, well, we'll use the same strategy. We'll have commanders talking to commanders. And we even went as far as asking ex-commanders of the guerrilla to fly on helicopters with microphones telling the people that used to fight with them, "There is a better life out there," "I'm doing good," "This is not worth it," etc. But, as you can all imagine, it was very easy to counteract, because what was the guerrilla going to say? "Yeah, right, if he doesn't do that, he's going to get killed." So it was easy, so we were suddenly left with nothing, because the guerrilla were spreading the word that all of those things are done because if they don't do it, they're in danger. And somebody, some brilliant person in our team, came back and said, "You know what I noticed? I noticed that around Christmastime, there have been peaks of demobilization since this war has started." And that was incredible, because that led us to think that we needed to talk to the human being and not to the soldier. We needed to step away from talking from government to army, from army to army, and we needed to talk about the universal values, and we needed to talk about humanity. And that was when the Christmas tree happened. This picture that I have here, you see this is the planning of the Christmas trees, and that man you see there with the three stars, he's Captain Juan Manuel Valdez. Captain Valdez was the first high-ranking official to give us the helicopters and the support we needed to put these Christmas trees up, and he said in that meeting something that I will never forget. He said, "I want to do this because being generous makes me stronger, makes my men feel stronger." And I get very emotional when I remember him because he was killed later in combat and we really miss him, but I wanted you all to see him, because he was really, really important. He gave us all the support to put up the first Christmas trees. What happened later is that the guerrillas who came out during the Christmas tree operation and all of that said, "That's really good, Christmas trees are really cool, but you know what? We really don't walk anymore. We use rivers." So rivers are the highways of the jungle, and this is something we learned, and most of the recruiting was being done in and around the river villages. So we went to these river villages, and we asked the people, and probably some of them were direct acquaintances of the guerrillas. We asked them, "Can you send guerrillas a message?" We collected over 6,000 messages. Some of them were notes saying, get out. Some of them were toys. Some of them were candy. Even people took off their jewelry, their little crosses and religious things, and put them in these floating balls that we sent down the rivers so that they could be picked up at night. And we sent thousands of these down the rivers, and then picked them up later if they weren't. But lots of them were picked up. This generated, on average, a demobilization every six hours, so this was incredible and it was about: Come home at Christmas. Then came the peace process, and when the peace process started, the whole mindset of the guerrilla changed. And it changed because it makes you think, "Well, if there's a peace process, this is probably going to be over. At some point I'm going to get out." And their fears completely changed, and their fears were not about, "Am I going to get killed?" Their fears were, "Am I going to be rejected? When I get out of this, am I going to be rejected?" So the past Christmas, what we did was we asked — we found 27 mothers of guerrillas, and we asked them to give us pictures of their children, when they only could recognize themselves, so as not to put their lives in danger, and we asked them to give the most motherly message you can get, which is, "Before you were a guerrilla, you were my child, so come home, I'm waiting for you." You can see the pictures here. I'll show you a couple. (Applause) Thank you. And these pictures were placed in many different places, and a lot of them came back, and it was really, really beautiful. And then we decided to work with society. So we did mothers around Christmastime. Now let's talk about the rest of the people. And you may be aware of this or not, but there was a World Cup this year, and Colombia played really well, and it was a unifying moment for Colombia. And what we did was tell the guerrillas, "Come, get out of the jungle. We're saving a place for you." So this was television, this was all different types of media saying, "We are saving a place for you." The soldier here in the commercial says, "I'm saving a place for you right here in this helicopter so that you can get out of this jungle and go enjoy the World Cup." Ex-football players, radio announcers, everybody was saving a place for the guerrilla. So since we started this work a little over eight years ago, 17,000 guerrillas have demobilized. I do not — (Applause) Thank you. I don't want to say in any way that it only has to do with what we do, but what I do know is that our work and the work that we do may have helped a lot of them start thinking about demobilization, and it may have helped a lot of them take the final decision. If that is true, advertising is still one of the most powerful tools of change that we have available. And I speak not only my behalf, but on behalf of all the colleagues I see here who work in advertising, and of all the team that has worked with me to do this, that if you want to change the world, or if you want to achieve peace, please call us. We'd love to help. Thank you. (Applause) |
Fighters and mourners of the Ukrainian revolution | {0: 'Anastasia Taylor-Lind is a documentary photographer who works around the world on issues relating to women, birth rights, depopulation and post-conflict regions.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | When I arrived in Kiev, on February 1 this year, Independence Square was under siege, surrounded by police loyal to the government. The protesters who occupied Maidan, as the square is known, prepared for battle, stockpiling homemade weapons and mass-producing improvised body armor. The Euromaidan protests began peacefully at the end of 2013, after the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a far-reaching accord with the European Union in favor of stronger ties with Russia. In response, tens of thousands of dissatisfied citizens poured into central Kiev to demonstrate against this allegiance. As the months passed, confrontations between police and civilians intensified. I set up a makeshift portrait studio by the barricades on Hrushevsky Street. There, I photographed the fighters against a black curtain, a curtain that obscured the highly seductive and visual backdrop of fire, ice and smoke. In order to tell the individual human stories here, I felt that I needed to remove the dramatic visuals that had become so familiar and repetitive within the mainstream media. What I was witnessing was not only news, but also history. With this realization, I was free from the photojournalistic conventions of the newspaper and the magazine. Oleg, Vasiliy and Maxim were all ordinary men, with ordinary lives from ordinary towns. But the elaborate costumes that they had bedecked themselves in were quite extraordinary. I say the word "costume" because these were not clothes that had been issued or coordinated by anyone. They were improvised uniforms made up of decommissioned military equipment, irregular combat fatigues and trophies taken from the police. I became interested in the way they were choosing to represent themselves, this outward expression of masculinity, the ideal of the warrior. I worked slowly, using an analog film camera with a manual focusing loop and a handheld light meter. The process is old-fashioned. It gives me time to speak with each person and to look at them, in silence, while they look back at me. Rising tensions culminated in the worst day of violence on February 20, which became known as Bloody Thursday. Snipers, loyal to the government, started firing on the civilians and protesters on Institutskaya Street. Many were killed in a very short space of time. The reception of the Hotel Ukraine became a makeshift morgue. There were lines of bodies laid in the street. And there was blood all over the pavements. The following day, President Yanukovych fled Ukraine. In all, three months of protests resulted in more than 120 confirmed dead and many more missing. History unfolded quickly, but celebration remained elusive in Maidan. As the days passed in Kiev's central square, streams of armed fighters were joined by tens of thousands of ordinary people, filling the streets in an act of collective mourning. Many were women who often carried flowers that they had brought to lay as marks of respect for the dead. They came day after day and they covered the square with millions of flowers. Sadness enveloped Maidan. It was quiet and I could hear the birds singing. I hadn't heard that before. I stopped women as they approached the barricades to lay their tributes and asked to make their picture. Most women cried when I photographed them. On the first day, my fixer, Emine, and I cried with almost every woman who visited our studio. There had been such a noticeable absence of women up until that point. And the color of their pastel coats, their shiny handbags, and the bunches of red carnations, white tulips and yellow roses that they carried jarred with the blackened square and the blackened men who were encamped there. It is clear to me that these two sets of pictures don't make much sense without the other. They are about men and women and the way we are — not the way we look, but the way we are. They speak about different gender roles in conflict, not only in Maidan, and not only in Ukraine. Men fight most wars and women mourn them. If the men showed the ideal of the warrior, then the women showed the implications of such violence. When I made these pictures, I believed that I was documenting the end of violent events in Ukraine. But now I understand that it is a record of the beginning. Today, the death toll stands around 3,000, while hundreds of thousands have been displaced. I was in Ukraine again six weeks ago. In Maidan, the barricades have been dismantled, and the paving stones which were used as weapons during the protests replaced, so that traffic flows freely through the center of the square. The fighters, the women and the flowers are gone. A huge billboard depicting geese flying over a wheat field covers the burned-out shell of the trade union's building and proclaims, "Glory to Ukraine. Glory to heroes." Thank you. (Applause). |
The world's most boring television ... and why it's hilariously addictive | {0: 'Thomas Hellum is an award-winning television producer who works at NRK Hordaland in Norway.\r\n\r\n'} | TEDxArendal | Thank you. I have only got 18 minutes to explain something that lasts for hours and days, so I'd better get started. Let's start with a clip from Al Jazeera's Listening Post. Richard Gizbert: Norway is a country that gets relatively little media coverage. Even the elections this past week passed without much drama. And that's the Norwegian media in a nutshell: not much drama. A few years back, Norway's public TV channel NRK decided to broadcast live coverage of a seven-hour train ride — seven hours of simple footage, a train rolling down the tracks. Norwegians, more than a million of them according to the ratings, loved it. A new kind of reality TV show was born, and it goes against all the rules of TV engagement. There is no story line, no script, no drama, no climax, and it's called Slow TV. For the past two months, Norwegians have been watching a cruise ship's journey up the coast, and there's a lot of fog on that coast. Executives at Norway's National Broadcasting Service are now considering broadcasting a night of knitting nationwide. On the surface, it sounds boring, because it is, but something about this TV experiment has gripped Norwegians. So we sent the Listening Post's Marcela Pizarro to Oslo to find out what it is, but first a warning: Viewers may find some of the images in the following report disappointing. (Laughter) Thomas Hellum: And then follows an eight-minute story on Al Jazeera about some strange TV programs in little Norway. Al Jazeera. CNN. How did we get there? We have to go back to 2009, when one of my colleagues got a great idea. Where do you get your ideas? In the lunchroom. So he said, why don't we make a radio program marking the day of the German invasion of Norway in 1940. We tell the story at the exact time during the night. Wow. Brilliant idea, except this was just a couple of weeks before the invasion day. So we sat in our lunchroom and discussed what other stories can you tell as they evolve? What other things take a really long time? So one of us came up with a train. The Bergen Railway had its 100-year anniversary that year It goes from western Norway to eastern Norway, and it takes exactly the same time as it did 40 years ago, over seven hours. (Laughter) So we caught our commissioning editors in Oslo, and we said, we want to make a documentary about the Bergen Railway, and we want to make it in full length, and the answer was, "Yes, but how long will the program be?" "Oh," we said, "full length." "Yes, but we mean the program." And back and forth. Luckily for us, they met us with laughter, very, very good laughter, so one bright day in September, we started a program that we thought should be seven hours and four minutes. Actually, it turned out to be seven hours and 14 minutes due to a signal failure at the last station. We had four cameras, three of them pointing out to the beautiful nature. Some talking to the guests, some information. (Video) Train announcement: We will arrive at Haugastøl Station. TH: And that's about it, but of course, also the 160 tunnels gave us the opportunity to do some archives. Narrator [in Norwegian]: Then a bit of flirting while the food is digested. The last downhill stretch before we reach our destination. We pass Mjølfjell Station. Then a new tunnel. (Laughter) TH: And now we thought, yes, we have a brilliant program. It will fit for the 2,000 train spotters in Norway. We brought it on air in November 2009. But no, this was far more attractive. This is the five biggest TV channels in Norway on a normal Friday, and if you look at NRK2 over here, look what happened when they put on the Bergen Railway show: 1.2 million Norwegians watched part of this program. (Applause) And another funny thing: When the host on our main channel, after they have got news for you, she said, "And on our second channel, the train has now nearly reached Myrdal station." Thousands of people just jumped on the train on our second channel like this. (Laughter) This was also a huge success in terms of social media. It was so nice to see all the thousands of Facebook and Twitter users discussing the same view, talking to each other as if they were on the same train together. And especially, I like this one. It's a 76-year-old man. He's watched all the program, and at the end station, he rises up to pick up what he thinks is his luggage, and his head hit the curtain rod, and he realized he is in his own living room. (Applause) So that's strong and living TV. Four hundred and thirty-six minute by minute on a Friday night, and during that first night, the first Twitter message came: Why be a chicken? Why stop at 436 when you can expand that to 8,040, minute by minute, and do the iconic journey in Norway, the coastal ship journey Hurtigruten from Bergen to Kirkenes, almost 3,000 kilometers, covering most of our coast. It has 120-year-old, very interesting history, and literally takes part in life and death along the coast. So just a week after the Bergen Railway, we called the Hurtigruten company and we started planning for our next show. We wanted to do something different. The Bergen Railway was a recorded program. So when we sat in our editing room, we watched this picture — it's all Ål Station — we saw this journalist. We had called him, we had spoken to him, and when we left the station, he took this picture of us and he waved to the camera, and we thought, what if more people knew that we were on board that train? Would more people show up? What would it look like? So we decided our next project, it should be live. We wanted this picture of us on the fjord and on the screen at the same time. So this is not the first time NRK had been on board a ship. This is back in 1964, when the technical managers have suits and ties and NRK rolled all its equipment on board a ship, and 200 meters out of the shore, transmitting the signal back, and in the machine room, they talked to the machine guy, and on the deck, they have splendid entertainment. So being on a ship, it's not the first time. But five and a half days in a row, and live, we wanted some help. And we asked our viewers out there, what do you want to see? What do you want us to film? How do you want this to look? Do you want us to make a website? What do you want on it? And we got some answers from you out there, and it helped us a very lot to build the program. So in June 2011, 23 of us went on board the Hurtigruten coastal ship and we set off. (Music) I have some really strong memories from that week, and it's all about people. This guy, for instance, he's head of research at the University in Tromsø (Laughter) And I will show you a piece of cloth, this one. It's the other strong memory. It belongs to a guy called Erik Hansen. And it's people like those two who took a firm grip of our program, and together with thousands of others along the route, they made the program what it became. They made all the stories. This is Karl. He's in the ninth grade. It says, "I will be a little late for school tomorrow." He was supposed to be in the school at 8 a.m. He came at 9 a.m., and he didn't get a note from his teacher, because the teacher had watched the program. (Laughter) How did we do this? Yes, we took a conference room on board the Hurtigruten. We turned it into a complete TV control room. We made it all work, of course, and then we took along 11 cameras. This is one of them. This is my sketch from February, and when you give this sketch to professional people in the Norwegian broadcasting company NRK, you get some cool stuff back. And with some very creative solutions. (Video) Narrator [in Norwegian]: Run it up and down. This is Norway's most important drill right now. It regulates the height of a bow camera in NRK's live production, one of 11 that capture great shots from the MS Nord-Norge. Eight wires keep the camera stable. Cameraman: I work on different camera solutions. They're just tools used in a different context. TH: Another camera is this one. It's normally used for sports. It made it possible for us to take close-up pictures of people 100 kilomteres away, like this one. (Laughter) People called us and asked, how is this man doing? He's doing fine. Everything went well. We also could take pictures of people waving at us, people along the route, thousands of them, and they all had a phone in their hand. And when you take a picture of them, and they get the message, "Now we are on TV, dad," they start waving back. This was waving TV for five and a half days, and people get so extremely happy when they can send a warm message to their loved ones. It was also a great success on social media. On the last day, we met Her Majesty the Queen of Norway, and Twitter couldn't quite handle it. And we also, on the web, during this week we streamed more than 100 years of video to 148 nations, and the websites are still there and they will be forever, actually, because Hurtigruten was selected to be part of the Norwegian UNESCO list of documents, and it's also in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest documentary ever. (Applause) Thank you. But it's a long program, so some watched part of it, like the Prime Minister. Some watched a little bit more. It says, "I haven't used my bed for five days." And he's 82 years old, and he hardly slept. He kept watching because something might happen, though it probably won't. (Laughter) This is the number of viewers along the route. You can see the famous Trollfjord and a day after, all-time high for NRK2. If you see the four biggest channels in Norway during June 2011, they will look like this, and as a TV producer, it's a pleasure to put Hurtigruten on top of it. It looks like this: 3.2 million Norwegians watched part of this program, and we are only five million here. Even the passengers on board the Hurtigruten coastal ship — (Laughter) — they chose to watched the telly instead of turning 90 degrees and watching out the window. So we were allowed to be part of people's living room with this strange TV program, with music, nature, people. And Slow TV was now a buzzword, and we started looking for other things we could make Slow TV about. So we could either take something long and make it a topic, like with the railway and the Hurtigruten, or we could take a topic and make it long. This is the last project. It's the peep show. It's 14 hours of birdwatching on a TV screen, actually 87 days on the web. We have made 18 hours of live salmon fishing. It actually took three hours before we got the first fish, and that's quite slow. We have made 12 hours of boat ride into the beautiful Telemark Canal, and we have made another train ride with the northern railway, and because this we couldn't do live, we did it in four seasons just to give the viewer another experience on the way. So our next project got us some attention outside Norway. This is from the Colbert Report on Comedy Central. (Video) Stephen Colbert: I've got my eye on a wildly popular program from Norway called "National Firewood Night," which consisted of mostly people in parkas chatting and chopping in the woods, and then eight hours of a fire burning in a fireplace. (Laughter) It destroyed the other top Norwegian shows, like "So You Think You Can Watch Paint Dry" and "The Amazing Glacier Race." And get this, almost 20 percent of the Norwegian population tuned in, 20 percent. TH: So, when wood fire and wood chopping can be that interesting, why not knitting? So on our next project, we used more than eight hours to go live from a sheep to a sweater, and Jimmy Kimmel in the ABC show, he liked that. (Music) (Video) Jimmy Kimmel: Even the people on the show are falling asleep, and after all that, the knitters actually failed to break the world record. They did not succeed, but remember the old Norwegian saying, it's not whether you win or lose that counts. In fact, nothing counts, and death is coming for us all. (Laughter) TH: Exactly. So why does this stand out? This is so completely different to other TV programming. We take the viewer on a journey that happens right now in real time, and the viewer gets the feeling of actually being there, actually being on the train, on the boat, and knitting together with others, and the reason I think why they're doing that is because we don't edit the timeline. It's important that we don't edit the timeline, and it's also important that what we make Slow TV about is something that we all can relate to, that the viewer can relate to, and that somehow has a root in our culture. This is a picture from last summer when we traveled the coast again for seven weeks. And of course this is a lot of planning, this is a lot of logistics. So this is the working plan for 150 people last summer, but more important is what you don't plan. You don't plan what's going to happen. You have to just take your cameras with you. It's like a sports event. You rig them and you see what's happening. So this is actually the whole running order for Hurtigruten, 134 hours, just written on one page. We didn't know anything more when we left Bergen. So you have to let the viewers make the stories themselves, and I'll give you an example of that. This is from last summer, and as a TV producer, it's a nice picture, but now you can cut to the next one. But this is Slow TV, so you have to keep this picture until it really starts hurting your stomach, and then you keep it a little bit longer, and when you keep it that long, I'm sure some of you now have noticed the cow. Some of you have seen the flag. Some of you start wondering, is the farmer at home? Has he left? Is he watching the cow? And where is that cow going? So my point is, the longer you keep a picture like this, and we kept it for 10 minutes, you start making the stories in your own head. That's Slow TV. So we think that Slow TV is one nice way of telling a TV story, and we think that we can continue doing it, not too often, once or twice a year, so we keep the feeling of an event, and we also think that the good Slow TV idea, that's the idea when people say, "Oh no, you can't put that on TV." When people smile, it might be a very good slow idea, so after all, life is best when it's a bit strange. Thank you. (Applause) |
The small and surprisingly dangerous detail the police track about you | {0: 'Catherine Crump is an assistant clinical professor at Berkeley Law School who focuses on the laws around data and surveillance.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | The shocking police crackdown on protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown, underscored the extent to which advanced military weapons and equipment, designed for the battlefield, are making their way to small-town police departments across the United States. Although much tougher to observe, this same thing is happening with surveillance equipment. NSA-style mass surveillance is enabling local police departments to gather vast quantities of sensitive information about each and every one of us in a way that was never previously possible. Location information can be very sensitive. If you drive your car around the United States, it can reveal if you go to a therapist, attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, if you go to church or if you don't go to church. And when that information about you is combined with the same information about everyone else, the government can gain a detailed portrait of how private citizens interact. This information used to be private. Thanks to modern technology, the government knows far too much about what happens behind closed doors. And local police departments make decisions about who they think you are based on this information. One of the key technologies driving mass location tracking is the innocuous-sounding Automatic License Plate Reader. If you haven't seen one, it's probably because you didn't know what to look for — they're everywhere. Mounted on roads or on police cars, Automatic License Plate Readers capture images of every passing car and convert the license plate into machine-readable text so that they can be checked against hot lists of cars potentially wanted for wrongdoing. But more than that, increasingly, local police departments are keeping records not just of people wanted for wrongdoing, but of every plate that passes them by, resulting in the collection of mass quantities of data about where Americans have gone. Did you know this was happening? When Mike Katz-Lacabe asked his local police department for information about the plate reader data they had on him, this is what they got: in addition to the date, time and location, the police department had photographs that captured where he was going and often who he was with. The second photo from the top is a picture of Mike and his two daughters getting out of their car in their own driveway. The government has hundreds of photos like this about Mike going about his daily life. And if you drive a car in the United States, I would bet money that they have photographs like this of you going about your daily life. Mike hasn't done anything wrong. Why is it okay that the government is keeping all of this information? The reason it's happening is because, as the cost of storing this data has plummeted, the police departments simply hang on to it, just in case it could be useful someday. The issue is not just that one police department is gathering this information in isolation or even that multiple police departments are doing it. At the same time, the federal government is collecting all of these individual pots of data, and pooling them together into one vast database with hundreds of millions of hits, showing where Americans have traveled. This document from the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which is one of the agencies primarily interested in this, is one of several that reveal the existence of this database. Meanwhile, in New York City, the NYPD has driven police cars equipped with license plate readers past mosques in order to figure out who is attending. The uses and abuses of this technology aren't limited to the United States. In the U.K., the police department put 80-year-old John Kat on a plate reader watch list after he had attended dozens of lawful political demonstrations where he liked to sit on a bench and sketch the attendees. License plate readers aren't the only mass location tracking technology available to law enforcement agents today. Through a technique known as a cell tower dump, law enforcement agents can uncover who was using one or more cell towers at a particular time, a technique which has been known to reveal the location of tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people. Also, using a device known as a StingRay, law enforcement agents can send tracking signals inside people's houses to identify the cell phones located there. And if they don't know which house to target, they've been known to drive this technology around through whole neighborhoods. Just as the police in Ferguson possess high-tech military weapons and equipment, so too do police departments across the United States possess high-tech surveillance gear. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there. The question is, what should we do about this? I think this poses a serious civil liberties threat. History has shown that once the police have massive quantities of data, tracking the movements of innocent people, it gets abused, maybe for blackmail, maybe for political advantage, or maybe for simple voyeurism. Fortunately, there are steps we can take. Local police departments can be governed by the city councils, which can pass laws requiring the police to dispose of the data about innocent people while allowing the legitimate uses of the technology to go forward. Thank you. (Applause). |
Social maps that reveal a city's intersections — and separations | {0: 'The co-host of TEDxMidAtlantic, Dave Troy is a serial entrepreneur and a data-viz fan.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | When we think about mapping cities, we tend to think about roads and streets and buildings, and the settlement narrative that led to their creation, or you might think about the bold vision of an urban designer, but there's other ways to think about mapping cities and how they got to be made. Today, I want to show you a new kind of map. This is not a geographic map. This is a map of the relationships between people in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, and what you can see here is that each dot represents a person, each line represents a relationship between those people, and each color represents a community within the network. Now, I'm here on the green side, down on the far right where the geeks are, and TEDx also is down on the far right. (Laughter) Now, on the other side of the network, you tend to have primarily African-American and Latino folks who are really concerned about somewhat different things than the geeks are, but just to give some sense, the green part of the network we call Smalltimore, for those of us that inhabit it, because it seems as though we're living in a very small town. We see the same people over and over again, but that's because we're not really exploring the full depth and breadth of the city. On the other end of the network, you have folks who are interested in things like hip-hop music and they even identify with living in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area over, say, the Baltimore city designation proper. But in the middle, you see that there's something that connects the two communities together, and that's sports. We have the Baltimore Orioles, the Baltimore Ravens football team, Michael Phelps, the Olympian. Under Armour, you may have heard of, is a Baltimore company, and that community of sports acts as the only bridge between these two ends of the network. Let's take a look at San Francisco. You see something a little bit different happening in San Francisco. On the one hand, you do have the media, politics and news lobe that tends to exist in Baltimore and other cities, but you also have this very predominant group of geeks and techies that are sort of taking over the top half of the network, and there's even a group that's so distinct and clear that we can identify it as Twitter employees, next to the geeks, in between the gamers and the geeks, at the opposite end of the hip-hop spectrum. So you can see, though, that the tensions that we've heard about in San Francisco in terms of people being concerned about gentrification and all the new tech companies that are bringing new wealth and settlement into the city are real, and you can actually see that documented here. You can see the LGBT community is not really getting along with the geek community that well, the arts community, the music community. And so it leads to things like this. ["Evict Twitter"] Somebody sent me this photo a few weeks ago, and it shows what is happening on the ground in San Francisco, and I think you can actually try to understand that through looking at a map like this. Let's take a look at Rio de Janeiro. I spent the last few weeks gathering data about Rio, and one of the things that stood out to me about this city is that everything's really kind of mixed up. It's a very heterogenous city in a way that Baltimore or San Francisco is not. You still have the lobe of people involved with government, newspapers, politics, columnists. TEDxRio is down in the lower right, right next to bloggers and writers. But then you also have this tremendous diversity of people that are interested in different kinds of music. Even Justin Bieber fans are represented here. Other boy bands, country singers, gospel music, funk and rap and stand-up comedy, and there's even a whole section around drugs and jokes. How cool is that? And then the Flamengo football team is also represented here. So you have that same kind of spread of sports and civics and the arts and music, but it's represented in a very different way, and I think that maybe fits with our understanding of Rio as being a very multicultural, musically diverse city. So we have all this data. It's an incredibly rich set of data that we have about cities now, maybe even richer than any data set that we've ever had before. So what can we do with it? Well, I think the first thing that we can try to understand is that segregation is a social construct. It's something that we choose to do, and we could choose not to do it, and if you kind of think about it, what we're doing with this data is aiming a space telescope at a city and looking at it as if was a giant high school cafeteria, and seeing how everybody arranged themselves in a seating chart. Well maybe it's time to shake up the seating chart a little bit. The other thing that we start to realize is that race is a really poor proxy for diversity. We've got people represented from all different types of races across the entire map here — only looking at race doesn't really contribute to our development of diversity. So if we're trying to use diversity as a way to tackle some of our more intractable problems, we need to start to think about diversity in a new way. And lastly, we have the ability to create interventions to start to reshape our cities in a new way, and I believe that if we have that capability, we may even bear some responsibility to do so. So what is a city? I think some might say that it is a geographical area or a collection of streets and buildings, but I believe that a city is the sum of the relationships of the people that live there, and I believe that if we can start to document those relationships in a real way then maybe we have a real shot at creating those kinds of cities that we'd like to have. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to overcome our biases? Walk boldly toward them | {0: 'Vernā Myers is dedicated to promoting meaningful, lasting diversity in the workplace.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | I was on a long road trip this summer, and I was having a wonderful time listening to the amazing Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns." It documents six million black folks fleeing the South from 1915 to 1970 looking for a respite from all the brutality and trying to get to a better opportunity up North, and it was filled with stories of the resilience and the brilliance of African-Americans, and it was also really hard to hear all the stories of the horrors and the humility, and all the humiliations. It was especially hard to hear about the beatings and the burnings and the lynchings of black men. And I said, "You know, this is a little deep. I need a break. I'm going to turn on the radio." I turned it on, and there it was: Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown, 18-year-old black man, unarmed, shot by a white police officer, laid on the ground dead, blood running for four hours while his grandmother and little children and his neighbors watched in horror, and I thought, here it is again. This violence, this brutality against black men has been going on for centuries. I mean, it's the same story. It's just different names. It could have been Amadou Diallo. It could have been Sean Bell. It could have been Oscar Grant. It could have been Trayvon Martin. This violence, this brutality, is really something that's part of our national psyche. It's part of our collective history. What are we going to do about it? You know that part of us that still crosses the street, locks the doors, clutches the purses, when we see young black men? That part. I mean, I know we're not shooting people down in the street, but I'm saying that the same stereotypes and prejudices that fuel those kinds of tragic incidents are in us. We've been schooled in them as well. I believe that we can stop these types of incidents, these Fergusons from happening, by looking within and being willing to change ourselves. So I have a call to action for you. There are three things that I want to offer us today to think about as ways to stop Ferguson from happening again; three things that I think will help us reform our images of young black men; three things that I'm hoping will not only protect them but will open the world so that they can thrive. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine our country embracing young black men, seeing them as part of our future, giving them that kind of openness, that kind of grace we give to people we love? How much better would our lives be? How much better would our country be? Let me just start with number one. We gotta get out of denial. Stop trying to be good people. We need real people. You know, I do a lot of diversity work, and people will come up to me at the beginning of the workshop. They're like, "Oh, Ms. Diversity Lady, we're so glad you're here" — (Laughter) — "but we don't have a biased bone in our body." And I'm like, "Really? Because I do this work every day, and I see all my biases." I mean, not too long ago, I was on a plane and I heard the voice of a woman pilot coming over the P.A. system, and I was just so excited, so thrilled. I was like, "Yes, women, we are rocking it. We are now in the stratosphere." It was all good, and then it started getting turbulent and bumpy, and I was like, "I hope she can drive." (Laughter) I know. Right. But it's not even like I knew that was a bias until I was coming back on the other leg and there's always a guy driving and it's often turbulent and bumpy, and I've never questioned the confidence of the male driver. The pilot is good. Now, here's the problem. If you ask me explicitly, I would say, "Female pilot: awesome." But it appears that when things get funky and a little troublesome, a little risky, I lean on a bias that I didn't even know that I had. You know, fast-moving planes in the sky, I want a guy. That's my default. Men are my default. Who is your default? Who do you trust? Who are you afraid of? Who do you implicitly feel connected to? Who do you run away from? I'm going to tell you what we have learned. The implicit association test, which measures unconscious bias, you can go online and take it. Five million people have taken it. Turns out, our default is white. We like white people. We prefer white. What do I mean by that? When people are shown images of black men and white men, we are more quickly able to associate that picture with a positive word, that white person with a positive word, than we are when we are trying to associate positive with a black face, and vice versa. When we see a black face, it is easier for us to connect black with negative than it is white with negative. Seventy percent of white people taking that test prefer white. Fifty percent of black people taking that test prefer white. You see, we were all outside when the contamination came down. What do we do about the fact that our brain automatically associates? You know, one of the things that you probably are thinking about, and you're probably like, you know what, I'm just going to double down on my color blindness. Yes, I'm going to recommit to that. I'm going to suggest to you, no. We've gone about as far as we can go trying to make a difference trying to not see color. The problem was never that we saw color. It was what we did when we saw the color. It's a false ideal. And while we're busy pretending not to see, we are not being aware of the ways in which racial difference is changing people's possibilities, that's keeping them from thriving, and sometimes it's causing them an early death. So in fact, what the scientists are telling us is, no way. Don't even think about color blindness. In fact, what they're suggesting is, stare at awesome black people. (Laughter) Look at them directly in their faces and memorize them, because when we look at awesome folks who are black, it helps to dissociate the association that happens automatically in our brain. Why do you think I'm showing you these beautiful black men behind me? There were so many, I had to cut them. Okay, so here's the thing: I'm trying to reset your automatic associations about who black men are. I'm trying to remind you that young black men grow up to be amazing human beings who have changed our lives and made them better. So here's the thing. The other possibility in science, and it's only temporarily changing our automatic assumptions, but one thing we know is that if you take a white person who is odious that you know, and stick it up next to a person of color, a black person, who is fabulous, then that sometimes actually causes us to disassociate too. So think Jeffrey Dahmer and Colin Powell. Just stare at them, right? (Laughter) But these are the things. So go looking for your bias. Please, please, just get out of denial and go looking for disconfirming data that will prove that in fact your old stereotypes are wrong. Okay, so that's number one: number two, what I'm going to say is move toward young black men instead of away from them. It's not the hardest thing to do, but it's also one of these things where you have to be conscious and intentional about it. You know, I was in a Wall Street area one time several years ago when I was with a colleague of mine, and she's really wonderful and she does diversity work with me and she's a woman of color, she's Korean. And we were outside, it was late at night, and we were sort of wondering where we were going, we were lost. And I saw this person across the street, and I was thinking, "Oh great, black guy." I was going toward him without even thinking about it. And she was like, "Oh, that's interesting." The guy across the street, he was a black guy. I think black guys generally know where they're going. I don't know why exactly I think that, but that's what I think. So she was saying, "Oh, you were going, 'Yay, a black guy'?" She said, "I was going, 'Ooh, a black guy.'" Other direction. Same need, same guy, same clothes, same time, same street, different reaction. And she said, "I feel so bad. I'm a diversity consultant. I did the black guy thing. I'm a woman of color. Oh my God!" And I said, "You know what? Please. We really need to relax about this." I mean, you've got to realize I go way back with black guys. (Laughter) My dad is a black guy. You see what I'm saying? I've got a 6'5" black guy son. I was married to a black guy. My black guy thing is so wide and so deep that I can pretty much sort and figure out who that black guy is, and he was my black guy. He said, "Yes, ladies, I know where you're going. I'll take you there." You know, biases are the stories we make up about people before we know who they actually are. But how are we going to know who they are when we've been told to avoid and be afraid of them? So I'm going to tell you to walk toward your discomfort. And I'm not asking you to take any crazy risks. I'm saying, just do an inventory, expand your social and professional circles. Who's in your circle? Who's missing? How many authentic relationships do you have with young black people, folks, men, women? Or any other major difference from who you are and how you roll, so to speak? Because, you know what? Just look around your periphery. There may be somebody at work, in your classroom, in your house of worship, somewhere, there's some black young guy there. And you're nice. You say hi. I'm saying go deeper, closer, further, and build the kinds of relationships, the kinds of friendships that actually cause you to see the holistic person and to really go against the stereotypes. I know some of you are out there, I know because I have some white friends in particular that will say, "You have no idea how awkward I am. Like, I don't think this is going to work for me. I'm sure I'm going to blow this." Okay, maybe, but this thing is not about perfection. It's about connection. And you're not going to get comfortable before you get uncomfortable. I mean, you just have to do it. And young black men, what I'm saying is if someone comes your way, genuinely and authentically, take the invitation. Not everyone is out to get you. Go looking for those people who can see your humanity. You know, it's the empathy and the compassion that comes out of having relationships with people who are different from you. Something really powerful and beautiful happens: you start to realize that they are you, that they are part of you, that they are you in your family, and then we cease to be bystanders and we become actors, we become advocates, and we become allies. So go away from your comfort into a bigger, brighter thing, because that is how we will stop another Ferguson from happening. That's how we create a community where everybody, especially young black men, can thrive. So this last thing is going to be harder, and I know it, but I'm just going to put it out there anyway. When we see something, we have to have the courage to say something, even to the people we love. You know, it's holidays and it's going to be a time when we're sitting around the table and having a good time. Many of us, anyways, will be in holidays, and you've got to listen to the conversations around the table. You start to say things like, "Grandma's a bigot." (Laughter) "Uncle Joe is racist." And you know, we love Grandma and we love Uncle Joe. We do. We know they're good people, but what they're saying is wrong. And we need to be able to say something, because you know who else is at the table? The children are at the table. And we wonder why these biases don't die, and move from generation to generation? Because we're not saying anything. We've got to be willing to say, "Grandma, we don't call people that anymore." "Uncle Joe, it isn't true that he deserved that. No one deserves that." And we've got to be willing to not shelter our children from the ugliness of racism when black parents don't have the luxury to do so, especially those who have young black sons. We've got to take our lovely darlings, our future, and we've got to tell them we have an amazing country with incredible ideals, we have worked incredibly hard, and we have made some progress, but we are not done. We still have in us this old stuff about superiority and it is causing us to embed those further into our institutions and our society and generations, and it is making for despair and disparities and a devastating devaluing of young black men. We still struggle, you have to tell them, with seeing both the color and the character of young black men, but that you, and you expect them, to be part of the forces of change in this society that will stand against injustice and is willing, above all other things, to make a society where young black men can be seen for all of who they are. So many amazing black men, those who are the most amazing statesmen that have ever lived, brave soldiers, awesome, hardworking laborers. These are people who are powerful preachers. They are incredible scientists and artists and writers. They are dynamic comedians. They are doting grandpas, caring sons. They are strong fathers, and they are young men with dreams of their own. Thank you. (Applause) |
The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn | {0: 'Jeremy Howard imagines how advanced machine learning can improve our lives.'} | TEDxBrussels | It used to be that if you wanted to get a computer to do something new, you would have to program it. Now, programming, for those of you here that haven't done it yourself, requires laying out in excruciating detail every single step that you want the computer to do in order to achieve your goal. Now, if you want to do something that you don't know how to do yourself, then this is going to be a great challenge. So this was the challenge faced by this man, Arthur Samuel. In 1956, he wanted to get this computer to be able to beat him at checkers. How can you write a program, lay out in excruciating detail, how to be better than you at checkers? So he came up with an idea: he had the computer play against itself thousands of times and learn how to play checkers. And indeed it worked, and in fact, by 1962, this computer had beaten the Connecticut state champion. So Arthur Samuel was the father of machine learning, and I have a great debt to him, because I am a machine learning practitioner. I was the president of Kaggle, a community of over 200,000 machine learning practictioners. Kaggle puts up competitions to try and get them to solve previously unsolved problems, and it's been successful hundreds of times. So from this vantage point, I was able to find out a lot about what machine learning can do in the past, can do today, and what it could do in the future. Perhaps the first big success of machine learning commercially was Google. Google showed that it is possible to find information by using a computer algorithm, and this algorithm is based on machine learning. Since that time, there have been many commercial successes of machine learning. Companies like Amazon and Netflix use machine learning to suggest products that you might like to buy, movies that you might like to watch. Sometimes, it's almost creepy. Companies like LinkedIn and Facebook sometimes will tell you about who your friends might be and you have no idea how it did it, and this is because it's using the power of machine learning. These are algorithms that have learned how to do this from data rather than being programmed by hand. This is also how IBM was successful in getting Watson to beat the two world champions at "Jeopardy," answering incredibly subtle and complex questions like this one. ["The ancient 'Lion of Nimrud' went missing from this city's national museum in 2003 (along with a lot of other stuff)"] This is also why we are now able to see the first self-driving cars. If you want to be able to tell the difference between, say, a tree and a pedestrian, well, that's pretty important. We don't know how to write those programs by hand, but with machine learning, this is now possible. And in fact, this car has driven over a million miles without any accidents on regular roads. So we now know that computers can learn, and computers can learn to do things that we actually sometimes don't know how to do ourselves, or maybe can do them better than us. One of the most amazing examples I've seen of machine learning happened on a project that I ran at Kaggle where a team run by a guy called Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto won a competition for automatic drug discovery. Now, what was extraordinary here is not just that they beat all of the algorithms developed by Merck or the international academic community, but nobody on the team had any background in chemistry or biology or life sciences, and they did it in two weeks. How did they do this? They used an extraordinary algorithm called deep learning. So important was this that in fact the success was covered in The New York Times in a front page article a few weeks later. This is Geoffrey Hinton here on the left-hand side. Deep learning is an algorithm inspired by how the human brain works, and as a result it's an algorithm which has no theoretical limitations on what it can do. The more data you give it and the more computation time you give it, the better it gets. The New York Times also showed in this article another extraordinary result of deep learning which I'm going to show you now. It shows that computers can listen and understand. (Video) Richard Rashid: Now, the last step that I want to be able to take in this process is to actually speak to you in Chinese. Now the key thing there is, we've been able to take a large amount of information from many Chinese speakers and produce a text-to-speech system that takes Chinese text and converts it into Chinese language, and then we've taken an hour or so of my own voice and we've used that to modulate the standard text-to-speech system so that it would sound like me. Again, the result's not perfect. There are in fact quite a few errors. (In Chinese) (Applause) There's much work to be done in this area. (In Chinese) (Applause) Jeremy Howard: Well, that was at a machine learning conference in China. It's not often, actually, at academic conferences that you do hear spontaneous applause, although of course sometimes at TEDx conferences, feel free. Everything you saw there was happening with deep learning. (Applause) Thank you. The transcription in English was deep learning. The translation to Chinese and the text in the top right, deep learning, and the construction of the voice was deep learning as well. So deep learning is this extraordinary thing. It's a single algorithm that can seem to do almost anything, and I discovered that a year earlier, it had also learned to see. In this obscure competition from Germany called the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark, deep learning had learned to recognize traffic signs like this one. Not only could it recognize the traffic signs better than any other algorithm, the leaderboard actually showed it was better than people, about twice as good as people. So by 2011, we had the first example of computers that can see better than people. Since that time, a lot has happened. In 2012, Google announced that they had a deep learning algorithm watch YouTube videos and crunched the data on 16,000 computers for a month, and the computer independently learned about concepts such as people and cats just by watching the videos. This is much like the way that humans learn. Humans don't learn by being told what they see, but by learning for themselves what these things are. Also in 2012, Geoffrey Hinton, who we saw earlier, won the very popular ImageNet competition, looking to try to figure out from one and a half million images what they're pictures of. As of 2014, we're now down to a six percent error rate in image recognition. This is better than people, again. So machines really are doing an extraordinarily good job of this, and it is now being used in industry. For example, Google announced last year that they had mapped every single location in France in two hours, and the way they did it was that they fed street view images into a deep learning algorithm to recognize and read street numbers. Imagine how long it would have taken before: dozens of people, many years. This is also happening in China. Baidu is kind of the Chinese Google, I guess, and what you see here in the top left is an example of a picture that I uploaded to Baidu's deep learning system, and underneath you can see that the system has understood what that picture is and found similar images. The similar images actually have similar backgrounds, similar directions of the faces, even some with their tongue out. This is not clearly looking at the text of a web page. All I uploaded was an image. So we now have computers which really understand what they see and can therefore search databases of hundreds of millions of images in real time. So what does it mean now that computers can see? Well, it's not just that computers can see. In fact, deep learning has done more than that. Complex, nuanced sentences like this one are now understandable with deep learning algorithms. As you can see here, this Stanford-based system showing the red dot at the top has figured out that this sentence is expressing negative sentiment. Deep learning now in fact is near human performance at understanding what sentences are about and what it is saying about those things. Also, deep learning has been used to read Chinese, again at about native Chinese speaker level. This algorithm developed out of Switzerland by people, none of whom speak or understand any Chinese. As I say, using deep learning is about the best system in the world for this, even compared to native human understanding. This is a system that we put together at my company which shows putting all this stuff together. These are pictures which have no text attached, and as I'm typing in here sentences, in real time it's understanding these pictures and figuring out what they're about and finding pictures that are similar to the text that I'm writing. So you can see, it's actually understanding my sentences and actually understanding these pictures. I know that you've seen something like this on Google, where you can type in things and it will show you pictures, but actually what it's doing is it's searching the webpage for the text. This is very different from actually understanding the images. This is something that computers have only been able to do for the first time in the last few months. So we can see now that computers can not only see but they can also read, and, of course, we've shown that they can understand what they hear. Perhaps not surprising now that I'm going to tell you they can write. Here is some text that I generated using a deep learning algorithm yesterday. And here is some text that an algorithm out of Stanford generated. Each of these sentences was generated by a deep learning algorithm to describe each of those pictures. This algorithm before has never seen a man in a black shirt playing a guitar. It's seen a man before, it's seen black before, it's seen a guitar before, but it has independently generated this novel description of this picture. We're still not quite at human performance here, but we're close. In tests, humans prefer the computer-generated caption one out of four times. Now this system is now only two weeks old, so probably within the next year, the computer algorithm will be well past human performance at the rate things are going. So computers can also write. So we put all this together and it leads to very exciting opportunities. For example, in medicine, a team in Boston announced that they had discovered dozens of new clinically relevant features of tumors which help doctors make a prognosis of a cancer. Very similarly, in Stanford, a group there announced that, looking at tissues under magnification, they've developed a machine learning-based system which in fact is better than human pathologists at predicting survival rates for cancer sufferers. In both of these cases, not only were the predictions more accurate, but they generated new insightful science. In the radiology case, they were new clinical indicators that humans can understand. In this pathology case, the computer system actually discovered that the cells around the cancer are as important as the cancer cells themselves in making a diagnosis. This is the opposite of what pathologists had been taught for decades. In each of those two cases, they were systems developed by a combination of medical experts and machine learning experts, but as of last year, we're now beyond that too. This is an example of identifying cancerous areas of human tissue under a microscope. The system being shown here can identify those areas more accurately, or about as accurately, as human pathologists, but was built entirely with deep learning using no medical expertise by people who have no background in the field. Similarly, here, this neuron segmentation. We can now segment neurons about as accurately as humans can, but this system was developed with deep learning using people with no previous background in medicine. So myself, as somebody with no previous background in medicine, I seem to be entirely well qualified to start a new medical company, which I did. I was kind of terrified of doing it, but the theory seemed to suggest that it ought to be possible to do very useful medicine using just these data analytic techniques. And thankfully, the feedback has been fantastic, not just from the media but from the medical community, who have been very supportive. The theory is that we can take the middle part of the medical process and turn that into data analysis as much as possible, leaving doctors to do what they're best at. I want to give you an example. It now takes us about 15 minutes to generate a new medical diagnostic test and I'll show you that in real time now, but I've compressed it down to three minutes by cutting some pieces out. Rather than showing you creating a medical diagnostic test, I'm going to show you a diagnostic test of car images, because that's something we can all understand. So here we're starting with about 1.5 million car images, and I want to create something that can split them into the angle of the photo that's being taken. So these images are entirely unlabeled, so I have to start from scratch. With our deep learning algorithm, it can automatically identify areas of structure in these images. So the nice thing is that the human and the computer can now work together. So the human, as you can see here, is telling the computer about areas of interest which it wants the computer then to try and use to improve its algorithm. Now, these deep learning systems actually are in 16,000-dimensional space, so you can see here the computer rotating this through that space, trying to find new areas of structure. And when it does so successfully, the human who is driving it can then point out the areas that are interesting. So here, the computer has successfully found areas, for example, angles. So as we go through this process, we're gradually telling the computer more and more about the kinds of structures we're looking for. You can imagine in a diagnostic test this would be a pathologist identifying areas of pathosis, for example, or a radiologist indicating potentially troublesome nodules. And sometimes it can be difficult for the algorithm. In this case, it got kind of confused. The fronts and the backs of the cars are all mixed up. So here we have to be a bit more careful, manually selecting these fronts as opposed to the backs, then telling the computer that this is a type of group that we're interested in. So we do that for a while, we skip over a little bit, and then we train the machine learning algorithm based on these couple of hundred things, and we hope that it's gotten a lot better. You can see, it's now started to fade some of these pictures out, showing us that it already is recognizing how to understand some of these itself. We can then use this concept of similar images, and using similar images, you can now see, the computer at this point is able to entirely find just the fronts of cars. So at this point, the human can tell the computer, okay, yes, you've done a good job of that. Sometimes, of course, even at this point it's still difficult to separate out groups. In this case, even after we let the computer try to rotate this for a while, we still find that the left sides and the right sides pictures are all mixed up together. So we can again give the computer some hints, and we say, okay, try and find a projection that separates out the left sides and the right sides as much as possible using this deep learning algorithm. And giving it that hint — ah, okay, it's been successful. It's managed to find a way of thinking about these objects that's separated out these together. So you get the idea here. This is a case not where the human is being replaced by a computer, but where they're working together. What we're doing here is we're replacing something that used to take a team of five or six people about seven years and replacing it with something that takes 15 minutes for one person acting alone. So this process takes about four or five iterations. You can see we now have 62 percent of our 1.5 million images classified correctly. And at this point, we can start to quite quickly grab whole big sections, check through them to make sure that there's no mistakes. Where there are mistakes, we can let the computer know about them. And using this kind of process for each of the different groups, we are now up to an 80 percent success rate in classifying the 1.5 million images. And at this point, it's just a case of finding the small number that aren't classified correctly, and trying to understand why. And using that approach, by 15 minutes we get to 97 percent classification rates. So this kind of technique could allow us to fix a major problem, which is that there's a lack of medical expertise in the world. The World Economic Forum says that there's between a 10x and a 20x shortage of physicians in the developing world, and it would take about 300 years to train enough people to fix that problem. So imagine if we can help enhance their efficiency using these deep learning approaches? So I'm very excited about the opportunities. I'm also concerned about the problems. The problem here is that every area in blue on this map is somewhere where services are over 80 percent of employment. What are services? These are services. These are also the exact things that computers have just learned how to do. So 80 percent of the world's employment in the developed world is stuff that computers have just learned how to do. What does that mean? Well, it'll be fine. They'll be replaced by other jobs. For example, there will be more jobs for data scientists. Well, not really. It doesn't take data scientists very long to build these things. For example, these four algorithms were all built by the same guy. So if you think, oh, it's all happened before, we've seen the results in the past of when new things come along and they get replaced by new jobs, what are these new jobs going to be? It's very hard for us to estimate this, because human performance grows at this gradual rate, but we now have a system, deep learning, that we know actually grows in capability exponentially. And we're here. So currently, we see the things around us and we say, "Oh, computers are still pretty dumb." Right? But in five years' time, computers will be off this chart. So we need to be starting to think about this capability right now. We have seen this once before, of course. In the Industrial Revolution, we saw a step change in capability thanks to engines. The thing is, though, that after a while, things flattened out. There was social disruption, but once engines were used to generate power in all the situations, things really settled down. The Machine Learning Revolution is going to be very different from the Industrial Revolution, because the Machine Learning Revolution, it never settles down. The better computers get at intellectual activities, the more they can build better computers to be better at intellectual capabilities, so this is going to be a kind of change that the world has actually never experienced before, so your previous understanding of what's possible is different. This is already impacting us. In the last 25 years, as capital productivity has increased, labor productivity has been flat, in fact even a little bit down. So I want us to start having this discussion now. I know that when I often tell people about this situation, people can be quite dismissive. Well, computers can't really think, they don't emote, they don't understand poetry, we don't really understand how they work. So what? Computers right now can do the things that humans spend most of their time being paid to do, so now's the time to start thinking about how we're going to adjust our social structures and economic structures to be aware of this new reality. Thank you. (Applause) |
The power of believing that you can improve | {0: "Carol Dweck is a pioneering researcher in the field of motivation, why people succeed (or don't) and how to foster success."} | TEDxNorrkoping | The power of yet. I heard about a high school in Chicago where students had to pass a certain number of courses to graduate, and if they didn't pass a course, they got the grade "Not Yet." And I thought that was fantastic, because if you get a failing grade, you think, I'm nothing, I'm nowhere. But if you get the grade "Not Yet", you understand that you're on a learning curve. It gives you a path into the future. "Not Yet" also gave me insight into a critical event early in my career, a real turning point. I wanted to see how children coped with challenge and difficulty, so I gave 10-year-olds problems that were slightly too hard for them. Some of them reacted in a shockingly positive way. They said things like, "I love a challenge," or, "You know, I was hoping this would be informative." They understood that their abilities could be developed. They had what I call a growth mindset. But other students felt it was tragic, catastrophic. From their more fixed mindset perspective, their intelligence had been up for judgment, and they failed. Instead of luxuriating in the power of yet, they were gripped in the tyranny of now. So what do they do next? I'll tell you what they do next. In one study, they told us they would probably cheat the next time instead of studying more if they failed a test. In another study, after a failure, they looked for someone who did worse than they did so they could feel really good about themselves. And in study after study, they have run from difficulty. Scientists measured the electrical activity from the brain as students confronted an error. On the left, you see the fixed-mindset students. There's hardly any activity. They run from the error. They don't engage with it. But on the right, you have the students with the growth mindset, the idea that abilities can be developed. They engage deeply. Their brain is on fire with yet. They engage deeply. They process the error. They learn from it and they correct it. How are we raising our children? Are we raising them for now instead of yet? Are we raising kids who are obsessed with getting As? Are we raising kids who don't know how to dream big dreams? Their biggest goal is getting the next A, or the next test score? And are they carrying this need for constant validation with them into their future lives? Maybe, because employers are coming to me and saying, "We have already raised a generation of young workers who can't get through the day without an award." So what can we do? How can we build that bridge to yet? Here are some things we can do. First of all, we can praise wisely, not praising intelligence or talent. That has failed. Don't do that anymore. But praising the process that kids engage in, their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement. This process praise creates kids who are hardy and resilient. There are other ways to reward yet. We recently teamed up with game scientists from the University of Washington to create a new online math game that rewarded yet. In this game, students were rewarded for effort, strategy and progress. The usual math game rewards you for getting answers right, right now, but this game rewarded process. And we got more effort, more strategies, more engagement over longer periods of time, and more perseverance when they hit really, really hard problems. Just the words "yet" or "not yet," we're finding, give kids greater confidence, give them a path into the future that creates greater persistence. And we can actually change students' mindsets. In one study, we taught them that every time they push out of their comfort zone to learn something new and difficult, the neurons in their brain can form new, stronger connections, and over time, they can get smarter. Look what happened: In this study, students who were not taught this growth mindset continued to show declining grades over this difficult school transition, but those who were taught this lesson showed a sharp rebound in their grades. We have shown this now, this kind of improvement, with thousands and thousands of kids, especially struggling students. So let's talk about equality. In our country, there are groups of students who chronically underperform, for example, children in inner cities, or children on Native American reservations. And they've done so poorly for so long that many people think it's inevitable. But when educators create growth mindset classrooms steeped in yet, equality happens. And here are just a few examples. In one year, a kindergarten class in Harlem, New York scored in the 95th percentile on the national achievement test. Many of those kids could not hold a pencil when they arrived at school. In one year, fourth-grade students in the South Bronx, way behind, became the number one fourth-grade class in the state of New York on the state math test. In a year, to a year and a half, Native American students in a school on a reservation went from the bottom of their district to the top, and that district included affluent sections of Seattle. So the Native kids outdid the Microsoft kids. This happened because the meaning of effort and difficulty were transformed. Before, effort and difficulty made them feel dumb, made them feel like giving up, but now, effort and difficulty, that's when their neurons are making new connections, stronger connections. That's when they're getting smarter. I received a letter recently from a 13-year-old boy. He said, "Dear Professor Dweck, I appreciate that your writing is based on solid scientific research, and that's why I decided to put it into practice. I put more effort into my schoolwork, into my relationship with my family, and into my relationship with kids at school, and I experienced great improvement in all of those areas. I now realize I've wasted most of my life." Let's not waste any more lives, because once we know that abilities are capable of such growth, it becomes a basic human right for children, all children, to live in places that create that growth, to live in places filled with "yet". Thank you. (Applause) |
Got a smartphone? Start broadcasting | {0: 'Journalist and photographer Bruno Torturra is the face of Media Ninja, a Brazilian digital collective making headlines for its ability to cover big news as it happens.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | Has anyone among you ever been exposed to tear gas? Tear gas? Anyone? I'm sorry to hear that, so you might know that it's a very toxic substance, but you might not know that it's a very simple molecule with an unpronouncable name: it's called chlorobenzalmalononitrile. I made it. It's decades old, but it's becoming very trendy among police forces around the planet lately, it seems, and according to my experience as a non-voluntary breather of it, tear gas has two main but quite opposite effects. One, it can really burn your eyes, and two, it can also help you to open them. Tear gas definitely helped to open mine to something that I want to share with you this afternoon: that livestreaming the power of independent broadcasts through the web can be a game-changer in journalism, in activism, and as I see it, in the political discourse as well. That idea started to dawn on me in early 2011 when I was covering a protest in São Paulo. It was the marijuana march, a gathering of people asking for the legalization of cannabis. When that group started to move, the riot police came from the back with rubber bullets, bombs, and then the gas. But to make a long story short, I had entered that protest as the editor-in-chief of a well-established printed magazine where I'd worked for 11 years, and thanks to this unsolicited effects of tear gas, I left it as a journalist that was now committed to new ways of sharing the raw experience of what it's like to be there, actually. So in the following week, I was back in the streets, but that time, I wasn't a member of any media outlet anymore. I was there as an independent livestreamer, and all I had with me was basically borrowed equipment. I had a very simple camera and a backpack with 3G modems. And I had this weblink that could be shared through social media, could be put in any website, and that time, the protest went along fine. There was no violence. There was no action scenes. But there was something really exciting, because I could see at a distance the TV channels covering it, and they had these big vans and the teams and the cameras, and I was basically doing the same thing and all I had was a backpack. And that was really exciting to a journalist, but the most interesting part was when I got back home, actually, because I learned that I had been watched by more than 90,000 people, and I got hundreds of emails and messages of people asking me, basically, how did I do it, how it was possible to do such a thing. And I learned something else, that that was actually the first time that somebody had ever done a livestreaming in a street protest in the country. And that really shocked me, because I was no geek, I was no technology guy, and all the equipment needed was already there, was easily available. And I realized that we had a frontier here, a very important one, that it was just a matter of changing the perspective, and the web could be actually used, already used, as a colossal and uncontrollable and highly anarchical TV channel, TV network, and anyone with very basic skills and very basic equipment, even someone like me who had this little stuttering issue, so if it happens, bear with me please, even someone like me could become a broadcaster. And that sounded revolutionary in my mind. So for the next couple of years, I started to experiment with livestreaming in different ways, not only in the streets but mostly in studios and in homes, until the beginning of 2013, last year, when I became the cofounder of a group called Mídia NINJA. NINJA is an acronym that stands for Narrativas Independentes Jornalismo e Ação, or in English, independent narratives, journalism, and action. It was a media group that had little media plan. We didn't have any financial structure. We were not planning to make money out of this, which was wise, because you shouldn't try to make money out of journalism now. But we had a very solid and clear conviction, that we knew that the hyperconnected environment of social media could maybe allow us to consolidate a network of experimental journalists throughout the country. So we launched a Facebook page first, and then a manifesto, and started to cover the streets in a very simple way. But then something happened, something that wasn't predicted, that no one could have anticipated. Street protests started to erupt in São Paulo. They began as very local and specific. They were against the bus fare hike that had just happened in the city. This is a bus. It's written there, "Theft." But those kind of manifestations started to grow, and they kept happening. So the police violence against them started to grow as well. But there was another conflict, the one I believe that's more important here to make my point that it was a narrative conflict. There was this mainstream media version of the facts that anyone who was on the streets could easily challenge if they presented their own vision of what was actually happening there. And it was this clash of visions, this clash of narratives, that I think turned those protests into a long period in the country of political reckoning where hundreds of thousands of people, probably more than a million people took to the streets in the whole country. But it wasn't about the bus fare hike anymore. It was about everything. The people's demands, their expectations, the reasons why they were on the streets could be as diverse as they could be contradictory in many cases. If you could read it, you would understand me. But it was in this environment of political catharsis that the country was going through that it had to do with politics, indeed, but it had to do also with a new way of organizing, through a new way of communicating. It was in that environment that Mídia NINJA emerged from almost anonymity to become a national phenomenon, because we did have the right equipment. We are not using big cameras. We are using basically this. We are using smartphones. And that, actually, allowed us to become invisible in the middle of the protests, but it allowed us to do something else: to show what it was like to be in the protests, to present to people at home a subjective perspective. But there was something that is more important, I think, than the equipment. It was our mindset, because we are not behaving as a media outlet. We are not competing for news. We are trying to encourage people, to invite people, and to actually teach people how to do this, how they also could become broadcasters. And that was crucial to turn Mídia NINJA from a small group of people, and in a matter of weeks, we multiplied and we grew exponentially throughout the country. So in a matter of a week or two, as the protests kept happening, we were hundreds of young people connected in this network throughout the country. We were covering more than 50 cities at the same time. That's something that no TV channel could ever do. That was responsible for turning us suddenly, actually, into kind of the mainstream media of social media. So we had a couple of thousands of followers on our Facebook page, and soon we had a quarter of a million followers. Our posts and our videos were being seen by more than 11 million timelines a week. It was way more than any newspaper or any magazine could ever do. And that turned Mídia NINJA into something else, more than a media outlet, than a media project. It became almost like a public service to the citizen, to the protester, to the activist, because they had a very simple and efficient and peaceful tool to confront both police and media authority. Many of our images started to be used in regular TV channels. Our livestreams started to be broadcast even in regular televisions when things got really rough. Some our images were responsible to take some people out of jail, people who were being arrested unfairly under false accusations, and we could prove them innocent. And that also turned Mídia NINJA very soon to be seen as almost an enemy of cops, unfortunately, and we started to be severely beaten, and eventually arrested on the streets. It happened in many cases. But that was also useful, because we were still at the web, so that helped to trigger an important debate in the country on the role of the media itself and the state of the freedom of the press in the country. So Mídia NINJA now evolved and finally consolidated itself in what we hoped it would become: a national network of hundreds of young people, self-organizing themselves locally to cover social, human rights issues, and expressing themselves not only politically but journalistically. What I started to do in the beginning of this year, as Mídia NINJA is already a self-organizing network, I'm dedicating myself to another project. It's called Fluxo, which is Portuguese for "stream." It's a journalism studio in São Paulo downtown, where I used livestream to experiment with what I call post-television formats. But I'm also trying to come up with ways to finance independent journalism through a direct relationship with an audience, with an active audience, because now I really want to try to make a living out of my tear gas resolution back then. But there's something more significant here, something that I believe is more important and more crucial than my personal example. I said that livestream could turn the web into a colossal TV network, but I believe it does something else, because after watching people using it, not only to cover things but to express, to organize themselves politically, I believe livestream can turn cyberspace into a global political arena where everyone might have a voice, a proper voice, because livestream takes the monopoly of the broadcast political discourse, of the verbal aspect of the political dialogue out of the mouths of just politicians and political pundits alone, and it empowers the citizen through this direct and non-mediated power of exchanging experiences and dialogue, empowers them to question and to influence authorities in ways in which we are about to see. And I believe it does something else that might be even more important, that the simplicity of the technology can merge objectivity and subjectivity in a very political way, as I see it, because it really helps the audience, the citizen, to see the world through somebody else's eye, so it helps the citizen to put him- or herself in other people's place. And that idea, I think, should be the intention, should be the goal of any good journalism, any good activism, but most of all, any good politics. Thank you very much. It was an honor. (Applause) |
Trash cart superheroes | {0: "Mundano's bold, colorful street art isn't just eye candy. His projects call attention to social, environmental and political issues, while raising chuckles from passersby."} | TEDGlobal 2014 | Our world has many superheroes. But they have the worst of all superpowers: invisibility. For example, the catadores, workers who collect recyclable materials for a living. Catadores emerged from social inequality, unemployment, and the abundance of solid waste from the deficiency of the waste collection system. Catadores provide a heavy, honest and essential work that benefits the entire population. But they are not acknowledged for it. Here in Brazil, they collect 90 percent of all the waste that's actually recycled. Most of the catadores work independently, picking waste from the streets and selling to junk yards at very low prices. They may collect over 300 kilos in their bags, shopping carts, bicycles and carroças. Carroças are carts built from wood or metal and found in several streets in Brazil, much like graffiti and street art. And this is how I first met these marginalized superheroes. I am a graffiti artist and activist and my art is social, environmental and political in nature. In 2007, I took my work beyond walls and onto the carroças, as a new urban support for my message. But at this time, giving voice to the catadores. By adding art and humor to the cause, it became more appealing, which helped call attention to the catadores and improve their self-esteem. And also, they are famous now on the streets, on mass media and social. So, the thing is, I plunged into this universe and have not stopped working since. I have painted over 200 carroças in many cities and have been invited to do exhibitions and trips worldwide. And then I realized that catadores, in their invisibility, are not exclusive to Brazil. I met them in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, South Africa, Turkey and even in developed countries such as the United States and Japan. And this was when I realized that I needed to have more people join the cause because it's a big challenge. And then, I created a collaborative movement called Pimp My Carroça — (Laughter) — which is a large crowdfunded event. Thank you. (Applause). So Pimp My Carroça is a large crowdfunded event to help catadores and their carroças. Catadores are assisted by well-being professionals and healthcare, like physicians, dentists, podiatrists, hair stylists, massage therapists and much more. But also, they also receive safety shirts, gloves, raincoats and eyeglasses to see in high-definition the city, while their carroças are renovated by our incredible volunteers. And then they receive safety items, too: reflective tapes, horns and mirrors. Then, finally, painted by a street artist and become part of part of this huge, amazing mobile art exhibition. Pimp My Carroça took to the streets of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba. But to meet the demand in other cities, including outside of Brazil, we have created Pimpx, which is inspired by TEDx, and it's a simplified, do-it-yourself, crowdfunded edition of Pimp My Carroça. So now everybody can join. In two years, over 170 catadores, 800 volunteers and 200 street artists and more than 1,000 donors have been involved in the Pimp My Carroça movement, whose actions have even been used in teaching recycling at a local school. So catadores are leaving invisibility behind and becoming increasingly respected and valued. Because of their pimped carroças, they are able to fight back to prejudice, increase their income and their interaction with society. So now, I'd like to challenge you to start looking at and acknowledging the catadores and other invisible superheroes from your city. Try to see the world as one, without boundaries or frontiers. Believe it or not, there are over 20 million catadores worldwide. So next time you see one, recognize them as a vital part of our society. Muito obrigado, thank you. (Applause). |
Go ahead, make up new words! | {0: 'As the co-founder of Reverb Technologies, the maker of the online dictionary Wordnik, Erin McKean is reshaping how we interact with language itself.'} | TEDYouth 2014 | I'm a lexicographer. I make dictionaries. And my job as a lexicographer is to try to put all the words possible into the dictionary. My job is not to decide what a word is; that is your job. Everybody who speaks English decides together what's a word and what's not a word. Every language is just a group of people who agree to understand each other. Now, sometimes when people are trying to decide whether a word is good or bad, they don't really have a good reason. So they say something like, "Because grammar!" (Laughter) I don't actually really care about grammar too much — don't tell anybody. But the word "grammar," actually, there are two kinds of grammar. There's the kind of grammar that lives inside your brain, and if you're a native speaker of a language or a good speaker of a language, it's the unconscious rules that you follow when you speak that language. And this is what you learn when you learn a language as a child. And here's an example: This is a wug, right? It's a wug. Now there is another one. There are two of these. There are two ... Audience: Wugs. Erin McKean: Exactly! You know how to make the plural of wug. That rule lives in your brain. You never had to be taught this rule, you just understand it. This is an experiment that was invented by a professor at [Boston University] named Jean Berko Gleason back in 1958. So we've been talking about this for a long time. Now, these kinds of natural rules that exist in your brain, they're not like traffic laws, they're more like laws of nature. And nobody has to remind you to obey a law of nature, right? When you leave the house in the morning, your mom doesn't say, "Hey, honey, I think it's going to be cold, take a hoodie, don't forget to obey the law of gravity." Nobody says this. Now, there are other rules that are more about manners than they are about nature. So you can think of a word as like a hat. Once you know how hats work, nobody has to tell you, "Don't wear hats on your feet." What they have to tell you is, "Can you wear hats inside? Who gets to wear a hat? What are the kinds of hats you get to wear?" Those are more of the second kind of grammar, which linguists often call usage, as opposed to grammar. Now, sometimes people use this kind of rules-based grammar to discourage people from making up words. And I think that is, well, stupid. So, for example, people are always telling you, "Be creative, make new music, do art, invent things, science and technology." But when it comes to words, they're like, "Don't! No. Creativity stops right here, whippersnappers. Give it a rest." (Laughter) But that makes no sense to me. Words are great. We should have more of them. I want you to make as many new words as possible. And I'm going to tell you six ways that you can use to make new words in English. The first way is the simplest way. Basically, steal them from other languages. ["Go rob other people"] (Laughter) Linguists call this borrowing, but we never give the words back , so I'm just going to be honest and call it stealing. We usually take words for things that we like, like delicious food. We took "kumquat" from Chinese, we took "caramel" from French. We also take words for cool things like "ninja," right? We took that from Japanese, which is kind of a cool trick because ninjas are hard to steal from. (Laughter) So another way that you can make words in English is by squishing two other English words together. This is called compounding. Words in English are like Lego: If you use enough force, you can put any two of them together. (Laughter) We do this all the time in English: Words like "heartbroken," "bookworm," "sandcastle" all are compounds. So go ahead and make words like "duckface," just don't make duckface. (Laughter) Another way that you can make words in English is kind of like compounding, but instead you use so much force when you squish the words together that some parts fall off. So these are blend words, like "brunch" is a blend of "breakfast" and "lunch." "Motel" is a blend of "motor" and "hotel." Who here knew that "motel" was a blend word? Yeah, that word is so old in English that lots of people don't know that there are parts missing. "Edutainment" is a blend of "education" and "entertainment." And of course, "electrocute" is a blend of "electric" and "execute." (Laughter) You can also make words by changing how they operate. This is called functional shift. You take a word that acts as one part of speech, and you change it into another part of speech. Okay, who here knew that "friend" hasn't always been a verb? "Friend" used to be noun and then we verbed it. Almost any word in English can be verbed. You can also take adjectives and make them into nouns. "Commercial" used to be an adjective and now it's a noun. And of course, you can "green" things. Another way to make words in English is back-formation. You can take a word and you can kind of squish it down a little bit. So for example, in English we had the word "editor" before we had the word "edit." "Edit" was formed from "editor." Sometimes these back-formations sound a little silly: Bulldozers bulldoze, butlers butle and burglers burgle. (Laughter) Another way to make words in English is to take the first letters of something and squish them together. So National Aeronautics and Space Administration becomes NASA. And of course you can do this with anything, OMG! So it doesn't matter how silly the words are. They can be really good words of English. "Absquatulate" is a perfectly good word of English. "Mugwump" is a perfectly good word of English. So the words don't have have to sound normal, they can sound really silly. Why should you make words? You should make words because every word is a chance to express your idea and get your meaning across. And new words grab people's attention. They get people to focus on what you're saying and that gives you a better chance to get your meaning across. A lot of people on this stage today have said, "In the future, you can do this, you can help with this, you can help us explore, you can help us invent." You can make a new word right now. English has no age limit. Go ahead, start making words today, send them to me, and I will put them in my online dictionary, Wordnik. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
See invisible motion, hear silent sounds | {0: 'Computer scientist Michael Rubinstein and his team have developed a "motion microscope" that can show video footage of barely perceivable movements, like breaths and heartbeats.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | So over the past few centuries, microscopes have revolutionized our world. They revealed to us a tiny world of objects, life and structures that are too small for us to see with our naked eyes. They are a tremendous contribution to science and technology. Today I'd like to introduce you to a new type of microscope, a microscope for changes. It doesn't use optics like a regular microscope to make small objects bigger, but instead it uses a video camera and image processing to reveal to us the tiniest motions and color changes in objects and people, changes that are impossible for us to see with our naked eyes. And it lets us look at our world in a completely new way. So what do I mean by color changes? Our skin, for example, changes its color very slightly when the blood flows under it. That change is incredibly subtle, which is why, when you look at other people, when you look at the person sitting next to you, you don't see their skin or their face changing color. When we look at this video of Steve here, it appears to us like a static picture, but once we look at this video through our new, special microscope, suddenly we see a completely different image. What you see here are small changes in the color of Steve's skin, magnified 100 times so that they become visible. We can actually see a human pulse. We can see how fast Steve's heart is beating, but we can also see the actual way that the blood flows in his face. And we can do that not just to visualize the pulse, but also to actually recover our heart rates, and measure our heart rates. And we can do it with regular cameras and without touching the patients. So here you see the pulse and heart rate we extracted from a neonatal baby from a video we took with a regular DSLR camera, and the heart rate measurement we get is as accurate as the one you'd get with a standard monitor in a hospital. And it doesn't even have to be a video we recorded. We can do it essentially with other videos as well. So I just took a short clip from "Batman Begins" here just to show Christian Bale's pulse. (Laughter) And you know, presumably he's wearing makeup, the lighting here is kind of challenging, but still, just from the video, we're able to extract his pulse and show it quite well. So how do we do all that? We basically analyze the changes in the light that are recorded at every pixel in the video over time, and then we crank up those changes. We make them bigger so that we can see them. The tricky part is that those signals, those changes that we're after, are extremely subtle, so we have to be very careful when you try to separate them from noise that always exists in videos. So we use some clever image processing techniques to get a very accurate measurement of the color at each pixel in the video, and then the way the color changes over time, and then we amplify those changes. We make them bigger to create those types of enhanced videos, or magnified videos, that actually show us those changes. But it turns out we can do that not just to show tiny changes in color, but also tiny motions, and that's because the light that gets recorded in our cameras will change not only if the color of the object changes, but also if the object moves. So this is my daughter when she was about two months old. It's a video I recorded about three years ago. And as new parents, we all want to make sure our babies are healthy, that they're breathing, that they're alive, of course. So I too got one of those baby monitors so that I could see my daughter when she was asleep. And this is pretty much what you'll see with a standard baby monitor. You can see the baby's sleeping, but there's not too much information there. There's not too much we can see. Wouldn't it be better, or more informative, or more useful, if instead we could look at the view like this. So here I took the motions and I magnified them 30 times, and then I could clearly see that my daughter was indeed alive and breathing. (Laughter) Here is a side-by-side comparison. So again, in the source video, in the original video, there's not too much we can see, but once we magnify the motions, the breathing becomes much more visible. And it turns out, there's a lot of phenomena we can reveal and magnify with our new motion microscope. We can see how our veins and arteries are pulsing in our bodies. We can see that our eyes are constantly moving in this wobbly motion. And that's actually my eye, and again this video was taken right after my daughter was born, so you can see I wasn't getting too much sleep. (Laughter) Even when a person is sitting still, there's a lot of information we can extract about their breathing patterns, small facial expressions. Maybe we could use those motions to tell us something about our thoughts or our emotions. We can also magnify small mechanical movements, like vibrations in engines, that can help engineers detect and diagnose machinery problems, or see how our buildings and structures sway in the wind and react to forces. Those are all things that our society knows how to measure in various ways, but measuring those motions is one thing, and actually seeing those motions as they happen is a whole different thing. And ever since we discovered this new technology, we made our code available online so that others could use and experiment with it. It's very simple to use. It can work on your own videos. Our collaborators at Quanta Research even created this nice website where you can upload your videos and process them online, so even if you don't have any experience in computer science or programming, you can still very easily experiment with this new microscope. And I'd like to show you just a couple of examples of what others have done with it. So this video was made by a YouTube user called Tamez85. I don't know who that user is, but he, or she, used our code to magnify small belly movements during pregnancy. It's kind of creepy. (Laughter) People have used it to magnify pulsing veins in their hands. And you know it's not real science unless you use guinea pigs, and apparently this guinea pig is called Tiffany, and this YouTube user claims it is the first rodent on Earth that was motion-magnified. You can also do some art with it. So this video was sent to me by a design student at Yale. She wanted to see if there's any difference in the way her classmates move. She made them all stand still, and then magnified their motions. It's like seeing still pictures come to life. And the nice thing with all those examples is that we had nothing to do with them. We just provided this new tool, a new way to look at the world, and then people find other interesting, new and creative ways of using it. But we didn't stop there. This tool not only allows us to look at the world in a new way, it also redefines what we can do and pushes the limits of what we can do with our cameras. So as scientists, we started wondering, what other types of physical phenomena produce tiny motions that we could now use our cameras to measure? And one such phenomenon that we focused on recently is sound. Sound, as we all know, is basically changes in air pressure that travel through the air. Those pressure waves hit objects and they create small vibrations in them, which is how we hear and how we record sound. But it turns out that sound also produces visual motions. Those are motions that are not visible to us but are visible to a camera with the right processing. So here are two examples. This is me demonstrating my great singing skills. (Singing) (Laughter) And I took a high-speed video of my throat while I was humming. Again, if you stare at that video, there's not too much you'll be able to see, but once we magnify the motions 100 times, we can see all the motions and ripples in the neck that are involved in producing the sound. That signal is there in that video. We also know that singers can break a wine glass if they hit the correct note. So here, we're going to play a note that's in the resonance frequency of that glass through a loudspeaker that's next to it. Once we play that note and magnify the motions 250 times, we can very clearly see how the glass vibrates and resonates in response to the sound. It's not something you're used to seeing every day. But this made us think. It gave us this crazy idea. Can we actually invert this process and recover sound from video by analyzing the tiny vibrations that sound waves create in objects, and essentially convert those back into the sounds that produced them. In this way, we can turn everyday objects into microphones. So that's exactly what we did. So here's an empty bag of chips that was lying on a table, and we're going to turn that bag of chips into a microphone by filming it with a video camera and analyzing the tiny motions that sound waves create in it. So here's the sound that we played in the room. (Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb") And this is a high-speed video we recorded of that bag of chips. Again it's playing. There's no chance you'll be able to see anything going on in that video just by looking at it, but here's the sound we were able to recover just by analyzing the tiny motions in that video. (Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb") I call it — Thank you. (Applause) I call it the visual microphone. We actually extract audio signals from video signals. And just to give you a sense of the scale of the motions here, a pretty loud sound will cause that bag of chips to move less than a micrometer. That's one thousandth of a millimeter. That's how tiny the motions are that we are now able to pull out just by observing how light bounces off objects and gets recorded by our cameras. We can recover sounds from other objects, like plants. (Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb") And we can recover speech as well. So here's a person speaking in a room. Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. Michael Rubinstein: And here's that speech again recovered just from this video of that same bag of chips. Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. MR: We used "Mary Had a Little Lamb" because those are said to be the first words that Thomas Edison spoke into his phonograph in 1877. It was one of the first sound recording devices in history. It basically directed the sounds onto a diaphragm that vibrated a needle that essentially engraved the sound on tinfoil that was wrapped around the cylinder. Here's a demonstration of recording and replaying sound with Edison's phonograph. (Video) Voice: Testing, testing, one two three. Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. Testing, testing, one two three. Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. MR: And now, 137 years later, we're able to get sound in pretty much similar quality but by just watching objects vibrate to sound with cameras, and we can even do that when the camera is 15 feet away from the object, behind soundproof glass. So this is the sound that we were able to recover in that case. Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. MR: And of course, surveillance is the first application that comes to mind. (Laughter) But it might actually be useful for other things as well. Maybe in the future, we'll be able to use it, for example, to recover sound across space, because sound can't travel in space, but light can. We've only just begun exploring other possible uses for this new technology. It lets us see physical processes that we know are there but that we've never been able to see with our own eyes until now. This is our team. Everything I showed you today is a result of a collaboration with this great group of people you see here, and I encourage you and welcome you to check out our website, try it out yourself, and join us in exploring this world of tiny motions. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why you should care about whale poo | {0: 'Dedicated to increasing awareness about Northern Indian Ocean blue whales, Asha de Vos is also committed to inspiring the next generation of marine biologists.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | In the 1600s, there were so many right whales in Cape Cod Bay off the east coast of the U.S. that apparently you could walk across their backs from one end of the bay to the other. Today, they number in the hundreds, and they're endangered. Like them, many species of whales saw their numbers drastically reduced by 200 years of whaling, where they were hunted and killed for their whale meat, oil and whale bone. We only have whales in our waters today because of the Save the Whales movement of the '70s. It was instrumental in stopping commercial whaling, and was built on the idea that if we couldn't save whales, what could we save? It was ultimately a test of our political ability to halt environmental destruction. So in the early '80s, there was a ban on commercial whaling that came into force as a result of this campaign. Whales in our waters are still low in numbers, however, because they do face a range of other human-induced threats. Unfortunately, many people still think that whale conservationists like myself do what we do only because these creatures are charismatic and beautiful. This is actually a disservice, because whales are ecosystem engineers. They help maintain the stability and health of the oceans, and even provide services to human society. So let's talk about why saving whales is critical to the resiliency of the oceans. It boils down to two main things: whale poop and rotting carcasses. As whales dive to the depths to feed and come up to the surface to breathe, they actually release these enormous fecal plumes. This whale pump, as it's called, actually brings essential limiting nutrients from the depths to the surface waters where they stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, which forms the base of all marine food chains. So really, having more whales in the oceans pooping is really beneficial to the entire ecosystem. Whales are also known to undertake some of the longest migrations of all mammals. Gray whales off America migrate 16,000 kilometers between productive feeding areas and less productive calving, or birthing, areas and back every year. As they do so, they transport fertilizer in the form of their feces from places that have it to places that need it. So clearly, whales are really important in nutrient cycling, both horizontally and vertically, through the oceans. But what's really cool is that they're also really important after they're dead. Whale carcasses are some of the largest form of detritus to fall from the ocean's surface, and they're called whale fall. As these carcasses sink, they provide a feast to some 400-odd species, including the eel-shaped, slime-producing hagfish. So over the 200 years of whaling, when we were busy killing and removing these carcasses from the oceans, we likely altered the rate and geographic distribution of these whale falls that would descend into deep oceans, and as a result, probably led to a number of extinctions of species that were most specialized and dependent on these carcasses for their survival. Whale carcasses are also known to transport about 190,000 tons of carbon, which is the equivalent of that produced by 80,000 cars per year from the atmosphere to the deep oceans, and the deep oceans are what we call "carbon sinks," because they trap and hold excess carbon from the atmosphere, and therefore help to delay global warming. Sometimes these carcasses also wash up on beaches and provide a meal to a number of predatory species on land. The 200 years of whaling was clearly detrimental and caused a reduction in the populations of whales between 60 to 90 percent. Clearly, the Save the Whales movement was instrumental in preventing commercial whaling from going on, but we need to revise this. We need to address the more modern, pressing problems that these whales face in our waters today. Amongst other things, we need to stop them from getting plowed down by container ships when they're in their feeding areas, and stop them from getting entangled in fishing nets as they float around in the ocean. We also need to learn to contextualize our conservation messages, so people really understand the true ecosystem value of these creatures. So, let's save the whales again, but this time, let's not just do it for their sake. Let's also do it for ours. Thank you. (Applause) |
Happy maps | {0: 'At Yahoo! Labs in Barcelona, Daniele Quercia and his colleagues imagine new ways to use online maps to improve our lives.'} | TED@BCG Berlin | I have a confession to make. As a scientist and engineer, I've focused on efficiency for many years. But efficiency can be a cult, and today I'd like to tell you about a journey that moved me out of the cult and back to a far richer reality. A few years ago, after finishing my Ph.D. in London, I moved to Boston. I lived in Boston and worked in Cambridge. I bought a racing bicycle that summer, and I bicycled every day to work. To find my way, I used my phone. It sent me over Mass. Ave., Massachusetts Avenue, the shortest route from Boston to Cambridge. But after a month that I was cycling every day on the car-packed Mass. Ave., I took a different route one day. I'm not entirely sure why I took a different route that day, a detour. I just remember a feeling of surprise; surprise at finding a street with no cars, as opposed to the nearby Mass. Ave. full of cars; surprise at finding a street draped by leaves and surrounded by trees. But after the feeling of surprise, I felt shame. How could I have been so blind? For an entire month, I was so trapped in my mobile app that a journey to work became one thing only: the shortest path. In this single journey, there was no thought of enjoying the road, no pleasure in connecting with nature, no possibility of looking people in the eyes. And why? Because I was saving a minute out of my commute. Now let me ask you: Am I alone here? How many of you have never used a mapping app for finding directions? Most of you, if not all, have. And don't get me wrong — mapping apps are the greatest game-changer for encouraging people to explore the city. You take your phone out and you know immediately where to go. However, the app also assumes there are only a handful of directions to the destination. It has the power to make those handful of directions the definitive direction to that destination. After that experience, I changed. I changed my research from traditional data-mining to understanding how people experience the city. I used computer science tools to replicate social science experiments at scale, at web scale. I became captivated by the beauty and genius of traditional social science experiments done by Jane Jacobs, Stanley Milgram, Kevin Lynch. The result of that research has been the creation of new maps, maps where you don't only find the shortest path, the blue one, but also the most enjoyable path, the red one. How was that possible? Einstein once said, "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." So with a bit of imagination, we needed to understand which parts of the city people find beautiful. At the University of Cambridge, with colleagues, we thought about this simple experiment. If I were to show you these two urban scenes, and I were to ask you which one is more beautiful, which one would you say? Don't be shy. Who says A? Who says B? Brilliant. Based on that idea, we built a crowdsourcing platform, a web game. Players are shown pairs of urban scenes, and they're asked to choose which one is more beautiful, quiet and happy. Based on thousands of user votes, then we are able to see where consensus emerges. We are able to see which are the urban scenes that make people happy. After that work, I joined Yahoo Labs, and I teamed up with Luca and Rossano, and together, we aggregated those winning locations in London to build a new map of the city, a cartography weighted for human emotions. On this cartography, you're not only able to see and connect from point A to point B the shortest segments, but you're also able to see the happy segment, the beautiful path, the quiet path. In tests, participants found the happy, the beautiful, the quiet path far more enjoyable than the shortest one, and that just by adding a few minutes to travel time. Participants also love to attach memories to places. Shared memories — that's where the old BBC building was; and personal memories — that's where I gave my first kiss. They also recalled how some paths smelled and sounded. So what if we had a mapping tool that would return the most enjoyable routes based not only on aesthetics but also based on smell, sound, and memories? That's where our research is going right now. More generally, my research, what it tries to do is avoid the danger of the single path, to avoid robbing people of fully experiencing the city in which they live. Walk the path through the park, not through the car park, and you have an entirely different path. Walk the path full of people you love and not full of cars, and you have an entirely different path. It's that simple. I would like to end with this thought: do you remember "The Truman Show?" It's a media satire in which a real person doesn't know he's living in a fabricated world. Perhaps we live in a world fabricated for efficiency. Look at some of your daily habits, and as Truman did in the movie, escape the fabricated world. Why? Well, if you think that adventure is dangerous, try routine. It's deadly. Thank you. (Applause) |
For more tolerance, we need more ... tourism? | {0: 'Aziz Abu Sarah helps people break down cultural and historical barriers through tourism.'} | TED2014 | I'm a tourism entrepreneur and a peacebuilder, but this is not how I started. When I was seven years old, I remember watching television and seeing people throwing rocks, and thinking, this must be a fun thing to do. So I got out to the street and threw rocks, not realizing I was supposed to throw rocks at Israeli cars. Instead, I ended up stoning my neighbors' cars. (Laughter) They were not enthusiastic about my patriotism. This is my picture with my brother. This is me, the little one, and I know what you're thinking: "You used to look cute, what the heck happened to you?" But my brother, who is older than me, was arrested when he was 18, taken to prison on charges of throwing stones. He was beaten up when he refused to confess that he threw stones, and as a result, had internal injuries that caused his death soon after he was released from prison. I was angry, I was bitter, and all I wanted was revenge. But that changed when I was 18. I decided that I needed Hebrew to get a job, and going to study Hebrew in that classroom was the first time I ever met Jews who were not soldiers. And we connected over really small things, like the fact that I love country music, which is really strange for Palestinians. But it was then that I realized also that we have a wall of anger, of hatred and of ignorance that separates us. I decided that it doesn't matter what happens to me. What really matters is how I deal with it. And therefore, I decided to dedicate my life to bringing down the walls that separate people. I do so through many ways. Tourism is one of them, but also media and education, and you might be wondering, really, can tourism change things? Can it bring down walls? Yes. Tourism is the best sustainable way to bring down those walls and to create a sustainable way of connecting with each other and creating friendships. In 2009, I cofounded Mejdi Tours, a social enterprise that aims to connect people, with two Jewish friends, by the way, and what we'll do, the model we did, for example, in Jerusalem, we would have two tour guides, one Israeli and one Palestinian, guiding the trips together, telling history and narrative and archaeology and conflict from totally different perspectives. I remember running a trip together with a friend named Kobi — Jewish congregation from Chicago, the trip was in Jerusalem — and we took them to a refugee camp, a Palestinian refugee camp, and there we had this amazing food. By the way, this is my mother. She's cool. And that's the Palestinian food called maqluba. It means "upside-down." You cook it with rice and chicken, and you flip it upside-down. It's the best meal ever. And we'll eat together. Then we had a joint band, Israeli and Palestinian musicians, and we did some belly-dancing. If you don't know any, I'll teach you later. But when we left, both sides, they were crying because they did not want to leave. Three years later, those relationships still exist. Imagine with me if the one billion people who travel internationally every year travel like this, not being taken in the bus from one side to another, from one hotel to another, taking pictures from the windows of their buses of people and cultures, but actually connecting with people. You know, I remember having a Muslim group from the U.K. going to the house of an Orthodox Jewish family, and having their first Friday night dinners, that Sabbath dinner, and eating together hamin, which is a Jewish food, a stew, just having the connection of realizing, after a while, that a hundred years ago, their families came out of the same place in Northern Africa. This is not a photo profile for your Facebook. This is not disaster tourism. This is the future of travel, and I invite you to join me to do that, to change your travel. We're doing it all over the world now, from Ireland to Iran to Turkey, and we see ourselves going everywhere to change the world. Thank you. (Applause) |
A forensic anthropologist who brings closure for the "disappeared" | {0: 'Fredy Peccerelli works with families whose loved ones “disappeared” in the 36-year armed conflict in Guatemala. The executive director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, he helps locate bodies and give back identities to those buried in mass graves.'} | TEDYouth 2014 | Guatemala is recovering from a 36-year armed conflict. A conflict that was fought during the Cold War. It was really just a small leftist insurgency and a devastating response by the state. What we have as a result is 200,000 civilian victims, 160,000 of those killed in the communities: small children, men, women, the elderly even. And then we have about 40,000 others, the missing, the ones we're still looking for today. We call them the Desaparecidos. Now, 83 percent of the victims are Mayan victims, victims that are the descendants of the original inhabitants of Central America. And only about 17 percent are of European descent. But the most important thing here is that the very people who are supposed to defend us, the police, the military, are the ones that committed most of the crimes. Now the families, they want information. They want to know what happened. They want the bodies of their loved ones. But most of all, what they want is they want you, they want everyone to know that their loved ones did nothing wrong. Now, my case was that my father received death threats in 1980. And we left. We left Guatemala and we came here. So I grew up in New York, I grew up in Brooklyn as a matter of fact, and I went to New Utrecht High School and I graduated from Brooklyn College. The only thing was that I really didn't know what was happening in Guatemala. I didn't care for it; it was too painful. But it wasn't till 1995 that I decided to do something about it. So I went back. I went back to Guatemala, to look for the bodies, to understand what happened and to look for part of myself as well. The way we work is that we give people information. We talk to the family members and we let them choose. We let them decide to tell us the stories, to tell us what they saw, to tell us about their loved ones. And even more important, we let them choose to give us a piece of themselves. A piece, an essence, of who they are. And that DNA is what we're going to compare to the DNA that comes from the skeletons. While we're doing that, though, we're looking for the bodies. And these are skeletons by now, most of these crimes happened 32 years ago. When we find the grave, we take out the dirt and eventually clean the body, document it, and exhume it. We literally bring the skeleton out of the ground. Once we have those bodies, though, we take them back to the city, to our lab, and we begin a process of trying to understand mainly two things: One is how people died. So here you see a gunshot wound to the back of the head or a machete wound, for example. The other thing we want to understand is who they are. Whether it's a baby, or an adult. Whether it's a woman or a man. But when we're done with that analysis what we'll do is we'll take a small fragment of the bone and we'll extract DNA from it. We'll take that DNA and then we'll compare it with the DNA of the families, of course. The best way to explain this to you is by showing you two cases. The first is the case of the military diary. Now this is a document that was smuggled out of somewhere in 1999. And what you see there is the state following individuals, people that, like you, wanted to change their country, and they jotted everything down. And one of the things that they wrote down is when they executed them. Inside that yellow rectangle, you see a code, it's a secret code: 300. And then you see a date. The 300 means "executed" and the date means when they were executed. Now that's going to come into play in a second. What we did is we conducted an exhumation in 2003, where we exhumed 220 bodies from 53 graves in a military base. Grave 9, though, matched the family of Sergio Saul Linares. Now Sergio was a professor at the university. He graduted from Iowa State University and went back to Guatemala to change his country. And he was captured on February 23, 1984. And if you can see there, he was executed on March 29, 1984, which was incredible. We had the body, we had the family's information and their DNA, and now we have documents that told us exactly what happened. But most important is about two weeks later, we go another hit, another match from the same grave to Amancio Villatoro. The DNA of that body also matched the DNA of that family. And then we noticed that he was also in the diary. But it was amazing to see that he was also executed on March 29, 1984. So that led us to think, hmm, how many bodies were in the grave? Six. So then we said, how many people were executed on March 29, 1984? That's right, six as well. So we have Juan de Dios, Hugo, Moises and Zoilo. All of them executed on the same date, all captured at different locations and at different moments. All put in that grave. The only thing we needed now was the DNA of those four families So we went and we looked for them and we found them. And we identified those six bodies and gave them back to the families. The other case I want to tell you about is that of a military base called CREOMPAZ. It actually means, "to believe in peace," but the acronym really means Regional Command Center for Peacekeeping Operations. And this is where the Guatemalan military trains peacekeepers from other countries, the ones that serve with the U.N. and go to countries like Haiti and the Congo. Well, we have testimony that said that within this military base, there were bodies, there were graves. So we went in there with a search warrant and about two hours after we went in, we found the first of 84 graves, a total of 533 bodies. Now, if you think about that, peacekeepers being trained on top of bodies. It's very ironic. But the bodies — face down, most of them, hands tied behind their backs, blindfolded, all types of trauma — these were people who were defenseless who were being executed. People that 533 families are looking for. So we're going to focus on Grave 15. Grave 15, what we noticed, was a grave full of women and children, 63 of them. And that immediately made us think, my goodness, where is there a case like this? When I got to Guatemala in 1995, I heard of a case of a massacre that happened on May 14, 1982, where the army came in, killed the men, and took the women and children in helicopters to an unknown location. Well, guess what? The clothing from this grave matched the clothing from the region where these people were taken from, where these women and children were taken from. So we conducted some DNA analysis, and guess what? We identified Martina Rojas and Manuel Chen. Both of them disappeared in that case, and now we could prove it. We have physical evidence that proves that this happened and that those people were taken to this base. Now, Manuel Chen was three years old. His mother went to the river to wash clothes, and she left him with a neighbor. That's when the army came and that's when he was taken away in a helicopter and never seen again until we found him in Grave 15. So now with science, with archaeology, with anthropology, with genetics, what we're doing is, we're giving a voice to the voiceless. But we're doing more than that. We're actually providing evidence for trials, like the genocide trial that happened last year in Guatemala where General Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide and sentenced to 80 years. So I came here to tell you today that this is happening everywhere — it's happening in Mexico right in front of us today — and we can't let it go on anymore. We have to now come together and decide that we're not going to have any more missing. So no more missing, guys. Okay? No more missing. Thank you. (Applause) |
Hopeful lessons from the battle to save rainforests | {0: 'Tasso Azevedo has helped reduce the rate of deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest by 75 percent — and inspired similar efforts around the world.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | When the Portuguese arrived in Latin America about 500 years ago, they obviously found this amazing tropical forest. And among all this biodiversity that they had never seen before, they found one species that caught their attention very quickly. This species, when you cut the bark, you find a very dark red resin that was very good to paint and dye fabric to make clothes. The indigenous people called this species pau brasil, and that's the reason why this land became "land of Brasil," and later on, Brazil. That's the only country in the world that has the name of a tree. So you can imagine that it's very cool to be a forester in Brazil, among other reasons. Forest products are all around us. Apart from all those products, the forest is very important for climate regulation. In Brazil, almost 70 percent of the evaporation that makes rain actually comes from the forest. Just the Amazon pumps to the atmosphere 20 billion tons of water every day. This is more than what the Amazon River, which is the largest river in the world, puts in the sea per day, which is 17 billion tons. If we had to boil water to get the same effect as evapotranspiration, we would need six months of the entire power generation capacity of the world. So it's a hell of a service for all of us. We have in the world about four billion hectares of forests. This is more or less China, U.S., Canada and Brazil all together, in terms of size, to have an idea. Three quarters of that is in the temperate zone, and just one quarter is in the tropics, but this one quarter, one billion hectares, holds most of the biodiversity, and very importantly, 50 percent of the living biomass, the carbon. Now, we used to have six billion hectares of forest — 50 percent more than what we have — 2,000 years ago. We've actually lost two billion hectares in the last 2,000 years. But in the last 100 years, we lost half of that. That was when we shifted from deforestation of temperate forests to deforestation of tropical forests. So think of this: In 100 years, we lost the same amount of forest in the tropics that we lost in 2,000 years in temperate forests. That's the speed of the destruction that we are having. Now, Brazil is an important piece of this puzzle. We have the second largest forest in the world, just after Russia. It means 12 percent of all the world's forests are in Brazil, most of that in the Amazon. It's the largest piece of forest we have. It's a very big, large area. You can see that you could fit many of the European countries there. We still have 80 percent of the forest cover. That's the good news. But we lost 15 percent in just 30 years. So if you go with that speed, very soon, we will loose this powerful pump that we have in the Amazon that regulates our climate. Deforestation was growing fast and accelerating at the end of the '90s and the beginning of the 2000s. (Chainsaw sound) (Sound of falling tree) Twenty-seven thousand square kilometers in one year. This is 2.7 million hectares. It's almost like half of Costa Rica every year. So at this moment — this is 2003, 2004 — I happened to be coming to work in the government. And together with other teammates in the National Forest Department, we were assigned a task to join a team and find out the causes of deforestation, and make a plan to combat that at a national level, involving the local governments, the civil society, business, local communities, in an effort that could tackle those causes. So we came up with this plan with 144 actions in different areas. Now I will go through all of them one by one — no, just giving some examples of what we had done in the next few years. So the first thing, we set up a system with the national space agency that could actually see where deforestation is happening, almost in real time. So now in Brazil, we have this system, DETER, where every month, or every two months, we get information on where deforestation is happening so we can actually act when it's happening. And all the information is fully transparent so others can replicate that in independent systems. This allows us, among other things, to apprehend 1.4 million cubic meters of logs that were illegally taken. Part of that we saw and sell, and all the revenue becomes a fund that now funds conservation projects of local communities as an endowment fund. This also allows us to make a big operation to seize corruption and illegal activities that ended up having 700 people in prison, including a lot of public servants. Then we made the connection that areas that have been doing illegal deforestation should not get any kind of credit or finance. So we cut this through the bank system and then linked this to the end users. So supermarkets, the slaughterhouses, and so on that buy products from illegal clear-cut areas, they also can be liable for the deforestation. So making all these connections to help to push the problem down. And also we work a lot on land tenure issues. It's very important for conflicts. Fifty million hectares of protected areas were created, which is an area the size of Spain. And of those, eight million were indigenous lands. Now we start to see results. So in the last 10 years, deforestation came down in Brazil 75 percent. (Applause) So if we compare it with the average deforestation that we had in the last decade, we saved 8.7 million hectares, which is the size of Austria. But more importantly, it avoided the emission of three billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is by far the largest contribution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, until today, as a positive action. One may think that when you do these kinds of actions to decrease, to push down deforestation, you will have an economic impact because you will not have economic activity or something like that. But it's interesting to know that it's quite the opposite. In fact, in the period when we have the deepest decline of deforestation, the economy grew, on average, double from the previous decade, when deforestation was actually going up. So it's a good lesson for us. Maybe this is completely disconnected, as we just learned by having deforestation come down. Now this is all good news, and it's quite an achievement, and we obviously should be very proud about that. But it's not even close to sufficient. In fact, if you think about the deforestation in the Amazon in 2013, that was over half a million hectares, which means that every minute, an area the size of two soccer fields is being cut in the Amazon last year, just last year. If we sum up the deforestation we have in the other biomes in Brazil, we are talking about still the largest deforestation rate in the world. It's more or less like we are forest heroes, but still deforestation champions. So we can't be satisfied, not even close to satisfied. So the next step, I think, is to fight to have zero loss of forest cover in Brazil and to have that as a goal for 2020. That's our next step. Now I've always been interested in the relationship between climate change and forests. First, because 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation, so it's a big part of the problem. But also, forests can be a big part of the solution since that's the best way we know to sink, capture and store carbon. Now, there is another relationship of climate and forests that really stuck me in 2008 and made me change my career from forests to working with climate change. I went to visit Canada, in British Columbia, together with the chiefs of the forest services of other countries that we have a kind of alliance of them, like Canada, Russia, India, China, U.S. And when we were there we learned about this pine beetle that is literally eating the forests in Canada. What we see here, those brown trees, these are really dead trees. They are standing dead trees because of the larvae of the beetle. What happens is that this beetle is controlled by the cold weather in the winter. For many years now, they don't have the sufficient cold weather to actually control the population of this beetle. And it became a disease that is really killing billions of trees. So I came back with this notion that the forest is actually one of the earliest and most affected victims of climate change. So I was thinking, if I succeed in working with all my colleagues to actually help to stop deforestation, maybe we will lose the battle later on for climate change by floods, heat, fires and so on. So I decided to leave the forest service and start to work directly on climate change, find a way to think and understand the challenge, and go from there. Now, the challenge of climate change is pretty straightforward. The goal is very clear. We want to limit the increase of the average temperature of the planet to two degrees. There are several reasons for that. I will not get into that now. But in order to get to this limit of two degrees, which is possible for us to survive, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, defines that we have a budget of emissions of 1,000 billion tons of CO2 from now until the end of the century. So if we divide this by the number of years, what we have is an average budget of 11 billion tons of CO2 per year. Now what is one ton of CO2? It's more or less what one small car, running 20 kilometers a day, will emit in one year. Or it's one flight, one way, from São Paulo to Johannesburg or to London, one way. Two ways, two tons. So 11 billion tons is twice that. Now the emissions today are 50 billion tons, and it's growing. It's growing and maybe it will be 61 by 2020. Now we need to go down to 10 by 2050. And while this happens, the population will grow from seven to nine billion people, the economy will grow from 60 trillion dollars in 2010 to 200 trillion dollars. And so what we need to do is to be much more efficient in a way that we can go from seven tons of carbon per capita per person, per year, into something like one. You have to choose. You take the airplane or you have a car. So the question is, can we make it? And that's the exactly the same question I got when I was developing a plan to combat deforestation. It's such a big problem, so complex. Can we really do it? I think so. Think of this: Deforestation means 60 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in Brazil in the last decade. Now it's a little bit less than 30 percent. In the world, 60 percent is energy. So if we can tackle directly the energy, the same way we could tackle deforestation, maybe we can have a chance. So there are five things that I think we should do. First, we need to disconnect development from carbon emissions. We don't need to clear-cut all the forests to actually get more jobs and agriculture and have more economy. That's what we proved when we decreased deforestation and the economy continued to grow. Same thing could happen in the energy sector. Second, we have to move the incentives to the right place. Today, 500 billion dollars a year goes into subsidies for fossil fuels. Why don't we put a price on carbon and transfer this to the renewable energy? Third, we need to measure and make it transparent where, when and who is emitting greenhouse gases so we can have actions specifically for each one of those opportunities. Fourth, we need to leapfrog the routes of development, which means, you don't need to go to the landline telephone before you get to the mobile phones. Same way we don't need to go to fossil fuels to the one billion people who don't have access to energy before we get to the clean energy. And fifth and last, we need to share responsibility between governments, business and civil society. There is work to do for everybody, and we need to have everybody on board. So to finalize, I think the future is not like a fate that you have to just go as business as usual goes. We need to have the courage to actually change the route, invest in something new, think that we can actually change the route. I think we are doing this with deforestation in Brazil, and I hope we can do it also with climate change in the world. Thank you. (Applause) |
Creative problem-solving in the face of extreme limits | {0: 'Drawing inspiration from frugal innovators in emerging markets, Navi Radjou helps businesses with limited resources discover unexpected ways to succeed.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | When you grow up in a developing country like India, as I did, you instantly learn to get more value from limited resources and find creative ways to reuse what you already have. Take Mansukh Prajapati, a potter in India. He has created a fridge made entirely of clay that consumes no electricity. He can keep fruits and vegetables fresh for many days. That's a cool invention, literally. In Africa, if you run out of your cell phone battery, don't panic. You will find some resourceful entrepreneurs who can recharge your cell phone using bicycles. And since we are in South America, let's go to Lima in Peru, a region with high humidity that receives only one inch of rainfall each year. An engineering college in Lima designed a giant advertising billboard that absorbs air humidity and converts it into purified water, generating over 90 liters of water every day. The Peruvians are amazing. They can literally create water out of thin air. For the past seven years, I have met and studied hundreds of entrepreneurs in India, China, Africa and South America, and they keep amazing me. Many of them did not go to school. They don't invent stuff in big R&D labs. The street is the lab. Why do they do that? Because they don't have the kind of basic resources we take for granted, like capital and energy, and basic services like healthcare and education are also scarce in those regions. When external resources are scarce, you have to go within yourself to tap the most abundant resource, human ingenuity, and use that ingenuity to find clever ways to solve problems with limited resources. In India, we call it Jugaad. Jugaad is a Hindi word that means an improvised fix, a clever solution born in adversity. Jugaad solutions are not sophisticated or perfect, but they create more value at lower cost. For me, the entrepreneurs who will create Jugaad solutions are like alchemists. They can magically transform adversity into opportunity, and turn something of less value into something of high value. In other words, they mastered the art of doing more with less, which is the essence of frugal innovation. Frugal innovation is the ability to create more economic and social value using fewer resources. Frugal innovation is not about making do; it's about making things better. Now I want to show you how, across emerging markets, entrepreneurs and companies are adopting frugal innovation on a larger scale to cost-effectively deliver healthcare and energy to billions of people who may have little income but very high aspirations. Let's first go to China, where the country's largest I.T. service provider, Neusoft, has developed a telemedicine solution to help doctors in cities remotely treat old and poor patients in Chinese villages. This solution is based on simple-to-use medical devices that less qualified health workers like nurses can use in rural clinics. China desperately needs these frugal medical solutions because by 2050 it will be home to over half a billion senior citizens. Now let's go to Kenya, a country where half the population uses M-Pesa, a mobile payment solution. This is a great solution for the African continent because 80 percent of Africans don't have a bank account, but what is exciting is that M-Pesa is now becoming the source of other disruptive business models in sectors like energy. Take M-KOPA, the home solar solution that comes literally in a box that has a solar rooftop panel, three LED lights, a solar radio, and a cell phone charger. The whole kit, though, costs 200 dollars, which is too expensive for most Kenyans, and this is where mobile telephony can make the solution more affordable. Today, you can buy this kit by making an initial deposit of just 35 dollars, and then pay off the rest by making a daily micro-payment of 45 cents using your mobile phone. Once you've made 365 micro-payments, the system is unlocked, and you own the product and you start receiving clean, free electricity. This is an amazing solution for Kenya, where 70 percent of people live off the grid. This shows that with frugal innovation what matters is that you take what is most abundant, mobile connectivity, to deal with what is scarce, which is energy. With frugal innovation, the global South is actually catching up and in some cases even leap-frogging the North. Instead of building expensive hospitals, China is using telemedicine to cost-effectively treat millions of patients, and Africa, instead of building banks and electricity grids, is going straight to mobile payments and distributed clean energy. Frugal innovation is diametrically opposed to the way we innovate in the North. I live in Silicon Valley, where we keep chasing the next big technology thing. Think of the iPhone 5, 6, then 7, 8. Companies in the West spend billions of dollars investing in R&D, and use tons of natural resources to create ever more complex products, to differentiate their brands from competition, and they charge customers more money for new features. So the conventional business model in the West is more for more. But sadly, this more for more model is running out of gas, for three reasons: First, a big portion of customers in the West because of the diminishing purchasing power, can no longer afford these expensive products. Second, we are running out of natural water and oil. In California, where I live, water scarcity is becoming a big problem. And third, most importantly, because of the growing income disparity between the rich and the middle class in the West, there is a big disconnect between existing products and services and basic needs of customers. Do you know that today, there are over 70 million Americans today who are underbanked, because existing banking services are not designed to address their basic needs. The prolonged economic crisis in the West is making people think that they are about to lose the high standard of living and face deprivation. I believe that the only way we can sustain growth and prosperity in the West is if we learn to do more with less. The good news is, that's starting to happen. Several Western companies are now adopting frugal innovation to create affordable products for Western consumers. Let me give you two examples. When I first saw this building, I told myself it's some kind of postmodern house. Actually, it's a small manufacturing plant set up by Grameen Danone, a joint venture between Grameen Bank of Muhammad Yunus and the food multinational Danone to make high-quality yogurt in Bangladesh. This factory is 10 percent the size of existing Danone factories and cost much less to build. I guess you can call it a low-fat factory. Now this factory, unlike Western factories that are highly automated, relies a lot on manual processes in order to generate jobs for local communities. Danone was so inspired by this model that combines economic efficiency and social sustainability, they are planning to roll it out in other parts of the world as well. Now, when you see this example, you might be thinking, "Well, frugal innovation is low tech." Actually, no. Frugal innovation is also about making high tech more affordable and more accessible to more people. Let me give you an example. In China, the R&D engineers of Siemens Healthcare have designed a C.T. scanner that is easy enough to be used by less qualified health workers, like nurses and technicians. This device can scan more patients on a daily basis, and yet consumes less energy, which is great for hospitals, but it's also great for patients because it reduces the cost of treatment by 30 percent and radiation dosage by up to 60 percent. This solution was initially designed for the Chinese market, but now it's selling like hotcakes in the U.S. and Europe, where hospitals are pressured to deliver quality care at lower cost. But the frugal innovation revolution in the West is actually led by creative entrepreneurs who are coming up with amazing solutions to address basic needs in the U.S. and Europe. Let me quickly give you three examples of startups that personally inspire me. The first one happens to be launched by my neighbor in Silicon Valley. It's called gThrive. They make these wireless sensors designed like plastic rulers that farmers can stick in different parts of the field and start collecting detailed information like soil conditions. This dynamic data allows farmers to optimize use of water energy while improving quality of the products and the yields, which is a great solution for California, which faces major water shortage. It pays for itself within one year. Second example is Be-Bound, also in Silicon Valley, that enables you to connect to the Internet even in no-bandwidth areas where there's no wi-fi or 3G or 4G. How do they do that? They simply use SMS, a basic technology, but that happens to be the most reliable and most widely available around the world. Three billion people today with cell phones can't access the Internet. This solution can connect them to the Internet in a frugal way. And in France, there is a startup calle Compte Nickel, which is revolutionizing the banking sector. It allows thousands of people to walk into a Mom and Pop store and in just five minutes activate the service that gives them two products: an international bank account number and an international debit card. They charge a flat annual maintenance fee of just 20 Euros. That means you can do all banking transactions — send and receive money, pay with your debit card — all with no additional charge. This is what I call low-cost banking without the bank. Amazingly, 75 percent of the customers using this service are the middle-class French who can't afford high banking fees. Now, I talked about frugal innovation, initially pioneered in the South, now being adopted in the North. Ultimately, we would like to see developed countries and developing countries come together and co-create frugal solutions that benefit the entire humanity. The exciting news is that's starting to happen. Let's go to Nairobi to find that out. Nairobi has horrendous traffic jams. When I first saw them, I thought, "Holy cow." Literally, because you have to dodge cows as well when you drive in Nairobi. To ease the situation, the engineers at the IBM lab in Kenya are piloting a solution called Megaffic, which initially was designed by the Japanese engineers. Unlike in the West, Megaffic doesn't rely on roadside sensors, which are very expensive to install in Nairobi. Instead they process images, traffic data, collected from a small number of low-resolution webcams in Nairobi streets, and then they use analytic software to predict congestion points, and they can SMS drivers alternate routes to take. Granted, Megaffic is not as sexy as self-driving cars, but it promises to take Nairobi drivers from point A to point B at least 20 percent faster. And earlier this year, UCLA Health launched its Global Lab for Innovation, which seeks to identify frugal healthcare solutions anywhere in the world that will be at least 20 percent cheaper than existing solutions in the U.S. and yet more effective. It also tries to bring together innovators from North and South to cocreate affordable healthcare solutions for all of humanity. I gave tons of examples of frugal innovators from around the world, but the question is, how do you go about adopting frugal innovation? Well, I gleaned out three principles from frugal innovators around the world that I want to share with you that you can apply in your own organization to do more with less. The first principle is: Keep it simple. Don't create solutions to impress customers. Make them easy enough to use and widely accessible, like the C.T. scanner we saw in China. Second principle: Do not reinvent the wheel. Try to leverage existing resources and assets that are widely available, like using mobile telephony to offer clean energy or Mom and Pop stores to offer banking services. Third principle is: Think and act horizontally. Companies tend to scale up vertically by centralizing operations in big factories and warehouses, but if you want to be agile and deal with immense customer diversity, you need to scale out horizontally using a distributed supply chain with smaller manufacturing and distribution units, like Grameen Bank has shown. The South pioneered frugal innovation out of sheer necessity. The North is now learning to do more and better with less as it faces resource constraints. As an Indian-born French national who lives in the United States, my hope is that we transcend this artificial North-South divide so that we can harness the collective ingenuity of innovators from around the world to cocreate frugal solutions that will improve the quality of life of everyone in the world, while preserving our precious planet. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Let's save the last pristine continent | {0: "Robert Swan has explored both poles, and wants to make sure that Antarctica, the world's last great wilderness, is never exploited."} | TEDGlobal 2014 | Let's go south. All of you are actually going south. This is the direction of south, this way, and if you go 8,000 kilometers out of the back of this room, you will come to as far south as you can go anywhere on Earth, the Pole itself. Now, I am not an explorer. I'm not an environmentalist. I'm actually just a survivor, and these photographs that I'm showing you here are dangerous. They are the ice melt of the South and North Poles. And ladies and gentlemen, we need to listen to what these places are telling us, and if we don't, we will end up with our own survival situation here on planet Earth. I have faced head-on these places, and to walk across a melting ocean of ice is without doubt the most frightening thing that's ever happened to me. Antarctica is such a hopeful place. It is protected by the Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959. In 1991, a 50-year agreement was entered into that stops any exploitation in Antarctica, and this agreement could be altered, changed, modified, or even abandoned starting in the year 2041. Ladies and gentlemen, people already far up north from here in the Arctic are already taking advantage of this ice melt, taking out resources from areas already that have been covered in ice for the last 10, 20, 30,000, 100,000 years. Can they not join the dots and think, "Why is the ice actually melting?" This is such an amazing place, the Antarctic, and I have worked hard for the last 23 years on this mission to make sure that what's happening up here in the North does never happen, cannot happen in the South. Where did this all begin? It began for me at the age of 11. Check out that haircut. It's a bit odd. (Laughter) And at the age of 11, I was inspired by the real explorers to want to try to be the first to walk to both Poles. I found it incredibly inspiring that the idea of becoming a polar traveler went down pretty well with girls at parties when I was at university. That was a bit more inspiring. And after years, seven years of fundraising, seven years of being told no, seven years of being told by my family to seek counseling and psychiatric help, eventually three of us found ourselves marching to the South Geographic Pole on the longest unassisted march ever made anywhere on Earth in history. In this photograph, we are standing in an area the size of the United States of America, and we're on our own. We have no radio communications, no backup. Beneath our feet, 90 percent of all the world's ice, 70 percent of all the world's fresh water. We're standing on it. This is the power of Antarctica. On this journey, we faced the danger of crevasses, intense cold, so cold that sweat turns to ice inside your clothing, your teeth can crack, water can freeze in your eyes. Let's just say it's a bit chilly. (Laughter) And after 70 desperate days, we arrive at the South Pole. We had done it. But something happened to me on that 70-day journey in 1986 that brought me here, and it hurt. My eyes changed color in 70 days through damage. Our faces blistered out. The skin ripped off and we wondered why. And when we got home, we were told by NASA that a hole in the ozone had been discovered above the South Pole, and we'd walked underneath it the same year it had been discovered. Ultraviolet rays down, hit the ice, bounced back, fried out the eyes, ripped off our faces. It was a bit of a shock — (Laughter) — and it started me thinking. In 1989, we now head north. Sixty days, every step away from the safety of land across a frozen ocean. It was desperately cold again. Here's me coming in from washing naked at -60 Celsius. And if anybody ever says to you, "I am cold" — (Laughter) — if they look like this, they are cold, definitely. (Applause) And 1,000 kilometers away from the safety of land, disaster strikes. The Arctic Ocean melts beneath our feet four months before it ever had in history, and we're 1,000 kilometers from safety. The ice is crashing around us, grinding, and I'm thinking, "Are we going to die?" But something clicked in my head on this day, as I realized we, as a world, are in a survival situation, and that feeling has never gone away for 25 long years. Back then, we had to march or die. And we're not some TV survivor program. When things go wrong for us, it's life or death, and our brave African-American Daryl, who would become the first American to walk to the North Pole, his heel dropped off from frostbite 200 klicks out. He must keep going, he does, and after 60 days on the ice, we stood at the North Pole. We had done it. Yes, I became the first person in history stupid enough to walk to both Poles, but it was our success. And sadly, on return home, it was not all fun. I became very low. To succeed at something is often harder than actually making it happen. I was empty, lonely, financially destroyed. I was without hope, but hope came in the form of the great Jacques Cousteau, and he inspired me to take on the 2041 mission. Being Jacques, he gave me clear instructions: Engage the world leaders, talk to industry and business, and above all, Rob, inspire young people, because they will choose the future of the preservation of Antarctica. For the world leaders, we've been to every world Earth Summit, all three of them, with our brave yacht, 2041, twice to Rio, once in '92, once in 2012, and for the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, we made the longest overland voyage ever made with a yacht, 13,000 kilometers around the whole of Southern Africa doing our best to inspire over a million young people in person about 2041 and about their environment. For the last 11 years, we have taken over 1,000 people, people from industry and business, women and men from companies, students from all over the world, down to Antarctica, and during those missions, we've managed to pull out over 1,500 tons of twisted metal left in Antarctica. That took eight years, and I'm so proud of it because we recycled all of it back here in South America. I have been inspired ever since I could walk to recycle by my mum. Here she is, and my mum — (Applause) — my mum is still recycling, and as she is in her 100th year, isn't that fantastic? (Applause) And when — I love my mum. (Laughter) But when Mum was born, the population of our planet was only 1.8 billion people, and talking in terms of billions, we have taken young people from industry and business from India, from China. These are game-changing nations, and will be hugely important in the decision about the preservation of the Antarctic. Unbelievably, we've engaged and inspired women to come from the Middle East, often for the first time they've represented their nations in Antarctica. Fantastic people, so inspired. To look after Antarctica, you've got to first engage people with this extraordinary place, form a relationship, form a bond, form some love. It is such a privilege to go to Antarctica, I can't tell you. I feel so lucky, and I've been 35 times in my life, and all those people who come with us return home as great champions, not only for Antarctica, but for local issues back in their own nations. Let's go back to where we began: the ice melt of the North and South Poles. And it's not good news. NASA informed us six months ago that the Western Antarctic Ice Shelf is now disintegrating. Huge areas of ice — look how big Antarctica is even compared to here — Huge areas of ice are breaking off from Antarctica, the size of small nations. And NASA have calculated that the sea level will rise, it is definite, by one meter in the next 100 years, the same time that my mum has been on planet Earth. It's going to happen, and I've realized that the preservation of Antarctica and our survival here on Earth are linked. And there is a very simple solution. If we are using more renewable energy in the real world, if we are being more efficient with the energy here, running our energy mix in a cleaner way, there will be no financial reason to go and exploit Antarctica. It won't make financial sense, and if we manage our energy better, we also may be able to slow down, maybe even stop, this great ice melt that threatens us. It's a big challenge, and what is our response to it? We've got to go back one last time, and at the end of next year, we will go back to the South Geographic Pole, where we arrived 30 years ago on foot, and retrace our steps of 1,600 kilometers, but this time only using renewable energy to survive. We will walk across those icecaps, which far down below are melting, hopefully inspiring some solutions on that issue. This is my son, Barney. He is coming with me. He is committed to walking side by side with his father, and what he will do is to translate these messages and inspire these messages to the minds of future young leaders. I'm extremely proud of him. Good on him, Barney. Ladies and gentlemen, a survivor — and I'm good — a survivor sees a problem and doesn't go, "Whatever." A survivor sees a problem and deals with that problem before it becomes a threat. We have 27 years to preserve the Antarctic. We all own it. We all have responsibility. The fact that nobody owns it maybe means that we can succeed. Antarctica is a moral line in the snow, and on one side of that line we should fight, fight hard for this one beautiful, pristine place left alone on Earth. I know it's possible. We are going to do it. And I'll leave you with these words from Goethe. I've tried to live by them. "If you can do, or dream you can, begin it now, for boldness has genius, power and magic in it." Good luck to you all. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How to protect fast-growing cities from failing | {0: 'Robert Muggah creates tools to understand cycles of violence in urban environments and opens dialogues on ways to confront them globally.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | We can cut violent deaths around the world by 50 percent in the next three decades. All we have to do is drop killing by 2.3 percent a year, and we'll hit that target. You don't believe me? Well, the leading epidemiologists and criminologists around the world seem to think we can, and so do I, but only if we focus on our cities, especially the most fragile ones. You see, I've been thinking about this a lot. For the last 20 years, I've been working in countries and cities ripped apart by conflict, violence, terrorism, or some insidious combination of all. I've tracked gun smugglers from Russia to Somalia, I've worked with warlords in Afghanistan and the Congo, I've counted cadavers in Colombia, in Haiti, in Sri Lanka, in Papua New Guinea. You don't need to be on the front line, though, to get a sense that our planet is spinning out of control, right? There's this feeling that international instability is the new normal. But I want you to take a closer look, and I think you'll see that the geography of violence is changing, because it's not so much our nation states that are gripped by conflict and crime as our cities: Aleppo, Bamako, Caracas, Erbil, Mosul, Tripoli, Salvador. Violence is migrating to the metropole. And maybe this is to be expected, right? After all, most people today, they live in cities, not the countryside. Just 600 cities, including 30 megacities, account for two thirds of global GDP. But when it comes to cities, the conversation is dominated by the North, that is, North America, Western Europe, Australia and Japan, where violence is actually at historic lows. As a result, city enthusiasts, they talk about the triumph of the city, of the creative classes, and the mayors that will rule the world. Now, I hope that mayors do one day rule the world, but, you know, the fact is, we don't hear any conversation, really, about what is happening in the South. And by South, I mean Latin America, Africa, Asia, where violence in some cases is accelerating, where infrastructure is overstretched, and where governance is sometimes an aspiration and not a reality. Now, some diplomats and development experts and specialists, they talk about 40 to 50 fragile states that will shape security in the 21st century. I think it's fragile cities which will define the future of order and disorder. That's because warfare and humanitarian action are going to be concentrated in our cities, and the fight for development, whether you define that as eradicating poverty, universal healthcare, beating back climate change, will be won or lost in the shantytowns, slums and favelas of our cities. I want to talk to you about four megarisks that I think will define fragility in our time, and if we can get to grips with these, I think we can do something with that lethal violence problem. So let me start with some good news. Fact is, we're living in the most peaceful moment in human history. Steven Pinker and others have shown how the intensity and frequency of conflict is actually at an all-time low. Now, Gaza, Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, as ghastly as these conflicts are, and they are horrific, they represent a relatively small blip upwards in a 50-year-long secular decline. What's more, we're seeing a dramatic reduction in homicide. Manuel Eisner and others have shown that for centuries, we've seen this incredible drop in murder, especially in the West. Most Northern cities today are 100 times safer than they were just 100 years ago. These two facts — the decline in armed conflict and the decline in murder — are amongst the most extraordinary, if unheralded, accomplishments of human history, and we should be really excited, right? Well, yeah, we should. There's just one problem: These two scourges are still with us. You see, 525,000 people — men, women, boys and girls — die violently every single year. Research I've been doing with Keith Krause and others has shown that between 50,000 and 60,000 people are dying in war zones violently. The rest, almost 500,000 people, are dying outside of conflict zones. In other words, 10 times more people are dying outside of war than inside war. What's more, violence is moving south, to Latin America and the Caribbean, to parts of Central and Southern Africa, and to bits of the Middle East and Central Asia. Forty of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world are right here in Latin America, 13 in Brazil, and the most dangerous of all, it's San Pedro Sula, Honduras' second city, with a staggering homicide rate of 187 murders per 100,000 people. That's 23 times the global average. Now, if violence is re-concentrating geographically, it's also being reconfigured to the world's new topography, because when it comes to cities, the world ain't flat, like Thomas Friedman likes to say. It's spiky. The dominance of the city as the primary mode of urban living is one of the most extraordinary demographic reversals in history, and it all happened so fast. You all know the figures, right? There's 7.3 billion people in the world today; there will be 9.6 billion by 2050. But consider this one fact: In the 1800s, one in 30 people lived in cities, today it's one in two, and tomorrow virtually everyone is going to be there. And this expansion in urbanization is going to be neither even nor equitable. The vast majority, 90 percent, will be happening in the South, in cities of the South. So urban geographers and demographers, they tell us that it's not necessarily the size or even the density of cities that predicts violence, no. Tokyo, with 35 million people, is one of the largest, and some might say safest, urban metropolises in the world. No, it's the speed of urbanization that matters. I call this turbo-urbanization, and it's one of the key drivers of fragility. When you think about the incredible expansion of these cities, and you think about turbo-urbanization, think about Karachi. Karachi was about 500,000 people in 1947, a hustling, bustling city. Today, it's 21 million people, and apart from accounting for three quarters of Pakistan's GDP, it's also one of the most violent cities in South Asia. Dhaka, Lagos, Kinshasa, these cities are now 40 times larger than they were in the 1950s. Now take a look at New York. The Big Apple, it took 150 years to get to eight million people. São Paulo, Mexico City, took 15 to reach that same interval. Now, what do these medium, large, mega-, and hypercities look like? What is their profile? Well, for one thing, they're young. What we're seeing in many of them is the rise of the youth bulge. Now, this is actually a good news story. It's a function of reductions in child mortality rates. But the youth bulge is something we've got to watch. What it basically means is the proportion of young people living in our fragile cities is much larger than those living in our healthier and wealthier ones. In some fragile cities, 75 percent of the population is under the age of 30. Think about that: Three in four people are under 30. It's like Palo Alto on steroids. Now, if you look at Mogadishu for example, in Mogadishu the mean age is 16 years old. Ditto for Dhaka, Dili and Kabul. And Tokyo? It's 46. Same for most Western European cities. Now, it's not just youth that necessarily predicts violence. That's one factor among many, but youthfulness combined with unemployment, lack of education, and — this is the kicker — being male, is a deadly proposition. They're statistically correlated, all those risk factors, with youth, and they tend to relate to increases in violence. Now, for those of you who are parents of teenage sons, you know what I'm talking about, right? Just imagine your boy without any structure with those unruly friends of his, out there cavorting about. Now, take away the parents, take away the education, limit the education possibilities, sprinkle in a little bit of drugs, alcohol and guns, and sit back and watch the fireworks. The implications are disconcerting. Right here in Brazil, the life expectancy is 73.6 years. If you live in Rio, I'm sorry, shave off two right there. But if you're young, you're uneducated, you lack employment, you're black, and you're male, your life expectancy drops to less than 60 years old. There's a reason why youthfulness and violence are the number one killers in this country. Okay, so it's not all doom and gloom in our cities. After all, cities are hubs of innovation, dynamism, prosperity, excitement, connectivity. They're where the smart people gather. And those young people I just mentioned, they're more digitally savvy and tech-aware than ever before. And this explosion, the Internet, and mobile technology, means that the digital divide separating the North and the South between countries and within them, is shrinking. But as we've heard so many times, these new technologies are dual-edged, right? Take the case of law enforcement. Police around the world are starting to use remote sensing and big data to anticipate crime. Some cops are able to predict criminal violence before it even happens. The future crime scenario, it's here today, and we've got to be careful. We have to manage the issues of the public safety against rights to individual privacy. But it's not just the cops who are innovating. We've heard extraordinary activities of civil society groups who are engaging in local and global collective action, and this is leading to digital protest and real revolution. But most worrying of all are criminal gangs who are going online and starting to colonize cyberspace. In Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, where I've been working, groups like the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel are hijacking social media. They're using it to recruit, to sell their products, to coerce, to intimidate and to kill. Violence is going virtual. So this is just a partial sketch of a fast-moving and dynamic and complex situation. I mean, there are many other megarisks that are going to define fragility in our time, not least income inequality, poverty, climate change, impunity. But we're facing a stark dilemma where some cities are going to thrive and drive global growth and others are going to stumble and pull it backwards. If we're going to change course, we need to start a conversation. We can't only focus on those cities that work, the Singapores, the Kuala Lumpurs, the Dubais, the Shanghais. We've got to bring those fragile cities into the conversation. One way to do this might be to start twinning our fragile cities with our healthier and wealthier ones, kickstarting a process of learning and collaboration and sharing of practices, of what works and what doesn't. A wonderful example of this is coming from El Salvador and Los Angeles, where the mayors in San Salvador and Los Angeles are collaborating on getting ex-gang members to work with current gang members, offering tutoring, education, and in the process are helping incubate cease-fires and truces, and we've seen homicide rates go down in San Salvador, once the world's most violent city, by 50 percent. We can also focus on hot cities, but also hot spots. Place and location matter fundamentally in shaping violence in our cities. Did you know that between one and two percent of street addresses in any fragile city can predict up to 99 percent of violent crime? Take the case of São Paulo, where I've been working. It's gone from being Brazil's most dangerous city to one of its safest, and it did this by doubling down on information collection, hot spot mapping, and police reform, and in the process, it dropped homicide by 70 percent in just over 10 years. We also got to focus on those hot people. It's tragic, but being young, unemployed, uneducated, male, increases the risks of being killed and killing. We have to break this cycle of violence and get in there early with our children, our youngest children, and valorize them, not stigmatize them. There's wonderful work that's happening that I've been involved with in Kingston, Jamaica and right here in Rio, which is putting education, employment, recreation up front for these high-risk groups, and as a result, we're seeing violence going down in their communities. We've also got to make our cities safer, more inclusive, and livable for all. The fact is, social cohesion matters. Mobility matters in our cities. We've got to get away from this model of segregation, exclusion, and cities with walls. My favorite example of how to do this comes from Medellín. When I lived in Colombia in the late 1990s, Medellín was the murder capital of the world, but it changed course, and it did this by deliberately investing in its low-income and most violent areas and integrating them with the middle-class ones through a network of cable cars, of public transport, and first-class infrastructure, and in the process, it dropped homicide by 79 percent in just under two decades. And finally, there's technology. Technology has enormous promise but also peril. We've seen examples here of extraordinary innovation, and much of it coming from this room, The police are engaging in predictive analytics. Citizens are engaging in new crowdsourcing solutions. Even my own group is involved in developing applications to provide more accountability over police and increase safety among citizens. But we need to be careful. If I have one single message for you, it's this: There is nothing inevitable about lethal violence, and we can make our cities safer. Folks, we have the opportunity of a lifetime to drop homicidal violence in half within our lifetime. So I have just one question: What are we waiting for? Thank you. (Applause) |
Poetry that frees the soul | {0: 'Cristina Domenech proposes to use language as an instrument of liberation and as a way to change the world.'} | TEDxRiodelaPlata | It's said that to be a poet you have to go to hell and back. The first time I visited the prison, I was not surprised by the noise of the padlocks, or the closing doors, or the cell bars, or by any of the things I had imagined. Maybe because the prison is in a quite open space. You can see the sky. Seagulls fly overhead, and you feel like you're next to the sea, that you're really close to the beach. But in fact, the gulls are looking for food in the dump near the prison. I went farther inside and I suddenly saw inmates moving across the corridors. Then it was as if I stepped back and thought that I could have very well been one of them. If I had another story, another context, different luck. Because nobody - nobody - can choose where they're born. In 2009, I was invited to join a project that San Martín National University conducted at the Unit 48 penitentiary, to coordinate a writing workshop. The prison service ceded some land at the end of the prison, which is where they constructed the University Center building. The first time I met with the prisoners, I asked them why they were asking for a writing workshop and they told me they wanted to put on paper all that they couldn't say and do. Right then I decided that I wanted poetry to enter the prison. So I said to them why don't we work with poetry, if they knew what poetry was. But nobody had a clue what poetry really was. They also suggested to me that the workshop should be not just for the inmates taking university classes, but for all the inmates. And so I said that to start this workshop, I needed to find a tool that we all had in common. That tool was language. We had language, we had the workshop. We could have poetry. But what I hadn't considered was that inequality exists in prison, too. Many of the prisoners hadn't even completed grammar school. Many couldn't use cursive, could barely print. They didn't write fluently, either. So we started looking for short poems. Very short, but very powerful. And we started to read, and we'd read one author, then another author, and by reading such short poems, they all began to realize that what the poetic language did was to break a certain logic, and create another system. Breaking the logic of language also breaks the logic of the system under which they've learned to respond. So a new system appeared, new rules that made them understand very quickly, - very quickly - that with poetic language they would be able to say absolutely whatever they wanted. It's said that to be a poet you have to go to hell and back. And they have plenty of hell. Plenty of hell. One of them once said: "In prison you never sleep. You can never sleep in jail. You can never close your eyelids." And so, like I’m doing now, I gave them a moment of silence, then said, “That's what poetry is, you guys. It's in this prison universe that you have all around you. Everything you say about how you never sleep, it exudes fear. All the things that go unwritten — all of that is poetry." So we started appropriating that hell; we plunged ourselves, headfirst, into the seventh circle. And in that seventh circle of hell, our very own, beloved circle, they learned that they could make the walls invisible, that they could make the windows yell, and that we could hide inside the shadows. When the first year of the workshop had ended, we organized a little closing party, like you do when a job is done with so much love, and you want to celebrate with a party. We called family, friends, the university authorities. The only thing the inmates had to do was read a poem, and receive their diplomas and applause. That was our simple party. The only thing I want to leave you with is the moment in which those men, some of them just huge when standing next to me, or the young boys - so young, but with an enormous pride, held their papers and trembled like little kids and sweated, and read their poems with their voices completely broken. That moment made me think a lot that for most of them, it was surely the very first time that someone applauded them for something they had done. In prison there are things that can't be done. In prison, you can't dream. In prison, you can't cry. There are words that are virtually forbidden, like the word "time," the word "future," the word "wish". But we dared to dream, and to dream a lot. We decided that they were going to write a book. Not only did they write a book, but they also bound it themselves. That was at the end of 2010. Then, we doubled the bet and wrote another book. And we bound that one, too. That was a short time ago, at the end of last year. What I see week after week, is how they're turning into different people; how they're being transformed. How words are empowering them with a dignity they had never known, that they couldn't even imagine. They had no idea such dignity could come from them. At the workshop, in that beloved hell we share, we all give something. We open our hands and hearts and give what we have, what we can. All of us; all of us equally. And so you feel that at least in a small way you're repairing that huge social fracture which makes it so that for many of them, prison is their only destination. I remember a verse by a tremendous poet, a great poet, from our Unit 48 workshop, Nicolás Dorado: "I will need an infinite thread to sew up this huge wound." Poetry does that; it sews up the wounds of exclusion. It opens doors. Poetry works as a mirror. It creates a mirror, which is the poem. They recognize themselves, they look at themselves in the poem and write from who they are, and are from what they write. In order to write, they need to appropriate the moment of writing which is a moment of extraordinary freedom. They have to get into their heads, search for that bit of freedom that can never be taken away when they write and that is also useful to realize that freedom is possible even inside a prison, and that the only bars we have in our wonderful space is the word "bars," and that all of us in our hell burn with happiness when we light the wick of the word. (Applause) I told you a lot about the prison, a lot about what I experience every week, and how I enjoy it and transform myself with the inmates. But you don't know how much I'd like it if you could feel, live, experience, even for a few seconds, what I enjoy every week and what makes me who I am. (Applause) Martín Bustamante: The heart chews tears of time; blinded by that light, it hides the speed of existence where the images go rowing by. It fights; it hangs on. The heart cracks under sad gazes, rides on storms that spread fire, lifts chests lowered by shame, knows that it's not just reading and going on, it also wishes to see the infinite blue. The heart sits down to think about things, fights to avoid being ordinary, tries to love without hurting, breathes the sun, giving courage to itself, surrenders, travels toward reason. The heart fights among the swamps, skirts the edge of the underworld, falls exhausted, but won't give in to what's easy, while irregular steps of intoxication wake up, wake the stillness. I'm Martín Bustamante, I'm a prisoner in Unit 48 of San Martín, today is my day of temporary release. And for me, poetry and literature have changed my life. Thank you very much! Cristina Domenech: Thank you! (Applause) |
How to let altruism be your guide | {0: 'Sometimes called the "happiest man in the world," Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk, author and photographer.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | So we humans have an extraordinary potential for goodness, but also an immense power to do harm. Any tool can be used to build or to destroy. That all depends on our motivation. Therefore, it is all the more important to foster an altruistic motivation rather than a selfish one. So now we indeed are facing many challenges in our times. Those could be personal challenges. Our own mind can be our best friend or our worst enemy. There's also societal challenges: poverty in the midst of plenty, inequalities, conflict, injustice. And then there are the new challenges, which we don't expect. Ten thousand years ago, there were about five million human beings on Earth. Whatever they could do, the Earth's resilience would soon heal human activities. After the Industrial and Technological Revolutions, that's not the same anymore. We are now the major agent of impact on our Earth. We enter the Anthropocene, the era of human beings. So in a way, if we were to say we need to continue this endless growth, endless use of material resources, it's like if this man was saying — and I heard a former head of state, I won't mention who, saying — "Five years ago, we were at the edge of the precipice. Today we made a big step forward." So this edge is the same that has been defined by scientists as the planetary boundaries. And within those boundaries, they can carry a number of factors. We can still prosper, humanity can still prosper for 150,000 years if we keep the same stability of climate as in the Holocene for the last 10,000 years. But this depends on choosing a voluntary simplicity, growing qualitatively, not quantitatively. So in 1900, as you can see, we were well within the limits of safety. Now, in 1950 came the great acceleration. Now hold your breath, not too long, to imagine what comes next. Now we have vastly overrun some of the planetary boundaries. Just to take biodiversity, at the current rate, by 2050, 30 percent of all species on Earth will have disappeared. Even if we keep their DNA in some fridge, that's not going to be reversible. So here I am sitting in front of a 7,000-meter-high, 21,000-foot glacier in Bhutan. At the Third Pole, 2,000 glaciers are melting fast, faster than the Arctic. So what can we do in that situation? Well, however complex politically, economically, scientifically the question of the environment is, it simply boils down to a question of altruism versus selfishness. I'm a Marxist of the Groucho tendency. (Laughter) Groucho Marx said, "Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?" (Laughter) Unfortunately, I heard the billionaire Steve Forbes, on Fox News, saying exactly the same thing, but seriously. He was told about the rise of the ocean, and he said, "I find it absurd to change my behavior today for something that will happen in a hundred years." So if you don't care for future generations, just go for it. So one of the main challenges of our times is to reconcile three time scales: the short term of the economy, the ups and downs of the stock market, the end-of-the-year accounts; the midterm of the quality of life — what is the quality every moment of our life, over 10 years and 20 years? — and the long term of the environment. When the environmentalists speak with economists, it's like a schizophrenic dialogue, completely incoherent. They don't speak the same language. Now, for the last 10 years, I went around the world meeting economists, scientists, neuroscientists, environmentalists, philosophers, thinkers in the Himalayas, all over the place. It seems to me, there's only one concept that can reconcile those three time scales. It is simply having more consideration for others. If you have more consideration for others, you will have a caring economics, where finance is at the service of society and not society at the service of finance. You will not play at the casino with the resources that people have entrusted you with. If you have more consideration for others, you will make sure that you remedy inequality, that you bring some kind of well-being within society, in education, at the workplace. Otherwise, a nation that is the most powerful and the richest but everyone is miserable, what's the point? And if you have more consideration for others, you are not going to ransack that planet that we have and at the current rate, we don't have three planets to continue that way. So the question is, okay, altruism is the answer, it's not just a novel ideal, but can it be a real, pragmatic solution? And first of all, does it exist, true altruism, or are we so selfish? So some philosophers thought we were irredeemably selfish. But are we really all just like rascals? That's good news, isn't it? Many philosophers, like Hobbes, have said so. But not everyone looks like a rascal. Or is man a wolf for man? But this guy doesn't seem too bad. He's one of my friends in Tibet. He's very kind. So now, we love cooperation. There's no better joy than working together, is there? And then not only humans. Then, of course, there's the struggle for life, the survival of the fittest, social Darwinism. But in evolution, cooperation — though competition exists, of course — cooperation has to be much more creative to go to increased levels of complexity. We are super-cooperators and we should even go further. So now, on top of that, the quality of human relationships. The OECD did a survey among 10 factors, including income, everything. The first one that people said, that's the main thing for my happiness, is quality of social relationships. Not only in humans. And look at those great-grandmothers. So now, this idea that if we go deep within, we are irredeemably selfish, this is armchair science. There is not a single sociological study, psychological study, that's ever shown that. Rather, the opposite. My friend, Daniel Batson, spent a whole life putting people in the lab in very complex situations. And of course we are sometimes selfish, and some people more than others. But he found that systematically, no matter what, there's a significant number of people who do behave altruistically, no matter what. If you see someone deeply wounded, great suffering, you might just help out of empathic distress — you can't stand it, so it's better to help than to keep on looking at that person. So we tested all that, and in the end, he said, clearly people can be altruistic. So that's good news. And even further, we should look at the banality of goodness. Now look at here. When we come out, we aren't going to say, "That's so nice. There was no fistfight while this mob was thinking about altruism." No, that's expected, isn't it? If there was a fistfight, we would speak of that for months. So the banality of goodness is something that doesn't attract your attention, but it exists. Now, look at this. So some psychologists said, when I tell them I run 140 humanitarian projects in the Himalayas that give me so much joy, they said, "Oh, I see, you work for the warm glow. That is not altruistic. You just feel good." You think this guy, when he jumped in front of the train, he thought, "I'm going to feel so good when this is over?" (Laughter) But that's not the end of it. They say, well, but when you interviewed him, he said, "I had no choice. I had to jump, of course." He has no choice. Automatic behavior. It's neither selfish nor altruistic. No choice? Well of course, this guy's not going to think for half an hour, "Should I give my hand? Not give my hand?" He does it. There is a choice, but it's obvious, it's immediate. And then, also, there he had a choice. (Laughter) There are people who had choice, like Pastor André Trocmé and his wife, and the whole village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France. For the whole Second World War, they saved 3,500 Jews, gave them shelter, brought them to Switzerland, against all odds, at the risk of their lives and those of their family. So altruism does exist. So what is altruism? It is the wish: May others be happy and find the cause of happiness. Now, empathy is the affective resonance or cognitive resonance that tells you, this person is joyful, this person suffers. But empathy alone is not sufficient. If you keep on being confronted with suffering, you might have empathic distress, burnout, so you need the greater sphere of loving-kindness. With Tania Singer at the Max Planck Institute of Leipzig, we showed that the brain networks for empathy and loving-kindness are different. Now, that's all well done, so we got that from evolution, from maternal care, parental love, but we need to extend that. It can be extended even to other species. Now, if we want a more altruistic society, we need two things: individual change and societal change. So is individual change possible? Two thousand years of contemplative study said yes, it is. Now, 15 years of collaboration with neuroscience and epigenetics said yes, our brains change when you train in altruism. So I spent 120 hours in an MRI machine. This is the first time I went after two and a half hours. And then the result has been published in many scientific papers. It shows without ambiguity that there is structural change and functional change in the brain when you train the altruistic love. Just to give you an idea: this is the meditator at rest on the left, meditator in compassion meditation, you see all the activity, and then the control group at rest, nothing happened, in meditation, nothing happened. They have not been trained. So do you need 50,000 hours of meditation? No, you don't. Four weeks, 20 minutes a day, of caring, mindfulness meditation already brings a structural change in the brain compared to a control group. That's only 20 minutes a day for four weeks. Even with preschoolers — Richard Davidson did that in Madison. An eight-week program: gratitude, loving- kindness, cooperation, mindful breathing. You would say, "Oh, they're just preschoolers." Look after eight weeks, the pro-social behavior, that's the blue line. And then comes the ultimate scientific test, the stickers test. Before, you determine for each child who is their best friend in the class, their least favorite child, an unknown child, and the sick child, and they have to give stickers away. So before the intervention, they give most of it to their best friend. Four, five years old, 20 minutes three times a week. After the intervention, no more discrimination: the same amount of stickers to their best friend and the least favorite child. That's something we should do in all the schools in the world. Now where do we go from there? (Applause) When the Dalai Lama heard that, he told Richard Davidson, "You go to 10 schools, 100 schools, the U.N., the whole world." So now where do we go from there? Individual change is possible. Now do we have to wait for an altruistic gene to be in the human race? That will take 50,000 years, too much for the environment. Fortunately, there is the evolution of culture. Cultures, as specialists have shown, change faster than genes. That's the good news. Look, attitude towards war has dramatically changed over the years. So now individual change and cultural change mutually fashion each other, and yes, we can achieve a more altruistic society. So where do we go from there? Myself, I will go back to the East. Now we treat 100,000 patients a year in our projects. We have 25,000 kids in school, four percent overhead. Some people say, "Well, your stuff works in practice, but does it work in theory?" There's always positive deviance. So I will also go back to my hermitage to find the inner resources to better serve others. But on the more global level, what can we do? We need three things. Enhancing cooperation: Cooperative learning in the school instead of competitive learning, Unconditional cooperation within corporations — there can be some competition between corporations, but not within. We need sustainable harmony. I love this term. Not sustainable growth anymore. Sustainable harmony means now we will reduce inequality. In the future, we do more with less, and we continue to grow qualitatively, not quantitatively. We need caring economics. The Homo economicus cannot deal with poverty in the midst of plenty, cannot deal with the problem of the common goods of the atmosphere, of the oceans. We need a caring economics. If you say economics should be compassionate, they say, "That's not our job." But if you say they don't care, that looks bad. We need local commitment, global responsibility. We need to extend altruism to the other 1.6 million species. Sentient beings are co-citizens in this world. and we need to dare altruism. So, long live the altruistic revolution. Viva la revolución de altruismo. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Why I make robots the size of a grain of rice | {0: 'Sarah Bergbreiter packs advanced technologies into tiny robots that can overcome obstacles 80 times their height. '} | TEDYouth 2014 | My students and I work on very tiny robots. Now, you can think of these as robotic versions of something that you're all very familiar with: an ant. We all know that ants and other insects at this size scale can do some pretty incredible things. We've all seen a group of ants, or some version of that, carting off your potato chip at a picnic, for example. But what are the real challenges of engineering these ants? Well, first of all, how do we get the capabilities of an ant in a robot at the same size scale? Well, first we need to figure out how to make them move when they're so small. We need mechanisms like legs and efficient motors in order to support that locomotion, and we need the sensors, power and control in order to pull everything together in a semi-intelligent ant robot. And finally, to make these things really functional, we want a lot of them working together in order to do bigger things. So I'll start with mobility. Insects move around amazingly well. This video is from UC Berkeley. It shows a cockroach moving over incredibly rough terrain without tipping over, and it's able to do this because its legs are a combination of rigid materials, which is what we traditionally use to make robots, and soft materials. Jumping is another really interesting way to get around when you're very small. So these insects store energy in a spring and release that really quickly to get the high power they need to jump out of water, for example. So one of the big contributions from my lab has been to combine rigid and soft materials in very, very small mechanisms. So this jumping mechanism is about four millimeters on a side, so really tiny. The hard material here is silicon, and the soft material is silicone rubber. And the basic idea is that we're going to compress this, store energy in the springs, and then release it to jump. So there's no motors on board this right now, no power. This is actuated with a method that we call in my lab "graduate student with tweezers." (Laughter) So what you'll see in the next video is this guy doing amazingly well for its jumps. So this is Aaron, the graduate student in question, with the tweezers, and what you see is this four-millimeter-sized mechanism jumping almost 40 centimeters high. That's almost 100 times its own length. And it survives, bounces on the table, it's incredibly robust, and of course survives quite well until we lose it because it's very tiny. Ultimately, though, we want to add motors to this too, and we have students in the lab working on millimeter-sized motors to eventually integrate onto small, autonomous robots. But in order to look at mobility and locomotion at this size scale to start, we're cheating and using magnets. So this shows what would eventually be part of a micro-robot leg, and you can see the silicone rubber joints and there's an embedded magnet that's being moved around by an external magnetic field. So this leads to the robot that I showed you earlier. The really interesting thing that this robot can help us figure out is how insects move at this scale. We have a really good model for how everything from a cockroach up to an elephant moves. We all move in this kind of bouncy way when we run. But when I'm really small, the forces between my feet and the ground are going to affect my locomotion a lot more than my mass, which is what causes that bouncy motion. So this guy doesn't work quite yet, but we do have slightly larger versions that do run around. So this is about a centimeter cubed, a centimeter on a side, so very tiny, and we've gotten this to run about 10 body lengths per second, so 10 centimeters per second. It's pretty quick for a little, small guy, and that's really only limited by our test setup. But this gives you some idea of how it works right now. We can also make 3D-printed versions of this that can climb over obstacles, a lot like the cockroach that you saw earlier. But ultimately we want to add everything onboard the robot. We want sensing, power, control, actuation all together, and not everything needs to be bio-inspired. So this robot's about the size of a Tic Tac. And in this case, instead of magnets or muscles to move this around, we use rockets. So this is a micro-fabricated energetic material, and we can create tiny pixels of this, and we can put one of these pixels on the belly of this robot, and this robot, then, is going to jump when it senses an increase in light. So the next video is one of my favorites. So you have this 300-milligram robot jumping about eight centimeters in the air. It's only four by four by seven millimeters in size. And you'll see a big flash at the beginning when the energetic is set off, and the robot tumbling through the air. So there was that big flash, and you can see the robot jumping up through the air. So there's no tethers on this, no wires connecting to this. Everything is onboard, and it jumped in response to the student just flicking on a desk lamp next to it. So I think you can imagine all the cool things that we could do with robots that can run and crawl and jump and roll at this size scale. Imagine the rubble that you get after a natural disaster like an earthquake. Imagine these small robots running through that rubble to look for survivors. Or imagine a lot of small robots running around a bridge in order to inspect it and make sure it's safe so you don't get collapses like this, which happened outside of Minneapolis in 2007. Or just imagine what you could do if you had robots that could swim through your blood. Right? "Fantastic Voyage," Isaac Asimov. Or they could operate without having to cut you open in the first place. Or we could radically change the way we build things if we have our tiny robots work the same way that termites do, and they build these incredible eight-meter-high mounds, effectively well ventilated apartment buildings for other termites in Africa and Australia. So I think I've given you some of the possibilities of what we can do with these small robots. And we've made some advances so far, but there's still a long way to go, and hopefully some of you can contribute to that destination. Thanks very much. (Applause) |
Better toilets, better life | {0: 'Joe Madiath brings Indian villagers together around water and sanitation projects.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | It is very fashionable and proper to speak about food in all its forms, all its colors, aromas and tastes. But after the food goes through the digestive system, when it is thrown out as crap, it is no longer fashionable to speak about it. It is rather revolting. I'm a guy who has graduated from bullshit to full-shit. (Laughter) My organization, Gram Vikas, which means "village development organization," was working in the area of renewable energy. On the most part, we were producing biogas, biogas for rural kitchens. We produce biogas in India by using animal manure, which usually, in India, is called cow dung. But as the gender-sensitive person that I am, I would like to call it bullshit. But realizing later on how important were sanitation and the disposal of crap in a proper way, we went into the arena of sanitation. Eighty percent of all diseases in India and most developing countries are because of poor quality water. And when we look at the reason for poor quality water, you find that it is our abysmal attitude to the disposal of human waste. Human waste, in its rawest form, finds its way back to drinking water, bathing water, washing water, irrigation water, whatever water you see. And this is the cause for 80 percent of the diseases in rural areas. In India, it is unfortunately only the women who carry water. So for all domestic needs, women have to carry water. So that is a pitiable state of affairs. Open defecation is rampant. Seventy percent of India defecates in the open. They sit there out in the open, with the wind on their sails, hiding their faces, exposing their bases, and sitting there in pristine glory — 70 percent of India. And if you look at the world total, 60 percent of all the crap that is thrown into the open is by Indians. A fantastic distinction. I don't know if we Indians can be proud of such a distinction. (Laughter) So we, together with a lot of villages, we began to talk about how to really address this situation of sanitation. And we came together and formed a project called MANTRA. MANTRA stands for Movement and Action Network for Transformation of Rural Areas. So we are speaking about transformation, transformation in rural areas. Villages that agree to implement this project, they organize a legal society where the general body consists of all members who elect a group of men and women who implement the project and, later on, who look after the operation and maintenance. They decide to build a toilet and a shower room. And from a protected water source, water will be brought to an elevated water reservoir and piped to all households through three taps: one in the toilet, one in the shower, one in the kitchen, 24 hours a day. The pity is that our cities, like New Delhi and Bombay, do not have a 24-hour water supply. But in these villages, we want to have it. There is a distinct difference in the quality. Well in India, we have a theory, which is very much accepted by the government bureaucracy and all those who matter, that poor people deserve poor solutions and absolutely poor people deserve pathetic solutions. This, combined with a Nobel Prize-worthy theory that the cheapest is the most economic, is the heady cocktail that the poor are forced to drink. We are fighting against this. We feel that the poor have been humiliated for centuries. And even in sanitation, they should not be humiliated. Sanitation is more about dignity than about human disposal of waste. And so you build these toilets and very often, we have to hear that the toilets are better than their houses. And you can see that in front are the attached houses and the others are the toilets. So these people, without a single exception of a family in a village, decide to build a toilet, a bathing room. And for that, they come together, collect all the local materials — local materials like rubble, sand, aggregates, usually a government subsidy is available to meet at least part of the cost of external materials like cement, steel, toilet commode. And they build a toilet and a bathing room. Also, all the unskilled laborers, that is daily wage earners, mostly landless, are given an opportunity to be trained as masons and plumbers. So while these people are being trained, others are collecting the materials. And when both are ready, they build a toilet, a shower room, and of course also a water tower, an elevated water reservoir. We use a system of two leach pits to treat the waste. From the toilet, the muck comes into the first leach pit. And when it is full, it is blocked and it can go to the next. But we discovered that if you plant banana trees, papaya trees on the periphery of these leach pits, they grow very well because they suck up all the nutrients and you get very tasty bananas, papayas. If any of you come to my place, I would be happy to share these bananas and papayas with you. So there you can see the completed toilets, the water towers. This is in a village where most of the people are even illiterate. It is always a 24-hour water supply because water gets polluted very often when you store it — a child dips his or her hand into it, something falls into it. So no water is stored. It's always on tap. This is how an elevated water reservoir is constructed. And that is the end product. Because it has to go high, and there is some space available, two or three rooms are made under the water tower, which are used by the village for different committee meetings. We have had clear evidence of the great impact of this program. Before we started, there were, as usual, more than 80 percent of people suffering from waterborne diseases. But after this, we have empirical evidence that 82 percent, on average, among all these villages — 1,200 villages have completed it — waterborne diseases have come down 82 percent. (Applause) Women usually used to spend, especially in the summer months, about six to seven hours a day carrying water. And when they went to carry water, because, as I said earlier, it's only women who carry water, they used to take their little children, girl children, also to carry water, or else to be back at home to look after the siblings. So there were less than nine percent of girl children attending school, even if there was a school. And boys, about 30 percent. But girls, it has gone to about 90 percent and boys, almost to 100 percent. (Applause) The most vulnerable section in a village are the landless laborers who are the daily wage-earners. Because they have gone through this training to be masons and plumbers and bar benders, now their ability to earn has increased 300 to 400 percent. So this is a democracy in action because there is a general body, a governing board, the committee. People are questioning, people are governing themselves, people are learning to manage their own affairs, they are taking their own futures into their hands. And that is democracy at the grassroots level in action. More than 1,200 villages have so far done this. It benefits over 400,000 people and it's still going on. And I hope it continues to move ahead. For India and such developing countries, armies and armaments, software companies and spaceships may not be as important as taps and toilets. Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. |
The danger of hiding who you are | {0: 'A human resources activist, Morgana Bailey wants to see the diversity of society reflected in the workplace, and employees of all walks of life feel comfortable being open about who they are.\r\n'} | TED@State Street London | When I was young, I prided myself as a nonconformist in the conservative U.S. state I live in, Kansas. I didn't follow along with the crowd. I wasn't afraid to try weird clothing trends or hairstyles. I was outspoken and extremely social. Even these pictures and postcards of my London semester abroad 16 years ago show that I obviously didn't care if I was perceived as weird or different. (Laughter) But that same year I was in London, 16 years ago, I realized something about myself that actually was somewhat unique, and that changed everything. I became the opposite of who I thought I once was. I stayed in my room instead of socializing. I stopped engaging in clubs and leadership activities. I didn't want to stand out in the crowd anymore. I told myself it was because I was growing up and maturing, not that I was suddenly looking for acceptance. I had always assumed I was immune to needing acceptance. After all, I was a bit unconventional. But I realize now that the moment I realized something was different about me was the exact same moment that I began conforming and hiding. Hiding is a progressive habit, and once you start hiding, it becomes harder and harder to step forward and speak out. In fact, even now, when I was talking to people about what this talk was about, I made up a cover story and I even hid the truth about my TED Talk. So it is fitting and scary that I have returned to this city 16 years later and I have chosen this stage to finally stop hiding. What have I been hiding for 16 years? I am a lesbian. (Applause) Thank you. I've struggled to say those words, because I didn't want to be defined by them. Every time I would think about coming out in the past, I would think to myself, but I just want to be known as Morgana, uniquely Morgana, but not "my lesbian friend Morgana," or "my gay coworker Morgana." Just Morgana. For those of you from large metropolitan areas, this may not seem like a big deal to you. It may seem strange that I have suppressed the truth and hidden this for so long. But I was paralyzed by my fear of not being accepted. And I'm not alone, of course. A 2013 Deloitte study found that a surprisingly large number of people hide aspects of their identity. Of all the employees they surveyed, 61 percent reported changing an aspect of their behavior or their appearance in order to fit in at work. Of all the gay, lesbian and bisexual employees, 83 percent admitted to changing some aspects of themselves so they would not appear at work "too gay." The study found that even in companies with diversity policies and inclusion programs, employees struggle to be themselves at work because they believe conformity is critical to their long-term career advancement. And while I was surprised that so many people just like me waste so much energy trying to hide themselves, I was scared when I discovered that my silence has life-or-death consequences and long-term social repercussions. Twelve years: the length by which life expectancy is shortened for gay, lesbian and bisexual people in highly anti-gay communities compared to accepting communities. Twelve years reduced life expectancy. When I read that in The Advocate magazine this year, I realized I could no longer afford to keep silent. The effects of personal stress and social stigmas are a deadly combination. The study found that gays in anti-gay communities had higher rates of heart disease, violence and suicide. What I once thought was simply a personal matter I realized had a ripple effect that went into the workplace and out into the community for every story just like mine. My choice to hide and not share who I really am may have inadvertently contributed to this exact same environment and atmosphere of discrimination. I'd always told myself there's no reason to share that I was gay, but the idea that my silence has social consequences was really driven home this year when I missed an opportunity to change the atmosphere of discrimination in my own home state of Kansas. In February, the Kansas House of Representatives brought up a bill for vote that would have essentially allowed businesses to use religious freedom as a reason to deny gays services. A former coworker and friend of mine has a father who serves in the Kansas House of Representatives. He voted in favor of the bill, in favor of a law that would allow businesses to not serve me. How does my friend feel about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning people? How does her father feel? I don't know, because I was never honest with them about who I am. And that shakes me to the core. What if I had told her my story years ago? Could she have told her father my experience? Could I have ultimately helped change his vote? I will never know, and that made me realize I had done nothing to try to make a difference. How ironic that I work in human resources, a profession that works to welcome, connect and encourage the development of employees, a profession that advocates that the diversity of society should be reflected in the workplace, and yet I have done nothing to advocate for diversity. When I came to this company one year ago, I thought to myself, this company has anti-discrimination policies that protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Their commitment to diversity is evident through their global inclusion programs. When I walk through the doors of this company, I will finally come out. But I didn't. Instead of taking advantage of the opportunity, I did nothing. (Applause) When I was looking through my London journal and scrapbook from my London semester abroad 16 years ago, I came across this modified quote from Toni Morrison's book, "Paradise." "There are more scary things inside than outside." And then I wrote a note to myself at the bottom: "Remember this." I'm sure I was trying to encourage myself to get out and explore London, but the message I missed was the need to start exploring and embracing myself. What I didn't realize until all these years later is that the biggest obstacles I will ever have to overcome are my own fears and insecurities. I believe that by facing my fears inside, I will be able to change reality outside. I made a choice today to reveal a part of myself that I have hidden for too long. I hope that this means I will never hide again, and I hope that by coming out today, I can do something to change the data and also to help others who feel different be more themselves and more fulfilled in both their professional and personal lives. Thank you. (Applause) |
Brain-to-brain communication has arrived. How we did it | {0: 'Miguel Nicolelis explores the limits of the brain-machine interface.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | On June 12, 2014, precisely at 3:33 in a balmy winter afternoon in São Paulo, Brazil, a typical South American winter afternoon, this kid, this young man that you see celebrating here like he had scored a goal, Juliano Pinto, 29 years old, accomplished a magnificent deed. Despite being paralyzed and not having any sensation from mid-chest to the tip of his toes as the result of a car crash six years ago that killed his brother and produced a complete spinal cord lesion that left Juliano in a wheelchair, Juliano rose to the occasion, and on this day did something that pretty much everybody that saw him in the six years deemed impossible. Juliano Pinto delivered the opening kick of the 2014 Brazilian World Soccer Cup here just by thinking. He could not move his body, but he could imagine the movements needed to kick a ball. He was an athlete before the lesion. He's a para-athlete right now. He's going to be in the Paralympic Games, I hope, in a couple years. But what the spinal cord lesion did not rob from Juliano was his ability to dream. And dream he did that afternoon, for a stadium of about 75,000 people and an audience of close to a billion watching on TV. And that kick crowned, basically, 30 years of basic research studying how the brain, how this amazing universe that we have between our ears that is only comparable to universe that we have above our head because it has about 100 billion elements talking to each other through electrical brainstorms, what Juliano accomplished took 30 years to imagine in laboratories and about 15 years to plan. When John Chapin and I, 15 years ago, proposed in a paper that we would build something that we called a brain-machine interface, meaning connecting a brain to devices so that animals and humans could just move these devices, no matter how far they are from their own bodies, just by imagining what they want to do, our colleagues told us that we actually needed professional help, of the psychiatry variety. And despite that, a Scot and a Brazilian persevered, because that's how we were raised in our respective countries, and for 12, 15 years, we made demonstration after demonstration suggesting that this was possible. And a brain-machine interface is not rocket science, it's just brain research. It's nothing but using sensors to read the electrical brainstorms that a brain is producing to generate the motor commands that have to be downloaded to the spinal cord, so we projected sensors that can read hundreds and now thousands of these brain cells simultaneously, and extract from these electrical signals the motor planning that the brain is generating to actually make us move into space. And by doing that, we converted these signals into digital commands that any mechanical, electronic, or even a virtual device can understand so that the subject can imagine what he, she or it wants to make move, and the device obeys that brain command. By sensorizing these devices with lots of different types of sensors, as you are going to see in a moment, we actually sent messages back to the brain to confirm that that voluntary motor will was being enacted, no matter where — next to the subject, next door, or across the planet. And as this message gave feedback back to the brain, the brain realized its goal: to make us move. So this is just one experiment that we published a few years ago, where a monkey, without moving its body, learned to control the movements of an avatar arm, a virtual arm that doesn't exist. What you're listening to is the sound of the brain of this monkey as it explores three different visually identical spheres in virtual space. And to get a reward, a drop of orange juice that monkeys love, this animal has to detect, select one of these objects by touching, not by seeing it, by touching it, because every time this virtual hand touches one of the objects, an electrical pulse goes back to the brain of the animal describing the fine texture of the surface of this object, so the animal can judge what is the correct object that he has to grab, and if he does that, he gets a reward without moving a muscle. The perfect Brazilian lunch: not moving a muscle and getting your orange juice. So as we saw this happening, we actually came and proposed the idea that we had published 15 years ago. We reenacted this paper. We got it out of the drawers, and we proposed that perhaps we could get a human being that is paralyzed to actually use the brain-machine interface to regain mobility. The idea was that if you suffered — and that can happen to any one of us. Let me tell you, it's very sudden. It's a millisecond of a collision, a car accident that transforms your life completely. If you have a complete lesion of the spinal cord, you cannot move because your brainstorms cannot reach your muscles. However, your brainstorms continue to be generated in your head. Paraplegic, quadriplegic patients dream about moving every night. They have that inside their head. The problem is how to get that code out of it and make the movement be created again. So what we proposed was, let's create a new body. Let's create a robotic vest. And that's exactly why Juliano could kick that ball just by thinking, because he was wearing the first brain-controlled robotic vest that can be used by paraplegic, quadriplegic patients to move and to regain feedback. That was the original idea, 15 years ago. What I'm going to show you is how 156 people from 25 countries all over the five continents of this beautiful Earth, dropped their lives, dropped their patents, dropped their dogs, wives, kids, school, jobs, and congregated to come to Brazil for 18 months to actually get this done. Because a couple years after Brazil was awarded the World Cup, we heard that the Brazilian government wanted to do something meaningful in the opening ceremony in the country that reinvented and perfected soccer until we met the Germans, of course. (Laughter) But that's a different talk, and a different neuroscientist needs to talk about that. But what Brazil wanted to do is to showcase a completely different country, a country that values science and technology, and can give a gift to millions, 25 million people around the world that cannot move any longer because of a spinal cord injury. Well, we went to the Brazilian government and to FIFA and proposed, well, let's have the kickoff of the 2014 World Cup be given by a Brazilian paraplegic using a brain-controlled exoskeleton that allows him to kick the ball and to feel the contact of the ball. They looked at us, thought that we were completely nuts, and said, "Okay, let's try." We had 18 months to do everything from zero, from scratch. We had no exoskeleton, we had no patients, we had nothing done. These people came all together and in 18 months, we got eight patients in a routine of training and basically built from nothing this guy, that we call Bra-Santos Dumont 1. The first brain-controlled exoskeleton to be built was named after the most famous Brazilian scientist ever, Alberto Santos Dumont, who, on October 19, 1901, created and flew himself the first controlled airship on air in Paris for a million people to see. Sorry, my American friends, I live in North Carolina, but it was two years before the Wright Brothers flew on the coast of North Carolina. (Applause) Flight control is Brazilian. (Laughter) So we went together with these guys and we basically put this exoskeleton together, 15 degrees of freedom, hydraulic machine that can be commanded by brain signals recorded by a non-invasive technology called electroencephalography that can basically allow the patient to imagine the movements and send his commands to the controls, the motors, and get it done. This exoskeleton was covered with an artificial skin invented by Gordon Cheng, one of my greatest friends, in Munich, to allow sensation from the joints moving and the foot touching the ground to be delivered back to the patient through a vest, a shirt. It is a smart shirt with micro-vibrating elements that basically delivers the feedback and fools the patient's brain by creating a sensation that it is not a machine that is carrying him, but it is he who is walking again. So we got this going, and what you'll see here is the first time one of our patients, Bruno, actually walked. And he takes a few seconds because we are setting everything, and you are going to see a blue light cutting in front of the helmet because Bruno is going to imagine the movement that needs to be performed, the computer is going to analyze it, Bruno is going to certify it, and when it is certified, the device starts moving under the command of Bruno's brain. And he just got it right, and now he starts walking. After nine years without being able to move, he is walking by himself. And more than that — (Applause) — more than just walking, he is feeling the ground, and if the speed of the exo goes up, he tells us that he is walking again on the sand of Santos, the beach resort where he used to go before he had the accident. That's why the brain is creating a new sensation in Bruno's head. So he walks, and at the end of the walk — I am running out of time already — he says, "You know, guys, I need to borrow this thing from you when I get married, because I wanted to walk to the priest and see my bride and actually be there by myself. Of course, he will have it whenever he wants. And this is what we wanted to show during the World Cup, and couldn't, because for some mysterious reason, FIFA cut its broadcast in half. What you are going to see very quickly is Juliano Pinto in the exo doing the kick a few minutes before we went to the pitch and did the real thing in front of the entire crowd, and the lights you are going to see just describe the operation. Basically, the blue lights pulsating indicate that the exo is ready to go. It can receive thoughts and it can deliver feedback, and when Juliano makes the decision to kick the ball, you are going to see two streams of green and yellow light coming from the helmet and going to the legs, representing the mental commands that were taken by the exo to actually make that happen. And in basically 13 seconds, Juliano actually did. You can see the commands. He gets ready, the ball is set, and he kicks. And the most amazing thing is, 10 seconds after he did that, and looked at us on the pitch, he told us, celebrating as you saw, "I felt the ball." And that's priceless. (Applause) So where is this going to go? I have two minutes to tell you that it's going to the limits of your imagination. Brain-actuating technology is here. This is the latest: We just published this a year ago, the first brain-to-brain interface that allows two animals to exchange mental messages so that one animal that sees something coming from the environment can send a mental SMS, a torpedo, a neurophysiological torpedo, to the second animal, and the second animal performs the act that he needed to perform without ever knowing what the environment was sending as a message, because the message came from the first animal's brain. So this is the first demo. I'm going to be very quick because I want to show you the latest. But what you see here is the first rat getting informed by a light that is going to show up on the left of the cage that he has to press the left cage to basically get a reward. He goes there and does it. And the same time, he is sending a mental message to the second rat that didn't see any light, and the second rat, in 70 percent of the times is going to press the left lever and get a reward without ever experiencing the light in the retina. Well, we took this to a little higher limit by getting monkeys to collaborate mentally in a brain net, basically to donate their brain activity and combine them to move the virtual arm that I showed you before, and what you see here is the first time the two monkeys combine their brains, synchronize their brains perfectly to get this virtual arm to move. One monkey is controlling the x dimension, the other monkey is controlling the y dimension. But it gets a little more interesting when you get three monkeys in there and you ask one monkey to control x and y, the other monkey to control y and z, and the third one to control x and z, and you make them all play the game together, moving the arm in 3D into a target to get the famous Brazilian orange juice. And they actually do. The black dot is the average of all these brains working in parallel, in real time. That is the definition of a biological computer, interacting by brain activity and achieving a motor goal. Where is this going? We have no idea. We're just scientists. (Laughter) We are paid to be children, to basically go to the edge and discover what is out there. But one thing I know: One day, in a few decades, when our grandchildren surf the Net just by thinking, or a mother donates her eyesight to an autistic kid who cannot see, or somebody speaks because of a brain-to-brain bypass, some of you will remember that it all started on a winter afternoon in a Brazilian soccer field with an impossible kick. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Bruno Giussani: Miguel, thank you for sticking to your time. I actually would have given you a couple more minutes, because there are a couple of points we want to develop, and, of course, clearly it seems that we need connected brains to figure out where this is going. So let's connect all this together. So if I'm understanding correctly, one of the monkeys is actually getting a signal and the other monkey is reacting to that signal just because the first one is receiving it and transmitting the neurological impulse. Miguel Nicolelis: No, it's a little different. No monkey knows of the existence of the other two monkeys. They are getting a visual feedback in 2D, but the task they have to accomplish is 3D. They have to move an arm in three dimensions. But each monkey is only getting the two dimensions on the video screen that the monkey controls. And to get that thing done, you need at least two monkeys to synchronize their brains, but the ideal is three. So what we found out is that when one monkey starts slacking down, the other two monkeys enhance their performance to get the guy to come back, so this adjusts dynamically, but the global synchrony remains the same. Now, if you flip without telling the monkey the dimensions that each brain has to control, like this guy is controlling x and y, but he should be controlling now y and z, instantaneously, that animal's brain forgets about the old dimensions and it starts concentrating on the new dimensions. So what I need to say is that no Turing machine, no computer can predict what a brain net will do. So we will absorb technology as part of us. Technology will never absorb us. It's simply impossible. BG: How many times have you tested this? And how many times have you succeeded versus failed? MN: Oh, tens of times. With the three monkeys? Oh, several times. I wouldn't be able to talk about this here unless I had done it a few times. And I forgot to mention, because of time, that just three weeks ago, a European group just demonstrated the first man-to-man brain-to-brain connection. BG: And how does that play? MN: There was one bit of information — big ideas start in a humble way — but basically the brain activity of one subject was transmitted to a second object, all non-invasive technology. So the first subject got a message, like our rats, a visual message, and transmitted it to the second subject. The second subject received a magnetic pulse in the visual cortex, or a different pulse, two different pulses. In one pulse, the subject saw something. On the other pulse, he saw something different. And he was able to verbally indicate what was the message the first subject was sending through the Internet across continents. Moderator: Wow. Okay, that's where we are going. That's the next TED Talk at the next conference. Miguel Nicolelis, thank you. MN: Thank you, Bruno. Thank you. |
To solve mass violence, look to locals | {0: 'Severine Autesserre traces civil war and endemic violence to its roots, and its resolution, in local and interpersonal conflicts.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | I want to speak about a forgotten conflict. It's a conflict that rarely hits the headlines. It happens right here, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now, most people outside of Africa don't know much about the war in Congo, so let me give you a couple of key facts. The Congolese conflict is the deadliest conflict since World War II. It has caused almost four million deaths. It has destabilized most of Central Africa for the past 18 years. It is the largest ongoing humanitarian crisis in the world. That's why I first went to Congo in 2001. I was a young humanitarian aid worker, and I met this woman who was my age. She was called Isabelle. Local militias had attacked Isabelle's village. They had killed many men, raped many women. They had looted everything. And then they wanted to take Isabelle, but her husband stepped in, and he said, "No, please don't take Isabelle. Take me instead." So he had gone to the forest with the militias, and Isabelle had never seen him again. Well, it's because of people like Isabelle and her husband that I have devoted my career to studying this war that we know so little about. Although there is one story about Congo that you may have heard. It's a story about minerals and rape. Policy statements and media reports both usually focus on a primary cause of violence in Congo — the illegal exploitation and trafficking of natural resources — and on a main consequence — sexual abuse of women and girls as a weapon of war. So, not that these two issues aren't important and tragic. They are. But today I want to tell you a different story. I want to tell you a story that emphasizes a core cause of the ongoing conflict. Violence in Congo is in large part driven by local bottom-up conflicts that international peace efforts have failed to help address. The story starts from the fact that not only is Congo notable for being the world's worst ongoing humanitarian crisis, but it is also home to some of the largest international peacebuilding efforts in the world. Congo hosts the largest and most expensive United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world. It was also the site of the first European-led peacekeeping mission, and for its first cases ever, the International Criminal Court chose to prosecute Congolese warlords. In 2006, when Congo held the first free national elections in its history, many observers thought that an end to violence in the region had finally come. The international community lauded the successful organization of these elections as finally an example of successful international intervention in a failed state. But the eastern provinces have continued to face massive population displacements and horrific human rights violations. Shortly before I went back there last summer, there was a horrible massacre in the province of South Kivu. Thirty-three people were killed. They were mostly women and children, and many of them were hacked to death. During the past eight years, fighting in the eastern provinces has regularly reignited full-scale civil and international war. So basically, every time we feel that we are on the brink of peace, the conflict explodes again. Why? Why have the massive international efforts failed to help Congo achieve lasting peace and security? Well, my answer to this question revolves around two central observations. First, one of the main reasons for the continuation of violence in Congo is fundamentally local — and when I say local, I really mean at the level of the individual, the family, the clan, the municipality, the community, the district, sometimes the ethnic group. For instance, you remember the story of Isabelle that I told you. Well, the reason why militias had attacked Isabelle's village was because they wanted to take the land that the villagers needed to cultivate food and to survive. The second central observation is that international peace efforts have failed to help address local conflicts because of the presence of a dominant peacebuilding culture. So what I mean is that Western and African diplomats, United Nations peacekeepers, donors, the staff of most nongovernmental organizations that work with the resolution of conflict, they all share a specific way of seeing the world. And I was one of these people, and I shared this culture, so I know all too well how powerful it is. Throughout the world, and throughout conflict zones, this common culture shapes the intervener's understanding of the causes of violence as something that is primarily located in the national and international spheres. It shapes our understanding of the path toward peace as something again that requires top-down intervention to address national and international tensions. And it shapes our understanding of the roles of foreign actors as engaging in national and international peace processes. Even more importantly, this common culture enables international peacebuilders to ignore the micro-level tensions that often jeopardize the macro-level settlements. So for instance, in Congo, because of how they are socialized and trained, United Nations officials, donors, diplomats, the staff of most nongovernmental organizations, they interpret continued fighting and massacres as a top-down problem. To them, the violence they see is the consequence of tensions between President Kabila and various national opponents, and tensions between Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. In addition, these international peacebuilders view local conflicts as simply the result of national and international tensions, insufficient state authority, and what they call the Congolese people's so-called inherent penchant for violence. The dominant culture also constructs intervention at the national and international levels as the only natural and legitimate task for United Nations staffers and diplomats. And it elevates the organization of general elections, which is now a sort of cure-all, as the most crucial state reconstruction mechanism over more effective state-building approaches. And that happens not only in Congo but also in many other conflict zones. But let's dig deeper, into the other main sources of violence. In Congo, continuing violence is motivated not only by the national and international causes but also by longstanding bottom-up agendas whose main instigators are villagers, traditional chiefs, community chiefs or ethnic leaders. Many conflicts revolve around political, social and economic stakes that are distinctively local. For instance, there is a lot of competition at the village or district level over who can be chief of village or chief of territory according to traditional law, and who can control the distribution of land and the exploitation of local mining sites. This competition often results in localized fighting, for instance in one village or territory, and quite frequently, it escalates into generalized fighting, so across a whole province, and even at times into neighboring countries. Take the conflict between Congolese of Rwandan descent and the so-called indigenous communities of the Kivus. This conflict started in the 1930s during Belgian colonization, when both communities competed over access to land and to local power. Then, in 1960, after Congolese independence, it escalated because each camp tried to align with national politicians, but still to advance their local agendas. And then, at the time of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, these local actors allied with Congolese and Rwandan armed groups, but still to advance their local agendas in the provinces of the Kivus. And since then, these local disputes over land and local power have fueled violence, and they have regularly jeopardized the national and international settlements. So we can wonder why in these circumstances the international peacebuilders have failed to help implement local peacebuilding programs. And the answer is that international interveners deem the resolution of grassroots conflict an unimportant, unfamiliar, and illegitimate task. The very idea of becoming involved at the local level clashes fundamentally with existing cultural norms, and it threatens key organizational interests. For instance, the very identity of the United Nations as this macro-level diplomatic organization would be upended if it were to refocus on local conflicts. And the result is that neither the internal resistance to the dominant ways of working nor the external shocks have managed to convince international actors that they should reevaluate their understanding of violence and intervention. And so far, there have been only very few exceptions. There have been exceptions, but only very few exceptions, to this broad pattern. So to wrap up, the story I just told you is a story about how a dominant peacebuilding culture shapes the intervener's understanding of what the causes of violence are, how peace is made, and what interventions should accomplish. These understandings enable international peacebuilders to ignore the micro-level foundations that are so necessary for sustainable peace. The resulting inattention to local conflicts leads to inadequate peacebuilding in the short term and potential war resumption in the long term. And what's fascinating is that this analysis helps us to better understand many cases of lasting conflict and international intervention failures, in Africa and elsewhere. Local conflicts fuel violence in most war and post-war environments, from Afghanistan to Sudan to Timor-Leste, and in the rare cases where there have been comprehensive, bottom-up peacebuilding initiatives, these attempts have been successful at making peace sustainable. One of the best examples is the contrast between the relatively peaceful situation in Somaliland, which benefited from sustained grassroots peacebuilding initiatives, and the violence prevalent in the rest of Somalia, where peacebuilding has been mostly top-down. And there are several other cases in which local, grassroots conflict resolution has made a crucial difference. So if we want international peacebuilding to work, in addition to any top-down intervention, conflicts must be resolved from the bottom up. And again, it's not that national and international tensions don't matter. They do. And it's not that national and international peacebuilding isn't necessary. It is. Instead, it is that both macro-level and micro-level peacebuilding are needed to make peace sustainable, and local nongovernmental organizations, local authorities and civil society representatives should be the main actors in the bottom-up process. So of course, there are obstacles. Local actors often lack the funding and sometimes the logistical means and the technical capacity to implement effective, local peacebuilding programs. So international actors should expand their funding and support for local conflict resolution. As for Congo, what can be done? After two decades of conflict and the deaths of millions, it's clear that we need to change our approach. Based on my field research, I believe that international and Congolese actors should pay more attention to the resolution of land conflict and the promotion of inter-community reconciliation. So for instance, in the province of the Kivus, the Life and Peace Institute and its Congolese partners have set up inter-community forums to discuss the specifics of local conflicts over land, and these forums have found solutions to help manage the violence. That's the kind of program that is sorely needed throughout eastern Congo. It's with programs like this that we can help people like Isabelle and her husband. So these will not be magic wands, but because they take into account deeply rooted causes of the violence, they could definitely be game-changers. Thank you. (Applause) |
My mother’s strange definition of empowerment | {0: 'Khadija Gbla is an award-winning inspirational speaker, facilitator and cross-cultural consultant. She is a former refugee from Sierra Leone currently living in Australia.'} | TEDxCanberra | Hi. Today I'm going to share my personal journey with female genital mutilation, FGM. Feel free to cry, laugh, cross your legs, or do anything your body feels like doing. I'm not going to name the things your body does. I was born in Sierra Leone. Did anybody watch "Blood Diamond"? If you have any thoughts — I don't have any diamonds on me, by the way. If you have heard of Ebola, well, that's in Sierra Leone as well. I don't have Ebola. You're all safe. Don't rush to the door. Be seated. You're fine. I was checked before I got here. My grandfather had three wives. Don't ask me why a man needs more than one wife. Men, do you need more than one wife? I don't think so. There you go. He was looking for a heart attack, that's what I say. Oh yeah, he was. When I was three, war broke out in Sierra Leone in 1991. I remember literally going to bed one night, everything was good. The next day, I woke up, bombs were dropping everywhere, and people were trying to kill me and my family. We escaped the war and ended up in Gambia, in West Africa. Ebola is there as well. Stay away from it. While we were there as refugees, we didn't know what was going to become of us. My mom applied for refugee status. She's a wonderful, smart woman, that one, and we were lucky. Australia said, we will take you in. Good job, Aussies. Before we were meant to travel, my mom came home one day, and said, "We're going on a little holiday, a little trip." She put us in a car, and we drove for hours and ended up in a bush in a remote area in Gambia. In this bush, we found two huts. An old lady came towards us. She was ethnic-looking, very old. She had a chat with my mom, and went back. Then she came back and walked away from us into a second hut. I'm standing there thinking, "This is very confusing. I don't know what's going on." The next thing I knew, my mom took me into this hut. She took my clothes off, and then she pinned me down on the floor. I struggled and tried to get her off me, but I couldn't. Then the old lady came towards me with a rusty-looking knife, one of the sharp knives, orange-looking, has never seen water or sunlight before. I thought she was going to slaughter me, but she didn't. She slowly slid down my body and ended up where my vagina is. She took hold of what I now know to be my clitoris, she took that rusty knife, and started cutting away, inch by inch. I screamed, I cried, and asked my mom to get off me so this pain will stop, but all she did was say, "Be quiet." This old lady sawed away at my flesh for what felt like forever, and then when she was done, she threw that piece of flesh across the floor as if it was the most disgusting thing she's ever touched. They both got off me, and left me there bleeding, crying, and confused as to what just happened. We never talked about this again. Very soon, we found that we were coming to Australia, and this is when you had the Sydney Olympics at the time, and people said we were going to the end of the world, there was nowhere else to go after Australia. Yeah, that comforted us a bit. It took us three days to get here. We went to Senegal, then France, and then Singapore. We went to the bathroom to wash our hands. We spent 15 minutes opening the tap like this. Then somebody came in, slid their hand under and water came out, and we thought, is this what we're in for? Like, seriously. We got to Adelaide, small place, where literally they dumped us in Adelaide, that's what I would say. They dumped us there. We were very grateful. We settled and we liked it. We were like, "We're home, we're here." Then somebody took us to Rundle Mall. Adelaide has only one mall. It's this small place. And we saw a lot of Asian people. My mom said all of a sudden, panicking, "You brought us to the wrong place. You must take us back to Australia." Yeah. It had to be explained to her that there were a lot of Asians in Australia and we were in the right place. So fine, it's all good. My mom then had this brilliant idea that I should go to a girls school because they were less racist. I don't know where she read that publication. (Laughter) Never found evidence of it to this day. Six hundred white kids, and I was the only black child there. No, I was the only person with a bit of a color on me. Let me say that. Chocolate color. There were no Asians, no indigenous. All we had was some tan girls, girls who felt the need to be under the sun. It wasn't the same as my chocolate, though. Not the same. Settling in Australia was quite hard, but it became harder when I started volunteering for an organization called Women's Health Statewide, and I joined their female genital mutilation program without any awareness of what this program was actually about, or that it related to me in any way. I spent months educating nurses and doctors about what female genital mutilation was and where it was practiced: Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and now, Australia and London and America, because, as we all know, we live in a multicultural society, and people who come from those backgrounds come with their culture, and sometimes they have cultural practices that we may not agree with, but they continue to practice them. One day, I was looking at the chart of the different types of female genital mutilation, FGM, I will just say FGM for short. Type I is when they cut off the hood. Type II is when they cut off the whole clitoris and some of your labia majora, or your outer lips, and Type III is when they cut off the whole clitoris and then they sew you up so you only have a little hole to pee and have your period. My eyes went onto Type II. Before all of this, I pretty much had amnesia. I was in so much shock and traumatized by what had happened, I didn't remember any of it. Yes, I was aware something bad happened to me, but I had no recollection of what had happened. I knew I had a scar down there, but I thought everybody had a scar down there. This had happened to everybody else. But when I looked at Type II, it all came back to me. I remembered what was done to me. I remembered being in that hut with that old lady and my mom holding me down. Words cannot express the pain I felt, the confusion that I felt, because now I realized that what was done to me was a terrible thing that in this society was called barbaric, it was called mutilation. My mother had said it was called circumcision, but here it was mutilation. I was thinking, I'm mutilated? I'm a mutilated person. Oh my God. And then the anger came. I was a black angry woman. (Laughter) Oh yeah. A little one, but angry nevertheless. I went home and said to my mom, "You did something." This is not the African thing to do, pointing at your mother, but hey, I was ready for any consequences. "You did something to me." She's like, "What are you talking about, Khadija?" She's used to me mouthing off. I'm like, "Those years ago, You circumcised me. You cut away something that belonged to me." She said, "Yes, I did. I did it for your own good. It was in your best interest. Your grandmother did it to me, and I did it to you. It's made you a woman." I'm like, "How?" She said, "You're empowered, Khadija. Do you get itchy down there?" I'm like, "No, why would I get itchy down there?" She said, "Well, if you were not circumcised, you would get itchy down there. Women who are not circumcised get itchy all the time. Then they sleep around with everybody. You are not going to sleep around with anybody." And I thought, her definition of empowerment was very strange. (Laughter) That was the end of our first conversation. I went back to school. These were the days when we had Dolly and Girlfriend magazines. There was always the sealed section. Anybody remember those sealed sections? The naughty bits, you know? Oh yeah, I love those. (Laughter) Anyway, there was always an article about pleasure and relationships and, of course, sex. But it always assumed that you had a clitoris, though, and I thought, this doesn't fit me. This doesn't talk about people like me. I don't have a clitoris. I watched TV and those women would moan like, "Oh! Oh!" I was like, these people and their damned clitoris. (Laughter) What is a woman without a clitoris supposed to do with her life? That's what I want to know. I want to do that too — "Oh! Oh!" and all of that. Didn't happen. So I came home once again and said to my mom, "Dolly and Girlfriend said I deserve pleasure, that I should be having orgasms, and that white men should figure out how to find the clitoris." Apparently, white men have a problem finding the clitoris. (Laughter) Just saying, it wasn't me. It was Dolly that said that. And I thought to myself, I had an inner joke in my head that said, "I will marry a white man. He won't have that problem with me." (Laughter) So I said to my mom, "Dolly and Girlfriend said I deserve pleasure, and do you know what you have taken away from me, what you have denied me? You have invaded me in the most sacred way. I want pleasure. I want to get horny, dammit, as well." And she said to me, "Who is Dolly and Girlfriend? Are they your new friends, Khadija?" I was like, "No, they're not. That's a magazine, mom, a magazine." She didn't get it. We came from two different worlds. When she was growing up, not having a clitoris was the norm. It was celebrated. I was an African Australian girl. I lived in a society that was very clitoris-centric. It was all about the damn clitoris! And I didn't have one! That pissed me off. So once I went through this strange phase of anger and pain and confusion, I remember booking an appointment with my therapist. Yes, I'm an African who has a therapist. There you go. And I said to her, "I was 13. I was a child. I was settling in a new country, I was dealing with racism and discrimination, English is my third language, and then there it was." I said to her, "I feel like I'm not a woman because of what was done to me. I feel incomplete. Am I going to be asexual?" Because from what I knew about FGM, the whole aim of it was to control the sexuality of women. It's so that we don't have any sexual desire. And I said, "Am I asexual now? Will I just live the rest of my life not feeling like having sex, not enjoying sex?" She couldn't answer my questions, so they went unanswered. When I started having my period around the age of 14, I realized I didn't have normal periods because of FGM. My periods were heavy, they were long, and they were very painful. Then they told me I had fibroids. They're like these little balls sitting there. One was covering one of my ovaries. And there came then the big news. "We don't think you can have children, Khadija." And once again, I was an angry black woman. I went home and I said to my mom, "Your act, your action, no matter what your may defense may be" — because she thought she did it out love — "what you did out of love is harming me, and it's hurting me. What do you have to say for that?" She said, "I did what I had to do as a mother." I'm still waiting for an apology, by the way. Then I got married. And once again — FGM is like the gift that keeps giving. You figure that out very soon. Sex was very painful. It hurt all the time. And of course I realized, they said, "You can't have kids." I thought, "Wow, is this my existence? Is this what life is all about?" I'm proud to tell you, five months ago, I was told I was pregnant. (Applause) I am the lucky girl. There are so many women out there who have gone through FGM who have infertility. I know a nine-year-old girl who has incontinence, constant infections, pain. It's that gift. It doesn't stop giving. It affects every area of your life, and this happened to me because I was born a girl in the wrong place. That's why it happened to me. I channel all that anger, all that pain, into advocacy because I needed my pain to be worth something. So I'm the director of an organization called No FGM Australia. You heard me right. Why No FGM Australia? FGM is in Australia. Two days ago, I had to call Child Protective Services, because somewhere in Australia, there's a four-year old there's a four-year-old whose mom is planning on performing FGM on her. That child is in kindy. I'll let that sink in: four years old. A couple of months ago, I met a lady who is married to a Malaysian man. Her husband came home one day and said he was going to take their daughters back to Malaysia to cut off their clitoris. And she said, "Why?" He said they were dirty. And she said, "Well, you married me." He said, "Oh, this is my cultural belief." They then went into a whole discussion where she said to him, "Over my dead body will you do that to my daughters." But imagine if this woman wasn't aware of what FGM was, if they never had that conversation? Her children would have been flown over to Malaysia and they would have come back changed for the rest of their lives. Do you know the millions of dollars it would take us to deal with an issue like that? [Three children per day] in Australia are at risk of having FGM performed on them. This is an Australian problem, people. It's not an African problem. It's not a Middle Eastern problem. It's not white, it's not black, it has no color, it's everybody's problem. FGM is child abuse. It's violence against women. It's saying that women don't have a right to sexual pleasure. It says we don't have a right to our bodies. Well, I say no to that, and you know what? Bullshit. That's what I have to say to that. (Applause) I am proud to say that I'm doing my part in ending FGM. What are you going to do? There may be a child in your classroom who is at risk of FGM. There may be a patient who comes to your hospital who is at risk of FGM. But this is the reality, that even in our beloved Australia, the most wonderful place in the world, children are being abused because of a culture. Culture should not be a defense for child abuse. I want ever single one of you to see FGM as an issue for you. Make it personal. It could be your daughter, your sister, your cousin. I can't fight FGM alone. I could try, but I can't. So my appeal to you is, please join me. Sign my petition on Change.org and type in Khadija, my name, and it'll come up, and sign it. The aim of that is to get support for FGM victims in Australia and to protect little girls growing up here to not have this evil done to them, because every child has a right to pleasure. Every child has a right to their bodies being left intact, and dammit, ever child has a right to a clitoris. So please join me in ending this act. My favorite quote is, "All it takes for evil to prevail is for a few good men and women to do nothing." Are you going to let this evil of female genital mutilation to prevail in Australia? I don't think so, so please join me in ensuring that it ends in my generation. Thank you. (Applause) |
The beauty and diversity of Muslim life | {0: "Bassam Tariq delights in making eclectic career choices. A blogger, a filmmaker, and a butcher's shop owner, the common theme linking everything together is his boundless celebration of humanity."} | TEDGlobal 2014 | I'm a blogger, a filmmaker and a butcher, and I'll explain how these identities come together. It started four years ago, when a friend and I opened our first Ramadan fast at one of the busiest mosques in New York City. Crowds of men with beards and skullcaps were swarming the streets. It was an FBI agent's wet dream. (Laughter) But being a part of this community, we knew how welcoming this space was. For years, I'd seen photos of this space being documented as a lifeless and cold monolith, much like the stereotypical image painted of the American Muslim experience. Frustrated by this myopic view, my friend and I had this crazy idea: Let's break our fast at a different mosque in a different state each night of Ramadan and share those stories on a blog. We called it "30 Mosques in 30 Days," and we drove to all the 50 states and shared stories from over 100 vastly different Muslim communities, ranging from the Cambodian refugees in the L.A. projects to the black Sufis living in the woods of South Carolina. What emerged was a beautiful and complicated portrait of America. The media coverage forced local journalists to revisit their Muslim communities, but what was really exciting was seeing people from around the world being inspired to take their own 30-mosque journey. There were even these two NFL athletes who took a sabbatical from the league to do so. And as 30 Mosques was blossoming around the world, I was actually stuck in Pakistan working on a film. My codirector, Omar, and I were at a breaking point with many of our friends on how to position the film. The movie is called "These Birds Walk," and it is about wayward street kids who are struggling to find some semblance of family. We focus on the complexities of youth and family discord, but our friends kept on nudging us to comment on drones and target killings to make the film "more relevant," essentially reducing these people who have entrusted us with their stories into sociopolitical symbols. Of course, we didn't listen to them, and instead, we championed the tender gestures of love and headlong flashes of youth. The agenda behind our cinematic immersion was only empathy, an emotion that's largely deficient from films that come from our region of the world. And as "These Birds Walk" played at film festivals and theaters internationally, I finally had my feet planted at home in New York, and with all the extra time and still no real money, my wife tasked me to cook more for us. And whenever I'd go to the local butcher to purchase some halal meat, something felt off. For those that don't know, halal is a term used for meat that is raised and slaughtered humanely following very strict Islamic guidelines. Unfortunately, the majority of halal meat in America doesn't rise to the standard that my faith calls for. The more I learned about these unethical practices, the more violated I felt, particularly because businesses from my own community were the ones taking advantage of my orthodoxy. So, with emotions running high, and absolutely no experience in butchery, some friends and I opened a meat store in the heart of the East Village fashion district. (Laughter) We call it Honest Chops, and we're reclaiming halal by sourcing organic, humanely raised animals, and by making it accessible and affordable to working-class families. There's really nothing like it in America. The unbelievable part is actually that 90 percent of our in-store customers are not even Muslim. For many, it is their first time interacting with Islam on such an intimate level. So all these disparate projects — (Laughter) — are the result of a restlessness. They are a visceral response to the businesses and curators who work hard to oversimplify my beliefs and my community, and the only way to beat their machine is to play by different rules. We must fight with an inventive approach. With the trust, with the access, with the love that only we can bring, we must unapologetically reclaim our beliefs in every moving image, in every cut of meat, because if we whitewash our stories for the sake of mass appeal, not only will we fail, but we will be trumped by those with more money and more resources to tell our stories. But the call for creative courage is not for novelty or relevance. It is simply because our communities are so damn unique and so damn beautiful. They demand us to find uncompromising ways to be acknowledged and respected. Thank you. (Applause) |
Online social change: easy to organize, hard to win | {0: 'Techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci asks big questions about our societies and our lives, as both algorithms and digital connectivity spread.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | So recently, we heard a lot about how social media helps empower protest, and that's true, but after more than a decade of studying and participating in multiple social movements, I've come to realize that the way technology empowers social movements can also paradoxically help weaken them. This is not inevitable, but overcoming it requires diving deep into what makes success possible over the long term. And the lessons apply in multiple domains. Now, take Turkey's Gezi Park protests, July 2013, which I went back to study in the field. Twitter was key to its organizing. It was everywhere in the park — well, along with a lot of tear gas. It wasn't all high tech. But the people in Turkey had already gotten used to the power of Twitter because of an unfortunate incident about a year before when military jets had bombed and killed 34 Kurdish smugglers near the border region, and Turkish media completely censored this news. Editors sat in their newsrooms and waited for the government to tell them what to do. One frustrated journalist could not take this anymore. He purchased his own plane ticket, and went to the village where this had occurred. And he was confronted by this scene: a line of coffins coming down a hill, relatives wailing. He later he told me how overwhelmed he felt, and didn't know what to do, so he took out his phone, like any one of us might, and snapped that picture and tweeted it out. And voila, that picture went viral and broke the censorship and forced mass media to cover it. So when, a year later, Turkey's Gezi protests happened, it started as a protest about a park being razed, but became an anti-authoritarian protest. It wasn't surprising that media also censored it, but it got a little ridiculous at times. When things were so intense, when CNN International was broadcasting live from Istanbul, CNN Turkey instead was broadcasting a documentary on penguins. Now, I love penguin documentaries, but that wasn't the news of the day. An angry viewer put his two screens together and snapped that picture, and that one too went viral, and since then, people call Turkish media the penguin media. (Laughter) But this time, people knew what to do. They just took out their phones and looked for actual news. Better, they knew to go to the park and take pictures and participate and share it more on social media. Digital connectivity was used for everything from food to donations. Everything was organized partially with the help of these new technologies. And using Internet to mobilize and publicize protests actually goes back a long way. Remember the Zapatistas, the peasant uprising in the southern Chiapas region of Mexico led by the masked, pipe-smoking, charismatic Subcomandante Marcos? That was probably the first movement that got global attention thanks to the Internet. Or consider Seattle '99, when a multinational grassroots effort brought global attention to what was then an obscure organization, the World Trade Organization, by also utilizing these digital technologies to help them organize. And more recently, movement after movement has shaken country after country: the Arab uprisings from Bahrain to Tunisia to Egypt and more; indignados in Spain, Italy, Greece; the Gezi Park protests; Taiwan; Euromaidan in Ukraine; Hong Kong. And think of more recent initiatives, like the #BringBackOurGirls hashtags. Nowadays, a network of tweets can unleash a global awareness campaign. A Facebook page can become the hub of a massive mobilization. Amazing. But think of the moments I just mentioned. The achievements they were able to have, their outcomes, are not really proportional to the size and energy they inspired. The hopes they rightfully raised are not really matched by what they were able to have as a result in the end. And this raises a question: As digital technology makes things easier for movements, why haven't successful outcomes become more likely as well? In embracing digital platforms for activism and politics, are we overlooking some of the benefits of doing things the hard way? Now, I believe so. I believe that the rule of thumb is: Easier to mobilize does not always mean easier to achieve gains. Now, to be clear, technology does empower in multiple ways. It's very powerful. In Turkey, I watched four young college students organize a countrywide citizen journalism network called 140Journos that became the central hub for uncensored news in the country. In Egypt, I saw another four young people use digital connectivity to organize the supplies and logistics for 10 field hospitals, very large operations, during massive clashes near Tahrir Square in 2011. And I asked the founder of this effort, called Tahrir Supplies, how long it took him to go from when he had the idea to when he got started. "Five minutes," he said. Five minutes. And he had no training or background in logistics. Or think of the Occupy movement which rocked the world in 2011. It started with a single email from a magazine, Adbusters, to 90,000 subscribers in its list. About two months after that first email, there were in the United States 600 ongoing occupations and protests. Less than one month after the first physical occupation in Zuccotti Park, a global protest was held in about 82 countries, 950 cities. It was one of the largest global protests ever organized. Now, compare that to what the Civil Rights Movement had to do in 1955 Alabama to protest the racially segregated bus system, which they wanted to boycott. They'd been preparing for many years and decided it was time to swing into action after Rosa Parks was arrested. But how do you get the word out — tomorrow we're going to start the boycott — when you don't have Facebook, texting, Twitter, none of that? So they had to mimeograph 52,000 leaflets by sneaking into a university duplicating room and working all night, secretly. They then used the 68 African-American organizations that criss-crossed the city to distribute those leaflets by hand. And the logistical tasks were daunting, because these were poor people. They had to get to work, boycott or no, so a massive carpool was organized, again by meeting. No texting, no Twitter, no Facebook. They had to meet almost all the time to keep this carpool going. Today, it would be so much easier. We could create a database, available rides and what rides you need, have the database coordinate, and use texting. We wouldn't have to meet all that much. But again, consider this: the Civil Rights Movement in the United States navigated a minefield of political dangers, faced repression and overcame, won major policy concessions, navigated and innovated through risks. In contrast, three years after Occupy sparked that global conversation about inequality, the policies that fueled it are still in place. Europe was also rocked by anti-austerity protests, but the continent didn't shift its direction. In embracing these technologies, are we overlooking some of the benefits of slow and sustained? To understand this, I went back to Turkey about a year after the Gezi protests and I interviewed a range of people, from activists to politicians, from both the ruling party and the opposition party and movements. I found that the Gezi protesters were despairing. They were frustrated, and they had achieved much less than what they had hoped for. This echoed what I'd been hearing around the world from many other protesters that I'm in touch with. And I've come to realize that part of the problem is that today's protests have become a bit like climbing Mt. Everest with the help of 60 Sherpas, and the Internet is our Sherpa. What we're doing is taking the fast routes and not replacing the benefits of the slower work. Because, you see, the kind of work that went into organizing all those daunting, tedious logistical tasks did not just take care of those tasks, they also created the kind of organization that could think together collectively and make hard decisions together, create consensus and innovate, and maybe even more crucially, keep going together through differences. So when you see this March on Washington in 1963, when you look at that picture, where this is the march where Martin Luther King gave his famous "I have a dream" speech, 1963, you don't just see a march and you don't just hear a powerful speech, you also see the painstaking, long-term work that can put on that march. And if you're in power, you realize you have to take the capacity signaled by that march, not just the march, but the capacity signaled by that march, seriously. In contrast, when you look at Occupy's global marches that were organized in two weeks, you see a lot of discontent, but you don't necessarily see teeth that can bite over the long term. And crucially, the Civil Rights Movement innovated tactically from boycotts to lunch counter sit-ins to pickets to marches to freedom rides. Today's movements scale up very quickly without the organizational base that can see them through the challenges. They feel a little like startups that got very big without knowing what to do next, and they rarely manage to shift tactically because they don't have the depth of capacity to weather such transitions. Now, I want to be clear: The magic is not in the mimeograph. It's in that capacity to work together, think together collectively, which can only be built over time with a lot of work. To understand all this, I interviewed a top official from the ruling party in Turkey, and I ask him, "How do you do it?" They too use digital technology extensively, so that's not it. So what's the secret? Well, he told me. He said the key is he never took sugar with his tea. I said, what has that got to do with anything? Well, he said, his party starts getting ready for the next election the day after the last one, and he spends all day every day meeting with voters in their homes, in their wedding parties, circumcision ceremonies, and then he meets with his colleagues to compare notes. With that many meetings every day, with tea offered at every one of them, which he could not refuse, because that would be rude, he could not take even one cube of sugar per cup of tea, because that would be many kilos of sugar, he can't even calculate how many kilos, and at that point I realized why he was speaking so fast. We had met in the afternoon, and he was already way over-caffeinated. But his party won two major elections within a year of the Gezi protests with comfortable margins. To be sure, governments have different resources to bring to the table. It's not the same game, but the differences are instructive. And like all such stories, this is not a story just of technology. It's what technology allows us to do converging with what we want to do. Today's social movements want to operate informally. They do not want institutional leadership. They want to stay out of politics because they fear corruption and cooptation. They have a point. Modern representative democracies are being strangled in many countries by powerful interests. But operating this way makes it hard for them to sustain over the long term and exert leverage over the system, which leads to frustrated protesters dropping out, and even more corrupt politics. And politics and democracy without an effective challenge hobbles, because the causes that have inspired the modern recent movements are crucial. Climate change is barreling towards us. Inequality is stifling human growth and potential and economies. Authoritarianism is choking many countries. We need movements to be more effective. Now, some people have argued that the problem is today's movements are not formed of people who take as many risks as before, and that is not true. From Gezi to Tahrir to elsewhere, I've seen people put their lives and livelihoods on the line. It's also not true, as Malcolm Gladwell claimed, that today's protesters form weaker virtual ties. No, they come to these protests, just like before, with their friends, existing networks, and sometimes they do make new friends for life. I still see the friends that I made in those Zapatista-convened global protests more than a decade ago, and the bonds between strangers are not worthless. When I got tear-gassed in Gezi, people I didn't know helped me and one another instead of running away. In Tahrir, I saw people, protesters, working really hard to keep each other safe and protected. And digital awareness-raising is great, because changing minds is the bedrock of changing politics. But movements today have to move beyond participation at great scale very fast and figure out how to think together collectively, develop strong policy proposals, create consensus, figure out the political steps and relate them to leverage, because all these good intentions and bravery and sacrifice by itself are not going to be enough. And there are many efforts. In New Zealand, a group of young people are developing a platform called Loomio for participatory decision making at scale. In Turkey, 140Journos are holding hack-a-thons so that they support communities as well as citizen journalism. In Argentina, an open-source platform called DemocracyOS is bringing participation to parliaments and political parties. These are all great, and we need more, but the answer won't just be better online decision-making, because to update democracy, we are going to need to innovate at every level, from the organizational to the political to the social. Because to succeed over the long term, sometimes you do need tea without sugar along with your Twitter. Thank you. (Applause) |
Humanity vs. Ebola. How we could win a terrifying war | {0: 'As the Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization’s Polio and Emergencies Cluster, Bruce Aylward works to ensure that polio stays under control and that the world is prepared to respond to health crises.'} | TEDxPlaceDesNations | When I was invited to give this talk a couple of months ago, we discussed a number of titles with the organizers, and a lot of different items were kicked around and were discussed. But nobody suggested this one, and the reason for that was two months ago, Ebola was escalating exponentially and spreading over wider geographic areas than we had ever seen, and the world was terrified, concerned and alarmed by this disease, in a way we've not seen in recent history. But today, I can stand here and I can talk to you about beating Ebola because of people whom you've never heard of, people like Peter Clement, a Liberian doctor who's working in Lofa County, a place that many of you have never heard of, probably, in Liberia. The reason that Lofa County is so important is because about five months ago, when the epidemic was just starting to escalate, Lofa County was right at the center, the epicenter of this epidemic. At that time, MSF and the treatment center there, they were seeing dozens of patients every single day, and these patients, these communities were becoming more and more terrified as time went by, with this disease and what it was doing to their families, to their communities, to their children, to their relatives. And so Peter Clement was charged with driving that 12-hour-long rough road from Monrovia, the capital, up to Lofa County, to try and help bring control to the escalating epidemic there. And what Peter found when he arrived was the terror that I just mentioned to you. So he sat down with the local chiefs, and he listened. And what he heard was heartbreaking. He heard about the devastation and the desperation of people affected by this disease. He heard the heartbreaking stories about not just the damage that Ebola did to people, but what it did to families and what it did to communities. And he listened to the local chiefs there and what they told him — They said, "When our children are sick, when our children are dying, we can't hold them at a time when we want to be closest to them. When our relatives die, we can't take care of them as our tradition demands. We are not allowed to wash the bodies to bury them the way our communities and our rituals demand. And for this reason, they were deeply disturbed, deeply alarmed and the entire epidemic was unraveling in front of them. People were turning on the healthcare workers who had come, the heroes who had come to try and help save the community, to help work with the community, and they were unable to access them. And what happened then was Peter explained to the leaders. The leaders listened. They turned the tables. And Peter explained what Ebola was. He explained what the disease was. He explained what it did to their communities. And he explained that Ebola threatened everything that made us human. Ebola means you can't hold your children the way you would in this situation. You can't bury your dead the way that you would. You have to trust these people in these space suits to do that for you. And ladies and gentlemen, what happened then was rather extraordinary: The community and the health workers, Peter, they sat down together and they put together a new plan for controlling Ebola in Lofa County. And the reason that this is such an important story, ladies and gentlemen, is because today, this county, which is right at the center of this epidemic you've been watching, you've been seeing in the newspapers, you've been seeing on the television screens, today Lofa County is nearly eight weeks without seeing a single case of Ebola. (Applause) Now, this doesn't mean that the job is done, obviously. There's still a huge risk that there will be additional cases there. But what it does teach us is that Ebola can be beaten. That's the key thing. Even on this scale, even with the rapid kind of growth that we saw in this environment here, we now know Ebola can be beaten. When communities come together with health care workers, work together, that's when this disease can be stopped. But how did Ebola end up in Lofa County in the first place? Well, for that, we have to go back 12 months, to the start of this epidemic. And as many of you know, this virus went undetected, it evaded detection for three or four months when it began. That's because this is not a disease of West Africa, it's a disease of Central Africa, half a continent away. People hadn't seen the disease before; health workers hadn't seen the disease before. They didn't know what they were dealing with, and to make it even more complicated, the virus itself was causing a symptom, a type of a presentation that wasn't classical of the disease. So people didn't even recognize the disease, people who knew Ebola. For that reason it evaded detection for some time, But contrary to public belief sometimes these days, once the virus was detected, there was a rapid surge in of support. MSF rapidly set up an Ebola treatment center, as many of you know, in the area. The World Health Organization and the partners that it works with deployed eventually hundreds of people over the next two months to be able to help track the virus. The problem, ladies and gentlemen, is by then, this virus, well known now as Ebola, had spread too far. It had already outstripped what was one of the largest responses that had been mounted so far to an Ebola outbreak. By the middle of the year, not just Guinea but now Sierra Leone and Liberia were also infected. As the virus was spreading geographically, the numbers were increasing and at this time, not only were hundreds of people infected and dying of the disease, but as importantly, the front line responders, the people who had gone to try and help, the health care workers, the other responders were also sick and dying by the dozens. The presidents of these countries recognized the emergencies. They met right around that time, they agreed on common action and they put together an emergency joint operation center in Conakry to try and work together to finish this disease and get it stopped, to implement the strategies we talked about. But what happened then was something we had never seen before with Ebola. What happened then was the virus, or someone sick with the virus, boarded an airplane, flew to another country, and for the first time, we saw in another distant country the virus pop up again. This time it was in Nigeria, in the teeming metropolis of Lagos, 21 million people. Now the virus was in that environment. And as you can anticipate, there was international alarm, international concern on a scale that we hadn't seen in recent years caused by a disease like this. The World Health Organization immediately called together an expert panel, looked at the situation, declared an international emergency. And in doing so, the expectation would be that there would be a huge outpouring of international assistance to help these countries which were in so much trouble and concern at that time. But what we saw was something very different. There was some great response. A number of countries came to assist — many, many NGOs and others, as you know, but at the same time, the opposite happened in many places. Alarm escalated, and very soon these countries found themselves not receiving the support they needed, but increasingly isolated. What we saw was commercial airlines [stopped] flying into these countries and people who hadn't even been exposed to the virus were no longer allowed to travel. This caused not only problems, obviously, for the countries themselves, but also for the response. Those organizations that were trying to bring people in, to try and help them respond to the outbreak, they could not get people on airplanes, they could not get them into the countries to be able to respond. In that situation, ladies and gentleman, a virus like Ebola takes advantage. And what we saw then was something also we hadn't seen before. Not only did this virus continue in the places where they'd already become infected, but then it started to escalate and we saw the case numbers that you see here, something we'd never seen before on such a scale, an exponential increase of Ebola cases not just in these countries or the areas already infected in these countries but also spreading further and deeper into these countries. Ladies and gentleman, this was one of the most concerning international emergencies in public health we've ever seen. And what happened in these countries then, many of you saw, again, on the television, read about in the newspapers, we saw the health system start to collapse under the weight of this epidemic. We saw the schools begin to close, markets no longer started, no longer functioned the way that they should in these countries. We saw that misinformation and misperceptions started to spread even faster through the communities, which became even more alarmed about the situation. They started to recoil from those people that you saw in those space suits, as they call them, who had come to help them. And then the situation deteriorated even further. The countries had to declare a state of emergency. Large populations needed to be quarantined in some areas, and then riots broke out. It was a very, very terrifying situation. Around the world, many people began to ask, can we ever stop Ebola when it starts to spread like this? And they started to ask, how well do we really know this virus? The reality is we don't know Ebola extremely well. It's a relatively modern disease in terms of what we know about it. We've known the disease only for 40 years, since it first popped up in Central Africa in 1976. But despite that, we do know many things: We know that this virus probably survives in a type of a bat. We know that it probably enters a human population when we come in contact with a wild animal that has been infected with the virus and probably sickened by it. Then we know that the virus spreads from person to person through contaminated body fluids. And as you've all seen, we know the horrific disease that it then causes in humans, where we see this disease cause severe fevers, diarrhea, vomiting, and then unfortunately, in 70 percent of the cases or often more, death. This is a very dangerous, debilitating, and deadly disease. But despite the fact that we've not known this disease for a particularly long time, and we don't know everything about it, we do know how to stop this disease. There are four things that are critical to stopping Ebola. First and foremost, the communities have got to understand this disease, they've got to understand how it spreads and how to stop it. And then we've got to be able to have systems that can find every single case, every contact of those cases, and begin to track the transmission chains so that you can stop transmission. We have to have treatment centers, specialized Ebola treatment centers, where the workers can be protected as they try to provide support to the people who are infected, so that they might survive the disease. And then for those who do die, we have to ensure there is a safe, but at the same time dignified, burial process, so that there is no spread at that time as well. So we do know how to stop Ebola, and these strategies work, ladies and gentlemen. The virus was stopped in Nigeria by these four strategies and the people implementing them, obviously. It was stopped in Senegal, where it had spread, and also in the other countries that were affected by this virus, in this outbreak. So there's no question that these strategies actually work. The big question, ladies and gentlemen, was whether these strategies could work on this scale, in this situation, with so many countries affected with the kind of exponential growth that you saw. That was the big question that we were facing just two or three months ago. Today we know the answer to that question. And we know that answer because of the extraordinary work of an incredible group of NGOs, of governments, of local leaders, of U.N. agencies and many humanitarian and other organizations that came and joined the fight to try and stop Ebola in West Africa. But what had to be done there was slightly different. These countries took those strategies I just showed you; the community engagement, the case finding, contact tracing, etc., and they turned them on their head. There was so much disease, they approached it differently. What they decided to do was they would first try and slow down this epidemic by rapidly building as many beds as possible in specialized treatment centers so that they could prevent the disease from spreading from those were infected. They would rapidly build out many, many burial teams so that they could safely deal with the dead, and with that, they would try and slow this outbreak to see if it could actually then be controlled using the classic approach of case finding and contact tracing. And when I went to West Africa about three months ago, when I was there what I saw was extraordinary. I saw presidents opening emergency operation centers themselves against Ebola so that they could personally coordinate and oversee and champion this surge of international support to try and stop this disease. We saw militaries from within those countries and from far beyond coming in to help build Ebola treatment centers that could be used to isolate those who were sick. We saw the Red Cross movement working with its partner agencies on the ground there to help train the communities so that they could actually safely bury their dead in a dignified manner themselves. And we saw the U.N. agencies, the World Food Program, build a tremendous air bridge that could get responders to every single corner of these countries rapidly to be able to implement the strategies that we just talked about. What we saw, ladies and gentlemen, which was probably most impressive, was this incredible work by the governments, by the leaders in these countries, with the communities, to try to ensure people understood this disease, understood the extraordinary things they would have to do to try and stop Ebola. And as a result, ladies and gentlemen, we saw something that we did not know only two or three months earlier, whether or not it would be possible. What we saw was what you see now in this graph, when we took stock on December 1. What we saw was we could bend that curve, so to speak, change this exponential growth, and bring some hope back to the ability to control this outbreak. And for this reason, ladies and gentlemen, there's absolutely no question now that we can catch up with this outbreak in West Africa and we can beat Ebola. The big question, though, that many people are asking, even when they saw this curve, they said, "Well, hang on a minute — that's great you can slow it down, but can you actually drive it down to zero?" We already answered that question back at the beginning of this talk, when I spoke about Lofa County in Liberia. We told you the story how Lofa County got to a situation where they have not seen Ebola for eight weeks. But there are similar stories from the other countries as well. From Gueckedou in Guinea, the first area where the first case was actually diagnosed. We've seen very, very few cases in the last couple of months, and here in Kenema, in Sierra Leone, another area in the epicenter, we have not seen the virus for more than a couple of weeks — way too early to declare victory, obviously, but evidence, ladies and gentlemen, not only can the response catch up to the disease, but this disease can be driven to zero. The challenge now, of course, is doing this on the scale needed right across these three countries, and that is a huge challenge. Because when you've been at something for this long, on this scale, two other big threats come in to join the virus. The first of those is complacency, the risk that as this disease curve starts to bend, the media look elsewhere, the world looks elsewhere. Complacency always a risk. And the other risk, of course, is when you've been working so hard for so long, and slept so few hours over the past months, people are tired, people become fatigued, and these new risks start to creep into the response. Ladies and gentlemen, I can tell you today I've just come back from West Africa. The people of these countries, the leaders of these countries, they are not complacent. They want to drive Ebola to zero in their countries. And these people, yes, they're tired, but they are not fatigued. They have an energy, they have a courage, they have the strength to get this finished. What they need, ladies and gentlemen, at this point, is the unwavering support of the international community, to stand with them, to bolster and bring even more support at this time, to get the job finished. Because finishing Ebola right now means turning the tables on this virus, and beginning to hunt it. Remember, this virus, this whole crisis, rather, started with one case, and is going to finish with one case. But it will only finish if those countries have got enough epidemiologists, enough health workers, enough logisticians and enough other people working with them to be able to find every one of those cases, track their contacts and make sure that this disease stops once and for all. Ladies and gentleman, Ebola can be beaten. Now we need you to take this story out to tell it to the people who will listen and educate them on what it means to beat Ebola, and more importantly, we need you to advocate with the people who can help us bring the resources we need to these countries, to beat this disease. There are a lot of people out there who will survive and will thrive, in part because of what you do to help us beat Ebola. Thank you. (Applause) |
9 myths about psychology, debunked | {0: 'Ben Ambridge is the author of "Psy-Q," a sparkling book debunking what we think we know about psychology.'} | TEDxYouth@Manchester | You've heard of your IQ, your general intelligence, but what's your Psy-Q? How much do you know about what makes you tick, and how good are you at predicting other people's behavior or even your own? And how much of what you think you know about psychology is wrong? Let's find out by counting down the top myths of psychology. You've probably heard it said that when it comes to their psychology, it's almost as if men are from Mars and women are from Venus. But how different are men and women, really? To find out, let's start by looking at something on which men and women really do differ and plotting some psychological gender differences on the same scale. One thing men and women do really differ on is how far they can throw a ball. So if we look at the data for men here, we see what is called a normal distribution curve. A few men can throw a ball really far, a few men, not far at all, but most, a kind of average distance. And women share the same distribution as well, but actually, there's quite a big difference. In fact, the average man can throw a ball further than about 98 percent of all women. Now let's look at what some psychological gender differences look like on the same standardized scale. Any psychologist will tell you that men are better at spatial awareness than women — things like map-reading, for example — and it's true. But let's have a look at the size of this difference. It's tiny; the lines are so close together, they almost overlap. In fact, the average woman is better than 33 percent of all men, and of course, if that was 50 percent, then the two genders would be exactly equal. It's worth bearing in mind that this difference and the next one I'll show you are pretty much the biggest psychological gender differences ever discovered in psychology. Here's the next one. Any psychologist will tell you that women are better with language and grammar than men. Here's performance on the standardized grammar test. There, the women. There go the men. Again, yes, women are better on average, but the lines are so close that 33 percent of men are better than the average woman. And again, if it was 50 percent, that would represent complete gender equality. So it's not really a case of Mars and Venus. It's more a case of, if anything, Mars and Snickers: basically the same, but one's maybe slightly nuttier than the other. When making a cake, do you prefer to use a recipe book with pictures? Yeah, a few people. Have a friend talk you through? Or have a go, making it up as you go along? Quite a few people there. OK, so if you said A, then this means that you're a visual learner, and you learn best when information is presented in a visual style. If you said B, it means you're an auditory learner, that you learn best when information is presented to you in an auditory format. And if you said C, it means that you're a kinesthetic learner, that you learn best when you get stuck in and do things with your hands. Except, of course, as you've probably guessed, that it doesn't, because the whole thing is a complete myth. Learning styles are made up and are not supported by scientific evidence. We know this because in tightly controlled experimental studies when learners are given material to learn, either in their preferred style or an opposite style, it makes no difference at all to the amount of information they retain. And if you think about it for just a second, it's obvious that this has to be true. It's obvious that the best presentation format depends not on you, but on what you're trying to learn. Could you learn to drive a car, for example, just by listening to someone telling you what to do, with no kinesthetic experience? Could you solve simultaneous equations by talking them through in your head, without writing them down? Could you revise for your architecture exams using interpretive dance if you're a kinesthetic learner? No; what you need to do is match the material to be learned to the presentation format, not you. I know many of you are A-level students that will have recently gotten your GCSE results. And if you didn't quite get what you were hoping for, then you can't really blame your learning style. But one thing that you might want to think about blaming is your genes. So what this is all about is that a recent study at University College London found that 58 percent of the variation between different students and their GCSE results was down to genetic factors. That sounds like a very precise figure. So how can we tell? Well, when we want to unpack the relative contributions of genes and the environment, what we can do is a twin study. Identical twins share 100 percent of their environment and 100 percent of their genes, whereas nonidentical twins share 100 percent of their environment, but just like any brother and sister, share only 50 percent of their genes. So by comparing how similar GCSE results are in identical twins versus nonidentical twins and doing some clever maths, we can get an idea of how much variation in performance is due to the environment, and how much is due to genes. And it turns out that it's about 58 percent due to genes. This isn't to undermine the hard work that you and your teachers here put in. If you didn't quite get the GCSE results that you were hoping for, then you can always try blaming your parents, or at least their genes. One thing that you shouldn't blame is being a left-brained or right-brained learner, because again, this is a myth. The myth here is that the left brain is logical, it's good with equations like this, and the right brain is more creative, so the right brain is better at music. But again, this is a myth, because nearly everything you do involves nearly all parts of your brain talking together, even just the most mundane thing like having a normal conversation. However, perhaps one reason why this myth has survived is that there is a slight grain of truth to it. A related version of the myth is that left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people, which kind of makes sense because your brain controls the opposite hand. So in left-handed people, the right side of the brain is slightly more active than the left side of the brain, and the idea is the right-hand side is more creative. Now, it isn't true per se that left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people. But what is true is that ambidextrous people, or people who use both hands for different tasks, are more creative thinkers than one-handed people, because being ambidextrous involves having both sides of the brain talk to each other a lot, which seems to be involved in creative and flexible thinking. The myth of the creative left-hander arises from the fact that being ambidextrous is more common amongst left-handers than right-handers, so a grain of truth in the idea of the creative left-hander, but not much. A related myth that you've probably heard of is that we only use 10 percent of our brains. This is, again, a complete myth. Nearly everything that we do, even the most mundane thing, uses nearly all of our brains. That said, it is of course true that most of us don't use our brainpower quite as well as we could. So what could we do to boost our brainpower? Maybe we could listen to a nice bit of Mozart. Have you heard of the idea of the Mozart effect? The idea is that listening to Mozart makes you smarter and improves your performance on IQ tests. Now again, what's interesting about this myth is that although it's basically a myth, there is a grain of truth to it. So the original study found that participants who were played Mozart music for a few minutes did better on a subsequent IQ test than participants who simply sat in silence. But a follow-up study recruited some people who liked Mozart music and then another group of people who were fans of the horror stories of Stephen King. And they played the people the music or the stories. The people who preferred Mozart music to the stories got a bigger IQ boost from the Mozart than the stories, but the people who preferred the stories to the Mozart music got a bigger IQ boost from listening to the Stephen King stories than the Mozart music. So the truth is that listening to something that you enjoy perks you up a bit and gives you a temporary IQ boost on a narrow range of tasks. There's no suggestion that listening to Mozart, or indeed Stephen King stories, is going to make you any smarter in the long run. Another version of the Mozart myth is that listening to Mozart can make you not only cleverer but healthier, too. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be true of someone who listened to the music of Mozart almost every day, Mozart himself, who suffered from gonorrhea, smallpox, arthritis, and, what most people think eventually killed him in the end, syphilis. This suggests that Mozart should have been a bit more careful, perhaps, when choosing his sexual partners. But how do we choose a partner? So a myth that I have to say is sometimes spread a bit by sociologists is that our preferences in a romantic partner are a product of our culture, that they're very culturally specific. But in fact, the data don't back this up. A famous study surveyed people from [37] different cultures across the globe from Americans to Zulus, on what they look for in a partner. And in every single culture across the globe, men placed more value on physical attractiveness in a partner than did women, and in every single culture, too, women placed more importance than did men on ambition and high earning power. In every culture, too, men preferred women who were younger than themselves, an average of, I think it was 2.66 years. And in every culture, too, women preferred men who were older than them, so an average of 3.42 years, which is why we've got here, "Everybody needs a Sugar Daddy." (Laughter) So moving on from trying to score with a partner to trying to score in basketball or football or whatever your sport is. The myth here is that sportsmen go through "hot hand" streaks, Americans call them, or "purple patches," we sometimes say in England, where they just can't miss, like this guy here. But in fact, what happens is that if you analyze the pattern of hits and misses statistically, it turns out that it's nearly always at random. Your brain creates patterns from the randomness. If you toss a coin, a streak of heads or tails is going to come out somewhere in the randomness, and because the brain likes to see patterns where there are none, we look at these streaks and attribute meaning to them and say, "Yeah he's really on form today," whereas actually you would get the same pattern if you were just getting hits and misses at random. An exception to this, however, is penalty shootouts. A recent study looking at penalty shootouts in football showed that players who represent countries with a very bad record in penalty shootouts, like, for example, England, tend to be quicker to take their shots than countries with a better record, and presumably as a result, they're more likely to miss. Which raises the question of if there's any way we could improve people's performance. And one thing you might think about doing is punishing people for their misses and seeing if that improves them. This idea, the effect that punishment can improve performance, was what participants thought they were testing in Milgram's famous learning and punishment experiment that you've probably heard about if you're a psychology student. The story goes that participants were prepared to give what they believed to be fatal electric shocks to a fellow participant when they got a question wrong, just because someone in a white coat told them to. But this story is a myth for three reasons. Firstly, and most crucially, the lab coat wasn't white. It was, in fact, grey. Secondly, the participants were told before the study and reminded any time they raised a concern, that although the shocks were painful, they were not fatal and indeed caused no permanent damage whatsoever. And thirdly, participants didn't give the shocks just because someone in the coat told them to. When they were interviewed after the study, all the participants said that they firmly believed that the learning and punishment study served a worthy scientific purpose which would have enduring gains for science, as opposed to the momentary, nonfatal discomfort caused to the participants. OK, so I've been talking for about 12 minutes now, and you've probably been sitting there listening to me, analyzing my speech patterns and body language and trying to work out if you should take any notice of what I'm saying, whether I'm telling the truth or whether I'm lying. But if so, you've probably completely failed, because although we all think we can catch a liar from their body language and speech patterns, hundreds of psychological tests over the years have shown that all of us, including police officers and detectives, are basically at chance when it comes to detecting lies from body language and verbal patterns. Interestingly, there is one exception: TV appeals for missing relatives. It's quite easy to predict when the relatives are missing and when the appealers have, in fact, murdered the relatives themselves. So hoax appealers are more likely to shake their heads, to look away, and to make errors in their speech, whereas genuine appealers are more likely to express hope that the person will return safely and to avoid brutal language. So, for example, they might say "taken from us" rather than "killed." Speaking of which, it's about time I killed this talk, but before I do, I just want to give you, in 30 seconds, the overarching myth of psychology. The myth is that psychology is just a collection of interesting theories, all of which say something useful and all of which have something to offer. What I hope to have shown you in the past few minutes is that this isn't true. What we need to do is assess psychological theories by seeing what predictions they make, whether that is that listening to Mozart makes you smarter, that you learn better when information is presented in your preferred learning style or whatever it is, all of these are testable empirical predictions, and the only way we can make progress is to test these predictions against the data in tightly controlled experimental studies. And it's only by doing so that we can hope to discover which of these theories are well supported, and which, like all the ones I've told you about today, are myths. Thank you. (Applause) |
Got a wicked problem? First, tell me how you make toast | {0: "Tom Wujec studies how we share and absorb information. He's an innovative practitioner of business visualization -- using design and technology to help groups solve problems and understand ideas. He is a Fellow at Autodesk."} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Some years ago, I stumbled across a simple design exercise that helps people understand and solve complex problems, and like many of these design exercises, it kind of seems trivial at first, but under deep inspection, it turns out that it reveals unexpected truths about the way that we collaborate and make sense of things. The exercise has three parts and begins with something that we all know how to do, which is how to make toast. It begins with a clean sheet of paper, a felt marker, and without using any words, you begin to draw how to make toast. And most people draw something like this. They draw a loaf of bread, which is sliced, then put into a toaster. The toast is then deposited for some time. It pops up, and then voila! After two minutes, toast and happiness. Now, over the years, I've collected many hundreds of drawings of these toasts, and some of them are very good, because they really illustrate the toast-making process quite clearly. And then there are some that are, well, not so good. They really suck, actually, because you don't know what they're trying to say. Under close inspection, some reveal some aspects of toast-making while hiding others. So there's some that are all about the toast, and all about the transformation of toast. And there's others that are all about the toaster, and the engineers love to draw the mechanics of this. (Laughter) And then there are others that are about people. It's about visualizing the experience that people have. And then there are others that are about the supply chain of making toast that goes all the way back to the store. It goes through the supply chain networks of teleportation and all the way back to the field and wheat, and one all actually goes all the way back to the Big Bang. So it's crazy stuff. But I think it's obvious that even though these drawings are really wildly different, they share a common quality, and I'm wondering if you can see it. Do you see it? What's common about these? Most drawings have nodes and links. So nodes represent the tangible objects like the toaster and people, and links represent the connections between the nodes. And it's the combination of links and nodes that produces a full systems model, and it makes our private mental models visible about how we think something works. So that's the value of these things. What's interesting about these systems models is how they reveal our various points of view. So for example, Americans make toast with a toaster. That seems obvious. Whereas many Europeans make toast with a frying pan, of course, and many students make toast with a fire. I don't really understand this. A lot of MBA students do this. So you can measure the complexity by counting the number of nodes, and the average illustration has between four and eight nodes. Less than that, the drawing seems trivial, but it's quick to understand, and more than 13, the drawing produces a feeling of map shock. It's too complex. So the sweet spot is between 5 and 13. So if you want to communicate something visually, have between five and 13 nodes in your diagram. So though we may not be skilled at drawing, the point is that we intuitively know how to break down complex things into simple things and then bring them back together again. So this brings us to our second part of the exercise, which is how to make toast, but now with sticky notes or with cards. So what happens then? Well, with cards, most people tend to draw clear, more detailed, and more logical nodes. You can see the step by step analysis that takes place, and as they build up their model, they move their nodes around, rearranging them like Lego blocks. Now, though this might seem trivial, it's actually really important. This rapid iteration of expressing and then reflecting and analyzing is really the only way in which we get clarity. It's the essence of the design process. And systems theorists do tell us that the ease with which we can change a representation correlates to our willingness to improve the model. So sticky note systems are not only more fluid, they generally produce way more nodes than static drawings. The drawings are much richer. And this brings us to our third part of the exercise, which is to draw how to make toast, but this time in a group. So what happens then? Well, here's what happens. It starts out messy, and then it gets really messy, and then it gets messier, but as people refine the models, the best nodes become more prominent, and with each iteration, the model becomes clearer because people build on top of each other's ideas. What emerges is a unified systems model that integrates the diversity of everyone's individual points of view, so that's a really different outcome from what usually happens in meetings, isn't it? So these drawings can contain 20 or more nodes, but participants don't feel map shock because they participate in the building of their models themselves. Now, what's also really interesting, that the groups spontaneously mix and add additional layers of organization to it. To deal with contradictions, for example, they add branching patterns and parallel patterns. Oh, and by the way, if they do it in complete silence, they do it much better and much more quickly. Really interesting — talking gets in the way. So here's some key lessons that can emerge from this. First, drawing helps us understand the situations as systems with nodes and their relationships. Movable cards produce better systems models, because we iterate much more fluidly. And then the group notes produce the most comprehensive models because we synthesize several points of view. So that's interesting. When people work together under the right circumstances, group models are much better than individual models. So this approach works really great for drawing how to make toast, but what if you wanted to draw something more relevant or pressing, like your organizational vision, or customer experience, or long-term sustainability? There's a visual revolution that's taking place as more organizations are addressing their wicked problems by collaboratively drawing them out. And I'm convinced that those who see their world as movable nodes and links really have an edge. And the practice is really pretty simple. You start with a question, you collect the nodes, you refine the nodes, you do it over again, you refine and refine and refine, and the patterns emerge, and the group gets clarity and you answer the question. So this simple act of visualizing and doing over and over again produces some really remarkable outcomes. What's really important to know is that it's the conversations that are the important aspects, not just the models themselves. And these visual frames of reference can grow to several hundreds or even thousands of nodes. So, one example is from an organization called Rodale. Big publishing company. They lost a bunch of money one year, and their executive team for three days visualized their entire practice. And what's interesting is that after visualizing the entire business, systems upon systems, they reclaimed 50 million dollars of revenue, and they also moved from a D rating to an A rating from their customers. Why? Because there's alignment from the executive team. So I'm now on a mission to help organizations solve their wicked problems by using collaborative visualization, and on a site that I've produced called drawtoast.com, I've collected a bunch of best practices. and so you can learn how to run a workshop here, you can learn more about the visual language and the structure of links and nodes that you can apply to general problem-solving, and download examples of various templates for unpacking the thorny problems that we all face in our organizations. So the seemingly trivial design exercise of drawing toast helps us get clear, engaged and aligned. So next time you're confronted with an interesting challenge, remember what design has to teach us. Make your ideas visible, tangible, and consequential. It's simple, it's fun, it's powerful, and I believe it's an idea worth celebrating. Thank you. (Applause) |
Old books reborn as art | {0: 'Artist Brian Dettmer digs into a good book (literally, with a knife) to create beautifully intricate forms that reflect how we see old information in a modern world.'} | TEDYouth 2014 | I'm an artist and I cut books. This is one of my first book works. It's called "Alternate Route to Knowledge." I wanted to create a stack of books so that somebody could come into the gallery and think they're just looking at a regular stack of books, but then as they got closer they would see this rough hole carved into it, and wonder what was happening, wonder why, and think about the material of the book. So I'm interested in the texture, but I'm more interested in the text and the images that we find within books. In most of my work, what I do is I seal the edges of a book with a thick varnish so it's creating sort of a skin on the outside of the book so it becomes a solid material, but then the pages inside are still loose, and then I carve into the surface of the book, and I'm not moving or adding anything. I'm just carving around whatever I find interesting. So everything you see within the finished piece is exactly where it was in the book before I began. I think of my work as sort of a remix, in a way, because I'm working with somebody else's material in the same way that a D.J. might be working with somebody else's music. This was a book of Raphael paintings, the Renaissance artist, and by taking his work and remixing it, carving into it, I'm sort of making it into something that's more new and more contemporary. I'm thinking also about breaking out of the box of the traditional book and pushing that linear format, and try to push the structure of the book itself so that the book can become fully sculptural. I'm using clamps and ropes and all sorts of materials, weights, in order to hold things in place before I varnish so that I can push the form before I begin, so that something like this can become a piece like this, which is just made from a single dictionary. Or something like this can become a piece like this. Or something like this, which who knows what that's going to be or why that's in my studio, will become a piece like this. So I think one of the reasons people are disturbed by destroying books, people don't want to rip books and nobody really wants to throw away a book, is that we think about books as living things, we think about them as a body, and they're created to relate to our body, as far as scale, but they also have the potential to continue to grow and to continue to become new things. So books really are alive. So I think of the book as a body, and I think of the book as a technology. I think of the book as a tool. And I also think of the book as a machine. I also think of the book as a landscape. This is a full set of encyclopedias that's been connected and sanded together, and as I carve through it, I'm deciding what I want to choose. So with encyclopedias, I could have chosen anything, but I specifically chose images of landscapes. And with the material itself, I'm using sandpaper and sanding the edges so not only the images suggest landscape, but the material itself suggests a landscape as well. So one of the things I do is when I'm carving through the book, I'm thinking about images, but I'm also thinking about text, and I think about them in a very similar way, because what's interesting is that when we're reading text, when we're reading a book, it puts images in our head, so we're sort of filling that piece. We're sort of creating images when we're reading text, and when we're looking at an image, we actually use language in order to understand what we're looking at. So there's sort of a yin-yang that happens, sort of a flip flop. So I'm creating a piece that the viewer is completing themselves. And I think of my work as almost an archaeology. I'm excavating and I'm trying to maximize the potential and discover as much as I possibly can and exposing it within my own work. But at the same time, I'm thinking about this idea of erasure, and what's happening now that most of our information is intangible, and this idea of loss, and this idea that not only is the format constantly shifting within computers, but the information itself, now that we don't have a physical backup, has to be constantly updated in order to not lose it. And I have several dictionaries in my own studio, and I do use a computer every day, and if I need to look up a word, I'll go on the computer, because I can go directly and instantly to what I'm looking up. I think that the book was never really the right format for nonlinear information, which is why we're seeing reference books becoming the first to be endangered or extinct. So I don't think that the book will ever really die. People think that now that we have digital technology, the book is going to die, and we are seeing things shifting and things evolving. I think that the book will evolve, and just like people said painting would die when photography and printmaking became everyday materials, but what it really allowed painting to do was it allowed painting to quit its day job. It allowed painting to not have to have that everyday chore of telling the story, and painting became free and was allowed to tell its own story, and that's when we saw Modernism emerge, and we saw painting go into different branches. And I think that's what's happening with books now, now that most of our technology, most of our information, most of our personal and cultural records are in digital form, I think it's really allowing the book to become something new. So I think it's a very exciting time for an artist like me, and it's very exciting to see what will happen with the book in the future. Thank you. (Applause) |
How butterflies self-medicate | {0: 'Jaap de Roode studies the ecology and evolution of parasites, focusing on those that attack the monarch butterfly. \r\n'} | TEDYouth 2014 | So infectious diseases, right? Infectious diseases are still the main cause of human suffering and death around the world. Every year, millions of people die of diseases such as T.B., malaria, HIV, around the world and even in the United States. Every year, thousands of Americans die of seasonal flu. Now of course, humans, we are creative. Right? We have come up with ways to protect ourselves against these diseases. We have drugs and vaccines. And we're conscious — we learn from our experiences and come up with creative solutions. We used to think we're alone in this, but now we know we're not. We're not the only medical doctors. Now we know that there's a lot of animals out there that can do it too. Most famous, perhaps, chimpanzees. Not so much different from us, they can use plants to treat their intestinal parasites. But the last few decades have shown us that other animals can do it too: elephants, porcupines, sheep, goats, you name it. And even more interesting than that is that recent discoveries are telling us that insects and other little animals with smaller brains can use medication too. The problem with infectious diseases, as we all know, is that pathogens continue to evolve, and a lot of the drugs that we have developed are losing their efficacy. And therefore, there is this great need to find new ways to discover drugs that we can use against our diseases. Now, I think that we should look at these animals, and we can learn from them how to treat our own diseases. As a biologist, I have been studying monarch butterflies for the last 10 years. Now, monarchs are extremely famous for their spectacular migrations from the U.S. and Canada down to Mexico every year, where millions of them come together, but it's not why I started studying them. I study monarchs because they get sick. They get sick like you. They get sick like me. And I think what they do can tell us a lot about drugs that we can develop for humans. Now, the parasites that monarchs get infected with are called ophryocystis elektroscirrha — a mouthful. What they do is they produce spores, millions of spores on the outside of the butterfly that are shown as little specks in between the scales of the butterfly. And this is really detrimental to the monarch. It shortens their lifespan, it reduces their ability to fly, it can even kill them before they're even adults. Very detrimental parasite. As part of my job, I spend a lot of time in the greenhouse growing plants, and the reason for this is that monarchs are extremely picky eaters. They only eat milkweed as larvae. Luckily, there are several species of milkweed that they can use, and all these milkweeds have cardenolides in them. These are chemicals that are toxic. They're toxic to most animals, but not to monarchs. In fact, monarchs can take up the chemicals, put it in their own bodies, and it makes them toxic against their predators, such as birds. And what they do, then, is advertise this toxicity through their beautiful warning colorations with this orange, black and white. So what I did during my job is grow plants in the greenhouse, different ones, different milkweeds. Some were toxic, including the tropical milkweed, with very high concentrations of these cardenolides. And some were not toxic. And then I fed them to monarchs. Some of the monarchs were healthy. They had no disease. But some of the monarchs were sick, and what I found is that some of these milkweeds are medicinal, meaning they reduce the disease symptoms in the monarch butterflies, meaning these monarchs can live longer when they are infected when feeding on these medicinal plants. And when I found this, I had this idea, and a lot of people said it was a crazy idea, but I thought, what if monarchs can use this? What if they can use these plants as their own form of medicine? What if they can act as medical doctors? So my team and I started doing experiments. In the first types of experiments, we had caterpillars, and gave them a choice: medicinal milkweed versus non-medicinal milkweed. And then we measured how much they ate of each species over their lifetime. And the result, as so often in science, was boring: Fifty percent of their food was medicinal. Fifty percent was not. These caterpillars didn't do anything for their own welfare. So then we moved on to adult butterflies, and we started asking the question whether it's the mothers that can medicate their offspring. Can the mothers lay their eggs on medicinal milkweed that will make their future offspring less sick? We have done these experiments now over several years, and always get the same results. What we do is we put a monarch in a big cage, a medicinal plant on one side, a non-medicinal plant on the other side, and then we measure the number of eggs that the monarchs lay on each plant. And what we find when we do that is always the same. What we find is that the monarchs strongly prefer the medicinal milkweed. In other words, what these females are doing is they're laying 68 percent of their eggs in the medicinal milkweed. Intriguingly, what they do is they actually transmit the parasites when they're laying the eggs. They cannot prevent this. They can also not medicate themselves. But what these experiments tell us is that these monarchs, these mothers, can lay their eggs on medicinal milkweed that will make their future offspring less sick. Now, this is a really important discovery, I think, not just because it tells us something cool about nature, but also because it may tell us something more about how we should find drugs. Now, these are animals that are very small and we tend to think of them as very simple. They have tiny little brains, yet they can do this very sophisticated medication. Now, we know that even today, most of our drugs derive from natural products, including plants, and in indigenous cultures, traditional healers often look at animals to find new drugs. In this way, elephants have told us how to treat stomach upset, and porcupines have told people how to treat bloody diarrhea. What I think is important, though, is to move beyond these large-brained mammals and give these guys more credit, these simple animals, these insects that we tend to think of as very, very simple with tiny little brains. The discovery that these animals can also use medication opens up completely new avenues, and I think that maybe one day, we will be treating human diseases with drugs that were first discovered by butterflies, and I think that is an amazing opportunity worth pursuing. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
How to run a company with (almost) no rules | {0: 'Two decades after transforming a struggling equipment supplier into a radically democratic and resilient (and successful) company, Ricardo Semler wants organizations to become wise.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | On Mondays and Thursdays, I learn how to die. I call them my terminal days. My wife Fernanda doesn't like the term, but a lot of people in my family died of melanoma cancer and my parents and grandparents had it. And I kept thinking, one day I could be sitting in front of a doctor who looks at my exams and says, "Ricardo, things don't look very good. You have six months or a year to live." And you start thinking about what you would do with this time. And you say, "I'm going to spend more time with the kids. I'm going to visit these places, I'm going to go up and down mountains and places and I'm going to do all the things I didn't do when I had the time." But of course, we all know these are very bittersweet memories we're going to have. It's very difficult to do. You spend a good part of the time crying, probably. So I said, I'm going to do something else. Every Monday and Thursday, I'm going use my terminal days. And I will do, during those days, whatever it is I was going to do if I had received that piece of news. (Laughter) When you think about — (Applause) when you think about the opposite of work, we, many times, think it's leisure. And you say, ah, I need some leisure time, and so forth. But the fact is that, leisure is a very busy thing. You go play golf and tennis, and you meet people, and you're going for lunch, and you're late for the movies. It's a very crowded thing that we do. The opposite of work is idleness. But very few of us know what to do with idleness. When you look at the way that we distribute our lives in general, you realize that in the periods in which we have a lot of money, we have very little time. And then when we finally have time, we have neither the money nor the health. So we started thinking about that as a company for the last 30 years. This is a complicated company with thousands of employees, hundreds of millions of dollars of business that makes rocket fuel propellent systems, runs 4,000 ATMs in Brazil, does income tax preparation for dozens of thousands. So this is not a simple business. We looked at it and we said, let's devolve to these people, let's give these people a company where we take away all the boarding school aspects of, this is when you arrive, this is how you dress, this is how you go to meetings, this is what you say, this is what you don't say, and let's see what's left. So we started this about 30 years ago, and we started dealing with this very issue. And so we said, look, the retirement, the whole issue of how we distribute our graph of life. Instead of going mountain climbing when you're 82, why don't you do it next week? And we'll do it like this, we'll sell you back your Wednesdays for 10 percent of your salary. So now, if you were going to be a violinist, which you probably weren't, you go and do this on Wednesday. And what we found — we thought, these are the older people who are going to be really interested in this program. And the average age of the first people who adhered were 29, of course. And so we started looking, and we said, we have to do things in a different way. So we started saying things like, why do we want to know what time you came to work, what time you left, etc.? Can't we exchange this for a contract for buying something from you, some kind of work? Why are we building these headquarters? Is it not an ego issue that we want to look solid and big and important? But we're dragging you two hours across town because of it? So we started asking questions one by one. We'd say it like this: One: How do we find people? We'd go out and try and recruit people and we'd say, look, when you come to us, we're not going to have two or three interviews and then you're going to be married to us for life. That's not how we do the rest of our lives. So, come have your interviews. Anyone who's interested in interviewing, you will show up. And then we'll see what happens out of the intuition that rises from that, instead of just filling out the little items of whether you're the right person. And then, come back. Spend an afternoon, spend a whole day, talk to anybody you want. Make sure we are the bride you thought we were and not all the bullshit we put into our own ads. (Laughter) Slowly we went to a process where we'd say things like, we don't want anyone to be a leader in the company if they haven't been interviewed and approved by their future subordinates. Every six months, everyone gets evaluated, anonymously, as a leader. And this determines whether they should continue in that leadership position, which is many times situational, as you know. And so if they don't have 70, 80 percent of a grade, they don't stay, which is probably the reason why I haven't been CEO for more than 10 years. And over time, we started asking other questions. We said things like, why can't people set their own salaries? What do they need to know? There's only three things you need to know: how much people make inside the company, how much people make somewhere else in a similar business and how much we make in general to see whether we can afford it. So let's give people these three pieces of information. So we started having, in the cafeteria, a computer where you could go in and you could ask what someone spent, how much someone makes, what they make in benefits, what the company makes, what the margins are, and so forth. And this is 25 years ago. As this information started coming to people, we said things like, we don't want to see your expense report, we don't want to know how many holidays you're taking, we don't want to know where you work. We had, at one point, 14 different offices around town, and we'd say, go to the one that's closest to your house, to the customer that you're going to visit today. Don't tell us where you are. And more, even when we had thousands of people, 5,000 people, we had two people in the H.R. department, and thankfully one of them has retired. (Laughter) And so, the question we were asking was, how can we be taking care of people? People are the only thing we have. We can't have a department that runs after people and looks after people. So as we started finding that this worked, and we'd say, we're looking for — and this is, I think, the main thing I was looking for in the terminal days and in the company, which is, how do you set up for wisdom? We've come from an age of revolution, industrial revolution, an age of information, an age of knowledge, but we're not any closer to the age of wisdom. How we design, how do we organize, for more wisdom? So for example, many times, what's the smartest or the intelligent decision doesn't jive. So we'd say things like, let's agree that you're going to sell 57 widgets per week. If you sell them by Wednesday, please go to the beach. Don't create a problem for us, for manufacturing, for application, then we have to buy new companies, we have to buy our competitors, we have to do all kinds of things because you sold too many widgets. So go to the beach and start again on Monday. (Laughter) (Applause) So the process is looking for wisdom. And in the process, of course, we wanted people to know everything, and we wanted to be truly democratic about the way we ran things. So our board had two seats open with the same voting rights, for the first two people who showed up. (Laughter) And so we had cleaning ladies voting on a board meeting, which had a lot of other very important people in suits and ties. And the fact is that they kept us honest. This process, as we started looking at the people who came to us, we'd say, now wait a second, people come to us and they say, where am I supposed to sit? How am I supposed to work? Where am I going to be in 5 years' time? And we looked at that and we said, we have to start much earlier. Where do we start? We said, oh, kindergarten seems like a good place. So we set up a foundation, which now has, for 11 years, three schools, where we started asking the same questions, how do you redesign school for wisdom? It is one thing to say, we need to recycle the teachers, we need the directors to do more. But the fact is that what we do with education is entirely obsolete. The teacher's role is entirely obsolete. Going from a math class, to biology, to 14th-century France is very silly. (Applause) So we started thinking, what could it look like? And we put together people, including people who like education, people like Paulo Freire, and two ministers of education in Brazil and we said, if we were to design a school from scratch, what would it look like? And so we created this school, which is called Lumiar, and Lumiar, one of them is a public school, and Lumiar says the following: Let's divide this role of the teacher into two. One guy, we'll call a tutor. A tutor, in the old sense of the Greek "paideia": Look after the kid. What's happening at home, what's their moment in life, etc.. But please don't teach, because the little you know compared to Google, we don't want to know. Keep that to yourself. (Laughter) Now, we'll bring in people who have two things: passion and expertise, and it could be their profession or not. And we use the senior citizens, who are 25 percent of the population with wisdom that nobody wants anymore. So we bring them to school and we say, teach these kids whatever you really believe in. So we have violinists teaching math. We have all kinds of things where we say, don't worry about the course material anymore. We have approximately 10 great threads that go from 2 to 17. Things like, how do we measure ourselves as humans? So there's a place for math and physics and all that there. How do we express ourselves? So there's a place for music and literature, etc., but also for grammar. And then we have things that everyone has forgotten, which are probably the most important things in life. The very important things in life, we know nothing about. We know nothing about love, we know nothing about death, we know nothing about why we're here. So we need a thread in school that talks about everything we don't know. So that's a big part of what we do. (Applause) So over the years, we started going into other things. We'd say, why do we have to scold the kids and say, sit down and come here and do that, and so forth. We said, let's get the kids to do something we call a circle, which meets once a week. And we'd say, you put the rules together and then you decide what you want to do with it. So can you all hit yourself on the head? Sure, for a week, try. They came up with the very same rules that we had, except they're theirs. And then, they have the power, which means, they can and do suspend and expel kids so that we're not playing school, they really decide. And then, in this same vein, we keep a digital mosaic, because this is not constructivist or Montessori or something. It's something where we keep the Brazilian curriculum with 600 tiles of a mosaic, which we want to expose these kids to by the time they're 17. And follow this all the time and we know how they're doing and we say, you're not interested in this now, let's wait a year. And the kids are in groups that don't have an age category, so the six-year-old kid who is ready for that with an 11-year-old, that eliminates all of the gangs and the groups and this stuff that we have in the schools, in general. And they have a zero to 100 percent grading, which they do themselves with an app every couple of hours. Until we know they're 37 percent of the way we'd like them to be on this issue, so that we can send them out in the world with them knowing enough about it. And so the courses are World Cup Soccer, or building a bicycle. And people will sign up for a 45-day course on building a bicycle. Now, try to build a bicycle without knowing that pi is 3.1416. You can't. And try, any one of you, using 3.1416 for something. You don't know anymore. So this is lost and that's what we try to do there, which is looking for wisdom in that school. And that brings us back to this graph and this distribution of our life. I accumulated a lot of money when I think about it. When you think and you say, now is the time to give back — well, if you're giving back, you took too much. (Laughter) (Applause) I keep thinking of Warren Buffet waking up one day and finding out he has 30 billion dollars more than he thought he had. And he looks and he says, what am I going to do with this? And he says, I'll give it to someone who really needs this. I'll give it to Bill Gates. (Laughter) And my guy, who's my financial advisor in New York, he says, look, you're a silly guy because you would have 4.1 times more money today if you had made money with money instead of sharing as you go. But I like sharing as you go better. (Applause) I taught MBAs at MIT for a time and I ended up, one day, at the Mount Auburn Cemetery. It is a beautiful cemetery in Cambridge. And I was walking around. It was my birthday and I was thinking. And the first time around, I saw these tombstones and these wonderful people who'd done great things and I thought, what do I want to be remembered for? And I did another stroll around, and the second time, another question came to me, which did me better, which was, why do I want to be remembered at all? (Laughter) And that, I think, took me different places. When I was 50, my wife Fernanda and I sat for a whole afternoon, we had a big pit with fire, and I threw everything I had ever done into that fire. This is a book in 38 languages, hundreds and hundreds of articles and DVDs, everything there was. And that did two things. One, it freed our five kids from following in our steps, our shadow — They don't know what I do. (Laughter) Which is good. And I'm not going to take them somewhere and say, one day all of this will be yours. (Laughter) The five kids know nothing, which is good. And the second thing is, I freed myself from this anchor of past achievement or whatever. I'm free to start something new every time and to decide things from scratch in part of those terminal days. And some people would say, oh, so now you have this time, these terminal days, and so you go out and do everything. No, we've been to the beaches, so we've been to Samoa and Maldives and Mozambique, so that's done. I've climbed mountains in the Himalayas. I've gone down 60 meters to see hammerhead sharks. I've spent 59 days on the back of a camel from Chad to Timbuktu. I've gone to the magnetic North Pole on a dog sled. So, we've been busy. It's what I'd like to call my empty bucket list. (Laughter) And with this rationale, I look at these days and I think, I'm not retired. I don't feel retired at all. And so I'm writing a new book. We started three new companies in the last two years. I'm now working on getting this school system for free out into the world, and I've found, very interestingly enough, that nobody wants it for free. And so I've been trying for 10 years to get the public system to take over this school rationale, much as the public schools we have, which has instead of 43 out of 100, as their rating, as their grades, has 91 out of 100. But for free, nobody wants it. So maybe we'll start charging for it and then it will go somewhere. But getting this out is one of the things we want to do. And I think what this leaves us as a message for all of you, I think is a little bit like this: We've all learned how to go on Sunday night to email and work from home. But very few of us have learned how to go to the movies on Monday afternoon. And if we're looking for wisdom, we need to learn to do that as well. And so, what we've done all of these years is very simple, is use the little tool, which is ask three whys in a row. Because the first why you always have a good answer for. The second why, it starts getting difficult. By the third why, you don't really know why you're doing what you're doing. What I want to leave you with is the seed and the thought that maybe if you do this, you will come to the question, what for? What am I doing this for? And hopefully, as a result of that, and over time, I hope that with this, and that's what I'm wishing you, you'll have a much wiser future. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So Ricardo, you're kind of crazy. (Laughter) To many people, this seems crazy. And yet so deeply wise, also. The pieces I'm trying to put together are this: Your ideas are so radical. How, in business, for example, these ideas have been out for a while, probably the percentage of businesses that have taken some of them is still quite low. Are there any times you've seen some big company take on one of your ideas and you've gone, "Yes!"? Ricardo Semler: It happens. It happened about two weeks ago with Richard Branson, with his people saying, oh, I don't want to control your holidays anymore, or Netflix does a little bit of this and that, but I don't think it's very important. I'd like to see it happen maybe a little bit in a bit of a missionary zeal, but that's a very personal one. But the fact is that it takes a leap of faith about losing control. And almost nobody who is in control is ready to take leaps of faith. It will have to come from kids and other people who are starting companies in a different way. CA: So that's the key thing? From your point of view the evidence is there, in the business point of view this works, but people just don't have the courage to — (Whoosh) RS: They don't even have the incentive. You're running a company with a 90-day mandate. It's a quarterly report. If you're not good in 90 days, you're out. So you say, "Here's a great program that, in less than one generation —" And the guy says, "Get out of here." So this is the problem. (Laughter) CA: What you're trying to do in education seems to me incredibly profound. Everyone is bothered about their country's education system. No one thinks that we've caught up yet to a world where there's Google and all these technological options. So you've got actual evidence now that the kids so far going through your system, there's a dramatic increase in performance. How do we help you move these ideas forward? RS: I think it's that problem of ideas whose time has come. And I've never been very evangelical about these things. We put it out there. Suddenly, you find people — there's a group in Japan, which scares me very much, which is called the Semlerists, and they have 120 companies. They've invited me. I've always been scared to go. And there is a group in Holland that has 600 small, Dutch companies. It's something that will flourish on its own. Part of it will be wrong, and it doesn't matter. This will find its own place. And I'm afraid of the other one, which says, this is so good you've got to do this. Let's set up a system and put lots of money into it and then people will do it no matter what. CA: So you have asked extraordinary questions your whole life. It seems to me that's the fuel that's driven a lot of this. Do you have any other questions for us, for TED, for this group here? RS: I always come back to variations of the question that my son asked me when he was three. We were sitting in a jacuzzi, and he said, "Dad, why do we exist?" There is no other question. Nobody has any other question. We have variations of this one question, from three onwards. So when you spend time in a company, in a bureaucracy, in an organization and you're saying, boy — how many people do you know who on their death beds said, boy, I wish I had spent more time at the office? So there's a whole thing of having the courage now — not in a week, not in two months, not when you find out you have something — to say, no, what am I doing this for? Stop everything. Let me do something else. And it will be okay, it will be much better than what you're doing, if you're stuck in a process. CA: So that strikes me as a profound and quite beautiful way to end this penultimate day of TED. Ricardo Semler, thank you so much. RS: Thank you so much. (Applause) |
My simple invention, designed to keep my grandfather safe | {0: "Kenneth Shinozuka designs smart products ... He's been doing so since he was in kindergarten."} | TEDYouth 2014 | What's the fastest growing threat to Americans' health? Cancer? Heart attacks? Diabetes? The answer is actually none of these; it's Alzheimer's disease. Every 67 seconds, someone in the United States is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. As the number of Alzheimer's patients triples by the year 2050, caring for them, as well as the rest of the aging population, will become an overwhelming societal challenge. My family has experienced firsthand the struggles of caring for an Alzheimer's patient. Growing up in a family with three generations, I've always been very close to my grandfather. When I was four years old, my grandfather and I were walking in a park in Japan when he suddenly got lost. It was one of the scariest moments I've ever experienced in my life, and it was also the first instance that informed us that my grandfather had Alzheimer's disease. Over the past 12 years, his condition got worse and worse, and his wandering in particular caused my family a lot of stress. My aunt, his primary caregiver, really struggled to stay awake at night to keep an eye on him, and even then often failed to catch him leaving the bed. I became really concerned about my aunt's well-being as well as my grandfather's safety. I searched extensively for a solution that could help my family's problems, but couldn't find one. Then, one night about two years ago, I was looking after my grandfather and I saw him stepping out of the bed. The moment his foot landed on the floor, I thought, why don't I put a pressure sensor on the heel of his foot? Once he stepped onto the floor and out of the bed, the pressure sensor would detect an increase in pressure caused by body weight and then wirelessly send an audible alert to the caregiver's smartphone. That way, my aunt could sleep much better at night without having to worry about my grandfather's wandering. So now I'd like to perform a demonstration of this sock. Could I please have my sock model on the stage? Great. So once the patient steps onto the floor — (Ringing) — an alert is sent to the caregiver's smartphone. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, sock model. So this is a drawing of my preliminary design. My desire to create a sensor-based technology perhaps stemmed from my lifelong love for sensors and technology. When I was six years old, an elderly family friend fell down in the bathroom and suffered severe injuries. I became concerned about my own grandparents and decided to invent a smart bathroom system. Motion sensors would be installed inside the tiles of bathroom floors to detect the falls of elderly patients whenever they fell down in the bathroom. Since I was only six years old at the time and I hadn't graduated from kindergarten yet, I didn't have the necessary resources and tools to translate my idea into reality, but nonetheless, my research experience really implanted in me a firm desire to use sensors to help the elderly people. I really believe that sensors can improve the quality of life of the elderly. When I laid out my plan, I realized that I faced three main challenges: first, creating a sensor; second, designing a circuit; and third, coding a smartphone app. This made me realize that my project was actually much harder to realize than I initially had thought it to be. First, I had to create a wearable sensor that was thin and flexible enough to be worn comfortably on the bottom of the patient's foot. After extensive research and testing of different materials like rubber, which I realized was too thick to be worn snugly on the bottom of the foot, I decided to print a film sensor with electrically conductive pressure-sensitive ink particles. Once pressure is applied, the connectivity between the particles increases. Therefore, I could design a circuit that would measure pressure by measuring electrical resistance. Next, I had to design a wearable wireless circuit, but wireless signal transmission consumes lots of power and requires heavy, bulky batteries. Thankfully, I was able to find out about the Bluetooth low energy technology, which consumes very little power and can be driven by a coin-sized battery. This prevented the system from dying in the middle of the night. Lastly, I had to code a smartphone app that would essentially transform the care-giver's smartphone into a remote monitor. For this, I had to expand upon my knowledge of coding with Java and XCode and I also had to learn about how to code for Bluetooth low energy devices by watching YouTube tutorials and reading various textbooks. Integrating these components, I was able to successfully create two prototypes, one in which the sensor is embedded inside a sock, and another that's a re-attachable sensor assembly that can be adhered anywhere that makes contact with the bottom of the patient's foot. I've tested the device on my grandfather for about a year now, and it's had a 100 percent success rate in detecting the over 900 known cases of his wandering. Last summer, I was able to beta test my device at several residential care facilities in California, and I'm currently incorporating the feedback to further improve the device into a marketable product. Testing the device on a number of patients made me realize that I needed to invent solutions for people who didn't want to wear socks to sleep at night. So sensor data, collected on a vast number of patients, can be useful for improving patient care and also leading to a cure for the disease, possibly. For example, I'm currently examining correlations between the frequency of a patient's nightly wandering and his or her daily activities and diet. One thing I'll never forget is when my device first caught my grandfather's wandering out of bed at night. At that moment, I was really struck by the power of technology to change lives for the better. People living happily and healthfully — that's the world that I imagine. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The mathematics of love | {0: 'Hannah Fry researches the trends in our civilization and ways we can forecast its future.'} | TEDxBinghamtonUniversity | Today I want to talk to you about the mathematics of love. Now, I think that we can all agree that mathematicians are famously excellent at finding love. (Laughter) But it's not just because of our dashing personalities, superior conversational skills and excellent pencil cases. It's also because we've actually done an awful lot of work into the maths of how to find the perfect partner. Now, in my favorite paper on the subject, which is entitled, "Why I Don't Have a Girlfriend" — (Laughter) Peter Backus tries to rate his chances of finding love. Now, Peter's not a very greedy man. Of all of the available women in the UK, all Peter's looking for is somebody who lives near him, somebody in the right age range, somebody with a university degree, somebody he's likely to get on well with, somebody who's likely to be attractive, somebody who's likely to find him attractive. (Laughter) And comes up with an estimate of 26 women in the whole of the UK. (Laughter) It's not looking very good, is it Peter? Now, just to put that into perspective, that's about 400 times fewer than the best estimates of how many intelligent extraterrestrial life forms there are. And it also gives Peter a 1 in 285,000 chance of bumping into any one of these special ladies on a given night out. I'd like to think that's why mathematicians don't really bother going on nights out anymore. The thing is that I personally don't subscribe to such a pessimistic view. Because I know, just as well as all of you do, that love doesn't really work like that. Human emotion isn't neatly ordered and rational and easily predictable. But I also know that that doesn't mean that mathematics hasn't got something that it can offer us, because, love, as with most of life, is full of patterns and mathematics is, ultimately, all about the study of patterns. Patterns from predicting the weather to the fluctuations in the stock market, to the movement of the planets or the growth of cities. And if we're being honest, none of those things are exactly neatly ordered and easily predictable, either. Because I believe that mathematics is so powerful that it has the potential to offer us a new way of looking at almost anything. Even something as mysterious as love. And so, to try to persuade you of how totally amazing, excellent and relevant mathematics is, I want to give you my top three mathematically verifiable tips for love. (Laughter) OK, so Top Tip #1: How to win at online dating. So my favorite online dating website is OkCupid, not least because it was started by a group of mathematicians. Now, because they're mathematicians, they have been collecting data on everybody who uses their site for almost a decade. And they've been trying to search for patterns in the way that we talk about ourselves and the way that we interact with each other on an online dating website. And they've come up with some seriously interesting findings. But my particular favorite is that it turns out that on an online dating website, how attractive you are does not dictate how popular you are, and actually, having people think that you're ugly can work to your advantage. (Laughter) Let me show you how this works. In a thankfully voluntary section of OkCupid, you are allowed to rate how attractive you think people are on a scale between one and five. Now, if we compare this score, the average score, to how many messages a selection of people receive, you can begin to get a sense of how attractiveness links to popularity on an online dating website. This is the graph the OkCupid guys have come up with. And the important thing to notice is that it's not totally true that the more attractive you are, the more messages you get. But the question arises then of what is it about people up here who are so much more popular than people down here, even though they have the same score of attractiveness? And the reason why is that it's not just straightforward looks that are important. So let me try to illustrate their findings with an example. So if you take someone like Portia de Rossi, for example, everybody agrees that Portia de Rossi is a very beautiful woman. Nobody thinks that she's ugly, but she's not a supermodel, either. If you compare Portia de Rossi to someone like Sarah Jessica Parker, now, a lot of people, myself included, I should say, think that Sarah Jessica Parker is seriously fabulous and possibly one of the most beautiful creatures to have ever have walked on the face of the Earth. But some other people, i.e., most of the Internet ... (Laughter) seem to think that she looks a bit like a horse. (Laughter) Now, I think that if you ask people how attractive they thought Jessica Parker or Portia de Rossi were, and you ask them to give them a score between one and five I reckon that they'd average out to have roughly the same score. But the way that people would vote would be very different. So Portia's scores would all be clustered around the four because everybody agrees that she's very beautiful, whereas Sarah Jessica Parker completely divides opinion. There'd be a huge spread in her scores. And actually it's this spread that counts. It's this spread that makes you more popular on an online Internet dating website. So what that means then is that if some people think that you're attractive, you're actually better off having some other people think that you're a massive minger. That's much better than everybody just thinking that you're the cute girl next door. Now, I think this begins to make a bit more sense when you think in terms of the people who are sending these messages. So let's say that you think somebody's attractive, but you suspect that other people won't necessarily be that interested. That means there's less competition for you and it's an extra incentive for you to get in touch. Whereas compare that to if you think somebody is attractive but you suspect that everybody is going to think they're attractive. Well, why would you bother humiliating yourself, let's be honest? But here's where the really interesting part comes. Because when people choose the pictures that they use on an online dating website, they often try to minimize the things that they think some people will find unattractive. The classic example is people who are, perhaps, a little bit overweight deliberately choosing a very cropped photo, (Laughter) or bald men, for example, deliberately choosing pictures where they're wearing hats. But actually this is the opposite of what you should do if you want to be successful. You should really, instead, play up to whatever it is that makes you different, even if you think that some people will find it unattractive. Because the people who fancy you are just going to fancy you anyway, and the unimportant losers who don't, well, they only play up to your advantage. OK, Top Tip #2: How to pick the perfect partner. So let's imagine then that you're a roaring success on the dating scene. But the question arises of how do you then convert that success into longer-term happiness, and in particular, how do you decide when is the right time to settle down? Now generally, it's not advisable to just cash in and marry the first person who comes along and shows you any interest at all. But, equally, you don't really want to leave it too long if you want to maximize your chance of long-term happiness. As my favorite author, Jane Austen, puts it, "An unmarried woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again." (Laughter) Thanks a lot, Jane. What do you know about love? (Laughter) So the question is then, how do you know when is the right time to settle down, given all the people that you can date in your lifetime? Thankfully, there's a rather delicious bit of mathematics that we can use to help us out here, called optimal stopping theory. So let's imagine, then, that you start dating when you're 15 and ideally, you'd like to be married by the time that you're 35. And there's a number of people that you could potentially date across your lifetime, and they'll be at varying levels of goodness. Now the rules are that once you cash in and get married, you can't look ahead to see what you could have had, and equally, you can't go back and change your mind. In my experience at least, I find that typically people don't much like being recalled years after being passed up for somebody else, or that's just me. So the math says then that what you should do in the first 37 percent of your dating window, you should just reject everybody as serious marriage potential. (Laughter) And then, you should pick the next person that comes along that is better than everybody that you've seen before. So here's the example. Now if you do this, it can be mathematically proven, in fact, that this is the best possible way of maximizing your chances of finding the perfect partner. Now unfortunately, I have to tell you that this method does come with some risks. For instance, imagine if your perfect partner appeared during your first 37 percent. Now, unfortunately, you'd have to reject them. (Laughter) Now, if you're following the maths, I'm afraid no one else comes along that's better than anyone you've seen before, so you have to go on rejecting everyone and die alone. (Laughter) Probably surrounded by cats ... (Laughter) nibbling at your remains. OK, another risk is, let's imagine, instead, that the first people that you dated in your first 37 percent are just incredibly dull, boring, terrible people. That's OK, because you're in your rejection phase, so that's fine, you can reject them. But then imagine the next person to come along is just marginally less boring, dull and terrible ... (Laughter) than everybody that you've seen before. Now, if you are following the maths, I'm afraid you have to marry them ... (Laughter) and end up in a relationship which is, frankly, suboptimal. Sorry about that. But I do think that there's an opportunity here for Hallmark to cash in on and really cater for this market. A Valentine's Day card like this. (Laughter) "My darling husband, you are marginally less terrible than the first 37 percent of people I dated." (Laughter) It's actually more romantic than I normally manage. (Laughter) OK, so this method doesn't give you a 100 percent success rate, but there's no other possible strategy that can do any better. And actually, in the wild, there are certain types of fish which follow and employ this exact strategy. So they reject every possible suitor that turns up in the first 37 percent of the mating season, and then they pick the next fish that comes along after that window that's, I don't know, bigger and burlier than all of the fish that they've seen before. I also think that subconsciously, humans, we do sort of do this anyway. We give ourselves a little bit of time to play the field, get a feel for the marketplace or whatever when we're young. And then we only start looking seriously at potential marriage candidates once we hit our mid-to-late 20s. I think this is conclusive proof, if ever it were needed, that everybody's brains are prewired to be just a little bit mathematical. OK, so that was Top Tip #2. Now, Top Tip #3: How to avoid divorce. OK, so let's imagine then that you picked your perfect partner and you're settling into a lifelong relationship with them. Now, I like to think that everybody would ideally like to avoid divorce, apart from, I don't know, Piers Morgan's wife, maybe? (Laughter) But it's a sad fact of modern life that one in two marriages in the States ends in divorce, with the rest of the world not being far behind. Now, you can be forgiven, perhaps for thinking that the arguments that precede a marital breakup are not an ideal candidate for mathematical investigation. For one thing, it's very hard to know what you should be measuring or what you should be quantifying. But this didn't stop a psychologist, John Gottman, who did exactly that. Gottman observed hundreds of couples having a conversation and recorded, well, everything you can think of. So he recorded what was said in the conversation, he recorded their skin conductivity, he recorded their facial expressions, their heart rates, their blood pressure, basically everything apart from whether or not the wife was actually always right, which incidentally she totally is. But what Gottman and his team found was that one of the most important predictors for whether or not a couple is going to get divorced was how positive or negative each partner was being in the conversation. Now, couples that were very low-risk scored a lot more positive points on Gottman's scale than negative. Whereas bad relationships, by which I mean, probably going to get divorced, they found themselves getting into a spiral of negativity. Now just by using these very simple ideas, Gottman and his group were able to predict whether a given couple was going to get divorced with a 90 percent accuracy. But it wasn't until he teamed up with a mathematician, James Murray, that they really started to understand what causes these negativity spirals and how they occur. And the results that they found, I think, are just incredibly impressively simple and interesting. So these equations predict how the wife or husband is going to respond in their next turn of the conversation, how positive or negative they're going to be. And these equations depend on the mood of the person when they're on their own, the mood of the person when they're with their partner, but most importantly, they depend on how much the husband and wife influence one another. Now, I think it's important to point out at this stage, that these exact equations have also been shown to be perfectly able at describing what happens between two countries in an arms race. (Laughter) So that an arguing couple spiraling into negativity and teetering on the brink of divorce is actually mathematically equivalent to the beginning of a nuclear war. (Laughter) But the really important term in this equation is the influence that people have on one another, and in particular, something called "the negativity threshold." Now, the negativity threshold, you can think of as how annoying the husband can be before the wife starts to get really pissed off, and vice versa. Now, I always thought that good marriages were about compromise and understanding and allowing the person to have the space to be themselves. So I would have thought that perhaps the most successful relationships were ones where there was a really high negativity threshold. Where couples let things go and only brought things up if they really were a big deal. But actually, the mathematics and subsequent findings by the team have shown the exact opposite is true. The best couples, or the most successful couples, are the ones with a really low negativity threshold. These are the couples that don't let anything go unnoticed and allow each other some room to complain. These are the couples that are continually trying to repair their own relationship, that have a much more positive outlook on their marriage. Couples that don't let things go and couples that don't let trivial things end up being a really big deal. Now of course, it takes a bit more than just a low negativity threshold and not compromising to have a successful relationship. But I think that it's quite interesting to know that there is really mathematical evidence to say that you should never let the sun go down on your anger. So those are my top three tips of how maths can help you with love and relationships. But I hope, that aside from their use as tips, they also give you a little bit of insight into the power of mathematics. Because for me, equations and symbols aren't just a thing. They're a voice that speaks out about the incredible richness of nature and the startling simplicity in the patterns that twist and turn and warp and evolve all around us, from how the world works to how we behave. So I hope that perhaps, for just a couple of you, a little bit of insight into the mathematics of love can persuade you to have a little bit more love for mathematics. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why we all need to practice emotional first aid | {0: 'Guy Winch asks us to take our emotional health as seriously as we take our physical health -- and explores how to heal from common heartaches.'} | TEDxLinnaeusUniversity | I grew up with my identical twin, who was an incredibly loving brother. Now, one thing about being a twin is, it makes you an expert at spotting favoritism. If his cookie was even slightly bigger than my cookie, I had questions. And clearly, I wasn't starving. (Laughter) When I became a psychologist, I began to notice favoritism of a different kind; and that is, how much more we value the body than we do the mind. I spent nine years at university earning my doctorate in psychology, and I can't tell you how many people look at my business card and say, "Oh — a psychologist. So, not a real doctor," as if it should say that on my card. [Dr. Guy Winch, Just a Psychologist (Not a Real Doctor)] (Laughter) This favoritism we show the body over the mind — I see it everywhere. I recently was at a friend's house, and their five-year-old was getting ready for bed. He was standing on a stool by the sink, brushing his teeth, when he slipped and scratched his leg on the stool when he fell. He cried for a minute, but then he got back up, got back on the stool, and reached out for a box of Band-Aids to put one on his cut. Now, this kid could barely tie his shoelaces, but he knew you have to cover a cut so it doesn't become infected, and you have to care for your teeth by brushing twice a day. We all know how to maintain our physical health and how to practice dental hygiene, right? We've known it since we were five years old. But what do we know about maintaining our psychological health? Well, nothing. What do we teach our children about emotional hygiene? Nothing. How is it that we spend more time taking care of our teeth than we do our minds? Why is it that our physical health is so much more important to us than our psychological health? We sustain psychological injuries even more often than we do physical ones, injuries like failure or rejection or loneliness. And they can also get worse if we ignore them, and they can impact our lives in dramatic ways. And yet, even though there are scientifically proven techniques we could use to treat these kinds of psychological injuries, we don't. It doesn't even occur to us that we should. "Oh, you're feeling depressed? Just shake it off; it's all in your head." Can you imagine saying that to somebody with a broken leg: "Oh, just walk it off; it's all in your leg." (Laughter) It is time we closed the gap between our physical and our psychological health. It's time we made them more equal, more like twins. Speaking of which, my brother is also a psychologist. So he's not a real doctor, either. (Laughter) We didn't study together, though. In fact, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life is move across the Atlantic to New York City to get my doctorate in psychology. We were apart then for the first time in our lives, and the separation was brutal for both of us. But while he remained among family and friends, I was alone in a new country. We missed each other terribly, but international phone calls were really expensive then, and we could only afford to speak for five minutes a week. When our birthday rolled around, it was the first we wouldn't be spending together. We decided to splurge, and that week, we would talk for 10 minutes. (Laughter) I spent the morning pacing around my room, waiting for him to call — and waiting ... and waiting. But the phone didn't ring. Given the time difference, I assumed, "OK, he's out with friends, he'll call later." There were no cell phones then. But he didn't. And I began to realize that after being away for over 10 months, he no longer missed me the way I missed him. I knew he would call in the morning, but that night was one of the saddest and longest nights of my life. I woke up the next morning. I glanced down at the phone, and I realized I had kicked it off the hook when pacing the day before. I stumbled out of bed, I put the phone back on the receiver, and it rang a second later. And it was my brother, and boy, was he pissed. (Laughter) It was the saddest and longest night of his life as well. Now, I tried to explain what happened, but he said, "I don't understand. If you saw I wasn't calling you, why didn't you just pick up the phone and call me?" He was right. Why didn't I call him? I didn't have an answer then. But I do today, and it's a simple one: loneliness. Loneliness creates a deep psychological wound, one that distorts our perceptions and scrambles our thinking. It makes us believe that those around us care much less than they actually do. It make us really afraid to reach out, because why set yourself up for rejection and heartache when your heart is already aching more than you can stand? I was in the grips of real loneliness back then, but I was surrounded by people all day, so it never occurred to me. But loneliness is defined purely subjectively. It depends solely on whether you feel emotionally or socially disconnected from those around you. And I did. There is a lot of research on loneliness, and all of it is horrifying. Loneliness won't just make you miserable; it will kill you. I'm not kidding. Chronic loneliness increases your likelihood of an early death by 14 percent. Fourteen percent! Loneliness causes high blood pressure, high cholesterol. It even suppress the functioning of your immune system, making you vulnerable to all kinds of illnesses and diseases. In fact, scientists have concluded that taken together, chronic loneliness poses as significant a risk for your long-term health and longevity as cigarette smoking. Now, cigarette packs come with warnings saying, "This could kill you." But loneliness doesn't. And that's why it's so important that we prioritize our psychological health, that we practice emotional hygiene. Because you can't treat a psychological wound if you don't even know you're injured. Loneliness isn't the only psychological wound that distorts our perceptions and misleads us. Failure does that as well. I once visited a day care center, where I saw three toddlers play with identical plastic toys. You had to slide the red button, and a cute doggie would pop out. One little girl tried pulling the purple button, then pushing it, and then she just sat back and looked at the box with her lower lip trembling. The little boy next to her watched this happen, then turned to his box and burst into tears without even touching it. Meanwhile, another little girl tried everything she could think of until she slid the red button, the cute doggie popped out, and she squealed with delight. So: three toddlers with identical plastic toys, but with very different reactions to failure. The first two toddlers were perfectly capable of sliding a red button. The only thing that prevented them from succeeding was that their mind tricked them into believing they could not. Now, adults get tricked this way as well, all the time. In fact, we all have a default set of feelings and beliefs that gets triggered whenever we encounter frustrations and setbacks. Are you aware of how your mind reacts to failure? You need to be. Because if your mind tries to convince you you're incapable of something, and you believe it, then like those two toddlers, you'll begin to feel helpless and you'll stop trying too soon, or you won't even try at all. And then you'll be even more convinced you can't succeed. You see, that's why so many people function below their actual potential. Because somewhere along the way, sometimes a single failure convinced them that they couldn't succeed, and they believed it. Once we become convinced of something, it's very difficult to change our mind. I learned that lesson the hard way when I was a teenager with my brother. We were driving with friends down a dark road at night, when a police car stopped us. There had been a robbery in the area and they were looking for suspects. The officer approached the car, and shined his flashlight on the driver, then on my brother in the front seat, and then on me. And his eyes opened wide and he said, "Where have I seen your face before?" (Laughter) And I said, "In the front seat." (Laughter) But that made no sense to him whatsoever, so now he thought I was on drugs. (Laughter) So he drags me out of the car, he searches me, he marches me over to the police car, and only when he verified I didn't have a police record, could I show him I had a twin in the front seat. But even as we were driving away, you could see by the look on his face he was convinced that I was getting away with something. (Laughter) Our mind is hard to change once we become convinced. So it might be very natural to feel demoralized and defeated after you fail. But you cannot allow yourself to become convinced you can't succeed. You have to fight feelings of helplessness. You have to gain control over the situation. And you have to break this kind of negative cycle before it begins. [Stop Emotional Bleeding] Our minds and our feelings — they're not the trustworthy friends we thought they were. They're more like a really moody friend, who can be totally supportive one minute, and really unpleasant the next. I once worked with this woman who, after 20 years marriage and an extremely ugly divorce, was finally ready for her first date. She had met this guy online, and he seemed nice and he seemed successful, and most importantly, he seemed really into her. So she was very excited, she bought a new dress, and they met at an upscale New York City bar for a drink. Ten minutes into the date, the man stands up and says, "I'm not interested," and walks out. Rejection is extremely painful. The woman was so hurt she couldn't move. All she could do was call a friend. Here's what the friend said: "Well, what do you expect? You have big hips, you have nothing interesting to say. Why would a handsome, successful man like that ever go out with a loser like you?" Shocking, right, that a friend could be so cruel? But it would be much less shocking if I told you it wasn't the friend who said that. It's what the woman said to herself. And that's something we all do, especially after a rejection. We all start thinking of all our faults and all our shortcomings, what we wish we were, what we wish we weren't. We call ourselves names. Maybe not as harshly, but we all do it. And it's interesting that we do, because our self-esteem is already hurting. Why would we want to go and damage it even further? We wouldn't make a physical injury worse on purpose. You wouldn't get a cut on your arm and decide, "Oh! I know — I'm going to take a knife and see how much deeper I can make it." But we do that with psychological injuries all the time. Why? Because of poor emotional hygiene. Because we don't prioritize our psychological health. We know from dozens of studies that when your self-esteem is lower, you are more vulnerable to stress and to anxiety; that failures and rejections hurt more, and it takes longer to recover from them. So when you get rejected, the first thing you should be doing is to revive your self-esteem, not join Fight Club and beat it into a pulp. When you're in emotional pain, treat yourself with the same compassion you would expect from a truly good friend. [Protect Your Self-Esteem] We have to catch our unhealthy psychological habits and change them. And one of unhealthiest and most common is called rumination. To ruminate means to chew over. It's when your boss yells at you or your professor makes you feel stupid in class, or you have big fight with a friend and you just can't stop replaying the scene in your head for days, sometimes for weeks on end. Now, ruminating about upsetting events in this way can easily become a habit, and it's a very costly one, because by spending so much time focused on upsetting and negative thoughts, you are actually putting yourself at significant risk for developing clinical depression, alcoholism, eating disorders, and even cardiovascular disease. The problem is, the urge to ruminate can feel really strong and really important, so it's a difficult habit to stop. I know this for a fact, because a little over a year ago, I developed the habit myself. You see, my twin brother was diagnosed with stage 3 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. His cancer was extremely aggressive. He had visible tumors all over his body. And he had to start a harsh course of chemotherapy. And I couldn't stop thinking about what he was going through. I couldn't stop thinking about how much he was suffering, even though he never complained, not once. He had this incredibly positive attitude. His psychological health was amazing. I was physically healthy, but psychologically, I was a mess. But I knew what to do. Studies tell us that even a two-minute distraction is sufficient to break the urge to ruminate in that moment. And so each time I had a worrying, upsetting, negative thought, I forced myself to concentrate on something else until the urge passed. And within one week, my whole outlook changed and became more positive and more hopeful. [Battle Negative Thinking] Nine weeks after he started chemotherapy, my brother had a CAT scan, and I was by his side when he got the results. All the tumors were gone. He still had three more rounds of chemotherapy to go, but we knew he would recover. This picture was taken two weeks ago. By taking action when you're lonely, by changing your responses to failure, by protecting your self-esteem, by battling negative thinking, you won't just heal your psychological wounds, you will build emotional resilience, you will thrive. A hundred years ago, people began practicing personal hygiene, and life expectancy rates rose by over 50 percent in just a matter of decades. I believe our quality of life could rise just as dramatically if we all began practicing emotional hygiene. Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone was psychologically healthier? If there were less loneliness and less depression? If people knew how to overcome failure? If they felt better about themselves and more empowered? If they were happier and more fulfilled? I can, because that's the world I want to live in. And that's the world my brother wants to live in as well. And if you just become informed and change a few simple habits, well — that's the world we can all live in. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime | {0: 'Nadine Burke Harris’ healthcare practice focuses on a little-understood, yet very common factor in childhood that can profoundly impact adult-onset disease: trauma.'} | TEDMED 2014 | In the mid-'90s, the CDC and Kaiser Permanente discovered an exposure that dramatically increased the risk for seven out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the United States. In high doses, it affects brain development, the immune system, hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed. Folks who are exposed in very high doses have triple the lifetime risk of heart disease and lung cancer and a 20-year difference in life expectancy. And yet, doctors today are not trained in routine screening or treatment. Now, the exposure I'm talking about is not a pesticide or a packaging chemical. It's childhood trauma. Okay. What kind of trauma am I talking about here? I'm not talking about failing a test or losing a basketball game. I am talking about threats that are so severe or pervasive that they literally get under our skin and change our physiology: things like abuse or neglect, or growing up with a parent who struggles with mental illness or substance dependence. Now, for a long time, I viewed these things in the way I was trained to view them, either as a social problem — refer to social services — or as a mental health problem — refer to mental health services. And then something happened to make me rethink my entire approach. When I finished my residency, I wanted to go someplace where I felt really needed, someplace where I could make a difference. So I came to work for California Pacific Medical Center, one of the best private hospitals in Northern California, and together, we opened a clinic in Bayview-Hunters Point, one of the poorest, most underserved neighborhoods in San Francisco. Now, prior to that point, there had been only one pediatrician in all of Bayview to serve more than 10,000 children, so we hung a shingle, and we were able to provide top-quality care regardless of ability to pay. It was so cool. We targeted the typical health disparities: access to care, immunization rates, asthma hospitalization rates, and we hit all of our numbers. We felt very proud of ourselves. But then I started noticing a disturbing trend. A lot of kids were being referred to me for ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, but when I actually did a thorough history and physical, what I found was that for most of my patients, I couldn't make a diagnosis of ADHD. Most of the kids I was seeing had experienced such severe trauma that it felt like something else was going on. Somehow I was missing something important. Now, before I did my residency, I did a master's degree in public health, and one of the things that they teach you in public health school is that if you're a doctor and you see 100 kids that all drink from the same well, and 98 of them develop diarrhea, you can go ahead and write that prescription for dose after dose after dose of antibiotics, or you can walk over and say, "What the hell is in this well?" So I began reading everything that I could get my hands on about how exposure to adversity affects the developing brains and bodies of children. And then one day, my colleague walked into my office, and he said, "Dr. Burke, have you seen this?" In his hand was a copy of a research study called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. That day changed my clinical practice and ultimately my career. The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study is something that everybody needs to know about. It was done by Dr. Vince Felitti at Kaiser and Dr. Bob Anda at the CDC, and together, they asked 17,500 adults about their history of exposure to what they called "adverse childhood experiences," or ACEs. Those include physical, emotional, or sexual abuse; physical or emotional neglect; parental mental illness, substance dependence, incarceration; parental separation or divorce; or domestic violence. For every yes, you would get a point on your ACE score. And then what they did was they correlated these ACE scores against health outcomes. What they found was striking. Two things: Number one, ACEs are incredibly common. Sixty-seven percent of the population had at least one ACE, and 12.6 percent, one in eight, had four or more ACEs. The second thing that they found was that there was a dose-response relationship between ACEs and health outcomes: the higher your ACE score, the worse your health outcomes. For a person with an ACE score of four or more, their relative risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease was two and a half times that of someone with an ACE score of zero. For hepatitis, it was also two and a half times. For depression, it was four and a half times. For suicidality, it was 12 times. A person with an ACE score of seven or more had triple the lifetime risk of lung cancer and three and a half times the risk of ischemic heart disease, the number one killer in the United States of America. Well, of course this makes sense. Some people looked at this data and they said, "Come on. You have a rough childhood, you're more likely to drink and smoke and do all these things that are going to ruin your health. This isn't science. This is just bad behavior." It turns out this is exactly where the science comes in. We now understand better than we ever have before how exposure to early adversity affects the developing brains and bodies of children. It affects areas like the nucleus accumbens, the pleasure and reward center of the brain that is implicated in substance dependence. It inhibits the prefrontal cortex, which is necessary for impulse control and executive function, a critical area for learning. And on MRI scans, we see measurable differences in the amygdala, the brain's fear response center. So there are real neurologic reasons why folks exposed to high doses of adversity are more likely to engage in high-risk behavior, and that's important to know. But it turns out that even if you don't engage in any high-risk behavior, you're still more likely to develop heart disease or cancer. The reason for this has to do with the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, the brain's and body's stress response system that governs our fight-or-flight response. How does it work? Well, imagine you're walking in the forest and you see a bear. Immediately, your hypothalamus sends a signal to your pituitary, which sends a signal to your adrenal gland that says, "Release stress hormones! Adrenaline! Cortisol!" And so your heart starts to pound, Your pupils dilate, your airways open up, and you are ready to either fight that bear or run from the bear. And that is wonderful if you're in a forest and there's a bear. (Laughter) But the problem is what happens when the bear comes home every night, and this system is activated over and over and over again, and it goes from being adaptive, or life-saving, to maladaptive, or health-damaging. Children are especially sensitive to this repeated stress activation, because their brains and bodies are just developing. High doses of adversity not only affect brain structure and function, they affect the developing immune system, developing hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed. So for me, this information threw my old training out the window, because when we understand the mechanism of a disease, when we know not only which pathways are disrupted, but how, then as doctors, it is our job to use this science for prevention and treatment. That's what we do. So in San Francisco, we created the Center for Youth Wellness to prevent, screen and heal the impacts of ACEs and toxic stress. We started simply with routine screening of every one of our kids at their regular physical, because I know that if my patient has an ACE score of 4, she's two and a half times as likely to develop hepatitis or COPD, she's four and half times as likely to become depressed, and she's 12 times as likely to attempt to take her own life as my patient with zero ACEs. I know that when she's in my exam room. For our patients who do screen positive, we have a multidisciplinary treatment team that works to reduce the dose of adversity and treat symptoms using best practices, including home visits, care coordination, mental health care, nutrition, holistic interventions, and yes, medication when necessary. But we also educate parents about the impacts of ACEs and toxic stress the same way you would for covering electrical outlets, or lead poisoning, and we tailor the care of our asthmatics and our diabetics in a way that recognizes that they may need more aggressive treatment, given the changes to their hormonal and immune systems. So the other thing that happens when you understand this science is that you want to shout it from the rooftops, because this isn't just an issue for kids in Bayview. I figured the minute that everybody else heard about this, it would be routine screening, multi-disciplinary treatment teams, and it would be a race to the most effective clinical treatment protocols. Yeah. That did not happen. And that was a huge learning for me. What I had thought of as simply best clinical practice I now understand to be a movement. In the words of Dr. Robert Block, the former President of the American Academy of Pediatrics, "Adverse childhood experiences are the single greatest unaddressed public health threat facing our nation today." And for a lot of people, that's a terrifying prospect. The scope and scale of the problem seems so large that it feels overwhelming to think about how we might approach it. But for me, that's actually where the hopes lies, because when we have the right framework, when we recognize this to be a public health crisis, then we can begin to use the right tool kit to come up with solutions. From tobacco to lead poisoning to HIV/AIDS, the United States actually has quite a strong track record with addressing public health problems, but replicating those successes with ACEs and toxic stress is going to take determination and commitment, and when I look at what our nation's response has been so far, I wonder, why haven't we taken this more seriously? You know, at first I thought that we marginalized the issue because it doesn't apply to us. That's an issue for those kids in those neighborhoods. Which is weird, because the data doesn't bear that out. The original ACEs study was done in a population that was 70 percent Caucasian, 70 percent college-educated. But then, the more I talked to folks, I'm beginning to think that maybe I had it completely backwards. If I were to ask how many people in this room grew up with a family member who suffered from mental illness, I bet a few hands would go up. And then if I were to ask how many folks had a parent who maybe drank too much, or who really believed that if you spare the rod, you spoil the child, I bet a few more hands would go up. Even in this room, this is an issue that touches many of us, and I am beginning to believe that we marginalize the issue because it does apply to us. Maybe it's easier to see in other zip codes because we don't want to look at it. We'd rather be sick. Fortunately, scientific advances and, frankly, economic realities make that option less viable every day. The science is clear: Early adversity dramatically affects health across a lifetime. Today, we are beginning to understand how to interrupt the progression from early adversity to disease and early death, and 30 years from now, the child who has a high ACE score and whose behavioral symptoms go unrecognized, whose asthma management is not connected, and who goes on to develop high blood pressure and early heart disease or cancer will be just as anomalous as a six-month mortality from HIV/AIDS. People will look at that situation and say, "What the heck happened there?" This is treatable. This is beatable. The single most important thing that we need today is the courage to look this problem in the face and say, this is real and this is all of us. I believe that we are the movement. Thank you. (Applause) |
For these women, reading is a daring act | {0: 'Laura Boushnak is a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian photographer whose work focuses on women, literacy and education reform in the Arab world. '} | TEDGlobal 2014 | As an Arab female photographer, I have always found ample inspiration for my projects in personal experiences. The passion I developed for knowledge, which allowed me to break barriers towards a better life was the motivation for my project I Read I Write. Pushed by my own experience, as I was not allowed initially to pursue my higher education, I decided to explore and document stories of other women who changed their lives through education, while exposing and questioning the barriers they face. I covered a range of topics that concern women's education, keeping in mind the differences among Arab countries due to economic and social factors. These issues include female illiteracy, which is quite high in the region; educational reforms; programs for dropout students; and political activism among university students. As I started this work, it was not always easy to convince the women to participate. Only after explaining to them how their stories might influence other women's lives, how they would become role models for their own community, did some agree. Seeking a collaborative and reflexive approach, I asked them to write their own words and ideas on prints of their own images. Those images were then shared in some of the classrooms, and worked to inspire and motivate other women going through similar educations and situations. Aisha, a teacher from Yemen, wrote, "I sought education in order to be independent and to not count on men with everything." One of my first subjects was Umm El-Saad from Egypt. When we first met, she was barely able to write her name. She was attending a nine-month literacy program run by a local NGO in the Cairo suburbs. Months later, she was joking that her husband had threatened to pull her out of the classes, as he found out that his now literate wife was going through his phone text messages. (Laughter) Naughty Umm El-Saad. Of course, that's not why Umm El-Saad joined the program. I saw how she was longing to gain control over her simple daily routines, small details that we take for granted, from counting money at the market to helping her kids in homework. Despite her poverty and her community's mindset, which belittles women's education, Umm El-Saad, along with her Egyptian classmates, was eager to learn how to read and write. In Tunisia, I met Asma, one of the four activist women I interviewed. The secular bioengineering student is quite active on social media. Regarding her country, which treasured what has been called the Arab Spring, she said, "I've always dreamt of discovering a new bacteria. Now, after the revolution, we have a new one every single day." Asma was referring to the rise of religious fundamentalism in the region, which is another obstacle to women in particular. Out of all the women I met, Fayza from Yemen affected me the most. Fayza was forced to drop out of school at the age of eight when she was married. That marriage lasted for a year. At 14, she became the third wife of a 60-year-old man, and by the time she was 18, she was a divorced mother of three. Despite her poverty, despite her social status as a divorcée in an ultra-conservative society, and despite the opposition of her parents to her going back to school, Fayza knew that her only way to control her life was through education. She is now 26. She received a grant from a local NGO to fund her business studies at the university. Her goal is to find a job, rent a place to live in, and bring her kids back with her. The Arab states are going through tremendous change, and the struggles women face are overwhelming. Just like the women I photographed, I had to overcome many barriers to becoming the photographer I am today, many people along the way telling me what I can and cannot do. Umm El-Saad, Asma and Fayza, and many women across the Arab world, show that it is possible to overcome barriers to education, which they know is the best means to a better future. And here I would like to end with a quote by Yasmine, one of the four activist women I interviewed in Tunisia. Yasmine wrote, "Question your convictions. Be who you to want to be, not who they want you to be. Don't accept their enslavement, for your mother birthed you free." Thank you. (Applause) |
How to go to space, without having to go to space | {0: 'Angelo Vermeulen wears many hats, including one as a crew commander for NASA, another as an artist and community organizer. '} | TEDGlobal 2014 | I am multidisciplinary. As a scientist, I've been a crew commander for a NASA Mars simulation last year, and as an artist, I create multicultural community art all over the planet. And recently, I've actually been combining both. But let me first talk a little more about that NASA mission. This is the HI-SEAS program. HI-SEAS is a NASA-funded planetary surface analogue on the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, and it's a research program that is specifically designed to study the effects of long-term isolation of small crews. I lived in this dome for four months with a crew of six, a very interesting experience, of course. We did all kinds of research. Our main research was actually a food study, but apart from that food study — developing a new food system for astronauts living in deep space — we also did all kinds of other research. We did extra-vehicular activities, as you can see here, wearing mock-up space suits, but we also had our chores and lots of other stuff to do, like questionnaires at the end of every day. Busy, busy work. Now, as you can imagine, it's quite challenging to live with just a small group of people in a small space for a long time. There's all kinds of psychological challenges: how to keep a team together in these circumstances; how to deal with the warping of time you start to sense when you're living in these circumstances; sleep problems that arise; etc. But also we learned a lot. I learned a lot about how individual crew members actually cope with a situation like this; how you can keep a crew productive and happy, for example, giving them a good deal of autonomy is a good trick to do that; and honestly, I learned a lot about leadership, because I was a crew commander. So doing this mission, I really started thinking more deeply about our future in outer space. We will venture into outer space, and we will start inhabiting outer space. I have no doubt about it. It might take 50 years or it might take 500 years, but it's going to happen nevertheless. So I came up with a new art project called Seeker. And the Seeker project is actually challenging communities all over the world to come up with starship prototypes that re-envision human habitation and survival. That's the core of the project. Now, one important thing: This is not a dystopian project. This is not about, "Oh my God, the world is going wrong and we have to escape because we need another future somewhere else." No, no. The project is basically inviting people to take a step away from earthbound constraints and, as such, reimagine our future. And it's really helpful, and it works really well, so that's really the important part of what we're doing. Now, in this project, I'm using a cocreation approach, which is a slightly different approach from what you would expect from many artists. I'm essentially dropping a basic idea into a group, into a community, people start gravitating to the idea, and together, we shape and build the artwork. It's a little bit like termites, really. We just work together, and even, for example, when architects visit what we're doing, sometimes they have a bit of a hard time understanding how we build without a master plan. We always come up with these fantastic large-scale scupltures that actually we can also inhabit. The first version was done in Belgium and Holland. It was built with a team of almost 50 people. This is the second iteration of that same project, but in Slovenia, in a different country, and the new group was like, we're going to do the architecture differently. So they took away the architecture, they kept the base of the artwork, and they built an entirely new, much more biomorphic architecture on top of that. And that's another crucial part of the project. It's an evolving artwork, evolving architecture. This was the last version that was just presented a few weeks ago in Holland, which was using caravans as modules to build a starship. We bought some second-hand caravans, cut them open, and reassembled them into a starship. Now, when we're thinking about starships, we're not just approaching it as a technological challenge. We're really looking at it as a combination of three systems: ecology, people and technology. So there's always a strong ecological component in the project. Here you can see aquaponic systems that are actually surrounding the astronauts, so they're constantly in contact with part of the food that they're eating. Now, a very typical thing for this project is that we run our own isolation missions inside these art and design projects. We actually lock ourselves up for multiple days on end, and test what we build. And this is, for example, on the right hand side you can see an isolation mission in the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana in Slovenia, where six artists and designers locked themselves up — I was part of that — for four days inside the museum. And, of course, obviously, this is a very performative and very strong experience for all of us. Now, the next version of the project is currently being developed together with Camilo Rodriguez-Beltran, who is also a TED Fellow, in the Atacama Desert in Chile, a magical place. First of all, it's really considered a Mars analogue. It really does look like Mars in certain locations and has been used by NASA to test equipment. And it has a long history of being connected to space through observations of the stars. It's now home to ALMA, the large telescope that's being developed there. But also, it's the driest location on the planet, and that makes it extremely interesting to build our project, because suddenly, sustainability is something we have to explore fully. We have no other option, so I'm very curious to see what's going to happen. Now, a specific thing for this particular version of the project is that I'm very interested to see how we can connect with the local population, the native population. These people have been living there for a very long time and can be considered experts in sustainability, and so I'm very interested to see what we can learn from them, and have an input of indigenous knowledge into space exploration. So we're trying to redefine how we look at our future in outer space by exploring integration, biology, technology and people; by using a cocreation approach; and by using and exploring local traditions and to see how we can learn from the past and integrate that into our deep future. Thank you. (Applause) |
The little problem I had renting a house | {0: 'James A. White Sr. believes that every person and organization has incredible potential. He works to help them understand it — and communicate it to others.'} | TEDxColumbus | An 18-year-old, African-American male joined the United States Air Force and was assigned to Mountain Home Air Force Base and was a part of the air police squadron. Upon first arriving there, the first goal that I had was for me to identify an apartment, so I could bring my wife and my new baby, Melanie, out to join me in Idaho. I immediately went to the personnel office, and talking with the guys in personnel, they said, "Hey, no problem finding an apartment in Mountain Home, Idaho. The people down there love us because they know if they have an airman who is coming in to rent one of their apartments, they'll always get their money." And that was a really important thing. He said, "So here is a list of people that you can call, and then they will then allow you to select the apartment that you want." So I got the list; I made the call. The lady answered on the other end and I told her what I wanted. She said, "Oh, great you called. We have four or five apartments available right now." She said, "Do you want a one-bedroom or two-bedroom?" Then she said, "Let's not talk about that. Just come on down, select the apartment that you want. We'll sign the contract and you'll have keys in your hand to get your family out here right away." So I was excited. I jumped in my car. I went downtown and knocked on the door. When I knocked on the door, the woman came to the door, and she looked at me, and she said, "Can I help you?" I said, "Yes, I'm the person who called about the apartments. I was just coming down to make my selection." She said, "You know what? I'm really sorry, but my husband rented those apartments and didn't tell me about them." I said, "You mean he rented all five of them in one hour?" She didn't give me a response, and what she said was this: She said, "Why don't you leave your number, and if we have some openings, I'll give you a call?" Needless to say, I did not get a call from her. Nor did I get any responses from the other people that they gave me on the list where I could get apartments. So as a result of that, and feeling rejected, I went back to the base, and I talked to the squadron commander. His name was McDow, Major McDow. I said, "Major McDow, I need your help." I told him what happened, and here's what he said to me: He said, "James, I would love to help you. But you know the problem: We can't make people rent to folks that they don't want to rent to. And besides, we have a great relationship with people in the community and we really don't want to damage that." He said, "So maybe this is what you should do. Why don't you let your family stay home, because you do know that you get a 30-day leave. So once a year, you can go home to your family, spend 30 days and then come on back." Needless to say, that didn't resonate for me. So after leaving him, I went back to personnel, and talking to the clerk, he said, "Jim, I think I have a solution for you. There's an airman who is leaving and he has a trailer. If you noticed, in Mountain Home, there are trailer parks and trailers all over the place. You can buy his trailer, and you'd probably get a really good deal because he wants to get out of town as soon as possible. And that would take care of your problem, and that would provide the solution for you." So I immediately jumped in my car, went downtown, saw the trailer — it was a small trailer, but under the circumstances, I figured that was the best thing that I could do. So I bought the trailer. And then I asked him, "Can I just leave the trailer here, and that would take care of all my problems, I wouldn't have to find another trailer park?" He said, "Before I say yes to that, I need to check with management." So I get back to the base, he called me back and management said, "No, you can't leave the trailer here because we had promised that slot to some other people." And that was strange to me because there were several other slots that were open, but it just so happened that he had promised that slot to someone else. So, what I did — and he said, "You shouldn't worry, Jim, because there are a lot of trailer parks." So I put out another exhaustive list of going to trailer parks. I went to one after another, after another. And I got the same kind of rejection there that I received when I was looking for the apartment. And as a result, the kind of comments that they made to me, in addition to saying that they didn't have any slots open, one person said, "Jim, the reason why we can't rent to you, we already have a Negro family in the trailer park." He said, "And it's not me, because I like you people." (Laughs) And that's what I did, too. I chuckled, too. He said, "But here's the problem: If I let you in, the other tenants will move out and I can't afford to take that kind of a hit." He said, "I just can't rent to you." Even though that was discouraging, it didn't stop me. I kept looking, and I looked at the far end of the town in Mountain Home, and there was a small trailer park. I mean, a really small trailer park. It didn't have any paved roads in it, it didn't have the concrete slabs, it didn't have fencing to portion off your trailer slot from other trailer slots. It didn't have a laundry facility. But the conclusion I reached at that moment was that I didn't have a lot of other options. So I called my wife, and I said, "We're going to make this one work." And we moved into it and we became homeowners in Mountain Home, Idaho. And of course, eventually things settled down. Four years after that, I received papers to move from Mountain Home, Idaho to a place called Goose Bay, Labrador. We won't even talk about that. It was another great location. (Laughter) So my challenge then was to get my family from Mountain Home, Idaho to Sharon, Pennsylvania. That wasn't a problem because we had just purchased a brand-new automobile. My mother called and said she'll fly out. She'll be with us as we drive, she'll help us manage the children. So she came out, her and Alice put a lot of food together for the trip. That morning, we left at about 5 a.m. Great trip, having a great time, good conversation. Somewhere around 6:30, 7 o'clock, we got a little bit tired, and we said, "Why don't we get a motel so that we can rest and then have an early start in the morning?" So we were looking at a number of the motels as we drove down the road, and we saw one, it was a great big, bright flashing light that said, "Vacancies, Vacancies, Vacanies." So we stopped in. They were in the parking lot, I went inside. When I walked inside, the lady was just finishing up one contract with some folks, some other people were coming in behind me. And so I walked to the counter, and she said, "How can I help you?" I said, "I would like to get a motel for the evening for my family." She said, "You know, I'm really sorry, I just rented the last one. We will not have any more until the morning." She said, "But if you go down the road about an hour, 45 minutes, there's another trailer park down there." I said, "Yeah, but you still have the 'Vacancies' light on, and it's flashing." She said, "Oh, I forgot." And she reached over and turned the light off. She looked at me and I looked at her. There were other people in the room. She kind of looked at them. No one said anything. So I just got the hint and I left, and went outside to the parking lot. And I told my mother and I told my wife and also Melanie, and I said, "It looks like we're going to have to drive a little bit further down the road to be able to sleep tonight." And we did drive down the road, but just before we took off and pulled out of the parking lot, guess what happened? The light came back on. And it said, "Vacancies, Vacancies, Vacancies." We were able to find a nice place. It wasn't our preference, but it was secure and it was clean. And so we had a great sleep that night. The piece that's important about that is that we had similar kinds of experiences from Idaho all the way through to Pennsylvania, where we were rejected from hotels, motels and restaurants. But we made it to Pennsylvania. We got the family settled. Everyone was glad to see the kids. I jumped on a plane and shot off to Goose Bay, Labrador, which is another story, right? (Laughter) Here it is, 53 years later, I now have nine grandchildren, two great-grandchildren. Five of the grandchildren are boys. I have master's, Ph.D., undergrad, one in medical school. I have a couple that are trending. They're almost there but not quite. (Laughter) I have one who has been in college now for eight years. (Laughter) He doesn't have a degree yet, but he wants to be a comedian. So we're just trying to get him to stay in school. Because you never know, just because you're funny at home, does not make you a comedian, right? (Laughter) But the thing about it, they're all good kids — no drugs, no babies in high school, no crime. So with that being the backdrop, I was sitting in my TV room watching TV, and they were talking about Ferguson and all the hullabaloo that was going on. And all of a sudden, one of the news commentators got on the air and she said, "In the last three months, eight unarmed African-American males have been killed by police, white homeowners, or white citizens." For some reason, at that moment it just all hit me. I said, "What is it? It is so insane. What is the hatred that's causing people to do these kinds of things?" Just then, one of my grandsons called. He said, "Granddad, did you hear what they said on TV?" I said, "Yes, I did." He said, "I'm just so confused. We do everything we do, but it seems that driving while black, walking while black, talking while black, it's just dangerous. What can we do? We do everything that you told us to do. When stopped by the police, we place both hands on the steering wheel at the 12 o'clock position. If asked to get identification, we tell them, 'I am slowly reaching over into the glove compartment to get my I.D.' When pulled out of the car to be searched, when laid on the ground to be searched, when our trunks are opened to be searched, we don't push back, we don't challenge because we know, you've told us, 'Don't you challenge the police. After it's over, call us and we'll be the ones to challenge." He said, "And this is the piece that really bugs me: Our white friends, our buddies, we kind of hang together. When they hear about these kinds of things happening to us, they say, 'Why do you take it? You need to push back. You need to challenge. You need to ask them for their identification.'" And here's what the boys have been taught to tell them: "We know that you can do that, but please do not do that while we're in the car because the consequences for you are significantly different than the consequences for us." And so as a grandparent, what do I tell my grandsons? How do I keep them safe? How do I keep them alive? As a result of this, people have come to me and said, "Jim, are you angry?" And my response to that is this: "I don't have the luxury of being angry, and I also know the consequences of being enraged." So therefore, the only thing that I can do is take my collective intellect and my energy and my ideas and my experiences and dedicate myself to challenge, at any point in time, anything that looks like it might be racist. So the first thing I have to do is to educate, the second thing I have to do is to unveil racism, and the last thing I need to do is do everything within my power to eradicate racism in my lifetime by any means necessary. The second thing I do is this: I want to appeal to Americans. I want to appeal to their humanity, to their dignity, to their civic pride and ownership to be able to not react to these heinous crimes in an adverse manner. But instead, to elevate your level of societal knowledge, your level of societal awareness and societal consciousness to then collectively come together, all of us come together, to make sure that we speak out against and we challenge any kind of insanity, any kind of insanity that makes it okay to kill unarmed people, regardless of their ethnicity, regardless of their race, regardless of their diversity makeup. We have to challenge that. It doesn't make any sense. The only way I think we can do that is through a collective. We need to have black and white and Asian and Hispanic just to step forward and say, "We are not going to accept that kind of behavior anymore." |
How our microbes make us who we are | {0: 'Rob Knight explores the unseen microbial world that exists literally right under our noses -- and everywhere else on (and in) our bodies.'} | TED2014 | We humans have always been very concerned about the health of our bodies, but we haven't always been that good at figuring out what's important. Take the ancient Egyptians, for example: very concerned about the body parts they thought they'd need in the afterlife, but they left some parts out. This part, for example. Although they very carefully preserved the stomach, the lungs, the liver, and so forth, they just mushed up the brain, drained it out through the nose, and threw it away, which makes sense, really, because what does a brain do for us anyway? But imagine if there were a kind of neglected organ in our bodies that weighed just as much as the brain and in some ways was just as important to who we are, but we knew so little about and treated with such disregard. And imagine if, through new scientific advances, we were just beginning to understand its importance to how we think of ourselves. Wouldn't you want to know more about it? Well, it turns out that we do have something just like that: our gut, or rather, its microbes. But it's not just the microbes in our gut that are important. Microbes all over our body turn out to be really critical to a whole range of differences that make different people who we are. So for example, have you ever noticed how some people get bitten by mosquitos way more often than others? It turns out that everyone's anecdotal experience out camping is actually true. For example, I seldom get bitten by mosquitos, but my partner Amanda attracts them in droves, and the reason why is that we have different microbes on our skin that produce different chemicals that the mosquitos detect. Now, microbes are also really important in the field of medicine. So, for example, what microbes you have in your gut determine whether particular painkillers are toxic to your liver. They also determine whether or not other drugs will work for your heart condition. And, if you're a fruit fly, at least, your microbes determine who you want to have sex with. We haven't demonstrated this in humans yet but maybe it's just a matter of time before we find out. (Laughter) So microbes are performing a huge range of functions. They help us digest our food. They help educate our immune system. They help us resist disease, and they may even be affecting our behavior. So what would a map of all these microbial communities look like? Well, it wouldn't look exactly like this, but it's a helpful guide for understanding biodiversity. Different parts of the world have different landscapes of organisms that are immediately characteristic of one place or another or another. With microbiology, it's kind of the same, although I've got to be honest with you: All the microbes essentially look the same under a microscope. So instead of trying to identify them visually, what we do is we look at their DNA sequences, and in a project called the Human Microbiome Project, NIH funded this $173 million project where hundreds of researchers came together to map out all the A's, T's, G's, and C's, and all of these microbes in the human body. So when we take them together, they look like this. It's a bit more difficult to tell who lives where now, isn't it? What my lab does is develop computational techniques that allow us to take all these terabytes of sequence data and turn them into something that's a bit more useful as a map, and so when we do that with the human microbiome data from 250 healthy volunteers, it looks like this. Each point here represents all the complex microbes in an entire microbial community. See, I told you they basically all look the same. So what we're looking at is each point represents one microbial community from one body site of one healthy volunteer. And so you can see that there's different parts of the map in different colors, almost like separate continents. And what it turns out to be is that those, as the different regions of the body, have very different microbes in them. So what we have is we have the oral community up there in green. Over on the other side, we have the skin community in blue, the vaginal community in purple, and then right down at the bottom, we have the fecal community in brown. And we've just over the last few years found out that the microbes in different parts of the body are amazingly different from one another. So if I look at just one person's microbes in the mouth and in the gut, it turns out that the difference between those two microbial communities is enormous. It's bigger than the difference between the microbes in this reef and the microbes in this prairie. So this is incredible when you think about it. What it means is that a few feet of difference in the human body makes more of a difference to your microbial ecology than hundreds of miles on Earth. And this is not to say that two people look basically the same in the same body habitat, either. So you probably heard that we're pretty much all the same in terms of our human DNA. You're 99.99 percent identical in terms of your human DNA to the person sitting next to you. But that's not true of your gut microbes: you might only share 10 percent similarity with the person sitting next to you in terms of your gut microbes. So that's as different as the bacteria on this prairie and the bacteria in this forest. So these different microbes have all these different kinds of functions that I told you about, everything from digesting food to involvement in different kinds of diseases, metabolizing drugs, and so forth. So how do they do all this stuff? Well, in part it's because although there's just three pounds of those microbes in our gut, they really outnumber us. And so how much do they outnumber us? Well, it depends on what you think of as our bodies. Is it our cells? Well, each of us consists of about 10 trillion human cells, but we harbor as many as 100 trillion microbial cells. So they outnumber us 10 to one. Now, you might think, well, we're human because of our DNA, but it turns out that each of us has about 20,000 human genes, depending on what you count exactly, but as many as two million to 20 million microbial genes. So whichever way we look at it, we're vastly outnumbered by our microbial symbionts. And it turns out that in addition to traces of our human DNA, we also leave traces of our microbial DNA on everything we touch. We showed in a study a few years ago that you can actually match the palm of someone's hand up to the computer mouse that they use routinely with up to 95 percent accuracy. So this came out in a scientific journal a few years ago, but more importantly, it was featured on "CSI: Miami," so you really know it's true. (Laughter) So where do our microbes come from in the first place? Well if, as I do, you have dogs or kids, you probably have some dark suspicions about that, all of which are true, by the way. So just like we can match you to your computer equipment by the microbes you share, we can also match you up to your dog. But it turns out that in adults, microbial communities are relatively stable, so even if you live together with someone, you'll maintain your separate microbial identity over a period of weeks, months, even years. It turns out that our first microbial communities depend a lot on how we're born. So babies that come out the regular way, all of their microbes are basically like the vaginal community, whereas babies that are delivered by C-section, all of their microbes instead look like skin. And this might be associated with some of the differences in health associated with Cesarean birth, such as more asthma, more allergies, even more obesity, all of which have been linked to microbes now, and when you think about it, until recently, every surviving mammal had been delivered by the birth canal, and so the lack of those protective microbes that we've co-evolved with might be really important for a lot of these different conditions that we now know involve the microbiome. When my own daughter was born a couple of years ago by emergency C-section, we took matters into our own hands and made sure she was coated with those vaginal microbes that she would have gotten naturally. Now, it's really difficult to tell whether this has had an effect on her health specifically, right? With a sample size of just one child, no matter how much we love her, you don't really have enough of a sample size to figure out what happens on average, but at two years old, she hasn't had an ear infection yet, so we're keeping our fingers crossed on that one. And what's more, we're starting to do clinical trials with more children to figure out whether this has a protective effect generally. So how we're born has a tremendous effect on what microbes we have initially, but where do we go after that? What I'm showing you again here is this map of the Human Microbiome Project Data, so each point represents a sample from one body site from one of 250 healthy adults. And you've seen children develop physically. You've seen them develop mentally. Now, for the first time, you're going to see one of my colleague's children develop microbially. So what we are going to look at is we're going to look at this one baby's stool, the fecal community, which represents the gut, sampled every week for almost two and a half years. And so we're starting on day one. What's going to happen is that the infant is going to start off as this yellow dot, and you can see that he's starting off basically in the vaginal community, as we would expect from his delivery mode. And what's going to happen over these two and a half years is that he's going to travel all the way down to resemble the adult fecal community from healthy volunteers down at the bottom. So I'm just going to start this going and we'll see how that happens. What you can see, and remember each step in this is just one week, what you can see is that week to week, the change in the microbial community of the feces of this one child, the differences week to week are much greater than the differences between individual healthy adults in the Human Microbiome Project cohort, which are those brown dots down at the bottom. And you can see he's starting to approach the adult fecal community. This is up to about two years. But something amazing is about to happen here. So he's getting antibiotics for an ear infection. What you can see is this huge change in the community, followed by a relatively rapid recovery. I'll just rewind that for you. And what we can see is that just over these few weeks, we have a much more radical change, a setback of many months of normal development, followed by a relatively rapid recovery, and by the time he reaches day 838, which is the end of this video, you can see that he has essentially reached the healthy adult stool community, despite that antibiotic intervention. So this is really interesting because it raises fundamental questions about what happens when we intervene at different ages in a child's life. So does what we do early on, where the microbiome is changing so rapidly, actually matter, or is it like throwing a stone into a stormy sea, where the ripples will just be lost? Well, fascinatingly, it turns out that if you give children antibiotics in the first six months of life, they're more likely to become obese later on than if they don't get antibiotics then or only get them later, and so what we do early on may have profound impacts on the gut microbial community and on later health that we're only beginning to understand. So this is fascinating, because one day, in addition to the effects that antibiotics have on antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which are very important, they may also be degrading our gut microbial ecosystems, and so one day we may come to regard antibiotics with the same horror that we currently reserve for those metal tools that the Egyptians used to use to mush up the brains before they drained them out for embalming. So I mentioned that microbes have all these important functions, and they've also now, just over the past few years, been connected to a whole range of different diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease, heart disease, colon cancer, and even obesity. Obesity has a really large effect, as it turns out, and today, we can tell whether you're lean or obese with 90 percent accuracy by looking at the microbes in your gut. Now, although that might sound impressive, in some ways it's a little bit problematic as a medical test, because you can probably tell which of these people is obese without knowing anything about their gut microbes, but it turns out that even if we sequence their complete genomes and had all their human DNA, we could only predict which one was obese with about 60 percent accuracy. So that's amazing, right? What it means that the three pounds of microbes that you carry around with you may be more important for some health conditions than every single gene in your genome. And then in mice, we can do a lot more. So in mice, microbes have been linked to all kinds of additional conditions, including things like multiple sclerosis, depression, autism, and again, obesity. But how can we tell whether these microbial differences that correlate with disease are cause or effect? Well, one thing we can do is we can raise some mice without any microbes of their own in a germ-free bubble. Then we can add in some microbes that we think are important, and see what happens. When we take the microbes from an obese mouse and transplant them into a genetically normal mouse that's been raised in a bubble with no microbes of its own, it becomes fatter than if it got them from a regular mouse. Why this happens is absolutely amazing, though. Sometimes what's going on is that the microbes are helping them digest food more efficiently from the same diet, so they're taking more energy from their food, but other times, the microbes are actually affecting their behavior. What they're doing is they're eating more than the normal mouse, so they only get fat if we let them eat as much as they want. So this is really remarkable, right? The implication is that microbes can affect mammalian behavior. So you might be wondering whether we can also do this sort of thing across species, and it turns out that if you take microbes from an obese person and transplant them into mice you've raised germ-free, those mice will also become fatter than if they received the microbes from a lean person, but we can design a microbial community that we inoculate them with that prevents them from gaining this weight. We can also do this for malnutrition. So in a project funded by the Gates Foundation, what we're looking at is children in Malawi who have kwashiorkor, a profound form of malnutrition, and mice that get the kwashiorkor community transplanted into them lose 30 percent of their body mass in just three weeks, but we can restore their health by using the same peanut butter-based supplement that is used for the children in the clinic, and the mice that receive the community from the healthy identical twins of the kwashiorkor children do fine. This is truly amazing because it suggests that we can pilot therapies by trying them out in a whole bunch of different mice with individual people's gut communities and perhaps tailor those therapies all the way down to the individual level. So I think it's really important that everyone has a chance to participate in this discovery. So, a couple of years ago, we started this project called American Gut, which allows you to claim a place for yourself on this microbial map. This is now the largest crowd-funded science project that we know of — over 8,000 people have signed up at this point. What happens is, they send in their samples, we sequence the DNA of their microbes and then release the results back to them. We also release them, de-identified, to scientists, to educators, to interested members of the general public, and so forth, so anyone can have access to the data. On the other hand, when we do tours of our lab at the BioFrontiers Institute, and we explain that we use robots and lasers to look at poop, it turns out that not everyone wants to know. (Laughter) But I'm guessing that many of you do, and so I brought some kits here if you're interested in trying this out for yourself. So why might we want to do this? Well, it turns out that microbes are not just important for finding out where we are in terms of our health, but they can actually cure disease. This is one of the newest things we've been able to visualize with colleagues at the University of Minnesota. So here's that map of the human microbiome again. What we're looking at now — I'm going to add in the community of some people with C. diff. So, this is a terrible form of diarrhea where you have to go up to 20 times a day, and these people have failed antibiotic therapy for two years before they're eligible for this trial. So what would happen if we transplanted some of the stool from a healthy donor, that star down at the bottom, into these patients. Would the good microbes do battle with the bad microbes and help to restore their health? So let's watch exactly what happens there. Four of those patients are about to get a transplant from that healthy donor at the bottom, and what you can see is that immediately, you have this radical change in the gut community. So one day after you do that transplant, all those symptoms clear up, the diarrhea vanishes, and they're essentially healthy again, coming to resemble the donor's community, and they stay there. (Applause) So we're just at the beginning of this discovery. We're just finding out that microbes have implications for all these different kinds of diseases, ranging from inflammatory bowel disease to obesity, and perhaps even autism and depression. What we need to do, though, is we need to develop a kind of microbial GPS, where we don't just know where we are currently but also where we want to go and what we need to do in order to get there, and we need to be able to make this simple enough that even a child can use it. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
How I work to protect women from honor killings | {0: 'In the tribal region where she was born, Khalida Brohi founded an organization to end honor killings and empower Pakistani women.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | While preparing for my talk I was reflecting on my life and trying to figure out where exactly was that moment when my journey began. A long time passed by, and I simply couldn't figure out the beginning or the middle or the end of my story. I always used to think that my beginning was one afternoon in my community when my mother had told me that I had escaped three arranged marriages by the time I was two. Or one evening when electricity had failed for eight hours in our community, and my dad sat, surrounded by all of us, telling us stories of when he was a little kid struggling to go to school while his father, who was a farmer, wanted him to work in the fields with him. Or that dark night when I was 16 when three little kids had come to me and they whispered in my ear that my friend was murdered in something called the honor killings. But then I realized that, as much as I know that these moments have contributed on my journey, they have influenced my journey but they have not been the beginning of it, but the true beginning of my journey was in front of a mud house in upper Sindh of Pakistan, where my father held the hand of my 14-year-old mother and they decided to walk out of the village to go to a town where they could send their kids to school. In a way, I feel like my life is kind of a result of some wise choices and decisions they've made. And just like that, another of their decisions was to keep me and my siblings connected to our roots. While we were living in a community I fondly remember as called Ribabad, which means community of the poor, my dad made sure that we also had a house in our rural homeland. I come from an indigenous tribe in the mountains of Balochistan called Brahui. Brahui, or Brohi, means mountain dweller, and it is also my language. Thanks to my father's very strict rules about connecting to our customs, I had to live a beautiful life of songs, cultures, traditions, stories, mountains, and a lot of sheep. But then, living in two extremes between the traditions of my culture, of my village, and then modern education in my school wasn't easy. I was aware that I was the only girl who got to have such freedom, and I was guilty of it. While going to school in Karachi and Hyderabad, a lot of my cousins and childhood friends were getting married off, some to older men, some in exchange, some even as second wives. I got to see the beautiful tradition and its magic fade in front of me when I saw that the birth of a girl child was celebrated with sadness, when women were told to have patience as their main virtue. Up until I was 16, I healed my sadness by crying, mostly at nights when everyone would sleep and I would sob in my pillow, until that one night when I found out my friend was killed in the name of honor. Honor killings is a custom where men and women are suspected of having relationships before or outside of the marriage, and they're killed by their family for it. Usually the killer is the brother or father or the uncle in the family. The U.N. reports there are about 1,000 honor murders every year in Pakistan, and these are only the reported cases. A custom that kills did not make any sense to me, and I knew I had to do something about it this time. I was not going to cry myself to sleep. I was going to do something, anything, to stop it. I was 16 — I started writing poetry and going door to door telling everybody about honor killings and why it happens, why it should be stopped, and raising awareness about it until I actually found a much, much better way to handle this issue. In those days, we were living in a very small, one-roomed house in Karachi. Every year, during the monsoon seasons, our house would flood up with water — rainwater and sewage — and my mom and dad would be taking the water out. In those days, my dad brought home a huge machine, a computer. It was so big it looked as if it was going to take up half of the only room we had, and had so many pieces and wires that needed to be connected. But it was still the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me and my sisters. My oldest brother Ali got to be in charge of taking care of the computer, and all of us were given 10 to 15 minutes every day to use it. Being the oldest of eight kids, I got to use it the last, and that was after I had washed the dishes, cleaned the house, made dinner with my mom, and put blankets on the floor for everyone to sleep, and after that, I would run to the computer, connect it to the Internet, and have pure joy and wonder for 10 to 15 minutes. In those days, I had discovered a website called Joogle. [Google] (Laughter) In my frantic wish to do something about this custom, I made use of Google and discovered Facebook, a website where people can connect to anyone around the world, and so, from my very tiny, cement-roofed room in Karachi, I connected with people in the U.K., the U.S., Australia and Canada, and created a campaign called WAKE UP Campaign against Honor Killings. It became enormous in just a few months. I got a lot of support from all around the world. Media was connecting to us. A lot of people were reaching out trying to raise awareness with us. It became so big that it went from online to the streets of my hometown, where we would do rallies and strikes trying to change the policies in Pakistan for women's support. And while I thought everything was perfect, my team — which was basically my friends and neighbors at that time — thought everything was going so well, we had no idea a big opposition was coming to us. My community stood up against us, saying we were spreading un-Islamic behavior. We were challenging centuries-old customs in those communities. I remember my father receiving anonymous letters saying, "Your daughter is spreading Western culture in the honorable societies." Our car was stoned at one point. One day I went to the office and found our metal signboard wrinkled and broken as if a lot of people had been hitting it with something heavy. Things got so bad that I had to hide myself in many ways. I would put up the windows of the car, veil my face, not speak while I was in public, but eventually situations got worse when my life was threatened, and I had to leave, back to Karachi, and our actions stopped. Back in Karachi, as an 18-year-old, I thought this was the biggest failure of my entire life. I was devastated. As a teenager, I was blaming myself for everything that happened. And it turns out, when we started reflecting, we did realize that it was actually me and my team's fault. There were two big reasons why our campaign had failed big time. One of those, the first reason, is we were standing against core values of people. We were saying no to something that was very important to them, challenging their code of honor, and hurting them deeply in the process. And number two, which was very important for me to learn, and amazing, and surprising for me to learn, was that we were not including the true heroes who should be fighting for themselves. The women in the villages had no idea we were fighting for them in the streets. Every time I would go back, I would find my cousins and friends with scarves on their faces, and I would ask, "What happened?" And they'd be like, "Our husbands beat us." But we are working in the streets for you! We are changing the policies. How is that not impacting their life? So then we found out something which was very amazing for us. The policies of a country do not necessarily always affect the tribal and rural communities. It was devastating — like, oh, we can't actually do something about this? And we found out there's a huge gap when it comes to official policies and the real truth on the ground. So this time, we were like, we are going to do something different. We are going to use strategy, and we are going to go back and apologize. Yes, apologize. We went back to the communities and we said we are very ashamed of what we did. We are here to apologize, and in fact, we are here to make it up to you. How do we do that? We are going to promote three of your main cultures. We know that it's music, language, and embroidery. Nobody believed us. Nobody wanted to work with us. It took a lot of convincing and discussions with these communities until they agreed that we are going to promote their language by making a booklet of their stories, fables and old tales in the tribe, and we would promote their music by making a CD of the songs from the tribe, and some drumbeating. And the third, which was my favorite, was we would promote their embroidery by making a center in the village where women would come every day to make embroidery. And so it began. We worked with one village, and we started our first center. It was a beautiful day. We started the center. Women were coming to make embroidery, and going through a life-changing process of education, learning about their rights, what Islam says about their rights, and enterprise development, how they can create money, and then how they can create money from money, how they can fight the customs that have been destroying their lives from so many centuries, because in Islam, in reality, women are supposed to be shoulder to shoulder with men. Women have so much status that we have not been hearing, that they have not been hearing, and we needed to tell them that they need to know where their rights are and how to take them by themselves, because they can do it and we can't. So this was the model which actually came out — very amazing. Through embroidery we were promoting their traditions. We went into the village. We would mobilize the community. We would make a center inside where 30 women will come for six months to learn about value addition of traditional embroidery, enterprise development, life skills and basic education, and about their rights and how to say no to those customs and how to stand as leaders for themselves and the society. After six months, we would connect these women to loans and to markets where they can become local entrepreneurs in their communities. We soon called this project Sughar. Sughar is a local word used in many, many languages in Pakistan. It means skilled and confident women. I truly believe, to create women leaders, there's only one thing you have to do: Just let them know that they have what it takes to be a leader. These women you see here, they have strong skills and potential to be leaders. All we had to do was remove the barriers that surrounded them, and that's what we decided to do. But then while we were thinking everything was going well, once again everything was fantastic, we found our next setback: A lot of men started seeing the visible changes in their wife. She's speaking more, she's making decisions — oh my gosh, she's handling everything in the house. They stopped them from coming to the centers, and this time, we were like, okay, time for strategy two. We went to the fashion industry in Pakistan and decided to do research about what happens there. Turns out the fashion industry in Pakistan is very strong and growing day by day, but there is less contribution from the tribal areas and to the tribal areas, especially women. So we decided to launch our first ever tribal women's very own fashion brand, which is now called Nomads. And so women started earning more, they started contributing more financially to the house, and men had to think again before saying no to them when they were coming to the centers. (Applause) Thank you, thank you. In 2013, we launched our first Sughar Hub instead of a center. We partnered with TripAdvisor and created a cement hall in the middle of a village and invited so many other organizations to work over there. We created this platform for the nonprofits so they can touch and work on the other issues that Sughar is not working on, which would be an easy place for them to give trainings, use it as a farmer school, even as a marketplace, and anything they want to use it for, and they have been doing really amazingly. And so far, we have been able to support 900 women in 24 villages around Pakistan. (Applause) But that's actually not what I want. My dream is to reach out to one million women in the next 10 years, and to make sure that happens, this year we launched Sughar Foundation in the U.S. It is not just going to fund Sughar but many other organizations in Pakistan to replicate the idea and to find even more innovative ways to unleash the rural women's potential in Pakistan. Thank you so much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Chris Anderson: Khalida, you are quite the force of nature. I mean, this story, in many ways, just seems beyond belief. It's incredible that someone so young could do achieve this much through so much force and ingenuity. So I guess one question: This is a spectacular dream to reach out and empower a million women — how much of the current success depends on you, the force of this magnetic personality? How does it scale? Khalida Brohi: I think my job is to give the inspiration out, give my dream out. I can't teach how to do it, because there are so many different ways. We have been experimenting with three ways only. There are a hundred different ways to unleash potential in women. I would just give the inspiration and that's my job. I will keep doing it. Sughar will still be growing. We are planning to reach out to two more villages, and soon I believe we will be scaling out of Pakistan into South Asia and beyond. CA: I love that when you talked about your team in the talk, I mean, you were all 18 at the time. What did this team look like? This was school friends, right? KB: Do people here believe that I'm at an age where I'm supposed to be a grandmother in my village? My mom was married at nine, and I am the oldest woman not married and not doing anything in my life in my village. CA: Wait, wait, wait, not doing anything? KB: No. CA: You're right. KB: People feel sorry for me, a lot of times. CA: But how much time are you spending now actually back in Balochistan? KB: I live over there. We live between, still, Karachi and Balochistan. My siblings are all going to school. I am still the oldest of eight siblings. CA: But what you're doing is definitely threatening to some people there. How do you handle safety? Do you feel safe? Are there issues there? KB: This question has come to me a lot of times before, and I feel like the word "fear" just comes to me and then drops, but there is one fear that I have that is different from that. The fear is that if I get killed, what would happen to the people who love me so much? My mom waits for me till late at night that I should come home. My sisters want to learn so much from me, and there are many, many girls in my community who want to talk to me and ask me different things, and I recently got engaged. (Laughs) (Applause) CA: Is he here? You've got to stand up. (Applause) KB: Escaping arranged marriages, I chose my own husband across the world in L.A., a really different world. I had to fight for a whole year. That's totally a different story. But I think that's the only thing that I'm afraid of, and I don't want my mom to not see anyone when she waits in the night. CA: So people who want to help you on their way, they can go on, they can maybe buy some of these clothes that you're bringing over that are actually made, the embroidery is done back in Balochistan? KB: Yeah. CA: Or they can get involved in the foundation. KB: Definitely. We are looking for as many people as we can, because now that the foundation's in the beginning process, I am trying to learn a lot about how to operate, how to get funding or reach out to more organizations, and especially in the e-commerce, which is very new for me. I mean, I am not a fashion person, believe me. CA: Well, it's been incredible to have you here. Please go on being courageous, go on being smart, and please stay safe. KB: Thank you so much. CA: Thank you, Khalida. (Applause) |
The power of herd immunity | {0: 'Dr. Romina Libster investigates influenza and other respiratory viruses, searching for ways to most effectively keep viruses from spreading.'} | TEDxRiodelaPlata | One of the first patients I had to see as a pediatrician was Sol, a beautiful month-old baby who was admitted with signs of a severe respiratory infection. Until then, I had never seen a patient worsen so fast. In just two days she was connected to a respirator and on the third day she died. Sol had whooping cough. After discussing the case in the room and after a quite distressing catharsis, I remember my chief resident said to me, "Okay, take a deep breath. Wash your face. And now comes the hardest part: We have to go talk to her parents." At that time, a thousand questions came to mind, from, "How could a one-month-old baby be so unfortunate?" to, "Could we have done something about it?" Before vaccines existed, many infectious diseases killed millions of people per year. During the 1918 flu pandemic 50 million people died. That's greater than Argentina's current population. Perhaps, the older ones among you remember the polio epidemic that occurred in Argentina in 1956. At that time, there was no vaccine available against polio. People didn't know what to do. They were going crazy. They would go painting trees with caustic lime. They'd put little bags of camphor in their children's underwear, as if that could do something. During the polio epidemic, thousands of people died. And thousands of people were left with very significant neurological damage. I know this because I read about it, because thanks to vaccines, my generation was lucky to not live through an epidemic as terrible as this. Vaccines are one of the great successes of the 20th century's public health. After potable water, they are the interventions that have most reduced mortality, even more than antibiotics. Vaccines eradicated terrible diseases such as smallpox from the planet and succeeded in significantly reducing mortality due to other diseases such as measles, whooping cough, polio and many more. All these diseases are considered vaccine-preventable diseases. What does this mean? That they are potentially preventable, but in order to be so, something must be done. You need to get vaccinated. I imagine that most, if not all of us here today, received a vaccine at some point in our life. Now, I'm not so sure that many of us know which vaccines or boosters we should receive after adolescence. Have you ever wondered who we are protecting when we vaccinate? What do I mean by that? Is there any other effect beyond protecting ourselves? Let me show you something. Imagine for a moment that we are in a city that has never had a case of a particular disease, such as the measles. This would mean that no one in the city has ever had contact with the disease. No one has natural defenses against, nor been vaccinated against measles. If one day, a person sick with the measles appears in this city the disease won't find much resistance and will begin spreading from person to person, and in no time it will disseminate throughout the community. After a certain time a big part of the population will be ill. This happened when there were no vaccines. Now, imagine the complete opposite case. We are in a city where more than 90 percent of the population has defenses against the measles, which means that they either had the disease, survived, and developed natural defenses; or that they had been immunized against measles. If one day, a person sick with the measles appears in this city, the disease will find much more resistance and won't be transmitted that much from person to person. The spread will probably remain contained and a measles outbreak won't happen. I would like you to pay attention to something. People who are vaccinated are not only protecting themselves, but by blocking the dissemination of the disease within the community, they are indirectly protecting the people in this community who are not vaccinated. They create a kind of protective shield which prevents them from coming in contact with the disease, so that these people are protected. This indirect protection that the unvaccinated people within a community receive simply by being surrounded by vaccinated people, is called herd immunity. Many people in the community depend almost exclusively on this herd immunity to be protected against disease. The unvaccinated people you see in infographics are not just hypothetical. Those people are our nieces and nephews, our children, who may be too young to receive their first shots. They are our parents, our siblings, our acquaintances, who may have a disease, or take medication that lowers their defenses. There are also people who are allergic to a particular vaccine. They could even be among us, any of us who got vaccinated, but the vaccine didn't produce the expected effect, because not all vaccines are always 100 percent effective. All these people depend almost exclusively on herd immunity to be protected against diseases. To achieve this effect of herd immunity, it is necessary that a large percentage of the population be vaccinated. This percentage is called the threshold. The threshold depends on many variables: It depends on the germ's characteristics, and those of the immune response that the vaccine generates. But they all have something in common. If the percentage of the population in a vaccinated community is below this threshold number, the disease will begin to spread more freely and may generate an outbreak of this disease within the community. Even diseases which were at some point controlled may reappear. This is not just a theory. This has happened, and is still happening. In 1998, a British researcher published an article in one of the most important medical journals, saying that the MMR vaccine, which is given for measles, mumps and rubella, was associated with autism. This generated an immediate impact. People began to stop getting vaccinated, and stopped vaccinating their children. And what happened? The number of people vaccinated, in many communities around the world, fell below this threshold. And there were outbreaks of measles in many cities in the world — in the U.S., in Europe. Many people got sick. People died of measles. What happened? This article also generated a huge stir within the medical community. Dozens of researchers began to assess if this was actually true. Not only could no one find a causal association between MMR and autism at the population level, but it was also found that this article had incorrect claims. Even more, it was fraudulent. It was fraudulent. In fact, the journal publicly retracted the article in 2010. One of the main concerns and excuses for not getting vaccinated are the adverse effects. Vaccines, like other drugs, can have potential adverse effects. Most are mild and temporary. But the benefits are always greater than possible complications. When we are ill, we want to heal fast. Many of us who are here take antibiotics when we have an infection, we take anti-hypertensives when we have high blood pressure, we take cardiac medications. Why? Because we are sick and we want to heal fast. And we don't question it much. Why is it so difficult to think of preventing diseases, by taking care of ourselves when we are healthy? We take care of ourselves a lot when affected by an illness, or in situations of imminent danger. I imagine most of us here, remember the influenza-A pandemic which broke out in 2009 in Argentina and worldwide. When the first cases began to come to light, we, here in Argentina, were entering the winter season. We knew absolutely nothing. Everything was a mess. People wore masks on the street, ran into pharmacies to buy alcohol gel. People would line up in pharmacies to get a vaccine, without even knowing if it was the right vaccine that would protect them against this new virus. We knew absolutely nothing. At that time, in addition to doing my fellowship at the Infant Foundation, I worked as a home pediatrician for a prepaid medicine company. I remember that I started my shift at 8 a.m., and by 8, I already had a list of 50 scheduled visits. It was chaos; people didn't know what to do. I remember the types of patients that I was examining. The patients were a little older than what we were used to seeing in winter, with longer fevers. And I mentioned that to my fellowship mentor, and he, for his part, had heard the same from a colleague, about the large number of pregnant women and young adults being hospitalized in intensive care, with hard-to-manage clinical profiles. At that time, we set out to understand what was happening. First thing Monday morning, we took the car and went to a hospital in Buenos Aires Province, that served as a referral hospital for cases of the new influenza virus. We arrived at the hospital; it was crowded. All health staff were dressed in NASA-like bio-safety suits. We all had face masks in our pockets. I, being a hypochondriac, didn't breathe for two hours. But we could see what was happening. Immediately, we started reaching out to pediatricians from six hospitals in the city and in Buenos Aires Province. Our main goal was to find out how this new virus behaved in contact with our children, in the shortest time possible. A marathon work. In less than three months, we could see what effect this new H1N1 virus had on the 251 children hospitalized by this virus. We could see which children got more seriously ill: children under four, especially those less than one year old; patients with neurological diseases; and young children with chronic pulmonary diseases. Identifying these at-risk groups was important to include them as priority groups in the recommendations for getting the influenza vaccine, not only here in Argentina, but also in other countries which the pandemic not yet reached. A year later, when a vaccine against the pandemic H1N1 virus became available, we wanted to see what happened. After a huge vaccination campaign aimed at protecting at-risk groups, these hospitals, with 93 percent of the at-risk groups vaccinated, had not hospitalized a single patient for the pandemic H1N1 virus. (Applause) In 2009: 251. In 2010: zero. Vaccination is an act of individual responsibility, but it has a huge collective impact. If I get vaccinated, not only am I protecting myself, but I am also protecting others. Sol had whooping cough. Sol was very young, and she hadn't yet received her first vaccine against whooping cough. I still wonder what would have happened if everyone around Sol had been vaccinated. (Applause) |
How we found the worst place to park in New York City -- using big data | {0: 'Ben Wellington blends his love of statistics, the city, and comedy in his entertaining analysis of the story of New York City, told through data.'} | TEDxNewYork | Six thousand miles of road, 600 miles of subway track, 400 miles of bike lanes and a half a mile of tram track, if you've ever been to Roosevelt Island. These are the numbers that make up the infrastructure of New York City. These are the statistics of our infrastructure. They're the kind of numbers you can find released in reports by city agencies. For example, the Department of Transportation will probably tell you how many miles of road they maintain. The MTA will boast how many miles of subway track there are. Most city agencies give us statistics. This is from a report this year from the Taxi and Limousine Commission, where we learn that there's about 13,500 taxis here in New York City. Pretty interesting, right? But did you ever think about where these numbers came from? Because for these numbers to exist, someone at the city agency had to stop and say, hmm, here's a number that somebody might want want to know. Here's a number that our citizens want to know. So they go back to their raw data, they count, they add, they calculate, and then they put out reports, and those reports will have numbers like this. The problem is, how do they know all of our questions? We have lots of questions. In fact, in some ways there's literally an infinite number of questions that we can ask about our city. The agencies can never keep up. So the paradigm isn't exactly working, and I think our policymakers realize that, because in 2012, Mayor Bloomberg signed into law what he called the most ambitious and comprehensive open data legislation in the country. In a lot of ways, he's right. In the last two years, the city has released 1,000 datasets on our open data portal, and it's pretty awesome. So you go and look at data like this, and instead of just counting the number of cabs, we can start to ask different questions. So I had a question. When's rush hour in New York City? It can be pretty bothersome. When is rush hour exactly? And I thought to myself, these cabs aren't just numbers, these are GPS recorders driving around in our city streets recording each and every ride they take. There's data there, and I looked at that data, and I made a plot of the average speed of taxis in New York City throughout the day. You can see that from about midnight to around 5:18 in the morning, speed increases, and at that point, things turn around, and they get slower and slower and slower until about 8:35 in the morning, when they end up at around 11 and a half miles per hour. The average taxi is going 11 and a half miles per hour on our city streets, and it turns out it stays that way for the entire day. (Laughter) So I said to myself, I guess there's no rush hour in New York City. There's just a rush day. Makes sense. And this is important for a couple of reasons. If you're a transportation planner, this might be pretty interesting to know. But if you want to get somewhere quickly, you now know to set your alarm for 4:45 in the morning and you're all set. New York, right? But there's a story behind this data. This data wasn't just available, it turns out. It actually came from something called a Freedom of Information Law Request, or a FOIL Request. This is a form you can find on the Taxi and Limousine Commission website. In order to access this data, you need to go get this form, fill it out, and they will notify you, and a guy named Chris Whong did exactly that. Chris went down, and they told him, "Just bring a brand new hard drive down to our office, leave it here for five hours, we'll copy the data and you take it back." And that's where this data came from. Now, Chris is the kind of guy who wants to make the data public, and so it ended up online for all to use, and that's where this graph came from. And the fact that it exists is amazing. These GPS recorders — really cool. But the fact that we have citizens walking around with hard drives picking up data from city agencies to make it public — it was already kind of public, you could get to it, but it was "public," it wasn't public. And we can do better than that as a city. We don't need our citizens walking around with hard drives. Now, not every dataset is behind a FOIL Request. Here is a map I made with the most dangerous intersections in New York City based on cyclist accidents. So the red areas are more dangerous. And what it shows is first the East side of Manhattan, especially in the lower area of Manhattan, has more cyclist accidents. That might make sense because there are more cyclists coming off the bridges there. But there's other hotspots worth studying. There's Williamsburg. There's Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. And this is exactly the kind of data we need for Vision Zero. This is exactly what we're looking for. But there's a story behind this data as well. This data didn't just appear. How many of you guys know this logo? Yeah, I see some shakes. Have you ever tried to copy and paste data out of a PDF and make sense of it? I see more shakes. More of you tried copying and pasting than knew the logo. I like that. So what happened is, the data that you just saw was actually on a PDF. In fact, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of PDF put out by our very own NYPD, and in order to access it, you would either have to copy and paste for hundreds and hundreds of hours, or you could be John Krauss. John Krauss was like, I'm not going to copy and paste this data. I'm going to write a program. It's called the NYPD Crash Data Band-Aid, and it goes to the NYPD's website and it would download PDFs. Every day it would search; if it found a PDF, it would download it and then it would run some PDF-scraping program, and out would come the text, and it would go on the Internet, and then people could make maps like that. And the fact that the data's here, the fact that we have access to it — Every accident, by the way, is a row in this table. You can imagine how many PDFs that is. The fact that we have access to that is great, but let's not release it in PDF form, because then we're having our citizens write PDF scrapers. It's not the best use of our citizens' time, and we as a city can do better than that. Now, the good news is that the de Blasio administration actually recently released this data a few months ago, and so now we can actually have access to it, but there's a lot of data still entombed in PDF. For example, our crime data is still only available in PDF. And not just our crime data, our own city budget. Our city budget is only readable right now in PDF form. And it's not just us that can't analyze it — our own legislators who vote for the budget also only get it in PDF. So our legislators cannot analyze the budget that they are voting for. And I think as a city we can do a little better than that as well. Now, there's a lot of data that's not hidden in PDFs. This is an example of a map I made, and this is the dirtiest waterways in New York City. Now, how do I measure dirty? Well, it's kind of a little weird, but I looked at the level of fecal coliform, which is a measurement of fecal matter in each of our waterways. The larger the circle, the dirtier the water, so the large circles are dirty water, the small circles are cleaner. What you see is inland waterways. This is all data that was sampled by the city over the last five years. And inland waterways are, in general, dirtier. That makes sense, right? And the bigger circles are dirty. And I learned a few things from this. Number one: Never swim in anything that ends in "creek" or "canal." But number two: I also found the dirtiest waterway in New York City, by this measure, one measure. In Coney Island Creek, which is not the Coney Island you swim in, luckily. It's on the other side. But Coney Island Creek, 94 percent of samples taken over the last five years have had fecal levels so high that it would be against state law to swim in the water. And this is not the kind of fact that you're going to see boasted in a city report, right? It's not going to be the front page on nyc.gov. You're not going to see it there, but the fact that we can get to that data is awesome. But once again, it wasn't super easy, because this data was not on the open data portal. If you were to go to the open data portal, you'd see just a snippet of it, a year or a few months. It was actually on the Department of Environmental Protection's website. And each one of these links is an Excel sheet, and each Excel sheet is different. Every heading is different: you copy, paste, reorganize. When you do you can make maps and that's great, but once again, we can do better than that as a city, we can normalize things. And we're getting there, because there's this website that Socrata makes called the Open Data Portal NYC. This is where 1,100 data sets that don't suffer from the things I just told you live, and that number is growing, and that's great. You can download data in any format, be it CSV or PDF or Excel document. Whatever you want, you can download the data that way. The problem is, once you do, you will find that each agency codes their addresses differently. So one is street name, intersection street, street, borough, address, building, building address. So once again, you're spending time, even when we have this portal, you're spending time normalizing our address fields. And that's not the best use of our citizens' time. We can do better than that as a city. We can standardize our addresses, and if we do, we can get more maps like this. This is a map of fire hydrants in New York City, but not just any fire hydrants. These are the top 250 grossing fire hydrants in terms of parking tickets. (Laughter) So I learned a few things from this map, and I really like this map. Number one, just don't park on the Upper East Side. Just don't. It doesn't matter where you park, you will get a hydrant ticket. Number two, I found the two highest grossing hydrants in all of New York City, and they're on the Lower East Side, and they were bringing in over 55,000 dollars a year in parking tickets. And that seemed a little strange to me when I noticed it, so I did a little digging and it turns out what you had is a hydrant and then something called a curb extension, which is like a seven-foot space to walk on, and then a parking spot. And so these cars came along, and the hydrant — "It's all the way over there, I'm fine," and there was actually a parking spot painted there beautifully for them. They would park there, and the NYPD disagreed with this designation and would ticket them. And it wasn't just me who found a parking ticket. This is the Google Street View car driving by finding the same parking ticket. So I wrote about this on my blog, on I Quant NY, and the DOT responded, and they said, "While the DOT has not received any complaints about this location, we will review the roadway markings and make any appropriate alterations." And I thought to myself, typical government response, all right, moved on with my life. But then, a few weeks later, something incredible happened. They repainted the spot, and for a second I thought I saw the future of open data, because think about what happened here. For five years, this spot was being ticketed, and it was confusing, and then a citizen found something, they told the city, and within a few weeks the problem was fixed. It's amazing. And a lot of people see open data as being a watchdog. It's not, it's about being a partner. We can empower our citizens to be better partners for government, and it's not that hard. All we need are a few changes. If you're FOILing data, if you're seeing your data being FOILed over and over again, let's release it to the public, that's a sign that it should be made public. And if you're a government agency releasing a PDF, let's pass legislation that requires you to post it with the underlying data, because that data is coming from somewhere. I don't know where, but it's coming from somewhere, and you can release it with the PDF. And let's adopt and share some open data standards. Let's start with our addresses here in New York City. Let's just start normalizing our addresses. Because New York is a leader in open data. Despite all this, we are absolutely a leader in open data, and if we start normalizing things, and set an open data standard, others will follow. The state will follow, and maybe the federal government, Other countries could follow, and we're not that far off from a time where you could write one program and map information from 100 countries. It's not science fiction. We're actually quite close. And by the way, who are we empowering with this? Because it's not just John Krauss and it's not just Chris Whong. There are hundreds of meetups going on in New York City right now, active meetups. There are thousands of people attending these meetups. These people are going after work and on weekends, and they're attending these meetups to look at open data and make our city a better place. Groups like BetaNYC, who just last week released something called citygram.nyc that allows you to subscribe to 311 complaints around your own home, or around your office. You put in your address, you get local complaints. And it's not just the tech community that are after these things. It's urban planners like the students I teach at Pratt. It's policy advocates, it's everyone, it's citizens from a diverse set of backgrounds. And with some small, incremental changes, we can unlock the passion and the ability of our citizens to harness open data and make our city even better, whether it's one dataset, or one parking spot at a time. Thank you. (Applause) |
A magical search for a coincidence | {0: 'Using a deck of cards and other simple props, Helder Guimarães gets up close to play with your perceptions and preconceptions.'} | TED2014 | I'd like to start my performance by saying 90 percent of everything is crap. (Laughter) It's called Sturgeon's law, and what that means is that the majority of anything is always bad. I have a giraffe here. I'm going to throw the giraffe behind my back and whoever catches it is going to help me on this next thing. Sir, you caught the giraffe. I have a playing card in my hand. Freely name any card in the deck. Audience member: 10 of hearts. Helder Guimarães: 10 of hearts. You could have named any card in the deck, but you said the 10 of hearts. Ninety percent of everything is crap, so there's this to prove that Sturgeon was correct. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) Sir, this is not your show. (Laughter) Keep the giraffe for a moment, okay? Jesus. (Laughter) Crazy people. Well, the truth is, why is the majority of everything bad? And my answer is: I think we stop thinking too soon. I'll give you a clear little example, something that people used to do around the turn of the century — not this century, the other one. The idea was to take a piece of paper and fold it inside out using only your weaker hand, in my case, the left hand. Something that would look like this. By the way you reacted, I can see your lack of interest. (Laughter) But that's okay, I understand why. We stop thinking too soon. But if we give it a little bit more thought, like a paper clip. A paper clip makes this a little bit more interesting. Not only that, if instead of using my hand with the fingers, I use my hand closed into a fist, that makes this even a little bit more interesting. Not only that, but I will impose myself a time limit of one second, something that would look like this. Now — no, no, no. Sturgeon may be correct. But he doesn't have to be correct forever. Things can always change. Sir, what was the card? The 10 of hearts? There's this to prove that things can always change — the 10 of hearts. (Applause) Secrets are important. And secrets are valuable. And this is the best secret I've ever experienced. It starts with a deck of cards onto the table, an old man and a claim, "I will not touch the deck till the end." It doesn't matter who the man was, all that matters was that sentence ringing in my head: "I will not touch the deck till the end." Now, during all this time, he was holding a small notebook that sometimes he would open and flip through the pages and look at something. But I was not really paying attention to the book because I was paying attention the deck and the claim he had made before, "I will not touch the deck till the end." Now sir, you have the giraffe. Go ahead, throw it in any direction so that you can find someone else at random. Perfect. Sir, you're going to play my role in this story. The old man turned to me and he said, "You could pick a red card or a black card." My answer was ... Audience member 2: The black card. HG: Indeed! It was a black card. He said, "It could be a club or a spade," and my answer was ... Audience member 2: Spade. HG: Indeed! It was a spade. He said, "It could be a high spade or a low spade." And my answer was ... Audience member 2: A high spade. HG: Indeed! It was a high spade. Since it's a high spade, it could be a nine, a 10, a jack, king, queen or the ace of spades. And my answer was ... Audience member 2: The king. HG: The king of spades, indeed. Now sir, let's be fair. You selected black, you selected spade, you selected the high spade, and you selected — sorry? Audience member 2: King. HG: King of spades. Did you feel I influenced you in any decision? Audience member 2: No, I just felt your energy. HG: But it was a free choice, correct? Because if not, we could start all over again. But it was really fair? Audience member 2: Absolutely. HG: Now, the old man turned to me and he asked me one more question, a number between one and 52. And the first number I thought of was ... Audience member 2: 17. HG: Indeed! It was the 17. The old man only said one more thing: "This is the end." And I knew exactly what that meant. I knew that he was going to touch the deck. Everything that you're about to see is exactly as it looked. He took the deck out of the box. Nothing in the box. He counted, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10." The tension was building. (Laughter) "11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17." And on the 17, instead of the king of spades, something appeared in the middle of the deck, that later, I would realize was actually a secret. The old man stood up, he left. I never saw him again. But he left his notebook that was there from the beginning. And when I picked it up, that was the best secret I've ever experienced. We are defined by the secrets we keep and by the secrets we share. And this was his way of sharing a secret with me. (Applause) Crazy shit! Now — (Laughter) I believe that amazing things happen all the time. I really do. And the reason why we don't see them as often, it's because we don't place ourselves in a position to search for those amazing things. But what if we decided to search for those amazing things, for those small coincidences in life that are truly amazing? So you have the giraffe, go ahead, throw it in any direction so you find one last person at random. Sir, I'm going to ask you, do you have, with you, a United States $1 bill? Audience member 3: I think so. HG: Yes? You see, a coincidence! (Laughter) Let's make sure you have it. Do you have it? Audience member 3: Yes. HG: Yes! Perfect. Now, I want you to do exactly the same thing I am about to do. I have a dollar bill here to explain. I want you to take the dollar bill, and fold the Washington part inside, like this. So you get this kind of big square, okay? Now, I want you to take the bill and fold it like this, lengthwise, so it becomes like a rectangle, and then again — really fold it, really crease it — and when you have it, please fold the bill again into a little square like this and let me know when you have it. Do you have it? Perfect. Now, I'm going to approach, and before we start, I want to make sure that we do this in very, very serious conditions. First of all, I want to ensure that we have a marker and we have a paper clip. First of all, take the marker and go ahead and sign the bill. And this is the reason why: later, I'm going to be doing a bunch of stuff on stage and I don't want you to think, oh, while I was distracted by Helder, someone came onstage and swapped the bill. So I want to make sure it's exactly the same bill. Now not only that, I want you to take the paper clip and put it around the bill. So even if nobody comes onstage and switches the bill, I don't have enough time to go open the bill and close it and see what I don't want to see. Is that fair? Now you can give me the marker back. And just like that, very clearly, I want to make sure that we place this in full view from the beginning of this experience and to make sure that everyone is going to see it, we're going to actually have a camera man onstage. Yes, perfect, so that you can see. That's your signature? Yes? Perfect. Now, we're going to use also the deck and a glass for this. And we're going to put ourselves in a position to search for an amazing coincidence. Do you mind, can you help me with this? Go ahead and take some cards and shuffle. And do you mind, can you take some cards and shuffle? You can take some cards and shuffle. You can shuffle cards in a variety of ways. You can shuffle cards like this. You can shuffle cards in a more messed up way, something like this. You can shuffle cards in the American way. As a Portuguese, I don't feel entitled to teach you guys how to do it. But the important part is after shuffling the cards, always remember to cut and complete the cards. Do you mind doing that for me, sir? Please cut and complete. And when you have it, place the cards up in the air. And you too, cut and complete and up in the air. Up in the air. A deck of cards cut and shuffled by one, two, three, four and five people. Now, very clearly, I'm going to gather the deck together. And just like that. I'm going to search for a coincidence in front of everyone. I'm going to try. I have some cards that maybe, maybe they don't mean anything. But maybe that's because we are not paying close attention. Because maybe, maybe they mean a lot. Before we start, sir, you gave me a dollar bill. Is that your signature? Audience member 3: Yes it is. HG: I want you to see very clearly that I'm going to open your bill and reveal a small secret that we created. And the secret of this dollar bill is the serial number. Madam, can you take the dollar bill? In the serial number, there is a letter. What is the first number after the letter? Audience member 4: Seven. HG: Seven. Seven. But, that's maybe just one coincidence. What is the second number? Audience member 4: Nine. So after the seven, we have a nine. And after the nine? Audience member 4: Two. HG: The two. And after the two? Audience member 4: Three. HG: Three, and after? Audience member 4: Three. HG: Three. Audience member 4: Seven. HG: Seven. Audience member 4: Four. HG: Four. Audience member 4: Two. HG: Two, and? Audience member 4: Q. HG: Q like in queen? (Applause) The queen of clubs! All the cards in order, just for you. And that's my show. Thank you very much and have a nice night. (Applause) |
The problem with "trickle-down techonomics" | {0: 'Jon Gosier is a serial tech entrepreneur and early-stage startup investor. In 2015, Time magazine listed him as one of the "12 New Faces of Black Leadership."'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | As a software developer and technologist, I've worked on a number of civic technology projects over the years. Civic tech is sometimes referred to as tech for good, using technology to solve humanitarian problems. This is in 2010 in Uganda, working on a solution that allowed local populations to avoid government surveillance on their mobile phones for expressing dissent. That same technology was deployed later in North Africa for similar purposes to help activists stay connected when governments were deliberately shutting off connectivity as a means of population control. But over the years, as I have thought about these technologies and the things that I work on, a question kind of nags in the back of my mind, which is, what if we're wrong about the virtues of technology, and if it sometimes actively hurts the communities that we're intending to help? The tech industry around the world tends to operate under similar assumptions that if we build great things, it will positively affect everyone. Eventually, these innovations will get out and find everyone. But that's not always the case. I like to call this blind championing of technology "trickle-down techonomics," to borrow a phrase. (Laughter) We tend to think that if we design things for the select few, eventually those technologies will reach everyone, and that's not always the case. Technology and innovation behaves a lot like wealth and capital. They tend to consolidate in the hands of the few, and sometimes they find their way out into the hands of the many. And so most of you aren't tackling oppressive regimes on the weekends, so I wanted to think of a few examples that might be a little bit more relatable. In the world of wearables and smartphones and apps, there's a big movement to track people's personal health with applications that track the number of calories that you burn or whether you're sitting too much or walking enough. These technologies make patient intake in medical facilities much more efficient, and in turn, these medical facilities are starting to expect these types of efficiencies. As these digital tools find their way into medical rooms, and they become digitally ready, what happens to the digitally invisible? What does the medical experience look like for someone who doesn't have the $400 phone or watch tracking their every movement? Do they now become a burden on the medical system? Is their experience changed? In the world of finance, Bitcoin and crypto-currencies are revolutionizing the way we move money around the world, but the challenge with these technologies is the barrier to entry is incredibly high, right? You need access to the same phones, devices, connectivity, and even where you don't, where you can find a proxy agent, usually they require a certain amount of capital to participate. And so the question that I ask myself is, what happens to the last community using paper notes when the rest of the world moves to digital currency? Another example from my hometown in Philadelphia: I recently went to the public library there, and they are facing an existential crisis. Public funding is dwindling, they have to reduce their footprint to stay open and stay relevant, and so one of the ways they're going about this is digitizing a number of the books and moving them to the cloud. This is great for most kids. Right? You can check out books from home, you can research on the way to school or from school, but these are really two big assumptions, that one, you have access at home, and two, that you have access to a mobile phone, and in Philadelphia, many kids do not. So what does their education experience look like in the wake of a completely cloud-based library, what used to be considered such a basic part of education? How do they stay competitive? A final example from across the world in East Africa: there's been a huge movement to digitize land ownership rights, for a number of reasons. Migrant communities, older generations dying off, and ultimately poor record-keeping have led to conflicts over who owns what. And so there was a big movement to put all this information online, to track all the ownership of these plots of land, put them in the cloud, and give them to the communities. But actually, the unintended consequence of this has been that venture capitalists, investors, real estate developers, have swooped in and they've begun buying up these plots of land right out from under these communities, because they have access to the technologies and the connectivity that makes that possible. So that's the common thread that connects these examples, the unintended consequences of the tools and the technologies that we make. As engineers, as technologists, we sometimes prefer efficiency over efficacy. We think more about doing things than the outcomes of what we are doing. This needs to change. We have a responsibility to think about the outcomes of the technologies we build, especially as they increasingly control the world in which we live. In the late '90s, there was a big push for ethics in the world of investment and banking. I think in 2014, we're long overdue for a similar movement in the area of tech and technology. So, I just encourage you, as you are all thinking about the next big thing, as entrepreneurs, as CEOs, as engineers, as makers, that you think about the unintended consequences of the things that you're building, because the real innovation is in finding ways to include everyone. Thank you. (Applause) |
What can save the rainforest? Your used cell phone | {0: 'Through his startup Rainforest Connection, Topher White transforms used cell phones into guardians of the rainforest.'} | TEDxCERN | (Rainforest noises) In the summer of 2011, as a tourist, I visited the rainforests of Borneo for the very first time, and as you might imagine, it was the overwhelming sounds of the forest that struck me the most. There's this constant cacophony of noise. Some things actually do stick out. For example, this here is a big bird, a rhinoceros hornbill. This buzzing is a cicada. This is a family of gibbons. It's actually singing to each other over a great distance. The place where this was recorded was in fact a gibbon reserve, which is why you can hear so many of them, but in fact the most important noise that was coming out of the forest that time was one that I didn't notice, and in fact nobody there had actually noticed it. So, as I said, this was a gibbon reserve. They spend most of their time rehabilitating gibbons, but they also have to spend a lot of their time protecting their area from illegal logging that takes place on the side. And so if we take the sound of the forest and we actually turn down the gibbons, the insects, and the rest, in the background, the entire time, in recordings you heard, was the sound of a chainsaw at great distance. They had three full-time guards who were posted around this sanctuary whose job was in fact to guard against illegal logging, and one day, we went walking, again as tourists, out into the forest, and within five minutes' walk, we stumbled upon somebody who was just sawing a tree down, five minutes' walk, a few hundred meters from the ranger station. They hadn't been able to hear the chainsaws, because as you heard, the forest is very, very loud. It struck me as quite unacceptable that in this modern time, just a few hundred meters away from a ranger station in a sanctuary, that in fact nobody could hear it when someone who has a chainsaw gets fired up. It sounds impossible, but in fact, it was quite true. So how do we stop illegal logging? It's really tempting, as an engineer, always to come up with a high-tech, super-crazy high-tech solution, but in fact, you're in the rainforest. It has to be simple, it has to be scalable, and so what we also noticed while were there was that everything we needed was already there. We could build a system that would allow us to stop this using what's already there. Who was there? What was already in the forest? Well, we had people. We had this group there that was dedicated, three full-time guards, that was dedicated to go and stop it, but they just needed to know what was happening out in the forest. The real surprise, this is the big one, was that there was connectivity out in the forest. There was cell phone service way out in the middle of nowhere. We're talking hundreds of kilometers from the nearest road, there's certainly no electricity, but they had very good cell phone service, these people in the towns were on Facebook all the time, they're surfing the web on their phones, and this sort of got me thinking that in fact it would be possible to use the sounds of the forest, pick up the sounds of chainsaws programmatically, because people can't hear them, and send an alert. But you have to have a device to go up in the trees. So if we can use some device to listen to the sounds of the forest, connect to the cell phone network that's there, and send an alert to people on the ground, perhaps we could have a solution to this issue for them. But let's take a moment to talk about saving the rainforest, because it's something that we've definitely all heard about forever. People in my generation have heard about saving the rainforest since we were kids, and it seems that the message has never changed: We've got to save the rainforest, it's super urgent, this many football fields have been destroyed yesterday. and yet here we are today, about half of the rainforest remains, and we have potentially more urgent problems like climate change. But in fact, this is the little-known fact that I didn't realize at the time: Deforestation accounts for more greenhouse gas than all of the world's planes, trains, cars, trucks and ships combined. It's the second highest contributor to climate change. Also, according to Interpol, as much as 90 percent of the logging that takes place in the rainforest is illegal logging, like the illegal logging that we saw. So if we can help people in the forest enforce the rules that are there, then in fact we could eat heavily into this 17 percent and potentially have a major impact in the short term. It might just be the cheapest, fastest way to fight climate change. And so here's the system that we imagine. It looks super high tech. The moment a sound of a chainsaw is heard in the forest, the device picks up the sound of the chainsaw, it sends an alert through the standard GSM network that's already there to a ranger in the field who can in fact show up in real time and stop the logging. It's no more about going out and finding a tree that's been cut. It's not about seeing a tree from a satellite in an area that's been clear cut, it's about real-time intervention. So I said it was the cheapest and fastest way to do it, but in fact, actually, as you saw, they weren't able to do it, so it may not be so cheap and fast. But if the devices in the trees were actually cell phones, it could be pretty cheap. Cell phones are thrown away by the hundreds of millions every year, hundreds of millions in the U.S. alone, not counting the rest of the world, which of course we should do, but in fact, cell phones are great. They're full of sensors. They can listen to the sounds of the forest. We do have to protect them. We have to put them in this box that you see here, and we do have to power them. Powering them is one of the greater engineering challenges that we had to deal with, because powering a cell phone under a tree canopy, any sort of solar power under a tree canopy, was an as-yet-unsolved problem, and that's this unique solar panel design that you see here, which in fact is built also from recycled byproducts of an industrial process. These are strips that are cut down. So this is me putting it all together in my parents' garage, actually. Thanks very much to them for allowing me to do that. As you can see, this is a device up in a tree. What you can see from here, perhaps, is that they are pretty well obscured up in the tree canopy at a distance. That's important, because although they are able to hear chainsaw noises up to a kilometer in the distance, allowing them to cover about three square kilometers, if someone were to take them, it would make the area unprotected. So does it actually work? Well, to test it, we took it back to Indonesia, not the same place, but another place, to another gibbon reserve that was threatened daily by illegal logging. On the very second day, it picked up illegal chainsaw noises. We were able to get a real-time alert. I got an email on my phone. Actually, we had just climbed the tree. Everyone had just gotten back down. All these guys are smoking cigarettes, and then I get an email, and they all quiet down, and in fact you can hear the chainsaw really, really faint in the background, but no one had noticed it until that moment. And so then we took off to actually stop these loggers. I was pretty nervous. This is the moment where we've actually arrived close to where the loggers are. This is the moment where you can see where I'm actually regretting perhaps the entire endeavor. I'm not really sure what's on the other side of this hill. That guy's much braver than I am. But he went, so I had to go, walking up, and in fact, he made it over the hill, and interrupted the loggers in the act. For them, it was such a surprise — they had never, ever been interrupted before — that it was such an impressive event for them, that we've heard from our partners they have not been back since. They were, in fact, great guys. They showed us how the entire operation works, and what they really convinced us on the spot was that if you can show up in real time and stop people, it's enough of a deterrent they won't come back. So — Thank you. (Applause) Word of this spread, possibly because we told a lot of people, and in fact, then some really amazing stuff started to happen. People from around the world started to send us emails, phone calls. What we saw was that people throughout Asia, people throughout Africa, people throughout South America, they told us that they could use it too, and what's most important, what we'd found that we thought might be exceptional, in the forest there was pretty good cell phone service. That was not exceptional, we were told, and that particularly is on the periphery of the forests that are most under threat. And then something really amazing happened, which was that people started sending us their own old cell phones. So in fact what we have now is a system where we can use people on the ground, people who are already there, who can both improve and use the existing connectivity, and we're using old cell phones that are being sent to us by people from around the world that want their phones to be doing something else in their afterlife, so to speak. And if the rest of the device can be completely recycled, then we believe it's an entirely upcycled device. So again, this didn't come because of any sort of high-tech solution. It just came from using what's already there, and I'm thoroughly convinced that if it's not phones, that there's always going to be enough there that you can build similar solutions that can be very effective in new contexts. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A love poem for lonely prime numbers | {0: '2012 World Poetry Slam Champion Harry Baker has travelled the world off the strength of his way with words. He combines the nerdiness of being a math student with the hopefulness of being a human.'} | TEDxExeter | My name is Harry Baker. Harry Baker is my name. If your name was Harry Baker, then our names would be the same. (Laughter) It's a short introductory part. Yeah, I'm Harry. I study maths. I write poetry. So I thought I'd start with a love poem about prime numbers. (Laughter) This is called "59." I was going to call it "Prime Time Loving." That reaction is why I didn't. (Laughter) So, "59." 59 wakes up on the wrong side of the bed. Realizes all his hair is on one side of his head. Takes just under a minute to work out that it’s because of the way that he slept. He finds some clothes and gets dressed. He can’t help but look in the mirror and be subtly impressed How he looks rough around the edges and yet casually messed. And as he glances out the window, he sees the sight that he gets blessed with of 60 from across the street. Now 60 was beautiful. With perfectly trimmed cuticles, dressed in something suitable. Never rude or crude at all. Unimprovable, right on time as usual, more on cue than a snooker ball but liked to play it super cool. 59 wanted to tell her that he knew her favorite flower. He thought of her every second, every minute, every hour. But he knew it wouldn’t work, he’d never get the girl. Because although she lived across the street they came from different worlds. While 59 admired 60’s perfectly round figure, 60 thought 59 was odd. (Laughter) One of his favorite films was "101 Dalmatians." She preferred the sequel. He romanticized the idea they were star-crossed lovers. They could overcome the odds and evens because they had each other. While she maintained the strict views imposed on her by her mother That separate could not be equal. And though at the time he felt stupid and dumb For trying to love a girl controlled by her stupid mum, He should have been comforted by the simple sum. Take 59 away from 60, and you’re left with the one. Sure enough after two months of moping around, 61 days later, 61 was who he found, He had lost his keys and his parents were out. So one day after school he went into a house As he noticed the slightly wonky numbers on the door, He wondered why he’d never introduced himself before, As she let him in, his jaw dropped in awe. 61 was like 60, but a little bit more. (Laughter) She had prettier eyes, and an approachable smile, And like him, rough around the edges, casual style, And like him, everything was in disorganized piles, And like him, her mum didn’t mind if friends stayed a while. Because she was like him, and he liked her. He reckoned she would like him if she knew he was like her, And it was different this time. I mean, this girl was wicked, So he plucked up the courage and asked for her digits. She said, "I'm 61." He grinned, said, "I'm 59." Today I’ve had a really nice time, So tomorrow if you wanted you could come over to mine? She said, "Sure." She loved talking to someone just as quirky, She agreed to this unofficial first date. In the end he was only ready one minute early, But it didn’t matter because she arrived one minute late. And from that moment on there was nonstop chatter, How they loved "X Factor," how they had two factors, How that did not matter, distinctiveness made them better, By the end of the night they knew they were meant together. And one day she was talking about stuck-up 60, She noticed that 59 looked a bit shifty. He blushed, told her of his crush: “The best thing that never happened because it led to us.” 61 was clever, see, not prone to jealousy, She looked him in the eyes and told him quite tenderly, "You’re 59, I’m 61, together we combine to become twice what 60 could ever be." (Laughter) At this point 59 had tears in his eyes, Was so glad to have this one-of-a-kind girl in his life. He told her the very definition of being prime Was that with only one and himself could his heart divide, And she was the one he wanted to give his heart to, She said she felt the same and now she knew the films were half true. Because that wasn't real love, that love was just a sample, When it came to real love, they were a prime example. Cheers. (Applause) That was the first poem that I wrote and it was for a prime number-themed poetry night — (Laughter) — which turned out to be a prime number-themed poetry competition. And I became a prime number-themed poetry competition winner, or as I like to call it, a prime minister. (Laughter) And this is how I discovered these things called poetry slams, and if you don't know what a poetry slam is, it was a format come up with in America 30 years ago as a way of tricking people into going to poetry events by putting an exciting word like "slam" on the end. (Laughter) And each performer got three minutes to perform and then random audience members would hold up scorecards, and they would end up with a numerical score, and what this meant is, it kind of broke down the barrier between performer and audience and encouraged the kind of connection with the listener. And what it also means is you can win. And if you win a poetry slam, you can call yourself a slam champion and pretend you're a wrestler, and if you lose a poetry slam you can say, "Oh, what? Poetry's a subjective art form, you can't put numbers on such things." (Laughter) But I loved it, and I got involved in these slams, and I became the U.K. slam champion and got invited to the Poetry World Cup in Paris, which was unbelievable. It was people from all around the world speaking in their native languages to be judged by five French strangers. (Laughter) And somehow, I won, which was great, and I've been able to travel the world since doing it, but it also means that this next piece is technically the best poem in the world. (Laughter) So... (Applause) According to five French strangers. So this is "Paper People." I like people. I'd like some paper people. They’d be purple paper people. Maybe pop-up purple paper people. Proper pop-up purple paper people. "How do you prop up pop-up purple paper people?" I hear you cry. Well I ... I’d probably prop up proper pop-up purple paper people with a proper pop-up purple people paperclip, but I’d pre-prepare appropriate adhesives as alternatives, a cheeky pack of Blu Tack just in case the paper slipped. Because I could build a pop-up metropolis. but I wouldn’t wanna deal with all the paper people politics. paper politicians with their paper-thin policies, broken promises without appropriate apologies. There’d be a little paper me. And a little paper you. And we could watch paper TV and it would all be pay-per-view. (Laughter) We’d see the poppy paper rappers rap about their paper package or watch paper people carriers get stuck in paper traffic on the A4. (Laughter) Paper. There’d be a paper princess Kate but we’d all stare at paper Pippa, and then we’d all live in fear of killer Jack the Paper-Ripper, because the paper propaganda propagates the people's prejudices, papers printing pictures of the photogenic terrorists. A little paper me. And a little paper you. And in a pop-up population people’s problems pop up too. There’d be a pompous paper parliament who remained out of touch, and who ignored the people's protests about all the paper cuts, then the peaceful paper protests would get blown to paper pieces, by the confetti cannons manned by pre-emptive police. And yes there’d still be paper money, so there’d still be paper greed, and the paper piggy bankers pocketing more than they need, purchasing the potpourri to pepper their paper properties, others live in poverty and ain’t acknowledged properly. A proper poor economy where so many are proper poor, but while their needs are ignored the money goes to big wars. Origami armies unfold plans for paper planes and we remain imprisoned in our own paper chains, but the greater shame is that it always seems to stay the same, what changes is who’s in power choosing how to lay the blame, they’re naming names, forgetting these are names of people, because in the end it all comes down to people. I like people. 'Cause even when the situation’s dire, it is only ever people who are able to inspire, and on paper, it’s hard to see how we all cope. But in the bottom of Pandora’s box there’s still hope, and I still hope 'cause I believe in people. People like my grandparents. Who every single day since I was born, have taken time out of their morning to pray for me. That’s 7892 days straight of someone checking I’m okay, and that’s amazing. People like my aunt who puts on plays with prisoners. People who are capable of genuine forgiveness. People like the persecuted Palestinians. People who go out of their way to make your life better, and expect nothing in return. You see, people have potential to be powerful. Just because the people in power tend to pretend to be victims we don’t need to succumb to that system. And a paper population is no different. There’s a little paper me. And a little paper you. And in a pop-up population people's problems pop up too, but even if the whole world fell apart then we’d still make it through. Because we’re people. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. I've just got time for one more. For me, poetry has been the ultimate way of ideas without frontiers. When I first started, the people who inspired me were the ones with the amazing stories, and I thought, as an 18-year-old with a happy life, it was too normal, but I could create these worlds where I could talk about my experiences and dreams and beliefs. So it's amazing to be here in front of you today. Thank you for being here. If you weren't here, it would be pretty much like the sound check yesterday. (Laughter) And this is more fun. So this last one is called "The Sunshine Kid." Thank you very much for listening. Old man sunshine was proud of his sun, And it brightened his day to see his little boy run, Not because of what he’d done, nor the problems overcome, But that despite that his disposition remained a sunny one. It hadn’t always been like this. There’d been times when he’d tried to hide his brightness, You see, every star hits periods of hardship, It takes a brighter light to inspire them through the darkness. If we go back to when he was born in a nebula, We know that he never was thought of as regular, Because he had a flair about him, To say the Midas touch is wrong But all he went near seemed to turn a little bronze, Yes this sun was loved by some more than others, It was a case of Joseph and his dreamcoat and his brothers Because standing out from the crowd had its pros and its cons, And jealousy created enemies in those he outshone Such as the Shadow People. Now the Shadow People didn’t like the Sunshine Kid, Because he showed up the dark things the Shadow People did, And when he shone he showed the places where the Shadow People hid, So the Shadow People had an evil plan to get rid of him, First up — they made fun of his sunspots, Shooting his dreams from the sky, their words were gunshots, Designed to remind him he wasn’t very cool And he didn’t fit in with any popular kids at school. They said his head was up in space and they would bring him down to Earth, Essentially he came from nothing and that is what he was worth, He’d never get to go to university to learn, Only degrees he’d ever show would be the first degree burns From those that came too close, they told him he was too bright, That’s why no one ever looked him in the eyes, His judgment became clouded So did the sky, With evaporated tears as the sun started to cry. Because the sunshine kid was bright, with a warm personality, And inside he burned savagely Hurt by the words and curses of the shadowy folk who spoke holes in his soul and left cavities, And as his heart hardened, his spark darkened, Every time they called him names it cooled his flames, He thought they might like him if he kept his light dim But they were busy telling lightning she had terrible aim, He couldn’t quite get to grips with what they said, So he let his light be eclipsed by what they said, He fell into a Lone Star State like Texas, And felt like he’d been punched in his solar plexus. But that’s when Little Miss Sunshine came along Singing her favorite song about how we’re made to be strong, And you don’t have to be wrong to belong, Just be true to who you are, because we are all stars at heart. Little Miss Sunshine was hot stuff, The kind of girl when you looked at her you forgot stuff, But for him, there was no forgetting her, The minute he saw her her image burned in his retina, She was out of this world, and she accepted him, Something about this girl meant he knew whenever she was next to him, Things weren’t as dark as they seemed, and he dared to dream, Shadows were nowhere to be seen; when she was there he beamed, His eyes would light up in ways that can’t be faked, When she grinned her rays erased the razor-tipped words of hate, They gave each other nicknames, they were "cool star" and "fun sun," And gradually the shadowy damage became undone, She was one in a septillion, and she was brilliant, Could turn the coldest blooded reptilians vermillion, Loved by billions, from Chileans to Brazilians, And taught the Sunshine Kid the meaning of resilience. She said: “All the darkness in the world cannot put out the light from a single candle So how the hell can they handle your light? Only you can choose to dim it, and the sky is the limit, so silence the critics by burning.” And if eyes are windows to the soul then she drew back the curtains And let the sun shine through the hurting. In a universe of adversity these stars stuck together, And though days became nights the memories would last forever, Whether the weatherman said it or not, it would be fine, 'Cause even behind the clouds the kid could still shine. Yes, the Sunshine Kid was bright, with a warm personality, And inside he burned savagely, Fueled by the fire inspired across galaxies By the girl who showed him belief. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Think your email's private? Think again | {0: 'Andy Yen is building an encrypted email program that lets everyone benefit from private communication.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | Twenty-five years ago, scientists at CERN created the World Wide Web. Since then, the Internet has transformed the way we communicate, the way we do business, and even the way we live. In many ways, the ideas that gave birth to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so many others, have now really transformed our lives, and this has brought us many real benefits such as a more connected society. However, there are also some downsides to this. Today, the average person has an astounding amount of personal information online, and we add to this online information every single time we post on Facebook, each time we search on Google, and each time we send an email. Now, many of us probably think, well, one email, there's nothing in there, right? But if you consider a year's worth of emails, or maybe even a lifetime of email, collectively, this tells a lot. It tells where we have been, who we have met, and in many ways, even what we're thinking about. And the more scary part about this is our data now lasts forever, so your data can and will outlive you. What has happened is that we've largely lost control over our data and also our privacy. So this year, as the web turns 25, it's very important for us to take a moment and think about the implications of this. We have to really think. We've lost privacy, yes, but actually what we've also lost is the idea of privacy itself. If you think about it, most of us here today probably remember what life was like before the Internet, but today, there's a new generation that is being taught from a very young age to share everything online, and this is a generation that is not going to remember when data was private. So we keep going down this road, 20 years from now, the word 'privacy' is going to have a completely different meaning from what it means to you and I. So, it's time for us to take a moment and think, is there anything we can do about this? And I believe there is. Let's take a look at one of the most widely used forms of communication in the world today: email. Before the invention of email, we largely communicated using letters, and the process was quite simple. You would first start by writing your message on a piece of paper, then you would place it into a sealed envelope, and from there, you would go ahead and send it after you put a stamp and address on it. Unfortunately, today, when we actually send an email, we're not sending a letter. What you are sending, in many ways, is actually a postcard, and it's a postcard in the sense that everybody that sees it from the time it leaves your computer to when it gets to the recipient can actually read the entire contents. So, the solution to this has been known for some time, and there's many attempts to do it. The most basic solution is to use encryption, and the idea is quite simple. First, you encrypt the connection between your computer and the email server. Then, you also encrypt the data as it sits on the server itself. But there's a problem with this, and that is, the email servers also hold the encryption keys, so now you have a really big lock with a key placed right next to it. But not only that, any government could lawfully ask for and get the key to your data, and this is all without you being aware of it. So the way we fix this problem is actually relatively easy, in principle: You give everybody their own keys, and then you make sure the server doesn't actually have the keys. This seems like common sense, right? So the question that comes up is, why hasn't this been done yet? Well, if we really think about it, we see that the business model of the Internet today really isn't compatible with privacy. Just take a look at some of the biggest names on the web, and you see that advertising plays a huge role. In fact, this year alone, advertising is 137 billion dollars, and to optimize the ads that are shown to us, companies have to know everything about us. They need to know where we live, how old we are, what we like, what we don't like, and anything else they can get their hands on. And if you think about it, the best way to get this information is really just to invade our privacy. So these companies aren't going to give us our privacy. If we want to have privacy online, what we have to do is we've got to go out and get it ourselves. For many years, when it came to email, the only solution was something known as PGP, which was quite complicated and only accessible to the tech-savvy. Here's a diagram that basically shows the process for encrypting and decrypting messages. So needless to say, this is not a solution for everybody, and this actually is part of the problem, because if you think about communication, by definition, it involves having someone to communicate with. So while PGP does a great job of what it's designed to do, for the people out there who can't understand how to use it, the option to communicate privately simply does not exist. And this is a problem that we need to solve. So if we want to have privacy online, the only way we can succeed is if we get the whole world on board, and this is only possible if we bring down the barrier to entry. I think this is actually the key challenge that lies in the tech community. What we really have to do is work and make privacy more accessible. So last summer, when the Edward Snowden story came out, several colleagues and I decided to see if we could make this happen. At that time, we were working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research at the world's largest particle collider, which collides protons, by the way. We were all scientists, so we used our scientific creativity and came up with a very creative name for our project: ProtonMail. (Laughter) Many startups these days actually begin in people's garages or people's basements. We were a bit different. We started out at the CERN cafeteria, which actually is great, because look, you have all the food and water you could ever want. But even better than this is that every day between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m., free of charge, the CERN cafeteria comes with several thousand scientists and engineers, and these guys basically know the answers to everything. So it was in this environment that we began working. What we actually want to do is we want to take your email and turn it into something that looks more like this, but more importantly, we want to do it in a way that you can't even tell that it's happened. So to do this, we actually need a combination of technology and also design. So how do we go about doing something like this? Well, it's probably a good idea not to put the keys on the server. So what we do is we generate encryption keys on your computer, and we don't generate a single key, but actually a pair of keys, so there's an RSA private key and an RSA public key, and these keys are mathematically connected. So let's have a look and see how this works when multiple people communicate. So here we have Bob and Alice, who want to communicate privately. So the key challenge is to take Bob's message and to get it to Alice in such a way that the server cannot read that message. So what we have to do is we have to encrypt it before it even leaves Bob's computer, and one of the tricks is, we encrypt it using the public key from Alice. Now this encrypted data is sent through the server to Alice, and because the message was encrypted using Alice's public key, the only key that can now decrypt it is a private key that belongs to Alice, and it turns out Alice is the only person that actually has this key. So we've now accomplished the objective, which is to get the message from Bob to Alice without the server being able to read what's going on. Actually, what I've shown here is a highly simplified picture. The reality is much more complex and it requires a lot of software that looks a bit like this. And that's actually the key design challenge: How do we take all this complexity, all this software, and implement it in a way that the user cannot see it. I think with ProtonMail, we have gotten pretty close to doing this. So let's see how it works in practice. Here, we've got Bob and Alice again, who also want to communicate securely. They simply create accounts on ProtonMail, which is quite simple and takes a few moments, and all the key encryption and generation is happening automatically in the background as Bob is creating his account. Once his account is created, he just clicks "compose," and now he can write his email like he does today. So he fills in his information, and then after that, all he has to do is click "send," and just like that, without understanding cryptography, and without doing anything different from how he writes email today, Bob has just sent an encrypted message. What we have here is really just the first step, but it shows that with improving technology, privacy doesn't have to be difficult, it doesn't have to be disruptive. If we change the goal from maximizing ad revenue to protecting data, we can actually make it accessible. Now, I know a question on everybody's minds is, okay, protecting privacy, this is a great goal, but can you actually do this without the tons of money that advertisements give you? And I think the answer is actually yes, because today, we've reached a point where people around the world really understand how important privacy is, and when you have that, anything is possible. Earlier this year, ProtonMail actually had so many users that we ran out of resources, and when this happened, our community of users got together and donated half a million dollars. So this is just an example of what can happen when you bring the community together towards a common goal. We can also leverage the world. Right now, we have a quarter of a million people that have signed up for ProtonMail, and these people come from everywhere, and this really shows that privacy is not just an American or a European issue, it's a global issue that impacts all of us. It's something that we really have to pay attention to going forward. So what do we have to do to solve this problem? Well, first of all, we need to support a different business model for the Internet, one that does not rely entirely on advertisements for revenue and for growth. We actually need to build a new Internet where our privacy and our ability to control our data is first and foremost. But even more importantly, we have to build an Internet where privacy is no longer just an option but is also the default. We have done the first step with ProtonMail, but this is really just the first step in a very, very long journey. The good news I can share with you guys today, the exciting news, is that we're not traveling alone. The movement to protect people's privacy and freedom online is really gaining momentum, and today, there are dozens of projects from all around the world who are working together to improve our privacy. These projects protect things from our chat to voice communications, also our file storage, our online search, our online browsing, and many other things. And these projects are not backed by billions of dollars in advertising, but they've found support really from the people, from private individuals like you and I from all over the world. This really matters, because ultimately, privacy depends on each and every one of us, and we have to protect it now because our online data is more than just a collection of ones and zeros. It's actually a lot more than that. It's our lives, our personal stories, our friends, our families, and in many ways, also our hopes and our aspirations. We need to spend time now to really protect our right to share this only with people that we want to share this with, because without this, we simply can't have a free society. So now's the time for us to collectively stand up and say, yes, we do want to live in a world with online privacy, and yes, we can work together to turn this vision into a reality. Thank you. (Applause) |
4 lessons I learned from taking a stand against drugs and gun violence | {0: "Ilona Szabó de Carvalho designs solutions for some of the world's biggest challenges -- from reducing violence and reforming drug laws to renewing democracy and fighting polarization."} | TEDGlobal 2014 | About 12 years ago, I gave up my career in banking to try to make the world a safer place. This involved a journey into national and global advocacy and meeting some of the most extraordinary people in the world. In the process, I became a civil society diplomat. Civil society diplomats do three things: They voice the concerns of the people, are not pinned down by national interests, and influence change through citizen networks, not only state ones. And if you want to change the world, we need more of them. But many people still ask, "Can civil society really make a big difference? Can citizens influence and shape national and global policy?" I never thought I would ask myself these questions, but here I am to share some lessons about two powerful civil society movements that I've been involved in. They are in issues that I'm passionate about: gun control and drug policy. And these are issues that matter here. Latin America is ground zero for both of them. For example, Brazil — this beautiful country hosting TEDGlobal has the world's ugliest record. We are the number one champion in homicidal violence. One in every 10 people killed around the world is a Brazilian. This translates into over 56,000 people dying violently each year. Most of them are young, black boys dying by guns. Brazil is also one of the world's largest consumers of drugs, and the War on Drugs has been especially painful here. Around 50 percent of the homicides in the streets in Brazil are related to the War on Drugs. The same is true for about 25 percent of people in jail. And it's not just Brazil that is affected by the twin problems of guns and drugs. Virtually every country and city across Central and South America is in trouble. Latin America has nine percent of the world's population, but 25 percent of its global violent deaths. These are not problems we can run away from. I certainly could not. So the first campaign I got involved with started here in 2003 to change Brazil's gun law and to create a program to buy back weapons. In just a few years, we not only changed national legislation that made it much more difficult for civilians to buy a gun, but we collected and destroyed almost half a million weapons. This was one of the biggest buyback programs in history — (Applause) — but we also suffered some setbacks. We lost a referendum to ban gun sales to civilians in 2005. The second initiative was also home-grown, but is today a global movement to reform the international drug control regime. I am the executive coordinator of something called the Global Commission on Drug Policy. The commission is a high-level group of global leaders brought together to identify more humane and effective approaches to the issue of drugs. Since we started in 2008, the taboo on drugs is broken. Across the Americas, from the US and Mexico to Colombia and Uruguay, change is in the air. But rather than tell you the whole story about these two movements, I just want to share with you four key insights. I call them lessons to change the world. There are certainly many more, but these are the ones that stand out to me. So the first lesson is: Change and control the narrative. It may seem obvious, but a key ingredient to civil society diplomacy is first changing and then controlling the narrative. This is something that veteran politicians understand, but that civil society groups generally do not do very well. In the case of drug policy, our biggest success has been to change the discussion away from prosecuting a War on Drugs to putting people's health and safety first. In a cutting-edge report we just launched in New York, we also showed that the groups benefiting most from this $320 billion market are criminal gangs and cartels. So in order to undermine the power and profit of these groups, we need to change the conversation. We need to make illegal drugs legal. But before I get you too excited, I don't mean drugs should be a free-for-all. What I'm talking about, and what the Global Commission advocates for is creating a highly regulated market, where different drugs would have different degrees of regulation. As for gun control, we were successful in changing, but not so much in controlling, the narrative. And this brings me to my next lesson: Never underestimate your opponents. If you want to succeed in changing the world, you need to know who you're up against. You need to learn their motivations and points of view. In the case of gun control, we really underestimated our opponents. After a very successful gun-collection program, we were elated. We had support from 80 percent of Brazilians, and thought that this could help us win the referendum to ban gun sales to civilians. But we were dead wrong. During a televised 20-day public debate, our opponent used our own arguments against us. We ended up losing the popular vote. It was really terrible. The National Rifle Association — yes, the American NRA — came to Brazil. They inundated our campaign with their propaganda, that as you know, links the right to own guns to ideas of freedom and democracy. They simply threw everything at us. They used our national flag, our independence anthem. They invoked women's rights and misused images of Mandela, Tiananmen Square, and even Hitler. They won by playing with people's fears. In fact, guns were almost completely ignored in their campaign. Their focus was on individual rights. But I ask you, which right is more important, the right to life or the right to have a gun that takes life away? (Applause) We thought people would vote in defense of life, but in a country with a recent past of military dictatorship, the anti-government message of our opponents resonated, and we were not prepared to respond. Lesson learned. We've been more successful in the case of drug policy. If you asked most people 10 years ago if an end to the War on Drugs was possible, they would have laughed. After all, there are huge military police prisons and financial establishments benefiting from this war. But today, the international drug control regime is starting to crumble. Governments and civil societies are experimenting with new approaches. The Global Commission on Drug Policy really knew its opposition, and rather than fighting them, our chair — former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso — reached out to leaders from across the political spectrum, from liberals to conservatives. This high level group agreed to honestly discuss the merits and flaws of drug policies. It was this reasoned, informed and strategic discussion that revealed the sad truth about the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs has simply failed across every metric. Drugs are cheaper and more available than ever, and consumption has risen globally. But even worse, it also generated massive negative unintended consequences. It is true that some people have made these arguments before, but we've made a difference by anticipating the arguments of our opponents and by leveraging powerful voices that a few years ago would probably have resisted change. Third lesson: Use data to drive your argument. Guns and drugs are emotive issues, and as we've painfully learned in the gun referendum campaign in Brazil, sometimes it's impossible to cut through the emotions and get to the facts. But this doesn't mean that we shouldn't try. Until quite recently, we simply didn't know how many Brazilians were killed by guns. Amazingly, it was a local soap opera called "Mulheres Apaixonadas" — or "Women in Love" — that kicked off Brazil's national gun control campaign. In one highly viewed episode, a soap opera lead actress was killed by a stray bullet. Brazilian grannies and housewives were outraged, and in a case of art imitating life, this episode also included footage of a real gun control march that we had organized right here, outside in Copacabana Beach. The televised death and march had a huge impact on public opinion. Within weeks, our national congress approved the disarmament bill that had been languishing for years. We were then able to mobilize data to show the successful outcomes of the change in the law and gun collection program. Here is what I mean: We could prove that in just one year, we saved more than 5,000 lives. (Applause) And in the case of drugs, in order to undermine this fear and prejudice that surrounds the issue, we managed to gather and present data that shows that today's drug policies cause much more harm than drug use per se, and people are starting to get it. My fourth insight is: Don't be afraid to bring together odd bedfellows. What we've learned in Brazil — and this doesn't only apply to my country — is the importance of bringing diverse and eclectic folks together. If you want to change the world, it helps to have a good cross-section of society on your side. In both the case of guns and drugs, we brought together a wonderful mix of people. We mobilized the elite and got huge support from the media. We gathered the victims, human rights champions, cultural icons. We also assembled the professional classes — doctors, lawyers, academia and more. What I've learned over the last years is that you need coalitions of the willing and of the unwilling to make change. In the case of drugs, we needed libertarians, anti-prohibitionists, legalizers, and liberal politicians. They may not agree on everything; in fact, they disagree on almost everything. But the legitimacy of the campaign is based on their diverse points of view. Over a decade ago, I had a comfortable future working for an investment bank. I was as far removed from the world of civil society diplomacy as you can imagine. But I took a chance. I changed course, and on the way, I helped to create social movements that I believe have made some parts of the world safer. Each and every one of us has the power to change the world. No matter what the issue, and no matter how hard the fight, civil society is central to the blueprint for change. Thank you. (Applause) |
In praise of macro -- yes, macro -- finance in Africa | {0: 'Sangu Delle is an entrepreneur and clean water activist. A TED Fellow who hails from Ghana, he sees incredible potential in the African economy.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | Traditional prescriptions for growth in Africa are not working very well. After one trillion dollars in African development-related aid in the last 60 years, real per capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s. Aid is not doing too well. In response, the Bretton Woods institutions — the IMF and the World Bank — pushed for free trade not aid, yet the historical record shows little empirical evidence that free trade leads to economic growth. The newly prescribed silver bullet is microcredit. We seem to be fixated on this romanticized idea that every poor peasant in Africa is an entrepreneur. (Laughter) Yet my work and travel in 40-plus countries across Africa have taught me that most people want jobs instead. My solution: Forget micro-entrepreneurs. Let's invest in building pan-African titans like Sudanese businessman Mo Ibrahim. Mo took a contrarian bet on Africa when he founded Celtel International in '98 and built it into a mobile cellular provider with 24 million subscribers across 14 African countries by 2004. The Mo model might be better than the everyman entrepreneur model, which prevents an effective means of diffusion and knowledge-sharing. Perhaps we are not at a stage in Africa where many actors and small enterprises leads to growth through competition. Consider these two alternative scenarios. One: You loan 200 dollars to each of 500 banana farmers allowing them to dry their surplus bananas and fetch 15 percent more revenue at the local market. Or two: You give 100,000 dollars to one savvy entrepreneur and help her set up a factory that yields 40 percent additional income to all 500 banana farmers and creates 50 additional jobs. We invested in the second scenario, and backed 26-year-old Kenyan entrepreneur Eric Muthomi to set up an agro-processing factory called Stawi to produce gluten-free banana-based flour and baby food. Stawi is leveraging economies of scale and using modern manufacturing processes to create value for not only its owners but its workers, who have an ownership in the business. Our dream is to take an Eric Muthomi and try to help him become a Mo Ibrahim, which requires skill, financing, local and global partnerships, and extraordinary perseverance. But why pan-African? The scramble for Africa during the Berlin Conference of 1884 — where, quite frankly, we Africans were not exactly consulted — (Laughter) (Applause) — resulted in massive fragmentation and many sovereign states with small populations: Liberia, four million; Cape Verde, 500,000. Pan-Africa gives you one billion people, granted across 55 countries with trade barriers and other impediments, but our ancestors traded across the continent before Europeans drew lines around us. The pan-African opportunities outweigh the challenges, and that's why we're expanding Stawi's markets from just Kenya to Algeria, Nigeria, Ghana, and anywhere else that will buy our food. We hope to help solve food security, empower farmers, create jobs, develop the local economy, and we hope to become rich in the process. While it's not the sexiest approach, and maybe it doesn't achieve the same feel-good as giving a woman 100 dollars to buy a goat on kiva.org, perhaps supporting fewer, higher-impact entrepreneurs to build massive businesses that scale pan-Africa can help change this. The political freedom for which our forebearers fought is meaningless without economic freedom. We hope to aid this fight for economic freedom by building world-class businesses, creating indigenous wealth, providing jobs that we so desperately need, and hopefully helping achieve this. Africa shall rise. Thank you. (Applause) Tom Rielly: So Sangu, of course, this is strong rhetoric. You're making 100 percent contrast between microcredit and regular investment and growing regular investment. Do you think there is a role for microcredit at all? Sangu Delle: I think there is a role. Microcredit has been a great, innovative way to expand financial access to the bottom of the pyramid. But for the problems we face in Africa, when we are looking at the Marshall Plan to revitalize war-torn Europe, it was not full of donations of sheep. We need more than just microcredit. We need more than just give 200 dollars. We need to build big businesses, and we need jobs. TR: Very good. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
Why the buildings of the future will be shaped by ... you | {0: 'With Architizer, an online hub for architecture, Marc Kushner is breaking architecture out of its insular echo chamber and reconnecting the public with buildings.'} | TED2014 | Today I'm going to speak to you about the last 30 years of architectural history. That's a lot to pack into 18 minutes. It's a complex topic, so we're just going to dive right in at a complex place: New Jersey. Because 30 years ago, I'm from Jersey, and I was six, and I lived there in my parents' house in a town called Livingston, and this was my childhood bedroom. Around the corner from my bedroom was the bathroom that I used to share with my sister. And in between my bedroom and the bathroom was a balcony that overlooked the family room. And that's where everyone would hang out and watch TV, so that every time that I walked from my bedroom to the bathroom, everyone would see me, and every time I took a shower and would come back in a towel, everyone would see me. And I looked like this. I was awkward, insecure, and I hated it. I hated that walk, I hated that balcony, I hated that room, and I hated that house. And that's architecture. (Laughter) Done. That feeling, those emotions that I felt, that's the power of architecture, because architecture is not about math and it's not about zoning, it's about those visceral, emotional connections that we feel to the places that we occupy. And it's no surprise that we feel that way, because according to the EPA, Americans spend 90 percent of their time indoors. That's 90 percent of our time surrounded by architecture. That's huge. That means that architecture is shaping us in ways that we didn't even realize. That makes us a little bit gullible and very, very predictable. It means that when I show you a building like this, I know what you think: You think "power" and "stability" and "democracy." And I know you think that because it's based on a building that was build 2,500 years ago by the Greeks. This is a trick. This is a trigger that architects use to get you to create an emotional connection to the forms that we build our buildings out of. It's a predictable emotional connection, and we've been using this trick for a long, long time. We used it [200] years ago to build banks. We used it in the 19th century to build art museums. And in the 20th century in America, we used it to build houses. And look at these solid, stable little soldiers facing the ocean and keeping away the elements. This is really, really useful, because building things is terrifying. It's expensive, it takes a long time, and it's very complicated. And the people that build things — developers and governments — they're naturally afraid of innovation, and they'd rather just use those forms that they know you'll respond to. That's how we end up with buildings like this. This is a nice building. This is the Livingston Public Library that was completed in 2004 in my hometown, and, you know, it's got a dome and it's got this round thing and columns, red brick, and you can kind of guess what Livingston is trying to say with this building: children, property values and history. But it doesn't have much to do with what a library actually does today. That same year, in 2004, on the other side of the country, another library was completed, and it looks like this. It's in Seattle. This library is about how we consume media in a digital age. It's about a new kind of public amenity for the city, a place to gather and read and share. So how is it possible that in the same year, in the same country, two buildings, both called libraries, look so completely different? And the answer is that architecture works on the principle of a pendulum. On the one side is innovation, and architects are constantly pushing, pushing for new technologies, new typologies, new solutions for the way that we live today. And we push and we push and we push until we completely alienate all of you. We wear all black, we get very depressed, you think we're adorable, we're dead inside because we've got no choice. We have to go to the other side and reengage those symbols that we know you love. So we do that, and you're happy, we feel like sellouts, so we start experimenting again and we push the pendulum back and back and forth and back and forth we've gone for the last 300 years, and certainly for the last 30 years. Okay, 30 years ago we were coming out of the '70s. Architects had been busy experimenting with something called brutalism. It's about concrete. (Laughter) You can guess this. Small windows, dehumanizing scale. This is really tough stuff. So as we get closer to the '80s, we start to reengage those symbols. We push the pendulum back into the other direction. We take these forms that we know you love and we update them. We add neon and we add pastels and we use new materials. And you love it. And we can't give you enough of it. We take Chippendale armoires and we turned those into skyscrapers, and skyscrapers can be medieval castles made out of glass. Forms got big, forms got bold and colorful. Dwarves became columns. (Laughter) Swans grew to the size of buildings. It was crazy. But it's the '80s, it's cool. (Laughter) We're all hanging out in malls and we're all moving to the suburbs, and out there, out in the suburbs, we can create our own architectural fantasies. And those fantasies, they can be Mediterranean or French or Italian. (Laughter) Possibly with endless breadsticks. This is the thing about postmodernism. This is the thing about symbols. They're easy, they're cheap, because instead of making places, we're making memories of places. Because I know, and I know all of you know, this isn't Tuscany. This is Ohio. (Laughter) So architects get frustrated, and we start pushing the pendulum back into the other direction. In the late '80s and early '90s, we start experimenting with something called deconstructivism. We throw out historical symbols, we rely on new, computer-aided design techniques, and we come up with new compositions, forms crashing into forms. This is academic and heady stuff, it's super unpopular, we totally alienate you. Ordinarily, the pendulum would just swing back into the other direction. And then, something amazing happened. In 1997, this building opened. This is the Guggenheim Bilbao, by Frank Gehry. And this building fundamentally changes the world's relationship to architecture. Paul Goldberger said that Bilbao was one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and the general public were completely united around a building. The New York Times called this building a miracle. Tourism in Bilbao increased 2,500 percent after this building was completed. So all of a sudden, everybody wants one of these buildings: L.A., Seattle, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Springfield. (Laughter) Everybody wants one, and Gehry is everywhere. He is our very first starchitect. Now, how is it possible that these forms — they're wild and radical — how is it possible that they become so ubiquitous throughout the world? And it happened because media so successfully galvanized around them that they quickly taught us that these forms mean culture and tourism. We created an emotional reaction to these forms. So did every mayor in the world. So every mayor knew that if they had these forms, they had culture and tourism. This phenomenon at the turn of the new millennium happened to a few other starchitects. It happened to Zaha and it happened to Libeskind, and what happened to these elite few architects at the turn of the new millennium could actually start to happen to the entire field of architecture, as digital media starts to increase the speed with which we consume information. Because think about how you consume architecture. A thousand years ago, you would have had to have walked to the village next door to see a building. Transportation speeds up: You can take a boat, you can take a plane, you can be a tourist. Technology speeds up: You can see it in a newspaper, on TV, until finally, we are all architectural photographers, and the building has become disembodied from the site. Architecture is everywhere now, and that means that the speed of communication has finally caught up to the speed of architecture. Because architecture actually moves quite quickly. It doesn't take long to think about a building. It takes a long time to build a building, three or four years, and in the interim, an architect will design two or eight or a hundred other buildings before they know if that building that they designed four years ago was a success or not. That's because there's never been a good feedback loop in architecture. That's how we end up with buildings like this. Brutalism wasn't a two-year movement, it was a 20-year movement. For 20 years, we were producing buildings like this because we had no idea how much you hated it. It's never going to happen again, I think, because we are living on the verge of the greatest revolution in architecture since the invention of concrete, of steel, or of the elevator, and it's a media revolution. So my theory is that when you apply media to this pendulum, it starts swinging faster and faster, until it's at both extremes nearly simultaneously, and that effectively blurs the difference between innovation and symbol, between us, the architects, and you, the public. Now we can make nearly instantaneous, emotionally charged symbols out of something that's brand new. Let me show you how this plays out in a project that my firm recently completed. We were hired to replace this building, which burned down. This is the center of a town called the Pines in Fire Island in New York State. It's a vacation community. We proposed a building that was audacious, that was different than any of the forms that the community was used to, and we were scared and our client was scared and the community was scared, so we created a series of photorealistic renderings that we put onto Facebook and we put onto Instagram, and we let people start to do what they do: share it, comment, like it, hate it. But that meant that two years before the building was complete, it was already a part of the community, so that when the renderings looked exactly like the finished product, there were no surprises. This building was already a part of this community, and then that first summer, when people started arriving and sharing the building on social media, the building ceased to be just an edifice and it became media, because these, these are not just pictures of a building, they're your pictures of a building. And as you use them to tell your story, they become part of your personal narrative, and what you're doing is you're short-circuiting all of our collective memory, and you're making these charged symbols for us to understand. That means we don't need the Greeks anymore to tell us what to think about architecture. We can tell each other what we think about architecture, because digital media hasn't just changed the relationship between all of us, it's changed the relationship between us and buildings. Think for a second about those librarians back in Livingston. If that building was going to be built today, the first thing they would do is go online and search "new libraries." They would be bombarded by examples of experimentation, of innovation, of pushing at the envelope of what a library can be. That's ammunition. That's ammunition that they can take with them to the mayor of Livingston, to the people of Livingston, and say, there's no one answer to what a library is today. Let's be a part of this. This abundance of experimentation gives them the freedom to run their own experiment. Everything is different now. Architects are no longer these mysterious creatures that use big words and complicated drawings, and you aren't the hapless public, the consumer that won't accept anything that they haven't seen anymore. Architects can hear you, and you're not intimidated by architecture. That means that that pendulum swinging back and forth from style to style, from movement to movement, is irrelevant. We can actually move forward and find relevant solutions to the problems that our society faces. This is the end of architectural history, and it means that the buildings of tomorrow are going to look a lot different than the buildings of today. It means that a public space in the ancient city of Seville can be unique and tailored to the way that a modern city works. It means that a stadium in Brooklyn can be a stadium in Brooklyn, not some red-brick historical pastiche of what we think a stadium ought to be. It means that robots are going to build our buildings, because we're finally ready for the forms that they're going to produce. And it means that buildings will twist to the whims of nature instead of the other way around. It means that a parking garage in Miami Beach, Florida, can also be a place for sports and for yoga and you can even get married there late at night. (Laughter) It means that three architects can dream about swimming in the East River of New York, and then raise nearly half a million dollars from a community that gathered around their cause, no one client anymore. It means that no building is too small for innovation, like this little reindeer pavilion that's as muscly and sinewy as the animals it's designed to observe. And it means that a building doesn't have to be beautiful to be lovable, like this ugly little building in Spain, where the architects dug a hole, packed it with hay, and then poured concrete around it, and when the concrete dried, they invited someone to come and clean that hay out so that all that's left when it's done is this hideous little room that's filled with the imprints and scratches of how that place was made, and that becomes the most sublime place to watch a Spanish sunset. Because it doesn't matter if a cow builds our buildings or a robot builds our buildings. It doesn't matter how we build, it matters what we build. Architects already know how to make buildings that are greener and smarter and friendlier. We've just been waiting for all of you to want them. And finally, we're not on opposite sides anymore. Find an architect, hire an architect, work with us to design better buildings, better cities, and a better world, because the stakes are high. Buildings don't just reflect our society, they shape our society down to the smallest spaces: the local libraries, the homes where we raise our children, and the walk that they take from the bedroom to the bathroom. Thank you. (Applause) |
What I learned as a kid in jail | {0: "Prison reform advocate Ismael Nazario helps former inmates from New York's Rikers Island jail reenter society."} | TEDxNewYork | We need to change the culture in our jails and prisons, especially for young inmates. New York state is one of only two in the U.S. that automatically arrests and tries 16- to 17-year-olds as adults. This culture of violence takes these young people and puts them in a hostile environment, and the correctional officers pretty much allow any and everything to go on. There's not really much for these young people to do to actually enhance their talent and actually rehabilitate them. Until we can raise the age of criminal responsibility to 18, we need to focus on changing the daily lives of these young people. I know firsthand. Before I ever turned 18, I spent approximately 400 days on Rikers Island, and to add to that I spent almost 300 days in solitary confinement, and let me tell you this: Screaming at the top of your lungs all day on your cell door or screaming at the top of your lungs out the window, it gets tiring. Since there's not much for you to do while you're in there, you start pacing back and forth in your cell, you start talking to yourself, your thoughts start running wild, and then your thoughts become your own worst enemy. Jails are actually supposed to rehabilitate a person, not cause him or her to become more angry, frustrated, and feel more hopeless. Since there's not a discharge plan put in place for these young people, they pretty much reenter society with nothing. And there's not really much for them to do to keep them from recidivating. But it all starts with the C.O.s. It's very easy for some people to look at these correctional officers as the good guys and the inmates as the bad guys, or vice versa for some, but it's a little more than that. See, these C.O.s are normal, everyday people. They come from the same neighborhoods as the population they "serve." They're just normal people. They're not robots, and there's nothing special about them. They do pretty much everything anybody else in society does. The male C.O.s want to talk and flirt with the female C.O.s. They play the little high school kid games with each other. They politic with one another. And the female C.O.s gossip to each other. So I spent numerous amounts of time with numerous amounts of C.O.s, and let me tell you about this one in particular named Monroe. One day he pulled me in between the A and B doors which separate the north and south sides of our housing unit. He pulled me there because I had a physical altercation with another young man in my housing unit, and he felt, since there was a female officer working on the floor, that I violated his shift. So he punched me in my chest. He kind of knocked the wind out of me. I wasn't impulsive, I didn't react right away, because I know this is their house. I have no wins. All he has to do is pull his pin and backup will come immediately. So I just gave him a look in his eyes and I guess he saw the anger and frustration just burning, and he said to me, "Your eyes are going to get you in a lot of trouble, because you're looking like you want to fight." So he commenced to taking off his utility belt, he took off his shirt and his badge, and he said, "We could fight." So I asked him, "You gonna hold it down?" Now, that's a term that's commonly used on Rikers Island meaning that you're not going to say anything to anybody, and you're not going to report it. He said, "Yeah, I'm gonna hold it down. You gonna hold it down?" I didn't even respond. I just punched him right in his face, and we began fighting right then and there. Towards the end of the fight, he slammed me up against the wall, so while we were tussled up, he said to me, "You good?" as if he got the best of me, but in my mind, I know I got the best of him, so I replied very cocky, "Oh, I'm good, you good?" He said, "Yeah, I'm good, I'm good." We let go, he shook my hand, said he gave me my respect, gave me a cigarette and sent me on my way. Believe it or not, you come across some C.O.s on Rikers Island that'll fight you one-on-one. They feel that they understand how it is, and they feel that I'm going to meet you where you're at. Since this is how you commonly handle your disputes, we can handle it in that manner. I walk away from it like a man, you walk away from it like a man, and that's it. Some C.O.s feel that they're jailing with you. This is why they have that mentality and that attitude and they go by that concept. In some instances, we're in it together with the C.O.s. However, institutions need to give these correctional officers proper trainings on how to properly deal with the adolescent population, and they also need to give them proper trainings on how to deal with the mental health population as well. These C.O.s play a big factor in these young people's lives for x amount of time until a disposition is reached on their case. So why not try to mentor these young people while they're there? Why not try to give them some type of insight to make a change, so once they reenter back into society, they're doing something positive? A second big thing to help our teens in jails is better programming. When I was on Rikers Island, the huge thing was solitary confinement. Solitary confinement was originally designed to break a person mentally, physically and emotionally. That's what it was designed for. The U.S. Attorney General recently released a report stating that they're going to ban solitary confinement in New York state for teens. One thing that kept me sane while I was in solitary confinement was reading. I tried to educate myself as much as possible. I read any and everything I could get my hands on. And aside from that, I wrote music and short stories. Some programs that I feel would benefit our young people are art therapy programs for the kids that like to draw and have that talent, and what about the young individuals that are musically inclined? How about a music program for them that actually teaches them how to write and make music? Just a thought. When adolescents come to Rikers Island, C74, RNDC is the building that they're housed in. That's nicknamed "gladiator school," because you have a young individual coming in from the street thinking that they're tough, being surrounded by a bunch of other young individuals from all of the five boroughs, and everybody feels that they're tough. So now you have a bunch of young gentlemen poking their chests out feeling that I have to prove I'm equally as tough as you or I'm tougher than you, you and you. But let's be honest: That culture is very dangerous and damaging to our young people. We need to help institutions and these teens realize that they don't have to lead the previous lifestyle that they led when they were on the street, that they can actually make a change. It's sad to report that while I was in prison, I used to hear dudes talking about when they get released from prison, what type of crimes they're going to commit when they get back in the street. The conversations used to sound something like this: "Oh, when I hit the street, my brother got this connection for this, that and the third," or, "My man over here got this connection for the low price. Let's exchange information," and, "When we hit the town, we're going to do it real big." I used to hear these conversations and think to myself, "Wow, these dudes are really talking about going back in the street and committing future crimes." So I came up with a name for that: I called it a go-back-to-jail-quick scheme because really, how long is that going to last? You get a retirement plan with that? Nice little pension? 401(k)? 403(b)? You get health insurance? Dental? (Laughter) But I will tell you this: Being in jail and being in prison, I came across some of the most intelligent, brilliant, and talented people that I would ever meet. I've seen individuals take a potato chip bag and turn it into the most beautiful picture frame. I've seen individuals take the state soap that's provided for free and turn them into the most beautiful sculptures that would make Michelangelo look like a kindergartner made it. At the age of 21, I was in a maximum-security prison called Elmira Correctional Facility. I just came out of the weight shack from working out, and I saw an older gentleman that I knew standing in the middle of the yard just looking up at the sky. Mind you, this older gentlemen was serving a 33-and-a-third-to-life sentence in which he already had served 20 years of that sentence. So I walk up to him and I said, "O.G., what's going on, man, you good?" He looked at me, and he said, "Yeah, I'm good, young blood." I'm like, "So what are you looking up at the sky for, man? What's so fascinating up there?" He said, "You look up and you tell me what you see." "Clouds." (Laughter) He said, "All right. What else do you see?" At that time, it was a plane passing by. I said, "All right, I see an airplane." He said, "Exactly, and what's on that airplane?" "People." "Exactly. Now where's that plane and those people going?" "I don't know. You know? Please let me know if you do. Then let me get some lottery numbers." He said, "You're missing the big picture, young blood. That plane with those people is going somewhere, while we're here stuck. The big picture is this: That plane with those people going somewhere, that's life passing us by while we behind these walls, stuck." Ever since that day, that sparked something in my mind and made me know I had to make a change. Growing up, I was always a good, smart kid. Some people would say I was a little too smart for my own good. I had dreams of becoming an architect or an archaeologist. Currently, I'm working at the Fortune Society, which is a reentry program, and I work with people as a case manager that are at high risk for recidivism. So I connect them with the services that they need once they're released from jail and prison so they can make a positive transition back into society. If I was to see my 15-year-old self today, I would sit down and talk to him and try to educate him and I would let him know, "Listen, this is me. I'm you. This is us. We are one. Everything that you're about to do, I know what you're gonna do before you do it because I already did it, and I would encourage him not to hang out with x, y and z people. I would tell him not to be in such-and-such place. I would tell him, keep your behind in school, man, because that's where you need to be, because that's what's going to get you somewhere in life. This is the message that we should be sharing with our young men and young women. We shouldn't be treating them as adults and putting them in cultures of violence that are nearly impossible for them to escape. Thank you. (Applause) |
Play this word game to come up with original ideas | {0: 'Shimpei Takahashi thinks we should forget about analyzing data or sales figures and just come up with ideas -- lots and lots of ideas.'} | TEDxTokyo | Hello. I'm a toy developer. With a dream of creating new toys that have never been seen before, I began working at a toy company nine years ago. When I first started working there, I proposed many new ideas to my boss every day. However, my boss always asked if I had the data to prove it would sell, and asked me to think of product development after analyzing market data. Data, data, data. So I analyzed the market data before thinking of a product. However, I was unable to think of anything new at that moment. (Laughter) My ideas were unoriginal. I wasn't getting any new ideas and I grew tired of thinking. It was so hard that I became this skinny. (Laughter) It's true. (Applause) You've all probably had similar experiences and felt this way too. Your boss was being difficult. The data was difficult. You become sick of thinking. Now, I throw out the data. It's my dream to create new toys. And now, instead of data, I'm using a game called Shiritori to come up with new ideas. I would like to introduce this method today. What is Shiritori? Take apple, elephant and trumpet, for example. It's a game where you take turns saying words that start with the last letter of the previous word. It's the same in Japanese and English. You can play Shiritori as you like: "neko, kora, raibu, burashi," etc, etc. [Cat, cola, concert, brush] Many random words will come out. You force those words to connect to what you want to think of and form ideas. In my case, for example, since I want to think of toys, what could a toy cat be? A cat that lands after doing a somersault from a high place? How about a toy with cola? A toy gun where you shoot cola and get someone soaking wet? (Laughter) Ridiculous ideas are okay. The key is to keep them flowing. The more ideas you produce, you're sure to come up with some good ones, too. A brush, for example. Can we make a toothbrush into a toy? We could combine a toothbrush with a guitar and — (Music noises) — you've got a toy you can play with while brushing your teeth. (Laughter) (Applause) Kids who don't like to brush their teeth might begin to like it. Can we make a hat into a toy? How about something like a roulette game, where you try the hat on one by one, and then, when someone puts it on, a scary alien breaks through the top screaming, "Ahh!" I wonder if there would be a demand for this at parties? Ideas that didn't come out while you stare at the data will start to come out. Actually, this bubble wrap, which is used to pack fragile objects, combined with a toy, made Mugen Pop Pop, a toy where you can pop the bubbles as much as you like. It was a big hit when it reached stores. Data had nothing to do with its success. Although it's only popping bubbles, it's a great way to kill time, so please pass this around amongst yourselves today and play with it. (Applause) Anyway, you continue to come up with useless ideas. Think up many trivial ideas, everyone. If you base your ideas on data analysis and know what you're aiming for, you'll end up trying too hard, and you can't produce new ideas. Even if you know what your aim is, think of ideas as freely as if you were throwing darts with your eyes closed. If you do this, you surely will hit somewhere near the center. At least one will. That's the one you should choose. If you do so, that idea will be in demand and, moreover, it will be brand new. That is how I think of new ideas. It doesn't have to be Shiritori; there are many different methods. You just have to choose words at random. You can flip through a dictionary and choose words at random. For example, you could look up two random letters and gather the results or go to the store and connect product names with what you want to think of. The point is to gather random words, not information from the category you're thinking for. If you do this, the ingredients for the association of ideas are collected and form connections that will produce many ideas. The greatest advantage to this method is the continuous flow of images. Because you're thinking of one word after another, the image of the previous word is still with you. That image will automatically be related with future words. Unconsciously, a concert will be connected to a brush and a roulette game will be connected to a hat. You wouldn't even realize it. You can come up with ideas that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. This method is, of course, not just for toys. You can collect ideas for books, apps, events, and many other projects. I hope you all try this method. There are futures that are born from data. However, using this silly game called Shiritori, I look forward to the exciting future you will create, a future you couldn't even imagine. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How to manage for collective creativity | {0: 'Linda Hill studies collective genius -- the way great companies, and great leaders, empower creativity from many.'} | TEDxCambridge | I have a confession to make. I'm a business professor whose ambition has been to help people learn to lead. But recently, I've discovered that what many of us think of as great leadership does not work when it comes to leading innovation. I'm an ethnographer. I use the methods of anthropology to understand the questions in which I'm interested. So along with three co-conspirators, I spent nearly a decade observing up close and personal exceptional leaders of innovation. We studied 16 men and women, located in seven countries across the globe, working in 12 different industries. In total, we spent hundreds of hours on the ground, on-site, watching these leaders in action. We ended up with pages and pages and pages of field notes that we analyzed and looked for patterns in what our leaders did. The bottom line? If we want to build organizations that can innovate time and again, we must unlearn our conventional notions of leadership. Leading innovation is not about creating a vision, and inspiring others to execute it. But what do we mean by innovation? An innovation is anything that is both new and useful. It can be a product or service. It can be a process or a way of organizing. It can be incremental, or it can be breakthrough. We have a pretty inclusive definition. How many of you recognize this man? Put your hands up. Keep your hands up, if you know who this is. How about these familiar faces? (Laughter) From your show of hands, it looks like many of you have seen a Pixar movie, but very few of you recognized Ed Catmull, the founder and CEO of Pixar — one of the companies I had the privilege of studying. My first visit to Pixar was in 2005, when they were working on "Ratatouille," that provocative movie about a rat becoming a master chef. Computer-generated movies are really mainstream today, but it took Ed and his colleagues nearly 20 years to create the first full-length C.G. movie. In the 20 years hence, they've produced 14 movies. I was recently at Pixar, and I'm here to tell you that number 15 is sure to be a winner. When many of us think about innovation, though, we think about an Einstein having an 'Aha!' moment. But we all know that's a myth. Innovation is not about solo genius, it's about collective genius. Let's think for a minute about what it takes to make a Pixar movie: No solo genius, no flash of inspiration produces one of those movies. On the contrary, it takes about 250 people four to five years, to make one of those movies. To help us understand the process, an individual in the studio drew a version of this picture. He did so reluctantly, because it suggested that the process was a neat series of steps done by discrete groups. Even with all those arrows, he thought it failed to really tell you just how iterative, interrelated and, frankly, messy their process was. Throughout the making of a movie at Pixar, the story evolves. So think about it. Some shots go through quickly. They don't all go through in order. It depends on how vexing the challenges are that they come up with when they are working on a particular scene. So if you think about that scene in "Up" where the boy hands the piece of chocolate to the bird, that 10 seconds took one animator almost six months to perfect. The other thing about a Pixar movie is that no part of the movie is considered finished until the entire movie wraps. Partway through one production, an animator drew a character with an arched eyebrow that suggested a mischievous side. When the director saw that drawing, he thought it was great. It was beautiful, but he said, "You've got to lose it; it doesn't fit the character." Two weeks later, the director came back and said, "Let's put in those few seconds of film." Because that animator was allowed to share what we referred to as his slice of genius, he was able to help that director reconceive the character in a subtle but important way that really improved the story. What we know is, at the heart of innovation is a paradox. You have to unleash the talents and passions of many people and you have to harness them into a work that is actually useful. Innovation is a journey. It's a type of collaborative problem solving, usually among people who have different expertise and different points of view. Innovations rarely get created full-blown. As many of you know, they're the result, usually, of trial and error. Lots of false starts, missteps and mistakes. Innovative work can be very exhilarating, but it also can be really downright scary. So when we look at why it is that Pixar is able to do what it does, we have to ask ourselves, what's going on here? For sure, history and certainly Hollywood, is full of star-studded teams that have failed. Most of those failures are attributed to too many stars or too many cooks, if you will, in the kitchen. So why is it that Pixar, with all of its cooks, is able to be so successful time and time again? When we studied an Islamic Bank in Dubai, or a luxury brand in Korea, or a social enterprise in Africa, we found that innovative organizations are communities that have three capabilities: creative abrasion, creative agility and creative resolution. Creative abrasion is about being able to create a marketplace of ideas through debate and discourse. In innovative organizations, they amplify differences, they don't minimize them. Creative abrasion is not about brainstorming, where people suspend their judgment. No, they know how to have very heated but constructive arguments to create a portfolio of alternatives. Individuals in innovative organizations learn how to inquire, they learn how to actively listen, but guess what? They also learn how to advocate for their point of view. They understand that innovation rarely happens unless you have both diversity and conflict. Creative agility is about being able to test and refine that portfolio of ideas through quick pursuit, reflection and adjustment. It's about discovery-driven learning where you act, as opposed to plan, your way to the future. It's about design thinking where you have that interesting combination of the scientific method and the artistic process. It's about running a series of experiments, and not a series of pilots. Experiments are usually about learning. When you get a negative outcome, you're still really learning something that you need to know. Pilots are often about being right. When they don't work, someone or something is to blame. The final capability is creative resolution. This is about doing decision making in a way that you can actually combine even opposing ideas to reconfigure them in new combinations to produce a solution that is new and useful. When you look at innovative organizations, they never go along to get along. They don't compromise. They don't let one group or one individual dominate, even if it's the boss, even if it's the expert. Instead, they have developed a rather patient and more inclusive decision making process that allows for both/and solutions to arise and not simply either/or solutions. These three capabilities are why we see that Pixar is able to do what it does. Let me give you another example, and that example is the infrastructure group of Google. The infrastructure group of Google is the group that has to keep the website up and running 24/7. So when Google was about to introduce Gmail and YouTube, they knew that their data storage system wasn't adequate. The head of the engineering group and the infrastructure group at that time was a man named Bill Coughran. Bill and his leadership team, who he referred to as his brain trust, had to figure out what to do about this situation. They thought about it for a while. Instead of creating a group to tackle this task, they decided to allow groups to emerge spontaneously around different alternatives. Two groups coalesced. One became known as Big Table, the other became known as Build It From Scratch. Big Table proposed that they build on the current system. Build It From Scratch proposed that it was time for a whole new system. Separately, these two teams were allowed to work full-time on their particular approach. In engineering reviews, Bill described his role as, "Injecting honesty into the process by driving debate." Early on, the teams were encouraged to build prototypes so that they could "bump them up against reality and discover for themselves the strengths and weaknesses of their particular approach." When Build It From Scratch shared their prototype with the group whose beepers would have to go off in the middle of the night if something went wrong with the website, they heard loud and clear about the limitations of their particular design. As the need for a solution became more urgent and as the data, or the evidence, began to come in, it became pretty clear that the Big Table solution was the right one for the moment. So they selected that one. But to make sure that they did not lose the learning of the Build it From Scratch team, Bill asked two members of that team to join a new team that was emerging to work on the next-generation system. This whole process took nearly two years, but I was told that they were all working at breakneck speed. Early in that process, one of the engineers had gone to Bill and said, "We're all too busy for this inefficient system of running parallel experiments." But as the process unfolded, he began to understand the wisdom of allowing talented people to play out their passions. He admitted, "If you had forced us to all be on one team, we might have focused on proving who was right, and winning, and not on learning and discovering what was the best answer for Google." Why is it that Pixar and Google are able to innovate time and again? It's because they've mastered the capabilities required for that. They know how to do collaborative problem solving, they know how to do discovery-driven learning and they know how to do integrated decision making. Some of you may be sitting there and saying to yourselves right now, "We don't know how to do those things in my organization. So why do they know how to do those things at Pixar, and why do they know how to do those things at Google?" When many of the people that worked for Bill told us, in their opinion, that Bill was one of the finest leaders in Silicon Valley, we completely agreed; the man is a genius. Leadership is the secret sauce. But it's a different kind of leadership, not the kind many of us think about when we think about great leadership. One of the leaders I met with early on said to me, "Linda, I don't read books on leadership. All they do is make me feel bad." (Laughter) "In the first chapter they say I'm supposed to create a vision. But if I'm trying to do something that's truly new, I have no answers. I don't know what direction we're going in and I'm not even sure I know how to figure out how to get there." For sure, there are times when visionary leadership is exactly what is needed. But if we want to build organizations that can innovate time and again, we must recast our understanding of what leadership is about. Leading innovation is about creating the space where people are willing and able to do the hard work of innovative problem solving. At this point, some of you may be wondering, "What does that leadership really look like?" At Pixar, they understand that innovation takes a village. The leaders focus on building a sense of community and building those three capabilities. How do they define leadership? They say leadership is about creating a world to which people want to belong. What kind of world do people want to belong in at Pixar? A world where you're living at the frontier. What do they focus their time on? Not on creating a vision. Instead they spend their time thinking about, "How do we design a studio that has the sensibility of a public square so that people will interact? Let's put in a policy that anyone, no matter what their level or role, is allowed to give notes to the director about how they feel about a particular film. What can we do to make sure that all the disruptors, all the minority voices in this organization, speak up and are heard? And, finally, let's bestow credit in a very generous way." I don't know if you've ever looked at the credits of a Pixar movie, but the babies born during a production are listed there. (Laughter) How did Bill think about what his role was? Bill said, "I lead a volunteer organization. Talented people don't want to follow me anywhere. They want to cocreate with me the future. My job is to nurture the bottom-up and not let it degenerate into chaos." How did he see his role? "I'm a role model, I'm a human glue, I'm a connector, I'm an aggregator of viewpoints. I'm never a dictator of viewpoints." Advice about how you exercise the role? Hire people who argue with you. And, guess what? Sometimes it's best to be deliberately fuzzy and vague. Some of you may be wondering now, what are these people thinking? They're thinking, "I'm not the visionary, I'm the social architect. I'm creating the space where people are willing and able to share and combine their talents and passions." If some of you are worrying now that you don't work at a Pixar, or you don't work at a Google, I want to tell you there's still hope. We've studied many organizations that were really not organizations you'd think of as ones where a lot of innovation happens. We studied a general counsel in a pharmaceutical company who had to figure out how to get the outside lawyers, 19 competitors, to collaborate and innovate. We studied the head of marketing at a German automaker where, fundamentally, they believed that it was the design engineers, not the marketeers, who were allowed to be innovative. We also studied Vineet Nayar at HCL Technologies, an Indian outsourcing company. When we met Vineet, his company was about, in his words, to become irrelevant. We watched as he turned that company into a global dynamo of I.T. innovation. At HCL technologies, like at many companies, the leaders had learned to see their role as setting direction and making sure that no one deviated from it. What he did is tell them it was time for them to think about rethinking what they were supposed to do. Because what was happening is that everybody was looking up and you weren't seeing the kind of bottom-up innovation we saw at Pixar or Google. So they began to work on that. They stopped giving answers, they stopped trying to provide solutions. Instead, what they did is they began to see the people at the bottom of the pyramid, the young sparks, the people who were closest to the customers, as the source of innovation. They began to transfer the organization's growth to that level. In Vineet's language, this was about inverting the pyramid so that you could unleash the power of the many by loosening the stranglehold of the few, and increase the quality and the speed of innovation that was happening every day. For sure, Vineet and all the other leaders that we studied were in fact visionaries. For sure, they understood that that was not their role. So I don't think it is accidental that many of you did not recognize Ed. Because Ed, like Vineet, understands that our role as leaders is to set the stage, not perform on it. If we want to invent a better future, and I suspect that's why many of us are here, then we need to reimagine our task. Our task is to create the space where everybody's slices of genius can be unleashed and harnessed, and turned into works of collective genius. Thank you. (Applause) |
I was held hostage for 317 days. Here's what I thought about… | {0: 'Vincent Cochetel is the Director of the Bureau for Europe at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).'} | TEDxPlaceDesNations | I cannot forget them. Their names were Aslan, Alik, Andrei, Fernanda, Fred, Galina, Gunnhild, Hans, Ingeborg, Matti, Natalya, Nancy, Sheryl, Usman, Zarema, and the list is longer. For many, their existence, their humanity, has been reduced to statistics, coldly recorded as "security incidents." For me, they were colleagues belonging to that community of humanitarian aid workers that tried to bring a bit of comfort to the victims of the wars in Chechnya in the '90s. They were nurses, logisticians, shelter experts, paralegals, interpreters. And for this service, they were murdered, their families torn apart, and their story largely forgotten. No one was ever sentenced for these crimes. I cannot forget them. They live in me somehow, their memories giving me meaning every day. But they are also haunting the dark street of my mind. As humanitarian aid workers, they made the choice to be at the side of the victim, to provide some assistance, some comfort, some protection, but when they needed protection themselves, it wasn't there. When you see the headlines of your newspaper these days with the war in Iraq or in Syria — aid worker abducted, hostage executed — but who were they? Why were they there? What motivated them? How did we become so indifferent to these crimes? This is why I am here today with you. We need to find better ways to remember them. We also need to explain the key values to which they dedicated their lives. We also need to demand justice. When in '96 I was sent by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to the North Caucasus, I knew some of the risks. Five colleagues had been killed, three had been seriously injured, seven had already been taken hostage. So we were careful. We were using armored vehicles, decoy cars, changing patterns of travel, changing homes, all sorts of security measures. Yet on a cold winter night of January '98, it was my turn. When I entered my flat in Vladikavkaz with a guard, we were surrounded by armed men. They took the guard, they put him on the floor, they beat him up in front of me, tied him, dragged him away. I was handcuffed, blindfolded, and forced to kneel, as the silencer of a gun pressed against my neck. When it happens to you, there is no time for thinking, no time for praying. My brain went on automatic, rewinding quickly the life I'd just left behind. It took me long minutes to figure out that those masked men there were not there to kill me, but that someone, somewhere, had ordered my kidnapping. Then a process of dehumanization started that day. I was no more than just a commodity. I normally don't talk about this, but I'd like to share a bit with you some of those 317 days of captivity. I was kept in an underground cellar, total darkness, for 23 hours and 45 minutes every day, and then the guards would come, normally two. They would bring a big piece of bread, a bowl of soup, and a candle. That candle would burn for 15 minutes, 15 minutes of precious light, and then they would take it away, and I returned to darkness. I was chained by a metal cable to my bed. I could do only four small steps. I always dreamt of the fifth one. And no TV, no radio, no newspaper, no one to talk to. I had no towel, no soap, no toilet paper, just two metal buckets open, one for water, for one waste. Can you imagine that mock execution can be a pastime for guards when they are sadistic or when they are just bored or drunk? We are breaking my nerves very slowly. Isolation and darkness are particularly difficult to describe. How do you describe nothing? There are no words for the depths of loneliness I reached in that very thin border between sanity and madness. In the darkness, sometimes I played imaginary games of checkers. I would start with the black, play with the white, back to the black trying to trick the other side. I don't play checkers anymore. I was tormented by the thoughts of my family and my colleague, the guard, Edik. I didn't know what had happened to him. I was trying not to think, I tried to fill up my time by doing all sorts of physical exercise on the spot. I tried to pray, I tried all sorts of memorization games. But darkness also creates images and thoughts that are not normal. One part of your brain wants you to resist, to shout, to cry, and the other part of the brain orders you to shut up and just go through it. It's a constant internal debate; there is no one to arbitrate. Once a guard came to me, very aggressively, and he told me, "Today you're going to kneel and beg for your food." I wasn't in a good mood, so I insulted him. I insulted his mother, I insulted his ancestors. The consequence was moderate: he threw the food into my waste. The day after he came back with the same demand. He got the same answer, which had the same consequence. Four days later, the body was full of pain. I didn't know hunger hurt so much when you have so little. So when the guards came down, I knelt. I begged for my food. Submission was the only way for me to make it to another candle. After my kidnapping, I was transferred from North Ossetia to Chechnya, three days of slow travel in the trunks of different cars, and upon arrival, I was interrogated for 11 days by a guy called Ruslan. The routine was always the same: a bit more light, 45 minutes. He would come down to the cellar, he would ask the guards to tie me on the chair, and he would turn on the music loud. And then he would yell questions. He would scream. He would beat me. I'll spare you the details. There are many questions I could not understand, and there are some questions I did not want to understand. The length of the interrogation was the duration of the tape: 15 songs, 45 minutes. I would always long for the last song. On one day, one night in that cellar, I don't know what it was, I heard a child crying above my head, a boy, maybe two or three years old. Footsteps, confusion, people running. So when Ruslan came the day after, before he put the first question to me, I asked him, "How is your son today? Is he feeling better?" Ruslan was taken by surprise. He was furious that the guards may have leaked some details about his private life. I kept talking about NGOs supplying medicines to local clinics that may help his son to get better. And we talked about education, we talked about families. He talked to me about his children. I talked to him about my daughters. And then he'd talk about guns, about cars, about women, and I had to talk about guns, about cars, about women. And we talked until the last song on the tape. Ruslan was the most brutal man I ever met. He did not touch me anymore. He did not ask any other questions. I was no longer just a commodity. Two days after, I was transferred to another place. There, a guard came to me, very close — it was quite unusual — and he said with a very soft voice, he said, "I'd like to thank you for the assistance your organization provided my family when we were displaced in nearby Dagestan." What could I possibly reply? It was so painful. It was like a blade in the belly. It took me weeks of internal thinking to try to reconcile the good reasons we had to assist that family and the soldier of fortune he became. He was young, he was shy. I never saw his face. He probably meant well. But in those 15 seconds, he made me question everything we did, all the sacrifices. He made me think also how they see us. Until then, I had assumed that they know why we are there and what we are doing. One cannot assume this. Well, explaining why we do this is not that easy, even to our closest relatives. We are not perfect, we are not superior, we are not the world's fire brigade, we are not superheroes, we don't stop wars, we know that humanitarian response is not a substitute for political solution. Yet we do this because one life matters. Sometimes that's the only difference you make — one individual, one family, a small group of individuals — and it matters. When you have a tsunami, an earthquake or a typhoon, you see teams of rescuers coming from all over the world, searching for survivors for weeks. Why? Nobody questions this. Every life matters, or every life should matter. This is the same for us when we help refugees, people displaced within their country by conflict, or stateless persons, I know many people, when they are confronted by overwhelming suffering, they feel powerless and they stop there. It's a pity, because there are so many ways people can help. We don't stop with that feeling. We try to do whatever we can to provide some assistance, some protection, some comfort. We have to. We can't do otherwise. It's what makes us feel, I don't know, simply human. That's a picture of me the day of my release. Months after my release, I met the then-French prime minister. The second thing he told me: "You were totally irresponsible to go to the North Caucasus. You don't know how many problems you've created for us." It was a short meeting. (Laughter) I think helping people in danger is responsible. In that war, that nobody seriously wanted to stop, and we have many of these today, bringing some assistance to people in need and a bit of protection was not just an act of humanity, it was making a real difference for the people. Why could he not understand this? We have a responsibility to try. You've heard about that concept: Responsibility to Protect. Outcomes may depend on various parameters. We may even fail, but there is worse than failing — it's not even trying when we can. Well, if you are met this way, if you sign up for this sort of job, your life is going to be full of joy and sadness, because there are a lot of people we cannot help, a lot of people we cannot protect, a lot of people we did not save. I call them my ghost, and by having witnessed their suffering from close, you take a bit of that suffering on yourself. Many young humanitarian workers go through their first experience with a lot of bitterness. They are thrown into situations where they are witness, but they are powerless to bring any change. They have to learn to accept it and gradually turn this into positive energy. It's difficult. Many don't succeed, but for those who do, there is no other job like this. You can see the difference you make every day. Humanitarian aid workers know the risk they are taking in conflict areas or in post-conflict environments, yet our life, our job, is becoming increasingly life-threatening, and the sanctity of our life is fading. Do you know that since the millennium, the number of attacks on humanitarian aid workers has tripled? 2013 broke new records: 155 colleagues killed, 171 seriously wounded, 134 abducted. So many broken lives. Until the beginning of the civil war in Somalia in the late '80s, humanitarian aid workers were sometimes victims of what we call collateral damages, but by and large we were not the target of these attacks. This has changed. Look at this picture. Baghdad, August 2003: 24 colleagues were killed. Gone are the days when a U.N. blue flag or a Red Cross would automatically protect us. Criminal groups and some political groups have cross-fertilized over the last 20 years, and they've created these sort of hybrids with whom we have no way of communicating. Humanitarian principles are tested, questioned, and often ignored, but perhaps more importantly, we have abandoned the search for justice. There seems to be no consequence whatsoever for attacks against humanitarian aid workers. After my release, I was told not to seek any form of justice. It won't do you any good, that's what I was told. Plus, you're going to put in danger the life of other colleagues. It took me years to see the sentencing of three people associated with my kidnapping, but this was the exception. There was no justice for any of the humanitarian aid workers killed or abducted in Chechnya between '95 and '99, and it's the same all over the world. This is unacceptable. This is inexcusable. Attacks on humanitarian aid workers are war crimes in international law. Those crimes should not go unpunished. We must end this cycle of impunity. We must consider that those attacks against humanitarian aid workers are attacks against humanity itself. That makes me furious. I know I'm very lucky compared to the refugees I work for. I don't know what it is to have seen my whole town destroyed. I don't know what it is to have seen my relatives shot in front of me. I don't know what it is to lose the protection of my country. I also know that I'm very lucky compared to other hostages. Four days before my eventful release, four hostages were beheaded a few miles away from where I was kept in captivity. Why them? Why am I here today? No easy answer. I was received with a lot of support that I got from my relatives, from colleagues, from friends, from people I didn't know. They have helped me over the years to come out of the darkness. Not everyone was treated with the same attention. How many of my colleagues, after a traumatic incident, took their own life? I can count nine that I knew personally. How many of my colleagues went through a difficult divorce after a traumatic experience because they could not explain anything anymore to their spouse? I've lost that count. There is a price for this type of life. In Russia, all war monuments have this beautiful inscription at the top. It says, (In Russian) "No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten." I do not forget my lost colleagues. I cannot forget anything. I call on you to remember their dedication and demand that humanitarian aid workers around the world be better protected. We should not let that light of hope they have brought to be switched off. After my ordeal, a lot of colleagues asked me, "But why do you continue? Why do you do this sort of job? Why do you have to go back to it?" My answer was very simple: If I had quit, that would have meant my kidnapper had won. They would have taken my soul and my humanity. Thank you. (Applause) |
The good news about PMS | {0: 'Robyn Stein DeLuca asks, What do we really know about PMS?'} | TEDxSBU | How many people here have heard of PMS? Everybody, right? Everyone knows that women go a little crazy right before they get their period, that the menstrual cycle throws them onto an inevitable hormonal roller coaster of irrationality and irritability. There's a general assumption that fluctuations in reproductive hormones cause extreme emotions and that the great majority of women are affected by this. Well, I am here to tell you that scientific evidence says neither of those assumptions is true. I'm here to give you the good news about PMS. But first, let's take a look at how firmly the idea of PMS is entrenched in American culture. If you examine newspaper or magazine articles, you'll see how widely assumed it is that everyone gets PMS. In an article in the magazine Redbook titled "You: PMS Free," readers were informed that between 80 to 90 percent of women suffer from PMS. L.A. Muscle magazine warned its readers that 40 to 50 percent of women suffer from PMS, and that it plays a major role in women's mental and physical health, and a couple of years ago, even the Wall Street Journal ran an article on calcium as a treatment for PMS, asking its female readers, "Do you turn into a witch every month?" From all these articles, you would think there must be a mountain of research verifying the widespread nature of PMS. However, after five decades of research, there's no strong consensus on the definition, the cause, the treatment, or even the existence of PMS. As most commonly defined by psychologists, PMS involves negative behavioral, cognitive and physical symptoms from the time of ovulation to menstruation. But here's where it gets tricky. Over 150 different symptoms have been used to diagnose PMS, and here are just a few of those. Now, I want to be clear here. I'm not saying women don't get some of these symptoms. What I'm saying is that getting some of these symptoms doesn't amount to a mental disorder, and when psychologists come up with a disorder that's so vaguely defined, the label eventually becomes meaningless. With a list of symptoms this long and wide, I could have PMS, you could have PMS, the guy in the third row here could have PMS, my dog could have PMS. (Laughter) Some researchers said you had to have five symptoms. Some said three. Other researchers said that symptoms were only meaningful if they were highly disturbing to you, but others said minor symptoms were just as important. For many years, because there was no standardization in the definition of PMS, when psychologists tried to report prevalence rates, their estimates ranged from five percent of women to 97 percent of women, so at the same time almost no one and almost everyone had PMS. Overall, the weaknesses in the methods of research on PMS have been considerable. First, many studies asked women to report their symptoms retrospectively, looking to the past and relying on memory, which is known to inflate reporting of PMS compared to what's called prospective reporting, which involves keeping a daily log of symptoms for at least two months in a row. Many studies also exclusively focused on white, middle-class women, which makes it problematic to apply study findings to all women. We know there's a strong cultural component to the belief in PMS because it's nearly unheard of outside of Western nations. Third, many studies failed to use control groups. If we want to understand the specific characteristics of women who have PMS, we need to be able to compare them to women who don't have PMS. And finally, many different types of questionnaires were used to diagnose PMS, focusing on different symptoms, symptom duration and severity. To do reliable research on any condition, scientists must agree on the specific characteristics that make up that condition so they're all talking about the same thing, and with PMS, this has not been the case. However, in 1994, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, thankfully — it's also the manual for mental health professionals — they redefined PMS as PMDD, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. And dysphoria refers to a feeling of agitation or unease. And according to these new DSM guidelines, in most menstrual cycles in the last year, at least five of 11 possible symptoms must appear in the week before menstruation starts; the symptoms must improve once menstruation has begun; and the symptoms must be absent the week after menstruation has ended. One of these symptoms must come from this list of four: marked mood swings, irritability, anxiety, or depression. The other symptoms could come from the first slide or from those on the second slide, including symptoms like feeling out of control and changes in sleep or appetite. The DSM also required now that the symptoms should be associated with clinically significant distress — there should be some kind of disturbance in work or school or social relationships — and that symptoms and symptom severity should now be documented by keeping a daily log for at least two cycles in a row. And finally, the DSM required that the emotional disturbance should be more than simply an exacerbation of an already existing disorder. So scientifically speaking, this is an improvement. We now have a limited number of symptoms, and a high impact on functioning that's required, and the reporting and timing of symptoms have both become very specific. Well, using this criteria and looking at most recent studies, we see that on average, three to eight percent of women suffer from PMDD. Not all women, not most women, not the majority of women, not even a lot of women: three to eight percent. For everyone else, variables like stressful events or happy occasions or even day of the week are more powerful predictors of mood than time of the month, and this is the information the scientific community has had since the 1990s. In 2002, my colleagues and I published an article describing the PMS and PMDD research, and several similar articles have appeared in psychology journals. The questions is, why hasn't this information trickled down to the public? Why do these myths persist? Well, certainly the onslaught of messages that women receive from books, TV, movies, the Internet, that everyone gets PMS go a long way in convincing them it must be true. Research tells us that the more a woman believes that everyone gets PMS, the more likely she is to erroneously report that she has it. Let me tell you what I mean by "erroneously." You might ask her, "Do you have PMS?" and she says yes, but then, when you have her keep a daily log of psychological symptoms for two months, no correlation is found between her symptoms and time of the month. Another reason for the persistence of the PMS myth has to do with the narrow boundaries of the feminine role. Feminist psychologists like Joan Chrisler have suggested that taking on the label of PMS allows women to express emotions that would otherwise be considered unladylike. The near universal definition of a good woman is one who is happy, loving, caring for others, and taking great satisfaction from that role. Well, PMS has become a permission slip to be angry, complain, be irritated, without losing the title of good woman. We know that the variables in a woman's environment are much more likely to cause her to be angry than her hormones, but when she attributes anger to hormones, she's absolved of responsibility or criticism. "Oh, that's not who she is. It's out of her control." And while this can be a useful tool, it serves to invalidate women's emotions. When people respond to a woman's anger with the thought, "Oh, it's just that time of the month," her ability to be taken seriously or effect change is severely limited. So who else benefits from the myth of PMS? Well, I can tell you that treating PMS has become a profitable, thriving industry. Amazon.com currently offers over 1,900 books on PMS treatment. A quick Google search will bring up a cornucopia of clinics, workshops and seminars. Reputable Internet sources of medical information like WebMD or the Mayo Clinic list PMS as a known disorder. It's not a known disorder, but they list it. And they also list the medications that physicians have prescribed to treat it, like anti-depressants or hormones. Interestingly, though, both websites say that the success of medication in treating PMS symptoms vary from woman to woman. Well, that doesn't make sense. If you've got a distinct disorder with a distinct cause, which PMS is supposed to be, then the treatment should bring improvement for a great number of women. This has not been the case with these treatments, and FDA regulations say that for a drug to be deemed effective, a large portion of the target population should see clinically significant improvement. So we have not had that at all with these so-called treatments. However, the financial gain of perpetuating the myth that PMS is a common mental disorder and is treatable is quite substantial. When women are prescribed drugs like anti-depressants or hormones, medical protocol requires that they have physician follow-up every three months. That's a lot of doctor visits. Pharmaceutical companies reap untold profits when women are convinced they should take a prescribed medication for all of their child-bearing lives. Over-the-counter drugs like Midol even claim to treat PMS symptoms like tension and irritability, even though they only contain a diuretic, a pain reliever and caffeine. Now, far be it from me to argue with the magical powers of caffeine, but I don't think reducing tension is one of them. Since 2002, Midol has marketed a Teen Midol to adolescents. They are aiming at young girls early, to convince them that everyone gets PMS and that it will make you a monster, but wait, there's something you can do about it: Take Midol and you will be a human being again. In 2013, Midol took in 48 million dollars in sales revenue. So while perpetuating the myth of PMS has been lucrative for some, it comes with some serious adverse consequences for women. First, it contributes to the medicalization of women's reproductive health. The medical field has a long history of conceptualizing women's reproductive processes as illnesses that require treatment, and this has come at many costs, including excessive Cesarean deliveries, hysterectomies and prescribed hormone treatments that have harmed rather than enhanced women's health. Second, the PMS myth also contributes to the stereotype of women as irrational and overemotional. When the menstrual cycle is described as a hormonal roller coaster that turns women into angry beasts, it becomes easy to question the competence of all women. Women have made tremendous strides in the workforce, but still there's a minuscule number of women at the highest echelons of fields like government or business, and when we think about who makes for a good CEO or senator, someone who has qualities like rationality, steadiness, competence come to mind, and in our culture, that sounds more like a man than a woman, and the PMS myth contributes to that. Psychologists know that the moods of men and women are more similar than different. One study followed men and women for four to six months and found that the number of mood swings they experienced and the severity of those mood swings were no different. And finally, the PMS myth keeps women from dealing with the actual issues causing them emotional upset. Individual issues like quality of relationship or work conditions or societal issues like racism or sexism or the daily grind of poverty are all strongly related to daily mood. Sweeping emotions under the rug of PMS keeps women from understanding the source of their negative emotions, but it also takes away the opportunity to take any action to change them. So the good news about PMS is that while some women get some symptoms because of the menstrual cycle, the great majority don't get a mental disorder. They go to work or school, take care of their families, and function at a normal level. We know the emotions and moods of men and women are more similar than different, so let's walk away from the tired old PMS myth of women as witches and embrace the reality of high emotional and professional functioning the great majority of women live every day. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can we create new senses for humans? | {0: 'David Eagleman decodes the mysteries of the tangled web of neurons and electricity that make our minds tick -- and also make us human.'} | TED2015 | We are built out of very small stuff, and we are embedded in a very large cosmos, and the fact is that we are not very good at understanding reality at either of those scales, and that's because our brains haven't evolved to understand the world at that scale. Instead, we're trapped on this very thin slice of perception right in the middle. But it gets strange, because even at that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of the action that's going on. So take the colors of our world. This is light waves, electromagnetic radiation that bounces off objects and it hits specialized receptors in the back of our eyes. But we're not seeing all the waves out there. In fact, what we see is less than a 10 trillionth of what's out there. So you have radio waves and microwaves and X-rays and gamma rays passing through your body right now and you're completely unaware of it, because you don't come with the proper biological receptors for picking it up. There are thousands of cell phone conversations passing through you right now, and you're utterly blind to it. Now, it's not that these things are inherently unseeable. Snakes include some infrared in their reality, and honeybees include ultraviolet in their view of the world, and of course we build machines in the dashboards of our cars to pick up on signals in the radio frequency range, and we built machines in hospitals to pick up on the X-ray range. But you can't sense any of those by yourself, at least not yet, because you don't come equipped with the proper sensors. Now, what this means is that our experience of reality is constrained by our biology, and that goes against the common sense notion that our eyes and our ears and our fingertips are just picking up the objective reality that's out there. Instead, our brains are sampling just a little bit of the world. Now, across the animal kingdom, different animals pick up on different parts of reality. So in the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and butyric acid; in the world of the black ghost knifefish, its sensory world is lavishly colored by electrical fields; and for the echolocating bat, its reality is constructed out of air compression waves. That's the slice of their ecosystem that they can pick up on, and we have a word for this in science. It's called the umwelt, which is the German word for the surrounding world. Now, presumably, every animal assumes that its umwelt is the entire objective reality out there, because why would you ever stop to imagine that there's something beyond what we can sense. Instead, what we all do is we accept reality as it's presented to us. Let's do a consciousness-raiser on this. Imagine that you are a bloodhound dog. Your whole world is about smelling. You've got a long snout that has 200 million scent receptors in it, and you have wet nostrils that attract and trap scent molecules, and your nostrils even have slits so you can take big nosefuls of air. Everything is about smell for you. So one day, you stop in your tracks with a revelation. You look at your human owner and you think, "What is it like to have the pitiful, impoverished nose of a human? (Laughter) What is it like when you take a feeble little noseful of air? How can you not know that there's a cat 100 yards away, or that your neighbor was on this very spot six hours ago?" (Laughter) So because we're humans, we've never experienced that world of smell, so we don't miss it, because we are firmly settled into our umwelt. But the question is, do we have to be stuck there? So as a neuroscientist, I'm interested in the way that technology might expand our umwelt, and how that's going to change the experience of being human. So we already know that we can marry our technology to our biology, because there are hundreds of thousands of people walking around with artificial hearing and artificial vision. So the way this works is, you take a microphone and you digitize the signal, and you put an electrode strip directly into the inner ear. Or, with the retinal implant, you take a camera and you digitize the signal, and then you plug an electrode grid directly into the optic nerve. And as recently as 15 years ago, there were a lot of scientists who thought these technologies wouldn't work. Why? It's because these technologies speak the language of Silicon Valley, and it's not exactly the same dialect as our natural biological sense organs. But the fact is that it works; the brain figures out how to use the signals just fine. Now, how do we understand that? Well, here's the big secret: Your brain is not hearing or seeing any of this. Your brain is locked in a vault of silence and darkness inside your skull. All it ever sees are electrochemical signals that come in along different data cables, and this is all it has to work with, and nothing more. Now, amazingly, the brain is really good at taking in these signals and extracting patterns and assigning meaning, so that it takes this inner cosmos and puts together a story of this, your subjective world. But here's the key point: Your brain doesn't know, and it doesn't care, where it gets the data from. Whatever information comes in, it just figures out what to do with it. And this is a very efficient kind of machine. It's essentially a general purpose computing device, and it just takes in everything and figures out what it's going to do with it, and that, I think, frees up Mother Nature to tinker around with different sorts of input channels. So I call this the P.H. model of evolution, and I don't want to get too technical here, but P.H. stands for Potato Head, and I use this name to emphasize that all these sensors that we know and love, like our eyes and our ears and our fingertips, these are merely peripheral plug-and-play devices: You stick them in, and you're good to go. The brain figures out what to do with the data that comes in. And when you look across the animal kingdom, you find lots of peripheral devices. So snakes have heat pits with which to detect infrared, and the ghost knifefish has electroreceptors, and the star-nosed mole has this appendage with 22 fingers on it with which it feels around and constructs a 3D model of the world, and many birds have magnetite so they can orient to the magnetic field of the planet. So what this means is that nature doesn't have to continually redesign the brain. Instead, with the principles of brain operation established, all nature has to worry about is designing new peripherals. Okay. So what this means is this: The lesson that surfaces is that there's nothing really special or fundamental about the biology that we come to the table with. It's just what we have inherited from a complex road of evolution. But it's not what we have to stick with, and our best proof of principle of this comes from what's called sensory substitution. And that refers to feeding information into the brain via unusual sensory channels, and the brain just figures out what to do with it. Now, that might sound speculative, but the first paper demonstrating this was published in the journal Nature in 1969. So a scientist named Paul Bach-y-Rita put blind people in a modified dental chair, and he set up a video feed, and he put something in front of the camera, and then you would feel that poked into your back with a grid of solenoids. So if you wiggle a coffee cup in front of the camera, you're feeling that in your back, and amazingly, blind people got pretty good at being able to determine what was in front of the camera just by feeling it in the small of their back. Now, there have been many modern incarnations of this. The sonic glasses take a video feed right in front of you and turn that into a sonic landscape, so as things move around, and get closer and farther, it sounds like "Bzz, bzz, bzz." It sounds like a cacophony, but after several weeks, blind people start getting pretty good at understanding what's in front of them just based on what they're hearing. And it doesn't have to be through the ears: this system uses an electrotactile grid on the forehead, so whatever's in front of the video feed, you're feeling it on your forehead. Why the forehead? Because you're not using it for much else. The most modern incarnation is called the brainport, and this is a little electrogrid that sits on your tongue, and the video feed gets turned into these little electrotactile signals, and blind people get so good at using this that they can throw a ball into a basket, or they can navigate complex obstacle courses. They can come to see through their tongue. Now, that sounds completely insane, right? But remember, all vision ever is is electrochemical signals coursing around in your brain. Your brain doesn't know where the signals come from. It just figures out what to do with them. So my interest in my lab is sensory substitution for the deaf, and this is a project I've undertaken with a graduate student in my lab, Scott Novich, who is spearheading this for his thesis. And here is what we wanted to do: we wanted to make it so that sound from the world gets converted in some way so that a deaf person can understand what is being said. And we wanted to do this, given the power and ubiquity of portable computing, we wanted to make sure that this would run on cell phones and tablets, and also we wanted to make this a wearable, something that you could wear under your clothing. So here's the concept. So as I'm speaking, my sound is getting captured by the tablet, and then it's getting mapped onto a vest that's covered in vibratory motors, just like the motors in your cell phone. So as I'm speaking, the sound is getting translated to a pattern of vibration on the vest. Now, this is not just conceptual: this tablet is transmitting Bluetooth, and I'm wearing the vest right now. So as I'm speaking — (Applause) — the sound is getting translated into dynamic patterns of vibration. I'm feeling the sonic world around me. So, we've been testing this with deaf people now, and it turns out that after just a little bit of time, people can start feeling, they can start understanding the language of the vest. So this is Jonathan. He's 37 years old. He has a master's degree. He was born profoundly deaf, which means that there's a part of his umwelt that's unavailable to him. So we had Jonathan train with the vest for four days, two hours a day, and here he is on the fifth day. Scott Novich: You. David Eagleman: So Scott says a word, Jonathan feels it on the vest, and he writes it on the board. SN: Where. Where. DE: Jonathan is able to translate this complicated pattern of vibrations into an understanding of what's being said. SN: Touch. Touch. DE: Now, he's not doing this — (Applause) — Jonathan is not doing this consciously, because the patterns are too complicated, but his brain is starting to unlock the pattern that allows it to figure out what the data mean, and our expectation is that, after wearing this for about three months, he will have a direct perceptual experience of hearing in the same way that when a blind person passes a finger over braille, the meaning comes directly off the page without any conscious intervention at all. Now, this technology has the potential to be a game-changer, because the only other solution for deafness is a cochlear implant, and that requires an invasive surgery. And this can be built for 40 times cheaper than a cochlear implant, which opens up this technology globally, even for the poorest countries. Now, we've been very encouraged by our results with sensory substitution, but what we've been thinking a lot about is sensory addition. How could we use a technology like this to add a completely new kind of sense, to expand the human umvelt? For example, could we feed real-time data from the Internet directly into somebody's brain, and can they develop a direct perceptual experience? So here's an experiment we're doing in the lab. A subject is feeling a real-time streaming feed from the Net of data for five seconds. Then, two buttons appear, and he has to make a choice. He doesn't know what's going on. He makes a choice, and he gets feedback after one second. Now, here's the thing: The subject has no idea what all the patterns mean, but we're seeing if he gets better at figuring out which button to press. He doesn't know that what we're feeding is real-time data from the stock market, and he's making buy and sell decisions. (Laughter) And the feedback is telling him whether he did the right thing or not. And what we're seeing is, can we expand the human umvelt so that he comes to have, after several weeks, a direct perceptual experience of the economic movements of the planet. So we'll report on that later to see how well this goes. (Laughter) Here's another thing we're doing: During the talks this morning, we've been automatically scraping Twitter for the TED2015 hashtag, and we've been doing an automated sentiment analysis, which means, are people using positive words or negative words or neutral? And while this has been going on, I have been feeling this, and so I am plugged in to the aggregate emotion of thousands of people in real time, and that's a new kind of human experience, because now I can know how everyone's doing and how much you're loving this. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a bigger experience than a human can normally have. We're also expanding the umvelt of pilots. So in this case, the vest is streaming nine different measures from this quadcopter, so pitch and yaw and roll and orientation and heading, and that improves this pilot's ability to fly it. It's essentially like he's extending his skin up there, far away. And that's just the beginning. What we're envisioning is taking a modern cockpit full of gauges and instead of trying to read the whole thing, you feel it. We live in a world of information now, and there is a difference between accessing big data and experiencing it. So I think there's really no end to the possibilities on the horizon for human expansion. Just imagine an astronaut being able to feel the overall health of the International Space Station, or, for that matter, having you feel the invisible states of your own health, like your blood sugar and the state of your microbiome, or having 360-degree vision or seeing in infrared or ultraviolet. So the key is this: As we move into the future, we're going to increasingly be able to choose our own peripheral devices. We no longer have to wait for Mother Nature's sensory gifts on her timescales, but instead, like any good parent, she's given us the tools that we need to go out and define our own trajectory. So the question now is, how do you want to go out and experience your universe? Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Can you feel it? DE: Yeah. Actually, this was the first time I felt applause on the vest. It's nice. It's like a massage. (Laughter) CA: Twitter's going crazy. Twitter's going mad. So that stock market experiment. This could be the first experiment that secures its funding forevermore, right, if successful? DE: Well, that's right, I wouldn't have to write to NIH anymore. CA: Well look, just to be skeptical for a minute, I mean, this is amazing, but isn't most of the evidence so far that sensory substitution works, not necessarily that sensory addition works? I mean, isn't it possible that the blind person can see through their tongue because the visual cortex is still there, ready to process, and that that is needed as part of it? DE: That's a great question. We actually have no idea what the theoretical limits are of what kind of data the brain can take in. The general story, though, is that it's extraordinarily flexible. So when a person goes blind, what we used to call their visual cortex gets taken over by other things, by touch, by hearing, by vocabulary. So what that tells us is that the cortex is kind of a one-trick pony. It just runs certain kinds of computations on things. And when we look around at things like braille, for example, people are getting information through bumps on their fingers. So I don't think we have any reason to think there's a theoretical limit that we know the edge of. CA: If this checks out, you're going to be deluged. There are so many possible applications for this. Are you ready for this? What are you most excited about, the direction it might go? DE: I mean, I think there's a lot of applications here. In terms of beyond sensory substitution, the things I started mentioning about astronauts on the space station, they spend a lot of their time monitoring things, and they could instead just get what's going on, because what this is really good for is multidimensional data. The key is this: Our visual systems are good at detecting blobs and edges, but they're really bad at what our world has become, which is screens with lots and lots of data. We have to crawl that with our attentional systems. So this is a way of just feeling the state of something, just like the way you know the state of your body as you're standing around. So I think heavy machinery, safety, feeling the state of a factory, of your equipment, that's one place it'll go right away. CA: David Eagleman, that was one mind-blowing talk. Thank you very much. DE: Thank you, Chris. (Applause) |
What if 3D printing was 100x faster? | {0: 'The CEO of Carbon3D, Joseph DeSimone has made breakthrough contributions to the field of 3D printing.'} | TED2015 | I'm thrilled to be here tonight to share with you something we've been working on for over two years, and it's in the area of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing. You see this object here. It looks fairly simple, but it's quite complex at the same time. It's a set of concentric geodesic structures with linkages between each one. In its context, it is not manufacturable by traditional manufacturing techniques. It has a symmetry such that you can't injection mold it. You can't even manufacture it through milling. This is a job for a 3D printer, but most 3D printers would take between three and 10 hours to fabricate it, and we're going to take the risk tonight to try to fabricate it onstage during this 10-minute talk. Wish us luck. Now, 3D printing is actually a misnomer. It's actually 2D printing over and over again, and it in fact uses the technologies associated with 2D printing. Think about inkjet printing where you lay down ink on a page to make letters, and then do that over and over again to build up a three-dimensional object. In microelectronics, they use something called lithography to do the same sort of thing, to make the transistors and integrated circuits and build up a structure several times. These are all 2D printing technologies. Now, I'm a chemist, a material scientist too, and my co-inventors are also material scientists, one a chemist, one a physicist, and we began to be interested in 3D printing. And very often, as you know, new ideas are often simple connections between people with different experiences in different communities, and that's our story. Now, we were inspired by the "Terminator 2" scene for T-1000, and we thought, why couldn't a 3D printer operate in this fashion, where you have an object arise out of a puddle in essentially real time with essentially no waste to make a great object? Okay, just like the movies. And could we be inspired by Hollywood and come up with ways to actually try to get this to work? And that was our challenge. And our approach would be, if we could do this, then we could fundamentally address the three issues holding back 3D printing from being a manufacturing process. One, 3D printing takes forever. There are mushrooms that grow faster than 3D printed parts. (Laughter) The layer by layer process leads to defects in mechanical properties, and if we could grow continuously, we could eliminate those defects. And in fact, if we could grow really fast, we could also start using materials that are self-curing, and we could have amazing properties. So if we could pull this off, imitate Hollywood, we could in fact address 3D manufacturing. Our approach is to use some standard knowledge in polymer chemistry to harness light and oxygen to grow parts continuously. Light and oxygen work in different ways. Light can take a resin and convert it to a solid, can convert a liquid to a solid. Oxygen inhibits that process. So light and oxygen are polar opposites from one another from a chemical point of view, and if we can control spatially the light and oxygen, we could control this process. And we refer to this as CLIP. [Continuous Liquid Interface Production.] It has three functional components. One, it has a reservoir that holds the puddle, just like the T-1000. At the bottom of the reservoir is a special window. I'll come back to that. In addition, it has a stage that will lower into the puddle and pull the object out of the liquid. The third component is a digital light projection system underneath the reservoir, illuminating with light in the ultraviolet region. Now, the key is that this window in the bottom of this reservoir, it's a composite, it's a very special window. It's not only transparent to light but it's permeable to oxygen. It's got characteristics like a contact lens. So we can see how the process works. You can start to see that as you lower a stage in there, in a traditional process, with an oxygen-impermeable window, you make a two-dimensional pattern and you end up gluing that onto the window with a traditional window, and so in order to introduce the next layer, you have to separate it, introduce new resin, reposition it, and do this process over and over again. But with our very special window, what we're able to do is, with oxygen coming through the bottom as light hits it, that oxygen inhibits the reaction, and we form a dead zone. This dead zone is on the order of tens of microns thick, so that's two or three diameters of a red blood cell, right at the window interface that remains a liquid, and we pull this object up, and as we talked about in a Science paper, as we change the oxygen content, we can change the dead zone thickness. And so we have a number of key variables that we control: oxygen content, the light, the light intensity, the dose to cure, the viscosity, the geometry, and we use very sophisticated software to control this process. The result is pretty staggering. It's 25 to 100 times faster than traditional 3D printers, which is game-changing. In addition, as our ability to deliver liquid to that interface, we can go 1,000 times faster I believe, and that in fact opens up the opportunity for generating a lot of heat, and as a chemical engineer, I get very excited at heat transfer and the idea that we might one day have water-cooled 3D printers, because they're going so fast. In addition, because we're growing things, we eliminate the layers, and the parts are monolithic. You don't see the surface structure. You have molecularly smooth surfaces. And the mechanical properties of most parts made in a 3D printer are notorious for having properties that depend on the orientation with which how you printed it, because of the layer-like structure. But when you grow objects like this, the properties are invariant with the print direction. These look like injection-molded parts, which is very different than traditional 3D manufacturing. In addition, we're able to throw the entire polymer chemistry textbook at this, and we're able to design chemistries that can give rise to the properties you really want in a 3D-printed object. (Applause) There it is. That's great. You always take the risk that something like this won't work onstage, right? But we can have materials with great mechanical properties. For the first time, we can have elastomers that are high elasticity or high dampening. Think about vibration control or great sneakers, for example. We can make materials that have incredible strength, high strength-to-weight ratio, really strong materials, really great elastomers, so throw that in the audience there. So great material properties. And so the opportunity now, if you actually make a part that has the properties to be a final part, and you do it in game-changing speeds, you can actually transform manufacturing. Right now, in manufacturing, what happens is, the so-called digital thread in digital manufacturing. We go from a CAD drawing, a design, to a prototype to manufacturing. Often, the digital thread is broken right at prototype, because you can't go all the way to manufacturing because most parts don't have the properties to be a final part. We now can connect the digital thread all the way from design to prototyping to manufacturing, and that opportunity really opens up all sorts of things, from better fuel-efficient cars dealing with great lattice properties with high strength-to-weight ratio, new turbine blades, all sorts of wonderful things. Think about if you need a stent in an emergency situation, instead of the doctor pulling off a stent out of the shelf that was just standard sizes, having a stent that's designed for you, for your own anatomy with your own tributaries, printed in an emergency situation in real time out of the properties such that the stent could go away after 18 months: really-game changing. Or digital dentistry, and making these kinds of structures even while you're in the dentist chair. And look at the structures that my students are making at the University of North Carolina. These are amazing microscale structures. You know, the world is really good at nano-fabrication. Moore's Law has driven things from 10 microns and below. We're really good at that, but it's actually very hard to make things from 10 microns to 1,000 microns, the mesoscale. And subtractive techniques from the silicon industry can't do that very well. They can't etch wafers that well. But this process is so gentle, we can grow these objects up from the bottom using additive manufacturing and make amazing things in tens of seconds, opening up new sensor technologies, new drug delivery techniques, new lab-on-a-chip applications, really game-changing stuff. So the opportunity of making a part in real time that has the properties to be a final part really opens up 3D manufacturing, and for us, this is very exciting, because this really is owning the intersection between hardware, software and molecular science, and I can't wait to see what designers and engineers around the world are going to be able to do with this great tool. Thanks for listening. (Applause) |
The price of shame | {0: 'Monica Lewinsky advocates for a safer and more compassionate social media environment, drawing from her unique experiences at the epicenter of a media maelstrom in 1998.'} | TED2015 | You're looking at a woman who was publicly silent for a decade. Obviously, that's changed, but only recently. It was several months ago that I gave my very first major public talk, at the Forbes "30 Under 30 Summit" — 1,500 brilliant people, all under the age of 30. That meant that in 1998, the oldest among the group were only 14, and the youngest, just four. I joked with them that some might only have heard of me from rap songs. Yes, I'm in rap songs. (Laughter) Almost 40 rap songs. (Laughter) But the night of my speech, a surprising thing happened. At the age of 41, I was hit on by a 27-year-old guy. (Laughter) I know, right? He was charming, and I was flattered, and I declined. You know what his unsuccessful pickup line was? He could make me feel 22 again. (Laughter) (Applause) I realized, later that night, I'm probably the only person over 40 who does not want to be 22 again. (Laughter) (Applause) At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss. And at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences. Can I see a show of hands of anyone here who didn't make a mistake or do something they regretted at 22? Yep. That's what I thought. So like me, at 22, a few of you may have also taken wrong turns and fallen in love with the wrong person, maybe even your boss. Unlike me, though, your boss probably wasn't the president of the United States of America. (Laughter) Of course, life is full of surprises. Not a day goes by that I'm not reminded of my mistake, and I regret that mistake deeply. In 1998, after having been swept up into an improbable romance, I was then swept up into the eye of a political, legal and media maelstrom like we had never seen before. Remember, just a few years earlier, news was consumed from just three places: reading a newspaper or magazine, listening to the radio or watching television. That was it. But that wasn't my fate. Instead, this scandal was brought to you by the digital revolution. That meant we could access all the information we wanted, when we wanted it, anytime, anywhere. And when the story broke in January 1998, it broke online. It was the first time the traditional news was usurped by the internet for a major news story — a click that reverberated around the world. What that meant for me personally was that overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one, worldwide. I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously. This rush to judgment, enabled by technology, led to mobs of virtual stone-throwers. Granted, it was before social media, but people could still comment online, e-mail stories, and, of course, e-mail cruel jokes. News sources plastered photos of me all over to sell newspapers, banner ads online, and to keep people tuned to the TV. Do you recall a particular image of me, say, wearing a beret? Now, I admit I made mistakes — especially wearing that beret. (Laughter) But the attention and judgment that I received — not the story, but that I personally received — was unprecedented. I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of course, "that woman." I was seen by many, but actually known by few. And I get it: it was easy to forget that that woman was dimensional, had a soul and was once unbroken. When this happened to me 17 years ago, there was no name for it. Now we call it "cyberbullying" and "online harassment." Today, I want to share some of my experience with you, talk about how that experience has helped shape my cultural observations, and how I hope my past experience can lead to a change that results in less suffering for others. In 1998, I lost my reputation and my dignity. I lost almost everything. And I almost lost my life. Let me paint a picture for you. It is September of 1998. I'm sitting in a windowless office room inside the Office of the Independent Counsel, underneath humming fluorescent lights. I'm listening to the sound of my voice, my voice on surreptitiously taped phone calls that a supposed friend had made the year before. I'm here because I've been legally required to personally authenticate all 20 hours of taped conversation. For the past eight months, the mysterious content of these tapes has hung like the sword of Damocles over my head. I mean, who can remember what they said a year ago? Scared and mortified, I listen, listen as I prattle on about the flotsam and jetsam of the day; listen as I confess my love for the president, and, of course, my heartbreak; listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth; listen, deeply, deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself, a self I don't even recognize. A few days later, the Starr Report is released to Congress, and all of those tapes and transcripts, those stolen words, form a part of it. That people can read the transcripts is horrific enough. But a few weeks later, the audiotapes are aired on TV, and significant portions made available online. The public humiliation was excruciating. Life was almost unbearable. This was not something that happened with regularity back then in 1998, and by "this," I mean the stealing of people's private words, actions, conversations or photos, and then making them public — public without consent, public without context and public without compassion. Fast-forward 12 years, to 2010, and now social media has been born. The landscape has sadly become much more populated with instances like mine, whether or not someone actually made a mistake, and now, it's for both public and private people. The consequences for some have become dire, very dire. I was on the phone with my mom in September of 2010, and we were talking about the news of a young college freshman from Rutgers University, named Tyler Clementi. Sweet, sensitive, creative Tyler was secretly webcammed by his roommate while being intimate with another man. When the online world learned of this incident, the ridicule and cyberbullying ignited. A few days later, Tyler jumped from the George Washington Bridge to his death. He was 18. My mom was beside herself about what happened to Tyler and his family, and she was gutted with pain in a way that I just couldn't quite understand. And then eventually, I realized she was reliving 1998, reliving a time when she sat by my bed every night, reliving — (Chokes up) sorry — reliving a time when she made me shower with the bathroom door open, and reliving a time when both of my parents feared that I would be humiliated to death, literally. Today, too many parents haven't had the chance to step in and rescue their loved ones. Too many have learned of their child's suffering and humiliation after it was too late. Tyler's tragic, senseless death was a turning point for me. It served to recontextualize my experiences, and I then began to look at the world of humiliation and bullying around me and see something different. In 1998, we had no way of knowing where this brave new technology called the internet would take us. Since then, it has connected people in unimaginable ways — joining lost siblings, saving lives, launching revolutions ... But the darkness, cyberbullying, and slut-shaming that I experienced had mushroomed. Every day online, people — especially young people, who are not developmentally equipped to handle this — are so abused and humiliated that they can't imagine living to the next day. And some, tragically, don't. And there's nothing virtual about that. Childline, a UK nonprofit that's focused on helping young people on various issues, released a staggering statistic late last year: from 2012 to 2013, there was an 87 percent increase in calls and e-mails related to cyberbullying. A meta-analysis done out of the Netherlands showed that for the first time, cyberbullying was leading to suicidal ideations more significantly than offline bullying. And you know, what shocked me — although it shouldn't have — was other research last year that determined humiliation was a more intensely felt emotion than either happiness or even anger. Cruelty to others is nothing new. But online, technologically enhanced shaming is amplified, uncontained and permanently accessible. The echo of embarrassment used to extend only as far as your family, village, school or community. But now, it's the online community too. Millions of people, often anonymously, can stab you with their words, and that's a lot of pain. And there are no perimeters around how many people can publicly observe you and put you in a public stockade. There is a very personal price to public humiliation, and the growth of the internet has jacked up that price. For nearly two decades now, we have slowly been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil, both on- and offline. Gossip websites, paparazzi, reality programming, politics, news outlets and sometimes hackers all traffic in shame. It's led to desensitization and a permissive environment online, which lends itself to trolling, invasion of privacy and cyberbullying. This shift has created what Professor Nicolaus Mills calls "a culture of humiliation." Consider a few prominent examples just from the past six months alone. Snapchat, the service which is used mainly by younger generations and claims that its messages only have the life span of a few seconds. You can imagine the range of content that that gets. A third-party app which Snapchatters use to preserve the life span of the messages was hacked, and 100,000 personal conversations, photos and videos were leaked online, to now have a life span of forever. Jennifer Lawrence and several other actors had their iCloud accounts hacked, and private, intimate, nude photos were plastered across the internet without their permission. One gossip website had over five million hits for this one story. And what about the Sony Pictures cyberhacking? The documents which received the most attention were private e-mails that had maximum public embarrassment value. But in this culture of humiliation, there is another kind of price tag attached to public shaming. The price does not measure the cost to the victim, which Tyler and too many others — notably, women, minorities and members of the LGBTQ community — have paid, but the price measures the profit of those who prey on them. This invasion of others is a raw material, efficiently and ruthlessly mined, packaged and sold at a profit. A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity, and shame is an industry. How is the money made? Clicks. The more shame, the more clicks. The more clicks, the more advertising dollars. We're in a dangerous cycle. The more we click on this kind of gossip, the more numb we get to the human lives behind it. And the more numb we get, the more we click. All the while, someone is making money off of the back of someone else's suffering. With every click, we make a choice. The more we saturate our culture with public shaming, the more accepted it is, the more we will see behavior like cyberbullying, trolling, some forms of hacking and online harassment. Why? Because they all have humiliation at their cores. This behavior is a symptom of the culture we've created. Just think about it. Changing behavior begins with evolving beliefs. We've seen that to be true with racism, homophobia and plenty of other biases, today and in the past. As we've changed beliefs about same-sex marriage, more people have been offered equal freedoms. When we began valuing sustainability, more people began to recycle. So as far as our culture of humiliation goes, what we need is a cultural revolution. Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop, and it's time for an intervention on the internet and in our culture. The shift begins with something simple, but it's not easy. We need to return to a long-held value of compassion, compassion and empathy. Online, we've got a compassion deficit, an empathy crisis. Researcher Brené Brown said, and I quote, "Shame can't survive empathy." Shame cannot survive empathy. I've seen some very dark days in my life. It was the compassion and empathy from my family, friends, professionals and sometimes even strangers that saved me. Even empathy from one person can make a difference. The theory of minority influence, proposed by social psychologist Serge Moscovici, says that even in small numbers, when there's consistency over time, change can happen. In the online world, we can foster minority influence by becoming upstanders. To become an upstander means instead of bystander apathy, we can post a positive comment for someone or report a bullying situation. Trust me, compassionate comments help abate the negativity. We can also counteract the culture by supporting organizations that deal with these kinds of issues, like the Tyler Clementi Foundation in the US; in the UK, there's Anti-Bullying Pro; and in Australia, there's PROJECT ROCKIT. We talk a lot about our right to freedom of expression. But we need to talk more about our responsibility to freedom of expression. We all want to be heard, but let's acknowledge the difference between speaking up with intention and speaking up for attention. The internet is the superhighway for the id. But online, showing empathy to others benefits us all and helps create a safer and better world. We need to communicate online with compassion, consume news with compassion and click with compassion. Just imagine walking a mile in someone else's headline. I'd like to end on a personal note. In the past nine months, the question I've been asked the most is "Why?" Why now? Why was I sticking my head above the parapet? You can read between the lines in those questions, and the answer has nothing to do with politics. The top-note answer was and is "Because it's time." Time to stop tiptoeing around my past, time to stop living a life of opprobrium and time to take back my narrative. It's also not just about saving myself. Anyone who is suffering from shame and public humiliation needs to know one thing: You can survive it. I know it's hard. It may not be painless, quick or easy, but you can insist on a different ending to your story. Have compassion for yourself. We all deserve compassion and to live both online and off in a more compassionate world. Thank you for listening. (Applause and cheers) |
How we're teaching computers to understand pictures | {0: 'As Director of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and Vision Lab, Fei-Fei Li is working to solve AI’s trickiest problems -- including image recognition, learning and language processing.'} | TED2015 | Let me show you something. (Video) Girl: Okay, that's a cat sitting in a bed. The boy is petting the elephant. Those are people that are going on an airplane. That's a big airplane. Fei-Fei Li: This is a three-year-old child describing what she sees in a series of photos. She might still have a lot to learn about this world, but she's already an expert at one very important task: to make sense of what she sees. Our society is more technologically advanced than ever. We send people to the moon, we make phones that talk to us or customize radio stations that can play only music we like. Yet, our most advanced machines and computers still struggle at this task. So I'm here today to give you a progress report on the latest advances in our research in computer vision, one of the most frontier and potentially revolutionary technologies in computer science. Yes, we have prototyped cars that can drive by themselves, but without smart vision, they cannot really tell the difference between a crumpled paper bag on the road, which can be run over, and a rock that size, which should be avoided. We have made fabulous megapixel cameras, but we have not delivered sight to the blind. Drones can fly over massive land, but don't have enough vision technology to help us to track the changes of the rainforests. Security cameras are everywhere, but they do not alert us when a child is drowning in a swimming pool. Photos and videos are becoming an integral part of global life. They're being generated at a pace that's far beyond what any human, or teams of humans, could hope to view, and you and I are contributing to that at this TED. Yet our most advanced software is still struggling at understanding and managing this enormous content. So in other words, collectively as a society, we're very much blind, because our smartest machines are still blind. "Why is this so hard?" you may ask. Cameras can take pictures like this one by converting lights into a two-dimensional array of numbers known as pixels, but these are just lifeless numbers. They do not carry meaning in themselves. Just like to hear is not the same as to listen, to take pictures is not the same as to see, and by seeing, we really mean understanding. In fact, it took Mother Nature 540 million years of hard work to do this task, and much of that effort went into developing the visual processing apparatus of our brains, not the eyes themselves. So vision begins with the eyes, but it truly takes place in the brain. So for 15 years now, starting from my Ph.D. at Caltech and then leading Stanford's Vision Lab, I've been working with my mentors, collaborators and students to teach computers to see. Our research field is called computer vision and machine learning. It's part of the general field of artificial intelligence. So ultimately, we want to teach the machines to see just like we do: naming objects, identifying people, inferring 3D geometry of things, understanding relations, emotions, actions and intentions. You and I weave together entire stories of people, places and things the moment we lay our gaze on them. The first step towards this goal is to teach a computer to see objects, the building block of the visual world. In its simplest terms, imagine this teaching process as showing the computers some training images of a particular object, let's say cats, and designing a model that learns from these training images. How hard can this be? After all, a cat is just a collection of shapes and colors, and this is what we did in the early days of object modeling. We'd tell the computer algorithm in a mathematical language that a cat has a round face, a chubby body, two pointy ears, and a long tail, and that looked all fine. But what about this cat? (Laughter) It's all curled up. Now you have to add another shape and viewpoint to the object model. But what if cats are hidden? What about these silly cats? Now you get my point. Even something as simple as a household pet can present an infinite number of variations to the object model, and that's just one object. So about eight years ago, a very simple and profound observation changed my thinking. No one tells a child how to see, especially in the early years. They learn this through real-world experiences and examples. If you consider a child's eyes as a pair of biological cameras, they take one picture about every 200 milliseconds, the average time an eye movement is made. So by age three, a child would have seen hundreds of millions of pictures of the real world. That's a lot of training examples. So instead of focusing solely on better and better algorithms, my insight was to give the algorithms the kind of training data that a child was given through experiences in both quantity and quality. Once we know this, we knew we needed to collect a data set that has far more images than we have ever had before, perhaps thousands of times more, and together with Professor Kai Li at Princeton University, we launched the ImageNet project in 2007. Luckily, we didn't have to mount a camera on our head and wait for many years. We went to the Internet, the biggest treasure trove of pictures that humans have ever created. We downloaded nearly a billion images and used crowdsourcing technology like the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform to help us to label these images. At its peak, ImageNet was one of the biggest employers of the Amazon Mechanical Turk workers: together, almost 50,000 workers from 167 countries around the world helped us to clean, sort and label nearly a billion candidate images. That was how much effort it took to capture even a fraction of the imagery a child's mind takes in in the early developmental years. In hindsight, this idea of using big data to train computer algorithms may seem obvious now, but back in 2007, it was not so obvious. We were fairly alone on this journey for quite a while. Some very friendly colleagues advised me to do something more useful for my tenure, and we were constantly struggling for research funding. Once, I even joked to my graduate students that I would just reopen my dry cleaner's shop to fund ImageNet. After all, that's how I funded my college years. So we carried on. In 2009, the ImageNet project delivered a database of 15 million images across 22,000 classes of objects and things organized by everyday English words. In both quantity and quality, this was an unprecedented scale. As an example, in the case of cats, we have more than 62,000 cats of all kinds of looks and poses and across all species of domestic and wild cats. We were thrilled to have put together ImageNet, and we wanted the whole research world to benefit from it, so in the TED fashion, we opened up the entire data set to the worldwide research community for free. (Applause) Now that we have the data to nourish our computer brain, we're ready to come back to the algorithms themselves. As it turned out, the wealth of information provided by ImageNet was a perfect match to a particular class of machine learning algorithms called convolutional neural network, pioneered by Kunihiko Fukushima, Geoff Hinton, and Yann LeCun back in the 1970s and '80s. Just like the brain consists of billions of highly connected neurons, a basic operating unit in a neural network is a neuron-like node. It takes input from other nodes and sends output to others. Moreover, these hundreds of thousands or even millions of nodes are organized in hierarchical layers, also similar to the brain. In a typical neural network we use to train our object recognition model, it has 24 million nodes, 140 million parameters, and 15 billion connections. That's an enormous model. Powered by the massive data from ImageNet and the modern CPUs and GPUs to train such a humongous model, the convolutional neural network blossomed in a way that no one expected. It became the winning architecture to generate exciting new results in object recognition. This is a computer telling us this picture contains a cat and where the cat is. Of course there are more things than cats, so here's a computer algorithm telling us the picture contains a boy and a teddy bear; a dog, a person, and a small kite in the background; or a picture of very busy things like a man, a skateboard, railings, a lampost, and so on. Sometimes, when the computer is not so confident about what it sees, we have taught it to be smart enough to give us a safe answer instead of committing too much, just like we would do, but other times our computer algorithm is remarkable at telling us what exactly the objects are, like the make, model, year of the cars. We applied this algorithm to millions of Google Street View images across hundreds of American cities, and we have learned something really interesting: first, it confirmed our common wisdom that car prices correlate very well with household incomes. But surprisingly, car prices also correlate well with crime rates in cities, or voting patterns by zip codes. So wait a minute. Is that it? Has the computer already matched or even surpassed human capabilities? Not so fast. So far, we have just taught the computer to see objects. This is like a small child learning to utter a few nouns. It's an incredible accomplishment, but it's only the first step. Soon, another developmental milestone will be hit, and children begin to communicate in sentences. So instead of saying this is a cat in the picture, you already heard the little girl telling us this is a cat lying on a bed. So to teach a computer to see a picture and generate sentences, the marriage between big data and machine learning algorithm has to take another step. Now, the computer has to learn from both pictures as well as natural language sentences generated by humans. Just like the brain integrates vision and language, we developed a model that connects parts of visual things like visual snippets with words and phrases in sentences. About four months ago, we finally tied all this together and produced one of the first computer vision models that is capable of generating a human-like sentence when it sees a picture for the first time. Now, I'm ready to show you what the computer says when it sees the picture that the little girl saw at the beginning of this talk. (Video) Computer: A man is standing next to an elephant. A large airplane sitting on top of an airport runway. FFL: Of course, we're still working hard to improve our algorithms, and it still has a lot to learn. (Applause) And the computer still makes mistakes. (Video) Computer: A cat lying on a bed in a blanket. FFL: So of course, when it sees too many cats, it thinks everything might look like a cat. (Video) Computer: A young boy is holding a baseball bat. (Laughter) FFL: Or, if it hasn't seen a toothbrush, it confuses it with a baseball bat. (Video) Computer: A man riding a horse down a street next to a building. (Laughter) FFL: We haven't taught Art 101 to the computers. (Video) Computer: A zebra standing in a field of grass. FFL: And it hasn't learned to appreciate the stunning beauty of nature like you and I do. So it has been a long journey. To get from age zero to three was hard. The real challenge is to go from three to 13 and far beyond. Let me remind you with this picture of the boy and the cake again. So far, we have taught the computer to see objects or even tell us a simple story when seeing a picture. (Video) Computer: A person sitting at a table with a cake. FFL: But there's so much more to this picture than just a person and a cake. What the computer doesn't see is that this is a special Italian cake that's only served during Easter time. The boy is wearing his favorite t-shirt given to him as a gift by his father after a trip to Sydney, and you and I can all tell how happy he is and what's exactly on his mind at that moment. This is my son Leo. On my quest for visual intelligence, I think of Leo constantly and the future world he will live in. When machines can see, doctors and nurses will have extra pairs of tireless eyes to help them to diagnose and take care of patients. Cars will run smarter and safer on the road. Robots, not just humans, will help us to brave the disaster zones to save the trapped and wounded. We will discover new species, better materials, and explore unseen frontiers with the help of the machines. Little by little, we're giving sight to the machines. First, we teach them to see. Then, they help us to see better. For the first time, human eyes won't be the only ones pondering and exploring our world. We will not only use the machines for their intelligence, we will also collaborate with them in ways that we cannot even imagine. This is my quest: to give computers visual intelligence and to create a better future for Leo and for the world. Thank you. (Applause) |
A tale of two Americas. And the mini-mart where they collided | {0: 'Anand Giridharadas writes about people and cultures caught amid the great forces of our time.'} | TED2015 | "Where are you from?" said the pale, tattooed man. "Where are you from?" It's September 21, 2001, 10 days after the worst attack on America since World War II. Everyone wonders about the next plane. People are looking for scapegoats. The president, the night before, pledges to "bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies." And in the Dallas mini-mart, a Dallas mini-part surrounded by tire shops and strip joints a Bangladeshi immigrant works the register. Back home, Raisuddin Bhuiyan was a big man, an Air Force officer. But he dreamed of a fresh start in America. If he had to work briefly in a mini-mart to save up for I.T. classes and his wedding in two months, so be it. Then, on September 21, that tattooed man enters the mart. He holds a shotgun. Raisuddin knows the drill: puts cash on the counter. This time, the man doesn't touch the money. "Where are you from?" he asks. "Excuse me?" Raisuddin answers. His accent betrays him. The tattooed man, a self-styled true American vigilante, shoots Raisuddin in revenge for 9/11. Raisuddin feels millions of bees stinging his face. In fact, dozens of scalding, birdshot pellets puncture his head. Behind the counter, he lays in blood. He cups a hand over his forehead to keep in the brains on which he'd gambled everything. He recites verses from the Koran, begging his God to live. He senses he is dying. He didn't die. His right eye left him. His fiancée left him. His landlord, the mini-mart owner, kicked him out. Soon he was homeless and 60,000 dollars in medical debt, including a fee for dialing for an ambulance. But Raisuddin lived. And years later, he would ask what he could do to repay his God and become worthy of this second chance. He would come to believe, in fact, that this chance called for him to give a second chance to a man we might think deserved no chance at all. Twelve years ago, I was a fresh graduate seeking my way in the world. Born in Ohio to Indian immigrants, I settled on the ultimate rebellion against my parents, moving to the country they had worked so damn hard to get out of. What I thought might be a six-month stint in Mumbai stretched to six years. I became a writer and found myself amid a magical story: the awakening of hope across much of the so-called Third World. Six years ago, I returned to America and realized something: The American Dream was thriving, but only in India. In America, not so much. In fact, I observed that America was fracturing into two distinct societies: a republic of dreams and a republic of fears. And then, I stumbled onto this incredible tale of two lives and of these two Americas that brutally collided in that Dallas mini-mart. I knew at once I wanted to learn more, and eventually that I would write a book about them, for their story was the story of America's fracturing and of how it might be put back together. After he was shot, Raisuddin's life grew no easier. The day after admitting him, the hospital discharged him. His right eye couldn't see. He couldn't speak. Metal peppered his face. But he had no insurance, so they bounced him. His family in Bangladesh begged him, "Come home." But he told them he had a dream to see about. He found telemarketing work, then he became an Olive Garden waiter, because where better to get over his fear of white people than the Olive Garden? (Laughter) Now, as a devout Muslim, he refused alcohol, didn't touch the stuff. Then he learned that not selling it would slash his pay. So he reasoned, like a budding American pragmatist, "Well, God wouldn't want me to starve, would he?" And before long, in some months, Raisuddin was that Olive Garden's highest grossing alcohol pusher. He found a man who taught him database administration. He got part-time I.T. gigs. Eventually, he landed a six-figure job at a blue chip tech company in Dallas. But as America began to work for Raisuddin, he avoided the classic error of the fortunate: assuming you're the rule, not the exception. In fact, he observed that many with the fortune of being born American were nonetheless trapped in lives that made second chances like his impossible. He saw it at the Olive Garden itself, where so many of his colleagues had childhood horror stories of family dysfunction, chaos, addiction, crime. He'd heard a similar tale about the man who shot him back when he attended his trial. The closer Raisuddin got to the America he had coveted from afar, the more he realized there was another, equally real, America that was stingier with second chances. The man who shot Raisuddin grew up in that stingier America. From a distance, Mark Stroman was always the spark of parties, always making girls feel pretty. Always working, no matter what drugs or fights he'd had the night before. But he'd always wrestled with demons. He entered the world through the three gateways that doom so many young American men: bad parents, bad schools, bad prisons. His mother told him, regretfully, as a boy that she'd been just 50 dollars short of aborting him. Sometimes, that little boy would be at school, he'd suddenly pull a knife on his fellow classmates. Sometimes that same little boy would be at his grandparents', tenderly feeding horses. He was getting arrested before he shaved, first juvenile, then prison. He became a casual white supremacist and, like so many around him, a drug-addled and absent father. And then, before long, he found himself on death row, for in his 2001 counter-jihad, he had shot not one mini-mart clerk, but three. Only Raisuddin survived. Strangely, death row was the first institution that left Stroman better. His old influences quit him. The people entering his life were virtuous and caring: pastors, journalists, European pen-pals. They listened to him, prayed with him, helped him question himself. And sent him on a journey of introspection and betterment. He finally faced the hatred that had defined his life. He read Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and regretted his swastika tattoos. He found God. Then one day in 2011, 10 years after his crimes, Stroman received news. One of the men he'd shot, the survivor, was fighting to save his life. You see, late in 2009, eight years after that shooting, Raisuddin had gone on his own journey, a pilgrimage to Mecca. Amid its crowds, he felt immense gratitude, but also duty. He recalled promising God, as he lay dying in 2001, that if he lived, he would serve humanity all his days. Then, he'd gotten busy relaying the bricks of a life. Now it was time to pay his debts. And he decided, upon reflection, that his method of payment would be an intervention in the cycle of vengeance between the Muslim and Western worlds. And how would he intervene? By forgiving Stroman publicly in the name of Islam and its doctrine of mercy. And then suing the state of Texas and its governor Rick Perry to prevent them from executing Stroman, exactly like most people shot in the face do. (Laughter) Yet Raisuddin's mercy was inspired not only by faith. A newly minted American citizen, he had come to believe that Stroman was the product of a hurting America that couldn't just be lethally injected away. That insight is what moved me to write my book "The True American." This immigrant begging America to be as merciful to a native son as it had been to an adopted one. In the mini-mart, all those years earlier, not just two men, but two Americas collided. An America that still dreams, still strives, still imagines that tomorrow can build on today, and an America that has resigned to fate, buckled under stress and chaos, lowered expectations, an ducked into the oldest of refuges: the tribal fellowship of one's own narrow kind. And it was Raisuddin, despite being a newcomer, despite being attacked, despite being homeless and traumatized, who belonged to that republic of dreams and Stroman who belonged to that other wounded country, despite being born with the privilege of a native white man. I realized these men's stories formed an urgent parable about America. The country I am so proud to call my own wasn't living through a generalized decline as seen in Spain or Greece, where prospects were dimming for everyone. America is simultaneously the most and the least successful country in the industrialized world. Launching the world's best companies, even as record numbers of children go hungry. Seeing life-expectancy drop for large groups, even as it polishes the world's best hospitals. America today is a sprightly young body, hit by one of those strokes that sucks the life from one side, while leaving the other worryingly perfect. On July 20, 2011, right after a sobbing Raisuddin testified in defense of Stroman's life, Stroman was killed by lethal injection by the state he so loved. Hours earlier, when Raisuddin still thought he could still save Stroman, the two men got to speak for the second time ever. Here is an excerpt from their phone call. Raisuddin: "Mark, you should know that I am praying for God, the most compassionate and gracious. I forgive you and I do not hate you. I never hated you." Stroman: "You are a remarkable person. Thank you from my heart. I love you, bro." Even more amazingly, after the execution, Raisuddin reached out to Stroman's eldest daughter, Amber, an ex-convinct and an addict. and offered his help. "You may have lost a father," he told her, "but you've gained an uncle." He wanted her, too, to have a second chance. If human history were a parade, America's float would be a neon shrine to second chances. But America, generous with second chances to the children of other lands, today grows miserly with first chances to the children of its own. America still dazzles at allowing anybody to become an American. But it is losing its luster at allowing every American to become a somebody. Over the last decade, seven million foreigners gained American citizenship. Remarkable. In the meanwhile, how many Americans gained a place in the middle class? Actually, the net influx was negative. Go back further, and it's even more striking: Since the 60s, the middle class has shrunk by 20 percent, mainly because of the people tumbling out of it. And my reporting around the country tells me the problem is grimmer than simple inequality. What I observe is a pair of secessions from the unifying center of American life. An affluent secession of up, up and away, into elite enclaves of the educated and into a global matrix of work, money and connections, and an impoverished secession of down and out into disconnected, dead-end lives that the fortunate scarcely see. And don't console yourself that you are the 99 percent. If you live near a Whole Foods, if no one in your family serves in the military, if you're paid by the year, not the hour, if most people you know finished college, if no one you know uses meth, if you married once and remain married, if you're not one of 65 million Americans with a criminal record — if any or all of these things describe you, then accept the possibility that actually, you may not know what's going on and you may be part of the problem. Other generations had to build a fresh society after slavery, pull through a depression, defeat fascism, freedom-ride in Mississippi. The moral challenge of my generation, I believe, is to reacquaint these two Americas, to choose union over secession once again. This ins't a problem we can tax or tax-cut away. It won't be solved by tweeting harder, building slicker apps, or starting one more artisanal coffee roasting service. It is a moral challenge that begs each of us in the flourishing America to take on the wilting America as our own, as Raisuddin tried to do. Like him, we can make pilgrimages. And there, in Baltimore and Oregon and Appalachia, find new purpose, as he did. We can immerse ourselves in that other country, bear witness to its hopes and sorrows, and, like Raisuddin, ask what we can do. What can you do? What can you do? What can we do? How might we build a more merciful country? We, the greatest inventors in the world, can invent solutions to the problems of that America, not only our own. We, the writers and the journalists, can cover that America's stories, instead of shutting down bureaus in its midst. We can finance that America's ideas, instead of ideas from New York and San Francisco. We can put our stethoscopes to its backs, teach there, go to court there, make there, live there, pray there. This, I believe, is the calling of a generation. An America whose two halves learn again to stride, to plow, to forge, to dare together. A republic of chances, rewoven, renewed, begins with us. Thank you. (Applause) |
Everyone around you has a story the world needs to hear | {0: 'Over thousands of archived and broadcast interviews, StoryCorps founder Dave Isay -- winner of the 2015 TED Prize -- has created an unprecedented document of the dreams and fears that touch us all.'} | TED2015 | Tonight, I'm going to try to make the case that inviting a loved one, a friend or even a stranger to record a meaningful interview with you just might turn out to be one of the most important moments in that person's life, and in yours. When I was 22 years old, I was lucky enough to find my calling when I fell into making radio stories. At almost the exact same time, I found out that my dad, who I was very, very close to, was gay. I was taken completely by surprise. We were a very tight-knit family, and I was crushed. At some point, in one of our strained conversations, my dad mentioned the Stonewall riots. He told me that one night in 1969, a group of young black and Latino drag queens fought back against the police at a gay bar in Manhattan called the Stonewall Inn, and how this sparked the modern gay rights movement. It was an amazing story, and it piqued my interest. So I decided to pick up my tape recorder and find out more. With the help of a young archivist named Michael Shirker, we tracked down all of the people we could find who had been at the Stonewall Inn that night. Recording these interviews, I saw how the microphone gave me the license to go places I otherwise never would have gone and talk to people I might not otherwise ever have spoken to. I had the privilege of getting to know some of the most amazing, fierce and courageous human beings I had ever met. It was the first time the story of Stonewall had been told to a national audience. I dedicated the program to my dad, it changed my relationship with him, and it changed my life. Over the next 15 years, I made many more radio documentaries, working to shine a light on people who are rarely heard from in the media. Over and over again, I'd see how this simple act of being interviewed could mean so much to people, particularly those who had been told that their stories didn't matter. I could literally see people's back straighten as they started to speak into the microphone. In 1998, I made a documentary about the last flophouse hotels on the Bowery in Manhattan. Guys stayed up in these cheap hotels for decades. They lived in cubicles the size of prison cells covered with chicken wire so you couldn't jump from one room into the next. Later, I wrote a book on the men with the photographer Harvey Wang. I remember walking into a flophouse with an early version of the book and showing one of the guys his page. He stood there staring at it in silence, then he grabbed the book out of my hand and started running down the long, narrow hallway holding it over his head shouting, "I exist! I exist." (Applause) In many ways, "I exist" became the clarion call for StoryCorps, this crazy idea that I had a dozen years ago. The thought was to take documentary work and turn it on its head. Traditionally, broadcast documentary has been about recording interviews to create a work of art or entertainment or education that is seen or heard by a whole lot of people, but I wanted to try something where the interview itself was the purpose of this work, and see if we could give many, many, many people the chance to be listened to in this way. So in Grand Central Terminal 11 years ago, we built a booth where anyone can come to honor someone else by interviewing them about their life. You come to this booth and you're met by a facilitator who brings you inside. You sit across from, say, your grandfather for close to an hour and you listen and you talk. Many people think of it as, if this was to be our last conversation, what would I want to ask of and say to this person who means so much to me? At the end of the session, you walk away with a copy of the interview and another copy goes to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress so that your great-great-great-grandkids can someday get to know your grandfather through his voice and story. So we open this booth in one of the busiest places in the world and invite people to have this incredibly intimate conversation with another human being. I had no idea if it would work, but from the very beginning, it did. People treated the experience with incredible respect, and amazing conversations happened inside. I want to play just one animated excerpt from an interview recorded at that original Grand Central Booth. This is 12-year-old Joshua Littman interviewing his mother, Sarah. Josh has Asperger's syndrome. As you may know, kids with Asperger's are incredibly smart but have a tough time socially. They usually have obsessions. In Josh's case, it's with animals, so this is Josh talking with his mom Sarah at Grand Central nine years ago. (Video) Josh Littman: From a scale of one to 10, do you think your life would be different without animals? Sarah Littman: I think it would be an eight without animals, because they add so much pleasure to life. JL: How else do you think your life would be different without them? SL: I could do without things like cockroaches and snakes. JL: Well, I'm okay with snakes as long as they're not venomous or constrict you or anything. SL: Yeah, I'm not a big snake person — JL: But cockroach is just the insect we love to hate. SL: Yeah, it really is. JL: Have you ever thought you couldn't cope with having a child? SL: I remember when you were a baby, you had really bad colic, so you would just cry and cry. JL: What's colic? SL: It's when you get this stomach ache and all you do is scream for, like, four hours. JL: Even louder than Amy does? SL: You were pretty loud, but Amy's was more high-pitched. JL: I think it feels like everyone seems to like Amy more, like she's the perfect little angel. SL: Well, I can understand why you think that people like Amy more, and I'm not saying it's because of your Asperger's syndrome, but being friendly comes easily to Amy, whereas I think for you it's more difficult, but the people who take the time to get to know you love you so much. JL: Like Ben or Eric or Carlos? SL: Yeah — JL: Like I have better quality friends but less quantity? (Laughter) SL: I wouldn't judge the quality, but I think — JL: I mean, first it was like, Amy loved Claudia, then she hated Claudia, she loved Claudia, then she hated Claudia. SL: Part of that's a girl thing, honey. The important thing for you is that you have a few very good friends, and really that's what you need in life. JL: Did I turn out to be the son you wanted when I was born? Did I meet your expectations? SL: You've exceeded my expectations, sweetie, because, sure, you have these fantasies of what your child's going to be like, but you have made me grow so much as a parent, because you think — JL: Well, I was the one who made you a parent. SL: You were the one who made me a parent. That's a good point. (Laughter) But also because you think differently from what they tell you in the parenting books, I really had to learn to think outside of the box with you, and it's made me much more creative as a parent and as a person, and I'll always thank you for that. JL: And that helped when Amy was born? SL: And that helped when Amy was born, but you are so incredibly special to me and I'm so lucky to have you as my son. (Applause) David Isay: After this story ran on public radio, Josh received hundreds of letters telling him what an amazing kid he was. His mom, Sarah, bound them together in a book, and when Josh got picked on at school, they would read the letters together. I just want to acknowledge that two of my heroes are here with us tonight. Sarah Littman and her son Josh, who is now an honors student in college. (Applause) You know, a lot of people talk about crying when they hear StoryCorps stories, and it's not because they're sad. Most of them aren't. I think it's because you're hearing something authentic and pure at this moment, when sometimes it's hard to tell what's real and what's an advertisement. It's kind of the anti-reality TV. Nobody comes to StoryCorps to get rich. Nobody comes to get famous. It's simply an act of generosity and love. So many of these are just everyday people talking about lives lived with kindness, courage, decency and dignity, and when you hear that kind of story, it can sometimes feel like you're walking on holy ground. So this experiment in Grand Central worked, and we expanded across the country. Today, more than 100,000 people in all 50 states in thousands of cities and towns across America have recorded StoryCorps interviews. It's now the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered. (Applause) We've hired and trained hundreds of facilitators to help guide people through the experience. Most serve a year or two with StoryCorps traveling the country, gathering the wisdom of humanity. They call it bearing witness, and if you ask them, all of the facilitators will tell you that the most important thing they've learned from being present during these interviews is that people are basically good. And I think for the first years of StoryCorps, you could argue that there was some kind of a selection bias happening, but after tens of thousands of interviews with every kind of person in every part of the country — rich, poor, five years old to 105, 80 different languages, across the political spectrum — you have to think that maybe these guys are actually onto something. I've also learned so much from these interviews. I've learned about the poetry and the wisdom and the grace that can be found in the words of people all around us when we simply take the time to listen, like this interview between a betting clerk in Brooklyn named Danny Perasa who brought his wife Annie to StoryCorps to talk about his love for her. (Audio) Danny Perasa: You see, the thing of it is, I always feel guilty when I say "I love you" to you. And I say it so often. I say it to remind you that as dumpy as I am, it's coming from me. It's like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio, and it's nice of you to keep the radio around the house. Annie Perasa: If I don't have a note on the kitchen table, I think there's something wrong. You write a love letter to me every morning. DP: Well, the only thing that could possibly be wrong is I couldn't find a silly pen. AP: To my princess: The weather outside today is extremely rainy. I'll call you at 11:20 in the morning. DP: It's a romantic weather report. AP: And I love you. I love you. I love you. DP: When a guy is happily married, no matter what happens at work, no matter what happens in the rest of the day, there's a shelter when you get home, there's a knowledge knowing that you can hug somebody without them throwing you downstairs and saying, "Get your hands off me." Being married is like having a color television set. You never want to go back to black and white. (Laughter) DI: Danny was about five feet tall with crossed eyes and one single snaggletooth, but Danny Perasa had more romance in his little pinky than all of Hollywood's leading men put together. What else have I learned? I've learned about the almost unimaginable capacity for the human spirit to forgive. I've learned about resilience and I've learned about strength. Like an interview with Oshea Israel and Mary Johnson. When Oshea was a teenager, he murdered Mary's only son, Laramiun Byrd, in a gang fight. A dozen years later, Mary went to prison to meet Oshea and find out who this person was who had taken her son's life. Slowly and remarkably, they became friends, and when he was finally released from the penitentiary, Oshea actually moved in next door to Mary. This is just a short excerpt of a conversation they had soon after Oshea was freed. (Video) Mary Johnson: My natural son is no longer here. I didn't see him graduate, and now you're going to college. I'll have the opportunity to see you graduate. I didn't see him get married. Hopefully one day, I'll be able to experience that with you. Oshea Israel: Just to hear you say those things and to be in my life in the manner in which you are is my motivation. It motivates me to make sure that I stay on the right path. You still believe in me, and the fact that you can do it despite how much pain I caused you, it's amazing. MJ: I know it's not an easy thing to be able to share our story together, even with us sitting here looking at each other right now. I know it's not an easy thing, so I admire that you can do this. OI: I love you, lady. MJ: I love you too, son. (Applause) DI: And I've been reminded countless times of the courage and goodness of people, and how the arc of history truly does bend towards justice. Like the story of Alexis Martinez, who was born Arthur Martinez in the Harold Ickes projects in Chicago. In the interview, she talks with her daughter Lesley about joining a gang as a young man, and later in life transitioning into the woman she was always meant to be. This is Alexis and her daughter Lesley. (Audio) Alexis Martinez: One of the most difficult things for me was I was always afraid that I wouldn't be allowed to be in my granddaughters' lives, and you blew that completely out of the water, you and your husband. One of the fruits of that is, in my relationship with my granddaughters, they fight with each other sometimes over whether I'm he or she. Lesley Martinez: But they're free to talk about it. AM: They're free to talk about it, but that, to me, is a miracle. LM: You don't have to apologize. You don't have to tiptoe. We're not going to cut you off, and that's something I've always wanted you to just know, that you're loved. AM: You know, I live this every day now. I walk down the streets as a woman, and I really am at peace with who I am. I mean, I wish I had a softer voice maybe, but now I walk in love and I try to live that way every day. DI: Now I walk in love. I'm going to tell you a secret about StoryCorps. It takes some courage to have these conversations. StoryCorps speaks to our mortality. Participants know this recording will be heard long after they're gone. There's a hospice doctor named Ira Byock who has worked closely with us on recording interviews with people who are dying. He wrote a book called "The Four Things That Matter Most" about the four things you want to say to the most important people in your life before they or you die: thank you, I love you, forgive me, I forgive you. They're just about the most powerful words we can say to one another, and often that's what happens in a StoryCorps booth. It's a chance to have a sense of closure with someone you care about — no regrets, nothing left unsaid. And it's hard and it takes courage, but that's why we're alive, right? So, the TED Prize. When I first heard from TED and Chris a few months ago about the possibility of the Prize, I was completely floored. They asked me to come up with a very brief wish for humanity, no more than 50 words. So I thought about it, I wrote my 50 words, and a few weeks later, Chris called and said, "Go for it." So here is my wish: that you will help us take everything we've learned through StoryCorps and bring it to the world so that anyone anywhere can easily record a meaningful interview with another human being which will then be archived for history. How are we going to do that? With this. We're fast moving into a future where everyone in the world will have access to one of these, and it has powers I never could have imagined 11 years ago when I started StoryCorps. It has a microphone, it can tell you how to do things, and it can send audio files. Those are the key ingredients. So the first part of the wish is already underway. Over the past couple of months, the team at StoryCorps has been working furiously to create an app that will bring StoryCorps out of our booths so that it can be experienced by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Remember, StoryCorps has always been two people and a facilitator helping them record their conversation, which is preserved forever, but at this very moment, we're releasing a public beta version of the StoryCorps app. The app is a digital facilitator that walks you through the StoryCorps interview process, helps you pick questions, and gives you all the tips you need to record a meaningful StoryCorps interview, and then with one tap upload it to our archive at the Library of Congress. That's the easy part, the technology. The real challenge is up to you: to take this tool and figure out how we can use it all across America and around the world, so that instead of recording thousands of StoryCorps interviews a year, we could potentially record tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or maybe even more. Imagine, for example, a national homework assignment where every high school student studying U.S. history across the country records an interview with an elder over Thanksgiving, so that in one single weekend an entire generation of American lives and experiences are captured. (Applause) Or imagine mothers on opposite sides of a conflict somewhere in the world sitting down not to talk about that conflict but to find out who they are as people, and in doing so, begin to build bonds of trust; or that someday it becomes a tradition all over the world that people are honored with a StoryCorps interview on their 75th birthday; or that people in your community go into retirement homes or hospitals or homeless shelters or even prisons armed with this app to honor the people least heard in our society and ask them who they are, what they've learned in life, and how they want to be remembered. (Applause) Ten years ago, I recorded a StoryCorps interview with my dad who was a psychiatrist, and became a well-known gay activist. This is the picture of us at that interview. I never thought about that recording until a couple of years ago, when my dad, who seemed to be in perfect health and was still seeing patients 40 hours a week, was diagnosed with cancer. He passed away very suddenly a few days later. It was June 28, 2012, the anniversary of the Stonewall riots. I listened to that interview for the first time at three in the morning on the day that he died. I have a couple of young kids at home, and I knew that the only way they were going to get to know this person who was such a towering figure in my life would be through that session. I thought I couldn't believe in StoryCorps any more deeply than I did, but it was at that moment that I fully and viscerally grasped the importance of making these recordings. Every day, people come up to me and say, "I wish I had interviewed my father or my grandmother or my brother, but I waited too long." Now, no one has to wait anymore. At this moment, when so much of how we communicate is fleeting and inconsequential, join us in creating this digital archive of conversations that are enduring and important. Help us create this gift to our children, this testament to who we are as human beings. I hope you'll help us make this wish come true. Interview a family member, a friend or even a stranger. Together, we can create an archive of the wisdom of humanity, and maybe in doing so, we'll learn to listen a little more and shout a little less. Maybe these conversations will remind us what's really important. And maybe, just maybe, it will help us recognize that simple truth that every life, every single life, matters equally and infinitely. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How to revive a neighborhood: with imagination, beauty and art | {0: 'Theaster Gates is a potter whose ambitions stretch far beyond the wheel and the kiln. In Chicago, his leadership of artist-led spaces has catalyzed interest and excitement in a formerly neglected neighborhood, as he uses culture as a transformational weapon. '} | TED2015 | I'm a potter, which seems like a fairly humble vocation. I know a lot about pots. I've spent about 15 years making them. One of the things that really excites me in my artistic practice and being trained as a potter is that you very quickly learn how to make great things out of nothing; that I spent a lot of time at my wheel with mounds of clay trying stuff; and that the limitations of my capacity, my ability, was based on my hands and my imagination; that if I wanted to make a really nice bowl and I didn't know how to make a foot yet, I would have to learn how to make a foot; that that process of learning has been very, very helpful to my life. I feel like, as a potter, you also start to learn how to shape the world. There have been times in my artistic capacity that I wanted to reflect on other really important moments in the history of the U.S., the history of the world where tough things happened, but how do you talk about tough ideas without separating people from that content? Could I use art like these old, discontinued firehoses from Alabama, to talk about the complexities of a moment of civil rights in the '60s? Is it possible to talk about my father and I doing labor projects? My dad was a roofer, construction guy, he owned small businesses, and at 80, he was ready to retire and his tar kettle was my inheritance. Now, a tar kettle doesn't sound like much of an inheritance. It wasn't. It was stinky and it took up a lot of space in my studio, but I asked my dad if he would be willing to make some art with me, if we could reimagine this kind of nothing material as something very special. And by elevating the material and my dad's skill, could we start to think about tar just like clay, in a new way, shaping it differently, helping us to imagine what was possible? After clay, I was then kind of turned on to lots of different kinds of materials, and my studio grew a lot because I thought, well, it's not really about the material, it's about our capacity to shape things. I became more and more interested in ideas and more and more things that were happening just outside my studio. Just to give you a little bit of context, I live in Chicago. I live on the South Side now. I'm a West Sider. For those of you who are not Chicagoans, that won't mean anything, but if I didn't mention that I was a West Sider, there would be a lot of people in the city that would be very upset. The neighborhood that I live in is Grand Crossing. It's a neighborhood that has seen better days. It is not a gated community by far. There is lots of abandonment in my neighborhood, and while I was kind of busy making pots and busy making art and having a good art career, there was all of this stuff that was happening just outside my studio. All of us know about failing housing markets and the challenges of blight, and I feel like we talk about it with some of our cities more than others, but I think a lot of our U.S. cities and beyond have the challenge of blight, abandoned buildings that people no longer know what to do anything with. And so I thought, is there a way that I could start to think about these buildings as an extension or an expansion of my artistic practice? And that if I was thinking along with other creatives — architects, engineers, real estate finance people — that us together might be able to kind of think in more complicated ways about the reshaping of cities. And so I bought a building. The building was really affordable. We tricked it out. We made it as beautiful as we could to try to just get some activity happening on my block. Once I bought the building for about 18,000 dollars, I didn't have any money left. So I started sweeping the building as a kind of performance. This is performance art, and people would come over, and I would start sweeping. Because the broom was free and sweeping was free. It worked out. (Laughter) But we would use the building, then, to stage exhibitions, small dinners, and we found that that building on my block, Dorchester — we now referred to the block as Dorchester projects — that in a way that building became a kind of gathering site for lots of different kinds of activity. We turned the building into what we called now the Archive House. The Archive House would do all of these amazing things. Very significant people in the city and beyond would find themselves in the middle of the hood. And that's when I felt like maybe there was a relationship between my history with clay and this new thing that was starting to develop, that we were slowly starting to reshape how people imagined the South Side of the city. One house turned into a few houses, and we always tried to suggest that not only is creating a beautiful vessel important, but the contents of what happens in those buildings is also very important. So we were not only thinking about development, but we were thinking about the program, thinking about the kind of connections that could happen between one house and another, between one neighbor and another. This building became what we call the Listening House, and it has a collection of discarded books from the Johnson Publishing Corporation, and other books from an old bookstore that was going out of business. I was actually just wanting to activate these buildings as much as I could with whatever and whoever would join me. In Chicago, there's amazing building stock. This building, which had been the former crack house on the block, and when the building became abandoned, it became a great opportunity to really imagine what else could happen there. So this space we converted into what we call Black Cinema House. Black Cinema House was an opportunity in the hood to screen films that were important and relevant to the folk who lived around me, that if we wanted to show an old Melvin Van Peebles film, we could. If we wanted to show "Car Wash," we could. That would be awesome. The building we soon outgrew, and we had to move to a larger space. Black Cinema House, which was made from just a small piece of clay, had to grow into a much larger piece of clay, which is now my studio. What I realized was that for those of you who are zoning junkies, that some of the things that I was doing in these buildings that had been left behind, they were not the uses by which the buildings were built, and that there are city policies that say, "Hey, a house that is residential needs to stay residential." But what do you do in neighborhoods when ain't nobody interested in living there? That the people who have the means to leave have already left? What do we do with these abandoned buildings? And so I was trying to wake them up using culture. We found that that was so exciting for folk, and people were so responsive to the work, that we had to then find bigger buildings. By the time we found bigger buildings, there was, in part, the resources necessary to think about those things. In this bank that we called the Arts Bank, it was in pretty bad shape. There was about six feet of standing water. It was a difficult project to finance, because banks weren't interested in the neighborhood because people weren't interested in the neighborhood because nothing had happened there. It was dirt. It was nothing. It was nowhere. And so we just started imagining, what else could happen in this building? (Applause) And so now that the rumor of my block has spread, and lots of people are starting to visit, we've found that the bank can now be a center for exhibition, archives, music performance, and that there are people who are now interested in being adjacent to those buildings because we brought some heat, that we kind of made a fire. One of the archives that we'll have there is this Johnson Publishing Corporation. We've also started to collect memorabilia from American history, from people who live or have lived in that neighborhood. Some of these images are degraded images of black people, kind of histories of very challenging content, and where better than a neighborhood with young people who are constantly asking themselves about their identity to talk about some of the complexities of race and class? In some ways, the bank represents a hub, that we're trying to create a pretty hardcore node of cultural activity, and that if we could start to make multiple hubs and connect some cool green stuff around there, that the buildings that we've purchased and rehabbed, which is now around 60 or 70 units, that if we could land miniature Versailles on top of that, and connect these buildings by a beautiful greenbelt — (Applause) — that this place where people never wanted to be would become an important destination for folk from all over the country and world. In some ways, it feels very much like I'm a potter, that we tackle the things that are at our wheel, we try with the skill that we have to think about this next bowl that I want to make. And it went from a bowl to a singular house to a block to a neighborhood to a cultural district to thinking about the city, and at every point, there were things that I didn't know that I had to learn. I've never learned so much about zoning law in my life. I never thought I'd have to. But as a result of that, I'm finding that there's not just room for my own artistic practice, there's room for a lot of other artistic practices. So people started asking us, "Well, Theaster, how are you going to go to scale?" and, "What's your sustainability plan?" (Laughter) (Applause) And what I found was that I couldn't export myself, that what seems necessary in cities like Akron, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana, is that there are people in those places who already believe in those places, that are already dying to make those places beautiful, and that often, those people who are passionate about a place are disconnected from the resources necessary to make cool things happen, or disconnected from a contingency of people that could help make things happen. So now, we're starting to give advice around the country on how to start with what you got, how to start with the things that are in front of you, how to make something out of nothing, how to reshape your world at a wheel or at your block or at the scale of the city. Thank you so much. (Applause) June Cohen: Thank you. So I think many people watching this will be asking themselves the question you just raised at the end: How can they do this in their own city? You can't export yourself. Give us a few pages out of your playbook about what someone who is inspired about their city can do to take on projects like yours? Theaster Gates: One of the things I've found that's really important is giving thought to not just the kind of individual project, like an old house, but what's the relationship between an old house, a local school, a small bodega, and is there some kind of synergy between those things? Can you get those folk talking? I've found that in cases where neighborhoods have failed, they still often have a pulse. How do you identify the pulse in that place, the passionate people, and then how do you get folk who have been fighting, slogging for 20 years, reenergized about the place that they live? And so someone has to do that work. If I were a traditional developer, I would be talking about buildings alone, and then putting a "For Lease" sign in the window. I think that you actually have to curate more than that, that there's a way in which you have to be mindful about, what are the businesses that I want to grow here? And then, are there people who live in this place who want to grow those businesses with me? Because I think it's not just a cultural space or housing; there has to be the recreation of an economic core. So thinking about those things together feels right. JC: It's hard to get people to create the spark again when people have been slogging for 20 years. Are there any methods you've found that have helped break through? TG: Yeah, I think that now there are lots of examples of folk who are doing amazing work, but those methods are sometimes like, when the media is constantly saying that only violent things happen in a place, then based on your skill set and the particular context, what are the things that you can do in your neighborhood to kind of fight some of that? So I've found that if you're a theater person, you have outdoor street theater festivals. In some cases, we don't have the resources in certain neighborhoods to do things that are a certain kind of splashy, but if we can then find ways of making sure that people who are local to a place, plus people who could be supportive of the things that are happening locally, when those people get together, I think really amazing things can happen. JC: So interesting. And how can you make sure that the projects you're creating are actually for the disadvantaged and not just for the sort of vegetarian indie movie crowd that might move in to take advantage of them. TG: Right on. So I think this is where it starts to get into the thick weeds. JC: Let's go there. TG: Right now, Grand Crossing is 99 percent black, or at least living, and we know that maybe who owns property in a place is different from who walks the streets every day. So it's reasonable to say that Grand Crossing is already in the process of being something different than it is today. But are there ways to think about housing trusts or land trusts or a mission-based development that starts to protect some of the space that happens, because when you have 7,500 empty lots in a city, you want something to happen there, but you need entities that are not just interested in the development piece, but entities that are interested in the stabilization piece, and I feel like often the developer piece is really motivated, but the other work of a kind of neighborhood consciousness, that part doesn't live anymore. So how do you start to grow up important watchdogs that ensure that the resources that are made available to new folk that are coming in are also distributed to folk who have lived in a place for a long time. JC: That makes so much sense. One more question: You make such a compelling case for beauty and the importance of beauty and the arts. There would be others who would argue that funds would be better spent on basic services for the disadvantaged. How do you combat that viewpoint, or come against it? TG: I believe that beauty is a basic service. (Applause) Often what I have found is that when there are resources that have not been made available to certain under-resourced cities or neighborhoods or communities, that sometimes culture is the thing that helps to ignite, and that I can't do everything, but I think that there's a way in which if you can start with culture and get people kind of reinvested in their place, other kinds of adjacent amenities start to grow, and then people can make a demand that's a poetic demand, and the political demands that are necessary to wake up our cities, they also become very poetic. JC: It makes perfect sense to me. Theaster, thank you so much for being here with us today. Thank you. Theaster Gates. (Applause) |
Why do ambitious women have flat heads? | {0: 'In 1962, Dame Stephanie "Steve" Shirley founded Freelance Programmers, a software firm with innovative work practices -- and (mainly) women employees.'} | TED2015 | When I wrote my memoir, the publishers were really confused. Was it about me as a child refugee, or as a woman who set up a high-tech software company back in the 1960s, one that went public and eventually employed over 8,500 people? Or was it as a mother of an autistic child? Or as a philanthropist that's now given away serious money? Well, it turns out, I'm all of these. So let me tell you my story. All that I am stems from when I got onto a train in Vienna, part of the Kindertransport that saved nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Europe. I was five years old, clutching the hand of my nine-year-old sister and had very little idea as to what was going on. "What is England and why am I going there?" I'm only alive because so long ago, I was helped by generous strangers. I was lucky, and doubly lucky to be later reunited with my birth parents. But, sadly, I never bonded with them again. But I've done more in the seven decades since that miserable day when my mother put me on the train than I would ever have dreamed possible. And I love England, my adopted country, with a passion that perhaps only someone who has lost their human rights can feel. I decided to make mine a life that was worth saving. And then, I just got on with it. (Laughter) Let me take you back to the early 1960s. To get past the gender issues of the time, I set up my own software house at one of the first such startups in Britain. But it was also a company of women, a company for women, an early social business. And people laughed at the very idea because software, at that time, was given away free with hardware. Nobody would buy software, certainly not from a woman. Although women were then coming out of the universities with decent degrees, there was a glass ceiling to our progress. And I'd hit that glass ceiling too often, and I wanted opportunities for women. I recruited professionally qualified women who'd left the industry on marriage, or when their first child was expected and structured them into a home-working organization. We pioneered the concept of women going back into the workforce after a career break. We pioneered all sorts of new, flexible work methods: job shares, profit-sharing, and eventually, co-ownership when I took a quarter of the company into the hands of the staff at no cost to anyone but me. For years, I was the first woman this, or the only woman that. And in those days, I couldn't work on the stock exchange, I couldn't drive a bus or fly an airplane. Indeed, I couldn't open a bank account without my husband's permission. My generation of women fought the battles for the right to work and the right for equal pay. Nobody really expected much from people at work or in society because all the expectations then were about home and family responsibilities. And I couldn't really face that, so I started to challenge the conventions of the time, even to the extent of changing my name from "Stephanie" to "Steve" in my business development letters, so as to get through the door before anyone realized that he was a she. (Laughter) My company, called Freelance Programmers, and that's precisely what it was, couldn't have started smaller: on the dining room table, and financed by the equivalent of 100 dollars in today's terms, and financed by my labor and by borrowing against the house. My interests were scientific, the market was commercial — things such as payroll, which I found rather boring. So I had to compromise with operational research work, which had the intellectual challenge that interested me and the commercial value that was valued by the clients: things like scheduling freight trains, time-tabling buses, stock control, lots and lots of stock control. And eventually, the work came in. We disguised the domestic and part-time nature of the staff by offering fixed prices, one of the very first to do so. And who would have guessed that the programming of the black box flight recorder of Supersonic Concord would have been done by a bunch of women working in their own homes. (Applause) All we used was a simple "trust the staff" approach and a simple telephone. We even used to ask job applicants, "Do you have access to a telephone?" An early project was to develop software standards on management control protocols. And software was and still is a maddeningly hard-to-control activity, so that was enormously valuable. We used the standards ourselves, we were even paid to update them over the years, and eventually, they were adopted by NATO. Our programmers — remember, only women, including gay and transgender — worked with pencil and paper to develop flowcharts defining each task to be done. And they then wrote code, usually machine code, sometimes binary code, which was then sent by mail to a data center to be punched onto paper tape or card and then re-punched, in order to verify it. All this, before it ever got near a computer. That was programming in the early 1960s. In 1975, 13 years from startup, equal opportunity legislation came in in Britain and that made it illegal to have our pro-female policies. And as an example of unintended consequences, my female company had to let the men in. (Laughter) When I started my company of women, the men said, "How interesting, because it only works because it's small." And later, as it became sizable, they accepted, "Yes, it is sizable now, but of no strategic interest." And later, when it was a company valued at over three billion dollars, and I'd made 70 of the staff into millionaires, they sort of said, "Well done, Steve!" (Laughter) (Applause) You can always tell ambitious women by the shape of our heads: They're flat on top for being patted patronizingly. (Laughter) (Applause) And we have larger feet to stand away from the kitchen sink. (Laughter) Let me share with you two secrets of success: Surround yourself with first-class people and people that you like; and choose your partner very, very carefully. Because the other day when I said, "My husband's an angel," a woman complained — "You're lucky," she said, "mine's still alive." (Laughter) If success were easy, we'd all be millionaires. But in my case, it came in the midst of family trauma and indeed, crisis. Our late son, Giles, was an only child, a beautiful, contented baby. And then, at two and a half, like a changeling in a fairy story, he lost the little speech that he had and turned into a wild, unmanageable toddler. Not the terrible twos; he was profoundly autistic and he never spoke again. Giles was the first resident in the first house of the first charity that I set up to pioneer services for autism. And then there's been a groundbreaking Prior's Court school for pupils with autism and a medical research charity, again, all for autism. Because whenever I found a gap in services, I tried to help. I like doing new things and making new things happen. And I've just started a three-year think tank for autism. And so that some of my wealth does go back to the industry from which it stems, I've also founded the Oxford Internet Institute and other IT ventures. The Oxford Internet Institute focuses not on the technology, but on the social, economic, legal and ethical issues of the Internet. Giles died unexpectedly 17 years ago now. And I have learned to live without him, and I have learned to live without his need of me. Philanthropy is all that I do now. I need never worry about getting lost because several charities would quickly come and find me. (Laughter) It's one thing to have an idea for an enterprise, but as many people in this room will know, making it happen is a very difficult thing and it demands extraordinary energy, self-belief and determination, the courage to risk family and home, and a 24/7 commitment that borders on the obsessive. So it's just as well that I'm a workaholic. I believe in the beauty of work when we do it properly and in humility. Work is not just something I do when I'd rather be doing something else. We live our lives forward. So what has all that taught me? I learned that tomorrow's never going to be like today, and certainly nothing like yesterday. And that made me able to cope with change, indeed, eventually to welcome change, though I'm told I'm still very difficult. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
There’s a better way to die, and architecture can help | {0: 'An architect and urban designer, Alison Killing uses journalism, filmmaking and exhibitions to help people better understand the built environment.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | I'd like to tell you a story about death and architecture. A hundred years ago, we tended to die of infectious diseases like pneumonia, that, if they took hold, would take us away quite quickly. We tended to die at home, in our own beds, looked after by family, although that was the default option because a lot of people lacked access to medical care. And then in the 20th century a lot of things changed. We developed new medicines like penicillin so we could treat those infectious diseases. New medical technologies like x-ray machines were invented. And because they were so big and expensive, we needed large, centralized buildings to keep them in, and they became our modern hospitals. After the Second World War, a lot of countries set up universal healthcare systems so that everyone who needed treatment could get it. The result was that lifespans extended from about 45 at the start of the century to almost double that today. The 20th century was this time of huge optimism about what science could offer, but with all of the focus on life, death was forgotten, even as our approach to death changed dramatically. Now, I'm an architect, and for the past year and a half I've been looking at these changes and at what they mean for architecture related to death and dying. We now tend to die of cancer and heart disease, and what that means is that many of us will have a long period of chronic illness at the end of our lives. During that period, we'll likely spend a lot of time in hospitals and hospices and care homes. Now, we've all been in a modern hospital. You know those fluorescent lights and the endless corridors and those rows of uncomfortable chairs. Hospital architecture has earned its bad reputation. But the surprising thing is, it wasn't always like this. This is L'Ospedale degli Innocenti, built in 1419 by Brunelleschi, who was one of the most famous and influential architects of his time. And when I look at this building and then think about hospitals today, what amazes me is this building's ambition. It's just a really great building. It has these courtyards in the middle so that all of the rooms have daylight and fresh air, and the rooms are big and they have high ceilings, so they just feel more comfortable to be in. And it's also beautiful. Somehow, we've forgotten that that's even possible for a hospital. Now, if we want better buildings for dying, then we have to talk about it, but because we find the subject of death uncomfortable, we don't talk about it, and we don't question how we as a society approach death. One of the things that surprised me most in my research, though, is how changeable attitudes actually are. This is the first crematorium in the U.K., which was built in Woking in the 1870s. And when this was first built, there were protests in the local village. Cremation wasn't socially acceptable, and 99.8 percent of people got buried. And yet, only a hundred years later, three quarters of us get cremated. People are actually really open to changing things if they're given the chance to talk about them. So this conversation about death and architecture was what I wanted to start when I did my first exhibition on it in Venice in June, which was called "Death in Venice." It was designed to be quite playful so that people would literally engage with it. This is one of our exhibits, which is an interactive map of London that shows just how much of the real estate in the city is given over to death and dying, and as you wave your hand across the map, the name of that piece of real estate, the building or cemetery, is revealed. Another of our exhibits was a series of postcards that people could take away with them. And they showed people's homes and hospitals and cemeteries and mortuaries, and they tell the story of the different spaces that we pass through on either side of death. We wanted to show that where we die is a key part of how we die. Now, the strangest thing was the way that visitors reacted to the exhibition, especially the audio-visual works. We had people dancing and running and jumping as they tried to activate the exhibits in different ways, and at a certain point they would kind of stop and remember that they were in an exhibition about death, and that maybe that's not how you're supposed to act. But actually, I would question whether there is one way that you're supposed to act around death, and if there's not, I'd ask you to think about what you think a good death is, and what you think that architecture that supports a good death might be like, and mightn't it be a little less like this and a little more like this? Thank you. (Applause) |
How I use sonar to navigate the world | {0: 'Daniel Kish expands the perceptual toolbox of both blind and sighted humans by teaching echolocation -- the ability to observe our surroundings via sound.'} | TED2015 | (Clicking) I was born with bilateral retinoblastoma, retinal cancer. My right eye was removed at seven months of age. I was 13 months when they removed my left eye. The first thing I did upon awakening from that last surgery was to climb out of my crib and begin wandering around the intensive care nursery, probably looking for the one who did this to me. (Laughter) Evidently, wandering around the nursery was not a problem for me without eyes. The problem was getting caught. It's impressions about blindness that are far more threatening to blind people than the blindness itself. Think for a moment about your own impressions of blindness. Think about your reactions when I first came onto the stage, or the prospect of your own blindness, or a loved one going blind. The terror is incomprehensible to most of us, because blindness is thought to epitomize ignorance and unawareness, hapless exposure to the ravages of the dark unknown. How poetic. Fortunately for me, my parents were not poetic. They were pragmatic. They understood that ignorance and fear were but matters of the mind, and the mind is adaptable. They believed that I should grow up to enjoy the same freedoms and responsibilities as everyone else. In their own words, I would move out — which I did when I was 18 — I will pay taxes — thanks — (Laughter) — and they knew the difference between love and fear. Fear immobilizes us in the face of challenge. They knew that blindness would pose a significant challenge. I was not raised with fear. They put my freedom first before all else, because that is what love does. Now, moving forward, how do I manage today? The world is a much larger nursery. Fortunately, I have my trusty long cane, longer than the canes used by most blind people. I call it my freedom staff. It will keep me, for example, from making an undignified departure from the stage. (Laughter) I do see that cliff edge. They warned us earlier that every imaginable mishap has occurred to speakers up here on the stage. I don't care to set a new precedent. But beyond that, many of you may have heard me clicking as I came onto the stage — (Clicking) — with my tongue. Those are flashes of sound that go out and reflect from surfaces all around me, just like a bat's sonar, and return to me with patterns, with pieces of information, much as light does for you. And my brain, thanks to my parents, has been activated to form images in my visual cortex, which we now call the imaging system, from those patterns of information, much as your brain does. I call this process flash sonar. It is how I have learned to see through my blindness, to navigate my journey through the dark unknowns of my own challenges, which has earned me the moniker "the remarkable Batman." Now, Batman I will accept. Bats are cool. Batman is cool. But I was not raised to think of myself as in any way remarkable. I have always regarded myself much like anyone else who navigates the dark unknowns of their own challenges. Is that so remarkable? I do not use my eyes, I use my brain. Now, someone, somewhere, must think that's remarkable, or I wouldn't be up here, but let's consider this for a moment. Everyone out there who faces or who has ever faced a challenge, raise your hands. Whoosh. Okay. Lots of hands going up, a moment, let me do a head count. (Clicking) This will take a while. (Clicking) (Laughter) Okay, lots of hands in the air. Keep them up. I have an idea. Those of you who use your brains to navigate these challenges, put your hands down. Okay, anyone with your hands still up has challenges of your own. (Laughter) So we all face challenges, and we all face the dark unknown, which is endemic to most challenges, which is what most of us fear, okay? But we all have brains that allow us, that activate to allow us to navigate the journey through these challenges. Okay? Case in point: I came up here and — (Clicking) — they wouldn't tell me where the lectern was. So you can't trust those TED folks. "Find it yourself," they said. So — (Laughter) And the feedback for the P.A. system is no help at all. So now I present to you a challenge. So if you'd all close your eyes for just a moment, okay? And you're going to learn a bit of flash sonar. I'm going to make a sound. I'm going to hold this panel in front of me, but I'm not going to move it. Just listen to the sound for a moment. Shhhhhhhhhh. Okay, nothing very interesting. Now, listen to what happens to that same exact sound when I move the panel. Shhhhhhhhhhh. (Pitch getting higher and lower) You do not know the power of the dark side. (Laughter) I couldn't resist. Okay, now keep your eyes closed because, did you hear the difference? Okay. Now, let's be sure. For your challenge, you tell me, just say "now" when you hear the panel start to move. Okay? We'll relax into this. Shhhhhhh. Audience: Now. Daniel Kish: Good. Excellent. Open your eyes. All right. So just a few centimeters, you would notice the difference. You've experienced sonar. You'd all make great blind people. (Laughter) Let's have a look at what can happen when this activation process is given some time and attention. (Video) Juan Ruiz: It's like you guys can see with your eyes and we can see with our ears. Brian Bushway: It's not a matter of enjoying it more or less, it's about enjoying it differently. Shawn Marsolais: It goes across. DK: Yeah. SM: And then it's gradually coming back down again. DK: Yes! SM: That's amazing. I can, like, see the car. Holy mother! J. Louchart: I love being blind. If I had the opportunity, honestly, I wouldn't go back to being sighted. JR: The bigger the goal, the more obstacles you'll face, and on the other side of that goal is victory. [In Italian] (Applause) DK: Now, do these people look terrified? Not so much. We have delivered activation training to tens of thousands of blind and sighted people from all backgrounds in nearly 40 countries. When blind people learn to see, sighted people seem inspired to want to learn to see their way better, more clearly, with less fear, because this exemplifies the immense capacity within us all to navigate any type of challenge, through any form of darkness, to discoveries unimagined when we are activated. I wish you all a most activating journey. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Daniel, my friend. As I know you can see, it's a spectacular standing ovation at TED. Thank you for an extraordinary talk. Just one more question about your world, your inner world that you construct. We think that we have things in our world that you as a blind person don't have, but what's your world like? What do you have that we don't have? DK: Three hundred and sixty-degree view, so my sonar works about as well behind me as it does in front of me. It works around corners. It works through surfaces. Generally, it's kind of a fuzzy three-dimensional geometry. One of my students, who has now become an instructor, when he lost his vision, after a few months he was sitting in his three story house and he realized that he could hear everything going on throughout the house: conversations, people in the kitchen, people in the bathroom, several floors away, several walls away. He said it was something like having x-ray vision. CA: What do you picture that you're in right now? How do you picture this theater? DK: Lots of loudspeakers, quite frankly. It's interesting. When people make a sound, when they laugh, when they fidget, when they take a drink or blow their nose or whatever, I hear everything. I hear every little movement that every single person makes. None of it really escapes my attention, and then, from a sonar perspective, the size of the room, the curvature of the audience around the stage, it's the height of the room. Like I say, it's all that kind of three-dimensional surface geometry all around me. CA: Well, Daniel, you have done a spectacular job of helping us all see the world in a different way. Thanks so much for that, truly. DK: Thank you. (Applause) |
Are China and the US doomed to conflict? | {0: 'While studying future alternatives for China’s global relations, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has come to an ominous conclusion: conflict is looming.'} | TED2015 | G'day, my name's Kevin. I'm from Australia. I'm here to help. (Laughter) Tonight, I want to talk about a tale of two cities. One of those cities is called Washington, and the other is called Beijing. Because how these two capitals shape their future and the future of the United States and the future of China doesn't just affect those two countries, it affects all of us in ways, perhaps, we've never thought of: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the fish we eat, the quality of our oceans, the languages we speak in the future, the jobs we have, the political systems we choose, and, of course, the great questions of war and peace. You see that bloke? He's French. His name is Napoleon. A couple of hundred years ago, he made this extraordinary projection: "China is a sleeping lion, and when she awakes, the world will shake." Napoleon got a few things wrong; he got this one absolutely right. Because China is today not just woken up, China has stood up and China is on the march, and the question for us all is where will China go and how do we engage this giant of the 21st century? You start looking at the numbers, they start to confront you in a big way. It's projected that China will become, by whichever measure — PPP, market exchange rates — the largest economy in the world over the course of the decade ahead. They're already the largest trading nation, already the largest exporting nation, already the largest manufacturing nation, and they're also the biggest emitters of carbon in the world. America comes second. So if China does become the world's largest economy, think about this: It'll be the first time since this guy was on the throne of England — George III, not a good friend of Napoleon's — that in the world we will have as the largest economy a non-English speaking country, a non-Western country, a non-liberal democratic country. And if you don't think that's going to affect the way in which the world happens in the future, then personally, I think you've been smoking something, and it doesn't mean you're from Colorado. So in short, the question we have tonight is, how do we understand this mega-change, which I believe to be the biggest change for the first half of the 21st century? It'll affect so many things. It will go to the absolute core. It's happening quietly. It's happening persistently. It's happening in some senses under the radar, as we are all preoccupied with what's going in Ukraine, what's going on in the Middle East, what's going on with ISIS, what's going on with ISIL, what's happening with the future of our economies. This is a slow and quiet revolution. And with a mega-change comes also a mega-challenge, and the mega-challenge is this: Can these two great countries, China and the United States — China, the Middle Kingdom, and the United States, Měiguó — which in Chinese, by the way, means "the beautiful country." Think about that — that's the name that China has given this country for more than a hundred years. Whether these two great civilizations, these two great countries, can in fact carve out a common future for themselves and for the world? In short, can we carve out a future which is peaceful and mutually prosperous, or are we looking at a great challenge of war or peace? And I have 15 minutes to work through war or peace, which is a little less time than they gave this guy to write a book called "War and Peace." People ask me, why is it that a kid growing up in rural Australia got interested in learning Chinese? Well, there are two reasons for that. Here's the first of them. That's Betsy the cow. Now, Betsy the cow was one of a herd of dairy cattle that I grew up with on a farm in rural Australia. See those hands there? These are not built for farming. So very early on, I discovered that in fact, working in a farm was not designed for me, and China was a very safe remove from any career in Australian farm life. Here's the second reason. That's my mom. Anyone here ever listen to what their mom told them to do? Everyone ever do what their mom told them to do? I rarely did, but what my mom said to me was, one day, she handed me a newspaper, a headline which said, here we have a huge change. And that change is China entering the United Nations. 1971, I had just turned 14 years of age, and she handed me this headline. And she said, "Understand this, learn this, because it's going to affect your future." So being a very good student of history, I decided that the best thing for me to do was, in fact, to go off and learn Chinese. The great thing about learning Chinese is that your Chinese teacher gives you a new name. And so they gave me this name: Kè, which means to overcome or to conquer, and Wén, and that's the character for literature or the arts. Kè Wén, Conqueror of the Classics. Any of you guys called "Kevin"? It's a major lift from being called Kevin to be called Conqueror of the Classics. (Laughter) I've been called Kevin all my life. Have you been called Kevin all your life? Would you prefer to be called Conqueror of the Classics? And so I went off after that and joined the Australian Foreign Service, but here is where pride — before pride, there always comes a fall. So there I am in the embassy in Beijing, off to the Great Hall of the People with our ambassador, who had asked me to interpret for his first meeting in the Great Hall of the People. And so there was I. If you've been to a Chinese meeting, it's a giant horseshoe. At the head of the horsehoe are the really serious pooh-bahs, and down the end of the horseshoe are the not-so-serious pooh-bahs, the junior woodchucks like me. And so the ambassador began with this inelegant phrase. He said, "China and Australia are currently enjoying a relationship of unprecedented closeness." And I thought to myself, "That sounds clumsy. That sounds odd. I will improve it." Note to file: Never do that. It needed to be a little more elegant, a little more classical, so I rendered it as follows. [In Chinese] There was a big pause on the other side of the room. You could see the giant pooh-bahs at the head of the horseshoe, the blood visibly draining from their faces, and the junior woodchucks at the other end of the horseshoe engaged in peals of unrestrained laughter. Because when I rendered his sentence, "Australia and China are enjoying a relationship of unprecedented closeness," in fact, what I said was that Australia and China were now experiencing fantastic orgasm. (Laughter) That was the last time I was asked to interpret. But in that little story, there's a wisdom, which is, as soon as you think you know something about this extraordinary civilization of 5,000 years of continuing history, there's always something new to learn. History is against us when it comes to the U.S. and China forging a common future together. This guy up here? He's not Chinese and he's not American. He's Greek. His name's Thucydides. He wrote the history of the Peloponnesian Wars. And he made this extraordinary observation about Athens and Sparta. "It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable." And hence, a whole literature about something called the Thucydides Trap. This guy here? He's not American and he's not Greek. He's Chinese. His name is Sun Tzu. He wrote "The Art of War," and if you see his statement underneath, it's along these lines: "Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected." Not looking good so far for China and the United States. This guy is an American. His name's Graham Allison. In fact, he's a teacher at the Kennedy School over there in Boston. He's working on a single project at the moment, which is, does the Thucydides Trap about the inevitably of war between rising powers and established great powers apply to the future of China-U.S. relations? It's a core question. And what Graham has done is explore 15 cases in history since the 1500s to establish what the precedents are. And in 11 out of 15 of them, let me tell you, they've ended in catastrophic war. You may say, "But Kevin — or Conqueror of the Classics — that was the past. We live now in a world of interdependence and globalization. It could never happen again." Guess what? The economic historians tell us that in fact, the time which we reached the greatest point of economic integration and globalization was in 1914, just before that happened, World War I, a sobering reflection from history. So if we are engaged in this great question of how China thinks, feels, and positions itself towards the United States, and the reverse, how do we get to the baseline of how these two countries and civilizations can possibly work together? Let me first go to, in fact, China's views of the U.S. and the rest of the West. Number one: China feels as if it's been humiliated at the hands of the West through a hundred years of history, beginning with the Opium Wars. When after that, the Western powers carved China up into little pieces, so that by the time it got to the '20s and '30s, signs like this one appeared on the streets of Shanghai. ["No dogs and Chinese allowed"] How would you feel if you were Chinese, in your own country, if you saw that sign appear? China also believes and feels as if, in the events of 1919, at the Peace Conference in Paris, when Germany's colonies were given back to all sorts of countries around in the world, what about German colonies in China? They were, in fact, given to Japan. When Japan then invaded China in the 1930s the world looked away and was indifferent to what would happen to China. And then, on top of that, the Chinese to this day believe that the United States and the West do not accept the legitimacy of their political system because it's so radically different from those of us who come from liberal democracies, and believe that the United States to this day is seeking to undermine their political system. China also believes that it is being contained by U.S. allies and by those with strategic partnerships with the U.S. right around its periphery. And beyond all that, the Chinese have this feeling in their heart of hearts and in their gut of guts that those of us in the collective West are just too damned arrogant. That is, we don't recognize the problems in our own system, in our politics and our economics, and are very quick to point the finger elsewhere, and believe that, in fact, we in the collective West are guilty of a great bunch of hypocrisy. Of course, in international relations, it's not just the sound of one hand clapping. There's another country too, and that's called the U.S. So how does the U.S. respond to all of the above? The U.S. has a response to each of those. On the question of is the U.S. containing China, they say, "No, look at the history of the Soviet Union. That was containment." Instead, what we have done in the U.S. and the West is welcome China into the global economy, and on top of that, welcome them into the World Trade Organization. The U.S. and the West say China cheats on the question of intellectual property rights, and through cyberattacks on U.S. and global firms. Furthermore, the United States says that the Chinese political system is fundamentally wrong because it's at such fundamental variance to the human rights, democracy, and rule of law that we enjoy in the U.S. and the collective West. And on top of all the above, what does the United States say? That they fear that China will, when it has sufficient power, establish a sphere of influence in Southeast Asia and wider East Asia, boot the United States out, and in time, when it's powerful enough, unilaterally seek to change the rules of the global order. So apart from all of that, it's just fine and dandy, the U.S.-China relationship. No real problems there. The challenge, though, is given those deep-rooted feelings, those deep-rooted emotions and thought patterns, what the Chinese call "Sīwéi," ways of thinking, how can we craft a basis for a common future between these two? I argue simply this: We can do it on the basis on a framework of constructive realism for a common purpose. What do I mean by that? Be realistic about the things that we disagree on, and a management approach that doesn't enable any one of those differences to break into war or conflict until we've acquired the diplomatic skills to solve them. Be constructive in areas of the bilateral, regional and global engagement between the two, which will make a difference for all of humankind. Build a regional institution capable of cooperation in Asia, an Asia-Pacific community. And worldwide, act further, like you've begun to do at the end of last year by striking out against climate change with hands joined together rather than fists apart. Of course, all that happens if you've got a common mechanism and political will to achieve the above. These things are deliverable. But the question is, are they deliverable alone? This is what our head tells us we need to do, but what about our heart? I have a little experience in the question back home of how you try to bring together two peoples who, frankly, haven't had a whole lot in common in the past. And that's when I apologized to Australia's indigenous peoples. This was a day of reckoning in the Australian government, the Australian parliament, and for the Australian people. After 200 years of unbridled abuse towards the first Australians, it was high time that we white folks said we were sorry. The important thing — (Applause) The important thing that I remember is staring in the faces of all those from Aboriginal Australia as they came to listen to this apology. It was extraordinary to see, for example, old women telling me the stories of when they were five years old and literally ripped away from their parents, like this lady here. It was extraordinary for me to then be able to embrace and to kiss Aboriginal elders as they came into the parliament building, and one woman said to me, it's the first time a white fella had ever kissed her in her life, and she was over 70. That's a terrible story. And then I remember this family saying to me, "You know, we drove all the way from the far North down to Canberra to come to this thing, drove our way through redneck country. On the way back, stopped at a cafe after the apology for a milkshake." And they walked into this cafe quietly, tentatively, gingerly, a little anxious. I think you know what I'm talking about. But the day after the apology, what happened? Everyone in that cafe, every one of the white folks, stood up and applauded. Something had happened in the hearts of these people in Australia. The white folks, our Aboriginal brothers and sisters, and we haven't solved all these problems together, but let me tell you, there was a new beginning because we had gone not just to the head, we'd gone also to the heart. So where does that conclude in terms of the great question that we've been asked to address this evening, which is the future of U.S.-China relations? The head says there's a way forward. The head says there is a policy framework, there's a common narrative, there's a mechanism through regular summitry to do these things and to make them better. But the heart must also find a way to reimagine the possibilities of the America-China relationship, and the possibilities of China's future engagement in the world. Sometimes, folks, we just need to take a leap of faith not quite knowing where we might land. In China, they now talk about the Chinese Dream. In America, we're all familiar with the term "the American Dream." I think it's time, across the world, that we're able to think also of something we might also call a dream for all humankind. Because if we do that, we might just change the way that we think about each other. [In Chinese] That's my challenge to America. That's my challenge to China. That's my challenge to all of us, but I think where there's a will and where there is imagination we can turn this into a future driven by peace and prosperity and not once again repeat the tragedies of war. I thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thanks so much for that. Thanks so much for that. It feels like you yourself have a role to play in this bridging. You, in a way, are uniquely placed to speak to both sides. Kevin Rudd: Well, what we Australians do best is organize the drinks, so you get them together in one room, and we suggest this and suggest that, then we go and get the drinks. But no, look, for all of us who are friends of these two great countries, America and China, you can do something. You can make a practical contribution, and for all you good folks here, next time you meet someone from China, sit down and have a conversation. See what you can find out about where they come from and what they think, and my challenge for all the Chinese folks who are going to watch this TED Talk at some time is do the same. Two of us seeking to change the world can actually make a huge difference. Those of us up the middle, we can make a small contribution. CA: Kevin, all power to you, my friend. Thank you. KR: Thank you. Thank you, folks. (Applause) |
The day I stood up alone | {0: 'Boniface Mwangi is an award-winning Kenyan photographer, artist and activist. He is a TED Fellow.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | People back home call me a heckler, a troublemaker, an irritant, a rebel, an activist, the voice of the people. But that wasn't always me. Growing up, I had a nickname. They used to call me Softy, meaning the soft, harmless boy. Like every other human being, I avoided trouble. In my childhood, they taught me silence. Don't argue, do as you're told. In Sunday school, they taught me don't confront, don't argue, even if you're right, turn the other cheek. This was reinforced by the political climate of the time. (Laughter) Kenya is a country where you are guilty until proven rich. (Laughter) Kenya's poor are five times more likely to be shot dead by the police who are meant to protect them than by criminals. This was reinforced by the political climate of the day. We had a president, Moi, who was a dictator. He ruled the country with an iron fist, and anyone who dared question his authority was arrested, tortured, jailed or even killed. That meant that people were taught to be smart cowards, stay out of trouble. Being a coward was not an insult. Being a coward was a compliment. We used to be told that a coward goes home to his mother. What that meant: that if you stayed out of trouble you're going to stay alive. I used to question this advice, and eight years ago we had an election in Kenya, and the results were violently disputed. What followed that election was terrible violence, rape, and the killing of over 1,000 people. My work was to document the violence. As a photographer, I took thousands of images, and after two months, the two politicians came together, had a cup of tea, signed a peace agreement, and the country moved on. I was a very disturbed man because I saw the violence firsthand. I saw the killings. I saw the displacement. I met women who had been raped, and it disturbed me, but the country never spoke about it. We pretended. We all became smart cowards. We decided to stay out of trouble and not talk about it. Ten months later, I quit my job. I said I could not stand it anymore. After quitting my job, I decided to organize my friends to speak about the violence in the country, to speak about the state of the nation, and June 1, 2009 was the day that we were meant to go to the stadium and try and get the president's attention. It's a national holiday, it's broadcast across the country, and I showed up at the stadium. My friends did not show up. I found myself alone, and I didn't know what to do. I was scared, but I knew very well that that particular day, I had to make a decision. Was I able to live as a coward, like everyone else, or was I going to make a stand? And when the president stood up to speak, I found myself on my feet shouting at the president, telling him to remember the post-election violence victims, to stop the corruption. And suddenly, out of nowhere, the police pounced on me like hungry lions. They held my mouth and dragged me out of the stadium, where they thoroughly beat me up and locked me up in jail. I spent that night in a cold cement floor in the jail, and that got me thinking. What was making me feel this way? My friends and family thought I was crazy because of what I did, and the images that I took were disturbing my life. The images that I took were just a number to many Kenyans. Most Kenyans did not see the violence. It was a story to them. And so I decided to actually start a street exhibition to show the images of the violence across the country and get people talking about it. We traveled the country and showed the images, and this was a journey that has started me to the activist path, where I decided to become silent no more, to talk about those things. We traveled, and our general site from our street exhibit became for political graffiti about the situation in the country, talking about corruption, bad leadership. We have even done symbolic burials. We have delivered live pigs to Kenya's parliament as a symbol of our politicians' greed. It has been done in Uganda and other countries, and what is most powerful is that the images have been picked by the media and amplified across the country, across the continent. Where I used to stand up alone seven years ago, now I belong to a community of many people who stand up with me. I am no longer alone when I stand up to speak about these things. I belong to a group of young people who are passionate about the country, who want to bring about change, and they're no longer afraid, and they're no longer smart cowards. So that was my story. That day in the stadium, I stood up as a smart coward. By that one action, I said goodbye to the 24 years living as a coward. There are two most powerful days in your life: the day you're born, and the day you discover why. That day standing up in that stadium shouting at the President, I discovered why I was truly born, that I would no longer be silent in the face of injustice. Do you know why you were born? Thank you. (Applause) Tom Rielly: It's an amazing story. I just want to ask you a couple quick questions. So PAWA254: you've created a studio, a place where young people can go and harness the power of digital media to do some of this action. What's happening now with PAWA? Boniface Mwangi: So we have this community of filmmakers, graffiti artists, musicians, and when there's an issue in the country, we come together, we brainstorm, and take up on that issue. So our most powerful tool is art, because we live in a very busy world where people are so busy in their life, and they don't have time to read. So we package our activism and we package our message in art. So from the music, the graffiti, the art, that's what we do. Can I say one more thing? TR: Yeah, of course. (Applause) BM: In spite of being arrested, beaten up, threatened, the moment I discovered my voice, that I could actually stand up for what I really believed in, I'm no longer afraid. I used to be called softy, but I'm no longer softy, because I discovered who I really am, as in, that's what I want to do, and there's such beauty in doing that. There's nothing as powerful as that, knowing that I'm meant to do this, because you don't get scared, you just continue living your life. Thank you. (Applause) |
The next outbreak? We're not ready | {0: "A passionate techie and a shrewd businessman, Bill Gates changed the world while leading Microsoft to dizzying success. Now he's doing it again with his own style of philanthropy and passion for innovation."} | TED2015 | When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war. That's why we had a barrel like this down in our basement, filled with cans of food and water. When the nuclear attack came, we were supposed to go downstairs, hunker down, and eat out of that barrel. Today the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn't look like this. Instead, it looks like this. If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes. Now, part of the reason for this is that we've invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents. But we've actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We're not ready for the next epidemic. Let's look at Ebola. I'm sure all of you read about it in the newspaper, lots of tough challenges. I followed it carefully through the case analysis tools we use to track polio eradication. And as you look at what went on, the problem wasn't that there was a system that didn't work well enough, the problem was that we didn't have a system at all. In fact, there's some pretty obvious key missing pieces. We didn't have a group of epidemiologists ready to go, who would have gone, seen what the disease was, seen how far it had spread. The case reports came in on paper. It was very delayed before they were put online and they were extremely inaccurate. We didn't have a medical team ready to go. We didn't have a way of preparing people. Now, Médecins Sans Frontières did a great job orchestrating volunteers. But even so, we were far slower than we should have been getting the thousands of workers into these countries. And a large epidemic would require us to have hundreds of thousands of workers. There was no one there to look at treatment approaches. No one to look at the diagnostics. No one to figure out what tools should be used. As an example, we could have taken the blood of survivors, processed it, and put that plasma back in people to protect them. But that was never tried. So there was a lot that was missing. And these things are really a global failure. The WHO is funded to monitor epidemics, but not to do these things I talked about. Now, in the movies it's quite different. There's a group of handsome epidemiologists ready to go, they move in, they save the day, but that's just pure Hollywood. The failure to prepare could allow the next epidemic to be dramatically more devastating than Ebola Let's look at the progression of Ebola over this year. About 10,000 people died, and nearly all were in the three West African countries. There's three reasons why it didn't spread more. The first is that there was a lot of heroic work by the health workers. They found the people and they prevented more infections. The second is the nature of the virus. Ebola does not spread through the air. And by the time you're contagious, most people are so sick that they're bedridden. Third, it didn't get into many urban areas. And that was just luck. If it had gotten into a lot more urban areas, the case numbers would have been much larger. So next time, we might not be so lucky. You can have a virus where people feel well enough while they're infectious that they get on a plane or they go to a market. The source of the virus could be a natural epidemic like Ebola, or it could be bioterrorism. So there are things that would literally make things a thousand times worse. In fact, let's look at a model of a virus spread through the air, like the Spanish Flu back in 1918. So here's what would happen: It would spread throughout the world very, very quickly. And you can see over 30 million people died from that epidemic. So this is a serious problem. We should be concerned. But in fact, we can build a really good response system. We have the benefits of all the science and technology that we talk about here. We've got cell phones to get information from the public and get information out to them. We have satellite maps where we can see where people are and where they're moving. We have advances in biology that should dramatically change the turnaround time to look at a pathogen and be able to make drugs and vaccines that fit for that pathogen. So we can have tools, but those tools need to be put into an overall global health system. And we need preparedness. The best lessons, I think, on how to get prepared are again, what we do for war. For soldiers, we have full-time, waiting to go. We have reserves that can scale us up to large numbers. NATO has a mobile unit that can deploy very rapidly. NATO does a lot of war games to check, are people well trained? Do they understand about fuel and logistics and the same radio frequencies? So they are absolutely ready to go. So those are the kinds of things we need to deal with an epidemic. What are the key pieces? First, we need strong health systems in poor countries. That's where mothers can give birth safely, kids can get all their vaccines. But, also where we'll see the outbreak very early on. We need a medical reserve corps: lots of people who've got the training and background who are ready to go, with the expertise. And then we need to pair those medical people with the military. taking advantage of the military's ability to move fast, do logistics and secure areas. We need to do simulations, germ games, not war games, so that we see where the holes are. The last time a germ game was done in the United States was back in 2001, and it didn't go so well. So far the score is germs: 1, people: 0. Finally, we need lots of advanced R&D in areas of vaccines and diagnostics. There are some big breakthroughs, like the Adeno-associated virus, that could work very, very quickly. Now I don't have an exact budget for what this would cost, but I'm quite sure it's very modest compared to the potential harm. The World Bank estimates that if we have a worldwide flu epidemic, global wealth will go down by over three trillion dollars and we'd have millions and millions of deaths. These investments offer significant benefits beyond just being ready for the epidemic. The primary healthcare, the R&D, those things would reduce global health equity and make the world more just as well as more safe. So I think this should absolutely be a priority. There's no need to panic. We don't have to hoard cans of spaghetti or go down into the basement. But we need to get going, because time is not on our side. In fact, if there's one positive thing that can come out of the Ebola epidemic, it's that it can serve as an early warning, a wake-up call, to get ready. If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic. Thank you. (Applause) |
5 ways to kill your dreams | {0: 'Bel Pesce left Brazil to study at MIT. But after a successful stint in Silicon Valley, she returned to inspire others with great ideas in her country to make them a reality.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | I dedicated the past two years to understanding how people achieve their dreams. When we think about the dreams we have, and the dent we want to leave in the universe, it is striking to see how big of an overlap there is between the dreams that we have, and projects that never happen. (Laughter) So I'm here to talk to you today about five ways how not to follow your dreams. One: Believe in overnight success. You know the story, right? The tech guy built a mobile app and sold it very fast for a lot of money. You know, the story may seem real, but I bet it's incomplete. If you go investigate further, the guy has done 30 apps before and he has done a master's on the topic, a PhD. He has been working on the topic for 20 years. This is really interesting. I myself have a story in Brazil that people think is an overnight success. I come from a humble family, and two weeks before the deadline to apply for MIT, I started the application process. And, voilà! I got in. People may think it's an overnight success, but that only worked because for the 17 years prior to that, I took life and education seriously. Your overnight success story is always a result of everything you've done in your life through that moment. Two: Believe someone else has the answers for you. Constantly, people want to help out, right? All sorts of people: your family, your friends, your business partners, they all have opinions on which path you should take: "And let me tell you, go through this pipe." But whenever you go inside, there are other ways you have to pick as well. And you need to make those decisions yourself. No one else has the perfect answers for your life. And you need to keep picking those decisions, right? The pipes are infinite and you're going to bump your head, and it's a part of the process. Three, and it's very subtle but very important: Decide to settle when growth is guaranteed. So when your life is going great, you have put together a great team, and you have growing revenue, and everything is set — time to settle. When I launched my first book, I worked really, really hard to distribute it everywhere in Brazil. With that, over three million people downloaded it, over 50,000 people bought physical copies. When I wrote a sequel, some impact was guaranteed. Even if I did little, sales would be OK. But OK is never OK. When you're growing towards a peak, you need to work harder than ever and find yourself another peak. Maybe if I did little, a couple hundred thousand people would read it, and that's great already. But if I work harder than ever, I can bring this number up to millions. That's why I decided, with my new book, to go to every single state of Brazil. And I can already see a higher peak. There's no time to settle down. Fourth tip, and that's really important: Believe the fault is someone else's. I constantly see people saying, "Yes, I had this great idea, but no investor had the vision to invest." "Oh, I created this great product, but the market is so bad, the sales didn't go well." Or, "I can't find good talent; my team is so below expectations." If you have dreams, it's your responsibility to make them happen. Yes, it may be hard to find talent. Yes, the market may be bad. But if no one invested in your idea, if no one bought your product, for sure, there is something there that is your fault. (Laughter) Definitely. You need to get your dreams and make them happen. And no one achieved their goals alone. But if you didn't make them happen, it's your fault and no one else's. Be responsible for your dreams. And one last tip, and this one is really important as well: Believe that the only things that matter are the dreams themselves. Once I saw an ad, and it was a lot of friends, they were going up a mountain, it was a very high mountain, and it was a lot of work. You could see that they were sweating and this was tough. And they were going up, and they finally made it to the peak. Of course, they decided to celebrate, right? I'm going to celebrate, so, "Yes! We made it, we're at the top!" Two seconds later, one looks at the other and says, "OK, let's go down." (Laughter) Life is never about the goals themselves. Life is about the journey. Yes, you should enjoy the goals themselves, but people think that you have dreams, and whenever you get to reaching one of those dreams, it's a magical place where happiness will be all around. But achieving a dream is a momentary sensation, and your life is not. The only way to really achieve all of your dreams is to fully enjoy every step of your journey. That's the best way. And your journey is simple — it's made of steps. Some steps will be right on. Sometimes you will trip. If it's right on, celebrate, because some people wait a lot to celebrate. And if you tripped, turn that into something to learn. If every step becomes something to learn or something to celebrate, you will for sure enjoy the journey. So, five tips: Believe in overnight success, believe someone else has the answers for you, believe that when growth is guaranteed, you should settle down, believe the fault is someone else's, and believe that only the goals themselves matter. Believe me, you do that, and you will destroy your dreams. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. Thanks. (Applause) |
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