title
stringlengths 6
88
| about_speakers
stringlengths 34
1.43k
⌀ | event
stringclasses 459
values | transcript
stringlengths 18
60.6k
|
|---|---|---|---|
Math is forever | {0: 'Eduardo Sáenz de Cabezón links science with humor and stories.'} | TEDxRiodelaPlata | Imagine you're in a bar, or a club, and you start talking, and after a while, the question comes up, "So, what do you do for work?" And since you think your job is interesting, you say, "I'm a mathematician." (Laughter) And inevitably, during that conversation one of these two phrases come up: A) "I was terrible at math, but it wasn't my fault. It's because the teacher was awful." (Laughter) Or B) "But what is math really for?" (Laughter) I'll now address Case B. (Laughter) When someone asks you what math is for, they're not asking you about applications of mathematical science. They're asking you, why did I have to study that bullshit I never used in my life again? (Laughter) That's what they're actually asking. So when mathematicians are asked what math is for, they tend to fall into two groups: 54.51 percent of mathematicians will assume an attacking position, and 44.77 percent of mathematicians will take a defensive position. There's a strange 0.8 percent, among which I include myself. Who are the ones that attack? The attacking ones are mathematicians who would tell you this question makes no sense, because mathematics have a meaning all their own — a beautiful edifice with its own logic — and that there's no point in constantly searching for all possible applications. What's the use of poetry? What's the use of love? What's the use of life itself? What kind of question is that? (Laughter) Hardy, for instance, was a model of this type of attack. And those who stand in defense tell you, "Even if you don't realize it, friend, math is behind everything." (Laughter) Those guys, they always bring up bridges and computers. "If you don't know math, your bridge will collapse." (Laughter) It's true, computers are all about math. And now these guys have also started saying that behind information security and credit cards are prime numbers. These are the answers your math teacher would give you if you asked him. He's one of the defensive ones. Okay, but who's right then? Those who say that math doesn't need to have a purpose, or those who say that math is behind everything we do? Actually, both are right. But remember I told you I belong to that strange 0.8 percent claiming something else? So, go ahead, ask me what math is for. Audience: What is math for? Eduardo Sáenz de Cabezón: Okay, 76.34 percent of you asked the question, 23.41 percent didn't say anything, and the 0.8 percent — I'm not sure what those guys are doing. Well, to my dear 76.31 percent — it's true that math doesn't need to serve a purpose, it's true that it's a beautiful structure, a logical one, probably one of the greatest collective efforts ever achieved in human history. But it's also true that there, where scientists and technicians are looking for mathematical theories that allow them to advance, they're within the structure of math, which permeates everything. It's true that we have to go somewhat deeper, to see what's behind science. Science operates on intuition, creativity. Math controls intuition and tames creativity. Almost everyone who hasn't heard this before is surprised when they hear that if you take a 0.1 millimeter thick sheet of paper, the size we normally use, and, if it were big enough, fold it 50 times, its thickness would extend almost the distance from the Earth to the sun. Your intuition tells you it's impossible. Do the math and you'll see it's right. That's what math is for. It's true that science, all types of science, only makes sense because it makes us better understand this beautiful world we live in. And in doing that, it helps us avoid the pitfalls of this painful world we live in. There are sciences that help us in this way quite directly. Oncological science, for example. And there are others we look at from afar, with envy sometimes, but knowing that we are what supports them. All the basic sciences support them, including math. All that makes science, science is the rigor of math. And that rigor factors in because its results are eternal. You probably said or were told at some point that diamonds are forever, right? That depends on your definition of forever! A theorem — that really is forever. (Laughter) The Pythagorean theorem is still true even though Pythagoras is dead, I assure you it's true. (Laughter) Even if the world collapsed the Pythagorean theorem would still be true. Wherever any two triangle sides and a good hypotenuse get together (Laughter) the Pythagorean theorem goes all out. It works like crazy. (Applause) Well, we mathematicians devote ourselves to come up with theorems. Eternal truths. But it isn't always easy to know the difference between an eternal truth, or theorem, and a mere conjecture. You need proof. For example, let's say I have a big, enormous, infinite field. I want to cover it with equal pieces, without leaving any gaps. I could use squares, right? I could use triangles. Not circles, those leave little gaps. Which is the best shape to use? One that covers the same surface, but has a smaller border. In the year 300, Pappus of Alexandria said the best is to use hexagons, just like bees do. But he didn't prove it. The guy said, "Hexagons, great! Let's go with hexagons!" He didn't prove it, it remained a conjecture. "Hexagons!" And the world, as you know, split into Pappists and anti-Pappists, until 1700 years later when in 1999, Thomas Hales proved that Pappus and the bees were right — the best shape to use was the hexagon. And that became a theorem, the honeycomb theorem, that will be true forever and ever, for longer than any diamond you may have. (Laughter) But what happens if we go to three dimensions? If I want to fill the space with equal pieces, without leaving any gaps, I can use cubes, right? Not spheres, those leave little gaps. (Laughter) What is the best shape to use? Lord Kelvin, of the famous Kelvin degrees and all, said that the best was to use a truncated octahedron which, as you all know — (Laughter) — is this thing here! (Applause) Come on. Who doesn't have a truncated octahedron at home? (Laughter) Even a plastic one. "Honey, get the truncated octahedron, we're having guests." Everybody has one! (Laughter) But Kelvin didn't prove it. It remained a conjecture — Kelvin's conjecture. The world, as you know, then split into Kelvinists and anti-Kelvinists (Laughter) until a hundred or so years later, someone found a better structure. Weaire and Phelan found this little thing over here — (Laughter) — this structure to which they gave the very clever name "the Weaire-Phelan structure." (Laughter) It looks like a strange object, but it isn't so strange, it also exists in nature. It's very interesting that this structure, because of its geometric properties, was used to build the Aquatics Center for the Beijing Olympic Games. There, Michael Phelps won eight gold medals, and became the best swimmer of all time. Well, until someone better comes along, right? As may happen with the Weaire-Phelan structure. It's the best until something better shows up. But be careful, because this one really stands a chance that in a hundred or so years, or even if it's in 1700 years, that someone proves it's the best possible shape for the job. It will then become a theorem, a truth, forever and ever. For longer than any diamond. So, if you want to tell someone that you will love them forever you can give them a diamond. But if you want to tell them that you'll love them forever and ever, give them a theorem! (Laughter) But hang on a minute! You'll have to prove it, so your love doesn't remain a conjecture. (Applause) |
How equal do we want the world to be? You'd be surprised | {0: 'The dismal science of economics is not as firmly grounded in actual behavior as was once supposed. In "Predictably Irrational," Dan Ariely told us why.'} | TED2015 | It would be nice to be objective in life, in many ways. The problem is that we have these color-tinted glasses as we look at all kinds of situations. For example, think about something as simple as beer. If I gave you a few beers to taste and I asked you to rate them on intensity and bitterness, different beers would occupy different space. But what if we tried to be objective about it? In the case of beer, it would be very simple. What if we did a blind taste? Well, if we did the same thing, you tasted the same beer, now in the blind taste, things would look slightly different. Most of the beers will go into one place. You will basically not be able to distinguish them, and the exception, of course, will be Guinness. (Laughter) Similarly, we can think about physiology. What happens when people expect something from their physiology? For example, we sold people pain medications. Some people, we told them the medications were expensive. Some people, we told them it was cheap. And the expensive pain medication worked better. It relieved more pain from people, because expectations do change our physiology. And of course, we all know that in sports, if you are a fan of a particular team, you can't help but see the game develop from the perspective of your team. So all of those are cases in which our preconceived notions and our expectations color our world. But what happened in more important questions? What happened with questions that had to do with social justice? So we wanted to think about what is the blind tasting version for thinking about inequality? So we started looking at inequality, and we did some large-scale surveys around the U.S. and other countries. So we asked two questions: Do people know what kind of level of inequality we have? And then, what level of inequality do we want to have? So let's think about the first question. Imagine I took all the people in the U.S. and I sorted them from the poorest on the right to the richest on the left, and then I divided them into five buckets: the poorest 20 percent, the next 20 percent, the next, the next, and the richest 20 percent. And then I asked you to tell me how much wealth do you think is concentrated in each of those buckets. So to make it simpler, imagine I ask you to tell me, how much wealth do you think is concentrated in the bottom two buckets, the bottom 40 percent? Take a second. Think about it and have a number. Usually we don't think. Think for a second, have a real number in your mind. You have it? Okay, here's what lots of Americans tell us. They think that the bottom 20 percent has about 2.9 percent of the wealth, the next group has 6.4, so together it's slightly more than nine. The next group, they say, has 12 percent, 20 percent, and the richest 20 percent, people think has 58 percent of the wealth. You can see how this relates to what you thought. Now, what's reality? Reality is slightly different. The bottom 20 percent has 0.1 percent of the wealth. The next 20 percent has 0.2 percent of the wealth. Together, it's 0.3. The next group has 3.9, 11.3, and the richest group has 84-85 percent of the wealth. So what we actually have and what we think we have are very different. What about what we want? How do we even figure this out? So to look at this, to look at what we really want, we thought about the philosopher John Rawls. If you remember John Rawls, he had this notion of what's a just society. He said a just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you would be willing to enter it in a random place. And it's a beautiful definition, because if you're wealthy, you might want the wealthy to have more money, the poor to have less. If you're poor, you might want more equality. But if you're going to go into that society in every possible situation, and you don't know, you have to consider all the aspects. It's a little bit like blind tasting in which you don't know what the outcome will be when you make a decision, and Rawls called this the "veil of ignorance." So, we took another group, a large group of Americans, and we asked them the question in the veil of ignorance. What are the characteristics of a country that would make you want to join it, knowing that you could end randomly at any place? And here is what we got. What did people want to give to the first group, the bottom 20 percent? They wanted to give them about 10 percent of the wealth. The next group, 14 percent of the wealth, 21, 22 and 32. Now, nobody in our sample wanted full equality. Nobody thought that socialism is a fantastic idea in our sample. But what does it mean? It means that we have this knowledge gap between what we have and what we think we have, but we have at least as big a gap between what we think is right to what we think we have. Now, we can ask these questions, by the way, not just about wealth. We can ask it about other things as well. So for example, we asked people from different parts of the world about this question, people who are liberals and conservatives, and they gave us basically the same answer. We asked rich and poor, they gave us the same answer, men and women, NPR listeners and Forbes readers. We asked people in England, Australia, the U.S. — very similar answers. We even asked different departments of a university. We went to Harvard and we checked almost every department, and in fact, from Harvard Business School, where a few people wanted the wealthy to have more and the [poor] to have less, the similarity was astonishing. I know some of you went to Harvard Business School. We also asked this question about something else. We asked, what about the ratio of CEO pay to unskilled workers? So you can see what people think is the ratio, and then we can ask the question, what do they think should be the ratio? And then we can ask, what is reality? What is reality? And you could say, well, it's not that bad, right? The red and the yellow are not that different. But the fact is, it's because I didn't draw them on the same scale. It's hard to see, there's yellow and blue in there. So what about other outcomes of wealth? Wealth is not just about wealth. We asked, what about things like health? What about availability of prescription medication? What about life expectancy? What about life expectancy of infants? How do we want this to be distributed? What about education for young people? And for older people? And across all of those things, what we learned was that people don't like inequality of wealth, but there's other things where inequality, which is an outcome of wealth, is even more aversive to them: for example, inequality in health or education. We also learned that people are particularly open to changes in equality when it comes to people who have less agency — basically, young kids and babies, because we don't think of them as responsible for their situation. So what are some lessons from this? We have two gaps: We have a knowledge gap and we have a desirability gap And the knowledge gap is something that we think about, how do we educate people? How do we get people to think differently about inequality and the consequences of inequality in terms of health, education, jealousy, crime rate, and so on? Then we have the desirability gap. How do we get people to think differently about what we really want? You see, the Rawls definition, the Rawls way of looking at the world, the blind tasting approach, takes our selfish motivation out of the picture. How do we implement that to a higher degree on a more extensive scale? And finally, we also have an action gap. How do we take these things and actually do something about it? I think part of the answer is to think about people like young kids and babies that don't have much agency, because people seem to be more willing to do this. To summarize, I would say, next time you go to drink beer or wine, first of all, think about, what is it in your experience that is real, and what is it in your experience that is a placebo effect coming from expectations? And then think about what it also means for other decisions in your life, and hopefully also for policy questions that affect all of us. Thanks a lot. (Applause) |
How to land on a comet | {0: 'As manager of the Rosetta mission, Fred Jansen is in charge of the project that could be instrumental in uncovering clues to the origins of life on Earth.'} | TED2015 | I'd like to take you on the epic quest of the Rosetta spacecraft. To escort and land the probe on a comet, this has been my passion for the past two years. In order to do that, I need to explain to you something about the origin of the solar system. When we go back four and a half billion years, there was a cloud of gas and dust. In the center of this cloud, our sun formed and ignited. Along with that, what we now know as planets, comets and asteroids formed. What then happened, according to theory, is that when the Earth had cooled down a bit after its formation, comets massively impacted the Earth and delivered water to Earth. They probably also delivered complex organic material to Earth, and that may have bootstrapped the emergence of life. You can compare this to having to solve a 250-piece puzzle and not a 2,000-piece puzzle. Afterwards, the big planets like Jupiter and Saturn, they were not in their place where they are now, and they interacted gravitationally, and they swept the whole interior of the solar system clean, and what we now know as comets ended up in something called the Kuiper Belt, which is a belt of objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. And sometimes these objects run into each other, and they gravitationally deflect, and then the gravity of Jupiter pulls them back into the solar system. And they then become the comets as we see them in the sky. The important thing here to note is that in the meantime, the four and a half billion years, these comets have been sitting on the outside of the solar system, and haven't changed — deep, frozen versions of our solar system. In the sky, they look like this. We know them for their tails. There are actually two tails. One is a dust tail, which is blown away by the solar wind. The other one is an ion tail, which is charged particles, and they follow the magnetic field in the solar system. There's the coma, and then there is the nucleus, which here is too small to see, and you have to remember that in the case of Rosetta, the spacecraft is in that center pixel. We are only 20, 30, 40 kilometers away from the comet. So what's important to remember? Comets contain the original material from which our solar system was formed, so they're ideal to study the components that were present at the time when Earth, and life, started. Comets are also suspected of having brought the elements which may have bootstrapped life. In 1983, ESA set up its long-term Horizon 2000 program, which contained one cornerstone, which would be a mission to a comet. In parallel, a small mission to a comet, what you see here, Giotto, was launched, and in 1986, flew by the comet of Halley with an armada of other spacecraft. From the results of that mission, it became immediately clear that comets were ideal bodies to study to understand our solar system. And thus, the Rosetta mission was approved in 1993, and originally it was supposed to be launched in 2003, but a problem arose with an Ariane rocket. However, our P.R. department, in its enthusiasm, had already made 1,000 Delft Blue plates with the name of the wrong comets. So I've never had to buy any china since. That's the positive part. (Laughter) Once the whole problem was solved, we left Earth in 2004 to the newly selected comet, Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This comet had to be specially selected because A, you have to be able to get to it, and B, it shouldn't have been in the solar system too long. This particular comet has been in the solar system since 1959. That's the first time when it was deflected by Jupiter, and it got close enough to the sun to start changing. So it's a very fresh comet. Rosetta made a few historic firsts. It's the first satellite to orbit a comet, and to escort it throughout its whole tour through the solar system — closest approach to the sun, as we will see in August, and then away again to the exterior. It's the first ever landing on a comet. We actually orbit the comet using something which is not normally done with spacecraft. Normally, you look at the sky and you know where you point and where you are. In this case, that's not enough. We navigated by looking at landmarks on the comet. We recognized features — boulders, craters — and that's how we know where we are respective to the comet. And, of course, it's the first satellite to go beyond the orbit of Jupiter on solar cells. Now, this sounds more heroic than it actually is, because the technology to use radio isotope thermal generators wasn't available in Europe at that time, so there was no choice. But these solar arrays are big. This is one wing, and these are not specially selected small people. They're just like you and me. (Laughter) We have two of these wings, 65 square meters. Now later on, of course, when we got to the comet, you find out that 65 square meters of sail close to a body which is outgassing is not always a very handy choice. Now, how did we get to the comet? Because we had to go there for the Rosetta scientific objectives very far away — four times the distance of the Earth to the sun — and also at a much higher velocity than we could achieve with fuel, because we'd have to take six times as much fuel as the whole spacecraft weighed. So what do you do? You use gravitational flybys, slingshots, where you pass by a planet at very low altitude, a few thousand kilometers, and then you get the velocity of that planet around the sun for free. We did that a few times. We did Earth, we did Mars, we did twice Earth again, and we also flew by two asteroids, Lutetia and Steins. Then in 2011, we got so far from the sun that if the spacecraft got into trouble, we couldn't actually save the spacecraft anymore, so we went into hibernation. Everything was switched off except for one clock. Here you see in white the trajectory, and the way this works. You see that from the circle where we started, the white line, actually you get more and more and more elliptical, and then finally we approached the comet in May 2014, and we had to start doing the rendezvous maneuvers. On the way there, we flew by Earth and we took a few pictures to test our cameras. This is the moon rising over Earth, and this is what we now call a selfie, which at that time, by the way, that word didn't exist. (Laughter) It's at Mars. It was taken by the CIVA camera. That's one of the cameras on the lander, and it just looks under the solar arrays, and you see the planet Mars and the solar array in the distance. Now, when we got out of hibernation in January 2014, we started arriving at a distance of two million kilometers from the comet in May. However, the velocity the spacecraft had was much too fast. We were going 2,800 kilometers an hour faster than the comet, so we had to brake. We had to do eight maneuvers, and you see here, some of them were really big. We had to brake the first one by a few hundred kilometers per hour, and actually, the duration of that was seven hours, and it used 218 kilos of fuel, and those were seven nerve-wracking hours, because in 2007, there was a leak in the system of the propulsion of Rosetta, and we had to close off a branch, so the system was actually operating at a pressure which it was never designed or qualified for. Then we got in the vicinity of the comet, and these were the first pictures we saw. The true comet rotation period is 12 and a half hours, so this is accelerated, but you will understand that our flight dynamics engineers thought, this is not going to be an easy thing to land on. We had hoped for some kind of spud-like thing where you could easily land. But we had one hope: maybe it was smooth. No. That didn't work either. (Laughter) So at that point in time, it was clearly unavoidable: we had to map this body in all the detail you could get, because we had to find an area which is 500 meters in diameter and flat. Why 500 meters? That's the error we have on landing the probe. So we went through this process, and we mapped the comet. We used a technique called photoclinometry. You use shadows thrown by the sun. What you see here is a rock sitting on the surface of the comet, and the sun shines from above. From the shadow, we, with our brain, can immediately determine roughly what the shape of that rock is. You can program that in a computer, you then cover the whole comet, and you can map the comet. For that, we flew special trajectories starting in August. First, a triangle of 100 kilometers on a side at 100 kilometers' distance, and we repeated the whole thing at 50 kilometers. At that time, we had seen the comet at all kinds of angles, and we could use this technique to map the whole thing. Now, this led to a selection of landing sites. This whole process we had to do, to go from the mapping of the comet to actually finding the final landing site, was 60 days. We didn't have more. To give you an idea, the average Mars mission takes hundreds of scientists for years to meet about where shall we go? We had 60 days, and that was it. We finally selected the final landing site and the commands were prepared for Rosetta to launch Philae. The way this works is that Rosetta has to be at the right point in space, and aiming towards the comet, because the lander is passive. The lander is then pushed out and moves towards the comet. Rosetta had to turn around to get its cameras to actually look at Philae while it was departing and to be able to communicate with it. Now, the landing duration of the whole trajectory was seven hours. Now do a simple calculation: if the velocity of Rosetta is off by one centimeter per second, seven hours is 25,000 seconds. That means 252 meters wrong on the comet. So we had to know the velocity of Rosetta much better than one centimeter per second, and its location in space better than 100 meters at 500 million kilometers from Earth. That's no mean feat. Let me quickly take you through some of the science and the instruments. I won't bore you with all the details of all the instruments, but it's got everything. We can sniff gas, we can measure dust particles, the shape of them, the composition, there are magnetometers, everything. This is one of the results from an instrument which measures gas density at the position of Rosetta, so it's gas which has left the comet. The bottom graph is September of last year. There is a long-term variation, which in itself is not surprising, but you see the sharp peaks. This is a comet day. You can see the effect of the sun on the evaporation of gas and the fact that the comet is rotating. So there is one spot, apparently, where there is a lot of stuff coming from, it gets heated in the Sun, and then cools down on the back side. And we can see the density variations of this. These are the gases and the organic compounds that we already have measured. You will see it's an impressive list, and there is much, much, much more to come, because there are more measurements. Actually, there is a conference going on in Houston at the moment where many of these results are presented. Also, we measured dust particles. Now, for you, this will not look very impressive, but the scientists were thrilled when they saw this. Two dust particles: the right one they call Boris, and they shot it with tantalum in order to be able to analyze it. Now, we found sodium and magnesium. What this tells you is this is the concentration of these two materials at the time the solar system was formed, so we learned things about which materials were there when the planet was made. Of course, one of the important elements is the imaging. This is one of the cameras of Rosetta, the OSIRIS camera, and this actually was the cover of Science magazine on January 23 of this year. Nobody had expected this body to look like this. Boulders, rocks — if anything, it looks more like the Half Dome in Yosemite than anything else. We also saw things like this: dunes, and what look to be, on the righthand side, wind-blown shadows. Now we know these from Mars, but this comet doesn't have an atmosphere, so it's a bit difficult to create a wind-blown shadow. It may be local outgassing, stuff which goes up and comes back. We don't know, so there is a lot to investigate. Here, you see the same image twice. On the left-hand side, you see in the middle a pit. On the right-hand side, if you carefully look, there are three jets coming out of the bottom of that pit. So this is the activity of the comet. Apparently, at the bottom of these pits is where the active regions are, and where the material evaporates into space. There is a very intriguing crack in the neck of the comet. You see it on the right-hand side. It's a kilometer long, and it's two and a half meters wide. Some people suggest that actually, when we get close to the sun, the comet may split in two, and then we'll have to choose, which comet do we go for? The lander — again, lots of instruments, mostly comparable except for the things which hammer in the ground and drill, etc. But much the same as Rosetta, and that is because you want to compare what you find in space with what you find on the comet. These are called ground truth measurements. These are the landing descent images that were taken by the OSIRIS camera. You see the lander getting further and further away from Rosetta. On the top right, you see an image taken at 60 meters by the lander, 60 meters above the surface of the comet. The boulder there is some 10 meters. So this is one of the last images we took before we landed on the comet. Here, you see the whole sequence again, but from a different perspective, and you see three blown-ups from the bottom-left to the middle of the lander traveling over the surface of the comet. Then, at the top, there is a before and an after image of the landing. The only problem with the after image is, there is no lander. But if you carefully look at the right-hand side of this image, we saw the lander still there, but it had bounced. It had departed again. Now, on a bit of a comical note here is that originally Rosetta was designed to have a lander which would bounce. That was discarded because it was way too expensive. Now, we forgot, but the lander knew. (Laughter) During the first bounce, in the magnetometers, you see here the data from them, from the three axes, x, y and z. Halfway through, you see a red line. At that red line, there is a change. What happened, apparently, is during the first bounce, somewhere, we hit the edge of a crater with one of the legs of the lander, and the rotation velocity of the lander changed. So we've been rather lucky that we are where we are. This is one of the iconic images of Rosetta. It's a man-made object, a leg of the lander, standing on a comet. This, for me, is one of the very best images of space science I have ever seen. (Applause) One of the things we still have to do is to actually find the lander. The blue area here is where we know it must be. We haven't been able to find it yet, but the search is continuing, as are our efforts to start getting the lander to work again. We listen every day, and we hope that between now and somewhere in April, the lander will wake up again. The findings of what we found on the comet: This thing would float in water. It's half the density of water. So it looks like a very big rock, but it's not. The activity increase we saw in June, July, August last year was a four-fold activity increase. By the time we will be at the sun, there will be 100 kilos a second leaving this comet: gas, dust, whatever. That's 100 million kilos a day. Then, finally, the landing day. I will never forget — absolute madness, 250 TV crews in Germany. The BBC was interviewing me, and another TV crew who was following me all day were filming me being interviewed, and it went on like that for the whole day. The Discovery Channel crew actually caught me when leaving the control room, and they asked the right question, and man, I got into tears, and I still feel this. For a month and a half, I couldn't think about landing day without crying, and I still have the emotion in me. With this image of the comet, I would like to leave you. Thank you. (Applause) |
My desperate journey with a human smuggler | {0: 'Barat Ali Batoor, an award-winning photojournalist, is a member of the Hazara people. He is based in Australia.'} | TEDxSydney | I am a Hazara, and the homeland of my people is Afghanistan. Like hundreds of thousands of other Hazara kids, I was born in exile. The ongoing persecution and operation against the Hazaras forced my parents to leave Afghanistan. This persecution has had a long history going back to the late 1800s, and the rule of King Abdur Rahman. He killed 63 percent of the Hazara population. He built minarets with their heads. Many Hazaras were sold into slavery, and many others fled the country for neighboring Iran and Pakistan. My parents also fled to Pakistan, and settled in Quetta, where I was born. After the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers, I got a chance to go to Afghanistan for the first time, with foreign journalists. I was only 18, and I got a job working as an interpreter. After four years, I felt it was safe enough to move to Afghanistan permanently, and I was working there as a documentary photographer, and I worked on many stories. One of the most important stories that I did was the dancing boys of Afghanistan. It is a tragic story about an appalling tradition. It involves young kids dancing for warlords and powerful men in the society. These boys are often abducted or bought from their poor parents, and they are put to work as sex slaves. This is Shukur. He was kidnapped from Kabul by a warlord. He was taken to another province, where he was forced to work as a sex slave for the warlord and his friends. When this story was published in the Washington Post, I started receiving death threats, and I was forced to leave Afghanistan, as my parents were. Along with my family, I returned back to Quetta. The situation in Quetta had changed dramatically since I left in 2005. Once a peaceful haven for the Hazaras, it had now turned into the most dangerous city in Pakistan. Hazaras are confined into two small areas, and they are marginalized socially, educationally, and financially. This is Nadir. I had known him since my childhood. He was injured when his van was ambushed by terrorists in Quetta. He later died of his injuries. Around 1,600 Hazara members had been killed in various attacks, and around 3,000 of them were injured, and many of them permanently disabled. The attacks on the Hazara community would only get worse, so it was not surprising that many wanted to flee. After Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Australia is home to the fourth largest population of Hazaras in the world. When it came time to leave Pakistan, Australia seemed the obvious choice. Financially, only one of us could leave, and it was decided that I would go, in the hope that if I arrived at my destination safely, I could work to get the rest of my family to join me later. We all knew about the risks, and how terrifying the journey is, and I met many people who lost loved ones at sea. It was a desperate decision to take, to leave everything behind, and no one makes this decision easily. If I had been able to simply fly to Australia, it would have taken me less than 24 hours. But getting a visa was impossible. My journey was much longer, much more complicated, and certainly more dangerous, traveling to Thailand by air, and then by road and boat to Malaysia and into Indonesia, paying people and smugglers all the way and spending a lot of time hiding and a lot of time in fear of being caught. In Indonesia, I joined a group of seven asylum seekers. We all shared a bedroom in a town outside of Jakarta called Bogor. After spending a week in Bogor, three of my roommates left for the perilous journey, and we got the news two days later that a distressed boat sank in the sea en route to Christmas Island. We found out that our three roommates — Nawroz, Jaffar and Shabbir — were also among those. Only Jaffar was rescued. Shabbir and Nawroz were never seen again. It made me think, am I doing the right thing? I concluded I really had no other choice but to go on. A few weeks later, we got the call from the people smuggler to alert us that the boat is ready for us to commence our sea journey. Taken in the night towards the main vessel on a motorboat, we boarded an old fishing boat that was already overloaded. There were 93 of us, and we were all below deck. No one was allowed up on the top. We all paid 6,000 dollars each for this part of the trip. The first night and day went smoothly, but by the second night, the weather turned. Waves tossed the boat around, and the timbers groaned. People below deck were crying, praying, recalling their loved ones. They were screaming. It was a terrible moment. It was like a scene from doomsday, or maybe like one of those scenes from those Hollywood movies that shows that everything is breaking apart and the world is just ending. It was happening to us for real. We didn't have any hope. Our boat was floating like a matchbox on the water without any control. The waves were much higher than our boat, and the water poured in faster than the motor pumps could take it out. We all lost hope. We thought, this is the end. We were watching our deaths, and I was documenting it. The captain told us that we are not going to make it, we have to turn back the boat. We went on the deck and turned our torches on and off to attract the attention of any passing boat. We kept trying to attract their attention by waving our life jackets and whistling. Eventually, we made it to a small island. Our boat crashing onto the rocks, I slipped into the water and destroyed my camera, whatever I had documented. But luckily, the memory card survived. It was a thick forest. We all split up into many groups as we argued over what to do next. We were all scared and confused. Then, after spending the night on the beach, we found a jetty and coconuts. We hailed a boat from a nearby resort, and then were quickly handed over to Indonesian water police. At Serang Detention Center, an immigration officer came and furtively strip-searched us. He took our mobile, my $300 cash, our shoes that we should not be able to escape, but we kept watching the guards, checking their movements, and around 4 a.m. when they sat around a fire, we removed two glass layers from an outside facing window and slipped through. We climbed a tree next to an outer wall that was topped with the shards of glass. We put the pillow on that and wrapped our forearms with bedsheets and climbed the wall, and we ran away with bare feet. I was free, with an uncertain future, no money. The only thing I had was the memory card with the pictures and footage. When my documentary was aired on SBS Dateline, many of my friends came to know about my situation, and they tried to help me. They did not allow me to take any other boat to risk my life. I also decided to stay in Indonesia and process my case through UNHCR, but I was really afraid that I would end up in Indonesia for many years doing nothing and unable to work, like every other asylum seeker. But it had happened to be a little bit different with me. I was lucky. My contacts worked to expedite my case through UNHCR, and I got resettled in Australia in May 2013. Not every asylum seeker is lucky like me. It is really difficult to live a life with an uncertain fate, in limbo. The issue of asylum seekers in Australia has been so extremely politicized that it has lost its human face. The asylum seekers have been demonized and then presented to the people. I hope my story and the story of other Hazaras could shed some light to show the people how these people are suffering in their countries of origin, and how they suffer, why they risk their lives to seek asylum. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to make peace? Get angry | {0: '2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi is a tireless activist fighting to protect the rights of voiceless children everywhere. '} | TED2015 | Today, I am going to talk about anger. When I was 11, seeing some of my friends leaving the school because their parents could not afford textbooks made me angry. When I was 27, hearing the plight of a desperate slave father whose daughter was about to be sold to a brothel made me angry. At the age of 50, lying on the street, in a pool of blood, along with my own son, made me angry. Dear friends, for centuries we were taught anger is bad. Our parents, teachers, priests — everyone taught us how to control and suppress our anger. But I ask why? Why can't we convert our anger for the larger good of society? Why can't we use our anger to challenge and change the evils of the world? That I tried to do. Friends, most of the brightest ideas came to my mind out of anger. Like when I was 35 and sat in a locked-up, tiny prison. The whole night, I was angry. But it has given birth to a new idea. But I will come to that later on. Let me begin with the story of how I got a name for myself. I had been a big admirer of Mahatma Gandhi since my childhood. Gandhi fought and lead India's freedom movement. But more importantly, he taught us how to treat the most vulnerable sections, the most deprived people, with dignity and respect. And so, when India was celebrating Mahatma Gandhi's birth centenary in 1969 — at that time I was 15 — an idea came to my mind. Why can't we celebrate it differently? I knew, as perhaps many of you might know, that in India, a large number of people are born in the lowest segment of caste. And they are treated as untouchables. These are the people — forget about allowing them to go to the temples, they cannot even go into the houses and shops of high-caste people. So I was very impressed with the leaders of my town who were speaking very highly against the caste system and untouchability and talking of Gandhian ideals. So inspired by that, I thought, let us set an example by inviting these people to eat food cooked and served by the untouchable community. I went to some low-caste, so-called untouchable, people, tried to convince them, but it was unthinkable for them. They told me, "No, no. It's not possible. It never happened." I said, "Look at these leaders, they are so great, they are against untouchability. They will come. If nobody comes, we can set an example." These people thought that I was too naive. Finally, they were convinced. My friends and I took our bicycles and invited political leaders. And I was so thrilled, rather, empowered to see that each one of them agreed to come. I thought, "Great idea. We can set an example. We can bring about change in the society." The day has come. All these untouchables, three women and two men, they agreed to come. I could recall that they had used the best of their clothes. They brought new utensils. They had taken baths hundreds of times because it was unthinkable for them to do. It was the moment of change. They gathered. Food was cooked. It was 7 o'clock. By 8 o'clock, we kept on waiting, because it's not very uncommon that the leaders become late, for an hour or so. So after 8 o'clock, we took our bicycles and went to these leaders' homes, just to remind them. One of the leader's wives told me, "Sorry, he is having some headache, perhaps he cannot come." I went to another leader and his wife told me, "Okay, you go, he will definitely join." So I thought that the dinner will take place, though not at that large a scale. I went back to the venue, which was a newly built Mahatma Gandhi Park. It was 10 o'clock. None of the leaders showed up. That made me angry. I was standing, leaning against Mahatma Gandhi's statue. I was emotionally drained, rather exhausted. Then I sat down where the food was lying. I kept my emotions on hold. But then, when I took the first bite, I broke down in tears. And suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. And it was the healing, motherly touch of an untouchable woman. And she told me, "Kailash, why are you crying? You have done your bit. You have eaten the food cooked by untouchables, which has never happened in our memory." She said, "You won today." And my friends, she was right. I came back home, a little after midnight, shocked to see that several high-caste elderly people were sitting in my courtyard. I saw my mother and elderly women were crying and they were pleading to these elderly people because they had threatened to outcaste my whole family. And you know, outcasting the family is the biggest social punishment one can think of. Somehow they agreed to punish only me, and the punishment was purification. That means I had to go 600 miles away from my hometown to the River Ganges to take a holy dip. And after that, I should organize a feast for priests, 101 priests, wash their feet and drink that water. It was total nonsense, and I refused to accept that punishment. How did they punish me? I was barred from entering into my own kitchen and my own dining room, my utensils were separated. But the night when I was angry, they wanted to outcaste me. But I decided to outcaste the entire caste system. (Applause) And that was possible because the beginning would have been to change the family name, or surname, because in India, most of the family names are caste names. So I decided to drop my name. And then, later on, I gave a new name to myself: Satyarthi, that means, "seeker of truth." (Applause) And that was the beginning of my transformative anger. Friends, maybe one of you can tell me, what was I doing before becoming a children's rights activist? Does anybody know? No. I was an engineer, an electrical engineer. And then I learned how the energy of burning fire, coal, the nuclear blast inside the chambers, raging river currents, fierce winds, could be converted into the light and lives of millions. I also learned how the most uncontrollable form of energy could be harnessed for good and making society better. So I'll come back to the story of when I was caught in the prison: I was very happy freeing a dozen children from slavery, handing them over to their parents. I cannot explain my joy when I free a child. I was so happy. But when I was waiting for my train to come back to my hometown, Delhi, I saw that dozens of children were arriving; they were being trafficked by someone. I stopped them, those people. I complained to the police. So the policemen, instead of helping me, they threw me in this small, tiny shell, like an animal. And that was the night of anger when one of the brightest and biggest ideas was born. I thought that if I keep on freeing 10 children, and 50 more will join, that's not done. And I believed in the power of consumers, and let me tell you that this was the first time when a campaign was launched by me or anywhere in the world, to educate and sensitize the consumers to create a demand for child-labor-free rugs. In Europe and America, we have been successful. And it has resulted in a fall in child labor in South Asian countries by 80 percent. (Applause) Not only that, but this first-ever consumer's power, or consumer's campaign has grown in other countries and other industries, maybe chocolate, maybe apparel, maybe shoes — it has gone beyond. My anger at the age of 11, when I realized how important education is for every child, I got an idea to collect used books and help the poorest children. I created a book bank at the age of 11. But I did not stop. Later on, I cofounded the world's single largest civil society campaign for education that is the Global Campaign for Education. That has helped in changing the whole thinking towards education from the charity mode to the human rights mode, and that has concretely helped the reduction of out-of-school children by half in the last 15 years. (Applause) My anger at the age of 27, to free that girl who was about to be sold to a brothel, has given me an idea to go for a new strategy of raid and rescue, freeing children from slavery. And I am so lucky and proud to say that it is not one or 10 or 20, but my colleagues and I have been able to physically liberate 83,000 child slaves and hand them over back to their families and mothers. (Applause) I knew that we needed global policies. We organized the worldwide marches against child labor and that has also resulted in a new international convention to protect the children who are in the worst forms. And the concrete result was that the number of child laborers globally has gone down by one third in the last 15 years. (Applause) So, in each case, it began from anger, turned into an idea, and action. So anger, what next? Idea, and — Audience: Action Kailash Satyarthi: Anger, idea, action. Which I tried to do. Anger is a power, anger is an energy, and the law of nature is that energy can never be created and never be vanished, can never be destroyed. So why can't the energy of anger be translated and harnessed to create a better and beautiful world, a more just and equitable world? Anger is within each one of you, and I will share a secret for a few seconds: that if we are confined in the narrow shells of egos, and the circles of selfishness, then the anger will turn out to be hatred, violence, revenge, destruction. But if we are able to break the circles, then the same anger could turn into a great power. We can break the circles by using our inherent compassion and connect with the world through compassion to make this world better. That same anger could be transformed into it. So dear friends, sisters and brothers, again, as a Nobel Laureate, I am urging you to become angry. I am urging you to become angry. And the angriest among us is the one who can transform his anger into idea and action. Thank you so much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: For many years, you've been an inspiration to others. Who or what inspires you and why? KS: Good question. Chris, let me tell you, and that is the truth, each time when I free a child, the child who has lost all his hope that he will ever come back to his mother, the first smile of freedom, and the mother who has lost all hope that the son or daughter can ever come back and sit in her lap, they become so emotional and the first tear of joy rolls down on her cheek, I see the glimpse of God in it — this is my biggest inspiration. And I am so lucky that not once, as I said before, but thousands of times, I have been able to witness my God in the faces of those children and they are my biggest inspirations. Thank you. (Applause) |
The best kindergarten you’ve ever seen | {0: 'Architect Takaharu Tezuka creates imaginative and versatile personal spaces.'} | TEDxKyoto | This is a kindergarten we designed in 2007. We made this kindergarten to be a circle. It's a kind of endless circulation on top of the roof. If you are a parent, you know that kids love to keep making circles. This is how the rooftop looks. And why did we design this? The principal of this kindergarten said, "No, I don't want a handrail." I said, "It's impossible." But he insisted: "How about having a net sticking out from the edge of the roof? So that it can catch the children falling off?" (Laughter) I said, "It's impossible." And of course, the government official said, "Of course you have to have a handrail." But we could keep that idea around the trees. There are three trees popping through. And we were allowed to call this rope as a handrail. But of course, rope has nothing to do with them. They fall into the net. And you get more, and more, more. (Laughter) Sometimes 40 children are around a tree. The boy on the branch, he loves the tree so he is eating the tree. (Laughter) And at the time of an event, they sit on the edge. It looks so nice from underneath. Monkeys in the zoo. (Laughter) Feeding time. (Laughter) (Applause) And we made the roof as low as possible, because we wanted to see children on top of the roof, not only underneath the roof. And if the roof is too high, you see only the ceiling. And the leg washing place — there are many kinds of water taps. You see with the flexible tubes, you want to spray water to your friends, and the shower, and the one in front is quite normal. But if you look at this, the boy is not washing his boots, he's putting water into his boots. (Laughter) This kindergarten is completely open, most of the year. And there is no boundary between inside and outside. So it means basically this architecture is a roof. And also there is no boundary between classrooms. So there is no acoustic barrier at all. When you put many children in a quiet box, some of them get really nervous. But in this kindergarten, there is no reason they get nervous. Because there is no boundary. And the principal says if the boy in the corner doesn't want to stay in the room, we let him go. He will come back eventually, because it's a circle, it comes back. (Laughter) But the point is, in that kind of occasion, usually children try to hide somewhere. But here, just they leave and come back. It's a natural process. And secondly, we consider noise very important. You know that children sleep better in noise. They don't sleep in a quiet space. And in this kindergarten, these children show amazing concentration in class. And you know, our kind grew up in the jungle with noise. They need noise. And you know, you can talk to your friends in a noisy bar. You are not supposed to be in silence. And you know, these days we are trying to make everything under control. You know, it's completely open. And you should know that we can go skiing in -20 degrees in winter. In summer you go swimming. The sand is 50 degrees. And also, you should know that you are waterproof. You never melt in rain. So, children are supposed to be outside. So that is how we should treat them. This is how they divide classrooms. They are supposed to help teachers. They don't. (Laughter) I didn't put him in. A classroom. And a washbasin. They talk to each other around the well. And there are always some trees in the classroom. A monkey trying to fish another monkey from above. (Laughter) Monkeys. (Laughter) And each classroom has at least one skylight. And this is where Santa Claus comes down at the time of Christmas. This is the annex building, right next to that oval-shaped kindergarten. The building is only five meters tall with seven floors. And of course, the ceiling height is very low. So you have to consider safety. So, we put our children, a daughter and a son. They tried to go in. He hit his head. He's okay. His skull is quite strong. He is resilient. It's my son. (Laughter) And he is trying to see if it is safe to jump off. And then we put other children. The traffic jam is awful in Tokyo, as you know. (Laughter) The driver in front, she needs to learn how to drive. Now these days, kids need a small dosage of danger. And in this kind of occasion, they learn to help each other. This is society. This is the kind of opportunity we are losing these days. Now, this drawing is showing the movement of a boy between 9:10 and 9:30. And the circumference of this building is 183 meters. So it's not exactly small at all. And this boy did 6,000 meters in the morning. But the surprise is yet to come. The children in this kindergarten do 4,000 meters on average. And these children have the highest athletic abilities among many kindergartens. The principal says, "I don't train them. We leave them on top of the roof. Just like sheep." (Laughter) They keep running. (Laughter) My point is don't control them, don't protect them too much, and they need to tumble sometimes. They need to get some injury. And that makes them learn how to live in this world. I think architecture is capable of changing this world, and people's lives. And this is one of the attempts to change the lives of children. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Why we need to rethink capitalism | {0: 'Paul Jones is founder of Tudor Investment Corporation and an active philanthropist.'} | TED2015 | This is a story about capitalism. It's a system I love because of the successes and opportunities it's afforded me and millions of others. I started in my 20s trading commodities, cotton in particular, in the pits, and if there was ever a free market free-for-all, this was it, where men wearing ties but acting like gladiators fought literally and physically for a profit. Fortunately, I was good enough that by the time I was 30, I was able to move into the upstairs world of money management, where I spent the next three decades as a global macro trader. And over that time, I've seen a lot of crazy things in the markets, and I've traded a lot of crazy manias. And unfortunately, I'm sad to report that right now we might be in the grips of one of the most disastrous, certainly of my career, and one consistent takeaway is manias never end well. Now, over the past 50 years, we as a society have come to view our companies and corporations in a very narrow, almost monomaniacal fashion with regard to how we value them, and we have put so much emphasis on profits, on short-term quarterly earnings and share prices, at the exclusion of all else. It's like we've ripped the humanity out of our companies. Now, we don't do that — conveniently reduce something to a set of numbers that you can play with like Lego toys — we don't do that in our individual life. We don't treat somebody or value them based on their monthly income or their credit score, but we have this double standard when it comes to the way that we value our businesses, and you know what? It's threatening the very underpinnings of our society. And here's how you'll see. This chart is corporate profit margins going back 40 years as a percentage of revenues, and you can see that we're at a 40-year high of 12.5 percent. Now, hooray if you're a shareholder, but if you're the other side of that, and you're the average American worker, then you can see it's not such a good thing. ["U.S. Share of Income Going to Labor vs. CEO-to-Worker Compensation Ratio"] Now, higher profit margins do not increase societal wealth. What they actually do is they exacerbate income inequality, and that's not a good thing. But intuitively, that makes sense, right? Because if the top 10 percent of American families own 90 percent of the stocks, as they take a greater share of corporate profits, then there's less wealth left for the rest of society. Again, income inequality is not a good thing. This next chart, made by The Equality Trust, shows 21 countries from Austria to Japan to New Zealand. On the horizontal axis is income inequality. The further to the right you go, the greater the income inequality. On the vertical axis are nine social and health metrics. The more you go up that, the worse the problems are, and those metrics include life expectancy, teenage pregnancy, literacy, social mobility, just to name a few. Now, those of you in the audience who are Americans may wonder, well, where does the United States rank? Where does it lie on that chart? And guess what? We're literally off the chart. Yes, that's us, with the greatest income inequality and the greatest social problems, according to those metrics. Now, here's a macro forecast that's easy to make, and that's, that gap between the wealthiest and the poorest, it will get closed. History always does it. It typically happens in one of three ways: either through revolution, higher taxes, or wars. None of those are on my bucket list. (Laughter) Now, there's another way to do it, and that's by increasing justness in corporate behavior, but the way that we're operating right now, that would require a tremendous change in behavior, and like an addict trying to kick a habit, the first step is to acknowledge that you have a problem. And let me just say, this profits mania that we're on is so deeply entrenched that we don't even realize how we're harming society. Here's a small but startling example of exactly how we're doing that: this chart shows corporate giving as a percentage of profits, not revenues, over the last 30 years. Juxtapose that to the earlier chart of corporate profit margins, and I ask you, does that feel right? In all fairness, when I started writing this, I thought, "Oh wow, what does my company, what does Tudor do?" And I realized we give one percent of corporate profits to charity every year. And I'm supposed to be a philanthropist. When I realized that, I literally wanted to throw up. But the point is, this mania is so deeply entrenched that well-intentioned people like myself don't even realize that we're part of it. Now, we're not going to change corporate behavior by simply increasing corporate philanthropy or charitable contributions. And oh, by the way, we've since quadrupled that, but — (Applause) — Please. But we can do it by driving more just behavior. And one way to do it is actually trusting the system that got us here in the first place, and that's the free market system. About a year ago, some friends of mine and I started a not-for-profit called Just Capital. Its mission is very simple: to help companies and corporations learn how to operate in a more just fashion by using the public's input to define exactly what the criteria are for just corporate behavior. Now, right now, there's no widely accepted standard that a company or corporation can follow, and that's where Just Capital comes in, because beginning this year and every year we'll be conducting a nationwide survey of a representative sample of 20,000 Americans to find out exactly what they think are the criteria for justness in corporate behavior. Now, this is a model that's going to start in the United States but can be expanded anywhere around the globe, and maybe we'll find out that the most important thing for the public is that we create living wage jobs, or make healthy products, or help, not harm, the environment. At Just Capital, we don't know, and it's not for us to decide. We're but messengers, but we have 100 percent confidence and faith in the American public to get it right. So we'll release the findings this September for the first time, and then next year, we'll poll again, and we'll take the additive step this time of ranking the 1,000 largest U.S. companies from number one to number 1,000 and everything in between. We're calling it the Just Index, and remember, we're an independent not-for-profit with no bias, and we will be giving the American public a voice. And maybe over time, we'll find out that as people come to know which companies are the most just, human and economic resources will be driven towards them, and they'll become the most prosperous and help our country be the most prosperous. Now, capitalism has been responsible for every major innovation that's made this world a more inspiring and wonderful place to live in. Capitalism has to be based on justice. It has to be, and now more than ever, with economic divisions growing wider every day. It's estimated that 47 percent of American workers can be displaced in the next 20 years. I'm not against progress. I want the driverless car and the jet pack just like everyone else. But I'm pleading for recognition that with increased wealth and profits has to come greater corporate social responsibility. "If justice is removed," said Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, "the great, the immense fabric of human society must in a moment crumble into atoms." Now, when I was young, and there was a problem, my mama used to always sigh and shake her head and say, "Have mercy, have mercy." Now's not the time for us, for the rest of us to show them mercy. The time is now for us to show them fairness, and we can do that, you and I, by starting where we work, in the businesses that we operate in. And when we put justness on par with profits, we'll get the most wonderful thing in all the world. We'll take back our humanity. Thank you. (Applause) |
How Mars might hold the secret to the origin of life | {0: 'To determine how life might persist on Mars, Nathalie Cabrol explores one of Earth’s most extreme environments: high-elevation Andean lakes and deserts.\r\n'} | TED2015 | Well, you know, sometimes the most important things come in the smallest packages. I am going to try to convince you, in the 15 minutes I have, that microbes have a lot to say about questions such as, "Are we alone?" and they can tell us more about not only life in our solar system but also maybe beyond, and this is why I am tracking them down in the most impossible places on Earth, in extreme environments where conditions are really pushing them to the brink of survival. Actually, sometimes me too, when I'm trying to follow them too close. But here's the thing: We are the only advanced civilization in the solar system, but that doesn't mean that there is no microbial life nearby. In fact, the planets and moons you see here could host life — all of them — and we know that, and it's a strong possibility. And if we were going to find life on those moons and planets, then we would answer questions such as, are we alone in the solar system? Where are we coming from? Do we have family in the neighborhood? Is there life beyond our solar system? And we can ask all those questions because there has been a revolution in our understanding of what a habitable planet is, and today, a habitable planet is a planet that has a zone where water can stay stable, but to me this is a horizontal definition of habitability, because it involves a distance to a star, but there is another dimension to habitability, and this is a vertical dimension. Think of it as conditions in the subsurface of a planet where you are very far away from a sun, but you still have water, energy, nutrients, which for some of them means food, and a protection. And when you look at the Earth, very far away from any sunlight, deep in the ocean, you have life thriving and it uses only chemistry for life processes. So when you think of it at that point, all walls collapse. You have no limitations, basically. And if you have been looking at the headlines lately, then you will see that we have discovered a subsurface ocean on Europa, on Ganymede, on Enceladus, on Titan, and now we are finding a geyser and hot springs on Enceladus, Our solar system is turning into a giant spa. For anybody who has gone to a spa knows how much microbes like that, right? (Laughter) So at that point, think also about Mars. There is no life possible at the surface of Mars today, but it might still be hiding underground. So, we have been making progress in our understanding of habitability, but we also have been making progress in our understanding of what the signatures of life are on Earth. And you can have what we call organic molecules, and these are the bricks of life, and you can have fossils, and you can minerals, biominerals, which is due to the reaction between bacteria and rocks, and of course you can have gases in the atmosphere. And when you look at those tiny green algae on the right of the slide here, they are the direct descendants of those who have been pumping oxygen a billion years ago in the atmosphere of the Earth. When they did that, they poisoned 90 percent of the life at the surface of the Earth, but they are the reason why you are breathing this air today. But as much as our understanding grows of all of these things, there is one question we still cannot answer, and this is, where are we coming from? And you know, it's getting worse, because we won't be able to find the physical evidence of where we are coming from on this planet, and the reason being is that anything that is older than four billion years is gone. All record is gone, erased by plate tectonics and erosion. This is what I call the Earth's biological horizon. Beyond this horizon we don't know where we are coming from. So is everything lost? Well, maybe not. And we might be able to find evidence of our own origin in the most unlikely place, and this place in Mars. How is this possible? Well clearly at the beginning of the solar system, Mars and the Earth were bombarded by giant asteroids and comets, and there were ejecta from these impacts all over the place. Earth and Mars kept throwing rocks at each other for a very long time. Pieces of rocks landed on the Earth. Pieces of the Earth landed on Mars. So clearly, those two planets may have been seeded by the same material. So yeah, maybe Granddady is sitting there on the surface and waiting for us. But that also means that we can go to Mars and try to find traces of our own origin. Mars may hold that secret for us. This is why Mars is so special to us. But for that to happen, Mars needed to be habitable at the time when conditions were right. So was Mars habitable? We have a number of missions telling us exactly the same thing today. At the time when life appeared on the Earth, Mars did have an ocean, it had volcanoes, it had lakes, and it had deltas like the beautiful picture you see here. This picture was sent by the Curiosity rover only a few weeks ago. It shows the remnants of a delta, and this picture tells us something: water was abundant and stayed founting at the surface for a very long time. This is good news for life. Life chemistry takes a long time to actually happen. So this is extremely good news, but does that mean that if we go there, life will be easy to find on Mars? Not necessarily. Here's what happened: At the time when life exploded at the surface of the Earth, then everything went south for Mars, literally. The atmosphere was stripped away by solar winds, Mars lost its magnetosphere, and then cosmic rays and U.V. bombarded the surface and water escaped to space and went underground. So if we want to be able to understand, if we want to be able to find those traces of the signatures of life at the surface of Mars, if they are there, we need to understand what was the impact of each of these events on the preservation of its record. Only then will we be able to know where those signatures are hiding, and only then will we be able to send our rover to the right places where we can sample those rocks that may be telling us something really important about who we are, or, if not, maybe telling us that somewhere, independently, life has appeared on another planet. So to do that, it's easy. You only need to go back 3.5 billion years ago in the past of a planet. We just need a time machine. Easy, right? Well, actually, it is. Look around you — that's planet Earth. This is our time machine. Geologists are using it to go back in the past of our own planet. I am using it a little bit differently. I use planet Earth to go in very extreme environments where conditions were similar to those of Mars at the time when the climate changed, and there I'm trying to understand what happened. What are the signatures of life? What is left? How are we going to find it? So for one moment now I'm going to take you with me on a trip into that time machine. And now, what you see here, we are at 4,500 meters in the Andes, but in fact we are less than a billion years after the Earth and Mars formed. The Earth and Mars will have looked pretty much exactly like that — volcanoes everywhere, evaporating lakes everywhere, minerals, hot springs, and then you see those mounds on the shore of those lakes? Those are built by the descendants of the first organisms that gave us the first fossil on Earth. But if we want to understand what's going on, we need to go a little further. And the other thing about those sites is that exactly like on Mars three and a half billion years ago, the climate is changing very fast, and water and ice are disappearing. But we need to go back to that time when everything changed on Mars, and to do that, we need to go higher. Why is that? Because when you go higher, the atmosphere is getting thinner, it's getting more unstable, the temperature is getting cooler, and you have a lot more U.V. radiation. Basically, you are getting to those conditions on Mars when everything changed. So I was not promising anything about a leisurely trip on the time machine. You are not going to be sitting in that time machine. You have to haul 1,000 pounds of equipment to the summit of this 20,000-foot volcano in the Andes here. That's about 6,000 meters. And you also have to sleep on 42-degree slopes and really hope that there won't be any earthquake that night. But when we get to the summit, we actually find the lake we came for. At this altitude, this lake is experiencing exactly the same conditions as those on Mars three and a half billion years ago. And now we have to change our voyage into an inner voyage inside that lake, and to do that, we have to remove our mountain gear and actually don suits and go for it. But at the time we enter that lake, at the very moment we enter that lake, we are stepping back three and a half billion years in the past of another planet, and then we are going to get the answer came for. Life is everywhere, absolutely everywhere. Everything you see in this picture is a living organism. Maybe not so the diver, but everything else. But this picture is very deceiving. Life is abundant in those lakes, but like in many places on Earth right now and due to climate change, there is a huge loss in biodiversity. In the samples that we took back home, 36 percent of the bacteria in those lakes were composed of three species, and those three species are the ones that have survived so far. Here's another lake, right next to the first one. The red color you see here is not due to minerals. It's actually due to the presence of a tiny algae. In this region, the U.V. radiation is really nasty. Anywhere on Earth, 11 is considered to be extreme. During U.V. storms there, the U.V. Index reaches 43. SPF 30 is not going to do anything to you over there, and the water is so transparent in those lakes that the algae has nowhere to hide, really, and so they are developing their own sunscreen, and this is the red color you see. But they can adapt only so far, and then when all the water is gone from the surface, microbes have only one solution left: They go underground. And those microbes, the rocks you see in that slide here, well, they are actually living inside rocks and they are using the protection of the translucence of the rocks to get the good part of the U.V. and discard the part that could actually damage their DNA. And this is why we are taking our rover to train them to search for life on Mars in these areas, because if there was life on Mars three and a half billion years ago, it had to use the same strategy to actually protect itself. Now, it is pretty obvious that going to extreme environments is helping us very much for the exploration of Mars and to prepare missions. So far, it has helped us to understand the geology of Mars. It has helped to understand the past climate of Mars and its evolution, but also its habitability potential. Our most recent rover on Mars has discovered traces of organics. Yeah, there are organics at the surface of Mars. And it also discovered traces of methane. And we don't know yet if the methane in question is really from geology or biology. Regardless, what we know is that because of the discovery, the hypothesis that there is still life present on Mars today remains a viable one. So by now, I think I have convinced you that Mars is very special to us, but it would be a mistake to think that Mars is the only place in the solar system that is interesting to find potential microbial life. And the reason is because Mars and the Earth could have a common root to their tree of life, but when you go beyond Mars, it's not that easy. Celestial mechanics is not making it so easy for an exchange of material between planets, and so if we were to discover life on those planets, it would be different from us. It would be a different type of life. But in the end, it might be just us, it might be us and Mars, or it can be many trees of life in the solar system. I don't know the answer yet, but I can tell you something: No matter what the result is, no matter what that magic number is, it is going to give us a standard by which we are going to be able to measure the life potential, abundance and diversity beyond our own solar system. And this can be achieved by our generation. This can be our legacy, but only if we dare to explore. Now, finally, if somebody tells you that looking for alien microbes is not cool because you cannot have a philosophical conversation with them, let me show you why and how you can tell them they're wrong. Well, organic material is going to tell you about environment, about complexity and about diversity. DNA, or any information carrier, is going to tell you about adaptation, about evolution, about survival, about planetary changes and about the transfer of information. All together, they are telling us what started as a microbial pathway, and why what started as a microbial pathway sometimes ends up as a civilization or sometimes ends up as a dead end. Look at the solar system, and look at the Earth. On Earth, there are many intelligent species, but only one has achieved technology. Right here in the journey of our own solar system, there is a very, very powerful message that says here's how we should look for alien life, small and big. So yeah, microbes are talking and we are listening, and they are taking us, one planet at a time and one moon at a time, towards their big brothers out there. And they are telling us about diversity, they are telling us about abundance of life, and they are telling us how this life has survived thus far to reach civilization, intelligence, technology and, indeed, philosophy. Thank you. (Applause) |
The hidden reason for poverty the world needs to address now | {0: 'As founder of International Justice Mission, Gary Haugen fights the chronically neglected global epidemic of violence against the poor.'} | TED2015 | To be honest, by personality, I'm just not much of a crier. But I think in my career that's been a good thing. I'm a civil rights lawyer, and I've seen some horrible things in the world. I began my career working police abuse cases in the United States. And then in 1994, I was sent to Rwanda to be the director of the U.N.'s genocide investigation. It turns out that tears just aren't much help when you're trying to investigate a genocide. The things I had to see, and feel and touch were pretty unspeakable. What I can tell you is this: that the Rwandan genocide was one of the world's greatest failures of simple compassion. That word, compassion, actually comes from two Latin words: cum passio, which simply mean "to suffer with." And the things that I saw and experienced in Rwanda as I got up close to human suffering, it did, in moments, move me to tears. But I just wish that I, and the rest of the world, had been moved earlier. And not just to tears, but to actually stop the genocide. Now by contrast, I've also been involved with one of the world's greatest successes of compassion. And that's the fight against global poverty. It's a cause that probably has involved all of us here. I don't know if your first introduction might have been choruses of "We Are the World," or maybe the picture of a sponsored child on your refrigerator door, or maybe the birthday you donated for fresh water. I don't really remember what my first introduction to poverty was but I do remember the most jarring. It was when I met Venus — she's a mom from Zambia. She's got three kids and she's a widow. When I met her, she had walked about 12 miles in the only garments she owned, to come to the capital city and to share her story. She sat down with me for hours, just ushered me in to the world of poverty. She described what it was like when the coals on the cooking fire finally just went completely cold. When that last drop of cooking oil finally ran out. When the last of the food, despite her best efforts, ran out. She had to watch her youngest son, Peter, suffer from malnutrition, as his legs just slowly bowed into uselessness. As his eyes grew cloudy and dim. And then as Peter finally grew cold. For over 50 years, stories like this have been moving us to compassion. We whose kids have plenty to eat. And we're moved not only to care about global poverty, but to actually try to do our part to stop the suffering. Now there's plenty of room for critique that we haven't done enough, and what it is that we've done hasn't been effective enough, but the truth is this: The fight against global poverty is probably the broadest, longest running manifestation of the human phenomenon of compassion in the history of our species. And so I'd like to share a pretty shattering insight that might forever change the way you think about that struggle. But first, let me begin with what you probably already know. Thirty-five years ago, when I would have been graduating from high school, they told us that 40,000 kids every day died because of poverty. That number, today, is now down to 17,000. Way too many, of course, but it does mean that every year, there's eight million kids who don't have to die from poverty. Moreover, the number of people in our world who are living in extreme poverty, which is defined as living off about a dollar and a quarter a day, that has fallen from 50 percent, to only 15 percent. This is massive progress, and this exceeds everybody's expectations about what is possible. And I think you and I, I think, honestly, that we can feel proud and encouraged to see the way that compassion actually has the power to succeed in stopping the suffering of millions. But here's the part that you might not hear very much about. If you move that poverty mark just up to two dollars a day, it turns out that virtually the same two billion people who were stuck in that harsh poverty when I was in high school, are still stuck there, 35 years later. So why, why are so many billions still stuck in such harsh poverty? Well, let's think about Venus for a moment. Now for decades, my wife and I have been moved by common compassion to sponsor kids, to fund microloans, to support generous levels of foreign aid. But until I had actually talked to Venus, I would have had no idea that none of those approaches actually addressed why she had to watch her son die. "We were doing fine," Venus told me, "until Brutus started to cause trouble." Now, Brutus is Venus' neighbor and "cause trouble" is what happened the day after Venus' husband died, when Brutus just came and threw Venus and the kids out of the house, stole all their land, and robbed their market stall. You see, Venus was thrown into destitution by violence. And then it occurred to me, of course, that none of my child sponsorships, none of the microloans, none of the traditional anti-poverty programs were going to stop Brutus, because they weren't meant to. This became even more clear to me when I met Griselda. She's a marvelous young girl living in a very poor community in Guatemala. And one of the things we've learned over the years is that perhaps the most powerful thing that Griselda and her family can do to get Griselda and her family out of poverty is to make sure that she goes to school. The experts call this the Girl Effect. But when we met Griselda, she wasn't going to school. In fact, she was rarely ever leaving her home. Days before we met her, while she was walking home from church with her family, in broad daylight, men from her community just snatched her off the street, and violently raped her. See, Griselda had every opportunity to go to school, it just wasn't safe for her to get there. And Griselda's not the only one. Around the world, poor women and girls between the ages of 15 and 44, they are — when victims of the everyday violence of domestic abuse and sexual violence — those two forms of violence account for more death and disability than malaria, than car accidents, than war combined. The truth is, the poor of our world are trapped in whole systems of violence. In South Asia, for instance, I could drive past this rice mill and see this man hoisting these 100-pound sacks of rice upon his thin back. But I would have no idea, until later, that he was actually a slave, held by violence in that rice mill since I was in high school. Decades of anti-poverty programs right in his community were never able to rescue him or any of the hundred other slaves from the beatings and the rapes and the torture of violence inside the rice mill. In fact, half a century of anti-poverty programs have left more poor people in slavery than in any other time in human history. Experts tell us that there's about 35 million people in slavery today. That's about the population of the entire nation of Canada, where we're sitting today. This is why, over time, I have come to call this epidemic of violence the Locust Effect. Because in the lives of the poor, it just descends like a plague and it destroys everything. In fact, now when you survey very, very poor communities, residents will tell you that their greatest fear is violence. But notice the violence that they fear is not the violence of genocide or the wars, it's everyday violence. So for me, as a lawyer, of course, my first reaction was to think, well, of course we've got to change all the laws. We've got to make all this violence against the poor illegal. But then I found out, it already is. The problem is not that the poor don't get laws, it's that they don't get law enforcement. In the developing world, basic law enforcement systems are so broken that recently the U.N. issued a report that found that "most poor people live outside the protection of the law." Now honestly, you and I have just about no idea of what that would mean because we have no first-hand experience of it. Functioning law enforcement for us is just a total assumption. In fact, nothing expresses that assumption more clearly than three simple numbers: 9-1-1, which, of course, is the number for the emergency police operator here in Canada and in the United States, where the average response time to a police 911 emergency call is about 10 minutes. So we take this just completely for granted. But what if there was no law enforcement to protect you? A woman in Oregon recently experienced what this would be like. She was home alone in her dark house on a Saturday night, when a man started to tear his way into her home. This was her worst nightmare, because this man had actually put her in the hospital from an assault just two weeks before. So terrified, she picks up that phone and does what any of us would do: She calls 911 — but only to learn that because of budget cuts in her county, law enforcement wasn't available on the weekends. Listen. Dispatcher: I don't have anybody to send out there. Woman: OK Dispatcher: Um, obviously if he comes inside the residence and assaults you, can you ask him to go away? Or do you know if he is intoxicated or anything? Woman: I've already asked him. I've already told him I was calling you. He's broken in before, busted down my door, assaulted me. Dispatcher: Uh-huh. Woman: Um, yeah, so ... Dispatcher: Is there any way you could safely leave the residence? Woman: No, I can't, because he's blocking pretty much my only way out. Dispatcher: Well, the only thing I can do is give you some advice, and call the sheriff's office tomorrow. Obviously, if he comes in and unfortunately has a weapon or is trying to cause you physical harm, that's a different story. You know, the sheriff's office doesn't work up there. I don't have anybody to send." Gary Haugen: Tragically, the woman inside that house was violently assaulted, choked and raped because this is what it means to live outside the rule of law. And this is where billions of our poorest live. What does that look like? In Bolivia, for example, if a man sexually assaults a poor child, statistically, he's at greater risk of slipping in the shower and dying than he is of ever going to jail for that crime. In South Asia, if you enslave a poor person, you're at greater risk of being struck by lightning than ever being sent to jail for that crime. And so the epidemic of everyday violence, it just rages on. And it devastates our efforts to try to help billions of people out of their two-dollar-a-day hell. Because the data just doesn't lie. It turns out that you can give all manner of goods and services to the poor, but if you don't restrain the hands of the violent bullies from taking it all away, you're going to be very disappointed in the long-term impact of your efforts. So you would think that the disintegration of basic law enforcement in the developing world would be a huge priority for the global fight against poverty. But it's not. Auditors of international assistance recently couldn't find even one percent of aid going to protect the poor from the lawless chaos of everyday violence. And honestly, when we do talk about violence against the poor, sometimes it's in the weirdest of ways. A fresh water organization tells a heart-wrenching story of girls who are raped on the way to fetching water, and then celebrates the solution of a new well that drastically shortens their walk. End of story. But not a word about the rapists who are still right there in the community. If a young woman on one of our college campuses was raped on her walk to the library, we would never celebrate the solution of moving the library closer to the dorm. And yet, for some reason, this is okay for poor people. Now the truth is, the traditional experts in economic development and poverty alleviation, they don't know how to fix this problem. And so what happens? They don't talk about it. But the more fundamental reason that law enforcement for the poor in the developing world is so neglected, is because the people inside the developing world, with money, don't need it. I was at the World Economic Forum not long ago talking to corporate executives who have massive businesses in the developing world and I was just asking them, "How do you guys protect all your people and property from all the violence?" And they looked at each other, and they said, practically in unison, "We buy it." Indeed, private security forces in the developing world are now, four, five and seven times larger than the public police force. In Africa, the largest employer on the continent now is private security. But see, the rich can pay for safety and can keep getting richer, but the poor can't pay for it and they're left totally unprotected and they keep getting thrown to the ground. This is a massive and scandalous outrage. And it doesn't have to be this way. Broken law enforcement can be fixed. Violence can be stopped. Almost all criminal justice systems, they start out broken and corrupt, but they can be transformed by fierce effort and commitment. The path forward is really pretty clear. Number one: We have to start making stopping violence indispensable to the fight against poverty. In fact, any conversation about global poverty that doesn't include the problem of violence must be deemed not serious. And secondly, we have to begin to seriously invest resources and share expertise to support the developing world as they fashion new, public systems of justice, not private security, that give everybody a chance to be safe. These transformations are actually possible and they're happening today. Recently, the Gates Foundation funded a project in the second largest city of the Philippines, where local advocates and local law enforcement were able to transform corrupt police and broken courts so drastically, that in just four short years, they were able to measurably reduce the commercial sexual violence against poor kids by 79 percent. You know, from the hindsight of history, what's always most inexplicable and inexcusable are the simple failures of compassion. Because I think history convenes a tribunal of our grandchildren and they just ask us, "Grandma, Grandpa, where were you? Where were you, Grandpa, when the Jews were fleeing Nazi Germany and were being rejected from our shores? Where were you? And Grandma, where were you when they were marching our Japanese-American neighbors off to internment camps? And Grandpa, where were you when they were beating our African-American neighbors just because they were trying to register to vote?" Likewise, when our grandchildren ask us, "Grandma, Grandpa, where were you when two billion of the world's poorest were drowning in a lawless chaos of everyday violence?" I hope we can say that we had compassion, that we raised our voice, and as a generation, we were moved to make the violence stop. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Really powerfully argued. Talk to us a bit about some of the things that have actually been happening to, for example, boost police training. How hard a process is that? GH: Well, one of the glorious things that's starting to happen now is that the collapse of these systems and the consequences are becoming obvious. There's actually, now, political will to do that. But it just requires now an investment of resources and transfer of expertise. There's a political will struggle that's going to take place as well, but those are winnable fights, because we've done some examples around the world at International Justice Mission that are very encouraging. CA: So just tell us in one country, how much it costs to make a material difference to police, for example — I know that's only one piece of it. GH: In Guatemala, for instance, we've started a project there with the local police and court system, prosecutors, to retrain them so that they can actually effectively bring these cases. And we've seen prosecutions against perpetrators of sexual violence increase by more than 1,000 percent. This project has been very modestly funded at about a million dollars a year, and the kind of bang you can get for your buck in terms of leveraging a criminal justice system that could function if it were properly trained and motivated and led, and these countries, especially a middle class that is seeing that there's really no future with this total instability and total privatization of security I think there's an opportunity, a window for change. CA: But to make this happen, you have to look at each part in the chain — the police, who else? GH: So that's the thing about law enforcement, it starts out with the police, they're the front end of the pipeline of justice, but they hand if off to the prosecutors, and the prosecutors hand it off to the courts, and the survivors of violence have to be supported by social services all the way through that. So you have to do an approach that pulls that all together. In the past, there's been a little bit of training of the courts, but they get crappy evidence from the police, or a little police intervention that has to do with narcotics or terrorism but nothing to do with treating the common poor person with excellent law enforcement, so it's about pulling that all together, and you can actually have people in very poor communities experience law enforcement like us, which is imperfect in our own experience, for sure, but boy, is it a great thing to sense that you can call 911 and maybe someone will protect you. CA: Gary, I think you've done a spectacular job of bringing this to the world's attention in your book and right here today. Thanks so much. Gary Haugen. (Applause) |
How I fell in love with quasars, blazars and our incredible universe | {0: 'Jedidah Isler studies blazars — supermassive hyperactive black holes that emit powerful jet streams. They are the universe’s most efficient particle accelerators, transferring energy throughout galaxies.'} | TED2015 | My first love was for the night sky. Love is complicated. You're looking at a fly-through of the Hubble Space Telescope Ultra-Deep Field, one of the most distant images of our universe ever observed. Everything you see here is a galaxy, comprised of billions of stars each. And the farthest galaxy is a trillion, trillion kilometers away. As an astrophysicist, I have the awesome privilege of studying some of the most exotic objects in our universe. The objects that have captivated me from first crush throughout my career are supermassive, hyperactive black holes. Weighing one to 10 billion times the mass of our own sun, these galactic black holes are devouring material, at a rate of upwards of 1,000 times more than your "average" supermassive black hole. (Laughter) These two characteristics, with a few others, make them quasars. At the same time, the objects I study are producing some of the most powerful particle streams ever observed. These narrow streams, called jets, are moving at 99.99 percent of the speed of light, and are pointed directly at the Earth. These jetted, Earth-pointed, hyperactive and supermassive black holes are called blazars, or blazing quasars. What makes blazars so special is that they're some of the universe's most efficient particle accelerators, transporting incredible amounts of energy throughout a galaxy. Here, I'm showing an artist's conception of a blazar. The dinner plate by which material falls onto the black hole is called the accretion disc, shown here in blue. Some of that material is slingshotted around the black hole and accelerated to insanely high speeds in the jet, shown here in white. Although the blazar system is rare, the process by which nature pulls in material via a disk, and then flings some of it out via a jet, is more common. We'll eventually zoom out of the blazar system to show its approximate relationship to the larger galactic context. Beyond the cosmic accounting of what goes in to what goes out, one of the hot topics in blazar astrophysics right now is where the highest-energy jet emission comes from. In this image, I'm interested in where this white blob forms and if, as a result, there's any relationship between the jet and the accretion disc material. Clear answers to this question were almost completely inaccessible until 2008, when NASA launched a new telescope that better detects gamma ray light — that is, light with energies a million times higher than your standard x-ray scan. I simultaneously compare variations between the gamma ray light data and the visible light data from day to day and year to year, to better localize these gamma ray blobs. My research shows that in some instances, these blobs form much closer to the black hole than we initially thought. As we more confidently localize where these gamma ray blobs are forming, we can better understand how jets are being accelerated, and ultimately reveal the dynamic processes by which some of the most fascinating objects in our universe are formed. This all started as a love story. And it still is. This love transformed me from a curious, stargazing young girl to a professional astrophysicist, hot on the heels of celestial discovery. Who knew that chasing after the universe would ground me so deeply to my mission here on Earth. Then again, when do we ever know where love's first flutter will truly take us. Thank you. (Applause) |
How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine | {0: 'Working at the frontiers of interactive technology, Chris Milk stretches virtual reality into a new canvas for storytelling.'} | TED2015 | Virtual reality started for me in sort of an unusual place. It was the 1970s. I got into the field very young: I was seven years old. And the tool that I used to access virtual reality was the Evel Knievel stunt cycle. This is a commercial for that particular item: (Video) Voice-over: What a jump! Evel's riding the amazing stunt cycle. That gyro-power sends him over 100 feet at top speed. Chris Milk: So this was my joy back then. I rode this motorcycle everywhere. And I was there with Evel Knievel; we jumped the Snake River Canyon together. I wanted the rocket. I never got the rocket, I only got the motorcycle. I felt so connected to this world. I didn't want to be a storyteller when I grew up, I wanted to be stuntman. I was there. Evel Knievel was my friend. I had so much empathy for him. But it didn't work out. (Laughter) I went to art school. I started making music videos. And this is one of the early music videos that I made: (Music: "Touch the Sky" by Kanye West) CM: You may notice some slight similarities here. (Laughter) And I got that rocket. (Laughter) So, now I'm a filmmaker, or, the beginning of a filmmaker, and I started using the tools that are available to me as a filmmaker to try to tell the most compelling stories that I can to an audience. And film is this incredible medium that allows us to feel empathy for people that are very different than us and worlds completely foreign from our own. Unfortunately, Evel Knievel did not feel the same empathy for us that we felt for him, and he sued us for this video — (Laughter) — shortly thereafter. On the upside, the man that I worshipped as a child, the man that I wanted to become as an adult, I was finally able to get his autograph. (Applause) Let's talk about film now. Film, it's an incredible medium, but essentially, it's the same now as it was then. It's a group of rectangles that are played in a sequence. And we've done incredible things with those rectangles. But I started thinking about, is there a way that I can use modern and developing technologies to tell stories in different ways and tell different kinds of stories that maybe I couldn't tell using the traditional tools of filmmaking that we've been using for 100 years? So I started experimenting, and what I was trying to do was to build the ultimate empathy machine. And here's one of the early experiments: (Music) So this is called "The Wilderness Downtown." It was a collaboration with Arcade Fire. It asked you to put in the address where you grew up at the beginning of it. It's a website. And out of it starts growing these little boxes with different browser windows. And you see this teenager running down a street, and then you see Google Street View and Google Maps imagery and you realize the street he's running down is yours. And when he stops in front of a house, he stops in front of your house. And this was great, and I saw people having an even deeper emotional reaction to this than the things that I had made in rectangles. And I'm essentially taking a piece of your history and putting it inside the framing of the story. But then I started thinking, okay, well that's a part of you, but how do I put all of you inside of the frame? So to do that, I started making art installations. And this is one called "The Treachery of Sanctuary." It's a triptych. I'm going to show you the third panel. (Music) So now I've got you inside of the frame, and I saw people having even more visceral emotional reactions to this work than the previous one. But then I started thinking about frames, and what do they represent? And a frame is just a window. I mean, all the media that we watch — television, cinema — they're these windows into these other worlds. And I thought, well, great. I got you in a frame. But I don't want you in the frame, I don't want you in the window, I want you through the window, I want you on the other side, in the world, inhabiting the world. So that leads me back to virtual reality. Let's talk about virtual reality. Unfortunately, talking about virtual reality is like dancing about architecture. And this is actually someone dancing about architecture in virtual reality. (Laughter) So, it's difficult to explain. Why is it difficult to explain? It's difficult because it's a very experiential medium. You feel your way inside of it. It's a machine, but inside of it, it feels like real life, it feels like truth. And you feel present in the world that you're inside and you feel present with the people that you're inside of it with. So, I'm going to show you a demo of a virtual reality film: a full-screen version of all the information that we capture when we shoot virtual reality. So we're shooting in every direction. This is a camera system that we built that has 3D cameras that look in every direction and binaural microphones that face in every direction. We take this and we build, basically, a sphere of a world that you inhabit. So what I'm going to show you is not a view into the world, it's basically the whole world stretched into a rectangle. So this film is called "Clouds Over Sidra," and it was made in conjunction with our virtual reality company called VRSE and the United Nations, and a co-collaborator named Gabo Arora. And we went to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan in December and shot the story of a 12-year-old girl there named Sidra. And she and her family fled Syria through the desert into Jordan and she's been living in this camp for the last year and a half. (Video) Sidra: My name is Sidra. I am 12 years old. I am in the fifth grade. I am from Syria, in the Daraa Province, Inkhil City. I have lived here in the Zaatari camp in Jordan for the last year and a half. I have a big family: three brothers, one is a baby. He cries a lot. I asked my father if I cried when I was a baby and he says I did not. I think I was a stronger baby than my brother. CM: So, when you're inside of the headset. you're not seeing it like this. You're looking around through this world. You'll notice you see full 360 degrees, in all directions. And when you're sitting there in her room, watching her, you're not watching it through a television screen, you're not watching it through a window, you're sitting there with her. When you look down, you're sitting on the same ground that she's sitting on. And because of that, you feel her humanity in a deeper way. You empathize with her in a deeper way. And I think that we can change minds with this machine. And we've already started to try to change a few. So we took this film to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. And we showed it to a group of people whose decisions affect the lives of millions of people. And these are people who might not otherwise be sitting in a tent in a refugee camp in Jordan. But in January, one afternoon in Switzerland, they suddenly all found themselves there. (Applause) And they were affected by it. So we're going to make more of them. We're working with the United Nations right now to shoot a whole series of these films. We just finished shooting a story in Liberia. And now, we're going to shoot a story in India. And we're taking these films, and we're showing them at the United Nations to people that work there and people that are visiting there. And we're showing them to the people that can actually change the lives of the people inside of the films. And that's where I think we just start to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality. It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way that I've never seen before in any other form of media. And it can change people's perception of each other. And that's how I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world. So, it's a machine, but through this machine we become more compassionate, we become more empathetic, and we become more connected. And ultimately, we become more human. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to raise a black son in America | {0: "Clint Smith's work blends art and activism."} | TED2015 | Growing up, I didn't always understand why my parents made me follow the rules that they did. Like, why did I really have to mow the lawn? Why was homework really that important? Why couldn't I put jelly beans in my oatmeal? My childhood was abound with questions like this. Normal things about being a kid and realizing that sometimes, it was best to listen to my parents even when I didn't exactly understand why. And it's not that they didn't want me to think critically. Their parenting always sought to reconcile the tension between having my siblings and I understand the realities of the world, while ensuring that we never accepted the status quo as inevitable. I came to realize that this, in and of itself, was a very purposeful form of education. One of my favorite educators, Brazilian author and scholar Paulo Freire, speaks quite explicitly about the need for education to be used as a tool for critical awakening and shared humanity. In his most famous book, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," he states, "No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so." I've been thinking a lot about this lately, this idea of humanity, and specifically, who in this world is afforded the privilege of being perceived as fully human. Over the course of the past several months, the world has watched as unarmed black men, and women, have had their lives taken at the hands of police and vigilante. These events and all that has transpired after them have brought me back to my own childhood and the decisions that my parents made about raising a black boy in America that growing up, I didn't always understand in the way that I do now. I think of how hard it must have been, how profoundly unfair it must have felt for them to feel like they had to strip away parts of my childhood just so that I could come home at night. For example, I think of how one night, when I was around 12 years old, on an overnight field trip to another city, my friends and I bought Super Soakers and turned the hotel parking lot into our own water-filled battle zone. We hid behind cars, running through the darkness that lay between the streetlights, boundless laughter ubiquitous across the pavement. But within 10 minutes, my father came outside, grabbed me by my forearm and led me into our room with an unfamiliar grip. Before I could say anything, tell him how foolish he had made me look in front of my friends, he derided me for being so naive. Looked me in the eye, fear consuming his face, and said, "Son, I'm sorry, but you can't act the same as your white friends. You can't pretend to shoot guns. You can't run around in the dark. You can't hide behind anything other than your own teeth." I know now how scared he must have been, how easily I could have fallen into the empty of the night, that some man would mistake this water for a good reason to wash all of this away. These are the sorts of messages I've been inundated with my entire life: Always keep your hands where they can see them, don't move too quickly, take off your hood when the sun goes down. My parents raised me and my siblings in an armor of advice, an ocean of alarm bells so someone wouldn't steal the breath from our lungs, so that they wouldn't make a memory of this skin. So that we could be kids, not casket or concrete. And it's not because they thought it would make us better than anyone else it's simply because they wanted to keep us alive. All of my black friends were raised with the same message, the talk, given to us when we became old enough to be mistaken for a nail ready to be hammered to the ground, when people made our melanin synonymous with something to be feared. But what does it do to a child to grow up knowing that you cannot simply be a child? That the whims of adolescence are too dangerous for your breath, that you cannot simply be curious, that you are not afforded the luxury of making a mistake, that someone's implicit bias might be the reason you don't wake up in the morning. But this cannot be what defines us. Because we have parents who raised us to understand that our bodies weren't meant for the backside of a bullet, but for flying kites and jumping rope, and laughing until our stomachs burst. We had teachers who taught us how to raise our hands in class, and not just to signal surrender, and that the only thing we should give up is the idea that we aren't worthy of this world. So when we say that black lives matter, it's not because others don't, it's simply because we must affirm that we are worthy of existing without fear, when so many things tell us we are not. I want to live in a world where my son will not be presumed guilty the moment he is born, where a toy in his hand isn't mistaken for anything other than a toy. And I refuse to accept that we can't build this world into something new, some place where a child's name doesn't have to be written on a t-shirt, or a tombstone, where the value of someone's life isn't determined by anything other than the fact that they had lungs, a place where every single one of us can breathe. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we unearthed the Spinosaurus | {0: 'Nizar Ibrahim scours Northern Africa for clues to what things were like there in the Cretaceous period. A 2015 TED Fellow, he has spearheaded the recent search for the semi-aquatic dinosaur Spinosaurus.'} | TEDYouth 2014 | These dragons from deep time are incredible creatures. They're bizzarre, they're beautiful, and there's very little we know about them. These thoughts were going through my head when I looked at the pages of my first dinosaur book. I was about five years old at the time, and I decided there and then that I would become a paleontologist. Paleontology allowed me to combine my love for animals with my desire to travel to far-flung corners of the world. And now, a few years later, I've led several expeditions to the ultimate far-flung corner on this planet, the Sahara. I've worked in the Sahara because I've been on a quest to uncover new remains of a bizarre, giant predatory dinosaur called Spinosaurus. A few bones of this animal have been found in the deserts of Egypt and were described about 100 years ago by a German paleontologist. Unfortunately, all his Spinosaurus bones were destroyed in World War II. So all we're left with are just a few drawings and notes. From these drawings, we know that this creature, which lived about 100 million years ago, was very big, it had tall spines on its back, forming a magnificent sail, and it had long, slender jaws, a bit like a crocodile, with conical teeth, that may have been used to catch slippery prey, like fish. But that was pretty much all we knew about this animal for the next 100 years. My fieldwork took me to the border region between Morocco and Algeria, a place called the Kem Kem. It's a difficult place to work in. You have to deal with sandstorms and snakes and scorpions, and it's very difficult to find good fossils there. But our hard work paid off. We discovered many incredible specimens. There's the largest dinosaur bone that had ever been found in this part of the Sahara. We found remains of giant predatory dinosaurs, medium-sized predatory dinosaurs, and seven or eight different kinds of crocodile-like hunters. These fossils were deposited in a river system. The river system was also home to a giant, car-sized coelacanth, a monster sawfish, and the skies over the river system were filled with pterosaurs, flying reptiles. It was a pretty dangerous place, not the kind of place where you'd want to travel to if you had a time machine. So we're finding all these incredible fossils of animals that lived alongside Spinosaurus, but Spinosaurus itself proved to be very elusive. We were just finding bits and pieces and I was hoping that we'd find a partial skeleton at some point. Finally, very recently, we were able to track down a dig site where a local fossil hunter found several bones of Spinosaurus. We returned to the site, we collected more bones. And so after 100 years we finally had another partial skeleton of this bizarre creature. And we were able to reconstruct it. We now know that Spinosaurus had a head a little bit like a crocodile, very different from other predatory dinosaurs, very different from the T. rex. But the really interesting information came from the rest of the skeleton. We had long spines, the spines forming the big sail. We had leg bones, we had skull bones, we had paddle-shaped feet, wide feet — again, very unusual, no other dinosaur has feet like this — and we think they may have been used to walk on soft sediment, or maybe for paddling in the water. We also looked at the fine microstructure of the bone, the inside structure of Spinosaurus bones, and it turns out that they're very dense and compact. Again, this is something we see in animals that spend a lot of time in the water, it's useful for buoyancy control in the water. We C.T.-scanned all of our bones and built a digital Spinosaurus skeleton. And when we looked at the digital skeleton, we realized that yes, this was a dinosaur unlike any other. It's bigger than a T. rex, and yes, the head has "fish-eating" written all over it, but really the entire skeleton has "water-loving" written all over it — dense bone, paddle-like feet, and the hind limbs are reduced in size, and again, this is something we see in animals that spend a substantial amount of time in the water. So, as we fleshed out our Spinosaurus — I'm looking at muscle attachments and wrapping our dinosaur in skin — we realize that we're dealing with a river monster, a predatory dinosaur, bigger than T. rex, the ruler of this ancient river of giants, feeding on the many aquatic animals I showed you earlier on. So that's really what makes this an incredible discovery. It's a dinosaur like no other. And some people told me, "Wow, this is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. There are not many things left to discover in the world." Well, I think nothing could be further from the truth. I think the Sahara's still full of treasures, and when people tell me there are no places left to explore, I like to quote a famous dinosaur hunter, Roy Chapman Andrews, and he said, "Always, there has been an adventure just around the corner — and the world is still full of corners." That was true many decades ago when Roy Chapman Andrews wrote these lines. And it is still true today. Thank you. (Applause) |
What happens when our computers get smarter than we are? | {0: 'Nick Bostrom works on big questions: What should we do, as individuals and as a species, to optimize our long-term prospects?'} | TED2015 | I work with a bunch of mathematicians, philosophers and computer scientists, and we sit around and think about the future of machine intelligence, among other things. Some people think that some of these things are sort of science fiction-y, far out there, crazy. But I like to say, okay, let's look at the modern human condition. (Laughter) This is the normal way for things to be. But if we think about it, we are actually recently arrived guests on this planet, the human species. Think about if Earth was created one year ago, the human species, then, would be 10 minutes old. The industrial era started two seconds ago. Another way to look at this is to think of world GDP over the last 10,000 years, I've actually taken the trouble to plot this for you in a graph. It looks like this. (Laughter) It's a curious shape for a normal condition. I sure wouldn't want to sit on it. (Laughter) Let's ask ourselves, what is the cause of this current anomaly? Some people would say it's technology. Now it's true, technology has accumulated through human history, and right now, technology advances extremely rapidly — that is the proximate cause, that's why we are currently so very productive. But I like to think back further to the ultimate cause. Look at these two highly distinguished gentlemen: We have Kanzi — he's mastered 200 lexical tokens, an incredible feat. And Ed Witten unleashed the second superstring revolution. If we look under the hood, this is what we find: basically the same thing. One is a little larger, it maybe also has a few tricks in the exact way it's wired. These invisible differences cannot be too complicated, however, because there have only been 250,000 generations since our last common ancestor. We know that complicated mechanisms take a long time to evolve. So a bunch of relatively minor changes take us from Kanzi to Witten, from broken-off tree branches to intercontinental ballistic missiles. So this then seems pretty obvious that everything we've achieved, and everything we care about, depends crucially on some relatively minor changes that made the human mind. And the corollary, of course, is that any further changes that could significantly change the substrate of thinking could have potentially enormous consequences. Some of my colleagues think we're on the verge of something that could cause a profound change in that substrate, and that is machine superintelligence. Artificial intelligence used to be about putting commands in a box. You would have human programmers that would painstakingly handcraft knowledge items. You build up these expert systems, and they were kind of useful for some purposes, but they were very brittle, you couldn't scale them. Basically, you got out only what you put in. But since then, a paradigm shift has taken place in the field of artificial intelligence. Today, the action is really around machine learning. So rather than handcrafting knowledge representations and features, we create algorithms that learn, often from raw perceptual data. Basically the same thing that the human infant does. The result is A.I. that is not limited to one domain — the same system can learn to translate between any pairs of languages, or learn to play any computer game on the Atari console. Now of course, A.I. is still nowhere near having the same powerful, cross-domain ability to learn and plan as a human being has. The cortex still has some algorithmic tricks that we don't yet know how to match in machines. So the question is, how far are we from being able to match those tricks? A couple of years ago, we did a survey of some of the world's leading A.I. experts, to see what they think, and one of the questions we asked was, "By which year do you think there is a 50 percent probability that we will have achieved human-level machine intelligence?" We defined human-level here as the ability to perform almost any job at least as well as an adult human, so real human-level, not just within some limited domain. And the median answer was 2040 or 2050, depending on precisely which group of experts we asked. Now, it could happen much, much later, or sooner, the truth is nobody really knows. What we do know is that the ultimate limit to information processing in a machine substrate lies far outside the limits in biological tissue. This comes down to physics. A biological neuron fires, maybe, at 200 hertz, 200 times a second. But even a present-day transistor operates at the Gigahertz. Neurons propagate slowly in axons, 100 meters per second, tops. But in computers, signals can travel at the speed of light. There are also size limitations, like a human brain has to fit inside a cranium, but a computer can be the size of a warehouse or larger. So the potential for superintelligence lies dormant in matter, much like the power of the atom lay dormant throughout human history, patiently waiting there until 1945. In this century, scientists may learn to awaken the power of artificial intelligence. And I think we might then see an intelligence explosion. Now most people, when they think about what is smart and what is dumb, I think have in mind a picture roughly like this. So at one end we have the village idiot, and then far over at the other side we have Ed Witten, or Albert Einstein, or whoever your favorite guru is. But I think that from the point of view of artificial intelligence, the true picture is actually probably more like this: AI starts out at this point here, at zero intelligence, and then, after many, many years of really hard work, maybe eventually we get to mouse-level artificial intelligence, something that can navigate cluttered environments as well as a mouse can. And then, after many, many more years of really hard work, lots of investment, maybe eventually we get to chimpanzee-level artificial intelligence. And then, after even more years of really, really hard work, we get to village idiot artificial intelligence. And a few moments later, we are beyond Ed Witten. The train doesn't stop at Humanville Station. It's likely, rather, to swoosh right by. Now this has profound implications, particularly when it comes to questions of power. For example, chimpanzees are strong — pound for pound, a chimpanzee is about twice as strong as a fit human male. And yet, the fate of Kanzi and his pals depends a lot more on what we humans do than on what the chimpanzees do themselves. Once there is superintelligence, the fate of humanity may depend on what the superintelligence does. Think about it: Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make. Machines will then be better at inventing than we are, and they'll be doing so on digital timescales. What this means is basically a telescoping of the future. Think of all the crazy technologies that you could have imagined maybe humans could have developed in the fullness of time: cures for aging, space colonization, self-replicating nanobots or uploading of minds into computers, all kinds of science fiction-y stuff that's nevertheless consistent with the laws of physics. All of this superintelligence could develop, and possibly quite rapidly. Now, a superintelligence with such technological maturity would be extremely powerful, and at least in some scenarios, it would be able to get what it wants. We would then have a future that would be shaped by the preferences of this A.I. Now a good question is, what are those preferences? Here it gets trickier. To make any headway with this, we must first of all avoid anthropomorphizing. And this is ironic because every newspaper article about the future of A.I. has a picture of this: So I think what we need to do is to conceive of the issue more abstractly, not in terms of vivid Hollywood scenarios. We need to think of intelligence as an optimization process, a process that steers the future into a particular set of configurations. A superintelligence is a really strong optimization process. It's extremely good at using available means to achieve a state in which its goal is realized. This means that there is no necessary connection between being highly intelligent in this sense, and having an objective that we humans would find worthwhile or meaningful. Suppose we give an A.I. the goal to make humans smile. When the A.I. is weak, it performs useful or amusing actions that cause its user to smile. When the A.I. becomes superintelligent, it realizes that there is a more effective way to achieve this goal: take control of the world and stick electrodes into the facial muscles of humans to cause constant, beaming grins. Another example, suppose we give A.I. the goal to solve a difficult mathematical problem. When the A.I. becomes superintelligent, it realizes that the most effective way to get the solution to this problem is by transforming the planet into a giant computer, so as to increase its thinking capacity. And notice that this gives the A.I.s an instrumental reason to do things to us that we might not approve of. Human beings in this model are threats, we could prevent the mathematical problem from being solved. Of course, perceivably things won't go wrong in these particular ways; these are cartoon examples. But the general point here is important: if you create a really powerful optimization process to maximize for objective x, you better make sure that your definition of x incorporates everything you care about. This is a lesson that's also taught in many a myth. King Midas wishes that everything he touches be turned into gold. He touches his daughter, she turns into gold. He touches his food, it turns into gold. This could become practically relevant, not just as a metaphor for greed, but as an illustration of what happens if you create a powerful optimization process and give it misconceived or poorly specified goals. Now you might say, if a computer starts sticking electrodes into people's faces, we'd just shut it off. A, this is not necessarily so easy to do if we've grown dependent on the system — like, where is the off switch to the Internet? B, why haven't the chimpanzees flicked the off switch to humanity, or the Neanderthals? They certainly had reasons. We have an off switch, for example, right here. (Choking) The reason is that we are an intelligent adversary; we can anticipate threats and plan around them. But so could a superintelligent agent, and it would be much better at that than we are. The point is, we should not be confident that we have this under control here. And we could try to make our job a little bit easier by, say, putting the A.I. in a box, like a secure software environment, a virtual reality simulation from which it cannot escape. But how confident can we be that the A.I. couldn't find a bug. Given that merely human hackers find bugs all the time, I'd say, probably not very confident. So we disconnect the ethernet cable to create an air gap, but again, like merely human hackers routinely transgress air gaps using social engineering. Right now, as I speak, I'm sure there is some employee out there somewhere who has been talked into handing out her account details by somebody claiming to be from the I.T. department. More creative scenarios are also possible, like if you're the A.I., you can imagine wiggling electrodes around in your internal circuitry to create radio waves that you can use to communicate. Or maybe you could pretend to malfunction, and then when the programmers open you up to see what went wrong with you, they look at the source code — Bam! — the manipulation can take place. Or it could output the blueprint to a really nifty technology, and when we implement it, it has some surreptitious side effect that the A.I. had planned. The point here is that we should not be confident in our ability to keep a superintelligent genie locked up in its bottle forever. Sooner or later, it will out. I believe that the answer here is to figure out how to create superintelligent A.I. such that even if — when — it escapes, it is still safe because it is fundamentally on our side because it shares our values. I see no way around this difficult problem. Now, I'm actually fairly optimistic that this problem can be solved. We wouldn't have to write down a long list of everything we care about, or worse yet, spell it out in some computer language like C++ or Python, that would be a task beyond hopeless. Instead, we would create an A.I. that uses its intelligence to learn what we value, and its motivation system is constructed in such a way that it is motivated to pursue our values or to perform actions that it predicts we would approve of. We would thus leverage its intelligence as much as possible to solve the problem of value-loading. This can happen, and the outcome could be very good for humanity. But it doesn't happen automatically. The initial conditions for the intelligence explosion might need to be set up in just the right way if we are to have a controlled detonation. The values that the A.I. has need to match ours, not just in the familiar context, like where we can easily check how the A.I. behaves, but also in all novel contexts that the A.I. might encounter in the indefinite future. And there are also some esoteric issues that would need to be solved, sorted out: the exact details of its decision theory, how to deal with logical uncertainty and so forth. So the technical problems that need to be solved to make this work look quite difficult — not as difficult as making a superintelligent A.I., but fairly difficult. Here is the worry: Making superintelligent A.I. is a really hard challenge. Making superintelligent A.I. that is safe involves some additional challenge on top of that. The risk is that if somebody figures out how to crack the first challenge without also having cracked the additional challenge of ensuring perfect safety. So I think that we should work out a solution to the control problem in advance, so that we have it available by the time it is needed. Now it might be that we cannot solve the entire control problem in advance because maybe some elements can only be put in place once you know the details of the architecture where it will be implemented. But the more of the control problem that we solve in advance, the better the odds that the transition to the machine intelligence era will go well. This to me looks like a thing that is well worth doing and I can imagine that if things turn out okay, that people a million years from now look back at this century and it might well be that they say that the one thing we did that really mattered was to get this thing right. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to control someone else's arm with your brain | {0: 'TED Fellow Greg Gage helps kids investigate the neuroscience in their own backyards.'} | TED2015 | The brain is an amazing and complex organ. And while many people are fascinated by the brain, they can't really tell you that much about the properties about how the brain works because we don't teach neuroscience in schools. And one of the reasons why is that the equipment is so complex and so expensive that it's really only done at major universities and large institutions. And so in order to be able to access the brain, you really need to dedicate your life and spend six and a half years as a graduate student just to become a neuroscientist to get access to these tools. And that's a shame because one out of five of us, that's 20 percent of the entire world, will have a neurological disorder. And there are zero cures for these diseases. And so it seems that what we should be doing is reaching back earlier in the eduction process and teaching students about neuroscience so that in the future, they may be thinking about possibly becoming a brain scientist. When I was a graduate student, my lab mate Tim Marzullo and myself, decided that what if we took this complex equipment that we have for studying the brain and made it simple enough and affordable enough that anyone that you know, an amateur or a high school student, could learn and actually participate in the discovery of neuroscience. And so we did just that. A few years ago, we started a company called Backyard Brains and we make DIY neuroscience equipment and I brought some here tonight, and I want to do some demonstrations. You guys want to see some? So I need a volunteer. So right before — what is your name? (Applause) Sam Kelly: Sam. Greg Gage: All right, Sam, I'm going to record from your brain. Have you had this before? SK: No. GG: I need you to stick out your arm for science, roll up your sleeve a bit, So what I'm going to do, I'm putting electrodes on your arm, and you're probably wondering, I just said I'm going to record from your brain, what am I doing with your arm? Well, you have about 80 billion neurons inside your brain right now. They're sending electrical messages back and forth, and chemical messages. But some of your neurons right here in your motor cortex are going to send messages down when you move your arm like this. They're going to go down across your corpus callosum, down onto your spinal cord to your lower motor neuron out to your muscles here, and that electrical discharge is going to be picked up by these electrodes right here and we're going to be able to listen to exactly what your brain is going to be doing. So I'm going to turn this on for a second. Have you ever heard what your brain sounds like? SK: No. GG: Let's try it out. So go ahead and squeeze your hand. (Rumbling) So what you're listening to, so this is your motor units happening right here. Let's take a look at it as well. So I'm going to stand over here, and I'm going to open up our app here. So now I want you to squeeze. (Rumbling) So right here, these are the motor units that are happening from her spinal cord out to her muscle right here, and as she's doing it, you're seeing the electrical activity that's happening here. You can even click here and try to see one of them. So keep doing it really hard. So now we've paused on one motor action potential that's happening right now inside of your brain. Do you guys want to see some more? (Applause) That's interesting, but let's get it better. I need one more volunteer. What is your name, sir? Miguel Goncalves: Miguel. GG: Miguel, all right. You're going to stand right here. So when you're moving your arm like this, your brain is sending a signal down to your muscles right here. I want you to move your arm as well. So your brain is going to send a signal down to your muscles. And so it turns out that there is a nerve that's right here that runs up here that innervates these three fingers, and it's close enough to the skin that we might be able to stimulate that so that what we can do is copy your brain signals going out to your hand and inject it into your hand, so that your hand will move when your brain tells your hand to move. So in a sense, she will take away your free will and you will no longer have any control over this hand. You with me? So I just need to hook you up. (Laughter) So I'm going to find your ulnar nerve, which is probably right around here. You don't know what you're signing up for when you come up. So now I'm going to move away and we're going to plug it in to our human-to-human interface over here. Okay, so Sam, I want you to squeeze your hand again. Do it again. Perfect. So now I'm going to hook you up over here so that you get the — It's going to feel a little bit weird at first, this is going to feel like a — (Laughter) You know, when you lose your free will, and someone else becomes your agent, it does feel a bit strange. Now I want you to relax your hand. Sam, you're with me? So you're going to squeeze. I'm not going to turn it on yet, so go ahead and give it a squeeze. So now, are you ready, Miguel? MG: Ready as I'll ever be. GG: I've turned it on, so go ahead and turn your hand. Do you feel that a little bit? MG: Nope. GG: Okay, do it again? MG: A little bit. GG: A little bit? (Laughter) So relax. So hit it again. (Laughter) Oh, perfect, perfect. So relax, do it again. All right, so right now, your brain is controlling your arm and it's also controlling his arm, so go ahead and just do it one more time. All right, so it's perfect. (Laughter) So now, what would happen if I took over my control of your hand? And so, just relax your hand. What happens? Ah, nothing. Why not? Because the brain has to do it. So you do it again. All right, that's perfect. Thank you guys for being such a good sport. This is what's happening all across the world — electrophysiology! We're going to bring on the neuro-revolution. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why we laugh | {0: 'While exploring the neuroscience of speech and vocal behavior, Sophie Scott stumbled upon a surprising second vocation: making audiences laugh as a stand-up comic.'} | TED2015 | Hi. I'm going to talk to you today about laughter, and I just want to start by thinking about the first time I can ever remember noticing laughter. This is when I was a little girl. I would've been about six. And I came across my parents doing something unusual, where they were laughing. They were laughing very, very hard. They were lying on the floor laughing. They were screaming with laughter. I did not know what they were laughing at, but I wanted in. I wanted to be part of that, and I kind of sat around at the edge going, "Hoo hoo!" (Laughter) Now, incidentally, what they were laughing at was a song which people used to sing, which was based around signs in toilets on trains telling you what you could and could not do in toilets on trains. And the thing you have to remember about the English is, of course, we do have an immensely sophisticated sense of humor. (Laughter) At the time, though, I didn't understand anything of that. I just cared about the laughter, and actually, as a neuroscientist, I've come to care about it again. And it is a really weird thing to do. What I'm going to do now is just play some examples of real human beings laughing, and I want you think about the sound people make and how odd that can be, and in fact how primitive laughter is as a sound. It's much more like an animal call than it is like speech. So here we've got some laughter for you. The first one is pretty joyful. (Audio: Laughing) Now this next guy, I need him to breathe. There's a point in there where I'm just, like, you've got to get some air in there, mate, because he just sounds like he's breathing out. (Audio: Laughing) This hasn't been edited; this is him. (Audio: Laughing) (Laughter) And finally we have — this is a human female laughing. And laughter can take us to some pretty odd places in terms of making noises. (Audio: Laughing) She actually says, "Oh my God, what is that?" in French. We're all kind of with her. I have no idea. Now, to understand laughter, you have to look at a part of the body that psychologists and neuroscientists don't normally spend much time looking at, which is the ribcage, and it doesn't seem terribly exciting, but actually you're all using your ribcage all the time. What you're all doing at the moment with your ribcage, and don't stop doing it, is breathing. So you use the intercostal muscles, the muscles between your ribs, to bring air in and out of your lungs just by expanding and contracting your ribcage, and if I was to put a strap around the outside of your chest called a breath belt, and just look at that movement, you see a rather gentle sinusoidal movement, so that's breathing. You're all doing it. Don't stop. As soon as you start talking, you start using your breathing completely differently. So what I'm doing now is you see something much more like this. In talking, you use very fine movements of the ribcage to squeeze the air out — and in fact, we're the only animals that can do this. It's why we can talk at all. Now, both talking and breathing has a mortal enemy, and that enemy is laughter, because what happens when you laugh is those same muscles start to contract very regularly, and you get this very marked sort of zig-zagging, and that's just squeezing the air out of you. It literally is that basic a way of making a sound. You could be stamping on somebody, it's having the same effect. You're just squeezing air out, and each of those contractions — Ha! — gives you a sound. And as the contractions run together, you can get these spasms, and that's when you start getting these — (Wheezing) — things happening. I'm brilliant at this. (Laughter) Now, in terms of the science of laughter, there isn't very much, but it does turn out that pretty much everything we think we know about laughter is wrong. So it's not at all unusual, for example, to hear people to say humans are the only animals that laugh. Nietzsche thought that humans are the only animals that laugh. In fact, you find laughter throughout the mammals. It's been well-described and well-observed in primates, but you also see it in rats, and wherever you find it — humans, primates, rats — you find it associated with things like tickling. That's the same for humans. You find it associated with play, and all mammals play. And wherever you find it, it's associated with interactions. So Robert Provine, who has done a lot of work on this, has pointed out that you are 30 times more likely to laugh if you are with somebody else than if you're on your own, and where you find most laughter is in social interactions like conversation. So if you ask human beings, "When do you laugh?" they'll talk about comedy and they'll talk about humor and they'll talk about jokes. If you look at when they laugh, they're laughing with their friends. And when we laugh with people, we're hardly ever actually laughing at jokes. You are laughing to show people that you understand them, that you agree with them, that you're part of the same group as them. You're laughing to show that you like them. You might even love them. You're doing all that at the same time as talking to them, and the laughter is doing a lot of that emotional work for you. Something that Robert Provine has pointed out, as you can see here, and the reason why we were laughing when we heard those funny laughs at the start, and why I was laughing when I found my parents laughing, is that it's an enormously behaviorally contagious effect. You can catch laughter from somebody else, and you are more likely to catch laughter off somebody else if you know them. So it's still modulated by this social context. You have to put humor to one side and think about the social meaning of laughter because that's where its origins lie. Now, something I've got very interested in is different kinds of laughter, and we have some neurobiological evidence about how human beings vocalize that suggests there might be two kinds of laughs that we have. So it seems possible that the neurobiology for helpless, involuntary laughter, like my parents lying on the floor screaming about a silly song, might have a different basis to it than some of that more polite social laughter that you encounter, which isn't horrible laughter, but it's behavior somebody is doing as part of their communicative act to you, part of their interaction with you; they are choosing to do this. In our evolution, we have developed two different ways of vocalizing. Involuntary vocalizations are part of an older system than the more voluntary vocalizations like the speech I'm doing now. So we might imagine that laughter might actually have two different roots. So I've been looking at this in more detail. To do this, we've had to make recordings of people laughing, and we've had to do whatever it takes to make people laugh, and we got those same people to produce more posed, social laughter. So imagine your friend told a joke, and you're laughing because you like your friend, but not really because the joke's all that. So I'm going to play you a couple of those. I want you to tell me if you think this laughter is real laughter, or if you think it's posed. So is this involuntary laughter or more voluntary laughter? (Audio: Laughing) What does that sound like to you? Audience: Posed. Sophie Scott: Posed? Posed. How about this one? (Audio: Laughing) (Laughter) I'm the best. (Laughter) (Applause) Not really. No, that was helpless laughter, and in fact, to record that, all they had to do was record me watching one of my friends listening to something I knew she wanted to laugh at, and I just started doing this. What you find is that people are good at telling the difference between real and posed laughter. They seem to be different things to us. Interestingly, you see something quite similar with chimpanzees. Chimpanzees laugh differently if they're being tickled than if they're playing with each other, and we might be seeing something like that here, involuntary laughter, tickling laughter, being different from social laughter. They're acoustically very different. The real laughs are longer. They're higher in pitch. When you start laughing hard, you start squeezing air out from your lungs under much higher pressures than you could ever produce voluntarily. For example, I could never pitch my voice that high to sing. Also, you start to get these sort of contractions and weird whistling sounds, all of which mean that real laughter is extremely easy, or feels extremely easy to spot. In contrast, posed laughter, we might think it sounds a bit fake. Actually, it's not, it's actually an important social cue. We use it a lot, we're choosing to laugh in a lot of situations, and it seems to be its own thing. So, for example, you find nasality in posed laughter, that kind of "ha ha ha ha ha" sound that you never get, you could not do, if you were laughing involuntarily. So they do seem to be genuinely these two different sorts of things. We took it into the scanner to see how brains respond when you hear laughter. And when you do this, this is a really boring experiment. We just played people real and posed laughs. We didn't tell them it was a study on laughter. We put other sounds in there to distract them, and all they're doing is lying listening to sounds. We don't tell them to do anything. Nonetheless, when you hear real laughter and when you hear posed laughter, the brains are responding completely differently, significantly differently. What you see in the regions in blue, which lies in auditory cortex, are the brain areas that respond more to the real laughs, and what seems to be the case, when you hear somebody laughing involuntarily, you hear sounds you would never hear in any other context. It's very unambiguous, and it seems to be associated with greater auditory processing of these novel sounds. In contrast, when you hear somebody laughing in a posed way, what you see are these regions in pink, which are occupying brain areas associated with mentalizing, thinking about what somebody else is thinking. And I think what that means is, even if you're having your brain scanned, which is completely boring and not very interesting, when you hear somebody going, "A ha ha ha ha ha," you're trying to work out why they're laughing. Laughter is always meaningful. You are always trying to understand it in context, even if, as far as you are concerned, at that point in time, it has not necessarily anything to do with you, you still want to know why those people are laughing. Now, we've had the opportunity to look at how people hear real and posed laughter across the age range. So this is an online experiment we ran with the Royal Society, and here we just asked people two questions. First of all, they heard some laughs, and they had to say, how real or posed do these laughs sound? The real laughs are shown in red and the posed laughs are shown in blue. What you see is there is a rapid onset. As you get older, you get better and better at spotting real laughter. So six-year-olds are at chance, they can't really hear the difference. By the time you are older, you get better, but interestingly, you do not hit peak performance in this dataset until you are in your late 30s and early 40s. You don't understand laughter fully by the time you hit puberty. You don't understand laughter fully by the time your brain has matured at the end of your teens. You're learning about laughter throughout your entire early adult life. If we turn the question around and now say not, what does the laughter sound like in terms of being real or posed, but we say, how much does this laughter make you want to laugh, how contagious is this laughter to you, we see a different profile. And here, the younger you are, the more you want to join in when you hear laughter. Remember me laughing with my parents when I had no idea what was going on. You really can see this. Now everybody, young and old, finds the real laughs more contagious than the posed laughs, but as you get older, it all becomes less contagious to you. Now, either we're all just becoming really grumpy as we get older, or it may mean that as you understand laughter better, and you are getting better at doing that, you need more than just hearing people laugh to want to laugh. You need the social stuff there. So we've got a very interesting behavior about which a lot of our lay assumptions are incorrect, but I'm coming to see that actually there's even more to laughter than it's an important social emotion we should look at, because it turns out people are phenomenally nuanced in terms of how we use laughter. There's a really lovely set of studies coming out from Robert Levenson's lab in California, where he's doing a longitudinal study with couples. He gets married couples, men and women, into the lab, and he gives them stressful conversations to have while he wires them up to a polygraph so he can see them becoming stressed. So you've got the two of them in there, and he'll say to the husband, "Tell me something that your wife does that irritates you." And what you see is immediately — just run that one through your head briefly, you and your partner — you can imagine everybody gets a bit more stressed as soon as that starts. You can see physically, people become more stressed. What he finds is that the couples who manage that feeling of stress with laughter, positive emotions like laughter, not only immediately become less stressed, they can see them physically feeling better, they're dealing with this unpleasant situation better together, they are also the couples that report high levels of satisfaction in their relationship and they stay together for longer. So in fact, when you look at close relationships, laughter is a phenomenally useful index of how people are regulating their emotions together. We're not just emitting it at each other to show that we like each other, we're making ourselves feel better together. Now, I don't think this is going to be limited to romantic relationships. I think this is probably going to be a characteristic of close emotional relationships such as you might have with friends, which explains my next clip, which is of a YouTube video of some young men in the former East Germany on making a video to promote their heavy metal band, and it's extremely macho, and the mood is very serious, and I want you to notice what happens in terms of laughter when things go wrong and how quickly that happens, and how that changes the mood. He's cold. He's about to get wet. He's got swimming trunks on, got a towel. Ice. What might possibly happen? Video starts. Serious mood. And his friends are already laughing. They are already laughing, hard. He's not laughing yet. (Laughter) He's starting to go now. And now they're all off. (Laughter) They're on the floor. (Laughter) The thing I really like about that is it's all very serious until he jumps onto the ice, and as soon as he doesn't go through the ice, but also there isn't blood and bone everywhere, his friends start laughing. And imagine if that had played him out with him standing there going, "No seriously, Heinrich, I think this is broken," we wouldn't enjoy watching that. That would be stressful. Or if he was running around with a visibly broken leg laughing, and his friends are going, "Heinrich, I think we need to go to the hospital now," that also wouldn't be funny. The fact that the laughter works, it gets him from a painful, embarrassing, difficult situation, into a funny situation, into what we're actually enjoying there, and I think that's a really interesting use, and it's actually happening all the time. For example, I can remember something like this happening at my father's funeral. We weren't jumping around on the ice in our underpants. We're not Canadian. (Laughter) (Applause) These events are always difficult, I had a relative who was being a bit difficult, my mum was not in a good place, and I can remember finding myself just before the whole thing started telling this story about something that happened in a 1970s sitcom, and I just thought at the time, I don't know why I'm doing this, and what I realized I was doing was I was coming up with something from somewhere I could use to make her laugh together with me. It was a very basic reaction to find some reason we can do this. We can laugh together. We're going to get through this. We're going to be okay. And in fact, all of us are doing this all the time. You do it so often, you don't even notice it. Everybody underestimates how often they laugh, and you're doing something, when you laugh with people, that's actually letting you access a really ancient evolutionary system that mammals have evolved to make and maintain social bonds, and clearly to regulate emotions, to make ourselves feel better. It's not something specific to humans — it's a really ancient behavior which really helps us regulate how we feel and makes us feel better. In other words, when it comes to laughter, you and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals. (Laughter) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we're priming some kids for college — and others for prison | {0: 'Alice Goffman’s fieldwork in a struggling Philadelphia neighborhood sheds harsh light on a justice system that creates suspects rather than citizens. '} | TED2015 | On the path that American children travel to adulthood, two institutions oversee the journey. The first is the one we hear a lot about: college. Some of you may remember the excitement that you felt when you first set off for college. Some of you may be in college right now and you're feeling this excitement at this very moment. College has some shortcomings. It's expensive; it leaves young people in debt. But all in all, it's a pretty good path. Young people emerge from college with pride and with great friends and with a lot of knowledge about the world. And perhaps most importantly, a better chance in the labor market than they had before they got there. Today I want to talk about the second institution overseeing the journey from childhood to adulthood in the United States. And that institution is prison. Young people on this journey are meeting with probation officers instead of with teachers. They're going to court dates instead of to class. Their junior year abroad is instead a trip to a state correctional facility. And they're emerging from their 20s not with degrees in business and English, but with criminal records. This institution is also costing us a lot, about 40,000 dollars a year to send a young person to prison in New Jersey. But here, taxpayers are footing the bill and what kids are getting is a cold prison cell and a permanent mark against them when they come home and apply for work. There are more and more kids on this journey to adulthood than ever before in the United States and that's because in the past 40 years, our incarceration rate has grown by 700 percent. I have one slide for this talk. Here it is. Here's our incarceration rate, about 716 people per 100,000 in the population. Here's the OECD countries. What's more, it's poor kids that we're sending to prison, too many drawn from African-American and Latino communities so that prison now stands firmly between the young people trying to make it and the fulfillment of the American Dream. The problem's actually a bit worse than this 'cause we're not just sending poor kids to prison, we're saddling poor kids with court fees, with probation and parole restrictions, with low-level warrants, we're asking them to live in halfway houses and on house arrest, and we're asking them to negotiate a police force that is entering poor communities of color, not for the purposes of promoting public safety, but to make arrest counts, to line city coffers. This is the hidden underside to our historic experiment in punishment: young people worried that at any moment, they will be stopped, searched and seized. Not just in the streets, but in their homes, at school and at work. I got interested in this other path to adulthood when I was myself a college student attending the University of Pennsylvania in the early 2000s. Penn sits within a historic African-American neighborhood. So you've got these two parallel journeys going on simultaneously: the kids attending this elite, private university, and the kids from the adjacent neighborhood, some of whom are making it to college, and many of whom are being shipped to prison. In my sophomore year, I started tutoring a young woman who was in high school who lived about 10 minutes away from the university. Soon, her cousin came home from a juvenile detention center. He was 15, a freshman in high school. I began to get to know him and his friends and family, and I asked him what he thought about me writing about his life for my senior thesis in college. This senior thesis became a dissertation at Princeton and now a book. By the end of my sophomore year, I moved into the neighborhood and I spent the next six years trying to understand what young people were facing as they came of age. The first week I spent in this neighborhood, I saw two boys, five and seven years old, play this game of chase, where the older boy ran after the other boy. He played the cop. When the cop caught up to the younger boy, he pushed him down, handcuffed him with imaginary handcuffs, took a quarter out of the other child's pocket, saying, "I'm seizing that." He asked the child if he was carrying any drugs or if he had a warrant. Many times, I saw this game repeated, sometimes children would simply give up running, and stick their bodies flat against the ground with their hands above their heads, or flat up against a wall. Children would yell at each other, "I'm going to lock you up, I'm going to lock you up and you're never coming home!" Once I saw a six-year-old child pull another child's pants down and try to do a cavity search. In the first 18 months that I lived in this neighborhood, I wrote down every time I saw any contact between police and people that were my neighbors. So in the first 18 months, I watched the police stop pedestrians or people in cars, search people, run people's names, chase people through the streets, pull people in for questioning, or make an arrest every single day, with five exceptions. Fifty-two times, I watched the police break down doors, chase people through houses or make an arrest of someone in their home. Fourteen times in this first year and a half, I watched the police punch, choke, kick, stomp on or beat young men after they had caught them. Bit by bit, I got to know two brothers, Chuck and Tim. Chuck was 18 when we met, a senior in high school. He was playing on the basketball team and making C's and B's. His younger brother, Tim, was 10. And Tim loved Chuck; he followed him around a lot, looked to Chuck to be a mentor. They lived with their mom and grandfather in a two-story row home with a front lawn and a back porch. Their mom was struggling with addiction all while the boys were growing up. She never really was able to hold down a job for very long. It was their grandfather's pension that supported the family, not really enough to pay for food and clothes and school supplies for growing boys. The family was really struggling. So when we met, Chuck was a senior in high school. He had just turned 18. That winter, a kid in the schoolyard called Chuck's mom a crack whore. Chuck pushed the kid's face into the snow and the school cops charged him with aggravated assault. The other kid was fine the next day, I think it was his pride that was injured more than anything. But anyway, since Chuck was 18, this agg. assault case sent him to adult county jail on State Road in northeast Philadelphia, where he sat, unable to pay the bail — he couldn't afford it — while the trial dates dragged on and on and on through almost his entire senior year. Finally, near the end of this season, the judge on this assault case threw out most of the charges and Chuck came home with only a few hundred dollars' worth of court fees hanging over his head. Tim was pretty happy that day. The next fall, Chuck tried to re-enroll as a senior, but the school secretary told him that he was then 19 and too old to be readmitted. Then the judge on his assault case issued him a warrant for his arrest because he couldn't pay the 225 dollars in court fees that came due a few weeks after the case ended. Then he was a high school dropout living on the run. Tim's first arrest came later that year after he turned 11. Chuck had managed to get his warrant lifted and he was on a payment plan for the court fees and he was driving Tim to school in his girlfriend's car. So a cop pulls them over, runs the car, and the car comes up as stolen in California. Chuck had no idea where in the history of this car it had been stolen. His girlfriend's uncle bought it from a used car auction in northeast Philly. Chuck and Tim had never been outside of the tri-state, let alone to California. But anyway, the cops down at the precinct charged Chuck with receiving stolen property. And then a juvenile judge, a few days later, charged Tim, age 11, with accessory to receiving a stolen property and then he was placed on three years of probation. With this probation sentence hanging over his head, Chuck sat his little brother down and began teaching him how to run from the police. They would sit side by side on their back porch looking out into the shared alleyway and Chuck would coach Tim how to spot undercover cars, how to negotiate a late-night police raid, how and where to hide. I want you to imagine for a second what Chuck and Tim's lives would be like if they were living in a neighborhood where kids were going to college, not prison. A neighborhood like the one I got to grow up in. Okay, you might say. But Chuck and Tim, kids like them, they're committing crimes! Don't they deserve to be in prison? Don't they deserve to be living in fear of arrest? Well, my answer would be no. They don't. And certainly not for the same things that other young people with more privilege are doing with impunity. If Chuck had gone to my high school, that schoolyard fight would have ended there, as a schoolyard fight. It never would have become an aggravated assault case. Not a single kid that I went to college with has a criminal record right now. Not a single one. But can you imagine how many might have if the police had stopped those kids and searched their pockets for drugs as they walked to class? Or had raided their frat parties in the middle of the night? Okay, you might say. But doesn't this high incarceration rate partly account for our really low crime rate? Crime is down. That's a good thing. Totally, that is a good thing. Crime is down. It dropped precipitously in the '90s and through the 2000s. But according to a committee of academics convened by the National Academy of Sciences last year, the relationship between our historically high incarceration rates and our low crime rate is pretty shaky. It turns out that the crime rate goes up and down irrespective of how many young people we send to prison. We tend to think about justice in a pretty narrow way: good and bad, innocent and guilty. Injustice is about being wrongfully convicted. So if you're convicted of something you did do, you should be punished for it. There are innocent and guilty people, there are victims and there are perpetrators. Maybe we could think a little bit more broadly than that. Right now, we're asking kids who live in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, who have the least amount of family resources, who are attending the country's worst schools, who are facing the toughest time in the labor market, who are living in neighborhoods where violence is an everyday problem, we're asking these kids to walk the thinnest possible line — to basically never do anything wrong. Why are we not providing support to young kids facing these challenges? Why are we offering only handcuffs, jail time and this fugitive existence? Can we imagine something better? Can we imagine a criminal justice system that prioritizes recovery, prevention, civic inclusion, rather than punishment? (Applause) A criminal justice system that acknowledges the legacy of exclusion that poor people of color in the U.S. have faced and that does not promote and perpetuate those exclusions. (Applause) And finally, a criminal justice system that believes in black young people, rather than treating black young people as the enemy to be rounded up. (Applause) The good news is that we already are. A few years ago, Michelle Alexander wrote "The New Jim Crow," which got Americans to see incarceration as a civil rights issue of historic proportions in a way they had not seen it before. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have come out very strongly on sentencing reform, on the need to address racial disparity in incarceration. We're seeing states throw out Stop and Frisk as the civil rights violation that it is. We're seeing cities and states decriminalize possession of marijuana. New York, New Jersey and California have been dropping their prison populations, closing prisons, while also seeing a big drop in crime. Texas has gotten into the game now, also closing prisons, investing in education. This curious coalition is building from the right and the left, made up of former prisoners and fiscal conservatives, of civil rights activists and libertarians, of young people taking to the streets to protest police violence against unarmed black teenagers, and older, wealthier people — some of you are here in the audience — pumping big money into decarceration initiatives In a deeply divided Congress, the work of reforming our criminal justice system is just about the only thing that the right and the left are coming together on. I did not think I would see this political moment in my lifetime. I think many of the people who have been working tirelessly to write about the causes and consequences of our historically high incarceration rates did not think we would see this moment in our lifetime. The question for us now is, how much can we make of it? How much can we change? I want to end with a call to young people, the young people attending college and the young people struggling to stay out of prison or to make it through prison and return home. It may seem like these paths to adulthood are worlds apart, but the young people participating in these two institutions conveying us to adulthood, they have one thing in common: Both can be leaders in the work of reforming our criminal justice system. Young people have always been leaders in the fight for equal rights, the fight for more people to be granted dignity and a fighting chance at freedom. The mission for the generation of young people coming of age in this, a sea-change moment, potentially, is to end mass incarceration and build a new criminal justice system, emphasis on the word justice. Thanks. (Applause) |
The case for engineering our food | {0: 'Embracing both genetically improved seed and ecologically based farming methods, Pamela Ronald aims to enhance sustainable agriculture.'} | TED2015 | I am a plant geneticist. I study genes that make plants resistant to disease and tolerant of stress. In recent years, millions of people around the world have come to believe that there's something sinister about genetic modification. Today, I am going to provide a different perspective. First, let me introduce my husband, Raoul. He's an organic farmer. On his farm, he plants a variety of different crops. This is one of the many ecological farming practices he uses to keep his farm healthy. Imagine some of the reactions we get: "Really? An organic farmer and a plant geneticist? Can you agree on anything?" Well, we can, and it's not difficult, because we have the same goal. We want to help nourish the growing population without further destroying the environment. I believe this is the greatest challenge of our time. Now, genetic modification is not new; virtually everything we eat has been genetically modified in some manner. Let me give you a few examples. On the left is an image of the ancient ancestor of modern corn. You see a single roll of grain that's covered in a hard case. Unless you have a hammer, teosinte isn't good for making tortillas. Now, take a look at the ancient ancestor of banana. You can see the large seeds. And unappetizing brussel sprouts, and eggplant, so beautiful. Now, to create these varieties, breeders have used many different genetic techniques over the years. Some of them are quite creative, like mixing two different species together using a process called grafting to create this variety that's half tomato and half potato. Breeders have also used other types of genetic techniques, such as random mutagenesis, which induces uncharacterized mutations into the plants. The rice in the cereal that many of us fed our babies was developed using this approach. Now, today, breeders have even more options to choose from. Some of them are extraordinarily precise. I want to give you a couple examples from my own work. I work on rice, which is a staple food for more than half the world's people. Each year, 40 percent of the potential harvest is lost to pest and disease. For this reason, farmers plant rice varieties that carry genes for resistance. This approach has been used for nearly 100 years. Yet, when I started graduate school, no one knew what these genes were. It wasn't until the 1990s that scientists finally uncovered the genetic basis of resistance. In my laboratory, we isolated a gene for immunity to a very serious bacterial disease in Asia and Africa. We found we could engineer the gene into a conventional rice variety that's normally susceptible, and you can see the two leaves on the bottom here are highly resistant to infection. Now, the same month that my laboratory published our discovery on the rice immunity gene, my friend and colleague Dave Mackill stopped by my office. He said, "Seventy million rice farmers are having trouble growing rice." That's because their fields are flooded, and these rice farmers are living on less than two dollars a day. Although rice grows well in standing water, most rice varieties will die if they're submerged for more than three days. Flooding is expected to be increasingly problematic as the climate changes. He told me that his graduate student Kenong Xu and himself were studying an ancient variety of rice that had an amazing property. It could withstand two weeks of complete submergence. He asked if I would be willing to help them isolate this gene. I said yes — I was very excited, because I knew if we were successful, we could potentially help millions of farmers grow rice even when their fields were flooded. Kenong spent 10 years looking for this gene. Then one day, he said, "Come look at this experiment. You've got to see it." I went to the greenhouse and I saw that the conventional variety that was flooded for 18 days had died, but the rice variety that we had genetically engineered with a new gene we had discovered, called Sub1, was alive. Kenong and I were amazed and excited that a single gene could have this dramatic effect. But this is just a greenhouse experiment. Would this work in the field? Now, I'm going to show you a four-month time lapse video taken at the International Rice Research Institute. Breeders there developed a rice variety carrying the Sub1 gene using another genetic technique called precision breeding. On the left, you can see the Sub1 variety, and on the right is the conventional variety. Both varieties do very well at first, but then the field is flooded for 17 days. You can see the Sub1 variety does great. In fact, it produces three and a half times more grain than the conventional variety. I love this video because it shows the power of plant genetics to help farmers. Last year, with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, three and a half million farmers grew Sub1 rice. (Applause) Thank you. Now, many people don't mind genetic modification when it comes to moving rice genes around, rice genes in rice plants, or even when it comes to mixing species together through grafting or random mutagenesis. But when it comes to taking genes from viruses and bacteria and putting them into plants, a lot of people say, "Yuck." Why would you do that? The reason is that sometimes it's the cheapest, safest, and most effective technology for enhancing food security and advancing sustainable agriculture. I'm going to give you three examples. First, take a look at papaya. It's delicious, right? But now, look at this papaya. This papaya is infected with papaya ringspot virus. In the 1950s, this virus nearly wiped out the entire production of papaya on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. Many people thought that the Hawaiian papaya was doomed, but then, a local Hawaiian, a plant pathologist named Dennis Gonsalves, decided to try to fight this disease using genetic engineering. He took a snippet of viral DNA and he inserted it into the papaya genome. This is kind of like a human getting a vaccination. Now, take a look at his field trial. You can see the genetically engineered papaya in the center. It's immune to infection. The conventional papaya around the outside is severely infected with the virus. Dennis' pioneering work is credited with rescuing the papaya industry. Today, 20 years later, there's still no other method to control this disease. There's no organic method. There's no conventional method. Eighty percent of Hawaiian papaya is genetically engineered. Now, some of you may still feel a little queasy about viral genes in your food, but consider this: The genetically engineered papaya carries just a trace amount of the virus. If you bite into an organic or conventional papaya that is infected with the virus, you will be chewing on tenfold more viral protein. Now, take a look at this pest feasting on an eggplant. The brown you see is frass, what comes out the back end of the insect. To control this serious pest, which can devastate the entire eggplant crop in Bangladesh, Bangladeshi farmers spray insecticides two to three times a week, sometimes twice a day, when pest pressure is high. But we know that some insecticides are very harmful to human health, especially when farmers and their families cannot afford proper protection, like these children. In less developed countries, it's estimated that 300,000 people die every year because of insecticide misuse and exposure. Cornell and Bangladeshi scientists decided to fight this disease using a genetic technique that builds on an organic farming approach. Organic farmers like my husband Raoul spray an insecticide called B.T., which is based on a bacteria. This pesticide is very specific to caterpillar pests, and in fact, it's nontoxic to humans, fish and birds. It's less toxic than table salt. But this approach does not work well in Bangladesh. That's because these insecticide sprays are difficult to find, they're expensive, and they don't prevent the insect from getting inside the plants. In the genetic approach, scientists cut the gene out of the bacteria and insert it directly into the eggplant genome. Will this work to reduce insecticide sprays in Bangladesh? Definitely. Last season, farmers reported they were able to reduce their insecticide use by a huge amount, almost down to zero. They're able to harvest and replant for the next season. Now, I've given you a couple examples of how genetic engineering can be used to fight pests and disease and to reduce the amount of insecticides. My final example is an example where genetic engineering can be used to reduce malnutrition. In less developed countries, 500,000 children go blind every year because of lack of Vitamin A. More than half will die. For this reason, scientists supported by the Rockefeller Foundation genetically engineered a golden rice to produce beta-carotene, which is the precursor of Vitamin A. This is the same pigment that we find in carrots. Researchers estimate that just one cup of golden rice per day will save the lives of thousands of children. But golden rice is virulently opposed by activists who are against genetic modification. Just last year, activists invaded and destroyed a field trial in the Philippines. When I heard about the destruction, I wondered if they knew that they were destroying much more than a scientific research project, that they were destroying medicines that children desperately needed to save their sight and their lives. Some of my friends and family still worry: How do you know genes in the food are safe to eat? I explained the genetic engineering, the process of moving genes between species, has been used for more than 40 years in wines, in medicine, in plants, in cheeses. In all that time, there hasn't been a single case of harm to human health or the environment. But I say, look, I'm not asking you to believe me. Science is not a belief system. My opinion doesn't matter. Let's look at the evidence. After 20 years of careful study and rigorous peer review by thousands of independent scientists, every major scientific organization in the world has concluded that the crops currently on the market are safe to eat and that the process of genetic engineering is no more risky than older methods of genetic modification. These are precisely the same organizations that most of us trust when it comes to other important scientific issues such as global climate change or the safety of vaccines. Raoul and I believe that, instead of worrying about the genes in our food, we must focus on how we can help children grow up healthy. We must ask if farmers in rural communities can thrive, and if everyone can afford the food. We must try to minimize environmental degradation. What scares me most about the loud arguments and misinformation about plant genetics is that the poorest people who most need the technology may be denied access because of the vague fears and prejudices of those who have enough to eat. We have a huge challenge in front of us. Let's celebrate scientific innovation and use it. It's our responsibility to do everything we can to help alleviate human suffering and safeguard the environment. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Chris Anderson: Powerfully argued. The people who argue against GMOs, as I understand it, the core piece comes from two things. One, complexity and unintended consequence. Nature is this incredibly complex machine. If we put out these brand new genes that we've created, that haven't been challenged by years of evolution, and they started mixing up with the rest of what's going on, couldn't that trigger some kind of cataclysm or problem, especially when you add in the commercial incentive that some companies have to put them out there? The fear is that those incentives mean that the decision is not made on purely scientific grounds, and even if it was, that there would be unintended consequences. How do we know that there isn't a big risk of some unintended consequence? Often our tinkerings with nature do lead to big, unintended consequences and chain reactions. Pamela Ronald: Okay, so on the commercial aspects, one thing that's really important to understand is that, in the developed world, farmers in the United States, almost all farmers, whether they're organic or conventional, they buy seed produced by seed companies. So there's definitely a commercial interest to sell a lot of seed, but hopefully they're selling seed that the farmers want to buy. It's different in the less developed world. Farmers there cannot afford the seed. These seeds are not being sold. These seeds are being distributed freely through traditional kinds of certification groups, so it is very important in less developed countries that the seed be freely available. CA: Wouldn't some activists say that this is actually part of the conspiracy? This is the heroin strategy. You seed the stuff, and people have no choice but to be hooked on these seeds forever? PR: There are a lot of conspiracy theories for sure, but it doesn't work that way. For example, the seed that's being distributed, the flood-tolerant rice, this is distributed freely through Indian and Bangladeshi seed certification agencies, so there's no commercial interest at all. The golden rice was developed through support of the Rockefeller Foundation. Again, it's being freely distributed. There are no commercial profits in this situation. And now to address your other question about, well, mixing genes, aren't there some unintended consequences? Absolutely — every time we do something different, there's an unintended consequence, but one of the points I was trying to make is that we've been doing kind of crazy things to our plants, mutagenesis using radiation or chemical mutagenesis. This induces thousands of uncharacterized mutations, and this is even a higher risk of unintended consequence than many of the modern methods. And so it's really important not to use the term GMO because it's scientifically meaningless. I feel it's very important to talk about a specific crop and a specific product, and think about the needs of the consumer. CA: So part of what's happening here is that there's a mental model in a lot of people that nature is nature, and it's pure and pristine, and to tinker with it is Frankensteinian. It's making something that's pure dangerous in some way, and I think you're saying that that whole model just misunderstands how nature is. Nature is a much more chaotic interplay of genetic changes that have been happening all the time anyway. PR: That's absolutely true, and there's no such thing as pure food. I mean, you could not spray eggplant with insecticides or not genetically engineer it, but then you'd be stuck eating frass. So there's no purity there. CA: Pam Ronald, thank you. That was powerfully argued. PR: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. (Applause) |
New video technology that reveals an object's hidden properties | {0: 'Computer vision expert Abe Davis pioneers methods to extract audio from silent digital videos, even footage shot on ordinary consumer cameras.'} | TED2015 | Most of us think of motion as a very visual thing. If I walk across this stage or gesture with my hands while I speak, that motion is something that you can see. But there's a world of important motion that's too subtle for the human eye, and over the past few years, we've started to find that cameras can often see this motion even when humans can't. So let me show you what I mean. On the left here, you see video of a person's wrist, and on the right, you see video of a sleeping infant, but if I didn't tell you that these were videos, you might assume that you were looking at two regular images, because in both cases, these videos appear to be almost completely still. But there's actually a lot of subtle motion going on here, and if you were to touch the wrist on the left, you would feel a pulse, and if you were to hold the infant on the right, you would feel the rise and fall of her chest as she took each breath. And these motions carry a lot of significance, but they're usually too subtle for us to see, so instead, we have to observe them through direct contact, through touch. But a few years ago, my colleagues at MIT developed what they call a motion microscope, which is software that finds these subtle motions in video and amplifies them so that they become large enough for us to see. And so, if we use their software on the left video, it lets us see the pulse in this wrist, and if we were to count that pulse, we could even figure out this person's heart rate. And if we used the same software on the right video, it lets us see each breath that this infant takes, and we can use this as a contact-free way to monitor her breathing. And so this technology is really powerful because it takes these phenomena that we normally have to experience through touch and it lets us capture them visually and non-invasively. So a couple years ago, I started working with the folks that created that software, and we decided to pursue a crazy idea. We thought, it's cool that we can use software to visualize tiny motions like this, and you can almost think of it as a way to extend our sense of touch. But what if we could do the same thing with our ability to hear? What if we could use video to capture the vibrations of sound, which are just another kind of motion, and turn everything that we see into a microphone? Now, this is a bit of a strange idea, so let me try to put it in perspective for you. Traditional microphones work by converting the motion of an internal diaphragm into an electrical signal, and that diaphragm is designed to move readily with sound so that its motion can be recorded and interpreted as audio. But sound causes all objects to vibrate. Those vibrations are just usually too subtle and too fast for us to see. So what if we record them with a high-speed camera and then use software to extract tiny motions from our high-speed video, and analyze those motions to figure out what sounds created them? This would let us turn visible objects into visual microphones from a distance. And so we tried this out, and here's one of our experiments, where we took this potted plant that you see on the right and we filmed it with a high-speed camera while a nearby loudspeaker played this sound. (Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb") And so here's the video that we recorded, and we recorded it at thousands of frames per second, but even if you look very closely, all you'll see are some leaves that are pretty much just sitting there doing nothing, because our sound only moved those leaves by about a micrometer. That's one ten-thousandth of a centimeter, which spans somewhere between a hundredth and a thousandth of a pixel in this image. So you can squint all you want, but motion that small is pretty much perceptually invisible. But it turns out that something can be perceptually invisible and still be numerically significant, because with the right algorithms, we can take this silent, seemingly still video and we can recover this sound. (Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb") (Applause) So how is this possible? How can we get so much information out of so little motion? Well, let's say that those leaves move by just a single micrometer, and let's say that that shifts our image by just a thousandth of a pixel. That may not seem like much, but a single frame of video may have hundreds of thousands of pixels in it, and so if we combine all of the tiny motions that we see from across that entire image, then suddenly a thousandth of a pixel can start to add up to something pretty significant. On a personal note, we were pretty psyched when we figured this out. (Laughter) But even with the right algorithm, we were still missing a pretty important piece of the puzzle. You see, there are a lot of factors that affect when and how well this technique will work. There's the object and how far away it is; there's the camera and the lens that you use; how much light is shining on the object and how loud your sound is. And even with the right algorithm, we had to be very careful with our early experiments, because if we got any of these factors wrong, there was no way to tell what the problem was. We would just get noise back. And so a lot of our early experiments looked like this. And so here I am, and on the bottom left, you can kind of see our high-speed camera, which is pointed at a bag of chips, and the whole thing is lit by these bright lamps. And like I said, we had to be very careful in these early experiments, so this is how it went down. (Video) Abe Davis: Three, two, one, go. Mary had a little lamb! Little lamb! Little lamb! (Laughter) AD: So this experiment looks completely ridiculous. (Laughter) I mean, I'm screaming at a bag of chips — (Laughter) — and we're blasting it with so much light, we literally melted the first bag we tried this on. (Laughter) But ridiculous as this experiment looks, it was actually really important, because we were able to recover this sound. (Audio) Mary had a little lamb! Little lamb! Little lamb! (Applause) AD: And this was really significant, because it was the first time we recovered intelligible human speech from silent video of an object. And so it gave us this point of reference, and gradually we could start to modify the experiment, using different objects or moving the object further away, using less light or quieter sounds. And we analyzed all of these experiments until we really understood the limits of our technique, because once we understood those limits, we could figure out how to push them. And that led to experiments like this one, where again, I'm going to speak to a bag of chips, but this time we've moved our camera about 15 feet away, outside, behind a soundproof window, and the whole thing is lit by only natural sunlight. And so here's the video that we captured. And this is what things sounded like from inside, next to the bag of chips. (Audio) Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. AD: And here's what we were able to recover from our silent video captured outside behind that window. (Audio) Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. (Applause) AD: And there are other ways that we can push these limits as well. So here's a quieter experiment where we filmed some earphones plugged into a laptop computer, and in this case, our goal was to recover the music that was playing on that laptop from just silent video of these two little plastic earphones, and we were able to do this so well that I could even Shazam our results. (Laughter) (Music: "Under Pressure" by Queen) (Applause) And we can also push things by changing the hardware that we use. Because the experiments I've shown you so far were done with a camera, a high-speed camera, that can record video about a 100 times faster than most cell phones, but we've also found a way to use this technique with more regular cameras, and we do that by taking advantage of what's called a rolling shutter. You see, most cameras record images one row at a time, and so if an object moves during the recording of a single image, there's a slight time delay between each row, and this causes slight artifacts that get coded into each frame of a video. And so what we found is that by analyzing these artifacts, we can actually recover sound using a modified version of our algorithm. So here's an experiment we did where we filmed a bag of candy while a nearby loudspeaker played the same "Mary Had a Little Lamb" music from before, but this time, we used just a regular store-bought camera, and so in a second, I'll play for you the sound that we recovered, and it's going to sound distorted this time, but listen and see if you can still recognize the music. (Audio: "Mary Had a Little Lamb") And so, again, that sounds distorted, but what's really amazing here is that we were able to do this with something that you could literally run out and pick up at a Best Buy. So at this point, a lot of people see this work, and they immediately think about surveillance. And to be fair, it's not hard to imagine how you might use this technology to spy on someone. But keep in mind that there's already a lot of very mature technology out there for surveillance. In fact, people have been using lasers to eavesdrop on objects from a distance for decades. But what's really new here, what's really different, is that now we have a way to picture the vibrations of an object, which gives us a new lens through which to look at the world, and we can use that lens to learn not just about forces like sound that cause an object to vibrate, but also about the object itself. And so I want to take a step back and think about how that might change the ways that we use video, because we usually use video to look at things, and I've just shown you how we can use it to listen to things. But there's another important way that we learn about the world: that's by interacting with it. We push and pull and poke and prod things. We shake things and see what happens. And that's something that video still won't let us do, at least not traditionally. So I want to show you some new work, and this is based on an idea I had just a few months ago, so this is actually the first time I've shown it to a public audience. And the basic idea is that we're going to use the vibrations in a video to capture objects in a way that will let us interact with them and see how they react to us. So here's an object, and in this case, it's a wire figure in the shape of a human, and we're going to film that object with just a regular camera. So there's nothing special about this camera. In fact, I've actually done this with my cell phone before. But we do want to see the object vibrate, so to make that happen, we're just going to bang a little bit on the surface where it's resting while we record this video. So that's it: just five seconds of regular video, while we bang on this surface, and we're going to use the vibrations in that video to learn about the structural and material properties of our object, and we're going to use that information to create something new and interactive. And so here's what we've created. And it looks like a regular image, but this isn't an image, and it's not a video, because now I can take my mouse and I can start interacting with the object. And so what you see here is a simulation of how this object would respond to new forces that we've never seen before, and we created it from just five seconds of regular video. (Applause) And so this is a really powerful way to look at the world, because it lets us predict how objects will respond to new situations, and you could imagine, for instance, looking at an old bridge and wondering what would happen, how would that bridge hold up if I were to drive my car across it. And that's a question that you probably want to answer before you start driving across that bridge. And of course, there are going to be limitations to this technique, just like there were with the visual microphone, but we found that it works in a lot of situations that you might not expect, especially if you give it longer videos. So for example, here's a video that I captured of a bush outside of my apartment, and I didn't do anything to this bush, but by capturing a minute-long video, a gentle breeze caused enough vibrations that we could learn enough about this bush to create this simulation. (Applause) And so you could imagine giving this to a film director, and letting him control, say, the strength and direction of wind in a shot after it's been recorded. Or, in this case, we pointed our camera at a hanging curtain, and you can't even see any motion in this video, but by recording a two-minute-long video, natural air currents in this room created enough subtle, imperceptible motions and vibrations that we could learn enough to create this simulation. And ironically, we're kind of used to having this kind of interactivity when it comes to virtual objects, when it comes to video games and 3D models, but to be able to capture this information from real objects in the real world using just simple, regular video, is something new that has a lot of potential. So here are the amazing people who worked with me on these projects. (Applause) And what I've shown you today is only the beginning. We've just started to scratch the surface of what you can do with this kind of imaging, because it gives us a new way to capture our surroundings with common, accessible technology. And so looking to the future, it's going to be really exciting to explore what this can tell us about the world. Thank you. (Applause) |
The dancer, the singer, the cellist ... and a moment of creative magic | {0: 'With his artistry and creativity, Bill T. Jones has inspired a generation of dancers, choreographers -- and audiences.', 1: 'Joshua Roman is an internationally recognized cellist. ', 2: 'With her lustrous voice and wide-ranging musical curiosity, Somi spins elegant vocal jazz from African legacies.\r\n'} | TED2015 | Isadora Duncan — (Music) — crazy, long-legged woman from San Francisco, got tired of this country, and she wanted to get out. Isadora was famous somewhere around 1908 for putting up a blue curtain, and she would stand with her hands over her solar plexus and she would wait, and she would wait, and then, she would move. (Music) Josh and I and Somi call this piece "The Red Circle and the Blue Curtain." Red circle. Blue curtain. But, this is not the beginning of the 20th century. This is a morning in Vancouver in 2015. (Music) (Singing) Come on, Josh! (Music) (Singing) Go! Are we there yet? I don't think so. Hey, yeah! (Music) What time is it? (Music) Where are we? Josh. Somi. Bill T. Josh. Somi. Bill T. (Applause) Yeah, yeah! |
Programming bacteria to detect cancer (and maybe treat it) | {0: 'Tal Danino explores the emerging frontier of combining biology and engineering (and art). He is a 2015 TED Fellow.'} | TED2015 | You may not realize this, but there are more bacteria in your body than stars in our entire galaxy. This fascinating universe of bacteria inside of us is an integral part of our health, and our technology is evolving so rapidly that today we can program these bacteria like we program computers. Now, the diagram that you see here, I know it looks like some kind of sports play, but it is actually a blueprint of the first bacterial program I developed. And like writing software, we can print and write DNA into different algorithms and programs inside of bacteria. What this program does is produces fluorescent proteins in a rhythmic fashion and generates a small molecule that allows bacteria to communicate and synchronize, as you're seeing in this movie. The growing colony of bacteria that you see here is about the width of a human hair. Now, what you can't see is that our genetic program instructs these bacteria to each produce small molecules, and these molecules travel between the thousands of individual bacteria telling them when to turn on and off. And the bacteria synchronize quite well at this scale, but because the molecule that synchronizes them together can only travel so fast, in larger colonies of bacteria, this results in traveling waves between bacteria that are far away from each other, and you can see these waves going from right to left across the screen. Now, our genetic program relies on a natural phenomenon called quorum sensing, in which bacteria trigger coordinated and sometimes virulent behaviors once they reach a critical density. You can observe quorum sensing in action in this movie, where a growing colony of bacteria only begins to glow once it reaches a high or critical density. Our genetic program continues producing these rhythmic patterns of fluorescent proteins as the colony grows outwards. This particular movie and experiment we call The Supernova, because it looks like an exploding star. Now, besides programming these beautiful patterns, I wondered, what else can we get these bacteria to do? And I decided to explore how we can program bacteria to detect and treat diseases in our bodies like cancer. One of the surprising facts about bacteria is that they can naturally grow inside of tumors. This happens because typically tumors are areas where the immune system has no access, and so bacteria find these tumors and use them as a safe haven to grow and thrive. We started using probiotic bacteria which are safe bacteria that have a health benefit, and found that when orally delivered to mice, these probiotics would selectively grow inside of liver tumors. We realized that the most convenient way to highlight the presence of the probiotics, and hence, the presence of the tumors, was to get these bacteria to produce a signal that would be detectable in the urine, and so we specifically programmed these probiotics to make a molecule that would change the color of your urine to indicate the presence of cancer. We went on to show that this technology could sensitively and specifically detect liver cancer, one that is challenging to detect otherwise. Now, since these bacteria specifically localize to tumors, we've been programming them to not only detect cancer but also to treat cancer by producing therapeutic molecules from within the tumor environment that shrink the existing tumors, and we've been doing this using quorum sensing programs like you saw in the previous movies. Altogether, imagine in the future taking a programmed probiotic that could detect and treat cancer, or even other diseases. Our ability to program bacteria and program life opens up new horizons in cancer research, and to share this vision, I worked with artist Vik Muniz to create the symbol of the universe, made entirely out of bacteria or cancer cells. Ultimately, my hope is that the beauty and purpose of this microscopic universe can inspire new and creative approaches for the future of cancer research. Thank you. (Applause) |
A song for my hero, the woman who rowed into a hurricane | {0: 'Dawn Landes, with her bright, supple voice and her restless imagination, is drawn to create and collaborate. A master of singer-songwriter pop, she is now writing a musical called "Row."'} | TED2015 | In June of 1998, Tori Murden McClure left Nags Head, North Carolina for France. That's her boat, the American Pearl. It's 23 feet long and just six feet across at its widest point. The deck was the size of a cargo bed of a Ford F-150 pickup truck. Tori and her friends built it by hand, and it weighed about 1,800 pounds. Her plan was to row it alone across the Atlantic Ocean — no motor, no sail — something no woman and no American had ever done before. This would be her route: over 3,600 miles across the open North Atlantic Ocean. Professionally, Tori worked as a project administrator for the city of Louisville, Kentucky, her hometown, but her real passion was exploring. This was not her first big expedition. Several years earlier, she'd become the first woman to ski to the South Pole. She was an accomplished rower in college, even competed for a spot on the 1992 U.S. Olympic team, but this, this was different. (Video) (Music) Tori Murden McClure: Hi. It's Sunday, July 5. Sector time 9 a.m. So that's Kentucky time now. Dawn Landes: Tori made these videos as she rowed. This is her 21st day at sea. At this point, she'd covered over 1,000 miles, had had no radio contact in more than two weeks following a storm that disabled all her long-range communications systems just five days in. Most days looked like this. At this point, she'd rowed over 200,000 strokes, fighting the current and the wind. Some days, she traveled as little as 15 feet. Yeah. And as frustrating as those days were, other days were like this. (Video) TMM: And I want to show you my little friends. DL: She saw fish, dolphins, whales, sharks, and even some sea turtles. After two weeks with no human contact, Tori was able to contact a local cargo ship via VHF radio. (Video) TMM: Do you guys have a weather report, over? Man: Heading up to a low ahead of you but it's heading, and you're obviously going northeast and there's a high behind us. That'd be coming east-northeast also. TMM: Good. DL: She's pretty happy to talk to another human at this point. (Video) TMM: So weather report says nothing dramatic is going to happen soon. DL: What the weather report didn't tell her was that she was rowing right into the path of Hurricane Danielle in the worst hurricane season on record in the North Atlantic. (Video) TMM: Just sprained my ankle. There's a very strong wind from the east now. It's blowing about. It's blowing! After 12 days of storm I get to row for four hours without a flagging wind. I'm not very happy right now. As happy as I was this morning, I am unhappy now, so ... DL: After nearly three months at sea, she'd covered over 3,000 miles. She was two thirds of the way there, but in the storm, the waves were the size of a seven-story building. Her boat kept capsizing. Some of them were pitchpole capsizes, flipping her end over end, and rowing became impossible. (Video) TMM: It's 6:30 a.m. I'm in something big, bad and ugly. Two capsizes. Last capsize, I took the rib off the top of my ceiling with my back. I've had about six capsizes now. The last one was a pitchpole. I have the Argus beacon with me. I would set off the distress signal, but quite frankly, I don't think they'd ever be able to find this little boat. It's so far underwater right now, the only part that's showing pretty much is the cabin. It's about 10 a.m. I've lost track of the number of capsizes. I seem to capsize about every 15 minutes. I think I may have broken my left arm. The waves are tearing the boat to shreds. I keep praying because I'm not sure I'm going to make it through this. DL: Tori set off her distress beacon and was rescued by a passing container ship. They found her abandoned boat two months later adrift near France. I read about it in the newspaper. In 1998, I was a high school student living in Louisville, Kentucky. Now, I live in New York City. I'm a songwriter. And her bravery stuck with me, and I'm adapting her story into a musical called "Row." When Tori returned home, she was feeling disheartened, she was broke. She was having a hard time making the transition back into civilization. In this scene, she sits at home. The phone is ringing, her friends are calling, but she doesn't know how to talk to them. She sings this song. It's called "Dear Heart." (Guitar) When I was dreaming, I took my body to beautiful places I'd never been. I saw Gibraltar, and stars of Kentucky burned in the moonlight, making me smile. And when I awoke here, the sky was so cloudy. I walked to a party where people I know try hard to know me and ask where I've been, but I can't explain what I've seen to them. Ah, listen, dear heart. Just pay attention, go right from the start. Ah, listen, dear heart. You can fall off the map, but don't fall apart. Ooh ooh ooh, ah ah ah ah ah. Ah ah, ah ah ah. When I was out there, the ocean would hold me, rock me and throw me, light as a child. But now I'm so heavy, nothing consoles me. My mind floats like driftwood, wayward and wild. Ah, listen, dear heart. Just pay attention, go right from the start. Ah, listen, dear heart. You can fall off the map, but don't fall apart. Ooh. Eventually, Tori starts to get her feet under her. She starts hanging out with her friends again. She meets a guy and falls in love for the first time. She gets a new job working for another Louisville native, Muhammad Ali. One day, at lunch with her new boss, Tori shares the news that two other women are setting out to row across the mid-Atlantic, to do something that she almost died trying to do. His response was classic Ali: "You don't want to go through life as the woman who almost rowed across the ocean." He was right. Tori rebuilt the American Pearl, and in December of 1999, she did it. (Applause) (Guitar) Thank you. (Applause) |
The first 21 days of a bee's life | {0: "Anand Varma's photos tell the story behind the science on everything from primate behavior and hummingbird biomechanics to amphibian disease and forest ecology."} | TED2015 | (Music) These bees are in my backyard in Berkeley, California. Until last year, I'd never kept bees before, but National Geographic asked me to photograph a story about them, and I decided, to be able to take compelling images, I should start keeping bees myself. And as you may know, bees pollinate one third of our food crops, and lately they've been having a really hard time. So as a photographer, I wanted to explore what this problem really looks like. So I'm going to show you what I found over the last year. This furry little creature is a fresh young bee halfway emerged from its brood cell, and bees right now are dealing with several different problems, including pesticides, diseases, and habitat loss, but the single greatest threat is a parasitic mite from Asia, Varroa destructor. And this pinhead-sized mite crawls onto young bees and sucks their blood. This eventually destroys a hive because it weakens the immune system of the bees, and it makes them more vulnerable to stress and disease. Now, bees are the most sensitive when they're developing inside their brood cells, and I wanted to know what that process really looks like, so I teamed up with a bee lab at U.C. Davis and figured out how to raise bees in front of a camera. I'm going to show you the first 21 days of a bee's life condensed into 60 seconds. This is a bee egg as it hatches into a larva, and those newly hatched larvae swim around their cells feeding on this white goo that nurse bees secrete for them. Then, their head and their legs slowly differentiate as they transform into pupae. Here's that same pupation process, and you can actually see the mites running around in the cells. Then the tissue in their body reorganizes and the pigment slowly develops in their eyes. The last step of the process is their skin shrivels up and they sprout hair. (Music) So — (Applause) As you can see halfway through that video, the mites were running around on the baby bees, and the way that beekeepers typically manage these mites is they treat their hives with chemicals. In the long run, that's bad news, so researchers are working on finding alternatives to control these mites. This is one of those alternatives. It's an experimental breeding program at the USDA Bee Lab in Baton Rouge, and this queen and her attendant bees are part of that program. Now, the researchers figured out that some of the bees have a natural ability to fight mites, so they set out to breed a line of mite-resistant bees. This is what it takes to breed bees in a lab. The virgin queen is sedated and then artificially inseminated using this precision instrument. Now, this procedure allows the researchers to control exactly which bees are being crossed, but there's a tradeoff in having this much control. They succeeded in breeding mite-resistant bees, but in that process, those bees started to lose traits like their gentleness and their ability to store honey, so to overcome that problem, these researchers are now collaborating with commercial beekeepers. This is Bret Adee opening one of his 72,000 beehives. He and his brother run the largest beekeeping operation in the world, and the USDA is integrating their mite-resistant bees into his operation with the hope that over time, they'll be able to select the bees that are not only mite-resistant but also retain all of these qualities that make them useful to us. And to say it like that makes it sound like we're manipulating and exploiting bees, and the truth is, we've been doing that for thousands of years. We took this wild creature and put it inside of a box, practically domesticating it, and originally that was so that we could harvest their honey, but over time we started losing our native pollinators, our wild pollinators, and there are many places now where those wild pollinators can no longer meet the pollination demands of our agriculture, so these managed bees have become an integral part of our food system. So when people talk about saving bees, my interpretation of that is we need to save our relationship to bees, and in order to design new solutions, we have to understand the basic biology of bees and understand the effects of stressors that we sometimes cannot see. In other words, we have to understand bees up close. Thank you. (Applause) |
Magical houses, made of bamboo | {0: 'Cultivating the power of sustainable materials, Elora Hardy leads \u200b\u200bIbuku, creating\u200b \u200b\u200bbespoke\u200b \u200bbamboo homes in her native Bali.\r\n'} | TED2015 | When I was nine years old, my mom asked me what I would want my house to look like, and I drew this fairy mushroom. And then she actually built it. (Laughter) I don't think I realized this was so unusual at the time, and maybe I still haven't, because I'm still designing houses. This is a six-story bespoke home on the island of Bali. It's built almost entirely from bamboo. The living room overlooks the valley from the fourth floor. You enter the house by a bridge. It can get hot in the tropics, so we make big curving roofs to catch the breezes. But some rooms have tall windows to keep the air conditioning in and the bugs out. This room we left open. We made an air-conditioned, tented bed. And one client wanted a TV room in the corner of her living room. Boxing off an area with tall walls just didn't feel right, so instead, we made this giant woven pod. Now, we do have all the necessary luxuries, like bathrooms. This one is a basket in the corner of the living room, and I've got tell you, some people actually hesitate to use it. We have not quite figured out our acoustic insulation. (Laughter) So there are lots of things that we're still working on, but one thing I have learned is that bamboo will treat you well if you use it right. It's actually a wild grass. It grows on otherwise unproductive land — deep ravines, mountainsides. It lives off of rainwater, spring water, sunlight, and of the 1,450 species of bamboo that grow across the world, we use just seven of them. That's my dad. He's the one who got me building with bamboo, and he is standing in a clump of Dendrocalamus asper niger that he planted just seven years ago. Each year, it sends up a new generation of shoots. That shoot, we watched it grow a meter in three days just last week, so we're talking about sustainable timber in three years. Now, we harvest from hundreds of family-owned clumps. Betung, as we call it, it's really long, up to 18 meters of usable length. Try getting that truck down the mountain. And it's strong: it has the tensile strength of steel, the compressive strength of concrete. Slam four tons straight down on a pole, and it can take it. Because it's hollow, it's lightweight, light enough to be lifted by just a few men, or, apparently, one woman. (Laughter) (Applause) And when my father built Green School in Bali, he chose bamboo for all of the buildings on campus, because he saw it as a promise. It's a promise to the kids. It's one sustainable material that they will not run out of. And when I first saw these structures under construction about six years ago, I just thought, this makes perfect sense. It is growing all around us. It's strong. It's elegant. It's earthquake-resistant. Why hasn't this happened sooner, and what can we do with it next? So along with some of the original builders of Green School, I founded Ibuku. Ibu means "mother," and ku means "mine," so it represents my Mother Earth, and at Ibuku, we are a team of artisans, architects and designers, and what we're doing together is creating a new way of building. Over the past five years together, we have built over 50 unique structures, most of them in Bali. Nine of them are at Green Village — you've just seen inside some of these homes — and we fill them with bespoke furniture, we surround them with veggie gardens, we would love to invite you all to come visit someday. And while you're there, you can also see Green School — we keep building classrooms there each year — as well as an updated fairy mushroom house. We're also working on a little house for export. This is a traditional Sumbanese home that we replicated, right down to the details and textiles. A restaurant with an open-air kitchen. It looks a lot like a kitchen, right? And a bridge that spans 22 meters across a river. Now, what we're doing, it's not entirely new. From little huts to elaborate bridges like this one in Java, bamboo has been in use across the tropical regions of the world for literally tens of thousands of years. There are islands and even continents that were first reached by bamboo rafts. But until recently, it was almost impossible to reliably protect bamboo from insects, and so, just about everything that was ever built out of bamboo is gone. Unprotected bamboo weathers. Untreated bamboo gets eaten to dust. And so that's why most people, especially in Asia, think that you couldn't be poor enough or rural enough to actually want to live in a bamboo house. And so we thought, what will it take to change their minds, to convince people that bamboo is worth building with, much less worth aspiring to? First, we needed safe treatment solutions. Borax is a natural salt. It turns bamboo into a viable building material. Treat it properly, design it carefully, and a bamboo structure can last a lifetime. Second, build something extraordinary out of it. Inspire people. Fortunately, Balinese culture fosters craftsmanship. It values the artisan. So combine those with the adventurous outliers from new generations of locally trained architects and designers and engineers, and always remember that you are designing for curving, tapering, hollow poles. No two poles alike, no straight lines, no two-by-fours here. The tried-and-true, well-crafted formulas and vocabulary of architecture do not apply here. We have had to invent our own rules. We ask the bamboo what it's good at, what it wants to become, and what it says is: respect it, design for its strengths, protect it from water, and to make the most of its curves. So we design in real 3D, making scale structural models out of the same material that we'll later use to build the house. And bamboo model-making, it's an art, as well as some hardcore engineering. So that's the blueprint of the house. (Laughter) And we bring it to site, and with tiny rulers, we measure each pole, and consider each curve, and we choose a piece of bamboo from the pile to replicate that house on site. When it comes down to the details, we consider everything. Why are doors so often rectangular? Why not round? How could you make a door better? Well, its hinges battle with gravity, and gravity will always win in the end, so why not have it pivot on the center where it can stay balanced? And while you're at it, why not doors shaped like teardrops? To reap the selective benefits and work within the constraints of this material, we have really had to push ourselves, and within that constraint, we have found space for something new. It's a challenge: how do you make a ceiling if you don't have any flat boards to work with? Let me tell you, sometimes I dream of sheet rock and plywood. (Laughter) But if what you've got is skilled craftsmen and itsy bitsy little splits, weave that ceiling together, stretch a canvas over it, lacquer it. How do you design durable kitchen countertops that do justice to this curving structure you've just built? Slice up a boulder like a loaf of bread, hand-carve each to fit the other, leave the crusts on, and what we're doing, it is almost entirely handmade. The structural connections of our buildings are reinforced by steel joints, but we use a lot of hand-whittled bamboo pins. There are thousands of pins in each floor. This floor is made of glossy and durable bamboo skin. You can feel the texture under bare feet. And the floor that you walk on, can it affect the way that you walk? Can it change the footprint that you'll ultimately leave on the world? I remember being nine years old and feeling wonder, and possibility, and a little bit of idealism. And we've got a really long way to go, there's a lot left to learn, but one thing I know is that with creativity and commitment, you can create beauty and comfort and safety and even luxury out of a material that will grow back. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why city flags may be the worst-designed thing you've never noticed | {0: 'With his show 99% Invisible, Roman Mars discovered new ways to jolt public radio out of its old paradigms, while at the same time spinning riveting tales of design.'} | TED2015 | I know what you're thinking: "Why does that guy get to sit down?" That's because this is radio. (Music) I tell radio stories about design, and I report on all kinds of stories: buildings and toothbrushes, mascots and wayfinding and fonts. My mission is to get people to engage with the design that they care about so they begin to pay attention to all forms of design. When you decode the world with design intent in mind, the world becomes kind of magical. Instead of seeing the broken things, you see all the little bits of genius that anonymous designers have sweated over to make our lives better. And that's essentially the definition of design: making life better and providing joy. And few things give me greater joy than a well-designed flag. (Laughter) Yeah! (Applause) Happy 50th anniversary on your flag, Canada. It is beautiful, gold standard. Love it. I'm kind of obsessed with flags. Sometimes I bring up the topic of flags, and people are like, "I don't care about flags," and then we start talking about flags, and trust me, 100 percent of people care about flags. There's just something about them that works on our emotions. My family wrapped my Christmas presents as flags this year, including the blue gift bag that's dressed up as the flag of Scotland. I put this picture online, and sure enough, within the first few minutes, someone left a comment that said, "You can take that Scottish Saltire and shove it up your ass." (Laughter) See, people are passionate about flags, you know? That's the way it is. What I love about flags is that once you understand the design of flags, what makes a good flag, what makes a bad flag, you can understand the design of almost anything. So what I'm going to do here is, I cracked open an episode of my radio show, "99% Invisible," and I'm going to reconstruct it here on stage, so when I press a button over here — Voice: S for Sound — Roman Mars: It's going to make a sound, and so whenever you hear a sound or a voice or a piece of music, it's because I pressed a button. Voice: Sound. RM: All right, got it? Here we go. Three, two. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. (Music) Narrator: The five basic principles of flag design. Roman Mars: According to the North American Vexillological Association. Vexillological. Ted Kaye: Vexillology is the study of flags. RM: It's that extra "lol" that makes it sound weird. Narrator: Number one, keep it simple. The flag should be so simple that a child can draw it from memory. RM: Before I moved to Chicago in 2005, I didn't even know cities had their own flags. TK: Most larger cities do have flags. RM: Well, I didn't know that, that's Ted Kaye, by the way. TK: Hello. RM: He's a flag expert, he's a totally awesome guy. TK: I'm Ted Kaye, I have edited a scholarly journal on flag studies, and I am currently involved with the Portland Flag Association and the North American Vexillological Association. RM: Ted literally wrote the book on flag design. Narrator: "Good Flag, Bad Flag." RM: It's more of a pamphlet, really, it's about 16 pages. TK: Yes, it's called "Good Flag, Bad Flag: How to Design a Great Flag." RM: And that first city flag I discovered in Chicago is a beaut: white field, two horizontal blue stripes, and four six-pointed red stars down the middle. (Sound) Narrator: Number two, use meaningful symbolism. TK: The blue stripes represent the water, the river and the lake. Narrator: The flag's images, colors or pattern should relate to what it symbolizes. TK: The red stars represent significant events in Chicago's history. RM: Namely, the founding of Fort Dearborn on the future site of Chicago, the Great Chicago Fire, the World Columbian Exposition, which everyone remembers because of the White City, and the Century of Progress Exposition, which no one remembers at all. Narrator: Number three, use two to three basic colors. TK: The basic rule for colors is to use two to three colors from the standard color set: red, white, blue, green, yellow and black. RM: The design of the Chicago flag has complete buy-in with an entire cross-section of the city. It is everywhere; every municipal building flies the flag. Whet Moser: There's probably at least one store on every block near where I work that sells some sort of Chicago flag paraphernalia. RM: That's Whet Moser from Chicago magazine. WM: Today, just for example, I went to get a haircut, and when I sat down in the barber's chair, there was a Chicago flag on the box that the barber kept all his tools in, and then in the mirror, there was a Chicago flag on the wall behind me. When I left, a guy passed me who had a Chicago flag badge on his backpack. RM: It's adaptable and remixable. The six-pointed stars in particular show up in all kinds of places. WM: The coffee I bought the other day had a Chicago star on it. RM: It's a distinct symbol of Chicago pride. TK: When a police officer or a firefighter dies in Chicago, often it's not the flag of the United States on his casket. It can be the flag of the city of Chicago. That's how deeply the flag has gotten into the civic imagery of Chicago. RM: And it isn't just that people love Chicago and therefore love the flag. I also think that people love Chicago more because the flag is so cool. TK: A positive feedback loop there between great symbolism and civic pride. RM: OK, so when I moved back to San Francisco in 2008, I researched its flag, because I had never seen it in the previous eight years I lived there. And I found it, I am sorry to say, sadly lacking. (Laughter) I know. It hurts me, too. (Laughter) TK: Well, let me start from the top. Narrator: Number one, keep it simple. TK: Keeping it simple. Narrator: The flag should be so simple that a child can draw it from memory. TK: It's a relatively complex flag. RM: OK, here we go, OK. The main component of the San Francisco flag is a phoenix representing the city rising from the ashes after the devastating fires of the 1850s. TK: A powerful symbol for San Francisco. RM: I still don't really dig the phoenix. Design-wise, it manages to both be too crude and have too many details at the same time, which if you were trying for that, you wouldn't be able to do it, and it just looks bad at a distance, but having deep meaning puts that element in the plus column. Behind the phoenix, the background is mostly white, and then it has a substantial gold border around it. TK: Which is a very attractive design element. RM: I think it's OK, but — (Laughter) here come the big no-nos of flag design. Narrator: Number four, no lettering or seals. Never use writing of any kind. RM: Underneath the phoenix, there's a motto on a ribbon that translates to "Gold in peace, iron in war," plus — and this is the big problem — it says San Francisco across the bottom. TK: If you need to write the name of what you're representing on your flag, your symbolism has failed. (Laughter) (Applause) RM: The United States flag doesn't say "USA" across the front. In fact, country flags, they tend to behave. Like, hats off to South Africa and Turkey and Israel and Somalia and Japan and Gambia. There's a bunch of really great country flags, but they obey good design principles because the stakes are high. They're on the international stage. But city, state and regional flags are another story. (Laughter) There is a scourge of bad flags — (Laughter) and they must be stopped. (Laughter) (Applause) That is the truth and that is the dare. The first step is to recognize that we have a problem. (Laughter) A lot of people tend to think that good design is just a matter of taste, and quite honestly, sometimes it is, actually, but sometimes it isn't, all right? (Laughter) Here's the full list of NAVA flag design principles. Narrator: The five basic principles of flag design. Narrator: Number one. TK: Keep it simple. Narrator: Number two. TK: Use meaningful symbolism. Narrator: Number three. TK: Use two to three basic colors. Narrator: Number four. TK: No lettering or seals. Narrator: Never use writing of any kind. TK: Because you can't read that at a distance. Narrator: Number five. TK: And be distinctive. RM: All the best flags tend to stick to these principles. And like I said before, most country flags are OK. But here's the thing: if you showed this list of principles to any designer of almost anything, they would say these principles — simplicity, deep meaning, having few colors or being thoughtful about colors, uniqueness, don't have writing you can't read — all those principles apply to them, too. But sadly, good design principles are rarely invoked in US city flags. Our biggest problem seems to be that fourth one. We just can't stop ourselves from putting our names on our flags, or little municipal seals with tiny writing on them. Here's the thing about municipal seals: They were designed to be on pieces of paper where you can read them, not on flags 100 feet away flapping in the breeze. So here's a bunch of flags again. Vexillologists call these SOBs: Seals on a bedsheet — (Laughter) and if you can't tell what city they go to, yeah, that's exactly the problem, except for Anaheim, apparently, they fixed it. (Laughter) These flags are everywhere in the US. The European equivalent of the municipal seal is the city coat of arms ... and this is where we can learn a lesson for how to do things right. So this is the city coat of arms of Amsterdam. Now, if this were a United States city, the flag would probably look like this. You know, yeah. (Laughter) But instead, the flag of Amsterdam looks like this. Rather than plopping the whole coat of arms on a solid background and writing "Amsterdam" below it, they just take the key elements of the escutcheon, the shield, and they turn it into the most badass city flag in the world. (Laughter) (Applause) And because it's so badass, those flags and crosses are found throughout Amsterdam, just like Chicago, they're used. Even though seal-on-a-bedsheet flags are particularly painful and offensive to me, nothing can quite prepare you for one of the biggest train wrecks in vexillological history. (Laughter) Are you ready? It's the flag of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Laughter) I mean, it's distinctive, I'll give them that. Steve Kodis: It was adopted in 1955. RM: The city ran a contest and gathered a bunch of submissions with all kinds of designs. SK: And an alderman by the name of Fred Steffan cobbled together parts of the submissions to make what is now the Milwaukee flag. RM: It's a kitchen sink flag. There's a gigantic gear representing industry, there's a ship recognizing the port, a giant stalk of wheat paying homage to the brewing industry. It's a hot mess, and Steve Kodis, a graphic designer from Milwaukee, wants to change it. SK: It's really awful. It's a misstep on the city's behalf, to say the least. RM: But what puts the Milwaukee flag over the top, almost to the point of self-parody, is on it is a picture of the Civil War battle flag of the Milwaukee regiment. SK: So that's the final element in it that just makes it that much more ridiculous, that there is a flag design within the Milwaukee flag. RM: On the flag. Yeah. Yeah. (Laughter) Yeah. (Music) Now, Milwaukee is a fantastic city. I've been there, I love it. The most depressing part of this flag, though, is that there have been two major redesign contests. The last one was held in 2001. 105 entries were received. TK: But in the end, the members of the Milwaukee Arts Board decided that none of the new entries were worthy of flying over the city. RM: They couldn't agree to change that thing! (Laughter) That's discouraging enough to make you think that good design and democracy just simply do not go together. (Laughter) But Steve Kotas is going to try one more time to redesign the Milwaukee flag. SK: I believe Milwaukee is a great city. Every great city deserves a great flag. RM: Steve isn't ready to reveal his design yet. One of the things about proposing one of these things is you have to get people on board, and then you reveal your design. But here's the trick: If you want to design a great flag, a kick-ass flag like Chicago's or DC's, which also has a great flag, start by drawing a one-by-one-and-a-half-inch rectangle on a piece of paper. Your design has to fit within that tiny rectangle. Here's why. TK: A three-by-five-foot flag on a pole 100 feet away looks about the same size as a one-by-one-and-a-half-inch rectangle seen about 15 inches from your eye. You'd be surprised by how compelling and simple the design can be when you hold yourself to that limitation. RM: Meanwhile, back in San Francisco. Is there anything we can do? TK: I like to say that in every bad flag there's a good flag trying to get out. The way to make San Francisco's flag a good flag is to take the motto off because you can't read that at a distance. Take the name off, and the border might even be made thicker, so it's more a part of the flag. And I would simply take the phoenix and make it a great big element in the middle of the flag. RM: But the current phoenix, that's got to go. TK: I would simplify or stylize the phoenix. Depict a big, wide-winged bird coming out of flames. Emphasize those flames. RM: So this San Francisco flag was designed by Frank Chimero based on Ted Kaye's suggestions. I don't know what he would do if we was completely unfettered and didn't follow those guidelines. Fans of my radio show and podcast, heard me complain about bad flags. They've sent me other suggested designs. This one's by Neil Mussett. Both are so much better. (Laughter) And I think if they were adopted, I would see them around the city. In my crusade to make flags of the world more beautiful, many listeners have taken it upon themselves to redesign their flags and look into the feasibility of getting them officially adopted. (Music) If you see your city flag and like it, fly it, even if it violates a design rule or two. I don't care. But if you don't see your city flag, maybe it doesn't exist, but maybe it does, and it just sucks, and I dare you to join the effort to try to change that. As we move more and more into cities, the city flag will become not just a symbol of that city as a place, but also, it could become a symbol of how that city considers design itself, especially today, as the populace is becoming more design-aware. And I think design awareness is at an all-time high. A well-designed flag could be seen as an indicator of how a city considers all of its design systems: its public transit, its parks, its signage. It might seem frivolous, but it's not. TK: Often when city leaders say, "We have more important things to do than worry about a city flag," my response is, "If you had a great city flag, you would have a banner for people to rally under to face those more important things." (Music) RM: I've seen firsthand what a good city flag can do in the case of Chicago. The marriage of good design and civic pride is something that we need in all places. The best part about municipal flags is that we own them. They are an open-source, publicly owned design language of the community. When they are done well, they are remixable, adaptable, and they are powerful. We could control the branding and graphical imagery of our cities with a good flag, but instead, by having bad flags we don't use, we cede that territory to sports teams and chambers of commerce and tourism boards. Sports teams can leave and break our hearts. And besides, some of us don't really care about sports. And tourism campaigns can just be cheesy. But a great city flag is something that represents a city to its people and its people to the world at large. And when that flag is a beautiful thing, that connection is a beautiful thing. So maybe all the city flags can be as inspiring as Hong Kong or Portland or Trondheim, and we can do away with all the bad flags like San Francisco, Milwaukee, Cedar Rapids, and finally, when we're all done, we can do something about Pocatello, Idaho, considered by the North American Vexillological Association as the worst city flag in North America. [Proud to be Pocatello] (Laughter) (Applause) Yeah. (Applause) That thing has a trademark symbol on it, people. (Laughter) That hurts me just to look at. (Laughter) Thank you so much for listening. (Applause) [Music by: Melodium (@melodiumbox) and Keegan DeWitt (@keegandewitt)] |
A moving song from women in prison for life | {0: 'A life sentence in Pennsylvania means exactly that; there is no possibility of parole. These women, all of whom have served decades in prison, sing about their lives on the inside.'} | TEDxMuncyStatePrison | (Music) Dannielle Hadley: Life in Pennsylvania means just that: life without the possibility of parole. For us lifers, as we call ourselves, our only chance for release is through commutation, which has only been granted to two women since 1989, close to 30 years ago. Our song, "This Is Not Our Home," it tells of our experiences while doing life without the possibility of parole. (Music) Brenda Watkins: I'm a woman. I'm a grandmother. I'm a daughter. I have a son. I'm not an angel. I'm not the devil. I came to jail when I was so young. I spend my time here inside these prison walls. Lost friends to death, saw some go home. Watch years pass, people come and go, while I do life without parole. I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done. I'm doing time here. This is not my home. Dream of freedom, hope for mercy. Will I see my family or die alone? As the years go by, I hold back my tears, because if I cry I'd give in to fear. I must be strong, have to hold on. Gotta get through another year. I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done. I'm doing time here. This is not my home. Dream of freedom, hope for mercy. Will I see my family or die alone? I'm not saying that I'm not guilty, I'm not saying that I shouldn't pay. All I'm asking is for forgiveness. Gotta have hope I'll be free someday. Is there a place for me in the world out there? Will they ever know or care that I'm chained? Is there redemption for the sin of my younger days? Because I've changed. Lord knows I've changed. I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done. I'm doing time here. This is not my home. Dream of freedom, hope for mercy. Will I see my family or die alone? Will I see my family or die alone? I'm known to you as Inmate 008106. Incarcerated 29 years. My name is Brenda Watkins. I was born and raised in Hoffman, North Carolina. This is not my home. (Applause) Thelma Nichols: Inmate number 0B2472. I've been incarcerated for 27 years. My name is Thelma Nichols. I was born and raised in Philadelphia, P.A. This is not my home. (Applause) DH: 008494. I've been incarcerated for 27 years. My name is Dannielle Hadley. I was born and raised in Philadelphia, P.A, and this is not my home. (Applause) Theresa Battles: Inmate 008309. I've been incarcerated for 27 years. My name is Theresa Battles. I'm from Norton, New Jersey, and this is not my home. (Applause) Debra Brown: I am known as Inmate 007080. I've been incarcerated for 30 years. My name is Debra Brown. I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is not my home. (Applause) Joann Butler: 005961. I've been incarcerated for 37 years. My name is Joann Butler, and I was born and raised in Philadelphia. This is not my home. (Applause) Diane Hamill Metzger: Number 005634. I've been incarcerated for 39 and one half years. My name is Diane Hamill Metzger. I'm from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home. (Applause) Lena Brown: I am 004867. Incarcerated 40 years. My name is Lena Brown, and I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home. (Applause) Trina Garnett: My number is 005545. My name is Trina Garnett, I've been incarcerated for 37 years, since I was 14 years old. Born and raised in Chester, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home. (Applause) Will I see my family or die alone? Or die alone? (Applause) |
My daughter, my wife, our robot, and the quest for immortality | {0: 'Whether she’s inventing satellite radio, developing life-saving drugs or digitizing the human mind, Martine Rothblatt has a knack for turning visionary ideas into commonplace technology. \r\n'} | TED2015 | Chris Anderson: So I guess what we're going to do is we're going to talk about your life, and using some pictures that you shared with me. And I think we should start right here with this one. Okay, now who is this? Martine Rothblatt: This is me with our oldest son Eli. He was about age five. This is taken in Nigeria right after having taken the Washington, D.C. bar exam. CA: Okay. But this doesn't really look like a Martine. MR: Right. That was myself as a male, the way I was brought up. Before I transitioned from male to female and Martin to Martine. CA: You were brought up Martin Rothblatt. MR: Correct. CA: And about a year after this picture, you married a beautiful woman. Was this love at first sight? What happened there? MR: It was love at the first sight. I saw Bina at a discotheque in Los Angeles, and we later began living together, but the moment I saw her, I saw just an aura of energy around her. I asked her to dance. She said she saw an aura of energy around me. I was a single male parent. She was a single female parent. We showed each other our kids' pictures, and we've been happily married for a third of a century now. (Applause) CA: And at the time, you were kind of this hotshot entrepreneur, working with satellites. I think you had two successful companies, and then you started addressing this problem of how could you use satellites to revolutionize radio. Tell us about that. MR: Right. I always loved space technology, and satellites, to me, are sort of like the canoes that our ancestors first pushed out into the water. So it was exciting for me to be part of the navigation of the oceans of the sky, and as I developed different types of satellite communication systems, the main thing I did was to launch bigger and more powerful satellites, the consequence of which was that the receiving antennas could be smaller and smaller, and after going through direct television broadcasting, I had the idea that if we could make a more powerful satellite, the receiving dish could be so small that it would just be a section of a parabolic dish, a flat little plate embedded into the roof of an automobile, and it would be possible to have nationwide satellite radio, and that's Sirius XM today. CA: Wow. So who here has used Sirius? (Applause) MR: Thank you for your monthly subscriptions. (Laughter) CA: So that succeeded despite all predictions at the time. It was a huge commercial success, but soon after this, in the early 1990s, there was this big transition in your life and you became Martine. MR: Correct. CA: So tell me, how did that happen? MR: It happened in consultation with Bina and our four beautiful children, and I discussed with each of them that I felt my soul was always female, and as a woman, but I was afraid people would laugh at me if I expressed it, so I always kept it bottled up and just showed my male side. And each of them had a different take on this. Bina said, "I love your soul, and whether the outside is Martin and Martine, it doesn't it matter to me, I love your soul." My son said, "If you become a woman, will you still be my father?" And I said, "Yes, I'll always be your father," and I'm still his father today. My youngest daughter did an absolutely brilliant five-year-old thing. She told people, "I love my dad and she loves me." So she had no problem with a gender blending whatsoever. CA: And a couple years after this, you published this book: "The Apartheid of Sex." What was your thesis in this book? MR: My thesis in this book is that there are seven billion people in the world, and actually, seven billion unique ways to express one's gender. And while people may have the genitals of a male or a female, the genitals don't determine your gender or even really your sexual identity. That's just a matter of anatomy and reproductive tracts, and people could choose whatever gender they want if they weren't forced by society into categories of either male or female the way South Africa used to force people into categories of black or white. We know from anthropological science that race is fiction, even though racism is very, very real, and we now know from cultural studies that separate male or female genders is a constructed fiction. The reality is a gender fluidity that crosses the entire continuum from male to female. CA: You yourself don't always feel 100 percent female. MR: Correct. I would say in some ways I change my gender about as often as I change my hairstyle. CA: (Laughs) Okay, now, this is your gorgeous daughter, Jenesis. And I guess she was about this age when something pretty terrible happened. MR: Yes, she was finding herself unable to walk up the stairs in our house to her bedroom, and after several months of doctors, she was diagnosed to have a rare, almost invariably fatal disease called pulmonary arterial hypertension. CA: So how did you respond to that? MR: Well, we first tried to get her to the best doctors we could. We ended up at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The head of pediatric cardiology told us that he was going to refer her to get a lung transplant, but not to hold out any hope, because there are very few lungs available, especially for children. He said that all people with this illness died, and if any of you have seen the film "Lorenzo's Oil," there's a scene when the protagonist kind of rolls down the stairway crying and bemoaning the fate of his son, and that's exactly how we felt about Jenesis. CA: But you didn't accept that as the limit of what you could do. You started trying to research and see if you could find a cure somehow. MR: Correct. She was in the intensive care ward for weeks at a time, and Bina and I would tag team to stay at the hospital while the other watched the rest of the kids, and when I was in the hospital and she was sleeping, I went to the hospital library. I read every article that I could find on pulmonary hypertension. I had not taken any biology, even in college, so I had to go from a biology textbook to a college-level textbook and then medical textbook and the journal articles, back and forth, and eventually I knew enough to think that it might be possible that somebody could find a cure. So we started a nonprofit foundation. I wrote a description asking people to submit grants and we would pay for medical research. I became an expert on the condition — doctors said to me, Martine, we really appreciate all the funding you've provided us, but we are not going to be able to find a cure in time to save your daughter. However, there is a medicine that was developed at the Burroughs Wellcome Company that could halt the progression of the disease, but Burroughs Wellcome has just been acquired by Glaxo Wellcome. They made a decision not to develop any medicines for rare and orphan diseases, and maybe you could use your expertise in satellite communications to develop this cure for pulmonary hypertension. CA: So how on earth did you get access to this drug? MR: I went to Glaxo Wellcome and after three times being rejected and having the door slammed in my face because they weren't going to out-license the drug to a satellite communications expert, they weren't going to send the drug out to anybody at all, and they thought I didn't have the expertise, finally I was able to persuade a small team of people to work with me and develop enough credibility. I wore down their resistance, and they had no hope this drug would even work, by the way, and they tried to tell me, "You're just wasting your time. We're sorry about your daughter." But finally, for 25,000 dollars and agreement to pay 10 percent of any revenues we might ever get, they agreed to give me worldwide rights to this drug. CA: And so you put this drug on the market in a really brilliant way, by basically charging what it would take to make the economics work. MR: Oh yes, Chris, but this really wasn't a drug that I ended up — after I wrote the check for 25,000, and I said, "Okay, where's the medicine for Jenesis?" they said, "Oh, Martine, there's no medicine for Jenesis. This is just something we tried in rats." And they gave me, like, a little plastic Ziploc bag of a small amount of powder. They said, "Don't give it to any human," and they gave me a piece of paper which said it was a patent, and from that, we had to figure out a way to make this medicine. A hundred chemists in the U.S. at the top universities all swore that little patent could never be turned into a medicine. If it was turned into a medicine, it could never be delivered because it had a half-life of only 45 minutes. CA: And yet, a year or two later, you were there with a medicine that worked for Jenesis. MR: Chris, the astonishing thing is that this absolutely worthless piece of powder that had the sparkle of a promise of hope for Jenesis is not only keeping Jenesis and other people alive today, but produces almost a billion and a half dollars a year in revenue. (Applause) CA: So here you go. So you took this company public, right? And made an absolute fortune. And how much have you paid Glaxo, by the way, after that 25,000? MR: Yeah, well, every year we pay them 10 percent of 1.5 billion, 150 million dollars, last year 100 million dollars. It's the best return on investment they ever received. (Laughter) CA: And the best news of all, I guess, is this. MR: Yes. Jenesis is an absolutely brilliant young lady. She's alive, healthy today at 30. You see me, Bina and Jenesis there. The most amazing thing about Jenesis is that while she could do anything with her life, and believe me, if you grew up your whole life with people in your face saying that you've got a fatal disease, I would probably run to Tahiti and just not want to run into anybody again. But instead she chooses to work in United Therapeutics. She says she wants to do all she can to help other people with orphan diseases get medicines, and today, she's our project leader for all telepresence activities, where she helps digitally unite the entire company to work together to find cures for pulmonary hypertension. CA: But not everyone who has this disease has been so fortunate. There are still many people dying, and you are tackling that too. How? MR: Exactly, Chris. There's some 3,000 people a year in the United States alone, perhaps 10 times that number worldwide, who continue to die of this illness because the medicines slow down the progression but they don't halt it. The only cure for pulmonary hypertension, pulmonary fibrosis, cystic fibrosis, emphysema, COPD, what Leonard Nimoy just died of, is a lung transplant, but sadly, there are only enough available lungs for 2,000 people in the U.S. a year to get a lung transplant, whereas nearly a half million people a year die of end-stage lung failure. CA: So how can you address that? MR: So I conceptualize the possibility that just like we keep cars and planes and buildings going forever with an unlimited supply of building parts and machine parts, why can't we create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs to keep people living indefinitely, and especially people with lung disease. So we've teamed up with the decoder of the human genome, Craig Venter, and the company he founded with Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize, to genetically modify the pig genome so that the pig's organs will not be rejected by the human body and thereby to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs. We do this through our company, United Therapeutics. CA: So you really believe that within, what, a decade, that this shortage of transplantable lungs maybe be cured, through these guys? MR: Absolutely, Chris. I'm as certain of that as I was of the success that we've had with direct television broadcasting, Sirius XM. It's actually not rocket science. It's straightforward engineering away one gene after another. We're so lucky to be born in the time that sequencing genomes is a routine activity, and the brilliant folks at Synthetic Genomics are able to zero in on the pig genome, find exactly the genes that are problematic, and fix them. CA: But it's not just bodies that — though that is amazing. (Applause) It's not just long-lasting bodies that are of interest to you now. It's long-lasting minds. And I think this graph for you says something quite profound. What does this mean? MR: What this graph means, and it comes from Ray Kurzweil, is that the rate of development in computer processing hardware, firmware and software, has been advancing along a curve such that by the 2020s, as we saw in earlier presentations today, there will be information technology that processes information and the world around us at the same rate as a human mind. CA: And so that being so, you're actually getting ready for this world by believing that we will soon be able to, what, actually take the contents of our brains and somehow preserve them forever? How do you describe that? MR: Well, Chris, what we're working on is creating a situation where people can create a mind file, and a mind file is the collection of their mannerisms, personality, recollection, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values, everything that we've poured today into Google, into Amazon, into Facebook, and all of this information stored there will be able, in the next couple decades, once software is able to recapitulate consciousness, be able to revive the consciousness which is imminent in our mind file. CA: Now you're not just messing around with this. You're serious. I mean, who is this? MR: This is a robot version of my beloved spouse, Bina. And we call her Bina 48. She was programmed by Hanson Robotics out of Texas. There's the centerfold from National Geographic magazine with one of her caregivers, and she roams the web and has hundreds of hours of Bina's mannerisms, personalities. She's kind of like a two-year-old kid, but she says things that blow people away, best expressed by perhaps a New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Amy Harmon who says her answers are often frustrating, but other times as compelling as those of any flesh person she's interviewed. CA: And is your thinking here, part of your hope here, is that this version of Bina can in a sense live on forever, or some future upgrade to this version can live on forever? MR: Yes. Not just Bina, but everybody. You know, it costs us virtually nothing to store our mind files on Facebook, Instagram, what-have-you. Social media is I think one of the most extraordinary inventions of our time, and as apps become available that will allow us to out-Siri Siri, better and better, and develop consciousness operating systems, everybody in the world, billions of people, will be able to develop mind clones of themselves that will have their own life on the web. CA: So the thing is, Martine, that in any normal conversation, this would sound stark-staring mad, but in the context of your life, what you've done, some of the things we've heard this week, the constructed realities that our minds give, I mean, you wouldn't bet against it. MR: Well, I think it's really nothing coming from me. If anything, I'm perhaps a bit of a communicator of activities that are being undertaken by the greatest companies in China, Japan, India, the U.S., Europe. There are tens of millions of people working on writing code that expresses more and more aspects of our human consciousness, and you don't have to be a genius to see that all these threads are going to come together and ultimately create human consciousness, and it's something we'll value. There are so many things to do in this life, and if we could have a simulacrum, a digital doppelgänger of ourselves that helps us process books, do shopping, be our best friends, I believe our mind clones, these digital versions of ourselves, will ultimately be our best friends, and for me personally and Bina personally, we love each other like crazy. Each day, we are always saying, like, "Wow, I love you even more than 30 years ago. And so for us, the prospect of mind clones and regenerated bodies is that our love affair, Chris, can go on forever. And we never get bored of each other. I'm sure we never will. CA: I think Bina's here, right? MR: She is, yeah. CA: Would it be too much, I don't know, do we have a handheld mic? Bina, could we invite you to the stage? I just have to ask you one question. Besides, we need to see you. (Applause) Thank you, thank you. Come and join Martine here. I mean, look, when you got married, if someone had told you that, in a few years time, the man you were marrying would become a woman, and a few years after that, you would become a robot — (Laughter) — how has this gone? How has it been? Bina Rothblatt: It's been really an exciting journey, and I would have never thought that at the time, but we started making goals and setting those goals and accomplishing things, and before you knew it, we just keep going up and up and we're still not stopping, so it's great. CA: Martine told me something really beautiful, just actually on Skype before this, which was that he wanted to live for hundreds of years as a mind file, but not if it wasn't with you. BR: That's right, we want to do it together. We're cryonicists as well, and we want to wake up together. CA: So just so as you know, from my point of view, this isn't only one of the most astonishing lives I have heard, it's one of the most astonishing love stories I've ever heard. It's just a delight to have you both here at TED. Thank you so much. MR: Thank you. (Applause) |
Physical therapy is boring -- play a game instead | {0: 'Cosmin Mihaiu is the CEO and co-founder of MIRA Rehab, which develops software that engages patients in interactive and therapeutic games, making physical rehabilitation fun.'} | TED2015 | When I was growing up, I really liked playing hide-and-seek a lot. One time, though, I thought climbing a tree would lead to a great hiding spot, but I fell and broke my arm. I actually started first grade with a big cast all over my torso. It was taken off six weeks later, but even then, I couldn't extend my elbow, and I had to do physical therapy to flex and extend it, 100 times per day, seven days per week. I barely did it, because I found it boring and painful, and as a result, it took me another six weeks to get better. Many years later, my mom developed frozen shoulder, which leads to pain and stiffness in the shoulder. The person I believed for half of my life to have superpowers suddenly needed help to get dressed or to cut food. She went each week to physical therapy, but just like me, she barely followed the home treatment, and it took her over five months to feel better. Both my mom and I required physical therapy, a process of doing a suite of repetitive exercises in order to regain the range of movement lost due to an accident or injury. At first, a physical therapist works with patients, but then it's up to the patients to do their exercises at home. But patients find physical therapy boring, frustrating, confusing and lengthy before seeing results. Sadly, patient noncompliance can be as high as 70 percent. This means the majority of patients don't do their exercises and therefore take a lot longer to get better. All physical therapists agree that special exercises reduce the time needed for recovery, but patients lack the motivation to do them. So together with three friends, all of us software geeks, we asked ourselves, wouldn't it be interesting if patients could play their way to recovery? We started building MIRA, A P.C. software platform that uses this Kinect device, a motion capture camera, to transform traditional exercises into video games. My physical therapist has already set up a schedule for my particular therapy. Let's see how this looks. The first game asks me to fly a bee up and down to gather pollen to deposit in beehives, all while avoiding the other bugs. I control the bee by doing elbow extension and flexion, just like when I was seven years old after the cast was taken off. When designing a game, we speak to physical therapists at first to understand what movement patients need to do. We then make that a video game to give patients simple, motivating objectives to follow. But the software is very customizable, and physical therapists can also create their own exercises. Using the software, my physical therapist recorded herself performing a shoulder abduction, which is one of the movements my mom had to do when she had frozen shoulder. I can follow my therapist's example on the left side of the screen, while on the right, I see myself doing the recommended movement. I feel more engaged and confident, as I'm exercising alongside my therapist with the exercises my therapist thinks are best for me. This basically extends the application for physical therapists to create whatever exercises they think are best. This is an auction house game for preventing falls, designed to strengthen muscles and improve balance. As a patient, I need to do sit and stand movements, and when I stand up, I bid for the items I want to buy. (Laughter) In two days, my grandmother will be 82 years old, and there's a 50 percent chance for people over 80 to fall at least once per year, which could lead to a broken hip or even worse. Poor muscle tone and impaired balance are the number one cause of falls, so reversing these problems through targeted exercise will help keep older people like my grandmother safer and independent for longer. When my schedule ends, MIRA briefly shows me how I progressed throughout my session. I have just shown you three different games for kids, adults and seniors. These can be used with orthopedic or neurologic patients, but we'll soon have options for children with autism, mental health or speech therapy. My physical therapist can go back to my profile and see the data gathered during my sessions. She can see how much I moved, how many points I scored, with what speed I moved my joints, and so on. My physical therapist can use all of this to adapt my treatment. I'm so pleased this version is now in use in over 10 clinics across Europe and the U.S., and we're working on the home version. We want to enable physical therapists to prescribe this digital treatment and help patients play their way to recovery at home. If my mom or I had a tool like this when we needed physical therapy, then we would have been more successful following the treatment, and perhaps gotten better a lot sooner. Thank you. (Applause) Tom Rielly: So Cosmin, tell me what hardware is this that they're rapidly putting away? What is that made of, and how much does it cost? Cosmin Milhau: So it's a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 for the demo, but you just need a computer and a Kinect, which is 120 dollars. TR: Right, and the Kinect is the thing that people use for their Xboxes to do 3D games, right? CM: Exactly, but you don't need the Xbox, you only need a camera. TR: Right, so this is less than a $1,000 solution. CM: Definitely, 400 dollars, you can definitely use it. TR: So right now, you're doing clinical trials in clinics. CM: Yes. TR: And then the hope is to get it so it's a home version and I can do my exercise remotely, and the therapist at the clinic can see how I'm doing and stuff like that. CM: Exactly. TR: Cool. Thanks so much. CM: Thank you. (Applause) |
Chimps have feelings and thoughts. They should also have rights | {0: 'By challenging long-held legal notions of “personhood”, Steven Wise seeks to grant cognitively advanced animals access to a full spectrum of fundamental rights.'} | TED2015 | I'd like to have you look at this pencil. It's a thing. It's a legal thing. And so are books you might have or the cars you own. They're all legal things. The great apes that you'll see behind me, they too are legal things. Now, I can do that to a legal thing. I can do whatever I want to my book or my car. These great apes, you'll see. The photographs are taken by a man named James Mollison who wrote a book called "James & Other Apes." And he tells in his book how every single one them, almost every one of them, is an orphan who saw his mother and father die before his eyes. They're legal things. So for centuries, there's been a great legal wall that separates legal things from legal persons. On one hand, legal things are invisible to judges. They don't count in law. They don't have any legal rights. They don't have the capacity for legal rights. They are the slaves. On the other side of that legal wall are the legal persons. Legal persons are very visible to judges. They count in law. They may have many rights. They have the capacity for an infinite number of rights. And they're the masters. Right now, all nonhuman animals are legal things. All human beings are legal persons. But being human and being a legal person has never been, and is not today, synonymous with a legal person. Humans and legal persons are not synonymous. On the one side, there have been many human beings over the centuries who have been legal things. Slaves were legal things. Women, children, were sometimes legal things. Indeed, a great deal of civil rights struggle over the last centuries has been to punch a hole through that wall and begin to feed these human things through the wall and have them become legal persons. But alas, that hole has closed up. Now, on the other side are legal persons, but they've never only been limited to human beings. There are, for example, there are many legal persons who are not even alive. In the United States, we're aware of the fact that corporations are legal persons. In pre-independence India, a court held that a Hindu idol was a legal person, that a mosque was a legal person. In 2000, the Indian Supreme Court held that the holy books of the Sikh religion was a legal person, and in 2012, just recently, there was a treaty between the indigenous peoples of New Zealand and the crown, in which it was agreed that a river was a legal person who owned its own riverbed. Now, I read Peter Singer's book in 1980, when I had a full head of lush, brown hair, and indeed I was moved by it, because I had become a lawyer because I wanted to speak for the voiceless, defend the defenseless, and I'd never realized how voiceless and defenseless the trillions, billions of nonhuman animals are. And I began to work as an animal protection lawyer. And by 1985, I realized that I was trying to accomplish something that was literally impossible, the reason being that all of my clients, all the animals whose interests I was trying to defend, were legal things; they were invisible. It was not going to work, so I decided that the only thing that was going to work was they had, at least some of them, had to also be moved through a hole that we could open up again in that wall and begin feeding the appropriate nonhuman animals through that hole onto the other side of being legal persons. Now, at that time, there was very little known about or spoken about truly animal rights, about the idea of having legal personhood or legal rights for a nonhuman animal, and I knew it was going to take a long time. And so, in 1985, I figured that it would take about 30 years before we'd be able to even begin a strategic litigation, long-term campaign, in order to be able to punch another hole through that wall. It turned out that I was pessimistic, that it only took 28. So what we had to do in order to begin was not only to write law review articles and teach classes, write books, but we had to then begin to get down to the nuts and bolts of how you litigate that kind of case. So one of the first things we needed to do was figure out what a cause of action was, a legal cause of action. And a legal cause of action is a vehicle that lawyers use to put their arguments in front of courts. It turns out there's a very interesting case that had occurred almost 250 years ago in London called Somerset vs. Stewart, whereby a black slave had used the legal system and had moved from a legal thing to a legal person. I was so interested in it that I eventually wrote an entire book about it. James Somerset was an eight-year-old boy when he was kidnapped from West Africa. He survived the Middle Passage, and he was sold to a Scottish businessman named Charles Stewart in Virginia. Now, 20 years later, Stewart brought James Somerset to London, and after he got there, James decided he was going to escape. And so one of the first things he did was to get himself baptized, because he wanted to get a set of godparents, because to an 18th-century slave, they knew that one of the major responsibilities of godfathers was to help you escape. And so in the fall of 1771, James Somerset had a confrontation with Charles Stewart. We don't know exactly what happened, but then James dropped out of sight. An enraged Charles Stewart then hired slave catchers to canvass the city of London, find him, bring him not back to Charles Stewart, but to a ship, the Ann and Mary, that was floating in London Harbour, and he was chained to the deck, and the ship was to set sail for Jamaica where James was to be sold in the slave markets and be doomed to the three to five years of life that a slave had harvesting sugar cane in Jamaica. Well now James' godparents swung into action. They approached the most powerful judge, Lord Mansfield, who was chief judge of the court of King's Bench, and they demanded that he issue a common law writ of habeus corpus on behalf of James Somerset. Now, the common law is the kind of law that English-speaking judges can make when they're not cabined in by statutes or constitutions, and a writ of habeus corpus is called the Great Writ, capital G, capital W, and it's meant to protect any of us who are detained against our will. A writ of habeus corpus is issued. The detainer is required to bring the detainee in and give a legally sufficient reason for depriving him of his bodily liberty. Well, Lord Mansfield had to make a decision right off the bat, because if James Somerset was a legal thing, he was not eligible for a writ of habeus corpus, only if he could be a legal person. So Lord Mansfield decided that he would assume, without deciding, that James Somerset was indeed a legal person, and he issued the writ of habeus corpus, and James's body was brought in by the captain of the ship. There were a series of hearings over the next six months. On June 22, 1772, Lord Mansfield said that slavery was so odious, and he used the word "odious," that the common law would not support it, and he ordered James free. At that moment, James Somerset underwent a legal transubstantiation. The free man who walked out of the courtroom looked exactly like the slave who had walked in, but as far as the law was concerned, they had nothing whatsoever in common. The next thing we did is that the Nonhuman Rights Project, which I founded, then began to look at what kind of values and principles do we want to put before the judges? What values and principles did they imbibe with their mother's milk, were they taught in law school, do they use every day, do they believe with all their hearts — and we chose liberty and equality. Now, liberty right is the kind of right to which you're entitled because of how you're put together, and a fundamental liberty right protects a fundamental interest. And the supreme interest in the common law are the rights to autonomy and self-determination. So they are so powerful that in a common law country, if you go to a hospital and you refuse life-saving medical treatment, a judge will not order it forced upon you, because they will respect your self-determination and your autonomy. Now, an equality right is the kind of right to which you're entitled because you resemble someone else in a relevant way, and there's the rub, relevant way. So if you are that, then because they have the right, you're like them, you're entitled to the right. Now, courts and legislatures draw lines all the time. Some are included, some are excluded. But you have to, at the bare minimum you must — that line has to be a reasonable means to a legitimate end. The Nonhuman Rights Project argues that drawing a line in order to enslave an autonomous and self-determining being like you're seeing behind me, that that's a violation of equality. We then searched through 80 jurisdictions, it took us seven years, to find the jurisdiction where we wanted to begin filing our first suit. We chose the state of New York. Then we decided upon who our plaintiffs are going to be. We decided upon chimpanzees, not just because Jane Goodall was on our board of directors, but because they, Jane and others, have studied chimpanzees intensively for decades. We know the extraordinary cognitive capabilities that they have, and they also resemble the kind that human beings have. And so we chose chimpanzees, and we began to then canvass the world to find the experts in chimpanzee cognition. We found them in Japan, Sweden, Germany, Scotland, England and the United States, and amongst them, they wrote 100 pages of affidavits in which they set out more than 40 ways in which their complex cognitive capability, either individually or together, all added up to autonomy and self-determination. Now, these included, for example, that they were conscious. But they're also conscious that they're conscious. They know they have a mind. They know that others have minds. They know they're individuals, and that they can live. They understand that they lived yesterday and they will live tomorrow. They engage in mental time travel. They remember what happened yesterday. They can anticipate tomorrow, which is why it's so terrible to imprison a chimpanzee, especially alone. It's the thing that we do to our worst criminals, and we do that to chimpanzees without even thinking about it. They have some kind of moral capacity. When they play economic games with human beings, they'll spontaneously make fair offers, even when they're not required to do so. They are numerate. They understand numbers. They can do some simple math. They can engage in language — or to stay out of the language wars, they're involved in intentional and referential communication in which they pay attention to the attitudes of those with whom they are speaking. They have culture. They have a material culture, a social culture. They have a symbolic culture. Scientists in the Taï Forests in the Ivory Coast found chimpanzees who were using these rocks to smash open the incredibly hard hulls of nuts. It takes a long time to learn how to do that, and they excavated the area and they found that this material culture, this way of doing it, these rocks, had passed down for at least 4,300 years through 225 chimpanzee generations. So now we needed to find our chimpanzee. Our chimpanzee, first we found two of them in the state of New York. Both of them would die before we could even get our suits filed. Then we found Tommy. Tommy is a chimpanzee. You see him behind me. Tommy was a chimpanzee. We found him in that cage. We found him in a small room that was filled with cages in a larger warehouse structure on a used trailer lot in central New York. We found Kiko, who is partially deaf. Kiko was in the back of a cement storefront in western Massachusetts. And we found Hercules and Leo. They're two young male chimpanzees who are being used for biomedical, anatomical research at Stony Brook. We found them. And so on the last week of December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed three suits all across the state of New York using the same common law writ of habeus corpus argument that had been used with James Somerset, and we demanded that the judges issue these common law writs of habeus corpus. We wanted the chimpanzees out, and we wanted them brought to Save the Chimps, a tremendous chimpanzee sanctuary in South Florida which involves an artificial lake with 12 or 13 islands — there are two or three acres where two dozen chimpanzees live on each of them. And these chimpanzees would then live the life of a chimpanzee, with other chimpanzees in an environment that was as close to Africa as possible. Now, all these cases are still going on. We have not yet run into our Lord Mansfield. We shall. We shall. This is a long-term strategic litigation campaign. We shall. And to quote Winston Churchill, the way we view our cases is that they're not the end, they're not even the beginning of the end, but they are perhaps the end of the beginning. Thank you. (Applause) |
Rethinking infidelity ... a talk for anyone who has ever loved | {0: 'Psychotherapist Esther Perel is changing the conversation on what it means to be in love and have a fulfilling sex life.'} | TED2015 | Why do we cheat? And why do happy people cheat? And when we say "infidelity," what exactly do we mean? Is it a hookup, a love story, paid sex, a chat room, a massage with a happy ending? Why do we think that men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy, but women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy? And is an affair always the end of a relationship? For the past 10 years, I have traveled the globe and worked extensively with hundreds of couples who have been shattered by infidelity. There is one simple act of transgression that can rob a couple of their relationship, their happiness and their very identity: an affair. And yet, this extremely common act is so poorly understood. So this talk is for anyone who has ever loved. Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so, too, the taboo against it. In fact, infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy, so much so, that this is the only commandment that is repeated twice in the Bible: once for doing it, and once just for thinking about it. (Laughter) So how do we reconcile what is universally forbidden, yet universally practiced? Now, throughout history, men practically had a license to cheat with little consequence, and supported by a host of biological and evolutionary theories that justified their need to roam, so the double standard is as old as adultery itself. But who knows what's really going on under the sheets there, right? Because when it comes to sex, the pressure for men is to boast and to exaggerate, but the pressure for women is to hide, minimize and deny, which isn't surprising when you consider that there are still nine countries where women can be killed for straying. Now, monogamy used to be one person for life. Today, monogamy is one person at a time. (Laughter) (Applause) I mean, many of you probably have said, "I am monogamous in all my relationships." (Laughter) We used to marry, and had sex for the first time. But now we marry, and we stop having sex with others. The fact is that monogamy had nothing to do with love. Men relied on women's fidelity in order to know whose children these are, and who gets the cows when I die. Now, everyone wants to know what percentage of people cheat. I've been asked that question since I arrived at this conference. (Laughter) It applies to you. But the definition of infidelity keeps on expanding: sexting, watching porn, staying secretly active on dating apps. So because there is no universally agreed-upon definition of what even constitutes an infidelity, estimates vary widely, from 26 percent to 75 percent. But on top of it, we are walking contradictions. So 95 percent of us will say that it is terribly wrong for our partner to lie about having an affair, but just about the same amount of us will say that that's exactly what we would do if we were having one. (Laughter) Now, I like this definition of an affair — it brings together the three key elements: a secretive relationship, which is the core structure of an affair; an emotional connection to one degree or another; and a sexual alchemy. And alchemy is the key word here, because the erotic frisson is such that the kiss that you only imagine giving, can be as powerful and as enchanting as hours of actual lovemaking. As Marcel Proust said, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person. So it's never been easier to cheat, and it's never been more difficult to keep a secret. And never has infidelity exacted such a psychological toll. When marriage was an economic enterprise, infidelity threatened our economic security. But now that marriage is a romantic arrangement, infidelity threatens our emotional security. Ironically, we used to turn to adultery — that was the space where we sought pure love. But now that we seek love in marriage, adultery destroys it. Now, there are three ways that I think infidelity hurts differently today. We have a romantic ideal in which we turn to one person to fulfill an endless list of needs: to be my greatest lover, my best friend, the best parent, my trusted confidant, my emotional companion, my intellectual equal. And I am it: I'm chosen, I'm unique, I'm indispensable, I'm irreplaceable, I'm the one. And infidelity tells me I'm not. It is the ultimate betrayal. Infidelity shatters the grand ambition of love. But if throughout history, infidelity has always been painful, today it is often traumatic, because it threatens our sense of self. So my patient Fernando, he's plagued. He goes on: "I thought I knew my life. I thought I knew who you were, who we were as a couple, who I was. Now, I question everything." Infidelity — a violation of trust, a crisis of identity. "Can I ever trust you again?" he asks. "Can I ever trust anyone again?" And this is also what my patient Heather is telling me, when she's talking to me about her story with Nick. Married, two kids. Nick just left on a business trip, and Heather is playing on his iPad with the boys, when she sees a message appear on the screen: "Can't wait to see you." Strange, she thinks, we just saw each other. And then another message: "Can't wait to hold you in my arms." And Heather realizes these are not for her. She also tells me that her father had affairs, but her mother, she found one little receipt in the pocket, and a little bit of lipstick on the collar. Heather, she goes digging, and she finds hundreds of messages, and photos exchanged and desires expressed. The vivid details of Nick's two-year affair unfold in front of her in real time, And it made me think: Affairs in the digital age are death by a thousand cuts. But then we have another paradox that we're dealing with these days. Because of this romantic ideal, we are relying on our partner's fidelity with a unique fervor. But we also have never been more inclined to stray, and not because we have new desires today, but because we live in an era where we feel that we are entitled to pursue our desires, because this is the culture where I deserve to be happy. And if we used to divorce because we were unhappy, today we divorce because we could be happier. And if divorce carried all the shame, today, choosing to stay when you can leave is the new shame. So Heather, she can't talk to her friends because she's afraid that they will judge her for still loving Nick, and everywhere she turns, she gets the same advice: Leave him. Throw the dog on the curb. And if the situation were reversed, Nick would be in the same situation. Staying is the new shame. So if we can divorce, why do we still have affairs? Now, the typical assumption is that if someone cheats, either there's something wrong in your relationship or wrong with you. But millions of people can't all be pathological. The logic goes like this: If you have everything you need at home, then there is no need to go looking elsewhere, assuming that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculate us against wanderlust. But what if passion has a finite shelf life? What if there are things that even a good relationship can never provide? If even happy people cheat, what is it about? The vast majority of people that I actually work with are not at all chronic philanderers. They are often people who are deeply monogamous in their beliefs, and at least for their partner. But they find themselves in a conflict between their values and their behavior. They often are people who have actually been faithful for decades, but one day they cross a line that they never thought they would cross, and at the risk of losing everything. But for a glimmer of what? Affairs are an act of betrayal, and they are also an expression of longing and loss. At the heart of an affair, you will often find a longing and a yearning for an emotional connection, for novelty, for freedom, for autonomy, for sexual intensity, a wish to recapture lost parts of ourselves or an attempt to bring back vitality in the face of loss and tragedy. I'm thinking about another patient of mine, Priya, who is blissfully married, loves her husband, and would never want to hurt the man. But she also tells me that she's always done what was expected of her: good girl, good wife, good mother, taking care of her immigrant parents. Priya, she fell for the arborist who removed the tree from her yard after Hurricane Sandy. And with his truck and his tattoos, he's quite the opposite of her. But at 47, Priya's affair is about the adolescence that she never had. And her story highlights for me that when we seek the gaze of another, it isn't always our partner that we are turning away from, but the person that we have ourselves become. And it isn't so much that we're looking for another person, as much as we are looking for another self. Now, all over the world, there is one word that people who have affairs always tell me. They feel alive. And they often will tell me stories of recent losses — of a parent who died, and a friend that went too soon, and bad news at the doctor. Death and mortality often live in the shadow of an affair, because they raise these questions. Is this it? Is there more? Am I going on for another 25 years like this? Will I ever feel that thing again? And it has led me to think that perhaps these questions are the ones that propel people to cross the line, and that some affairs are an attempt to beat back deadness, in an antidote to death. And contrary to what you may think, affairs are way less about sex, and a lot more about desire: desire for attention, desire to feel special, desire to feel important. And the very structure of an affair, the fact that you can never have your lover, keeps you wanting. That in itself is a desire machine, because the incompleteness, the ambiguity, keeps you wanting that which you can't have. Now some of you probably think that affairs don't happen in open relationships, but they do. First of all, the conversation about monogamy is not the same as the conversation about infidelity. But the fact is that it seems that even when we have the freedom to have other sexual partners, we still seem to be lured by the power of the forbidden, that if we do that which we are not supposed to do, then we feel like we are really doing what we want to. And I've also told quite a few of my patients that if they could bring into their relationships one tenth of the boldness, the imagination and the verve that they put into their affairs, they probably would never need to see me. (Laughter) So how do we heal from an affair? Desire runs deep. Betrayal runs deep. But it can be healed. And some affairs are death knells for relationships that were already dying on the vine. But others will jolt us into new possibilities. The fact is, the majority of couples who have experienced affairs stay together. But some of them will merely survive, and others will actually be able to turn a crisis into an opportunity. They'll be able to turn this into a generative experience. And I'm actually thinking even more so for the deceived partner, who will often say, "You think I didn't want more? But I'm not the one who did it." But now that the affair is exposed, they, too, get to claim more, and they no longer have to uphold the status quo that may not have been working for them that well, either. I've noticed that a lot of couples, in the immediate aftermath of an affair, because of this new disorder that may actually lead to a new order, will have depths of conversations with honesty and openness that they haven't had in decades. And, partners who were sexually indifferent find themselves suddenly so lustfully voracious, they don't know where it's coming from. Something about the fear of loss will rekindle desire, and make way for an entirely new kind of truth. So when an affair is exposed, what are some of the specific things that couples can do? We know from trauma that healing begins when the perpetrator acknowledges their wrongdoing. So for the partner who had the affair, for Nick, one thing is to end the affair, but the other is the essential, important act of expressing guilt and remorse for hurting his wife. But the truth is that I have noticed that quite a lot of people who have affairs may feel terribly guilty for hurting their partner, but they don't feel guilty for the experience of the affair itself. And that distinction is important. And Nick, he needs to hold vigil for the relationship. He needs to become, for a while, the protector of the boundaries. It's his responsibility to bring it up, because if he thinks about it, he can relieve Heather from the obsession, and from having to make sure that the affair isn't forgotten, and that in itself begins to restore trust. But for Heather, or deceived partners, it is essential to do things that bring back a sense of self-worth, to surround oneself with love and with friends and activities that give back joy and meaning and identity. But even more important, is to curb the curiosity to mine for the sordid details — Where were you? Where did you do it? How often? Is she better than me in bed? — questions that only inflict more pain, and keep you awake at night. And instead, switch to what I call the investigative questions, the ones that mine the meaning and the motives — What did this affair mean for you? What were you able to express or experience there that you could no longer do with me? What was it like for you when you came home? What is it about us that you value? Are you pleased this is over? Every affair will redefine a relationship, and every couple will determine what the legacy of the affair will be. But affairs are here to stay, and they're not going away. And the dilemmas of love and desire, they don't yield just simple answers of black and white and good and bad, and victim and perpetrator. Betrayal in a relationship comes in many forms. There are many ways that we betray our partner: with contempt, with neglect, with indifference, with violence. Sexual betrayal is only one way to hurt a partner. In other words, the victim of an affair is not always the victim of the marriage. Now, you've listened to me, and I know what you're thinking: She has a French accent, she must be pro-affair. (Laughter) So, you're wrong. I am not French. (Laughter) (Applause) And I'm not pro-affair. But because I think that good can come out of an affair, I have often been asked this very strange question: Would I ever recommend it? Now, I would no more recommend you have an affair than I would recommend you have cancer, and yet we know that people who have been ill often talk about how their illness has yielded them a new perspective. The main question that I've been asked since I arrived at this conference when I said I would talk about infidelity is, for or against? I said, "Yes." (Laughter) I look at affairs from a dual perspective: hurt and betrayal on one side, growth and self-discovery on the other — what it did to you, and what it meant for me. And so when a couple comes to me in the aftermath of an affair that has been revealed, I will often tell them this: Today in the West, most of us are going to have two or three relationships or marriages, and some of us are going to do it with the same person. Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create a second one together? Thank you. (Applause) |
The joy of surfing in ice-cold water | {0: 'Chris Burkard travels to remote, risky and often icy locations to capture stunning images that turn traditional surf photography on its head.\r\n'} | TED2015 | So if I told you that this was the face of pure joy, would you call me crazy? I wouldn't blame you, because every time I look at this Arctic selfie, I shiver just a little bit. I want to tell you a little bit about this photograph. I was swimming around in the Lofoten Islands in Norway, just inside the Arctic Circle, and the water was hovering right at freezing. The air? A brisk -10 with windchill, and I could literally feel the blood trying to leave my hands, feet and face, and rush to protect my vital organs. It was the coldest I've ever been. But even with swollen lips, sunken eyes, and cheeks flushed red, I have found that this place right here is somewhere I can find great joy. Now, when it comes to pain, psychologist Brock Bastian probably said it best when he wrote, "Pain is a kind of shortcut to mindfulness. It makes us suddenly aware of everything in the environment. It brutally draws us in to a virtual sensory awareness of the world much like meditation." If shivering is a form of meditation, then I would consider myself a monk. (Laughter) Now, before we get into the why would anyone ever want to surf in freezing cold water? I would love to give you a little perspective on what a day in my life can look like. (Music) (Video) Man: I mean, I know we were hoping for good waves, but I don't think anybody thought that was going to happen. I can't stop shaking. I am so cold. (Music) (Applause) Chris Burkard: So, surf photographer, right? I don't even know if it's a real job title, to be honest. My parents definitely didn't think so when I told them at 19 I was quitting my job to pursue this dream career: blue skies, warm tropical beaches, and a tan that lasts all year long. I mean, to me, this was it. Life could not get any better. Sweating it out, shooting surfers in these exotic tourist destinations. But there was just this one problem. You see, the more time I spent traveling to these exotic locations, the less gratifying it seemed to be. I set out seeking adventure, and what I was finding was only routine. It was things like wi-fi, TV, fine dining, and a constant cellular connection that to me were all the trappings of places heavily touristed in and out of the water, and it didn't take long for me to start feeling suffocated. I began craving wild, open spaces, and so I set out to find the places others had written off as too cold, too remote, and too dangerous to surf, and that challenge intrigued me. I began this sort of personal crusade against the mundane, because if there's one thing I've realized, it's that any career, even one as seemingly glamorous as surf photography, has the danger of becoming monotonous. So in my search to break up this monotony, I realized something: There's only about a third of the Earth's oceans that are warm, and it's really just that thin band around the equator. So if I was going to find perfect waves, it was probably going to happen somewhere cold, where the seas are notoriously rough, and that's exactly where I began to look. And it was my first trip to Iceland that I felt like I found exactly what I was looking for. I was blown away by the natural beauty of the landscape, but most importantly, I couldn't believe we were finding perfect waves in such a remote and rugged part of the world. At one point, we got to the beach only to find massive chunks of ice had piled on the shoreline. They created this barrier between us and the surf, and we had to weave through this thing like a maze just to get out into the lineup. and once we got there, we were pushing aside these ice chunks trying to get into waves. It was an incredible experience, one I'll never forget, because amidst those harsh conditions, I felt like I stumbled onto one of the last quiet places, somewhere that I found a clarity and a connection with the world I knew I would never find on a crowded beach. I was hooked. I was hooked. (Laughter) Cold water was constantly on my mind, and from that point on, my career focused on these types of harsh and unforgiving environments, and it took me to places like Russia, Norway, Alaska, Iceland, Chile, the Faroe Islands, and a lot of places in between. And one of my favorite things about these places was simply the challenge and the creativity it took just to get there: hours, days, weeks spent on Google Earth trying to pinpoint any remote stretch of beach or reef we could actually get to. And once we got there, the vehicles were just as creative: snowmobiles, six-wheel Soviet troop carriers, and a couple of super-sketchy helicopter flights. (Laughter) Helicopters really scare me, by the way. There was this one particularly bumpy boat ride up the coast of Vancouver Island to this kind of remote surf spot, where we ended up watching helplessly from the water as bears ravaged our camp site. They walked off with our food and bits of our tent, clearly letting us know that we were at the bottom of the food chain and that this was their spot, not ours. But to me, that trip was a testament to the wildness I traded for those touristy beaches. Now, it wasn't until I traveled to Norway — (Laughter) — that I really learned to appreciate the cold. So this is the place where some of the largest, the most violent storms in the world send huge waves smashing into the coastline. We were in this tiny, remote fjord, just inside the Arctic Circle. It had a greater population of sheep than people, so help if we needed it was nowhere to be found. I was in the water taking pictures of surfers, and it started to snow. And then the temperature began to drop. And I told myself, there's not a chance you're getting out of the water. You traveled all this way, and this is exactly what you've been waiting for: freezing cold conditions with perfect waves. And although I couldn't even feel my finger to push the trigger, I knew I wasn't getting out. So I just did whatever I could. I shook it off, whatever. But that was the point that I felt this wind gush through the valley and hit me, and what started as this light snowfall quickly became a full-on blizzard, and I started to lose perception of where I was. I didn't know if I was drifting out to sea or towards shore, and all I could really make out was the faint sound of seagulls and crashing waves. Now, I knew this place had a reputation for sinking ships and grounding planes, and while I was out there floating, I started to get a little bit nervous. Actually, I was totally freaking out — (Laughter) — and I was borderline hypothermic, and my friends eventually had to help me out of the water. And I don't know if it was delirium setting in or what, but they told me later I had a smile on my face the entire time. Now, it was this trip and probably that exact experience where I really began to feel like every photograph was precious, because all of a sudden in that moment, it was something I was forced to earn. And I realized, all this shivering had actually taught me something: In life, there are no shortcuts to joy. Anything that is worth pursuing is going to require us to suffer just a little bit, and that tiny bit of suffering that I did for my photography, it added a value to my work that was so much more meaningful to me than just trying to fill the pages of magazines. See, I gave a piece of myself in these places, and what I walked away with was a sense of fulfillment I had always been searching for. So I look back at this photograph. It's easy to see frozen fingers and cold wetsuits and even the struggle that it took just to get there, but most of all, what I see is just joy. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
How we cut youth violence in Boston by 79 percent | {0: 'A key player in the "Boston miracle" that lowered the rate of youth crime and gang violence, Rev. Jeffrey Brown is a Baptist minister.'} | TED2015 | I've learned some of my most important life lessons from drug dealers and gang members and prostitutes, and I've had some of my most profound theological conversations not in the hallowed halls of a seminary but on a street corner on a Friday night, at 1 a.m. That's a little unusual, since I am a Baptist minister, seminary-trained, and pastored a church for over 20 years, but it's true. It came as a part of my participation in a public safety crime reduction strategy that saw a 79 percent reduction in violent crime over an eight-year period in a major city. But I didn't start out wanting to be a part of somebody's crime reduction strategy. I was 25, had my first church. If you would have asked me what my ambition was, I would have told you I wanted to be a megachurch pastor. I wanted a 15-, 20,000-member church. I wanted my own television ministry. I wanted my own clothing line. (Laughter) I wanted to be your long distance carrier. You know, the whole nine yards. (Laughter) After about a year of pastoring, my membership went up about 20 members. So megachurchdom was way down the road. But seriously, if you'd have said, "What is your ambition?" I would have said just to be a good pastor, to be able to be with people through all the passages of life, to preach messages that would have an everyday meaning for folks, and in the African-American tradition, to be able to represent the community that I serve. But there was something else that was happening in my city and in the entire metro area, and in most metro areas in the United States, and that was the homicide rate started to rise precipitously. And there were young people who were killing each other for reasons that I thought were very trivial, like bumping into someone in a high school hallway, and then after school, shooting the person. Someone with the wrong color shirt on, on the wrong street corner at the wrong time. And something needed to be done about that. It got to the point where it started to change the character of the city. You could go to any housing project, for example, like the one that was down the street from my church, and you would walk in, and it would be like a ghost town, because the parents wouldn't allow their kids to come out and play, even in the summertime, because of the violence. You would listen in the neighborhoods on any given night, and to the untrained ear, it sounded like fireworks, but it was gunfire. You'd hear it almost every night, when you were cooking dinner, telling your child a bedtime story, or just watching TV. And you can go to any emergency room at any hospital, and you would see lying on gurneys young black and Latino men shot and dying. And I was doing funerals, but not of the venerated matriarchs and patriarchs who'd lived a long life and there's a lot to say. I was doing funerals of 18-year-olds, 17-year-olds, and 16-year-olds, and I was standing in a church or at a funeral home struggling to say something that would make some meaningful impact. And so while my colleagues were building these cathedrals great and tall and buying property outside of the city and moving their congregations out so that they could create or recreate their cities of God, the social structures in the inner cities were sagging under the weight of all of this violence. And so I stayed, because somebody needed to do something, and so I had looked at what I had and moved on that. I started to preach decrying the violence in the community. And I started to look at the programming in my church, and I started to build programs that would catch the at-risk youth, those who were on the fence to the violence. I even tried to be innovative in my preaching. You all have heard of rap music, right? Rap music? I even tried to rap sermon one time. It didn't work, but at least I tried it. I'll never forget the young person who came to me after that sermon. He waited until everybody was gone, and he said, "Rev, rap sermon, huh?" And I was like, "Yeah, what do you think?" And he said, "Don't do that again, Rev." (Laughter) But I preached and I built these programs, and I thought maybe if my colleagues did the same that it would make a difference. But the violence just careened out of control, and people who were not involved in the violence were getting shot and killed: somebody going to buy a pack of cigarettes at a convenience store, or someone who was sitting at a bus stop just waiting for a bus, or kids who were playing in the park, oblivious to the violence on the other side of the park, but it coming and visiting them. Things were out of control, and I didn't know what to do, and then something happened that changed everything for me. It was a kid by the name of Jesse McKie, walking home with his friend Rigoberto Carrion to the housing project down the street from my church. They met up with a group of youth who were from a gang in Dorchester, and they were killed. But as Jesse was running from the scene mortally wounded, he was running in the direction of my church, and he died some 100, 150 yards away. If he would have gotten to the church, it wouldn't have made a difference, because the lights were out; nobody was home. And I took that as a sign. When they caught some of the youth that had done this deed, to my surprise, they were around my age, but the gulf that was between us was vast. It was like we were in two completely different worlds. And so as I contemplated all of this and looked at what was happening, I suddenly realized that there was a paradox that was emerging inside of me, and the paradox was this: in all of those sermons that I preached decrying the violence, I was also talking about building community, but I suddenly realized that there was a certain segment of the population that I was not including in my definition of community. And so the paradox was this: If I really wanted the community that I was preaching for, I needed to reach out and embrace this group that I had cut out of my definition. Which meant not about building programs to catch those who were on the fences of violence, but to reach out and to embrace those who were committing the acts of violence, the gang bangers, the drug dealers. As soon as I came to that realization, a quick question came to my mind. Why me? I mean, isn't this a law enforcement issue? This is why we have the police, right? As soon as the question, "Why me?" came, the answer came just as quickly: Why me? Because I'm the one who can't sleep at night thinking about it. Because I'm the one looking around saying somebody needs to do something about this, and I'm starting to realize that that someone is me. I mean, isn't that how movements start anyway? They don't start with a grand convention and people coming together and then walking in lockstep with a statement. But it starts with just a few, or maybe just one. It started with me that way, and so I decided to figure out the culture of violence in which these young people who were committing them existed, and I started to volunteer at the high school. After about two weeks of volunteering at the high school, I realized that the youth that I was trying to reach, they weren't going to high school. I started to walk in the community, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to realize that they weren't out during the day. So I started to walk the streets at night, late at night, going into the parks where they were, building the relationship that was necessary. A tragedy happened in Boston that brought a number of clergy together, and there was a small cadre of us who came to the realization that we had to come out of the four walls of our sanctuary and meet the youth where they were, and not try to figure out how to bring them in. And so we decided to walk together, and we would get together in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city on a Friday night and on a Saturday night at 10 p.m., and we would walk until 2 or 3 in the morning. I imagine we were quite the anomaly when we first started walking. I mean, we weren't drug dealers. We weren't drug customers. We weren't the police. Some of us would have collars on. It was probably a really odd thing. But they started speaking to us after a while, and what we found out is that while we were walking, they were watching us, and they wanted to make sure of a couple of things: that number one, we were going to be consistent in our behavior, that we would keep coming out there; and then secondly, they had wanted to make sure that we weren't out there to exploit them. Because there was always somebody who would say, "We're going to take back the streets," but they would always seem to have a television camera with them, or a reporter, and they would enhance their own reputation to the detriment of those on the streets. So when they saw that we had none of that, they decided to talk to us. And then we did an amazing thing for preachers. We decided to listen and not preach. Come on, give it up for me. (Laughter) (Applause) All right, come on, you're cutting into my time now, okay? (Laughter) But it was amazing. We said to them, "We don't know our own communities after 9 p.m. at night, between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m., but you do. You are the subject matter experts, if you will, of that period of time. So talk to us. Teach us. Help us to see what we're not seeing. Help us to understand what we're not understanding." And they were all too happy to do that, and we got an idea of what life on the streets was all about, very different than what you see on the 11 o'clock news, very different than what is portrayed in popular media and even social media. And as we were talking with them, a number of myths were dispelled about them with us. And one of the biggest myths was that these kids were cold and heartless and uncharacteristically bold in their violence. What we found out was the exact opposite. Most of the young people who were out there on the streets are just trying to make it on the streets. And we also found out that some of the most intelligent and creative and magnificent and wise people that we've ever met were on the street, engaged in a struggle. And I know some of them call it survival, but I call them overcomers, because when you're in the conditions that they're in, to be able to live every day is an accomplishment of overcoming. And as a result of that, we said to them, "How do you see this church, how do you see this institution helping this situation?" And we developed a plan in conversation with these youths. We stopped looking at them as the problem to be solved, and we started looking at them as partners, as assets, as co-laborers in the struggle to reduce violence in the community. Imagine developing a plan, you have one minister at one table and a heroin dealer at the other table, coming up with a way in which the church can help the entire community. The Boston Miracle was about bringing people together. We had other partners. We had law enforcement partners. We had police officers. It wasn't the entire force, because there were still some who still had that lock-'em-up mentality, but there were other cops who saw the honor in partnering with the community, who saw the responsibility from themselves to be able to work as partners with community leaders and faith leaders in order to reduce violence in the community. Same with probation officers, same with judges, same with folks who were up that law enforcement chain, because they realized, like we did, that we'll never arrest ourselves out of this situation, that there will not be enough prosecutions made, and you cannot fill these jails up enough in order to alleviate the problem. I helped to start an organization 20 years ago, a faith-based organization, to deal with this issue. I left it about four years ago and started working in cities across the United States, 19 in total, and what I found out was that in those cities, there was always this component of community leaders who put their heads down and their nose to the grindstone, who checked their egos at the door and saw the whole as greater than the sum of its parts, and came together and found ways to work with youth out on the streets, that the solution is not more cops, but the solution is mining the assets that are there in the community, to have a strong community component in the collaboration around violence reduction. Now, there is a movement in the United States of young people who I am very proud of who are dealing with the structural issues that need to change if we're going to be a better society. But there is this political ploy to try to pit police brutality and police misconduct against black-on-black violence. But it's a fiction. It's all connected. When you think about decades of failed housing policies and poor educational structures, when you think about persistent unemployment and underemployment in a community, when you think about poor healthcare, and then you throw drugs into the mix and duffel bags full of guns, little wonder that you would see this culture of violence emerge. And then the response that comes from the state is more cops and more suppression of hot spots. It's all connected, and one of the wonderful things that we've been able to do is to be able to show the value of partnering together — community, law enforcement, private sector, the city — in order to reduce violence. You have to value that community component. I believe that we can end the era of violence in our cities. I believe that it is possible and that people are doing it even now. But I need your help. It can't just come from folks who are burning themselves out in the community. They need support. They need help. Go back to your city. Find those people. "You need some help? I'll help you out." Find those people. They're there. Bring them together with law enforcement, the private sector, and the city, with the one aim of reducing violence, but make sure that that community component is strong. Because the old adage that comes from Burundi is right: that you do for me, without me, you do to me. God bless you. Thank you. (Applause) |
What does my headscarf mean to you? | {0: "Yassmin Abdel-Magied wears many hats, including a hijab. She's a mechanical engineer, writer and activist who campaigns for tolerance and diversity."} | TEDxSouthBank | Someone who looks like me walks past you in the street. Do you think they're a mother, a refugee or a victim of oppression? Or do you think they're a cardiologist, a barrister or maybe your local politician? Do you look me up and down, wondering how hot I must get or if my husband has forced me to wear this outfit? What if I wore my scarf like this? I can walk down the street in the exact same outfit and what the world expects of me and the way I'm treated depends on the arrangement of this piece of cloth. But this isn't going to be another monologue about the hijab because Lord knows, Muslim women are so much more than the piece of cloth they choose, or not, to wrap their head in. This is about looking beyond your bias. What if I walked past you and later on you'd found out that actually I was a race car engineer, and that I designed my own race car and I ran my university's race team, because it's true. What if I told you that I was actually trained as a boxer for five years, because that's true, too. Would it surprise you? Why? Ladies and gentlemen, ultimately, that surprise and the behaviors associated with it are the product of something called unconscious bias, or implicit prejudice. And that results in the ridiculously detrimental lack of diversity in our workforce, particularly in areas of influence. Hello, Australian Federal Cabinet. (Applause) Let me just set something out from the outset: Unconscious bias is not the same as conscious discrimination. I'm not saying that in all of you, there's a secret sexist or racist or ageist lurking within, waiting to get out. That's not what I'm saying. We all have our biases. They're the filters through which we see the world around us. I'm not accusing anyone, bias is not an accusation. Rather, it's something that has to be identified, acknowledged and mitigated against. Bias can be about race, it can be about gender. It can also be about class, education, disability. The fact is, we all have biases against what's different, what's different to our social norms. The thing is, if we want to live in a world where the circumstances of your birth do not dictate your future and where equal opportunity is ubiquitous, then each and every one of us has a role to play in making sure unconscious bias does not determine our lives. There's this really famous experiment in the space of unconscious bias and that's in the space of gender in the 1970s and 1980s. So orchestras, back in the day, were made up mostly of dudes, up to only five percent were female. And apparently, that was because men played it differently, presumably better, presumably. But in 1952, The Boston Symphony Orchestra started an experiment. They started blind auditions. So rather than face-to-face auditions, you would have to play behind a screen. Now funnily enough, no immediate change was registered until they asked the audition-ers to take their shoes off before they entered the room. because the clickity-clack of the heels against the hardwood floors was enough to give the ladies away. Now get this, there results of the audition showed that there was a 50 percent increased chance a woman would progress past the preliminary stage. And it almost tripled their chances of getting in. What does that tell us? Well, unfortunately for the guys, men actually didn't play differently, but there was the perception that they did. And it was that bias that was determining their outcome. So what we're doing here is identifying and acknowledging that a bias exists. And look, we all do it. Let me give you an example. A son and his father are in a horrible car accident. The father dies on impact and the son, who's severely injured, is rushed to hospital. The surgeon looks at the son when they arrive and is like, "I can't operate." Why? "The boy is my son." How can that be? Ladies and gentlemen, the surgeon is his mother. Now hands up — and it's okay — but hands up if you initially assumed the surgeon was a guy? There's evidence that that unconscious bias exists, but we all just have to acknowledge that it's there and then look at ways that we can move past it so that we can look at solutions. Now one of the interesting things around the space of unconscious bias is the topic of quotas. And this something that's often brought up. And of of the criticisms is this idea of merit. Look, I don't want to be picked because I'm a chick, I want to be picked because I have merit, because I'm the best person for the job. It's a sentiment that's pretty common among female engineers that I work with and that I know. And yeah, I get it, I've been there. But, if the merit idea was true, why would identical resumes, in an experiment done in 2012 by Yale, identical resumes sent out for a lab technician, why would Jennifers be deemed less competent, be less likely to be offered the job, and be paid less than Johns. The unconscious bias is there, but we just have to look at how we can move past it. And, you know, it's interesting, there's some research that talks about why this is the case and it's called the merit paradox. And in organizations — and this is kind of ironic — in organizations that talk about merit being their primary value-driver in terms of who they hire, they were more likely to hire dudes and more likely to pay the guys more because apparently merit is a masculine quality. But, hey. So you guys think you've got a good read on me, you kinda think you know what's up. Can you imagine me running one of these? Can you imagine me walking in and being like, "Hey boys, this is what's up. This is how it's done." Well, I'm glad you can. (Applause) Because ladies and gentlemen, that's my day job. And the cool thing about it is that it's pretty entertaining. Actually, in places like Malaysia, Muslim women on rigs isn't even comment-worthy. There are that many of them. But, it is entertaining. I remember, I was telling one of the guys, "Hey, mate, look, I really want to learn how to surf." And he's like, "Yassmin, I don't know how you can surf with all that gear you've got on, and I don't know any women-only beaches." And then, the guy came up with a brilliant idea, he was like, "I know, you run that organization Youth Without Borders, right? Why don't you start a clothing line for Muslim chicks in beaches. You can call it Youth Without Boardshorts." (Laughter) And I was like, "Thanks, guys." And I remember another bloke telling me that I should eat all the yogurt I could because that was the only culture I was going to get around there. But, the problem is, it's kind of true because there's an intense lack of diversity in our workforce, particularly in places of influence. Now, in 2010, The Australian National University did an experiment where they sent out 4,000 identical applications to entry level jobs, essentially. To get the same number of interviews as someone with an Anglo-Saxon name, if you were Chinese, you had to send out 68 percent more applications. If you were Middle Eastern — Abdel-Magied — you had to send out 64 percent, and if you're Italian, you're pretty lucky, you only have to send out 12 percent more. In places like Silicon Valley, it's not that much better. In Google, they put out some diversity results and 61 percent white, 30 percent Asian and nine, a bunch of blacks, Hispanics, all that kind of thing. And the rest of the tech world is not that much better and they've acknowledged it, but I'm not really sure what they're doing about it. The thing is, it doesn't trickle up. In a study done by Green Park, who are a British senior exec supplier, they said that over half of the FTSE 100 companies don't have a nonwhite leader at their board level, executive or non-executive. And two out of every three don't have an executive who's from a minority. And most of the minorities that are at that sort of level are non-executive board directors. So their influence isn't that great. I've told you a bunch of terrible things. You're like, "Oh my god, how bad is that? What can I do about it?" Well, fortunately, we've identified that there's a problem. There's a lack of opportunity, and that's due to unconscious bias. But you might be sitting there thinking, "I ain't brown. What's that got to do with me?" Let me offer you a solution. And as I've said before, we live in a world where we're looking for an ideal. And if we want to create a world where the circumstances of your birth don't matter, we all have to be part of the solution. And interestingly, the author of the lab resume experiment offered some sort of a solution. She said the one thing that brought the successful women together, the one thing that they had in common, was the fact that they had good mentors. So mentoring, we've all kind of heard that before, it's in the vernacular. Here's another challenge for you. I challenge each and every one of you to mentor someone different. Think about it. Everyone wants to mentor someone who kind of is familiar, who looks like us, we have shared experiences. If I see a Muslim chick who's got a bit of attitude, I'm like, "What's up? We can hang out." You walk into a room and there's someone who went to the same school, you play the same sports, there's a high chance that you're going to want to help that person out. But for the person in the room who has no shared experiences with you it becomes extremely difficult to find that connection. The idea of finding someone different to mentor, someone who doesn't come from the same background as you, whatever that background is, is about opening doors for people who couldn't even get to the damn hallway. Because ladies and gentlemen, the world is not just. People are not born with equal opportunity. I was born in one of the poorest cities in the world, Khartoum. I was born brown, I was born female, and I was born Muslim in a world that is pretty suspicious of us for reasons I can't control. However, I also acknowledge the fact that I was born with privilege. I was born with amazing parents, I was given an education and had the blessing of migrating to Australia. But also, I've been blessed with amazing mentors who've opened doors for me that I didn't even know were there. A mentor who said to me, "Hey, your story's interesting. Let's write something about it so that I can share it with people." A mentor who said, "I know you're all those things that don't belong on an Australian rig, but come on anyway." And here I am, talking to you. And I'm not the only one. There's all sorts of people in my communities that I see have been helped out by mentors. A young Muslim man in Sydney who ended up using his mentor's help to start up a poetry slam in Bankstown and now it's a huge thing. And he's able to change the lives of so many other young people. Or a lady here in Brisbane, an Afghan lady who's a refugee, who could barely speak English when she came to Australia, her mentors helped her become a doctor and she took our Young Queenslander of the Year Award in 2008. She's an inspiration. This is so not smooth. This is me. But I'm also the woman in the rig clothes, and I'm also the woman who was in the abaya at the beginning. Would you have chosen to mentor me if you had seen me in one of those other versions of who I am? Because I'm that same person. We have to look past our unconscious bias, find someone to mentor who's at the opposite end of your spectrum because structural change takes time, and I don't have that level of patience. So if we're going to create a change, if we're going to create a world where we all have those kinds of opportunities, then choose to open doors for people. Because you might think that diversity has nothing to do with you, but we are all part of this system and we can all be part of that solution. And if you don't know where to find someone different, go to the places you wouldn't usually go. If you enroll in private high school tutoring, go to your local state school or maybe just drop into your local refugee tutoring center. Or perhaps you work at an office. Take out that new grad who looks totally out of place — 'cause that was me — and open doors for them, not in a tokenistic way, because we're not victims, but show them the opportunities because opening up your world will make you realize that you have access to doors that they didn't even know existed and you didn't even know they didn't have. Ladies and gentlemen, there is a problem in our community with lack of opportunity, especially due to unconscious bias. But each and every one one of you has the potential to change that. I know you've been given a lot of challenges today, but if you can take this one piece and think about it a little differently, because diversity is magic. And I encourage you to look past your initial perceptions because I bet you, they're probably wrong. Thank you. (Applause) |
The search for planets beyond our solar system | {0: 'Sara Seager’s research led to the first discovery of an atmosphere on a planet outside our solar system. Now she’s on the hunt for a twin Earth.'} | TED2015 | I'm here to tell you about the real search for alien life. Not little green humanoids arriving in shiny UFOs, although that would be nice. But it's the search for planets orbiting stars far away. Every star in our sky is a sun. And if our sun has planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc., surely those other stars should have planets also, and they do. And in the last two decades, astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets. Our night sky is literally teeming with exoplanets. We know, statistically speaking, that every star has at least one planet. And in the search for planets, and in the future, planets that might be like Earth, we're able to help address some of the most amazing and mysterious questions that have faced humankind for centuries. Why are we here? Why does our universe exist? How did Earth form and evolve? How and why did life originate and populate our planet? The second question that we often think about is: Are we alone? Is there life out there? Who is out there? You know, this question has been around for thousands of years, since at least the time of the Greek philosophers. But I'm here to tell you just how close we're getting to finding out the answer to this question. It's the first time in human history that this really is within reach for us. Now when I think about the possibilities for life out there, I think of the fact that our sun is but one of many stars. This is a photograph of a real galaxy, we think our Milky Way looks like this galaxy. It's a collection of bound stars. But our [sun] is one of hundreds of billions of stars and our galaxy is one of upwards of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Knowing that small planets are very common, you can just do the math. And there are just so many stars and so many planets out there, that surely, there must be life somewhere out there. Well, the biologists get furious with me for saying that, because we have absolutely no evidence for life beyond Earth yet. Well, if we were able to look at our galaxy from the outside and zoom in to where our sun is, we see a real map of the stars. And the highlighted stars are those with known exoplanets. This is really just the tip of the iceberg. Here, this animation is zooming in onto our solar system. And you'll see here the planets as well as some spacecraft that are also orbiting our sun. Now if we can imagine going to the West Coast of North America, and looking out at the night sky, here's what we'd see on a spring night. And you can see the constellations overlaid and again, so many stars with planets. There's a special patch of the sky where we have thousands of planets. This is where the Kepler Space Telescope focused for many years. Let's zoom in and look at one of the favorite exoplanets. This star is called Kepler-186f. It's a system of about five planets. And by the way, most of these exoplanets, we don't know too much about. We know their size, and their orbit and things like that. But there's a very special planet here called Kepler-186f. This planet is in a zone that is not too far from the star, so that the temperature may be just right for life. Here, the artist's conception is just zooming in and showing you what that planet might be like. So, many people have this romantic notion of astronomers going to the telescope on a lonely mountaintop and looking at the spectacular night sky through a big telescope. But actually, we just work on our computers like everyone else, and we get our data by email or downloading from a database. So instead of coming here to tell you about the somewhat tedious nature of the data and data analysis and the complex computer models we make, I have a different way to try to explain to you some of the things that we're thinking about exoplanets. Here's a travel poster: "Kepler-186f: Where the grass is always redder on the other side." That's because Kepler-186f orbits a red star, and we're just speculating that perhaps the plants there, if there is vegetation that does photosynthesis, it has different pigments and looks red. "Enjoy the gravity on HD 40307g, a Super-Earth." This planet is more massive than Earth and has a higher surface gravity. "Relax on Kepler-16b, where your shadow always has company." (Laughter) We know of a dozen planets that orbit two stars, and there's likely many more out there. If we could visit one of those planets, you literally would see two sunsets and have two shadows. So actually, science fiction got some things right. Tatooine from Star Wars. And I have a couple of other favorite exoplanets to tell you about. This one is Kepler-10b, it's a hot, hot planet. It orbits over 50 times closer to its star than our Earth does to our sun. And actually, it's so hot, we can't visit any of these planets, but if we could, we would melt long before we got there. We think the surface is hot enough to melt rock and has liquid lava lakes. Gliese 1214b. This planet, we know the mass and the size and it has a fairly low density. It's somewhat warm. We actually don't know really anything about this planet, but one possibility is that it's a water world, like a scaled-up version of one of Jupiter's icy moons that might be 50 percent water by mass. And in this case, it would have a thick steam atmosphere overlaying an ocean, not of liquid water, but of an exotic form of water, a superfluid — not quite a gas, not quite a liquid. And under that wouldn't be rock, but a form of high-pressure ice, like ice IX. So out of all these planets out there, and the variety is just simply astonishing, we mostly want to find the planets that are Goldilocks planets, we call them. Not too big, not too small, not too hot, not too cold — but just right for life. But to do that, we'd have to be able to look at the planet's atmosphere, because the atmosphere acts like a blanket trapping heat — the greenhouse effect. We have to be able to assess the greenhouse gases on other planets. Well, science fiction got some things wrong. The Star Trek Enterprise had to travel vast distances at incredible speeds to orbit other planets so that First Officer Spock could analyze the atmosphere to see if the planet was habitable or if there were lifeforms there. Well, we don't need to travel at warp speeds to see other planet atmospheres, although I don't want to dissuade any budding engineers from figuring out how to do that. We actually can and do study planet atmospheres from here, from Earth orbit. This is a picture, a photograph of the Hubble Space Telescope taken by the shuttle Atlantis as it was departing after the last human space flight to Hubble. They installed a new camera, actually, that we use for exoplanet atmospheres. And so far, we've been able to study dozens of exoplanet atmospheres, about six of them in great detail. But those are not small planets like Earth. They're big, hot planets that are easy to see. We're not ready, we don't have the right technology yet to study small exoplanets. But nevertheless, I wanted to try to explain to you how we study exoplanet atmospheres. I want you to imagine, for a moment, a rainbow. And if we could look at this rainbow closely, we would see that some dark lines are missing. And here's our sun, the white light of our sun split up, not by raindrops, but by a spectrograph. And you can see all these dark, vertical lines. Some are very narrow, some are wide, some are shaded at the edges. And this is actually how astronomers have studied objects in the heavens, literally, for over a century. So here, each different atom and molecule has a special set of lines, a fingerprint, if you will. And that's how we study exoplanet atmospheres. And I'll just never forget when I started working on exoplanet atmospheres 20 years ago, how many people told me, "This will never happen. We'll never be able to study them. Why are you bothering?" And that's why I'm pleased to tell you about all the atmospheres studied now, and this is really a field of its own. So when it comes to other planets, other Earths, in the future when we can observe them, what kind of gases would we be looking for? Well, you know, our own Earth has oxygen in the atmosphere to 20 percent by volume. That's a lot of oxygen. But without plants and photosynthetic life, there would be no oxygen, virtually no oxygen in our atmosphere. So oxygen is here because of life. And our goal then is to look for gases in other planet atmospheres, gases that don't belong, that we might be able to attribute to life. But which molecules should we search for? I actually told you how diverse exoplanets are. We expect that to continue in the future when we find other Earths. And that's one of the main things I'm working on now, I have a theory about this. It reminds me that nearly every day, I receive an email or emails from someone with a crazy theory about physics of gravity or cosmology or some such. So, please don't email me one of your crazy theories. (Laughter) Well, I had my own crazy theory. But, who does the MIT professor go to? Well, I emailed a Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine and he said, "Sure, come and talk to me." So I brought my two biochemistry friends and we went to talk to him about our crazy theory. And that theory was that life produces all small molecules, so many molecules. Like, everything I could think of, but not being a chemist. Think about it: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, molecular hydrogen, molecular nitrogen, methane, methyl chloride — so many gases. They also exist for other reasons, but just life even produces ozone. So we go to talk to him about this, and immediately, he shot down the theory. He found an example that didn't exist. So, we went back to the drawing board and we think we have found something very interesting in another field. But back to exoplanets, the point is that life produces so many different types of gases, literally thousands of gases. And so what we're doing now is just trying to figure out on which types of exoplanets, which gases could be attributed to life. And so when it comes time when we find gases in exoplanet atmospheres that we won't know if they're being produced by intelligent aliens or by trees, or a swamp, or even just by simple, single-celled microbial life. So working on the models and thinking about biochemistry, it's all well and good. But a really big challenge ahead of us is: how? How are we going to find these planets? There are actually many ways to find planets, several different ways. But the one that I'm most focused on is how can we open a gateway so that in the future, we can find hundreds of Earths. We have a real shot at finding signs of life. And actually, I just finished leading a two-year project in this very special phase of a concept we call the starshade. And the starshade is a very specially shaped screen and the goal is to fly that starshade so it blocks out the light of a star so that the telescope can see the planets directly. Here, you can see myself and two team members holding up one small part of the starshade. It's shaped like a giant flower, and this is one of the prototype petals. The concept is that a starshade and telescope could launch together, with the petals unfurling from the stowed position. The central truss would expand, with the petals snapping into place. Now, this has to be made very precisely, literally, the petals to microns and they have to deploy to millimeters. And this whole structure would have to fly tens of thousands of kilometers away from the telescope. It's about tens of meters in diameter. And the goal is to block out the starlight to incredible precision so that we'd be able to see the planets directly. And it has to be a very special shape, because of the physics of defraction. Now this is a real project that we worked on, literally, you would not believe how hard. Just so you believe it's not just in movie format, here's a real photograph of a second-generation starshade deployment test bed in the lab. And in this case, I just wanted you to know that that central truss has heritage left over from large radio deployables in space. So after all of that hard work where we try to think of all the crazy gases that might be out there, and we build the very complicated space telescopes that might be out there, what are we going to find? Well, in the best case, we will find an image of another exo-Earth. Here is Earth as a pale blue dot. And this is actually a real photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, four billion miles away. And that red light is just scattered light in the camera optics. But what's so awesome to consider is that if there are intelligent aliens orbiting on a planet around a star near to us and they build complicated space telescopes of the kind that we're trying to build, all they'll see is this pale blue dot, a pinprick of light. And so sometimes, when I pause to think about my professional struggle and huge ambition, it's hard to think about that in contrast to the vastness of the universe. But nonetheless, I am devoting the rest of my life to finding another Earth. And I can guarantee that in the next generation of space telescopes, in the second generation, we will have the capability to find and identity other Earths. And the capability to split up the starlight so that we can look for gases and assess the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, estimate the surface temperature, and look for signs of life. But there's more. In this case of searching for other planets like Earth, we are making a new kind of map of the nearby stars and of the planets orbiting them, including [planets] that actually might be inhabitable by humans. And so I envision that our descendants, hundreds of years from now, will embark on an interstellar journey to other worlds. And they will look back at all of us as the generation who first found the Earth-like worlds. Thank you. (Applause) June Cohen: And I give you, for a question, Rosetta Mission Manager Fred Jansen. Fred Jansen: You mentioned halfway through that the technology to actually look at the spectrum of an exoplanet like Earth is not there yet. When do you expect this will be there, and what's needed? Actually, what we expect is what we call our next-generation Hubble telescope. And this is called the James Webb Space Telescope, and that will launch in 2018, and that's what we're going to do, we're going to look at a special kind of planet called transient exoplanets, and that will be our first shot at studying small planets for gases that might indicate the planet is habitable. JC: I'm going to ask you one follow-up question, too, Sara, as the generalist. So I am really struck by the notion in your career of the opposition you faced, that when you began thinking about exoplanets, there was extreme skepticism in the scientific community that they existed, and you proved them wrong. What did it take to take that on? SS: Well, the thing is that as scientists, we're supposed to be skeptical, because our job to make sure that what the other person is saying actually makes sense or not. But being a scientist, I think you've seen it from this session, it's like being an explorer. You have this immense curiosity, this stubbornness, this sort of resolute will that you will go forward no matter what other people say. JC: I love that. Thank you, Sara. (Applause) |
Gorgeous portraits of the world's vanishing people | {0: 'Jimmy Nelson’s photographs of vanishing tribes illuminate the indigenous cultures of our shared world.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | Now, I've been making pictures for quite a long time, and normally speaking, a picture like this, for me, should be straightforward. I'm in southern Ethiopia. I'm with the Daasanach. There's a big family, there's a very beautiful tree, and I make these pictures with this very large, extremely cumbersome, very awkward technical plate film camera. Does anybody know 4x5 and 10x8 sheets of film, and you're setting it up, putting it on the tripod. I've got the family, spent the better part of a day talking with them. They sort of understand what I'm on about. They think I'm a bit crazy, but that's another story. And what's most important for me is the beauty and the aesthetic, and that's based on the light. So the light's setting on my left-hand side, and there's a balance in the communication with the Daasanach, the family of 30, all ages. There's babies and there's grandparents, I'm getting them in the tree and waiting for the light to set, and it's going, going, and I've got one sheet of film left, and I think, I'm okay, I'm in control, I'm in control. I'm setting it up and I'm setting up, and the light's just about to go, and I want it to be golden, I want it to be beautiful. I want it to be hanging on the horizon so it lights these people, in all the potential glory that they could be presented. And it's about to go and it's about to go, and I put my sheet in the camera, it's all focused, and all of a sudden there's a massive "whack," and I'm looking around, and in the top corner of the tree, one of the girls slaps the girl next to her, and the girl next to her pulls her hair, and all hell breaks loose, and I'm standing there going, "But the light, the light. Wait, I need the light. Stay still! Stay still!" And they start screaming, and then one of the men turns around and starts screaming, shouting, and the whole tree collapses, not the tree, but the people in the tree. They're all running around screaming, and they run back off into the village in this sort of cloud of smoke, and I'm left there standing behind my tripod. I've got my sheet, and the light's gone, and I can't make the picture. Where have they all gone? I had no idea. It took me a week, it took me a week to make the picture which you see here today, and I'll tell you why. (Applause) It's very, very, very simple — I spent a week going around the village, and I went to every single one: "Hello, can you meet at the tree? What's your story? Who are you?" And it all turned out to be about a boyfriend, for crying out loud. I mean, I have teenage kids. I should know. It was about a boyfriend. The girl on the top, she'd kissed the wrong boy, and they'd started having a fight. And there was a very, very beautiful lesson for me in that: If I was going to photograph these people in the dignified, respectful way that I had intended, and put them on a pedestal, I had to understand them. It wasn't just about turning up. It wasn't just about shaking a hand. It wasn't about just saying, "I'm Jimmy, I'm a photographer." I had to get to know every single one of them, right down to whose boyfriend is who and who is allowed to kiss who. So in the end, a week later, and I was absolutely exhausted, I mean on my knees going, "Please get back up in that tree. It's a picture I need to make." They all came back. I put them all back up in the tree. I made sure the girls were in the right position, and the ones that slapped, one was over there. They did look at each other. If you look at it later, they're staring at each other very angrily, and I've got the tree and everything, and then at the last minute, I go, "The goat, the goat! I need something for the eye to look at. I need a white goat in the middle." So I swapped all the goats around. I put the goats in. But even then I got it wrong, because if you can see on the left-hand side, another little boy storms off because I didn't choose his goat. So the moral being I have to learn to speak Goat as well as Daasanach. But anyway, the effort that goes into that picture and the story that I've just related to you, as you can imagine, there are hundreds of other bizarre, eccentric stories of hundreds of other people around the world. And this was about four years ago, and I set off on a journey, to be honest, a very indulgent journey. I'm a real romantic. I'm an idealist, perhaps in some ways naive. But I truly believe that there are people on the planet that are beautiful. It's very, very simple. It's not rocket science. I wanted to put these people on a pedestal. I wanted to put them on a pedestal like they'd never been seen before. So, I chose about 35 different groups, tribes, indigenous cultures. They were chosen purely because of their aesthetic, and I'll talk more about that later. I'm not an anthropologist, I have no technical study with the subject, but I do have a very, very, very deep passion, and I believe that I had to choose the most beautiful people on the planet in the most beautiful environment that they lived in, and put the two together and present them to you. About a year ago, I published the first pictures, and something extraordinarily exciting happened. The whole world came running, and it was a bizarre experience, because everybody, from everywhere: "Who are they? What are they? How many are they? Where did you find them? Are they real? You faked it. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me." Millions of questions for which, to be honest, I don't have the answers. I really didn't have the answers, and I could sort of understand, okay, they're beautiful, that was my intention, but the questions that I was being fired at, I could not answer them. Until, it was quite amusing, about a year ago somebody said, "You've been invited to do a TED Talk." And I said, "Ted? Ted? Who's Ted? I haven't met Ted before." He said, "No, a TED Talk." I said, "But who's Ted? Do I have to talk to him or do we sit with each other on the stage?" And, "No, no, the TED group. You must know about it." And I said, "I've been in a teepee and in a yurt for the last five years. How do I know who Ted is? Introduce me to him." Anyway, to cut a long story short, he said, "We have to do a TED Talk." Researched. Oh, exciting. That's great! And then eventually you're going to go to TEDGlobal. Even more exciting. But what you need to do, you need to teach the people lessons, lessons that you've learned on your travels around the world with these tribes. I thought, lessons, okay, well, what did I learn? Good question. Three. You need three lessons, and they need to be terribly profound. (Laughter) And I thought, three lessons, well, I'm going to think about it. (Applause) So I thought long and hard, and I stood here two days ago, and I had my test run, and I had my cards and my clicker in my hands and my pictures were on the screen, and I had my three lessons, and I started presenting them, and I had this very odd out-of-body experience. I sort of looked at myself standing there, going, "Oh, Jimmy, this is complete loads of codswallop. All these people sitting here, they've had more of these talks, they've heard more lessons in their life. Who are you to tell them what you've learned? Who are you to guide them and who are you to show them what is right, what is wrong, what these people have to say?" And I had a little bit of a, it was very private, a little bit of a meltdown. I went back, and a little bit like the boy walking away from the tree with his goats, very disgruntled, going, that didn't work, It wasn't what I wanted to communicate. And I thought long and hard about it, and I thought, well, the only thing I can communicate is very, very basic. You have to turn it all the way around. There's only one person I know here, and that's me. I'm still getting to know myself, and it's a lifelong journey, and I probably won't have all the answers, but I did learn some extraordinary things on this journey. So what I'm going to do is share with you my lessons. It's a very, as I explained at the beginning, very indulgent, very personal, how and why I made these pictures, and I leave it to you as the audience to interpret what these lessons have meant to me, what they could perhaps mean to you. I traveled enormously as a child. I was very nomadic. It was actually very exciting. All around the world, and I had this feeling that I was pushed off at great speed to become somebody, become that individual, Jimmy. Go off into the planet, and so I ran, and I ran, and my wife sometimes kids me, "Jimmy, you look a bit like Forrest Gump," but I'm, "No, it's all about something, trust me." So I kept running and I kept running, and I sort of got somewhere and I sort of stood there and looked around me and I thought, well, where do I belong? Where do I fit? What am I? Where am I from? I had no idea. So I hope there aren't too many psychologists in this audience. Perhaps part of this journey is about me trying to find out where I belonged. So whilst going, and don't worry, I didn't when I arrived with these tribes, I didn't paint myself yellow and run around with these spears and loincloths. But what I did find were people that belonged themselves, and they inspired me, some extraordinary people, and I'd like to introduce you to some heroes of mine. They're the Huli. Now, the Huli are some of the most extraordinarily beautiful people on the planet. They're proud. They live in the Papua New Guinean highlands. There's not many of them left, and they're called the Huli wigmen. And images like this, I mean, this is what it's all about for me. And you've spent weeks and months there talking with them, getting there, and I want to put them on a pedestal, and I said, "You have something that many people have not seen. You sit in this stunning nature." And it really does look like this, and they really do look like this. This is the real thing. And you know why they're proud? You know why they look like this, and why I broke my back literally to photograph them and present them to you? It's because they have these extraordinary rituals. And the Huli have this ritual: When they're teenagers, becoming a man, they have to shave their heads, and they spend the rest of their life shaving their heads every single day, and what they do with that hair, they make it into a creation, a creation that's a very personal creation. It's their creation. It's their Huli creation. So they're called the Huli wigmen. That's a wig on his head. It's all made out of his human hair. And then they decorate that wig with the feathers of the birds of paradise, and don't worry, there are many birds there. There's very few people living, so nothing to get too upset about, and they spend the rest of their life recreating these hats and getting further and further, and it's extraordinary, and there's another group, they're called the Kalam, and they live in the next valley, but they speak a completely different language, they look completely different, and they wear a hat, and it's built out of scarabs, these fantastic emerald green little scarabs, and sometimes there are 5,000 or 6,000 scarabs in this hat, and they spend the whole of their life collecting these scarabs to build these hats. So the Huli inspired me in that they belong. Perhaps I have to work harder at finding a ritual which matters for me and going back into my past to see where I actually fit. An extremely important part of this project was about how I photograph these extraordinary people. And it's basically beauty. I think beauty matters. We spend the whole of our existence revolving around beauty: beautiful places, beautiful things, and ultimately, beautiful people. It's very, very, very significant. I've spent all of my life analyzing what do I look like? Am I perceived as beautiful? Does it matter if I'm a beautiful person or not, or is it purely based on my aesthetic? And then when I went off, I came to a very narrow conclusion. Do I have to go around the world photographing, excuse me, women between the age of 25 and 30? Is that what beauty is going to be? Is everything before and after that utterly irrelevant? And it was only until I went on a journey, a journey that was so extreme, I still get shivers when I think about it. I went to a part of the world, and I don't know whether any of you have ever heard of Chukotka. Has anybody ever heard of Chukotka? Chukotka probably is, technically, as far as one can go and still be on the living planet. It's 13 hours' flight from Moscow. First you've got to get to Moscow, and then 13 hours' flight nonstop from Moscow. And that's if you get there. As you can see, some people sort of miss the runway. And then when you land there, in Chukotka are the Chukchis. Now, the Chukchis are the last indigenous Inuits of Siberia, and they're people I'd heard about, I'd hardly seen any images of, but I knew they were there, and I'd been in touch with this guide, and this guide said, "There's this fantastic tribe. There's only about 40 of them. You'll be okay. We'll find them." So off we went on this journey. When we arrived there, after a month of traveling across the ice, and we'd got to them, but then I was not allowed to photograph them. They said, "You cannot photograph us. You have to wait. You have to wait until you get to know us. You have to wait until you understand us. You have to wait until you see how we interact with one another." And only then, it was many, many weeks later, I saw a respect. They had zero judgment. They observed one another, from the youth, from the middle aged to the old. They need each other. The children need to chew the meat all day because the adults don't have any teeth, but at the same time, the children take the old aged people out to the toilet because they're infirm, so there's this fantastic community of respect. And they adore and admire one another, and they truly taught me what beauty was. (Applause) Now I'm going to ask for a little bit of audience interaction. This is extremely important for the end of my talk. If you could look at somebody left to the right of you, and I want you to observe them, and I want you to give them a compliment. This is very important. Now, it may be their nose or their hair or even their aura, I don't mind, but please look at each other, give them a compliment. You have to be quick, because I'm running out of time. And you have to remember it. Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you, you've given each other compliments. Hold that compliment very, very tightly. Hold it for later. And the last thing, it was extraordinarily profound, and it happened only two weeks ago. Two weeks ago I went back to the Himba. Now, the Himba live in northern Namibia on the border of Angola, and I'd been there a few times before, and I'd gone back to present this book I'd made, to show them the pictures, to get into a discussion with them, to say, "This is how I saw you. This is how I love you. This is how I respect you. What do you think? Am I right? Am I wrong?" So I wanted this debate. It was very, very, very emotional, and one night we were sitting around the campfire, and I have to be honest, I think I'd had a little bit too much to drink, and I was sort of sitting under the stars going, "This is great, you've seen my pictures, we love each other." (Laughter) And I'm a little bit slow, and I looked around me, and I said, I thought, maybe, the fence is missing. Wasn't there a fence here last time I came? You know, this big protective fence around the village, and they sort of looked at me and go, "Yeah, chief die." And I thought, okay, chief dying, right, you know, look up at the stars again, look at the campfire. Chief die. What on Earth does chief die have to do with the fence? "Chief die. First we destroy, yeah? Then we reflect. Then we rebuild. Then we respect." And I burst out in tears, because my father had only just died prior to this journey, and I didn't ever acknowledge him, I didn't ever appreciate him for the fact that I'm probably standing here today because of him. These people taught me that we are only who we are because of our parents and our grandparents and our forefathers going on and on and on before that, and I, no matter how romantic or how idealistic I am on this journey, I did not know that until two weeks ago. I did not know that until two weeks ago. So what's this all about? Well, there's an image I'd like to show you, quite a special image, and it wasn't essentially the image I wanted to choose. I was sitting there the other day, and I have to finish on a strong image. And somebody said, "You have to show them the picture of the Nenets. The Nenets." I was like, yeah, but that's not my favorite picture. She went, "No no no no no no no. It's an amazing picture. You're in his eyes." I said, "What do you mean I'm in his eyes? It's a picture of the Nenets." She said, "No, look, look closely, you're in his eyes." And when you look closely at this picture, there is a reflection of me in his eyes, so I think perhaps he has my soul, and I'm in his soul, and whilst these pictures look at you, I ask you to look at them. You may not be reflected in his eyes, but there is something extraordinarily important about these people. I don't ultimately have the answers, as I've just shared with you, but you must do. There must be something there. So if you can briefly reflect on what I was discussing about beauty and about belonging and about our ancestors and our roots, and I need you all to stand for me, please. (Laughter) Now you have no excuse. It's almost lunchtime, and this is not a standing ovation, so don't worry, I'm not fishing for compliments. But you were given a compliment a few minutes ago. Now I want you to stand tall. I want you to breathe in. This is what I say. I'm not going to get on my knees for two weeks. I'm not going to ask you to carry a goat, and I know you don't have any camels. Photography's extraordinarily powerful. It's this language which we now all understand. We truly do all understand it, and we have this global digital fireplace, don't we, but I want to share you with the world, because you are also a tribe. You are the TED tribe, yeah? But you have to remember that compliment. You have to stand tall, breathe in through your nose, and I'm going to photograph you. Okay? I need to do a panoramic shot, so it's going to take a minute, so you have to concentrate, okay? Breathe in, stand tall, no laughing. Shh, breathe through your nose. I'm going to photograph. (Clicks) Thank you. (Applause) |
The single biggest reason why start-ups succeed | {0: 'Bill Gross founded Idealab, an incubator of new inventions, ideas and businesses.'} | TED2015 | I'm really excited to share with you some findings that really surprise me about what makes companies succeed the most, what factors actually matter the most for startup success. I believe that the startup organization is one of the greatest forms to make the world a better place. If you take a group of people with the right equity incentives and organize them in a startup, you can unlock human potential in a way never before possible. You get them to achieve unbelievable things. But if the startup organization is so great, why do so many fail? That's what I wanted to find out. I wanted to find out what actually matters most for startup success. And I wanted to try to be systematic about it, avoid some of my instincts and maybe misperceptions I have from so many companies I've seen over the years. I wanted to know this because I've been starting businesses since I was 12 years old when I sold candy at the bus stop in junior high school, to high school, when I made solar energy devices, to college, when I made loudspeakers. And when I graduated from college, I started software companies. And 20 years ago, I started Idealab, and in the last 20 years, we started more than 100 companies, many successes, and many big failures. We learned a lot from those failures. So I tried to look across what factors accounted the most for company success and failure. So I looked at these five. First, the idea. I used to think that the idea was everything. I named my company Idealab for how much I worship the "aha!" moment when you first come up with the idea. But then over time, I came to think that maybe the team, the execution, adaptability, that mattered even more than the idea. I never thought I'd be quoting boxer Mike Tyson on the TED stage, but he once said, "Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face." (Laughter) And I think that's so true about business as well. So much about a team's execution is its ability to adapt to getting punched in the face by the customer. The customer is the true reality. And that's why I came to think that the team maybe was the most important thing. Then I started looking at the business model. Does the company have a very clear path generating customer revenues? That started rising to the top in my thinking about maybe what mattered most for success. Then I looked at the funding. Sometimes companies received intense amounts of funding. Maybe that's the most important thing? And then of course, the timing. Is the idea way too early and the world's not ready for it? Is it early, as in, you're in advance and you have to educate the world? Is it just right? Or is it too late, and there's already too many competitors? So I tried to look very carefully at these five factors across many companies. And I looked across all 100 Idealab companies, and 100 non-Idealab companies to try and come up with something scientific about it. So first, on these Idealab companies, the top five companies — Citysearch, CarsDirect, GoTo, NetZero, Tickets.com — those all became billion-dollar successes. And the five companies on the bottom — Z.com, Insider Pages, MyLife, Desktop Factory, Peoplelink — we all had high hopes for, but didn't succeed. So I tried to rank across all of those attributes how I felt those companies scored on each of those dimensions. And then for non-Idealab companies, I looked at wild successes, like Airbnb and Instagram and Uber and Youtube and LinkedIn. And some failures: Webvan, Kozmo, Pets.com Flooz and Friendster. The bottom companies had intense funding, they even had business models in some cases, but they didn't succeed. I tried to look at what factors actually accounted the most for success and failure across all of these companies, and the results really surprised me. The number one thing was timing. Timing accounted for 42 percent of the difference between success and failure. Team and execution came in second, and the idea, the differentiability of the idea, the uniqueness of the idea, that actually came in third. Now, this isn't absolutely definitive, it's not to say that the idea isn't important, but it very much surprised me that the idea wasn't the most important thing. Sometimes it mattered more when it was actually timed. The last two, business model and funding, made sense to me actually. I think business model makes sense to be that low because you can start out without a business model and add one later if your customers are demanding what you're creating. And funding, I think as well, if you're underfunded at first but you're gaining traction, especially in today's age, it's very, very easy to get intense funding. So now let me give you some specific examples about each of these. So take a wild success like Airbnb that everybody knows about. Well, that company was famously passed on by many smart investors because people thought, "No one's going to rent out a space in their home to a stranger." Of course, people proved that wrong. But one of the reasons it succeeded, aside from a good business model, a good idea, great execution, is the timing. That company came out right during the height of the recession when people really needed extra money, and that maybe helped people overcome their objection to renting out their own home to a stranger. Same thing with Uber. Uber came out, incredible company, incredible business model, great execution, too. But the timing was so perfect for their need to get drivers into the system. Drivers were looking for extra money; it was very, very important. Some of our early successes, Citysearch, came out when people needed web pages. GoTo.com, which we announced actually at TED in 1998, was when companies were looking for cost-effective ways to get traffic. We thought the idea was so great, but actually, the timing was probably maybe more important. And then some of our failures. We started a company called Z.com, it was an online entertainment company. We were so excited about it — we raised enough money, we had a great business model, we even signed incredibly great Hollywood talent to join the company. But broadband penetration was too low in 1999-2000. It was too hard to watch video content online, you had to put codecs in your browser and do all this stuff, and the company eventually went out of business in 2003. Just two years later, when the codec problem was solved by Adobe Flash and when broadband penetration crossed 50 percent in America, YouTube was perfectly timed. Great idea, but unbelievable timing. In fact, YouTube didn't even have a business model when it first started. It wasn't even certain that that would work out. But that was beautifully, beautifully timed. So what I would say, in summary, is execution definitely matters a lot. The idea matters a lot. But timing might matter even more. And the best way to really assess timing is to really look at whether consumers are really ready for what you have to offer them. And to be really, really honest about it, not be in denial about any results that you see, because if you have something you love, you want to push it forward, but you have to be very, very honest about that factor on timing. As I said earlier, I think startups can change the world and make the world a better place. I hope some of these insights can maybe help you have a slightly higher success ratio, and thus make something great come to the world that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Thank you very much, you've been a great audience. (Applause) |
The surprisingly logical minds of babies | {0: 'Developmental behavior studies spearheaded by Laura Schulz are changing our notions of how children learn. '} | TED2015 | Mark Twain summed up what I take to be one of the fundamental problems of cognitive science with a single witticism. He said, "There's something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment in fact." (Laughter) Twain meant it as a joke, of course, but he's right: There's something fascinating about science. From a few bones, we infer the existence of dinosuars. From spectral lines, the composition of nebulae. From fruit flies, the mechanisms of heredity, and from reconstructed images of blood flowing through the brain, or in my case, from the behavior of very young children, we try to say something about the fundamental mechanisms of human cognition. In particular, in my lab in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, I have spent the past decade trying to understand the mystery of how children learn so much from so little so quickly. Because, it turns out that the fascinating thing about science is also a fascinating thing about children, which, to put a gentler spin on Mark Twain, is precisely their ability to draw rich, abstract inferences rapidly and accurately from sparse, noisy data. I'm going to give you just two examples today. One is about a problem of generalization, and the other is about a problem of causal reasoning. And although I'm going to talk about work in my lab, this work is inspired by and indebted to a field. I'm grateful to mentors, colleagues, and collaborators around the world. Let me start with the problem of generalization. Generalizing from small samples of data is the bread and butter of science. We poll a tiny fraction of the electorate and we predict the outcome of national elections. We see how a handful of patients responds to treatment in a clinical trial, and we bring drugs to a national market. But this only works if our sample is randomly drawn from the population. If our sample is cherry-picked in some way — say, we poll only urban voters, or say, in our clinical trials for treatments for heart disease, we include only men — the results may not generalize to the broader population. So scientists care whether evidence is randomly sampled or not, but what does that have to do with babies? Well, babies have to generalize from small samples of data all the time. They see a few rubber ducks and learn that they float, or a few balls and learn that they bounce. And they develop expectations about ducks and balls that they're going to extend to rubber ducks and balls for the rest of their lives. And the kinds of generalizations babies have to make about ducks and balls they have to make about almost everything: shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings. So do babies care whether the tiny bit of evidence they see is plausibly representative of a larger population? Let's find out. I'm going to show you two movies, one from each of two conditions of an experiment, and because you're going to see just two movies, you're going to see just two babies, and any two babies differ from each other in innumerable ways. But these babies, of course, here stand in for groups of babies, and the differences you're going to see represent average group differences in babies' behavior across conditions. In each movie, you're going to see a baby doing maybe just exactly what you might expect a baby to do, and we can hardly make babies more magical than they already are. But to my mind the magical thing, and what I want you to pay attention to, is the contrast between these two conditions, because the only thing that differs between these two movies is the statistical evidence the babies are going to observe. We're going to show babies a box of blue and yellow balls, and my then-graduate student, now colleague at Stanford, Hyowon Gweon, is going to pull three blue balls in a row out of this box, and when she pulls those balls out, she's going to squeeze them, and the balls are going to squeak. And if you're a baby, that's like a TED Talk. It doesn't get better than that. (Laughter) But the important point is it's really easy to pull three blue balls in a row out of a box of mostly blue balls. You could do that with your eyes closed. It's plausibly a random sample from this population. And if you can reach into a box at random and pull out things that squeak, then maybe everything in the box squeaks. So maybe babies should expect those yellow balls to squeak as well. Now, those yellow balls have funny sticks on the end, so babies could do other things with them if they wanted to. They could pound them or whack them. But let's see what the baby does. (Video) Hyowon Gweon: See this? (Ball squeaks) Did you see that? (Ball squeaks) Cool. See this one? (Ball squeaks) Wow. Laura Schulz: Told you. (Laughs) (Video) HG: See this one? (Ball squeaks) Hey Clara, this one's for you. You can go ahead and play. (Laughter) LS: I don't even have to talk, right? All right, it's nice that babies will generalize properties of blue balls to yellow balls, and it's impressive that babies can learn from imitating us, but we've known those things about babies for a very long time. The really interesting question is what happens when we show babies exactly the same thing, and we can ensure it's exactly the same because we have a secret compartment and we actually pull the balls from there, but this time, all we change is the apparent population from which that evidence was drawn. This time, we're going to show babies three blue balls pulled out of a box of mostly yellow balls, and guess what? You [probably won't] randomly draw three blue balls in a row out of a box of mostly yellow balls. That is not plausibly randomly sampled evidence. That evidence suggests that maybe Hyowon was deliberately sampling the blue balls. Maybe there's something special about the blue balls. Maybe only the blue balls squeak. Let's see what the baby does. (Video) HG: See this? (Ball squeaks) See this toy? (Ball squeaks) Oh, that was cool. See? (Ball squeaks) Now this one's for you to play. You can go ahead and play. (Fussing) (Laughter) LS: So you just saw two 15-month-old babies do entirely different things based only on the probability of the sample they observed. Let me show you the experimental results. On the vertical axis, you'll see the percentage of babies who squeezed the ball in each condition, and as you'll see, babies are much more likely to generalize the evidence when it's plausibly representative of the population than when the evidence is clearly cherry-picked. And this leads to a fun prediction: Suppose you pulled just one blue ball out of the mostly yellow box. You [probably won't] pull three blue balls in a row at random out of a yellow box, but you could randomly sample just one blue ball. That's not an improbable sample. And if you could reach into a box at random and pull out something that squeaks, maybe everything in the box squeaks. So even though babies are going to see much less evidence for squeaking, and have many fewer actions to imitate in this one ball condition than in the condition you just saw, we predicted that babies themselves would squeeze more, and that's exactly what we found. So 15-month-old babies, in this respect, like scientists, care whether evidence is randomly sampled or not, and they use this to develop expectations about the world: what squeaks and what doesn't, what to explore and what to ignore. Let me show you another example now, this time about a problem of causal reasoning. And it starts with a problem of confounded evidence that all of us have, which is that we are part of the world. And this might not seem like a problem to you, but like most problems, it's only a problem when things go wrong. Take this baby, for instance. Things are going wrong for him. He would like to make this toy go, and he can't. I'll show you a few-second clip. And there's two possibilities, broadly: Maybe he's doing something wrong, or maybe there's something wrong with the toy. So in this next experiment, we're going to give babies just a tiny bit of statistical data supporting one hypothesis over the other, and we're going to see if babies can use that to make different decisions about what to do. Here's the setup. Hyowon is going to try to make the toy go and succeed. I am then going to try twice and fail both times, and then Hyowon is going to try again and succeed, and this roughly sums up my relationship to my graduate students in technology across the board. But the important point here is it provides a little bit of evidence that the problem isn't with the toy, it's with the person. Some people can make this toy go, and some can't. Now, when the baby gets the toy, he's going to have a choice. His mom is right there, so he can go ahead and hand off the toy and change the person, but there's also going to be another toy at the end of that cloth, and he can pull the cloth towards him and change the toy. So let's see what the baby does. (Video) HG: Two, three. Go! (Music) LS: One, two, three, go! Arthur, I'm going to try again. One, two, three, go! YG: Arthur, let me try again, okay? One, two, three, go! (Music) Look at that. Remember these toys? See these toys? Yeah, I'm going to put this one over here, and I'm going to give this one to you. You can go ahead and play. LS: Okay, Laura, but of course, babies love their mommies. Of course babies give toys to their mommies when they can't make them work. So again, the really important question is what happens when we change the statistical data ever so slightly. This time, babies are going to see the toy work and fail in exactly the same order, but we're changing the distribution of evidence. This time, Hyowon is going to succeed once and fail once, and so am I. And this suggests it doesn't matter who tries this toy, the toy is broken. It doesn't work all the time. Again, the baby's going to have a choice. Her mom is right next to her, so she can change the person, and there's going to be another toy at the end of the cloth. Let's watch what she does. (Video) HG: Two, three, go! (Music) Let me try one more time. One, two, three, go! Hmm. LS: Let me try, Clara. One, two, three, go! Hmm, let me try again. One, two, three, go! (Music) HG: I'm going to put this one over here, and I'm going to give this one to you. You can go ahead and play. (Applause) LS: Let me show you the experimental results. On the vertical axis, you'll see the distribution of children's choices in each condition, and you'll see that the distribution of the choices children make depends on the evidence they observe. So in the second year of life, babies can use a tiny bit of statistical data to decide between two fundamentally different strategies for acting in the world: asking for help and exploring. I've just shown you two laboratory experiments out of literally hundreds in the field that make similar points, because the really critical point is that children's ability to make rich inferences from sparse data underlies all the species-specific cultural learning that we do. Children learn about new tools from just a few examples. They learn new causal relationships from just a few examples. They even learn new words, in this case in American Sign Language. I want to close with just two points. If you've been following my world, the field of brain and cognitive sciences, for the past few years, three big ideas will have come to your attention. The first is that this is the era of the brain. And indeed, there have been staggering discoveries in neuroscience: localizing functionally specialized regions of cortex, turning mouse brains transparent, activating neurons with light. A second big idea is that this is the era of big data and machine learning, and machine learning promises to revolutionize our understanding of everything from social networks to epidemiology. And maybe, as it tackles problems of scene understanding and natural language processing, to tell us something about human cognition. And the final big idea you'll have heard is that maybe it's a good idea we're going to know so much about brains and have so much access to big data, because left to our own devices, humans are fallible, we take shortcuts, we err, we make mistakes, we're biased, and in innumerable ways, we get the world wrong. I think these are all important stories, and they have a lot to tell us about what it means to be human, but I want you to note that today I told you a very different story. It's a story about minds and not brains, and in particular, it's a story about the kinds of computations that uniquely human minds can perform, which involve rich, structured knowledge and the ability to learn from small amounts of data, the evidence of just a few examples. And fundamentally, it's a story about how starting as very small children and continuing out all the way to the greatest accomplishments of our culture, we get the world right. Folks, human minds do not only learn from small amounts of data. Human minds think of altogether new ideas. Human minds generate research and discovery, and human minds generate art and literature and poetry and theater, and human minds take care of other humans: our old, our young, our sick. We even heal them. In the years to come, we're going to see technological innovations beyond anything I can even envision, but we are very unlikely to see anything even approximating the computational power of a human child in my lifetime or in yours. If we invest in these most powerful learners and their development, in babies and children and mothers and fathers and caregivers and teachers the ways we invest in our other most powerful and elegant forms of technology, engineering and design, we will not just be dreaming of a better future, we will be planning for one. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Laura, thank you. I do actually have a question for you. First of all, the research is insane. I mean, who would design an experiment like that? (Laughter) I've seen that a couple of times, and I still don't honestly believe that that can truly be happening, but other people have done similar experiments; it checks out. The babies really are that genius. LS: You know, they look really impressive in our experiments, but think about what they look like in real life, right? It starts out as a baby. Eighteen months later, it's talking to you, and babies' first words aren't just things like balls and ducks, they're things like "all gone," which refer to disappearance, or "uh-oh," which refer to unintentional actions. It has to be that powerful. It has to be much more powerful than anything I showed you. They're figuring out the entire world. A four-year-old can talk to you about almost anything. (Applause) CA: And if I understand you right, the other key point you're making is, we've been through these years where there's all this talk of how quirky and buggy our minds are, that behavioral economics and the whole theories behind that that we're not rational agents. You're really saying that the bigger story is how extraordinary, and there really is genius there that is underappreciated. LS: One of my favorite quotes in psychology comes from the social psychologist Solomon Asch, and he said the fundamental task of psychology is to remove the veil of self-evidence from things. There are orders of magnitude more decisions you make every day that get the world right. You know about objects and their properties. You know them when they're occluded. You know them in the dark. You can walk through rooms. You can figure out what other people are thinking. You can talk to them. You can navigate space. You know about numbers. You know causal relationships. You know about moral reasoning. You do this effortlessly, so we don't see it, but that is how we get the world right, and it's a remarkable and very difficult-to-understand accomplishment. CA: I suspect there are people in the audience who have this view of accelerating technological power who might dispute your statement that never in our lifetimes will a computer do what a three-year-old child can do, but what's clear is that in any scenario, our machines have so much to learn from our toddlers. LS: I think so. You'll have some machine learning folks up here. I mean, you should never bet against babies or chimpanzees or technology as a matter of practice, but it's not just a difference in quantity, it's a difference in kind. We have incredibly powerful computers, and they do do amazingly sophisticated things, often with very big amounts of data. Human minds do, I think, something quite different, and I think it's the structured, hierarchical nature of human knowledge that remains a real challenge. CA: Laura Schulz, wonderful food for thought. Thank you so much. LS: Thank you. (Applause) |
The first secret of design is ... noticing | {0: 'As the originator of the iPod, Tony Fadell is no stranger to disruptive technology. With Nest, he’s zeroed in on tech’s most elusive targets: household appliances.'} | TED2015 | In the great 1980s movie "The Blues Brothers," there's a scene where John Belushi goes to visit Dan Aykroyd in his apartment in Chicago for the very first time. It's a cramped, tiny space and it's just three feet away from the train tracks. As John sits on Dan's bed, a train goes rushing by, rattling everything in the room. John asks, "How often does that train go by?" Dan replies, "So often, you won't even notice it." And then, something falls off the wall. We all know what he's talking about. As human beings, we get used to everyday things really fast. As a product designer, it's my job to see those everyday things, to feel them, and try to improve upon them. For example, see this piece of fruit? See this little sticker? That sticker wasn't there when I was a kid. But somewhere as the years passed, someone had the bright idea to put that sticker on the fruit. Why? So it could be easier for us to check out at the grocery counter. Well that's great, we can get in and out of the store quickly. But now, there's a new problem. When we get home and we're hungry and we see this ripe, juicy piece of fruit on the counter, we just want to pick it up and eat it. Except now, we have to look for this little sticker. And dig at it with our nails, damaging the flesh. Then rolling up that sticker — you know what I mean. And then trying to flick it off your fingers. (Applause) It's not fun, not at all. But something interesting happened. See the first time you did it, you probably felt those feelings. You just wanted to eat the piece of fruit. You felt upset. You just wanted to dive in. By the 10th time, you started to become less upset and you just started peeling the label off. By the 100th time, at least for me, I became numb to it. I simply picked up the piece of fruit, dug at it with my nails, tried to flick it off, and then wondered, "Was there another sticker?" So why is that? Why do we get used to everyday things? Well as human beings, we have limited brain power. And so our brains encode the everyday things we do into habits so we can free up space to learn new things. It's a process called habituation and it's one of the most basic ways, as humans, we learn. Now, habituation isn't always bad. Remember learning to drive? I sure do. Your hands clenched at 10 and 2 on the wheel, looking at every single object out there — the cars, the lights, the pedestrians. It's a nerve-wracking experience. So much so, that I couldn't even talk to anyone else in the car and I couldn't even listen to music. But then something interesting happened. As the weeks went by, driving became easier and easier. You habituated it. It started to become fun and second nature. And then, you could talk to your friends again and listen to music. So there's a good reason why our brains habituate things. If we didn't, we'd notice every little detail, all the time. It would be exhausting, and we'd have no time to learn about new things. But sometimes, habituation isn't good. If it stops us from noticing the problems that are around us, well, that's bad. And if it stops us from noticing and fixing those problems, well, then that's really bad. Comedians know all about this. Jerry Seinfeld's entire career was built on noticing those little details, those idiotic things we do every day that we don't even remember. He tells us about the time he visited his friends and he just wanted to take a comfortable shower. He'd reach out and grab the handle and turn it slightly one way, and it was 100 degrees too hot. And then he'd turn it the other way, and it was 100 degrees too cold. He just wanted a comfortable shower. Now, we've all been there, we just don't remember it. But Jerry did, and that's a comedian's job. But designers, innovators and entrepreneurs, it's our job to not just notice those things, but to go one step further and try to fix them. See this, this person, this is Mary Anderson. In 1902 in New York City, she was visiting. It was a cold, wet, snowy day and she was warm inside a streetcar. As she was going to her destination, she noticed the driver opening the window to clean off the excess snow so he could drive safely. When he opened the window, though, he let all this cold, wet air inside, making all the passengers miserable. Now probably, most of those passengers just thought, "It's a fact of life, he's got to open the window to clean it. That's just how it is." But Mary didn't. Mary thought, "What if the diver could actually clean the windshield from the inside so that he could stay safe and drive and the passengers could actually stay warm?" So she picked up her sketchbook right then and there, and began drawing what would become the world's first windshield wiper. Now as a product designer, I try to learn from people like Mary to try to see the world the way it really is, not the way we think it is. Why? Because it's easy to solve a problem that almost everyone sees. But it's hard to solve a problem that almost no one sees. Now some people think you're born with this ability or you're not, as if Mary Anderson was hardwired at birth to see the world more clearly. That wasn't the case for me. I had to work at it. During my years at Apple, Steve Jobs challenged us to come into work every day, to see our products through the eyes of the customer, the new customer, the one that has fears and possible frustrations and hopeful exhilaration that their new technology product could work straightaway for them. He called it staying beginners, and wanted to make sure that we focused on those tiny little details to make them faster, easier and seamless for the new customers. So I remember this clearly in the very earliest days of the iPod. See, back in the '90s, being a gadget freak like I am, I would rush out to the store for the very, very latest gadget. I'd take all the time to get to the store, I'd check out, I'd come back home, I'd start to unbox it. And then, there was another little sticker: the one that said, "Charge before use." What! I can't believe it! I just spent all this time buying this product and now I have to charge before use. I have to wait what felt like an eternity to use that coveted new toy. It was crazy. But you know what? Almost every product back then did that. When it had batteries in it, you had to charge it before you used it. Well, Steve noticed that and he said, "We're not going to let that happen to our product." So what did we do? Typically, when you have a product that has a hard drive in it, you run it for about 30 minutes in the factory to make sure that hard drive's going to be working years later for the customer after they pull it out of the box. What did we do instead? We ran that product for over two hours. Why? Well, first off, we could make a higher quality product, be easy to test, and make sure it was great for the customer. But most importantly, the battery came fully charged right out of the box, ready to use. So that customer, with all that exhilaration, could just start using the product. It was great, and it worked. People liked it. Today, almost every product that you get that's battery powered comes out of the box fully charged, even if it doesn't have a hard drive. But back then, we noticed that detail and we fixed it, and now everyone else does that as well. No more, "Charge before use." So why am I telling you this? Well, it's seeing the invisible problem, not just the obvious problem, that's important, not just for product design, but for everything we do. You see, there are invisible problems all around us, ones we can solve. But first we need to see them, to feel them. So, I'm hesitant to give you any tips about neuroscience or psychology. There's far too many experienced people in the TED community who would know much more about that than I ever will. But let me leave you with a few tips that I do, that we all can do, to fight habituation. My first tip is to look broader. You see, when you're tackling a problem, sometimes, there are a lot of steps that lead up to that problem. And sometimes, a lot of steps after it. If you can take a step back and look broader, maybe you can change some of those boxes before the problem. Maybe you can combine them. Maybe you can remove them altogether to make that better. Take thermostats, for instance. In the 1900s when they first came out, they were really simple to use. You could turn them up or turn them down. People understood them. But in the 1970s, the energy crisis struck, and customers started thinking about how to save energy. So what happened? Thermostat designers decided to add a new step. Instead of just turning up and down, you now had to program it. So you could tell it the temperature you wanted at a certain time. Now that seemed great. Every thermostat had started adding that feature. But it turned out that no one saved any energy. Now, why is that? Well, people couldn't predict the future. They just didn't know how their weeks would change season to season, year to year. So no one was saving energy, and what happened? Thermostat designers went back to the drawing board and they focused on that programming step. They made better U.I.s, they made better documentation. But still, years later, people were not saving any energy because they just couldn't predict the future. So what did we do? We put a machine-learning algorithm in instead of the programming that would simply watch when you turned it up and down, when you liked a certain temperature when you got up, or when you went away. And you know what? It worked. People are saving energy without any programming. So, it doesn't matter what you're doing. If you take a step back and look at all the boxes, maybe there's a way to remove one or combine them so that you can make that process much simpler. So that's my first tip: look broader. For my second tip, it's to look closer. One of my greatest teachers was my grandfather. He taught me all about the world. He taught me how things were built and how they were repaired, the tools and techniques necessary to make a successful project. I remember one story he told me about screws, and about how you need to have the right screw for the right job. There are many different screws: wood screws, metal screws, anchors, concrete screws, the list went on and on. Our job is to make products that are easy to install for all of our customs themselves without professionals. So what did we do? I remembered that story that my grandfather told me, and so we thought, "How many different screws can we put in the box? Was it going to be two, three, four, five? Because there's so many different wall types." So we thought about it, we optimized it, and we came up with three different screws to put in the box. We thought that was going to solve the problem. But it turned out, it didn't. So we shipped the product, and people weren't having a great experience. So what did we do? We went back to the drawing board just instantly after we figured out we didn't get it right. And we designed a special screw, a custom screw, much to the chagrin of our investors. They were like, "Why are you spending so much time on a little screw? Get out there and sell more!" And we said, "We will sell more if we get this right." And it turned out, we did. With that custom little screw, there was just one screw in the box, that was easy to mount and put on the wall. So if we focus on those tiny details, the ones we may not see and we look at them as we say, "Are those important or is that the way we've always done it? Maybe there's a way to get rid of those." So my last piece of advice is to think younger. Every day, I'm confronted with interesting questions from my three young kids. They come up with questions like, "Why can't cars fly around traffic?" Or, "Why don't my shoelaces have Velcro instead?" Sometimes, those questions are smart. My son came to me the other day and I asked him, "Go run out to the mailbox and check it." He looked at me, puzzled, and said, "Why doesn't the mailbox just check itself and tell us when it has mail?" (Laughter) I was like, "That's a pretty good question." So, they can ask tons of questions and sometimes we find out we just don't have the right answers. We say, "Son, that's just the way the world works." So the more we're exposed to something, the more we get used to it. But kids haven't been around long enough to get used to those things. And so when they run into problems, they immediately try to solve them, and sometimes they find a better way, and that way really is better. So my advice that we take to heart is to have young people on your team, or people with young minds. Because if you have those young minds, they cause everyone in the room to think younger. Picasso once said, "Every child is an artist. The problem is when he or she grows up, is how to remain an artist." We all saw the world more clearly when we saw it for the first time, before a lifetime of habits got in the way. Our challenge is to get back there, to feel that frustration, to see those little details, to look broader, look closer, and to think younger so we can stay beginners. It's not easy. It requires us pushing back against one of the most basic ways we make sense of the world. But if we do, we could do some pretty amazing things. For me, hopefully, that's better product design. For you, that could mean something else, something powerful. Our challenge is to wake up each day and say, "How can I experience the world better?" And if we do, maybe, just maybe, we can get rid of these dumb little stickers. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How this FBI strategy is actually creating US-based terrorists | {0: 'An investigative journalist who reports on the FBI’s misuse of informants in counterterrorism operations, Trevor Aaronson asks the question: Is the United States catching terrorists or creating them?'} | TED2015 | The FBI is responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than any other organization. More than al Qaeda, more than al Shabaab, more than the Islamic State, more than all of them combined. This isn't likely how you think about the FBI. You probably think of FBI agents gunning down bad guys like John Dillinger, or arresting corrupt politicians. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the FBI became less concerned with gangsters and crooked elected officials. The new target became terrorists, and the pursuit of terrorists has consumed the FBI. Every year, the Bureau spends 3.3 billion dollars on domestic counterterrorism activities. Compare than to just 2.6 billion dollars combined for organized crime, financial fraud, public corruption and all other types of traditional criminal activity. I've spent years pouring through the case files of terrorism prosecutions in the United States, and I've come to the conclusion that the FBI is much better at creating terrorists than it is at catching terrorists. In the 14 years since 9/11, you can count about six real terrorist attacks in the United States. These include the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, as well as failed attacks, such as the time when a man named Faisal Shahzad tried to deliver a car bomb to Times Square. In those same 14 years, the Bureau, however, has bragged about how it's foiled dozens of terrorism plots. In all, the FBI has arrested more than 175 people in aggressive, undercover conterterrorism stings. These operations, which are usually led by an informant, provide the means and opportunity, and sometimes even the idea, for mentally ill and economically desperate people to become what we now term terrorists. After 9/11, the FBI was given an edict: never again. Never another attack on American soil. FBI agents were told to find terrorists before they struck. To do this, agents recruited a network of more than 15,000 informants nationwide, all looking for anyone who might be dangerous. An informant can earn 100,000 dollars or more for every terrorism case they bring to the FBI. That's right, the FBI is paying mostly criminals and con men six figures to spy on communities in the United States, but mostly Muslim American communities. These informants nab people like Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh. Both are mentally ill. Abdul-Latif had a history of huffing gasoline and attempting suicide. Mujahidh had schizoaffective disorder, he had trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy. In 2012, the FBI arrested these two men for conspiring to attack a military recruiting station outside Seattle with weapons provided, of course, by the FBI. The FBI's informant was Robert Childs, a convicted rapist and child molester who was paid 90,000 dollars for his work on the case. This isn't an outlier. In 2009, an FBI informant who had fled Pakistan on murder charges led four men in a plot to bomb synagogues in the Bronx. The lead defendant was James Cromitie, a broke Walmart employee with a history of mental problems. And the informant had offered him 250,000 dollars if he participated in that plot. There are many more examples. Today, The Intercept published my new story about a counterterrorism sting in Tampa involving Sami Osmakac, a young man who was living near Tampa, Florida. Osmakac also had schizoaffective disorder. He too was broke, and he had no connections to international terrorist groups. Nonetheless, an FBI informant gave him a job, handed him money, introduced him to an undercover agent posing as a terrorist, and lured him in a plot to bomb an Irish bar. But here's what's interesting: The lead undercover agent — you can see him in this picture with his face blurred — would go back to the Tampa field office with his recording equipment on. Behind closed doors, FBI agents admitted that what they were doing was farcical. A federal judge doesn't want you to hear about these conversations. He sealed the transcripts and placed them under a protective order in an attempt to prevent someone like me from doing something like this. Behind closed doors, the lead agent, the squad supervisor, described their would-be terrorist as a "retarded fool who didn't have a pot to piss in." They described his terrorist ambitions as wishy-washy and a pipe dream scenario. But that didn't stop the FBI. They provided Sami Osmakac everything he needed. They gave him a car bomb, they gave him an AK-47, they helped him make a so-called martyrdom video, and they even gave him money for a taxi cab so that he could get to where they wanted him to go. As they were working the sting, the squad supervisor tells his agents he wanted a Hollywood ending. And he got a Hollywood ending. When Sami Osmakac attempted to deliver what he thought was a car bomb, he was arrested, convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Sami Osmakac isn't alone. He's one of more than 175 so-called terrorists, for whom the FBI has created Hollywood endings. U.S. government officials call this the War on Terror. It's really just theater, a national security theater, with mentally ill men like Sami Osmakac unwitting actors in a carefully choreographed production brought to you by the FBI. Thank you. (Applause) Tom Rielly: So, those are some pretty strong accusations, pretty strong charges. How can you back this up? Trevor Aaronson: My research began in 2010 when I received a grant from the Investigative Reporting Program at U.C. Berkeley, and a research assistant and I put together a database of all terrorism prosecutions at the time during the first decade after 9/11. And we used the court file to find out whether the defendants had any connections to international terrorist groups, whether an informant was used, and whether the informant played the role of an agent provocateur by providing the means and opportunity. And we submitted that to the FBI and we asked them to respond to our database. If they believed there were any errors, we asked them to tell us what they were and we'd go back and check and they never challenged any of our findings. Later, I used that data in a magazine article and later in my book, and on appearances on places like CBS and NPR, they were offered that opportunity again to say, "Trevor Aaronson's findings are wrong." And they've never come forward and said, "These are the problems with those findings." So the data has since been used by groups like Human Rights Watch on its recent report on these types of sting operations. And so far, the FBI has never really responded to these charges that it's really not catching terrorists so much as it's catching mentally ill people that it can dress up as terrorists in these types of sting operations. TR: So The Intercept is that new investigative journalism website, that's cofounded by Glenn Greenwald. Tell us about your article and why there. TA: The Intercept seemed to be the most logical place for this because my article is really leveraging the fact that a source had leaked to me transcripts of these private FBI conversations that a federal judge had sealed based on the government's claim that their release would irreparably damage the U.S. government's law enforcement strategy. So a place like The Intercept was set up to protect journalists and publish their work when they're dealing with very sensitive matters like this. So my story in The Intercept, which was just published today, tells the story of how Sami Osmakac was set up in this FBI sting and goes into much greater detail. In this talk, I could only highlight the things that they said, such as calling him a "retarded fool." But it was much more elaborate, they went to great lengths to put money in Sami Osmakac's hands, which he then used to purchase weapons from the undercover agent. When he went to trial, the central piece of evidence was that he paid for these weapons, when in truth, these transcripts show how the FBI orchestrated someone who was essentially mentally ill and broke to get money to then pay for weapons that they could then charge him in a conspiracy for. TR: One final question. Less than 10 days ago, the FBI arrested some potential ISIS suspects in Brooklyn, saying that they might be headed to Syria, and were those real, or examples of more of the same? TA: Well so far, we only know what's come out in the court file, but they seem to suggest it's another example of the same. These types of sting operations have moved from flavor to flavor. So initially it was al Qaeda plots, and now the Islamic State is the current flavor. What's worth noting about that case is that the three men that were charged only began the plot to go to Syria after the introduction of the FBI informant, and in fact, the FBI informant had helped them with the travel documents that they needed. In kind of a comical turn in that particular case, one of the defendant's mother had found out that he was interested in going to Syria and had hid his passport. So it's unclear that even if he had showed up at the airport, that he ever could have gone anywhere. So yes, there are people who might be interested in joining the Islamic State in the United States, and those are people that the United States government should be looking at to see if they're interested in violence here. In this particular case, given the evidence that's so far come out, it suggests the FBI made it possible for these guys to move along in a plan to go to Syria when they were never close to that in the first place. TR: Thanks a lot, that's amazing. TA: Thank you. (Applause) |
How to fix a broken school? Lead fearlessly, love hard | {0: 'As a Philadelphia high school principal, Linda Cliatt-Wayman held an unwavering belief in the potential of all children. \r\n'} | TEDWomen 2015 | It was November 1, 2002, my first day as a principal, but hardly my first day in the school district of Philadelphia. I graduated from Philadelphia public schools, and I went on to teach special education for 20 years in a low-income, low-performing school in North Philadelphia, where crime is rampant and deep poverty is among the highest in the nation. Shortly after I walked into my new school, a huge fight broke out among the girls. After things were quickly under control, I immediately called a meeting in the school's auditorium to introduce myself as the school's new principal. (Applause) I walked in angry, a little nervous — (Laughter) — but I was determined to set the tone for my new students. I started listing as forcefully as I could my expectations for their behavior and my expectations for what they would learn in school. When, all of a sudden, a girl way in the back of the auditorium, she stood up and she said, "Miss! Miss!" When our eyes locked, she said, "Why do you keep calling this a school? This is not a school." In one outburst, Ashley had expressed what I felt and never quite was able to articulate about my own experience when I attended a low-performing school in the same neighborhood, many, many, many years earlier. That school was definitely not a school. Fast forwarding a decade later to 2012, I was entering my third low-performing school as principal. I was to be Strawberry Mansion's fourth principal in four years. It was labeled "low-performing and persistently dangerous" due to its low test scores and high number of weapons, drugs, assaults and arrests. Shortly as I approached the door of my new school and attempted to enter, and found the door locked with chains, I could hear Ashley's voice in my ears going, "Miss! Miss! This is not a school." The halls were dim and dark from poor lighting. There were tons of piles of broken old furniture and desks in the classrooms, and there were thousands of unused materials and resources. This was not a school. As the year progressed, I noticed that the classrooms were nearly empty. The students were just scared: scared to sit in rows in fear that something would happen; scared because they were often teased in the cafeteria for eating free food. They were scared from all the fighting and all the bullying. This was not a school. And then, there were the teachers, who were incredibly afraid for their own safety, so they had low expectations for the students and themselves, and they were totally unaware of their role in the destruction of the school's culture. This was the most troubling of all. You see, Ashley was right, and not just about her school. For far too many schools, for kids who live in poverty, their schools are really not schools at all. But this can change. Let me tell you how it's being done at Strawberry Mansion High School. Anybody who's ever worked with me will tell you I am known for my slogans. (Laughter) So today, I am going to use three that have been paramount in our quest for change. My first slogan is: if you're going to lead, lead. I always believed that what happens in a school and what does not happen in a school is up to the principal. I am the principal, and having that title required me to lead. I was not going to stay in my office, I was not going to delegate my work, and I was not going to be afraid to address anything that was not good for children, whether that made me liked or not. I am a leader, so I know I cannot do anything alone. So, I assembled a top-notch leadership team who believed in the possibility of all the children, and together, we tackled the small things, like resetting every single locker combination by hand so that every student could have a secure locker. We decorated every bulletin board in that building with bright, colorful, and positive messages. We took the chains off the front doors of the school. We got the lightbulbs replaced, and we cleaned every classroom to its core, recycling every, every textbook that was not needed, and discarded thousands of old materials and furniture. We used two dumpsters per day. And, of course, of course, we tackled the big stuff, like rehauling the entire school budget so that we can reallocate funds to have more teachers and support staff. We rebuilt the entire school day schedule from scratch to add a variety of start and end times, remediation, honors courses, extracurricular activities, and counseling, all during the school day. All during the school day. We created a deployment plan that specified where every single support person and police officer would be every minute of the day, and we monitored at every second of the day, and, our best invention ever, we devised a schoolwide discipline program titled "Non-negotiables." It was a behavior system — designed to promote positive behavior at all times. The results? Strawberry Mansion was removed from the Persistently Dangerous List our first year after being — (Applause) — after being on the Persistently Dangerous List for five consecutive years. Leaders make the impossible possible. That brings me to my second slogan: So what? Now what? (Laughter) (Applause) When we looked at the data, and we met with the staff, there were many excuses for why Strawberry Mansion was low-performing and persistently dangerous. They said that only 68 percent of the kids come to school on a regular basis, 100 percent of them live in poverty, only one percent of the parents participate, many of the children come from incarceration and single-parent homes, 39 percent of the students have special needs, and the state data revealed that six percent of the students were proficient in algebra, and 10 were proficient in literature. After they got through telling us all the stories of how awful the conditions and the children were, I looked at them, and I said, "So what. Now what? What are we gonna do about it?" (Applause) Eliminating excuses at every turn became my primary responsibility. We addressed every one of those excuses through a mandatory professional development, paving the way for intense focus on teaching and learning. After many observations, what we determined was that teachers knew what to teach but they did not know how to teach so many children with so many vast abilities. So, we developed a lesson delivery model for instruction that focused on small group instruction, making it possible for all the students to get their individual needs met in the classroom. The results? After one year, state data revealed that our scores have grown by 171 percent in Algebra and 107 percent in literature. (Applause) We have a very long way to go, a very long way to go, but we now approach every obstacle with a "So What. Now What?" attitude. And that brings me to my third and final slogan. (Laughter) If nobody told you they loved you today, you remember I do, and I always will. My students have problems: social, emotional and economic problems you could never imagine. Some of them are parents themselves, and some are completely alone. If someone asked me my real secret for how I truly keep Strawberry Mansion moving forward, I would have to say that I love my students and I believe in their possibilities unconditionally. When I look at them, I can only see what they can become, and that is because I am one of them. I grew up poor in North Philadelphia too. I know what it feels like to go to a school that's not a school. I know what it feels like to wonder if there's ever going to be any way out of poverty. But because of my amazing mother, I got the ability to dream despite the poverty that surrounded me. So — (Applause) — if I'm going to push my students toward their dream and their purpose in life, I've got to get to know who they are. So I have to spend time with them, so I manage the lunchroom every day. (Laughter) And while I'm there, I talk to them about deeply personal things, and when it's their birthday, I sing "Happy Birthday" even though I cannot sing at all. (Laughter) I often ask them, "Why do you want me to sing when I cannot sing at all?" (Laughter) And they respond by saying, "Because we like feeling special." We hold monthly town hall meetings to listen to their concerns, to find out what is on their minds. They ask us questions like, "Why do we have to follow rules?" "Why are there so many consequences?" "Why can't we just do what we want to do?" (Laughter) They ask, and I answer each question honestly, and this exchange in listening helps to clear up any misconceptions. Every moment is a teachable moment. My reward, my reward for being non-negotiable in my rules and consequences is their earned respect. I insist on it, and because of this, we can accomplish things together. They are clear about my expectations for them, and I repeat those expectations every day over the P.A. system. I remind them — (Laughter) I remind them of those core values of focus, tradition, excellence, integrity and perseverance, and I remind them every day how education can truly change their lives. And I end every announcement the same: "If nobody told you they loved you today, you remember I do, and I always will." Ashley's words of "Miss, Miss, this is not a school," is forever etched in my mind. If we are truly going to make real progress in addressing poverty, then we have to make sure that every school that serves children in poverty is a real school, a school, a school — (Applause) — a school that provides them with knowledge and mental training to navigate the world around them. I do not know all the answers, but what I do know is for those of us who are privileged and have the responsibility of leading a school that serves children in poverty, we must truly lead, and when we are faced with unbelievable challenges, we must stop and ask ourselves, "So what. Now what? What are we going to do about it?" And as we lead, we must never forget that every single one of our students is just a child, often scared by what the world tells them they should be, and no matter what the rest of the world tells them they should be, we should always provide them with hope, our undivided attention, unwavering belief in their potential, consistent expectations, and we must tell them often, if nobody told them they loved them today, remember we do, and we always will. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, Jesus. |
This is what it's like to go undercover in North Korea | {0: 'Suki Kim\'s investigation, "Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea\'s Elite," chronicles her six months undercover in Pyongyang during Kim Jong-Il\'s final six months. She worked as a teacher and a missionary in a university for future leaders -- all while writing her book.'} | TED2015 | In 2011, during the final six months of Kim Jong-Il's life, I lived undercover in North Korea. I was born and raised in South Korea, their enemy. I live in America, their other enemy. Since 2002, I had visited North Korea a few times. And I had come to realize that to write about it with any meaning, or to understand the place beyond the regime's propaganda, the only option was total immersion. So I posed as a teacher and a missionary at an all-male university in Pyongyang. The Pyongyang University of Science and Technology was founded by Evangelical Christians who cooperate with the regime to educate the sons of the North Korean elite, without proselytizing, which is a capital crime there. The students were 270 young men, expected to be the future leaders of the most isolated and brutal dictatorship in existence. When I arrived, they became my students. 2011 was a special year, marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of North Korea's original Great Leader, Kim Il-Sung. To celebrate the occasion, the regime shut down all universities, and sent students off to the fields to build the DPRK's much-heralded ideal as the world's most powerful and prosperous nation. My students were the only ones spared from that fate. North Korea is a gulag posing as a nation. Everything there is about the Great Leader. Every book, every newspaper article, every song, every TV program — there is just one subject. The flowers are named after him, the mountains are carved with his slogans. Every citizen wears the badge of the Great Leader at all times. Even their calendar system begins with the birth of Kim Il-Sung. The school was a heavily guarded prison, posing as a campus. Teachers could only leave on group outings accompanied by an official minder. Even then, our trips were limited to sanctioned national monuments celebrating the Great Leader. The students were not allowed to leave the campus, or communicate with their parents. Their days were meticulously mapped out, and any free time they had was devoted to honoring their Great Leader. Lesson plans had to meet the approval of North Korean staff, every class was recorded and reported on, every room was bugged, and every conversation, overheard. Every blank space was covered with the portraits of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, like everywhere else in North Korea. We were never allowed to discuss the outside world. As students of science and technology, many of them were computer majors but they did not know the existence of the Internet. They had never heard of Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. Facebook, Twitter — none of those things would have meant a thing. And I could not tell them. I went there looking for truth. But where do you even start when an entire nation's ideology, my students' day-to-day realities, and even my own position at the universities, were all built on lies? I started with a game. We played "Truth and Lie." A volunteer would write a sentence on the chalkboard, and the other students had to guess whether it was a truth or a lie. Once a student wrote, "I visited China last year on vacation," and everyone shouted, "Lie!" They all knew this wasn't possible. Virtually no North Korean is allowed to leave the country. Even traveling within their own country requires a travel pass. I had hoped that this game would reveal some truth about my students, because they lie so often and so easily, whether about the mythical accomplishments of their Great Leader, or the strange claim that they cloned a rabbit as fifth graders. The difference between truth and lies seemed at times hazy to them. It took me a while to understand the different types of lies; they lie to shield their system from the world, or they were taught lies, and were just regurgitating them. Or, at moments, they lied out of habit. But if all they have ever known were lies, how could we expect them to be otherwise? Next, I tried to teach them essay writing. But that turned out to be nearly impossible. Essays are about coming up with one's own thesis, and making an evidence-based argument to prove it. These students, however, were simply told what to think, and they obeyed. In their world, critical thinking was not allowed. I also gave them the weekly assignment of writing a personal letter, to anybody. It took a long time, but eventually some of them began to write to their mothers, their friends, their girlfriends. Although those were just homework, and would never reach their intended recipients, my students slowly began to reveal their true feelings in them. They wrote that they were fed up with the sameness of everything. They were worried about their future. In those letters, they rarely ever mentioned their Great Leader. I was spending all of my time with these young men. We all ate meals together, played basketball together. I often called them gentlemen, which made them giggle. They blushed at the mention of girls. And I came to adore them. And watching them open up even in the tiniest of ways, was deeply moving. But something also felt wrong. During those months of living in their world, I often wondered if the truth would, in fact, improve their lives. I wanted so much to tell them the truth, of their country and of the outside world, where Arab youth were turning their rotten regime inside out, using the power of social media, where everyone except them was connected through the world wide web, which wasn't worldwide after all. But for them, the truth was dangerous. By encouraging them to run after it, I was putting them at risk — of persecution, of heartbreak. When you're not allowed to express anything in the open, you become good at reading what is unspoken. In one of their personal letters to me, a student wrote that he understood why I always called them gentlemen. It was because I was wishing them to be gentle in life, he said. On my last day in December of 2011, the day Kim Jong-Il's death was announced, their world shattered. I had to leave without a proper goodbye. But I think they knew how sad I was for them. Once, toward the end of my stay, a student said to me, "Professor, we never think of you as being different from us. Our circumstances are different, but you're the same as us. We want you to know that we truly think of you as being the same." Today, if I could respond to my students with a letter of my own, which is of course impossible, I would tell them this: "My dear gentlemen, It's been a bit over three years since I last saw you. And now, you must be 22 — maybe even as old as 23. At our final class, I asked you if there was anything you wanted. The only wish you expressed, the only thing you ever asked of me in all those months we spent together, was for me to speak to you in Korean. Just once. I was there to teach you English; you knew it wasn't allowed. But I understood then, you wanted to share that bond of our mother tongue. I called you my gentlemen, but I don't know if being gentle in Kim Jong-Un's merciless North Korea is a good thing. I don't want you to lead a revolution — let some other young person do it. The rest of the world might casually encourage or even expect some sort of North Korean Spring, but I don't want you to do anything risky, because I know in your world, someone is always watching. I don't want to imagine what might happen to you. If my attempts to reach you have inspired something new in you, I would rather you forget me. Become soldiers of your Great Leader, and live long, safe lives. You once asked me if I thought your city of Pyongyang was beautiful, and I could not answer truthfully then. But I know why you asked. I know that it was important for you to hear that I, your teacher, the one who has seen the world that you are forbidden from, declare your city as the most beautiful. I know hearing that would make your lives there a bit more bearable, but no, I don't find your capital beautiful. Not because it's monotone and concrete, but because of what it symbolizes: a monster that feeds off the rest of the country, where citizens are soldiers and slaves. All I see there is darkness. But it's your home, so I cannot hate it. And I hope instead that you, my lovely young gentlemen, will one day help make it beautiful. Thank you. (Applause) |
One woman, five characters, and a sex lesson from the future | {0: 'Tony Award-winning monologist, UNICEF ambassador, firebrand and FCC-fighting poet -- Sarah Jones assumes as many roles offstage as on.'} | TED2015 | This is a play called "Sell/Buy/Date." It's my first since "Bridge and Tunnel," which I did on Broadway, and this one, I — thank you — I've excerpted it just for you, so here we go. Right. Class, let's be absolutely certain all electronic devices are switched off before we begin. So class, hopefully you'll recognize what you just heard me say as the — ? Very good, the cellular phone announcement. Right? This was also known as a mobile phone. So you'll remember, people of that era would have had an external electronic device, right, something like this, and they all would have carried one of these around with them, and amongst their biggest fears was the sheer mortification that one of these might ring at some inopportune moment. Right? So a bit of trivia about that era for you. (Laughter) So the format of today's class is I will be presenting multiple BERT modules today from that period in history, right, so starting circa 2016. And remember, this was the very first year of the BERT program. So we've got quite a few of these to get through. Bear in mind, I will be living into various different bodies, different ages, also what were then called races, or ethnic groups, as you'll remember from Unit 1. And — (Laughter) — and along the gender continuum, I will be living into males as well. It was quite binary at that time. (Laughter) Also, don't forget, we are reading the book module for next week's focus on gender. Now, I know some of you have requested the book in pill form. I know people still believe ingesting it is better for retention, but since we are trying to experience what our forebears did, right, let's please just consider doing the actual ocular reading, okay? And also, how many people have your emotional shunts engaged? Right. Please toggle them off. Okay? I know it's challenging, but I want you to be able to feel the entire natural emo range, all right? It is essential to this part of the syllabus. Yes, Macy? All right. I understand. If you're unwilling to — All right, well, we can discuss that after class. All right, we will discuss your concerns. Just relax. Nobody's died and gone to composting. Okay. After class. Okay? After class. Let's just get started, okay. This first subject identified as a middle-class homemaker. Remember, these early modules in these people's full identities were protected, and this allowed them to speak more freely on our topic, which for many of them was taboo. Okay honey, now, I'm ready when you are. No, sweetheart, I said, I'm ready when you are. I'm freezing. It's like a meat locker in here in this recording studio. I should have brought a shmata. All this fancy technology but they can't afford heat. What is he saying? I can't hear you! I can't hear you through the glass, honey! There you are in my ear. Oh, you can hear me? The whole time. Oh, yes, I am a little chilly. Yes, oh the cold is for the machines, the new technology. Okay. Yes, now remind me again, you're recording not only my voice but my feelings and my memories? Right. Yes, BERT, yes, I read about it. Bio-Empathetic Resonant Technology. Right, right, so people will be able to feel my experience and my memory? Okay. No, right, I'm ready. I just thought you were going to give me a test to see how my memory's doing. I was going to tell you you're too late, it's already bad news. No, no, go ahead, honey. Oh, that's the first question? What do I think of prostitution? Are you soliciting me, young man? I've heard of May-December romances, but what are you, about 20 years old? Eighteen? Eighteen years. I think I have candies in my purse older than 18 years old. (Laughter) I'm teasing you, sweetheart. No, I'm comfortable with any question. Sure. So about the prostitution — oh, sex worker, sex worker. No, just in my day, they called it prostitution, not sex work. Oh, because it includes pornography also? Okay. No, well, I guess when I was a girl, we didn't really have a name for that either. We would have said dirty magazines, I suppose, or dirty movies. Well, it's not like what you have with the Internet. No, well, I don't mind sharing. My late husband and I, we were a very romantic couple. Lots of tenderness, you understand. Well, as you get older, you know, at one point I thought my husband might be helped by using some of the pills men can take, but he wasn't interested in those, so I thought, what about maybe watching an adult movie on the Internet? Just for inspiration, you understand. Well, at the time, neither of us were very good on the computer, so usually, if we needed help with the Internet, we would just call our children or our grandchildren, but obviously, in this case, that wasn't an option, so I thought, I'll have a look myself, just to see. How difficult could it be? You search for certain key words and you look — Oh wow is right, young man. You can't imagine what I saw. Well, first of all, I was just trying to find, you know, couples, normal couples making love, but this, so many people together at one time. You couldn't tell which part belonged to which body. How they even got the cameras to capture some of this, I couldn't tell you. But the one thing they didn't capture was making love. There was lots of making of something, but they took the love part right out of it, you know, the fun. It was all very extreme, you know? Like you would say, with the extreme sports. Lots of endurance, but never tenderness. So anyway, needless to say, that was $19.95 I'll never get back again, but it only showed up on the credit card as "entertainment services," so my husband was never the wiser, and after all of that, well, you could say it turned out he didn't need the extra inspiration after all. Right, so next subject is a young woman — (Applause) — Next subject, class, is a young woman called Bella, a university student interviewed in 2016 during what was called an Intro to Feminist Porn class as part of her major in sex work at a college in the Bay Area. (Laughter) Yeah, I just want to, like, get a recording of, like, you guys recording me, like a meta recording, or whatever. It's just like this whole experience is just, like, really amazing, and I'd like to capture that for, like, Instagram and my Tumblr. So, like, hi guys, it's me, Bella, and I am, like, being interviewed right now for this, like, really amazing Bio-Empathetic Resonance Technology, which is, like, basically where they are, like, recording, as you can see from these, whatever, like, electrodes, the formation of, like, neuropeptides in my hippocampus, or whatever. They will later be able to reconstitute these as, like, my own actual memory, like actual experiences, so other people can, like, actually feel what I'm feeling right now. Okay. Okay. So, like, hello, BERT person of the future who is experiencing me. This is what it feels like to be, like, a college freshman, and also the, like, headache that you are experiencing through me is the, like, residual effect of the Jell-O shots which I had last night at the bi-weekly feminist pole dancing party which I cohost on Wednesdays. It's called "Don't Get All Pole-emical" — (Laughter) — and it's in Beekman Hall, and, what else, like, non-Jell-O shots are also available for vegans, and, oh, okay, yeah, totally, yeah, we should also focus on your questions also. So for your record, I am, like, a sex work studies major but minoring in social media with a concentration on notable YouTube memes. (Laughter) Yes, well, of course, like, I consider myself to be, like, obviously, like, a feminist. I was named for Bella Abzug, who was, like, a famous, like, feminist from history, and, like, also I feel that it is, like, important to, like, represent women who are, like, sex-positive feminists. What is sex-negative? Well, like, I guess I would ask, like, what do you think sex-negative is? (Laughter) Yeah, because, like, the terms that we use are, like, so important, because, like, we call it sex work because it helps people understand that, like, it's work, and, like, you know, just like there are, like, healthcare providers and, like, insurance providers, like, we think of these workers as, like, sex care providers. Yeah, but like, I don't think of myself like, providing direct sex care services per se as, like, being a requirement for me to be, like, an advocate. Like, I support other women's right to choose it voluntarily, like, if they enjoy it. Yeah, but, like, I see myself going forward as more likely, like, protecting sex workers', like, legal freedoms and rights. Yeah, so, like, basically, I'm planning on becoming a lawyer. Right, class. (Laughter) (Applause) So these next two modules are also circa 2016. One subject is an Irishwoman with a particularly noteworthy relationship to this issue, but first will be a West Indian woman, a self-described escort who was recorded at a sex workers' rights rally and parade. She was interviewed whilst marching in full carnival headdress and very little else. All right, you want me to start talking now. Yeah, I told you, you can put those wires anywhere you want to as long as it don't get in the way. Yeah, no, but, tell me again what the name of — BERT? BERT. Yeah, I was telling you, you know, I think I have in all my time I have had at least one client with that name, so this won't be the first time I had BERT all over me. Oh, I'm sorry, but you got to get into the spirit of it if you're going to interview me. All right? You can say it. No justice, no piece! No justice, no piece! But you see the sign? You get it? P-I-E-C-E. No justice, no piece of us. You understand? Right, so that's the part where I was telling you is that when I first came to this country, I worked every job I could find. I was a nanny; I was a home care attendant for all these different old people, and then I said, child, if I have to touch another white man's backside, I might as well get paid a lot more money for it than this, you understand? Pshh, you know how hard it is being a domestic worker? Some of these men, they're heavy. You have to pick them up and flip them over. Now, I let them pick me up and flip me over, you understand? Well, you have to have a sense of humor about it, that's what I think. No, but see, listen, you find me somebody who don't hate some part of their job. I mean, there's a lot of things about this job that I hate, but the money is not one of them, and I will tell you, as long as this is the best possibility for me to make real money, I am going to be Jamaican-No-Fakin' if that's what they want to call me. No, I'm not even from Jamaica. That's how they market me. My family is from Trinidad and the Virgin Islands. They don't know what I do, but you know what? My children, they know that their school fees are paid, they have their books and their computer, and this way, I know that they have a chance. So I'm not going to tell you that what I do, it's easy, I'm not going to tell you that I feel — what's that you said, liberated? But I'm going to tell you that I feel paid. Right. (Applause) Thanks, that's lovely, and just the cup of tea, love, and just a splash of the whiskey. It's perfect, that's grand. Just a drop more. A splash. Perfect. What was your name? Peter? Is that right, so, Peter? Right. So that, that is the unique part of it for me, right, is that I ended up in both, first in the convent, and then in the prostitution after. That's right. (Laughter) So one woman at the university here in Dublin, she wrote about me. She said, Maureen Fitzroy is the living embodiment of the whore-virgin dichotomy. Right? (Laughter) Doesn't it sound like something you need to go into hospital? Well, I've got this terrible dichotomy. Doesn't it. Right. Well, for me though, it was, as a girl, it started with me dad. I mean, half the time, when he spoke to us, it was just a sort of tell us we were all useless rotten idiots and we had no morals, that type of thing. And I certainly didn't do myself any favors. By the time I was 16, I had started messing about with this older fella, and he wanted it to be our little secret, and I did as I was told, didn't I, and when that got back to me dad, he had me sent straightaway to the convent. Well no, that older fella, he would still come to find me in the convent. Yeah, he'd leave me notes tucked into the holes in the brick at the back of the charity shop so we could meet. And he'd tell me how he's leaving his wife, and I believed him, until I got pregnant. I did, Peter, and I left him a note about it in our special place there, and I never did hear from him again. No, I gave it up for adoption so it could have a decent life, and then they wouldn't let me back into the convent. No, my one sister Virginia gave me a fiver for the coach to Dublin, and that's how I ended up here. Well, surprise, surprise, I fell in love with another fella much older than me, and I always say I was just so happy because he didn't drink, I married the bastard. Well, he didn't drink, but he did have just the wee heroin problem, didn't he, and — That's right, and before I knew it, he was the one who turned me on to the prostitution, my own husband. He had me supporting the both of us. I was 18. Well, it wasn't Pretty Woman, I can tell you that. That Julia Roberts, if she'd ever had to sleep with a man to put a few pounds in her pocket, I don't think she'd ever have made that film. Well, for your record, my opinion of the legalization, I'd say I'm against it. I just, I don't care what these young girls say. You know, living like that, you're just lost, and, you know, I'm 63 years old. I'm still trying to find who I am. You know, I never was a wife or a nun, or a prostitute even, really, not really. Nobody ever asked who I wanted to be. They just told me, and if you legalize it, then you're really telling these girls, "Go on and get lost for a living," and a lot of them, they'll do as they're told. All right, so four perspectives from four quite — (Applause) — four quite different voices there, right? One woman saying sex itself is natural but the sex industry seems to mechanize or industrialize it. Then the second woman considered sex work to be empowering, liberating, and feminist, though she, herself, notably, did not seem keen to do it. The third woman, who actually was a so-called sex worker did not agree that it was liberating but she wanted the right to the economic empowerment, and then we hear the fourth woman saying not only prostitution itself but proscribed roles for women in general prevented her from ever finding who she was, right? So another fact most people did not know was the average age of an at-risk girl being introduced to the sex industry was 12 or 13. Also consider that the age when all girls in that society first became exposed to sexualized images of women was quite a bit earlier, right? This was a doll called Barbie, right? I initially thought she was an educational tool for anorexia prevention — (Laughter) — but actually she was considered by many to be a wholesome symbol of femininity, and often young girls began what was called dieting. Remember this? This was restricting food intake on purpose by the age of six, and defining themselves based on attractiveness by around that same time. Right? Yes? Right, Bradley, okay, excellent point. So there was a lucrative market in that society in convincing all people they had to look a certain way to even have a sex life, right? But girls, especially, were expected to be "sexy" while avoiding being perceived as "sluts" for being sexual. Right? So there's that shame piece we've heard about. Yes. Valerie, right? Okay, very good. Of course, men were having sex as well, but you'll remember from the reading, what were male sluts called? Very good, they were called men. (Laughter) (Applause) So not easy living in a world like that, right? Though it was not all bad news either. Most women in the early 2000s considered themselves empowered, and men generally felt they were also evolved in this area, and, in fact, most people would have been aware of issues like human trafficking, for example, but they would have seen that as quite separate from more recreational adult entertainment. And so we'll just very briefly, class — we don't have a lot of time — we'll just very briefly hear from a man on our topic at this stage. So this next subject was interviewed on the night of his bachelor party. Dude, can you, all right, can you just keep it down? I'm trying to talk to BERT right now. Oh, your name's not BERT. BERT's the name of the, oh, all right. No, no, no, totally, it's totally fine. I'm mostly sober, so I just want to be helpful. Yeah, and I totally believe in causes, yeah, like, all that stuff. (Laughter) And actually, I'm wearing Toms right now. Yeah, Toms, like, the shoes, like, you buy a pair and then a kid in Africa gets clean water. Yeah. Totally. But what was the question again? Sorry. Of course I believe in women's rights. I'm marrying a woman. (Laughter) No, but I mean, like, just because I'm in a strip club parking lot doesn't mean that I'm, like, a sexist or whatever. My fiancee is totally amazing, she's totally a strong girl, woman, smart woman, like, the whole thing. Yeah, she knows I'm here. She's probably at a strip club herself right now, like, as a joke, same as me. My best man, I told him he could surprise me, and he thought this would be hilarious, but this is not something. Yeah, we all went to B school together. Wharton. (Laughter) Yeah, so, dude, can you guys — All right, but it's my bachelor party, and I can spend it in the parking lot with Anderson Cooper if I want to. All right, I'll see you in there. All right, okay, so Anderson, so, like, first of all, stripping, but then, like, all the other things you're talking about, prostitution and all that stuff, that's, like, not the same thing at all. You know? Like, you keep calling it the sex industry or whatever, but it's like, if the girl wants to be an exotic dancer and she's 18, like, that's her right. Whoa, whoa, I hear what you're saying, but I just feel like people, they just want to make it seem like all dudes are just, like, predators, that we would just automatically go to a prostitute, or whatever. Even, like, when I pledged, you know, like when I rushed my fraternity. My brothers who I'm close to, those guys, they're all like me. We're just normal people, but, like, there's this myth that you must be that guy who is kind of an asshole, and like, all bros before hos or whatever. And actually, like, bros before hos, it doesn't mean like what it sounds like. It's actually just like a joking way of saying that you care about your brothers and you put them first. Yeah, but, you can't blame the media, either. I mean, like, if you go watch "Hangover 2," and you think that's an instruction manual for your life, like, I don't know what to tell you. You know? You don't watch "Bourne Identity" and go drive your car over a gondola in Venice. (Laughter) Well, yeah, okay, like, if you're a little kid or whatever, of course it's different, but — Yeah, all right, I remember one thing like that. I was at this kid's house one time playing GTA, uh, Grand Theft Auto? Dude, are you from Canada? (Laughter) So, like, whatever, with Grand Theft Auto, you're this kid, like, you're this guy walking around or whatever, and you can basically, like, the more cops you kill, the more points you get, and stuff like that. But also, you can find prostitutes and obviously you can do sexual stuff with them, but you can, like, kill them and take your money back. Yeah, this kid, I remember he ran over a couple of them a few times with his car and he got all these points. We were, like, 10, I think. It felt pretty terrible, actually. No, I don't think I said anything, I just finished playing and went home. All right class, so then there were men who had more than just a passing relationship to this issue. (Laughter) The next subject described himself as a reformed and remorseful pimp turned motivational speaker, life coach and therapist, but if you want to know more about him, you'll have to come to the entire play. Thank you so much, you beautiful TED audience. I will see you for "Sell/Buy/Date." (Applause) |
Do we see reality as it is? | {0: 'Donald Hoffman studies how our visual perception, guided by millions of years of natural selection, authors every aspect of our everyday reality.'} | TED2015 | I love a great mystery, and I'm fascinated by the greatest unsolved mystery in science, perhaps because it's personal. It's about who we are, and I can't help but be curious. The mystery is this: What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious experiences, such as your experience of the taste of chocolate or the feeling of velvet? Now, this mystery is not new. In 1868, Thomas Huxley wrote, "How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the genie when Aladdin rubbed his lamp." Now, Huxley knew that brain activity and conscious experiences are correlated, but he didn't know why. To the science of his day, it was a mystery. In the years since Huxley, science has learned a lot about brain activity, but the relationship between brain activity and conscious experiences is still a mystery. Why? Why have we made so little progress? Well, some experts think that we can't solve this problem because we lack the necessary concepts and intelligence. We don't expect monkeys to solve problems in quantum mechanics, and as it happens, we can't expect our species to solve this problem either. Well, I disagree. I'm more optimistic. I think we've simply made a false assumption. Once we fix it, we just might solve this problem. Today, I'd like tell you what that assumption is, why it's false, and how to fix it. Let's begin with a question: Do we see reality as it is? I open my eyes and I have an experience that I describe as a red tomato a meter away. As a result, I come to believe that in reality, there's a red tomato a meter away. I then close my eyes, and my experience changes to a gray field, but is it still the case that in reality, there's a red tomato a meter away? I think so, but could I be wrong? Could I be misinterpreting the nature of my perceptions? We have misinterpreted our perceptions before. We used to think the Earth is flat, because it looks that way. Pythagorus discovered that we were wrong. Then we thought that the Earth is the unmoving center of the Universe, again because it looks that way. Copernicus and Galileo discovered, again, that we were wrong. Galileo then wondered if we might be misinterpreting our experiences in other ways. He wrote: "I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be annihilated." Now, that's a stunning claim. Could Galileo be right? Could we really be misinterpreting our experiences that badly? What does modern science have to say about this? Well, neuroscientists tell us that about a third of the brain's cortex is engaged in vision. When you simply open your eyes and look about this room, billions of neurons and trillions of synapses are engaged. Now, this is a bit surprising, because to the extent that we think about vision at all, we think of it as like a camera. It just takes a picture of objective reality as it is. Now, there is a part of vision that's like a camera: the eye has a lens that focuses an image on the back of the eye where there are 130 million photoreceptors, so the eye is like a 130-megapixel camera. But that doesn't explain the billions of neurons and trillions of synapses that are engaged in vision. What are these neurons up to? Well, neuroscientists tell us that they are creating, in real time, all the shapes, objects, colors, and motions that we see. It feels like we're just taking a snapshot of this room the way it is, but in fact, we're constructing everything that we see. We don't construct the whole world at once. We construct what we need in the moment. Now, there are many demonstrations that are quite compelling that we construct what we see. I'll just show you two. In this example, you see some red discs with bits cut out of them, but if I just rotate the disks a little bit, suddenly, you see a 3D cube pop out of the screen. Now, the screen of course is flat, so the three-dimensional cube that you're experiencing must be your construction. In this next example, you see glowing blue bars with pretty sharp edges moving across a field of dots. In fact, no dots move. All I'm doing from frame to frame is changing the colors of dots from blue to black or black to blue. But when I do this quickly, your visual system creates the glowing blue bars with the sharp edges and the motion. There are many more examples, but these are just two that you construct what you see. But neuroscientists go further. They say that we reconstruct reality. So, when I have an experience that I describe as a red tomato, that experience is actually an accurate reconstruction of the properties of a real red tomato that would exist even if I weren't looking. Now, why would neuroscientists say that we don't just construct, we reconstruct? Well, the standard argument given is usually an evolutionary one. Those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage compared to those who saw less accurately, and therefore they were more likely to pass on their genes. We are the offspring of those who saw more accurately, and so we can be confident that, in the normal case, our perceptions are accurate. You see this in the standard textbooks. One textbook says, for example, "Evolutionarily speaking, vision is useful precisely because it is so accurate." So the idea is that accurate perceptions are fitter perceptions. They give you a survival advantage. Now, is this correct? Is this the right interpretation of evolutionary theory? Well, let's first look at a couple of examples in nature. The Australian jewel beetle is dimpled, glossy and brown. The female is flightless. The male flies, looking, of course, for a hot female. When he finds one, he alights and mates. There's another species in the outback, Homo sapiens. The male of this species has a massive brain that he uses to hunt for cold beer. (Laughter) And when he finds one, he drains it, and sometimes throws the bottle into the outback. Now, as it happens, these bottles are dimpled, glossy, and just the right shade of brown to tickle the fancy of these beetles. The males swarm all over the bottles trying to mate. They lose all interest in the real females. Classic case of the male leaving the female for the bottle. (Laughter) (Applause) The species almost went extinct. Australia had to change its bottles to save its beetles. (Laughter) Now, the males had successfully found females for thousands, perhaps millions of years. It looked like they saw reality as it is, but apparently not. Evolution had given them a hack. A female is anything dimpled, glossy and brown, the bigger the better. (Laughter) Even when crawling all over the bottle, the male couldn't discover his mistake. Now, you might say, beetles, sure, they're very simple creatures, but surely not mammals. Mammals don't rely on tricks. Well, I won't dwell on this, but you get the idea. (Laughter) So this raises an important technical question: Does natural selection really favor seeing reality as it is? Fortunately, we don't have to wave our hands and guess; evolution is a mathematically precise theory. We can use the equations of evolution to check this out. We can have various organisms in artificial worlds compete and see which survive and which thrive, which sensory systems are more fit. A key notion in those equations is fitness. Consider this steak: What does this steak do for the fitness of an animal? Well, for a hungry lion looking to eat, it enhances fitness. For a well-fed lion looking to mate, it doesn't enhance fitness. And for a rabbit in any state, it doesn't enhance fitness, so fitness does depend on reality as it is, yes, but also on the organism, its state and its action. Fitness is not the same thing as reality as it is, and it's fitness, and not reality as it is, that figures centrally in the equations of evolution. So, in my lab, we have run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations with lots of different randomly chosen worlds and organisms that compete for resources in those worlds. Some of the organisms see all of the reality, others see just part of the reality, and some see none of the reality, only fitness. Who wins? Well, I hate to break it to you, but perception of reality goes extinct. In almost every simulation, organisms that see none of reality but are just tuned to fitness drive to extinction all the organisms that perceive reality as it is. So the bottom line is, evolution does not favor veridical, or accurate perceptions. Those perceptions of reality go extinct. Now, this is a bit stunning. How can it be that not seeing the world accurately gives us a survival advantage? That is a bit counterintuitive. But remember the jewel beetle. The jewel beetle survived for thousands, perhaps millions of years, using simple tricks and hacks. What the equations of evolution are telling us is that all organisms, including us, are in the same boat as the jewel beetle. We do not see reality as it is. We're shaped with tricks and hacks that keep us alive. Still, we need some help with our intuitions. How can not perceiving reality as it is be useful? Well, fortunately, we have a very helpful metaphor: the desktop interface on your computer. Consider that blue icon for a TED Talk that you're writing. Now, the icon is blue and rectangular and in the lower right corner of the desktop. Does that mean that the text file itself in the computer is blue, rectangular, and in the lower right-hand corner of the computer? Of course not. Anyone who thought that misinterprets the purpose of the interface. It's not there to show you the reality of the computer. In fact, it's there to hide that reality. You don't want to know about the diodes and resistors and all the megabytes of software. If you had to deal with that, you could never write your text file or edit your photo. So the idea is that evolution has given us an interface that hides reality and guides adaptive behavior. Space and time, as you perceive them right now, are your desktop. Physical objects are simply icons in that desktop. There's an obvious objection. Hoffman, if you think that train coming down the track at 200 MPH is just an icon of your desktop, why don't you step in front of it? And after you're gone, and your theory with you, we'll know that there's more to that train than just an icon. Well, I wouldn't step in front of that train for the same reason that I wouldn't carelessly drag that icon to the trash can: not because I take the icon literally — the file is not literally blue or rectangular — but I do take it seriously. I could lose weeks of work. Similarly, evolution has shaped us with perceptual symbols that are designed to keep us alive. We'd better take them seriously. If you see a snake, don't pick it up. If you see a cliff, don't jump off. They're designed to keep us safe, and we should take them seriously. That does not mean that we should take them literally. That's a logical error. Another objection: There's nothing really new here. Physicists have told us for a long time that the metal of that train looks solid but really it's mostly empty space with microscopic particles zipping around. There's nothing new here. Well, not exactly. It's like saying, I know that that blue icon on the desktop is not the reality of the computer, but if I pull out my trusty magnifying glass and look really closely, I see little pixels, and that's the reality of the computer. Well, not really — you're still on the desktop, and that's the point. Those microscopic particles are still in space and time: they're still in the user interface. So I'm saying something far more radical than those physicists. Finally, you might object, look, we all see the train, therefore none of us constructs the train. But remember this example. In this example, we all see a cube, but the screen is flat, so the cube that you see is the cube that you construct. We all see a cube because we all, each one of us, constructs the cube that we see. The same is true of the train. We all see a train because we each see the train that we construct, and the same is true of all physical objects. We're inclined to think that perception is like a window on reality as it is. The theory of evolution is telling us that this is an incorrect interpretation of our perceptions. Instead, reality is more like a 3D desktop that's designed to hide the complexity of the real world and guide adaptive behavior. Space as you perceive it is your desktop. Physical objects are just the icons in that desktop. We used to think that the Earth is flat because it looks that way. Then we thought that the Earth is the unmoving center of reality because it looks that way. We were wrong. We had misinterpreted our perceptions. Now we believe that spacetime and objects are the nature of reality as it is. The theory of evolution is telling us that once again, we're wrong. We're misinterpreting the content of our perceptual experiences. There's something that exists when you don't look, but it's not spacetime and physical objects. It's as hard for us to let go of spacetime and objects as it is for the jewel beetle to let go of its bottle. Why? Because we're blind to our own blindnesses. But we have an advantage over the jewel beetle: our science and technology. By peering through the lens of a telescope we discovered that the Earth is not the unmoving center of reality, and by peering through the lens of the theory of evolution we discovered that spacetime and objects are not the nature of reality. When I have a perceptual experience that I describe as a red tomato, I am interacting with reality, but that reality is not a red tomato and is nothing like a red tomato. Similarly, when I have an experience that I describe as a lion or a steak, I'm interacting with reality, but that reality is not a lion or a steak. And here's the kicker: When I have a perceptual experience that I describe as a brain, or neurons, I am interacting with reality, but that reality is not a brain or neurons and is nothing like a brain or neurons. And that reality, whatever it is, is the real source of cause and effect in the world — not brains, not neurons. Brains and neurons have no causal powers. They cause none of our perceptual experiences, and none of our behavior. Brains and neurons are a species-specific set of symbols, a hack. What does this mean for the mystery of consciousness? Well, it opens up new possibilities. For instance, perhaps reality is some vast machine that causes our conscious experiences. I doubt this, but it's worth exploring. Perhaps reality is some vast, interacting network of conscious agents, simple and complex, that cause each other's conscious experiences. Actually, this isn't as crazy an idea as it seems, and I'm currently exploring it. But here's the point: Once we let go of our massively intuitive but massively false assumption about the nature of reality, it opens up new ways to think about life's greatest mystery. I bet that reality will end up turning out to be more fascinating and unexpected than we've ever imagined. The theory of evolution presents us with the ultimate dare: Dare to recognize that perception is not about seeing truth, it's about having kids. And by the way, even this TED is just in your head. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: If that's really you there, thank you. So there's so much from this. I mean, first of all, some people may just be profoundly depressed at the thought that, if evolution does not favor reality, I mean, doesn't that to some extent undermine all our endeavors here, all our ability to think that we can think the truth, possibly even including your own theory, if you go there? Donald Hoffman: Well, this does not stop us from a successful science. What we have is one theory that turned out to be false, that perception is like reality and reality is like our perceptions. That theory turns out to be false. Okay, throw that theory away. That doesn't stop us from now postulating all sorts of other theories about the nature of reality, so it's actually progress to recognize that one of our theories was false. So science continues as normal. There's no problem here. CA: So you think it's possible — (Laughter) — This is cool, but what you're saying I think is it's possible that evolution can still get you to reason. DH: Yes. Now that's a very, very good point. The evolutionary game simulations that I showed were specifically about perception, and they do show that our perceptions have been shaped not to show us reality as it is, but that does not mean the same thing about our logic or mathematics. We haven't done these simulations, but my bet is that we'll find that there are some selection pressures for our logic and our mathematics to be at least in the direction of truth. I mean, if you're like me, math and logic is not easy. We don't get it all right, but at least the selection pressures are not uniformly away from true math and logic. So I think that we'll find that we have to look at each cognitive faculty one at a time and see what evolution does to it. What's true about perception may not be true about math and logic. CA: I mean, really what you're proposing is a kind of modern-day Bishop Berkeley interpretation of the world: consciousness causes matter, not the other way around. DH: Well, it's slightly different than Berkeley. Berkeley thought that, he was a deist, and he thought that the ultimate nature of reality is God and so forth, and I don't need to go where Berkeley's going, so it's quite a bit different from Berkeley. I call this conscious realism. It's actually a very different approach. CA: Don, I could literally talk with you for hours, and I hope to do that. Thanks so much for that. DH: Thank you. (Applause) |
A powerful poem about what it feels like to be transgender | {0: 'Lee Mokobe is a 20-year-old South African slam poet and co-founder of Vocal Revolutionaries.'} | TEDWomen 2015 | The first time I uttered a prayer was in a glass-stained cathedral. I was kneeling long after the congregation was on its feet, dip both hands into holy water, trace the trinity across my chest, my tiny body drooping like a question mark all over the wooden pew. I asked Jesus to fix me, and when he did not answer I befriended silence in the hopes that my sin would burn and salve my mouth would dissolve like sugar on tongue, but shame lingered as an aftertaste. And in an attempt to reintroduce me to sanctity, my mother told me of the miracle I was, said I could grow up to be anything I want. I decided to be a boy. It was cute. I had snapback, toothless grin, used skinned knees as street cred, played hide and seek with what was left of my goal. I was it. The winner to a game the other kids couldn't play, I was the mystery of an anatomy, a question asked but not answered, tightroping between awkward boy and apologetic girl, and when I turned 12, the boy phase wasn't deemed cute anymore. It was met with nostalgic aunts who missed seeing my knees in the shadow of skirts, who reminded me that my kind of attitude would never bring a husband home, that I exist for heterosexual marriage and child-bearing. And I swallowed their insults along with their slurs. Naturally, I did not come out of the closet. The kids at my school opened it without my permission. Called me by a name I did not recognize, said "lesbian," but I was more boy than girl, more Ken than Barbie. It had nothing to do with hating my body, I just love it enough to let it go, I treat it like a house, and when your house is falling apart, you do not evacuate, you make it comfortable enough to house all your insides, you make it pretty enough to invite guests over, you make the floorboards strong enough to stand on. My mother fears I have named myself after fading things. As she counts the echoes left behind by Mya Hall, Leelah Alcorn, Blake Brockington. She fears that I'll die without a whisper, that I'll turn into "what a shame" conversations at the bus stop. She claims I have turned myself into a mausoleum, that I am a walking casket, news headlines have turned my identity into a spectacle, Bruce Jenner on everyone's lips while the brutality of living in this body becomes an asterisk at the bottom of equality pages. No one ever thinks of us as human because we are more ghost than flesh, because people fear that my gender expression is a trick, that it exists to be perverse, that it ensnares them without their consent, that my body is a feast for their eyes and hands and once they have fed off my queer, they'll regurgitate all the parts they did not like. They'll put me back into the closet, hang me with all the other skeletons. I will be the best attraction. Can you see how easy it is to talk people into coffins, to misspell their names on gravestones. And people still wonder why there are boys rotting, they go away in high school hallways they are afraid of becoming another hashtag in a second afraid of classroom discussions becoming like judgment day and now oncoming traffic is embracing more transgender children than parents. I wonder how long it will be before the trans suicide notes start to feel redundant, before we realize that our bodies become lessons about sin way before we learn how to love them. Like God didn't save all this breath and mercy, like my blood is not the wine that washed over Jesus' feet. My prayers are now getting stuck in my throat. Maybe I am finally fixed, maybe I just don't care, maybe God finally listened to my prayers. Thank you. (Applause) |
This app knows how you feel -- from the look on your face | {0: 'What if a computer could recognize your facial expression, and react to how you feel? Rana el Kaliouby sees big possibilities in making technology emotionally aware.'} | TEDWomen 2015 | Our emotions influence every aspect of our lives, from our health and how we learn, to how we do business and make decisions, big ones and small. Our emotions also influence how we connect with one another. We've evolved to live in a world like this, but instead, we're living more and more of our lives like this — this is the text message from my daughter last night — in a world that's devoid of emotion. So I'm on a mission to change that. I want to bring emotions back into our digital experiences. I started on this path 15 years ago. I was a computer scientist in Egypt, and I had just gotten accepted to a Ph.D. program at Cambridge University. So I did something quite unusual for a young newlywed Muslim Egyptian wife: With the support of my husband, who had to stay in Egypt, I packed my bags and I moved to England. At Cambridge, thousands of miles away from home, I realized I was spending more hours with my laptop than I did with any other human. Yet despite this intimacy, my laptop had absolutely no idea how I was feeling. It had no idea if I was happy, having a bad day, or stressed, confused, and so that got frustrating. Even worse, as I communicated online with my family back home, I felt that all my emotions disappeared in cyberspace. I was homesick, I was lonely, and on some days I was actually crying, but all I had to communicate these emotions was this. (Laughter) Today's technology has lots of I.Q., but no E.Q.; lots of cognitive intelligence, but no emotional intelligence. So that got me thinking, what if our technology could sense our emotions? What if our devices could sense how we felt and reacted accordingly, just the way an emotionally intelligent friend would? Those questions led me and my team to create technologies that can read and respond to our emotions, and our starting point was the human face. So our human face happens to be one of the most powerful channels that we all use to communicate social and emotional states, everything from enjoyment, surprise, empathy and curiosity. In emotion science, we call each facial muscle movement an action unit. So for example, action unit 12, it's not a Hollywood blockbuster, it is actually a lip corner pull, which is the main component of a smile. Try it everybody. Let's get some smiles going on. Another example is action unit 4. It's the brow furrow. It's when you draw your eyebrows together and you create all these textures and wrinkles. We don't like them, but it's a strong indicator of a negative emotion. So we have about 45 of these action units, and they combine to express hundreds of emotions. Teaching a computer to read these facial emotions is hard, because these action units, they can be fast, they're subtle, and they combine in many different ways. So take, for example, the smile and the smirk. They look somewhat similar, but they mean very different things. (Laughter) So the smile is positive, a smirk is often negative. Sometimes a smirk can make you become famous. But seriously, it's important for a computer to be able to tell the difference between the two expressions. So how do we do that? We give our algorithms tens of thousands of examples of people we know to be smiling, from different ethnicities, ages, genders, and we do the same for smirks. And then, using deep learning, the algorithm looks for all these textures and wrinkles and shape changes on our face, and basically learns that all smiles have common characteristics, all smirks have subtly different characteristics. And the next time it sees a new face, it essentially learns that this face has the same characteristics of a smile, and it says, "Aha, I recognize this. This is a smile expression." So the best way to demonstrate how this technology works is to try a live demo, so I need a volunteer, preferably somebody with a face. (Laughter) Cloe's going to be our volunteer today. So over the past five years, we've moved from being a research project at MIT to a company, where my team has worked really hard to make this technology work, as we like to say, in the wild. And we've also shrunk it so that the core emotion engine works on any mobile device with a camera, like this iPad. So let's give this a try. As you can see, the algorithm has essentially found Cloe's face, so it's this white bounding box, and it's tracking the main feature points on her face, so her eyebrows, her eyes, her mouth and her nose. The question is, can it recognize her expression? So we're going to test the machine. So first of all, give me your poker face. Yep, awesome. (Laughter) And then as she smiles, this is a genuine smile, it's great. So you can see the green bar go up as she smiles. Now that was a big smile. Can you try a subtle smile to see if the computer can recognize? It does recognize subtle smiles as well. We've worked really hard to make that happen. And then eyebrow raised, indicator of surprise. Brow furrow, which is an indicator of confusion. Frown. Yes, perfect. So these are all the different action units. There's many more of them. This is just a slimmed-down demo. But we call each reading an emotion data point, and then they can fire together to portray different emotions. So on the right side of the demo — look like you're happy. So that's joy. Joy fires up. And then give me a disgust face. Try to remember what it was like when Zayn left One Direction. (Laughter) Yeah, wrinkle your nose. Awesome. And the valence is actually quite negative, so you must have been a big fan. So valence is how positive or negative an experience is, and engagement is how expressive she is as well. So imagine if Cloe had access to this real-time emotion stream, and she could share it with anybody she wanted to. Thank you. (Applause) So, so far, we have amassed 12 billion of these emotion data points. It's the largest emotion database in the world. We've collected it from 2.9 million face videos, people who have agreed to share their emotions with us, and from 75 countries around the world. It's growing every day. It blows my mind away that we can now quantify something as personal as our emotions, and we can do it at this scale. So what have we learned to date? Gender. Our data confirms something that you might suspect. Women are more expressive than men. Not only do they smile more, their smiles last longer, and we can now really quantify what it is that men and women respond to differently. Let's do culture: So in the United States, women are 40 percent more expressive than men, but curiously, we don't see any difference in the U.K. between men and women. (Laughter) Age: People who are 50 years and older are 25 percent more emotive than younger people. Women in their 20s smile a lot more than men the same age, perhaps a necessity for dating. But perhaps what surprised us the most about this data is that we happen to be expressive all the time, even when we are sitting in front of our devices alone, and it's not just when we're watching cat videos on Facebook. We are expressive when we're emailing, texting, shopping online, or even doing our taxes. Where is this data used today? In understanding how we engage with media, so understanding virality and voting behavior; and also empowering or emotion-enabling technology, and I want to share some examples that are especially close to my heart. Emotion-enabled wearable glasses can help individuals who are visually impaired read the faces of others, and it can help individuals on the autism spectrum interpret emotion, something that they really struggle with. In education, imagine if your learning apps sense that you're confused and slow down, or that you're bored, so it's sped up, just like a great teacher would in a classroom. What if your wristwatch tracked your mood, or your car sensed that you're tired, or perhaps your fridge knows that you're stressed, so it auto-locks to prevent you from binge eating. (Laughter) I would like that, yeah. What if, when I was in Cambridge, I had access to my real-time emotion stream, and I could share that with my family back home in a very natural way, just like I would've if we were all in the same room together? I think five years down the line, all our devices are going to have an emotion chip, and we won't remember what it was like when we couldn't just frown at our device and our device would say, "Hmm, you didn't like that, did you?" Our biggest challenge is that there are so many applications of this technology, my team and I realize that we can't build them all ourselves, so we've made this technology available so that other developers can get building and get creative. We recognize that there are potential risks and potential for abuse, but personally, having spent many years doing this, I believe that the benefits to humanity from having emotionally intelligent technology far outweigh the potential for misuse. And I invite you all to be part of the conversation. The more people who know about this technology, the more we can all have a voice in how it's being used. So as more and more of our lives become digital, we are fighting a losing battle trying to curb our usage of devices in order to reclaim our emotions. So what I'm trying to do instead is to bring emotions into our technology and make our technologies more responsive. So I want those devices that have separated us to bring us back together. And by humanizing technology, we have this golden opportunity to reimagine how we connect with machines, and therefore, how we, as human beings, connect with one another. Thank you. (Applause) |
Forget the pecking order at work | {0: 'The former CEO of five businesses, Margaret Heffernan explores the all-too-human thought patterns that lead organizations and managers astray.'} | TEDWomen 2015 | An evolutionary biologist at Purdue University named William Muir studied chickens. He was interested in productivity — I think it's something that concerns all of us — but it's easy to measure in chickens because you just count the eggs. (Laughter) He wanted to know what could make his chickens more productive, so he devised a beautiful experiment. Chickens live in groups, so first of all, he selected just an average flock, and he let it alone for six generations. But then he created a second group of the individually most productive chickens — you could call them superchickens — and he put them together in a superflock, and each generation, he selected only the most productive for breeding. After six generations had passed, what did he find? Well, the first group, the average group, was doing just fine. They were all plump and fully feathered and egg production had increased dramatically. What about the second group? Well, all but three were dead. They'd pecked the rest to death. (Laughter) The individually productive chickens had only achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of the rest. Now, as I've gone around the world talking about this and telling this story in all sorts of organizations and companies, people have seen the relevance almost instantly, and they come up and they say things to me like, "That superflock, that's my company." (Laughter) Or, "That's my country." Or, "That's my life." All my life I've been told that the way we have to get ahead is to compete: get into the right school, get into the right job, get to the top, and I've really never found it very inspiring. I've started and run businesses because invention is a joy, and because working alongside brilliant, creative people is its own reward. And I've never really felt very motivated by pecking orders or by superchickens or by superstars. But for the past 50 years, we've run most organizations and some societies along the superchicken model. We've thought that success is achieved by picking the superstars, the brightest men, or occasionally women, in the room, and giving them all the resources and all the power. And the result has been just the same as in William Muir's experiment: aggression, dysfunction and waste. If the only way the most productive can be successful is by suppressing the productivity of the rest, then we badly need to find a better way to work and a richer way to live. (Applause) So what is it that makes some groups obviously more successful and more productive than others? Well, that's the question a team at MIT took to research. They brought in hundreds of volunteers, they put them into groups, and they gave them very hard problems to solve. And what happened was exactly what you'd expect, that some groups were very much more successful than others, but what was really interesting was that the high-achieving groups were not those where they had one or two people with spectacularly high I.Q. Nor were the most successful groups the ones that had the highest aggregate I.Q. Instead, they had three characteristics, the really successful teams. First of all, they showed high degrees of social sensitivity to each other. This is measured by something called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. It's broadly considered a test for empathy, and the groups that scored highly on this did better. Secondly, the successful groups gave roughly equal time to each other, so that no one voice dominated, but neither were there any passengers. And thirdly, the more successful groups had more women in them. (Applause) Now, was this because women typically score more highly on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, so you're getting a doubling down on the empathy quotient? Or was it because they brought a more diverse perspective? We don't really know, but the striking thing about this experiment is that it showed what we know, which is some groups do better than others, but what's key to that is their social connectedness to each other. So how does this play out in the real world? Well, it means that what happens between people really counts, because in groups that are highly attuned and sensitive to each other, ideas can flow and grow. People don't get stuck. They don't waste energy down dead ends. An example: Arup is one of the world's most successful engineering firms, and it was commissioned to build the equestrian center for the Beijing Olympics. Now, this building had to receive two and a half thousand really highly strung thoroughbred horses that were coming off long-haul flights, highly jet-lagged, not feeling their finest. And the problem the engineer confronted was, what quantity of waste to cater for? Now, you don't get taught this in engineering school — (Laughter) — and it's not really the kind of thing you want to get wrong, so he could have spent months talking to vets, doing the research, tweaking the spreadsheet. Instead, he asked for help and he found someone who had designed the Jockey Club in New York. The problem was solved in less than a day. Arup believes that the culture of helpfulness is central to their success. Now, helpfulness sounds really anemic, but it's absolutely core to successful teams, and it routinely outperforms individual intelligence. Helpfulness means I don't have to know everything, I just have to work among people who are good at getting and giving help. At SAP, they reckon that you can answer any question in 17 minutes. But there isn't a single high-tech company I've worked with that imagines for a moment that this is a technology issue, because what drives helpfulness is people getting to know each other. Now that sounds so obvious, and we think it'll just happen normally, but it doesn't. When I was running my first software company, I realized that we were getting stuck. There was a lot of friction, but not much else, and I gradually realized the brilliant, creative people that I'd hired didn't know each other. They were so focused on their own individual work, they didn't even know who they were sitting next to, and it was only when I insisted that we stop working and invest time in getting to know each other that we achieved real momentum. Now, that was 20 years ago, and now I visit companies that have banned coffee cups at desks because they want people to hang out around the coffee machines and talk to each other. The Swedes even have a special term for this. They call it fika, which means more than a coffee break. It means collective restoration. At Idexx, a company up in Maine, they've created vegetable gardens on campus so that people from different parts of the business can work together and get to know the whole business that way. Have they all gone mad? Quite the opposite — they've figured out that when the going gets tough, and it always will get tough if you're doing breakthrough work that really matters, what people need is social support, and they need to know who to ask for help. Companies don't have ideas; only people do. And what motivates people are the bonds and loyalty and trust they develop between each other. What matters is the mortar, not just the bricks. Now, when you put all of this together, what you get is something called social capital. Social capital is the reliance and interdependency that builds trust. The term comes from sociologists who were studying communities that proved particularly resilient in times of stress. Social capital is what gives companies momentum, and social capital is what makes companies robust. What does this mean in practical terms? It means that time is everything, because social capital compounds with time. So teams that work together longer get better, because it takes time to develop the trust you need for real candor and openness. And time is what builds value. When Alex Pentland suggested to one company that they synchronize coffee breaks so that people would have time to talk to each other, profits went up 15 million dollars, and employee satisfaction went up 10 percent. Not a bad return on social capital, which compounds even as you spend it. Now, this isn't about chumminess, and it's no charter for slackers, because people who work this way tend to be kind of scratchy, impatient, absolutely determined to think for themselves because that's what their contribution is. Conflict is frequent because candor is safe. And that's how good ideas turn into great ideas, because no idea is born fully formed. It emerges a little bit as a child is born, kind of messy and confused, but full of possibilities. And it's only through the generous contribution, faith and challenge that they achieve their potential. And that's what social capital supports. Now, we aren't really used to talking about this, about talent, about creativity, in this way. We're used to talking about stars. So I started to wonder, well, if we start working this way, does that mean no more stars? So I went and I sat in on the auditions at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. And what I saw there really surprised me, because the teachers weren't looking for individual pyrotechnics. They were looking for what happened between the students, because that's where the drama is. And when I talked to producers of hit albums, they said, "Oh sure, we have lots of superstars in music. It's just, they don't last very long. It's the outstanding collaborators who enjoy the long careers, because bringing out the best in others is how they found the best in themselves." And when I went to visit companies that are renowned for their ingenuity and creativity, I couldn't even see any superstars, because everybody there really mattered. And when I reflected on my own career, and the extraordinary people I've had the privilege to work with, I realized how much more we could give each other if we just stopped trying to be superchickens. (Laughter) (Applause) Once you appreciate truly how social work is, a lot of things have to change. Management by talent contest has routinely pitted employees against each other. Now, rivalry has to be replaced by social capital. For decades, we've tried to motivate people with money, even though we've got a vast amount of research that shows that money erodes social connectedness. Now, we need to let people motivate each other. And for years, we've thought that leaders were heroic soloists who were expected, all by themselves, to solve complex problems. Now, we need to redefine leadership as an activity in which conditions are created in which everyone can do their most courageous thinking together. We know that this works. When the Montreal Protocol called for the phasing out of CFCs, the chlorofluorocarbons implicated in the hole in the ozone layer, the risks were immense. CFCs were everywhere, and nobody knew if a substitute could be found. But one team that rose to the challenge adopted three key principles. The first was the head of engineering, Frank Maslen, said, there will be no stars in this team. We need everybody. Everybody has a valid perspective. Second, we work to one standard only: the best imaginable. And third, he told his boss, Geoff Tudhope, that he had to butt out, because he knew how disruptive power can be. Now, this didn't mean Tudhope did nothing. He gave the team air cover, and he listened to ensure that they honored their principles. And it worked: Ahead of all the other companies tackling this hard problem, this group cracked it first. And to date, the Montreal Protocol is the most successful international environmental agreement ever implemented. There was a lot at stake then, and there's a lot at stake now, and we won't solve our problems if we expect it to be solved by a few supermen or superwomen. Now we need everybody, because it is only when we accept that everybody has value that we will liberate the energy and imagination and momentum we need to create the best beyond measure. Thank you. (Applause) |
The forgotten history of autism | {0: 'Steve Silberman is a writer and contributing editor for Wired who covers science and society. His newest book explores neurodiversity and the link between autism and genius.'} | TED2015 | Just after Christmas last year, 132 kids in California got the measles by either visiting Disneyland or being exposed to someone who'd been there. The virus then hopped the Canadian border, infecting more than 100 children in Quebec. One of the tragic things about this outbreak is that measles, which can be fatal to a child with a weakened immune system, is one of the most easily preventable diseases in the world. An effective vaccine against it has been available for more than half a century, but many of the kids involved in the Disneyland outbreak had not been vaccinated because their parents were afraid of something allegedly even worse: autism. But wait — wasn't the paper that sparked the controversy about autism and vaccines debunked, retracted, and branded a deliberate fraud by the British Medical Journal? Don't most science-savvy people know that the theory that vaccines cause autism is B.S.? I think most of you do, but millions of parents worldwide continue to fear that vaccines put their kids at risk for autism. Why? Here's why. This is a graph of autism prevalence estimates rising over time. For most of the 20th century, autism was considered an incredibly rare condition. The few psychologists and pediatricians who'd even heard of it figured they would get through their entire careers without seeing a single case. For decades, the prevalence estimates remained stable at just three or four children in 10,000. But then, in the 1990s, the numbers started to skyrocket. Fundraising organizations like Autism Speaks routinely refer to autism as an epidemic, as if you could catch it from another kid at Disneyland. So what's going on? If it isn't vaccines, what is it? If you ask the folks down at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta what's going on, they tend to rely on phrases like "broadened diagnostic criteria" and "better case finding" to explain these rising numbers. But that kind of language doesn't do much to allay the fears of a young mother who is searching her two-year-old's face for eye contact. If the diagnostic criteria had to be broadened, why were they so narrow in the first place? Why were cases of autism so hard to find before the 1990s? Five years ago, I decided to try to uncover the answers to these questions. I learned that what happened has less to do with the slow and cautious progress of science than it does with the seductive power of storytelling. For most of the 20th century, clinicians told one story about what autism is and how it was discovered, but that story turned out to be wrong, and the consequences of it are having a devastating impact on global public health. There was a second, more accurate story of autism which had been lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the clinical literature. This second story tells us everything about how we got here and where we need to go next. The first story starts with a child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Leo Kanner. In 1943, Kanner published a paper describing 11 young patients who seemed to inhabit private worlds, ignoring the people around them, even their own parents. They could amuse themselves for hours by flapping their hands in front of their faces, but they were panicked by little things like their favorite toy being moved from its usual place without their knowledge. Based on the patients who were brought to his clinic, Kanner speculated that autism is very rare. By the 1950s, as the world's leading authority on the subject, he declared that he had seen less than 150 true cases of his syndrome while fielding referrals from as far away as South Africa. That's actually not surprising, because Kanner's criteria for diagnosing autism were incredibly selective. For example, he discouraged giving the diagnosis to children who had seizures but now we know that epilepsy is very common in autism. He once bragged that he had turned nine out of 10 kids referred to his office as autistic by other clinicians without giving them an autism diagnosis. Kanner was a smart guy, but a number of his theories didn't pan out. He classified autism as a form of infantile psychosis caused by cold and unaffectionate parents. These children, he said, had been kept neatly in a refrigerator that didn't defrost. At the same time, however, Kanner noticed that some of his young patients had special abilities that clustered in certain areas like music, math and memory. One boy in his clinic could distinguish between 18 symphonies before he turned two. When his mother put on one of his favorite records, he would correctly declare, "Beethoven!" But Kanner took a dim view of these abilities, claiming that the kids were just regurgitating things they'd heard their pompous parents say, desperate to earn their approval. As a result, autism became a source of shame and stigma for families, and two generations of autistic children were shipped off to institutions for their own good, becoming invisible to the world at large. Amazingly, it wasn't until the 1970s that researchers began to test Kanner's theory that autism was rare. Lorna Wing was a cognitive psychologist in London who thought that Kanner's theory of refrigerator parenting were "bloody stupid," as she told me. She and her husband John were warm and affectionate people, and they had a profoundly autistic daughter named Susie. Lorna and John knew how hard it was to raise a child like Susie without support services, special education, and the other resources that are out of reach without a diagnosis. To make the case to the National Health Service that more resources were needed for autistic children and their families, Lorna and her colleague Judith Gould decided to do something that should have been done 30 years earlier. They undertook a study of autism prevalence in the general population. They pounded the pavement in a London suburb called Camberwell to try to find autistic children in the community. What they saw made clear that Kanner's model was way too narrow, while the reality of autism was much more colorful and diverse. Some kids couldn't talk at all, while others waxed on at length about their fascination with astrophysics, dinosaurs or the genealogy of royalty. In other words, these children didn't fit into nice, neat boxes, as Judith put it, and they saw lots of them, way more than Kanner's monolithic model would have predicted. At first, they were at a loss to make sense of their data. How had no one noticed these children before? But then Lorna came upon a reference to a paper that had been published in German in 1944, the year after Kanner's paper, and then forgotten, buried with the ashes of a terrible time that no one wanted to remember or think about. Kanner knew about this competing paper, but scrupulously avoided mentioning it in his own work. It had never even been translated into English, but luckily, Lorna's husband spoke German, and he translated it for her. The paper offered an alternate story of autism. Its author was a man named Hans Asperger, who ran a combination clinic and residential school in Vienna in the 1930s. Asperger's ideas about teaching children with learning differences were progressive even by contemporary standards. Mornings at his clinic began with exercise classes set to music, and the children put on plays on Sunday afternoons. Instead of blaming parents for causing autism, Asperger framed it as a lifelong, polygenetic disability that requires compassionate forms of support and accommodations over the course of one's whole life. Rather than treating the kids in his clinic like patients, Asperger called them his little professors, and enlisted their help in developing methods of education that were particularly suited to them. Crucially, Asperger viewed autism as a diverse continuum that spans an astonishing range of giftedness and disability. He believed that autism and autistic traits are common and always have been, seeing aspects of this continuum in familiar archetypes from pop culture like the socially awkward scientist and the absent-minded professor. He went so far as to say, it seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential. Lorna and Judith realized that Kanner had been as wrong about autism being rare as he had been about parents causing it. Over the next several years, they quietly worked with the American Psychiatric Association to broaden the criteria for diagnosis to reflect the diversity of what they called "the autism spectrum." In the late '80s and early 1990s, their changes went into effect, swapping out Kanner's narrow model for Asperger's broad and inclusive one. These changes weren't happening in a vacuum. By coincidence, as Lorna and Judith worked behind the scenes to reform the criteria, people all over the world were seeing an autistic adult for the first time. Before "Rain Man" came out in 1988, only a tiny, ingrown circle of experts knew what autism looked like, but after Dustin Hoffman's unforgettable performance as Raymond Babbitt earned "Rain Man" four Academy Awards, pediatricians, psychologists, teachers and parents all over the world knew what autism looked like. Coincidentally, at the same time, the first easy-to-use clinical tests for diagnosing autism were introduced. You no longer had to have a connection to that tiny circle of experts to get your child evaluated. The combination of "Rain Man," the changes to the criteria, and the introduction of these tests created a network effect, a perfect storm of autism awareness. The number of diagnoses started to soar, just as Lorna and Judith predicted, indeed hoped, that it would, enabling autistic people and their families to finally get the support and services they deserved. Then Andrew Wakefield came along to blame the spike in diagnoses on vaccines, a simple, powerful, and seductively believable story that was as wrong as Kanner's theory that autism was rare. If the CDC's current estimate, that one in 68 kids in America are on the spectrum, is correct, autistics are one of the largest minority groups in the world. In recent years, autistic people have come together on the Internet to reject the notion that they are puzzles to be solved by the next medical breakthrough, coining the term "neurodiversity" to celebrate the varieties of human cognition. One way to understand neurodiversity is to think in terms of human operating systems. Just because a P.C. is not running Windows doesn't mean that it's broken. By autistic standards, the normal human brain is easily distractable, obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail. To be sure, autistic people have a hard time living in a world not built for them. [Seventy] years later, we're still catching up to Asperger, who believed that the "cure" for the most disabling aspects of autism is to be found in understanding teachers, accommodating employers, supportive communities, and parents who have faith in their children's potential. An autistic [man] named Zosia Zaks once said, "We need all hands on deck to right the ship of humanity." As we sail into an uncertain future, we need every form of human intelligence on the planet working together to tackle the challenges that we face as a society. We can't afford to waste a brain. Thank you. (Applause) |
A visual history of inequality in industrial America | {0: 'LaToya Ruby Frazier focuses her camera lens on working class families, exploring themes of family, inequality, health care and environmental racism.'} | TED2015 | Along the ancient path of the Monongahela River, Braddock, Pennsylvania sits in the eastern region of Allegheny County, approximately nine miles outside of Pittsburgh. An industrial suburb, Braddock is home to Andrew Carnegie's first steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Works. Operating since 1875, it is the last functioning steel mill in the region. For 12 years, I have produced collaborative portraits, still lifes, landscapes and aerial views in order to build a visual archive to address the intersection of the steel industry, the environment, and the health care system's impact on the bodies of my family and community. The tradition and grand narrative of Braddock is mostly comprised of stories of industrialists and trade unions. Currently, the new narrative about Braddock, a poster child for Rust Belt revitalization, is a story of urban pioneers discovering a new frontier. Mass media has omitted the fact that Braddock is predominantly black. Our existence has been co-opted, silenced and erased. Fourth generation in a lineage of women, I was raised under the protection and care of Grandma Ruby, off 8th Street at 805 Washington Avenue. She worked as a manager for Goodwill. Mom was a nurse's aid. She watched the steel mills close and white flight to suburban developments. By the time my generation walked the streets, disinvestment at the local, state and federal level, eroded infrastructure, and the War on Drugs dismantled my family and community. Grandma Ruby's stepfather Gramps was one of few black men to retire from Carnegie's mill with his pension. He worked in high temperatures, tearing down and rebuilding furnaces, cleaning up spilt metal and slag. The history of a place is written on the body and the landscape. Areas of heavy truck traffic, exposure to benzene and atomized metals, risk cancer and lupus. One hundred twenty-three licensed beds, 652 employees, rehabilitation programs decimated. A housing discrimination lawsuit against Allegheny County removed where the projects Talbot Towers once stood. Recent rezoning for more light industry has since appeared. Google Maps and Google Earth pixelations conceal the flammable waste being used to squeeze the Bunn family off their home and land. In 2013, I chartered a helicopter with my cameras to document this aggressive dispossession. In flight, my observation reveals thousands of plastic white bundles owned by a conservation industry that claims it's eco-friendly and recycles millions of tires to preserve people's lives and to improve people's lives. My work spirals from the micro to the macro level, excavating hidden histories. Recently, at the Seattle Art Museum, Isaac Bunn and I mounted this exhibition, and the exhibition was used as a platform to launch his voice. Through reclamation of our narrative, we will continue to fight historic erasure and socioeconomic inequality. Thank you. (Applause) |
An 11-year-old prodigy performs old-school jazz | {0: "Young piano player Joey Alexander has an old soul's gift for jazz."} | TED2015 | (Music) (Music) (Applause) (Applause) |
Confessions of a bad feminist | {0: 'In "Bad Feminist," her 2014 book of essays, Roxane Gay laid out a wise, funny and deeply empathetic vision of modern feminism, acceptance and identity -- flaws and all.\r\n\r\n'} | TEDWomen 2015 | I am failing as a woman, I am failing as a feminist. I have passionate opinions about gender equality, but I worry that to freely accept the label of "feminist," would not be fair to good feminists. I'm a feminist, but I'm a rather bad one. Oh, so I call myself a Bad Feminist. Or at least, I wrote an essay, and then I wrote a book called "Bad Feminist," and then in interviews, people started calling me The Bad Feminist. (Laughter) So, what started as a bit of an inside joke with myself and a willful provocation, has become a thing. Let me take a step back. When I was younger, mostly in my teens and 20s, I had strange ideas about feminists as hairy, angry, man-hating, sex-hating women — as if those are bad things. (Laughter) These days, I look at how women are treated the world over, and anger, in particular, seems like a perfectly reasonable response. But back then, I worried about the tone people used when suggesting I might be a feminist. The feminist label was an accusation, it was an "F" word, and not a nice one. I was labeled a woman who doesn't play by the rules, who expects too much, who thinks far too highly of myself, by daring to believe I'm equal — (Coughs) — superior to a man. You don't want to be that rebel woman, until you realize that you very much are that woman, and cannot imagine being anyone else. As I got older, I began to accept that I am, indeed, a feminist, and a proud one. I hold certain truths to be self-evident: Women are equal to men. We deserve equal pay for equal work. We have the right to move through the world as we choose, free from harassment or violence. We have the right to easy, affordable access to birth control, and reproductive services. We have the right to make choices about our bodies, free from legislative oversight or evangelical doctrine. We have the right to respect. There's more. When we talk about the needs of women, we have to consider the other identities we inhabit. We are not just women. We are people with different bodies, gender expressions, faiths, sexualities, class backgrounds, abilities, and so much more. We need to take into account these differences and how they affect us, as much as we account for what we have in common. Without this kind of inclusion, our feminism is nothing. I hold these truths to be self-evident, but let me be clear: I'm a mess. I am full of contradictions. There are many ways in which I'm doing feminism wrong. I have another confession. When I drive to work, I listen to thuggish rap at a very loud volume. (Laughter) Even though the lyrics are degrading to women — these lyrics offend me to my core — the classic Yin Yang Twins song "Salt Shaker" — it is amazing. (Laughter) "Make it work with your wet t-shirt. Bitch, you gotta shake it 'til your camel starts to hurt!" (Laughter) Think about it. (Laughter) Poetry, right? I am utterly mortified by my music choices. (Laughter) I firmly believe in man work, which is anything I don't want to do, including — (Laughter) — all domestic tasks, but also: bug killing, trash removal, lawn care and vehicle maintenance. I want no part of any of that. (Laughter) Pink is my favorite color. I enjoy fashion magazines and pretty things. I watch "The Bachelor" and romantic comedies, and I have absurd fantasies about fairy tales coming true. Some of my transgressions are more flagrant. If a woman wants to take her husband's name, that is her choice, and it is not my place to judge. If a woman chooses to stay home to raise her children, I embrace that choice, too. The problem is not that she makes herself economically vulnerable in that choice; the problem is that our society is set up to make women economically vulnerable when they choose. Let's deal with that. (Applause) I reject the mainstream feminism that has historically ignored or deflected the needs of women of color, working-class women, queer women and transgender women, in favor of supporting white, middle- and upper-class straight women. Listen, if that's good feminism — I am a very bad feminist. (Laughter) There is also this: As a feminist, I feel a lot of pressure. We have this tendency to put visible feminists on a pedestal. We expect them to pose perfectly. When they disappoint us, we gleefully knock them from the very pedestal we put them on. Like I said, I am a mess — consider me knocked off that pedestal before you ever try to put me up there. (Laughter) Too many women, particularly groundbreaking women and industry leaders, are afraid to be labeled as feminists. They're afraid to stand up and say, "Yes, I am a feminist," for fear of what that label means, for fear of being unable to live up to unrealistic expectations. Take, for example, Beyoncé, or as I call her, The Goddess. (Laughter) She has emerged, in recent years, as a visible feminist. At the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, she performed in front of the word "feminist" 10 feet high. It was a glorious spectacle to see this pop star openly embracing feminism and letting young women and men know that being a feminist is something to celebrate. As the moment faded, cultural critics began endlessly debating whether or not Beyoncé was, indeed, a feminist. They graded her feminism, instead of simply taking a grown, accomplished woman at her word. (Laughter) (Applause) We demand perfection from feminists, because we are still fighting for so much, we want so much, we need so damn much. We go far beyond reasonable, constructive criticism, to dissecting any given woman's feminism, tearing it apart until there's nothing left. We do not need to do that. Bad feminism — or really, more inclusive feminism — is a starting point. But what happens next? We go from acknowledging our imperfections to accountability, or walking the walk, and being a little bit brave. If I listen to degrading music, I am creating a demand for which artists are more than happy to contribute a limitless supply. These artists are not going to change how they talk about women in their songs until we demand that change by affecting their bottom line. Certainly, it is difficult. Why must it be so catchy? (Laughter) It's hard to make the better choice, and it is so easy to justify a lesser one. But — when I justify bad choices, I make it harder for women to achieve equality, the equality that we all deserve, and I need to own that. I think of my nieces, ages three and four. They are gorgeous and headstrong, brilliant girls, who are a whole lot of brave. I want them to thrive in a world where they are valued for the powerful creatures they are. I think of them, and suddenly, the better choice becomes far easier to make. We can all make better choices. We can change the channel when a television show treats sexual violence against women like sport, Game of Thrones. We can change the radio station when we hear songs that treat women as nothing. We can spend our box office dollars elsewhere when movies don't treat women as anything more than decorative objects. We can stop supporting professional sports where the athletes treat their partners like punching bags. (Applause) In other ways, men — and especially straight white men — can say, "No, I will not publish with your magazine, or participate in your project, or otherwise work with you, until you include a fair number of women, both as participants and decision makers. I won't work with you until your publication, or your organization, is more inclusive of all kinds of difference." Those of us who are underrepresented and invited to participate in such projects, can also decline to be included until more of us are invited through the glass ceiling, and we are tokens no more. Without these efforts, without taking these stands, our accomplishments are going to mean very little. We can commit these small acts of bravery and hope that our choices trickle upward to the people in power — editors, movie and music producers, CEOs, lawmakers — the people who can make bigger, braver choices to create lasting, meaningful change. We can also boldly claim our feminism — good, bad, or anywhere in between. The last line of my book "Bad Feminist" says, "I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all." This is true for so many reasons, but first and foremost, I say this because once upon a time, my voice was stolen from me, and feminism helped me to get my voice back. There was an incident. I call it an incident so I can carry the burden of what happened. Some boys broke me, when I was so young, I did not know what boys can do to break a girl. They treated me like I was nothing. I began to believe I was nothing. They stole my voice, and in the after, I did not dare to believe that anything I might say could matter. But — I had writing. And there, I wrote myself back together. I wrote myself toward a stronger version of myself. I read the words of women who might understand a story like mine, and women who looked like me, and understood what it was like to move through the world with brown skin. I read the words of women who showed me I was not nothing. I learned to write like them, and then I learned to write as myself. I found my voice again, and I started to believe that my voice is powerful beyond measure. Through writing and feminism, I also found that if I was a little bit brave, another woman might hear me and see me and recognize that none of us are the nothing the world tries to tell us we are. In one hand, I hold the power to accomplish anything. And in my other, I hold the humbling reality that I am just one woman. I am a bad feminist, I am a good woman, I am trying to become better in how I think, and what I say, and what I do, without abandoning everything that makes me human. I hope that we can all do the same. I hope that we can all be a little bit brave, when we most need such bravery. (Applause) |
The art of first impressions -- in design and life | {0: "Chip Kidd's book jacket designs spawned a revolution in the art of American book packaging."} | TEDSalon NY2015 | Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah, blah. So what the hell was that? Well, you don't know because you couldn't understand it. It wasn't clear. But hopefully, it was said with enough conviction that it was at least alluringly mysterious. Clarity or mystery? I'm balancing these two things in my daily work as a graphic designer, as well as my daily life as a New Yorker every day, and there are two elements that absolutely fascinate me. Here's an example. Now, how many people know what this is? Okay. Now how many people know what this is? Okay. Thanks to two more deft strokes by the genius Charles M. Schulz, we now have seven deft strokes that in and of themselves create an entire emotional life, one that has enthralled hundreds of millions of fans for over 50 years. This is actually a cover of a book that I designed about the work of Schulz and his art, which will be coming out this fall, and that is the entire cover. There is no other typographic information or visual information on the front, and the name of the book is "Only What's Necessary." So this is sort of symbolic about the decisions I have to make every day about the design that I'm perceiving, and the design I'm creating. So clarity. Clarity gets to the point. It's blunt. It's honest. It's sincere. We ask ourselves this. ["When should you be clear?"] Now, something like this, whether we can read it or not, needs to be really, really clear. Is it? This is a rather recent example of urban clarity that I just love, mainly because I'm always late and I am always in a hurry. So when these meters started showing up a couple of years ago on street corners, I was thrilled, because now I finally knew how many seconds I had to get across the street before I got run over by a car. Six? I can do that. (Laughter) So let's look at the yin to the clarity yang, and that is mystery. Mystery is a lot more complicated by its very definition. Mystery demands to be decoded, and when it's done right, we really, really want to. ["When should you be mysterious?"] In World War II, the Germans really, really wanted to decode this, and they couldn't. Here's an example of a design that I've done recently for a novel by Haruki Murakami, who I've done design work for for over 20 years now, and this is a novel about a young man who has four dear friends who all of a sudden, after their freshman year of college, completely cut him off with no explanation, and he is devastated. And the friends' names each have a connotation in Japanese to a color. So there's Mr. Red, there's Mr. Blue, there's Ms. White, and Ms. Black. Tsukuru Tazaki, his name does not correspond to a color, so his nickname is Colorless, and as he's looking back on their friendship, he recalls that they were like five fingers on a hand. So I created this sort of abstract representation of this, but there's a lot more going on underneath the surface of the story, and there's more going on underneath the surface of the jacket. The four fingers are now four train lines in the Tokyo subway system, which has significance within the story. And then you have the colorless subway line intersecting with each of the other colors, which basically he does later on in the story. He catches up with each of these people to find out why they treated him the way they did. And so this is the three-dimensional finished product sitting on my desk in my office, and what I was hoping for here is that you'll simply be allured by the mystery of what this looks like, and will want to read it to decode and find out and make more clear why it looks the way it does. ["The Visual Vernacular."] This is a way to use a more familiar kind of mystery. What does this mean? This is what it means. ["Make it look like something else."] The visual vernacular is the way we are used to seeing a certain thing applied to something else so that we see it in a different way. This is an approach I wanted to take to a book of essays by David Sedaris that had this title at the time. ["All the Beauty You Will Ever Need"] Now, the challenge here was that this title actually means nothing. It's not connected to any of the essays in the book. It came to the author's boyfriend in a dream. Thank you very much, so — (Laughter) — so usually, I am creating a design that is in some way based on the text, but this is all the text there is. So you've got this mysterious title that really doesn't mean anything, so I was trying to think: Where might I see a bit of mysterious text that seems to mean something but doesn't? And sure enough, not long after, one evening after a Chinese meal, this arrived, and I thought, "Ah, bing, ideagasm!" (Laughter) I've always loved the hilariously mysterious tropes of fortune cookies that seem to mean something extremely deep but when you think about them — if you think about them — they really don't. This says, "Hardly anyone knows how much is gained by ignoring the future." Thank you. (Laughter) But we can take this visual vernacular and apply it to Mr. Sedaris, and we are so familiar with how fortune cookie fortunes look that we don't even need the bits of the cookie anymore. We're just seeing this strange thing and we know we love David Sedaris, and so we're hoping that we're in for a good time. ["'Fraud' Essays by David Rakoff"] David Rakoff was a wonderful writer and he called his first book "Fraud" because he was getting sent on assignments by magazines to do things that he was not equipped to do. So he was this skinny little urban guy and GQ magazine would send him down the Colorado River whitewater rafting to see if he would survive. And then he would write about it, and he felt that he was a fraud and that he was misrepresenting himself. And so I wanted the cover of this book to also misrepresent itself and then somehow show a reader reacting to it. This led me to graffiti. I'm fascinated by graffiti. I think anybody who lives in an urban environment encounters graffiti all the time, and there's all different sorts of it. This is a picture I took on the Lower East Side of just a transformer box on the sidewalk and it's been tagged like crazy. Now whether you look at this and think, "Oh, that's a charming urban affectation," or you look at it and say, "That's illegal abuse of property," the one thing I think we can all agree on is that you cannot read it. Right? There is no clear message here. There is another kind of graffiti that I find far more interesting, which I call editorial graffiti. This is a picture I took recently in the subway, and sometimes you see lots of prurient, stupid stuff, but I thought this was interesting, and this is a poster that is saying rah-rah Airbnb, and someone has taken a Magic Marker and has editorialized about what they think about it. And it got my attention. So I was thinking, how do we apply this to this book? So I get the book by this person, and I start reading it, and I'm thinking, this guy is not who he says he is; he's a fraud. And I get out a red Magic Marker, and out of frustration just scribble this across the front. Design done. (Laughter) And they went for it! (Laughter) Author liked it, publisher liked it, and that is how the book went out into the world, and it was really fun to see people reading this on the subway and walking around with it and what have you, and they all sort of looked like they were crazy. (Laughter) ["'Perfidia' a novel by James Ellroy"] Okay, James Ellroy, amazing crime writer, a good friend, I've worked with him for many years. He is probably best known as the author of "The Black Dahlia" and "L.A. Confidential." His most recent novel was called this, which is a very mysterious name that I'm sure a lot of people know what it means, but a lot of people don't. And it's a story about a Japanese-American detective in Los Angeles in 1941 investigating a murder. And then Pearl Harbor happens, and as if his life wasn't difficult enough, now the race relations have really ratcheted up, and then the Japanese-American internment camps are quickly created, and there's lots of tension and horrible stuff as he's still trying to solve this murder. And so I did at first think very literally about this in terms of all right, we'll take Pearl Harbor and we'll add it to Los Angeles and we'll make this apocalyptic dawn on the horizon of the city. And so that's a picture from Pearl Harbor just grafted onto Los Angeles. My editor in chief said, "You know, it's interesting but I think you can do better and I think you can make it simpler." And so I went back to the drawing board, as I often do. But also, being alive to my surroundings, I work in a high-rise in Midtown, and every night, before I leave the office, I have to push this button to get out, and the big heavy glass doors open and I can get onto the elevator. And one night, all of a sudden, I looked at this and I saw it in a way that I hadn't really noticed it before. Big red circle, danger. And I thought this was so obvious that it had to have been done a zillion times, and so I did a Google image search, and I couldn't find another book cover that looked quite like this, and so this is really what solved the problem, and graphically it's more interesting and creates a bigger tension between the idea of a certain kind of sunrise coming up over L.A. and America. ["'Gulp' A tour of the human digestive system by Mary Roach."] Mary Roach is an amazing writer who takes potentially mundane scientific subjects and makes them not mundane at all; she makes them really fun. So in this particular case, it's about the human digestive system. So I'm trying to figure out what is the cover of this book going to be. This is a self-portrait. (Laughter) Every morning I look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror to see if my tongue is black. And if it's not, I'm good to go. (Laughter) I recommend you all do this. But I also started thinking, here's our introduction. Right? Into the human digestive system. But I think what we can all agree on is that actual photographs of human mouths, at least based on this, are off-putting. (Laughter) So for the cover, then, I had this illustration done which is literally more palatable and reminds us that it's best to approach the digestive system from this end. (Laughter) I don't even have to complete the sentence. All right. ["Unuseful mystery"] What happens when clarity and mystery get mixed up? And we see this all the time. This is what I call unuseful mystery. I go down into the subway — I take the subway a lot — and this piece of paper is taped to a girder. Right? And now I'm thinking, uh-oh, and the train's about to come and I'm trying to figure out what this means, and thanks a lot. Part of the problem here is that they've compartmentalized the information in a way they think is helpful, and frankly, I don't think it is at all. So this is mystery we do not need. What we need is useful clarity, so just for fun, I redesigned this. This is using all the same elements. (Applause) Thank you. I am still waiting for a call from the MTA. (Laughter) You know, I'm actually not even using more colors than they use. They just didn't even bother to make the 4 and the 5 green, those idiots. (Laughter) So the first thing we see is that there is a service change, and then, in two complete sentences with a beginning, a middle and an end, it tells us what the change is and what's going to be happening. Call me crazy! (Laughter) ["Useful mystery"] All right. Now, here is a piece of mystery that I love: packaging. This redesign of the Diet Coke can by Turner Duckworth is to me truly a piece of art. It's a work of art. It's beautiful. But part of what makes it so heartening to me as a designer is that he's taken the visual vernacular of Diet Coke — the typefaces, the colors, the silver background — and he's reduced them to their most essential parts, so it's like going back to the Charlie Brown face. It's like, how can you give them just enough information so they know what it is but giving them the credit for the knowledge that they already have about this thing? It looks great, and you would go into a delicatessen and all of a sudden see that on the shelf, and it's wonderful. Which makes the next thing — ["Unuseful clarity"] — all the more disheartening, at least to me. So okay, again, going back down into the subway, after this came out, these are pictures that I took. Times Square subway station: Coca-Cola has bought out the entire thing for advertising. Okay? And maybe some of you know where this is going. Ahem. "You moved to New York with the clothes on your back, the cash in your pocket, and your eyes on the prize. You're on Coke." (Laughter) "You moved to New York with an MBA, one clean suit, and an extremely firm handshake. You're on Coke." (Laughter) These are real! (Laughter) Not even the support beams were spared, except they switched into Yoda mode. (Laughter) "Coke you're on." (Laughter) ["Excuse me, I'm on WHAT??"] This campaign was a huge misstep. It was pulled almost instantly due to consumer backlash and all sorts of unflattering parodies on the web — (Laughter) — and also that dot next to "You're on," that's not a period, that's a trademark. So thanks a lot. So to me, this was just so bizarre about how they could get the packaging so mysteriously beautiful and perfect and the message so unbearably, clearly wrong. It was just incredible to me. So I just hope that I've been able to share with you some of my insights on the uses of clarity and mystery in my work, and maybe how you might decide to be more clear in your life, or maybe to be a bit more mysterious and not so over-sharing. (Laughter) And if there's just one thing that I leave you with from this talk, I hope it's this: Blih blih blih blah. Blah blah blih blih. ["'Judge This,' Chip Kidd"] Blih blih blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. Blah blah. (Applause) |
What do we do when antibiotics don't work any more? | {0: 'Maryn McKenna recounts the often terrifying stories behind emerging drug-resistant diseases that medical science is barely keeping at bay.'} | TED2015 | This is my great uncle, my father's father's younger brother. His name was Joe McKenna. He was a young husband and a semi-pro basketball player and a fireman in New York City. Family history says he loved being a fireman, and so in 1938, on one of his days off, he elected to hang out at the firehouse. To make himself useful that day, he started polishing all the brass, the railings on the fire truck, the fittings on the walls, and one of the fire hose nozzles, a giant, heavy piece of metal, toppled off a shelf and hit him. A few days later, his shoulder started to hurt. Two days after that, he spiked a fever. The fever climbed and climbed. His wife was taking care of him, but nothing she did made a difference, and when they got the local doctor in, nothing he did mattered either. They flagged down a cab and took him to the hospital. The nurses there recognized right away that he had an infection, what at the time they would have called "blood poisoning," and though they probably didn't say it, they would have known right away that there was nothing they could do. There was nothing they could do because the things we use now to cure infections didn't exist yet. The first test of penicillin, the first antibiotic, was three years in the future. People who got infections either recovered, if they were lucky, or they died. My great uncle was not lucky. He was in the hospital for a week, shaking with chills, dehydrated and delirious, sinking into a coma as his organs failed. His condition grew so desperate that the people from his firehouse lined up to give him transfusions hoping to dilute the infection surging through his blood. Nothing worked. He died. He was 30 years old. If you look back through history, most people died the way my great uncle died. Most people didn't die of cancer or heart disease, the lifestyle diseases that afflict us in the West today. They didn't die of those diseases because they didn't live long enough to develop them. They died of injuries — being gored by an ox, shot on a battlefield, crushed in one of the new factories of the Industrial Revolution — and most of the time from infection, which finished what those injuries began. All of that changed when antibiotics arrived. Suddenly, infections that had been a death sentence became something you recovered from in days. It seemed like a miracle, and ever since, we have been living inside the golden epoch of the miracle drugs. And now, we are coming to an end of it. My great uncle died in the last days of the pre-antibiotic era. We stand today on the threshold of the post-antibiotic era, in the earliest days of a time when simple infections such as the one Joe had will kill people once again. In fact, they already are. People are dying of infections again because of a phenomenon called antibiotic resistance. Briefly, it works like this. Bacteria compete against each other for resources, for food, by manufacturing lethal compounds that they direct against each other. Other bacteria, to protect themselves, evolve defenses against that chemical attack. When we first made antibiotics, we took those compounds into the lab and made our own versions of them, and bacteria responded to our attack the way they always had. Here is what happened next: Penicillin was distributed in 1943, and widespread penicillin resistance arrived by 1945. Vancomycin arrived in 1972, vancomycin resistance in 1988. Imipenem in 1985, and resistance to in 1998. Daptomycin, one of the most recent drugs, in 2003, and resistance to it just a year later in 2004. For 70 years, we played a game of leapfrog — our drug and their resistance, and then another drug, and then resistance again — and now the game is ending. Bacteria develop resistance so quickly that pharmaceutical companies have decided making antibiotics is not in their best interest, so there are infections moving across the world for which, out of the more than 100 antibiotics available on the market, two drugs might work with side effects, or one drug, or none. This is what that looks like. In 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, identified a single case in a hospital in North Carolina of an infection resistant to all but two drugs. Today, that infection, known as KPC, has spread to every state but three, and to South America, Europe and the Middle East. In 2008, doctors in Sweden diagnosed a man from India with a different infection resistant to all but one drug that time. The gene that creates that resistance, known as NDM, has now spread from India into China, Asia, Africa, Europe and Canada, and the United States. It would be natural to hope that these infections are extraordinary cases, but in fact, in the United States and Europe, 50,000 people a year die of infections which no drugs can help. A project chartered by the British government known as the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance estimates that the worldwide toll right now is 700,000 deaths a year. That is a lot of deaths, and yet, the chances are good that you don't feel at risk, that you imagine these people were hospital patients in intensive care units or nursing home residents near the ends of their lives, people whose infections are remote from us, in situations we can't identify with. What you didn't think about, none of us do, is that antibiotics support almost all of modern life. If we lost antibiotics, here's what else we'd lose: First, any protection for people with weakened immune systems — cancer patients, AIDS patients, transplant recipients, premature babies. Next, any treatment that installs foreign objects in the body: stents for stroke, pumps for diabetes, dialysis, joint replacements. How many athletic baby boomers need new hips and knees? A recent study estimates that without antibiotics, one out of ever six would die. Next, we'd probably lose surgery. Many operations are preceded by prophylactic doses of antibiotics. Without that protection, we'd lose the ability to open the hidden spaces of the body. So no heart operations, no prostate biopsies, no Cesarean sections. We'd have to learn to fear infections that now seem minor. Strep throat used to cause heart failure. Skin infections led to amputations. Giving birth killed, in the cleanest hospitals, almost one woman out of every 100. Pneumonia took three children out of every 10. More than anything else, we'd lose the confident way we live our everyday lives. If you knew that any injury could kill you, would you ride a motorcycle, bomb down a ski slope, climb a ladder to hang your Christmas lights, let your kid slide into home plate? After all, the first person to receive penicillin, a British policeman named Albert Alexander, who was so ravaged by infection that his scalp oozed pus and doctors had to take out an eye, was infected by doing something very simple. He walked into his garden and scratched his face on a thorn. That British project I mentioned which estimates that the worldwide toll right now is 700,000 deaths a year also predicts that if we can't get this under control by 2050, not long, the worldwide toll will be 10 million deaths a year. How did we get to this point where what we have to look forward to is those terrifying numbers? The difficult answer is, we did it to ourselves. Resistance is an inevitable biological process, but we bear the responsibility for accelerating it. We did this by squandering antibiotics with a heedlessness that now seems shocking. Penicillin was sold over the counter until the 1950s. In much of the developing world, most antibiotics still are. In the United States, 50 percent of the antibiotics given in hospitals are unnecessary. Forty-five percent of the prescriptions written in doctor's offices are for conditions that antibiotics cannot help. And that's just in healthcare. On much of the planet, most meat animals get antibiotics every day of their lives, not to cure illnesses, but to fatten them up and to protect them against the factory farm conditions they are raised in. In the United States, possibly 80 percent of the antibiotics sold every year go to farm animals, not to humans, creating resistant bacteria that move off the farm in water, in dust, in the meat the animals become. Aquaculture depends on antibiotics too, particularly in Asia, and fruit growing relies on antibiotics to protect apples, pears, citrus, against disease. And because bacteria can pass their DNA to each other like a traveler handing off a suitcase at an airport, once we have encouraged that resistance into existence, there is no knowing where it will spread. This was predictable. In fact, it was predicted by Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered penicillin. He was given the Nobel Prize in 1945 in recognition, and in an interview shortly after, this is what he said: "The thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of a man who succumbs to infection with a pencillin-resistant organism." He added, "I hope this evil can be averted." Can we avert it? There are companies working on novel antibiotics, things the superbugs have never seen before. We need those new drugs badly, and we need incentives: discovery grants, extended patents, prizes, to lure other companies into making antibiotics again. But that probably won't be enough. Here's why: Evolution always wins. Bacteria birth a new generation every 20 minutes. It takes pharmaceutical chemistry 10 years to derive a new drug. Every time we use an antibiotic, we give the bacteria billions of chances to crack the codes of the defenses we've constructed. There has never yet been a drug they could not defeat. This is asymmetric warfare, but we can change the outcome. We could build systems to harvest data to tell us automatically and specifically how antibiotics are being used. We could build gatekeeping into drug order systems so that every prescription gets a second look. We could require agriculture to give up antibiotic use. We could build surveillance systems to tell us where resistance is emerging next. Those are the tech solutions. They probably aren't enough either, unless we help. Antibiotic resistance is a habit. We all know how hard it is to change a habit. But as a society, we've done that in the past. People used to toss litter into the streets, used to not wear seatbelts, used to smoke inside public buildings. We don't do those things anymore. We don't trash the environment or court devastating accidents or expose others to the possibility of cancer, because we decided those things were expensive, destructive, not in our best interest. We changed social norms. We could change social norms around antibiotic use too. I know that the scale of antibiotic resistance seems overwhelming, but if you've ever bought a fluorescent lightbulb because you were concerned about climate change, or read the label on a box of crackers because you think about the deforestation from palm oil, you already know what it feels like to take a tiny step to address an overwhelming problem. We could take those kinds of steps for antibiotic use too. We could forgo giving an antibiotic if we're not sure it's the right one. We could stop insisting on a prescription for our kid's ear infection before we're sure what caused it. We could ask every restaurant, every supermarket, where their meat comes from. We could promise each other never again to buy chicken or shrimp or fruit raised with routine antibiotic use, and if we did those things, we could slow down the arrival of the post-antibiotic world. But we have to do it soon. Penicillin began the antibiotic era in 1943. In just 70 years, we walked ourselves up to the edge of disaster. We won't get 70 years to find our way back out again. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How a driverless car sees the road | {0: 'Chris Umson is the Director of Self-Driving Cars at Google[x].'} | TED2015 | So in 1885, Karl Benz invented the automobile. Later that year, he took it out for the first public test drive, and — true story — crashed into a wall. For the last 130 years, we've been working around that least reliable part of the car, the driver. We've made the car stronger. We've added seat belts, we've added air bags, and in the last decade, we've actually started trying to make the car smarter to fix that bug, the driver. Now, today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the difference between patching around the problem with driver assistance systems and actually having fully self-driving cars and what they can do for the world. I'm also going to talk to you a little bit about our car and allow you to see how it sees the world and how it reacts and what it does, but first I'm going to talk a little bit about the problem. And it's a big problem: 1.2 million people are killed on the world's roads every year. In America alone, 33,000 people are killed each year. To put that in perspective, that's the same as a 737 falling out of the sky every working day. It's kind of unbelievable. Cars are sold to us like this, but really, this is what driving's like. Right? It's not sunny, it's rainy, and you want to do anything other than drive. And the reason why is this: Traffic is getting worse. In America, between 1990 and 2010, the vehicle miles traveled increased by 38 percent. We grew by six percent of roads, so it's not in your brains. Traffic really is substantially worse than it was not very long ago. And all of this has a very human cost. So if you take the average commute time in America, which is about 50 minutes, you multiply that by the 120 million workers we have, that turns out to be about six billion minutes wasted in commuting every day. Now, that's a big number, so let's put it in perspective. You take that six billion minutes and you divide it by the average life expectancy of a person, that turns out to be 162 lifetimes spent every day, wasted, just getting from A to B. It's unbelievable. And then, there are those of us who don't have the privilege of sitting in traffic. So this is Steve. He's an incredibly capable guy, but he just happens to be blind, and that means instead of a 30-minute drive to work in the morning, it's a two-hour ordeal of piecing together bits of public transit or asking friends and family for a ride. He doesn't have that same freedom that you and I have to get around. We should do something about that. Now, conventional wisdom would say that we'll just take these driver assistance systems and we'll kind of push them and incrementally improve them, and over time, they'll turn into self-driving cars. Well, I'm here to tell you that's like me saying that if I work really hard at jumping, one day I'll be able to fly. We actually need to do something a little different. And so I'm going to talk to you about three different ways that self-driving systems are different than driver assistance systems. And I'm going to start with some of our own experience. So back in 2013, we had the first test of a self-driving car where we let regular people use it. Well, almost regular — they were 100 Googlers, but they weren't working on the project. And we gave them the car and we allowed them to use it in their daily lives. But unlike a real self-driving car, this one had a big asterisk with it: They had to pay attention, because this was an experimental vehicle. We tested it a lot, but it could still fail. And so we gave them two hours of training, we put them in the car, we let them use it, and what we heard back was something awesome, as someone trying to bring a product into the world. Every one of them told us they loved it. In fact, we had a Porsche driver who came in and told us on the first day, "This is completely stupid. What are we thinking?" But at the end of it, he said, "Not only should I have it, everyone else should have it, because people are terrible drivers." So this was music to our ears, but then we started to look at what the people inside the car were doing, and this was eye-opening. Now, my favorite story is this gentleman who looks down at his phone and realizes the battery is low, so he turns around like this in the car and digs around in his backpack, pulls out his laptop, puts it on the seat, goes in the back again, digs around, pulls out the charging cable for his phone, futzes around, puts it into the laptop, puts it on the phone. Sure enough, the phone is charging. All the time he's been doing 65 miles per hour down the freeway. Right? Unbelievable. So we thought about this and we said, it's kind of obvious, right? The better the technology gets, the less reliable the driver is going to get. So by just making the cars incrementally smarter, we're probably not going to see the wins we really need. Let me talk about something a little technical for a moment here. So we're looking at this graph, and along the bottom is how often does the car apply the brakes when it shouldn't. You can ignore most of that axis, because if you're driving around town, and the car starts stopping randomly, you're never going to buy that car. And the vertical axis is how often the car is going to apply the brakes when it's supposed to to help you avoid an accident. Now, if we look at the bottom left corner here, this is your classic car. It doesn't apply the brakes for you, it doesn't do anything goofy, but it also doesn't get you out of an accident. Now, if we want to bring a driver assistance system into a car, say with collision mitigation braking, we're going to put some package of technology on there, and that's this curve, and it's going to have some operating properties, but it's never going to avoid all of the accidents, because it doesn't have that capability. But we'll pick some place along the curve here, and maybe it avoids half of accidents that the human driver misses, and that's amazing, right? We just reduced accidents on our roads by a factor of two. There are now 17,000 less people dying every year in America. But if we want a self-driving car, we need a technology curve that looks like this. We're going to have to put more sensors in the vehicle, and we'll pick some operating point up here where it basically never gets into a crash. They'll happen, but very low frequency. Now you and I could look at this and we could argue about whether it's incremental, and I could say something like "80-20 rule," and it's really hard to move up to that new curve. But let's look at it from a different direction for a moment. So let's look at how often the technology has to do the right thing. And so this green dot up here is a driver assistance system. It turns out that human drivers make mistakes that lead to traffic accidents about once every 100,000 miles in America. In contrast, a self-driving system is probably making decisions about 10 times per second, so order of magnitude, that's about 1,000 times per mile. So if you compare the distance between these two, it's about 10 to the eighth, right? Eight orders of magnitude. That's like comparing how fast I run to the speed of light. It doesn't matter how hard I train, I'm never actually going to get there. So there's a pretty big gap there. And then finally, there's how the system can handle uncertainty. So this pedestrian here might be stepping into the road, might not be. I can't tell, nor can any of our algorithms, but in the case of a driver assistance system, that means it can't take action, because again, if it presses the brakes unexpectedly, that's completely unacceptable. Whereas a self-driving system can look at that pedestrian and say, I don't know what they're about to do, slow down, take a better look, and then react appropriately after that. So it can be much safer than a driver assistance system can ever be. So that's enough about the differences between the two. Let's spend some time talking about how the car sees the world. So this is our vehicle. It starts by understanding where it is in the world, by taking a map and its sensor data and aligning the two, and then we layer on top of that what it sees in the moment. So here, all the purple boxes you can see are other vehicles on the road, and the red thing on the side over there is a cyclist, and up in the distance, if you look really closely, you can see some cones. Then we know where the car is in the moment, but we have to do better than that: we have to predict what's going to happen. So here the pickup truck in top right is about to make a left lane change because the road in front of it is closed, so it needs to get out of the way. Knowing that one pickup truck is great, but we really need to know what everybody's thinking, so it becomes quite a complicated problem. And then given that, we can figure out how the car should respond in the moment, so what trajectory it should follow, how quickly it should slow down or speed up. And then that all turns into just following a path: turning the steering wheel left or right, pressing the brake or gas. It's really just two numbers at the end of the day. So how hard can it really be? Back when we started in 2009, this is what our system looked like. So you can see our car in the middle and the other boxes on the road, driving down the highway. The car needs to understand where it is and roughly where the other vehicles are. It's really a geometric understanding of the world. Once we started driving on neighborhood and city streets, the problem becomes a whole new level of difficulty. You see pedestrians crossing in front of us, cars crossing in front of us, going every which way, the traffic lights, crosswalks. It's an incredibly complicated problem by comparison. And then once you have that problem solved, the vehicle has to be able to deal with construction. So here are the cones on the left forcing it to drive to the right, but not just construction in isolation, of course. It has to deal with other people moving through that construction zone as well. And of course, if anyone's breaking the rules, the police are there and the car has to understand that that flashing light on the top of the car means that it's not just a car, it's actually a police officer. Similarly, the orange box on the side here, it's a school bus, and we have to treat that differently as well. When we're out on the road, other people have expectations: So, when a cyclist puts up their arm, it means they're expecting the car to yield to them and make room for them to make a lane change. And when a police officer stood in the road, our vehicle should understand that this means stop, and when they signal to go, we should continue. Now, the way we accomplish this is by sharing data between the vehicles. The first, most crude model of this is when one vehicle sees a construction zone, having another know about it so it can be in the correct lane to avoid some of the difficulty. But we actually have a much deeper understanding of this. We could take all of the data that the cars have seen over time, the hundreds of thousands of pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles that have been out there and understand what they look like and use that to infer what other vehicles should look like and other pedestrians should look like. And then, even more importantly, we could take from that a model of how we expect them to move through the world. So here the yellow box is a pedestrian crossing in front of us. Here the blue box is a cyclist and we anticipate that they're going to nudge out and around the car to the right. Here there's a cyclist coming down the road and we know they're going to continue to drive down the shape of the road. Here somebody makes a right turn, and in a moment here, somebody's going to make a U-turn in front of us, and we can anticipate that behavior and respond safely. Now, that's all well and good for things that we've seen, but of course, you encounter lots of things that you haven't seen in the world before. And so just a couple of months ago, our vehicles were driving through Mountain View, and this is what we encountered. This is a woman in an electric wheelchair chasing a duck in circles on the road. (Laughter) Now it turns out, there is nowhere in the DMV handbook that tells you how to deal with that, but our vehicles were able to encounter that, slow down, and drive safely. Now, we don't have to deal with just ducks. Watch this bird fly across in front of us. The car reacts to that. Here we're dealing with a cyclist that you would never expect to see anywhere other than Mountain View. And of course, we have to deal with drivers, even the very small ones. Watch to the right as someone jumps out of this truck at us. And now, watch the left as the car with the green box decides he needs to make a right turn at the last possible moment. Here, as we make a lane change, the car to our left decides it wants to as well. And here, we watch a car blow through a red light and yield to it. And similarly, here, a cyclist blowing through that light as well. And of course, the vehicle responds safely. And of course, we have people who do I don't know what sometimes on the road, like this guy pulling out between two self-driving cars. You have to ask, "What are you thinking?" (Laughter) Now, I just fire-hosed you with a lot of stuff there, so I'm going to break one of these down pretty quickly. So what we're looking at is the scene with the cyclist again, and you might notice in the bottom, we can't actually see the cyclist yet, but the car can: it's that little blue box up there, and that comes from the laser data. And that's not actually really easy to understand, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn that laser data and look at it, and if you're really good at looking at laser data, you can see a few dots on the curve there, right there, and that blue box is that cyclist. Now as our light is red, the cyclist's light has turned yellow already, and if you squint, you can see that in the imagery. But the cyclist, we see, is going to proceed through the intersection. Our light has now turned green, his is solidly red, and we now anticipate that this bike is going to come all the way across. Unfortunately the other drivers next to us were not paying as much attention. They started to pull forward, and fortunately for everyone, this cyclists reacts, avoids, and makes it through the intersection. And off we go. Now, as you can see, we've made some pretty exciting progress, and at this point we're pretty convinced this technology is going to come to market. We do three million miles of testing in our simulators every single day, so you can imagine the experience that our vehicles have. We are looking forward to having this technology on the road, and we think the right path is to go through the self-driving rather than driver assistance approach because the urgency is so large. In the time I have given this talk today, 34 people have died on America's roads. How soon can we bring it out? Well, it's hard to say because it's a really complicated problem, but these are my two boys. My oldest son is 11, and that means in four and a half years, he's going to be able to get his driver's license. My team and I are committed to making sure that doesn't happen. Thank you. (Laughter) (Applause) Chris Anderson: Chris, I've got a question for you. Chris Urmson: Sure. CA: So certainly, the mind of your cars is pretty mind-boggling. On this debate between driver-assisted and fully driverless — I mean, there's a real debate going on out there right now. So some of the companies, for example, Tesla, are going the driver-assisted route. What you're saying is that that's kind of going to be a dead end because you can't just keep improving that route and get to fully driverless at some point, and then a driver is going to say, "This feels safe," and climb into the back, and something ugly will happen. CU: Right. No, that's exactly right, and it's not to say that the driver assistance systems aren't going to be incredibly valuable. They can save a lot of lives in the interim, but to see the transformative opportunity to help someone like Steve get around, to really get to the end case in safety, to have the opportunity to change our cities and move parking out and get rid of these urban craters we call parking lots, it's the only way to go. CA: We will be tracking your progress with huge interest. Thanks so much, Chris. CU: Thank you. (Applause) |
The surprising thing I learned sailing solo around the world | {0: 'After setting a record for sailing around the world, Dame Ellen MacArthur has turned her attention toward creating a more "circular" economy -- where resources and power recirculate and regenerate.'} | TED2015 | When you're a child, anything and everything is possible. The challenge, so often, is hanging on to that as we grow up. And as a four-year-old, I had the opportunity to sail for the first time. I will never forget the excitement as we closed the coast. I will never forget the feeling of adventure as I climbed on board the boat and stared into her tiny cabin for the first time. But the most amazing feeling was the feeling of freedom, the feeling that I felt when we hoisted her sails. As a four-year-old child, it was the greatest sense of freedom that I could ever imagine. I made my mind up there and then that one day, somehow, I was going to sail around the world. So I did what I could in my life to get closer to that dream. Age 10, it was saving my school dinner money change. Every single day for eight years, I had mashed potato and baked beans, which cost 4p each, and gravy was free. Every day I would pile up the change on the top of my money box, and when that pile reached a pound, I would drop it in and cross off one of the 100 squares I'd drawn on a piece of paper. Finally, I bought a tiny dinghy. I spent hours sitting on it in the garden dreaming of my goal. I read every book I could on sailing, and then eventually, having been told by my school I wasn't clever enough to be a vet, left school age 17 to begin my apprenticeship in sailing. So imagine how it felt just four years later to be sitting in a boardroom in front of someone who I knew could make that dream come true. I felt like my life depended on that moment, and incredibly, he said yes. And I could barely contain my excitement as I sat in that first design meeting designing a boat on which I was going to sail solo nonstop around the world. From that first meeting to the finish line of the race, it was everything I'd ever imagined. Just like in my dreams, there were amazing parts and tough parts. We missed an iceberg by 20 feet. Nine times, I climbed to the top of her 90-foot mast. We were blown on our side in the Southern Ocean. But the sunsets, the wildlife, and the remoteness were absolutely breathtaking. After three months at sea, age just 24, I finished in second position. I'd loved it, so much so that within six months I decided to go around the world again, but this time not in a race: to try to be the fastest person ever to sail solo nonstop around the world. Now for this, I needed a different craft: bigger, wider, faster, more powerful. Just to give that boat some scale, I could climb inside her mast all the way to the top. Seventy-five foot long, 60 foot wide. I affectionately called her Moby. She was a multihull. When we built her, no one had ever made it solo nonstop around the world in one, though many had tried, but whilst we built her, a Frenchman took a boat 25 percent bigger than her and not only did he make it, but he took the record from 93 days right down to 72. The bar was now much, much higher. And these boats were exciting to sail. This was a training sail off the French coast. This I know well because I was one of the five crew members on board. Five seconds is all it took from everything being fine to our world going black as the windows were thrust underwater, and that five seconds goes quickly. Just see how far below those guys the sea is. Imagine that alone in the Southern Ocean plunged into icy water, thousands of miles away from land. It was Christmas Day. I was forging into the Southern Ocean underneath Australia. The conditions were horrendous. I was approaching a part in the ocean which was 2,000 miles away from the nearest town. The nearest land was Antarctica, and the nearest people would be those manning the European Space Station above me. (Laughter) You really are in the middle of nowhere. If you need help, and you're still alive, it takes four days for a ship to get to you and then four days for that ship to get you back to port. No helicopter can reach you out there, and no plane can land. We are forging ahead of a huge storm. Within it, there was 80 knots of wind, which was far too much wind for the boat and I to cope with. The waves were already 40 to 50 feet high, and the spray from the breaking crests was blown horizontally like snow in a blizzard. If we didn't sail fast enough, we'd be engulfed by that storm, and either capsized or smashed to pieces. We were quite literally hanging on for our lives and doing so on a knife edge. The speed I so desperately needed brought with it danger. We all know what it's like driving a car 20 miles an hour, 30, 40. It's not too stressful. We can concentrate. We can turn on the radio. Take that 50, 60, 70, accelerate through to 80, 90, 100 miles an hour. Now you have white knuckles and you're gripping the steering wheel. Now take that car off road at night and remove the windscreen wipers, the windscreen, the headlights and the brakes. That's what it's like in the Southern Ocean. (Laughter) (Applause) You could imagine it would be quite difficult to sleep in that situation, even as a passenger. But you're not a passenger. You're alone on a boat you can barely stand up in, and you have to make every single decision on board. I was absolutely exhausted, physically and mentally. Eight sail changes in 12 hours. The mainsail weighed three times my body weight, and after each change, I would collapse on the floor soaked with sweat with this freezing Southern Ocean air burning the back of my throat. But out there, those lowest of the lows are so often contrasted with the highest of the highs. A few days later, we came out of the back of the low. Against all odds, we'd been able to drive ahead of the record within that depression. The sky cleared, the rain stopped, and our heartbeat, the monstrous seas around us were transformed into the most beautiful moonlit mountains. It's hard to explain, but you enter a different mode when you head out there. Your boat is your entire world, and what you take with you when you leave is all you have. If I said to you all now, "Go off into Vancouver and find everything you will need for your survival for the next three months," that's quite a task. That's food, fuel, clothes, even toilet roll and toothpaste. That's what we do, and when we leave we manage it down to the last drop of diesel and the last packet of food. No experience in my life could have given me a better understanding of the definition of the word "finite." What we have out there is all we have. There is no more. And never in my life had I ever translated that definition of finite that I'd felt on board to anything outside of sailing until I stepped off the boat at the finish line having broken that record. (Applause) Suddenly I connected the dots. Our global economy is no different. It's entirely dependent on finite materials we only have once in the history of humanity. And it was a bit like seeing something you weren't expecting under a stone and having two choices: I either put that stone to one side and learn more about it, or I put that stone back and I carry on with my dream job of sailing around the world. I chose the first. I put it to one side and I began a new journey of learning, speaking to chief executives, experts, scientists, economists to try to understand just how our global economy works. And my curiosity took me to some extraordinary places. This photo was taken in the burner of a coal-fired power station. I was fascinated by coal, fundamental to our global energy needs, but also very close to my family. My great-grandfather was a coal miner, and he spent 50 years of his life underground. This is a photo of him, and when you see that photo, you see someone from another era. No one wears trousers with a waistband quite that high in this day and age. (Laughter) But yet, that's me with my great-grandfather, and by the way, they are not his real ears. (Laughter) We were close. I remember sitting on his knee listening to his mining stories. He talked of the camaraderie underground, and the fact that the miners used to save the crusts of their sandwiches to give to the ponies they worked with underground. It was like it was yesterday. And on my journey of learning, I went to the World Coal Association website, and there in the middle of the homepage, it said, "We have about 118 years of coal left." And I thought to myself, well, that's well outside my lifetime, and a much greater figure than the predictions for oil. But I did the math, and I realized that my great-grandfather had been born exactly 118 years before that year, and I sat on his knee until I was 11 years old, and I realized it's nothing in time, nor in history. And it made me make a decision I never thought I would make: to leave the sport of solo sailing behind me and focus on the greatest challenge I'd ever come across: the future of our global economy. And I quickly realized it wasn't just about energy. It was also materials. In 2008, I picked up a scientific study looking at how many years we have of valuable materials to extract from the ground: copper, 61; tin, zinc, 40; silver, 29. These figures couldn't be exact, but we knew those materials were finite. We only have them once. And yet, our speed that we've used these materials has increased rapidly, exponentially. With more people in the world with more stuff, we've effectively seen 100 years of price declines in those basic commodities erased in just 10 years. And this affects all of us. It's brought huge volatility in prices, so much so that in 2011, your average European car manufacturer saw a raw material price increase of 500 million Euros, wiping away half their operating profits through something they have absolutely no control over. And the more I learned, the more I started to change my own life. I started traveling less, doing less, using less. It felt like actually doing less was what we had to do. But it sat uneasy with me. It didn't feel right. It felt like we were buying ourselves time. We were eking things out a bit longer. Even if everybody changed, it wouldn't solve the problem. It wouldn't fix the system. It was vital in the transition, but what fascinated me was, in the transition to what? What could actually work? It struck me that the system itself, the framework within which we live, is fundamentally flawed, and I realized ultimately that our operating system, the way our economy functions, the way our economy's been built, is a system in itself. At sea, I had to understand complex systems. I had to take multiple inputs, I had to process them, and I had to understand the system to win. I had to make sense of it. And as I looked at our global economy, I realized it too is that system, but it's a system that effectively can't run in the long term. And I realized we've been perfecting what's effectively a linear economy for 150 years, where we take a material out of the ground, we make something out of it, and then ultimately that product gets thrown away, and yes, we do recycle some of it, but more an attempt to get out what we can at the end, not by design. It's an economy that fundamentally can't run in the long term, and if we know that we have finite materials, why would we build an economy that would effectively use things up, that would create waste? Life itself has existed for billions of years and has continually adapted to use materials effectively. It's a complex system, but within it, there is no waste. Everything is metabolized. It's not a linear economy at all, but circular. And I felt like the child in the garden. For the first time on this new journey, I could see exactly where we were headed. If we could build an economy that would use things rather than use them up, we could build a future that really could work in the long term. I was excited. This was something to work towards. We knew exactly where we were headed. We just had to work out how to get there, and it was exactly with this in mind that we created the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in September 2010. Many schools of thought fed our thinking and pointed to this model: industrial symbiosis, performance economy, sharing economy, biomimicry, and of course, cradle-to-cradle design. Materials would be defined as either technical or biological, waste would be designed out entirely, and we would have a system that could function absolutely in the long term. So what could this economy look like? Maybe we wouldn't buy light fittings, but we'd pay for the service of light, and the manufacturers would recover the materials and change the light fittings when we had more efficient products. What if packaging was so nontoxic it could dissolve in water and we could ultimately drink it? It would never become waste. What if engines were re-manufacturable, and we could recover the component materials and significantly reduce energy demand. What if we could recover components from circuit boards, reutilize them, and then fundamentally recover the materials within them through a second stage? What if we could collect food waste, human waste? What if we could turn that into fertilizer, heat, energy, ultimately reconnecting nutrients systems and rebuilding natural capital? And cars — what we want is to move around. We don't need to own the materials within them. Could cars become a service and provide us with mobility in the future? All of this sounds amazing, but these aren't just ideas, they're real today, and these lie at the forefront of the circular economy. What lies before us is to expand them and scale them up. So how would you shift from linear to circular? Well, the team and I at the foundation thought you might want to work with the top universities in the world, with leading businesses within the world, with the biggest convening platforms in the world, and with governments. We thought you might want to work with the best analysts and ask them the question, "Can the circular economy decouple growth from resource constraints? Is the circular economy able to rebuild natural capital? Could the circular economy replace current chemical fertilizer use?" Yes was the answer to the decoupling, but also yes, we could replace current fertilizer use by a staggering 2.7 times. But what inspired me most about the circular economy was its ability to inspire young people. When young people see the economy through a circular lens, they see brand new opportunities on exactly the same horizon. They can use their creativity and knowledge to rebuild the entire system, and it's there for the taking right now, and the faster we do this, the better. So could we achieve this in their lifetimes? Is it actually possible? I believe yes. When you look at the lifetime of my great-grandfather, anything's possible. When he was born, there were only 25 cars in the world; they had only just been invented. When he was 14, we flew for the first time in history. Now there are 100,000 charter flights every single day. When he was 45, we built the first computer. Many said it wouldn't catch on, but it did, and just 20 years later we turned it into a microchip of which there will be thousands in this room here today. Ten years before he died, we built the first mobile phone. It wasn't that mobile, to be fair, but now it really is, and as my great-grandfather left this Earth, the Internet arrived. Now we can do anything, but more importantly, now we have a plan. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why I believe the mistreatment of women is the number one human rights abuse | {0: 'The president of the United States from 1977 to 1981, Jimmy Carter has used his post-presidency years to work for peace, teach, write and engage in global activism.\r\n'} | TEDWomen 2015 | As a matter of fact, I was trying to think about my career since I left the White House, and the best example I have is a cartoon in The New Yorker a couple of years ago. This little boy is looking up at his father, and he says, "Daddy, when I grow up, I want to be a former president." (Laughter) Well, I have had a great blessing as a former president, because I have had an access that very few other people in the world have ever had to get to know so many people around this whole universe. Not only am I familiar with the 50 states in the United States, but also my wife and I have visited more than 145 countries in the world, and the Carter Center has had full-time programs in 80 nations on Earth. And a lot of times, when we go into a country, we not only the meet the king or the president, but we also meet the villagers who live in the most remote areas of Africa. So our overall commitment at the Carter Center is to promote human rights, and knowing the world as I do, I can tell you without any equivocation that the number one abuse of human rights on Earth is, strangely, not addressed quite often, is the abuse of women and girls. (Applause) There are a couple of reasons for this that I'll mention to begin with. First of all is the misinterpretation of religious scriptures, holy scriptures, in the Bible, Old Testament, New Testament, Quran and so forth, and these have been misinterpreted by men who are now in the ascendant positions in the synagogues and the churches and in the mosques. And they interpret these rules to make sure that women are ordinarily relegated to a secondary position compared to men in the eyes of God. This is a very serious problem. It's ordinarily not addressed. A number of years ago, in the year 2000, I had been a Baptist, a Southern Baptist for 70 years — I tell you, I still teach Sunday school every Sunday; I'll be teaching this Sunday as well — but the Southern Baptist Convention in the year 2000 decided that women should play a secondary position, a subservient position to men. So they issued an edict, in effect, that prevents women from being priests, pastors, deacons in the church, or chaplains in the military, and if a woman teaches a classroom in a Southern Baptist seminary, they cannot teach if a boy is in the room, because you can find verses in the Bible, there's over 30,000 verses in the Bible, that say that a woman shouldn't teach a man, and so forth. But the basic thing is the scriptures are misinterpreted to keep men in an ascendant position. That is an all-pervasive problem, because men can exert that power and if an abusive husband or an employer, for instance, wants to cheat women, they can say that if women are not equal in the eyes of God, why should I treat them as equals myself? Why should I pay them equal pay for doing the same kind of work? The other very serious blight that causes this problem is the excessive resort to violence, and that is increasing tremendously around the world. In the United States of America, for instance, we have had an enormous increase in abuse of poor people, mostly black people and minorities, by putting them in prison. When I was in office as governor of Georgia, one out of every 1,000 Americans were in prison. Nowadays, 7.3 people per 1,000 are in prison. That's a sevenfold increase. And since I left the White House, there's been an 800 percent increase in the number of women who are black who are in prison. We also have [one of the only countries] on Earth that still has the death penalty that is a developed country. And we rank right alongside the countries that are most abusive in all elements of human rights in encouraging the death penalty. We're in California now, and I figured out the other day that California has spent four billion dollars in convicting 13 people for the death penalty. If you add that up, that's 307 million dollars it costs California to send a person to be executed. Nebraska this week just passed a law abolishing the death penalty, because it costs so much. (Applause) So the resort to violence and abuse of poor people and helpless people is another cause of the increase in abuse of women. Let me just go down a very few abuses of women that concern me most, and I'll be fairly brief, because I have a limited amount of time, as you know. One is genital mutilation. Genital mutilation is horrible and not known by American women, but in some countries, many countries, when a child is born that's a girl, very soon in her life, her genitals are completely cut away by a so-called cutter who has a razor blade and, in a non-sterilized way, they remove the exterior parts of a woman's genitalia. And sometimes, in more extreme cases but not very rare cases, they sew the orifice up so the girl can just urinate or menstruate. And then later, when she gets married, the same cutter goes in and opens the orifice up so she can have sex. This is not a rare thing, although it's against the law in most countries. In Egypt, for instance, 91 percent of all the females that live in Egypt today have been sexually mutilated in that way. In some countries, it's more than 98 percent of the women are cut that way before they reach maturity. This is a horrible affliction on all women that live in those countries. Another very serious thing is honor killings, where a family with misinterpretation, again, of a holy scripture — there's nothing in the Quran that mandates this — will execute a girl in their family if she is raped or if she marries a man that her father does not approve, or sometimes even if she wears inappropriate clothing. And this is done by members of her own family, so the family becomes murderers when the girl brings so-called disgrace to the family. An analysis was done in Egypt not so long ago by the United Nations and it showed that 75 percent of these murders of a girl are perpetrated by the father, the uncle or the brother, but 25 percent of the murders are conducted by women. Another problem that we have in the world that relates to women particularly is slavery, or human trafficking it's called nowadays. There were about 12.5 million people sold from Africa into slavery in the New World back in the 19th century and the 18th century. There are 30 million people now living in slavery. The United States Department of State now has a mandate from Congress to give a report every year, and the State Department reports that 800,000 people are sold across international borders every year into slavery, and that 80 percent of those sold are women, into sexual slavery. In the United States right this moment, 60,000 people are living in human bondage, or slavery. Atlanta, Georgia, where the Carter Center is located and where I teach at Emory University, they have between 200 and 300 women, people sold into slavery every month. It's the number one place in the nation because of that. Atlanta has the busiest airport in the world, and they also have a lot of passengers that come from the Southern Hemisphere. If a brothel owner wants to buy a girl that has brown or black skin, they can do it for 1,000 dollars. A white-skinned girl brings several times more than that, and the average brothel owner in Atlanta and in the United States now can earn about $35,000 per slave. The sex trade in Atlanta, Georgia, exceeds the total drug trade in Atlanta, Georgia. So this is another very serious problem, and the basic problem is prostitution, because there's not a whorehouse in America that's not known by the local officials, the local policemen, or the chief of police or the mayor and so forth. And this leads to one of the worst problems, and that is that women are bought increasingly and put into sexual slavery in all countries in the world. Sweden has got a good approach to it. About 15 to 20 years ago, Sweden decided to change the law, and women are no longer prosecuted if they are in sexual slavery, but the brothel owners and the pimps and the male customers are prosecuted, and — (Applause) — prostitution has gone down. In the United States, we take just the opposite position. For every male arrested for illegal sex trade, 25 women are arrested in the United States of America. Canada, Ireland, I've already said Sweden, France, and other countries are moving now towards this so-called Swedish model. That's another thing that can be done. We have two great institutions in this country that all of us admire: our military and our great university system. In the military, they are now analyzing how many sexual assaults take place. The last report I got, there were 26,000 sexual assaults that took place in the military — 26,000. Only 3,000, not much more than 1 percent, are actually prosecuted, and the reason is that the commanding officer of any organization — a ship like my submarine, or a battalion in the Army or a company in the Marines — the commanding officer has the right under law to decide whether to prosecute a rapist or not, and of course, the last thing they want is for anybody to know that under their command, sexual assaults are taking place, so they do not do it. That law needs to be changed. About one out of four girls who enter American universities will be sexually assaulted before she graduates, and this is now getting a lot of publicity, partially because of my book, but other things, and so 89 universities in America are now condemned by the Department of Education under Title IX because the officials of the universities are not taking care of the women to protect them from sexual assault. The Department of Justice says that more than half of the rapes on a college campus take place by serial rapists, because outside of the university system, if they rape somebody, they'll be prosecuted, but when they get on a university campus, they can rape with impunity. They're not prosecuted. Those are the kinds of things that go on in our society. Another thing that's very serious about the abuse of women and girls is the lack of equal pay for equal work, as you know. (Applause) And this is sometimes misinterpreted, but for full-time employment, a woman in the United States now gets 23 percent less than a man. When I became president, the difference was 39 percent. So we've made some progress, partially because I was president and so forth — (Applause) (Laughter) — but in the last 15 years, there's been no progress made, so it's been just about 23 or 24 percent difference for the last 15 years. These are the kind of things that go on. If you take the Fortune 500 companies, 23 of them have women CEOs, out of 500, and those CEOs, I need not tell you, make less on an average than the other CEOs. Well, that's what goes on in our country. Another problem with the United States is we are the most warlike nation on Earth. We have been to war with about 25 different countries since the Second World War. Sometimes, we've had soldiers on the ground fighting. The other times, we've been flying overhead dropping bombs on people. Other times, of course, now, we have drones that attack people and so forth. We've been at war with 25 different countries or more since the Second World War. There was four years, I won't say which ones, where we didn't — (Applause) — we didn't drop a bomb, we didn't launch a missile, we didn't fire a bullet. But anyway, those kinds of things, the resort to violence and the misinterpretation of the holy scriptures are what causes, are the basic causes, of abuse of women and girls. There's one more basic cause that I need not mention, and that is that in general, men don't give a damn. (Applause) That's true. The average man that might say, I'm against the abuse of women and girls quietly accepts the privileged position that we occupy, and this is very similar to what I knew when I was a child, when separate but equal had existed. Racial discrimination, legally, had existed for 100 years, from 1865 at the end of the War Between the States, the Civil War, all the way up to the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson got the bills passed for equal rights. But during that time, there were many white people that didn't think that racial discrimination was okay, but they stayed quiet, because they enjoyed the privileges of better jobs, unique access to jury duty, better schools, and everything else, and that's the same thing that exists today, because the average man really doesn't care. Even though they say, "I'm against discrimination against girls and women," they enjoy a privileged position. And it's very difficult to get the majority of men who control the university system, the majority of men that control the military system, the majority of men that control the governments of the world, and the majority of men that control the great religions. So what is the basic thing that we need to do today? I would say the best thing that we could do today is for the women in the powerful nations like this one, and where you come from, Europe and so forth, who have influence and who have freedom to speak and to act, need to take the responsibility on yourselves to be more forceful in demanding an end to racial discrimination against girls and women all over the world. The average woman in Egypt doesn't have much to say about her daughters getting genitally mutilated and so forth. I didn't even go down to detail about that. But I hope that out of this conference, that every woman here will get your husbands to realize that these abuses on the college campuses and the military and so forth and in the future job market, need to protect your daughters and your granddaughters. I have 12 grandchildren, four children, and 10 great-grandchildren, and I think often about them and about the plight that they will face in America, not only if they lived in Egypt or a foreign country, in having equal rights, and I hope that all of you will join me in being a champion for women and girls around the world and protect their human rights. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The amazing story of the man who gave us modern pain relief | {0: 'Latif Nasser is the director of research at Radiolab, where he has reported on such disparate topics as culture-bound illnesses, snowflake photography, sinking islands and 16th-century automata.'} | TED2015 | A few years ago, my mom developed rheumatoid arthritis. Her wrists, knees and toes swelled up, causing crippling, chronic pain. She had to file for disability. She stopped attending our local mosque. Some mornings it was too painful for her to brush her teeth. I wanted to help. But I didn't know how. I'm not a doctor. So, what I am is a historian of medicine. So I started to research the history of chronic pain. Turns out, UCLA has an entire history of pain collection in their archives. And I found a story — a fantastic story — of a man who saved — rescued — millions of people from pain; people like my mom. Yet, I had never heard of him. There were no biographies of him, no Hollywood movies. His name was John J. Bonica. But when our story begins, he was better known as Johnny "Bull" Walker. It was a summer day in 1941. The circus had just arrived in the tiny town of Brookfield, New York. Spectators flocked to see the wire-walkers, the tramp clowns — if they were lucky, the human cannonball. They also came to see the strongman, Johnny "Bull" Walker, a brawny bully who'd pin you for a dollar. You know, on that particular day, a voice rang out over the circus P.A. system. They needed a doctor urgently, in the live animal tent. Something had gone wrong with the lion tamer. The climax of his act had gone wrong, and his head was stuck inside the lion's mouth. He was running out of air; the crowd watched in horror as he struggled and then passed out. When the lion finally did relax its jaws, the lion tamer just slumped to the ground, motionless. When he came to a few minutes later, he saw a familiar figure hunched over him. It was Bull Walker. The strongman had given the lion tamer mouth-to-mouth, and saved his life. Now, the strongman hadn't told anyone, but he was actually a third-year medical student. He toured with the circus during summers to pay tuition, but kept it a secret to protect his persona. He was supposed to be a brute, a villain — not a nerdy do-gooder. His medical colleagues didn't know his secret, either. As he put it, "If you were an athlete, you were a dumb dodo." So he didn't tell them about the circus, or about how he wrestled professionally on evenings and weekends. He used a pseudonym like Bull Walker, or later, the Masked Marvel. He even kept it a secret that same year, when he was crowned the Light Heavyweight Champion of the world. Over the years, John J. Bonica lived these parallel lives. He was a wrestler; he was a doctor. He was a heel; he was a hero. He inflicted pain, and he treated it. And he didn’t know it at the time, but over the next five decades, he'd draw on these dueling identities to forge a whole new way to think about pain. It'd change modern medicine so much so, that decades later, Time magazine would call him pain relief's founding father. But that all happened later. In 1942, Bonica graduated medical school and married Emma, his sweetheart, whom he had met at one of his matches years before. He still wrestled in secret — he had to. His internship at New York's St. Vincent's Hospital paid nothing. With his championship belt, he wrestled in big-ticket venues, like Madison Square Garden, against big-time opponents, like Everett "The Blonde Bear" Marshall, or three-time world champion, Angelo Savoldi. The matches took a toll on his body; he tore hip joints, fractured ribs. One night, The Terrible Turk's big toe scratched a scar like Capone's down the side of his face. The next morning at work, he had to wear a surgical mask to hide it. Twice Bonica showed up to the O.R. with one eye so bruised, he couldn't see out of it. But worst of all were his mangled cauliflower ears. He said they felt like two baseballs on the sides of his head. Pain just kept accumulating in his life. Next, he watched his wife go into labor at his hospital. She heaved and pushed, clearly in anguish. Her obstetrician called out to the intern on duty to give her a few drops of ether to ease her pain. But the intern was a young guy, just three weeks on the job — he was jittery, and in applying the ether, irritated Emma's throat. She vomited and choked, and started to turn blue. Bonica, who was watching all this, pushed the intern out of the way, cleared her airway, and saved his wife and his unborn daughter. At that moment, he decided to devote his life to anesthesiology. Later, he'd even go on to help develop the epidural, for delivering mothers. But before he could focus on obstetrics, Bonica had to report for basic training. Right around D-Day, Bonica showed up to Madigan Army Medical Center, near Tacoma. At 7,700 beds, it was one of the largest army hospitals in America. Bonica was in charge of all pain control there. He was only 27. Treating so many patients, Bonica started noticing cases that contradicted everything he had learned. Pain was supposed to be a kind of alarm bell — in a good way — a body's way of signaling an injury, like a broken arm. But in some cases, like after a patient had a leg amputated, that patient might still complain of pain in that nonexistent leg. But if the injury had been treated, why would the alarm bell keep ringing? There were other cases in which there was no evidence of an injury whatsoever, and yet, still the patient hurt. Bonica tracked down all the specialists at his hospital — surgeons, neurologists, psychiatrists, others. And he tried to get their opinions on his patients. It took too long, so he started organizing group meetings over lunch. It would be like a tag team of specialists going up against the patient's pain. No one had ever focused on pain this way before. After that, he hit the books. He read every medical textbook he could get his hands on, carefully noting every mention of the word "pain." Out of the 14,000 pages he read, the word "pain" was on 17 and a half of them. Seventeen and a half. For the most basic, most common, most frustrating part of being a patient. Bonica was shocked — I'm quoting him, he said, "What the hell kind of conclusion can you come to there? The most important thing from the patient's perspective, they don't talk about." So over the next eight years, Bonica would talk about it. He'd write about it; he'd write those missing pages. He wrote what would later be known as the Bible of Pain. In it he proposed new strategies, new treatments using nerve-block injections. He proposed a new institution, the Pain Clinic, based on those lunchtime meetings. But the most important thing about his book was that it was kind of an emotional alarm bell for medicine. A desperate plea to doctors to take pain seriously in patients' lives. He recast the very purpose of medicine. The goal wasn't to make patients better; it was to make patients feel better. He pushed his pain agenda for decades, before it finally took hold in the mid-'70s. Hundreds of pain clinics sprung up all over the world. But as they did — a tragic twist. Bonica's years of wrestling caught up to him. He had been out of the ring for over 20 years, but those 1,500 professional bouts had left a mark on his body. Still in his mid-50s, he suffered severe osteoarthritis. Over the next 20 years he'd have 22 surgeries, including four spine operations, and hip replacement after hip replacement. He could barely raise his arm, turn his neck. He needed aluminum crutches to walk. His friends and former students became his doctors. One recalled that he probably had more nerve-block injections than anyone else on the planet. Already a workaholic, he worked even more — 15- to 18-hour days. Healing others became more than just his job, it was his own most effective form of relief. "If I wasn't as busy as I am," he told a reporter at the time, "I would be a completely disabled guy." On a business trip to Florida in the early 1980s, Bonica got a former student to drive him to the Hyde Park area in Tampa. They drove past palm trees and pulled up to an old mansion, with giant silver howitzer cannons hidden in the garage. The house belonged to the Zacchini family, who were something like American circus royalty. Decades earlier, Bonica had watched them, clad in silver jumpsuits and goggles, doing the act they pioneered — the Human Cannonball. But now they were like him: retired. That generation is all dead now, including Bonica, so there's no way to know exactly what they said that day. But still, I love imagining it. The strongman and the human cannonballs reunited, showing off old scars, and new ones. Maybe Bonica gave them medical advice. Maybe he told them what he later said in an oral history, which is that his time in the circus and wrestling deeply molded his life. Bonica saw pain close up. He felt it. He lived it. And it made it impossible for him to ignore in others. Out of that empathy, he spun a whole new field, played a major role in getting medicine to acknowledge pain in and of itself. In that same oral history, Bonica claimed that pain is the most complex human experience. That it involves your past life, your current life, your interactions, your family. That was definitely true for Bonica. But it was also true for my mom. It's easy for doctors to see my mom as a kind of professional patient, a woman who just spends her days in waiting rooms. Sometimes I get stuck seeing her that same way. But as I saw Bonica's pain — a testament to his fully lived life — I started to remember all the things that my mom's pain holds. Before they got swollen and arthritic, my mom's fingers clacked away in the hospital H.R. department where she worked. They folded samosas for our entire mosque. When I was a kid, they cut my hair, wiped my nose, tied my shoes. Thank you. (Applause) |
Meet the women fighting on the front lines of an American war | {0: 'Gayle Tzemach Lemmon writes about women around the world living their lives at war and in conflict zones.'} | TEDWomen 2015 | Every group of female friends has the funny one, the one you go to when you need a good cry, the one who tells you to suck it up when you've had a hard day. And this group was no different. Except that this was a community of groundbreaking women who came together — first to become teammates, then friends, and then family — in the least likely of places: on the Special Operations battlefield. This was a group of women whose friendship and valor was cemented not only by what they had seen and done at the tip of the spear, but by the fact that they were there at a time when women — officially, at least — remained banned from ground combat, and America had no idea they existed. This story begins with Special Operations leaders, some of the most tested men in the United States military, saying, "We need women to help us wage this war." "America would never kill its way to the end of its wars," it argued. "Needed more knowledge and more understanding." And as everyone knows, if you want to understand what's happening in a community and in a home, you talk to women, whether you're talking about Southern Afghanistan, or Southern California. But in this case, men could not talk to women, because in a conservative and traditional society like Afghanistan, that would cause grave offense. So you needed women soldiers out there. That meant, at this time in the war, that the women who would be recruited to serve alongside Army Rangers and Navy SEALs, would be seeing the kind of combat experienced by less than five percent of the entire United States military. Less than five percent. So the call went out. "Female soldiers: Become a part of history. Join Special Operations on the battlefield in Afghanistan." This is in 2011. And from Alabama to Alaska, a group of women who had always wanted to do something that mattered alongside the best of the best, and to make a difference for their country, answered that call to serve. And for them it was not about politics, it was about serving with purpose. And so, the women who came to North Carolina to compete for a spot on these teams which would put women on the Special Operations front lines, landed and found very quickly a community, the likes of which they had never seen. Full of women who were as fierce and as fit as they were, and as driven to make a difference. They didn't have to apologize for who they were, and in fact, they could celebrate it. And what they found when they were there was that all of a sudden, there were lots of people like them. As one of them said, "It was like you looked around and realized there was more than one giraffe at the zoo." Among this team of standouts was Cassie, a young woman who managed to be an ROTC cadet, a sorority sister and a Women's Studies minor, all in one person. Tristan, a West Point track star, who always ran and road marched with no socks, and had shoes whose smell proved it. (Laughter) Amber, a Heidi look-alike, who had always wanted to be in the infantry, and when she found out that women couldn't be, she decided to become an intel officer. She served in Bosnia, and later helped the FBI to bust drug gangs in Pennsylvania. And then there was Kate, who played high school football all four years, and actually wanted to drop out after the first, to go into the glee club, but when boys told her that girls couldn't play football, she decided to stay for all the little girls who would come after her. For them, biology had shaped part of their destiny, and put, as Cassie once said, "everything noble out of reach for girls." And yet, here was a chance to serve with the best of the best on a mission that mattered to their country, not despite the fact that they were female, but because of it. This team of women, in many ways, was like women everywhere. They wore makeup, and in fact, they would bond in the ladies' room over eyeliner and eye pencil. They also wore body armor. They would put 50 pounds of weight on their backs, and board the helicopter for an operation, and they would come back and watch a movie called "Bridesmaids." (Laughter) They even wore a thing called Spanx, because, as they found very quickly, the uniforms made for men were big where they should be small, and small where they should be big. So Lane, an Iraq War veteran — you see her here on my left — decided she was going to go on Amazon and order a pair of Spanx to her base, so that her pants would fit better when she went out on mission each night. These women would get together over video conference from all around Afghanistan from their various bases, and they would talk about what it was like to be one of the only women doing what they were doing. They would swap jokes, they would talk about what was working, what wasn't, what they had learned to do well, what they needed to do better. And they would talk about some of the lighter moments of being women out on the Special Operations front lines, including the Shewee, which was a tool that let you pee like a guy, although it's said to have had only a 40 percent accuracy rate out there. (Laughter) These women lived in the "and." They proved you could be fierce and you could be feminine. You could wear mascara and body armor. You could love CrossFit, and really like cross-stitch. You could love to climb out of helicopters and you could also love to bake cookies. Women live in the and every single day, and these women brought that to this mission as well. On this life and death battlefield they never forgot that being female may have brought them to the front lines, but being a soldier is what would prove themselves there. There was the night Amber went out on mission, and in talking to the women of the house, realized that there was a barricaded shooter lying in wait for the Afghan and American forces who were waiting to enter the home. Another night it was Tristan who found out that there were pieces that make up explosives all around the house in which they were standing, and that in fact, explosives lay all the way between there and where they were about to head that night. There was the night another one of their teammates proved herself to a decidedly skeptical team of SEALs, when she found the intel item they were looking for wrapped up in a baby's wet diaper. And there was the night that Isabel, another one of their teammates, found the things that they were looking for, and received an Impact Award from the Rangers who said that without her, the things and the people they were looking for that night would never have been found. That night and so many others, they went out to prove themselves, not only for one another, but for everybody who would come after them. And also for the men alongside whom they served. We talk a lot about how behind every great man is a good woman. And in this case, next to these women stood men who wanted to see them succeed. The Army Ranger who trained them had served 12 deployments. And when they told him that he had to go train girls, he had no idea what to expect. But at the end of eight days with these women in the summer of 2011, he told his fellow Ranger, "We have just witnessed history. These may well be our own Tuskegee Airmen." (Applause) At the heart of this team was the one person who everyone called "the best of us." She was a petite blonde dynamo, who barely reached five-foot-three. And she was this wild mix of Martha Stewart, and what we know as G.I. Jane. She was someone who loved to make dinner for her husband, her Kent State ROTC sweetheart who pushed her to be her best, and to trust herself, and to test every limit she could. She also loved to put 50 pounds of weight on her back and run for miles, and she loved to be a soldier. She was somebody who had a bread maker in her office in Kandahar, and would bake a batch of raisin bread, and then go to the gym and bust out 25 or 30 pull-ups from a dead hang. She was the person who, if you needed an extra pair of boots or a home-cooked dinner, would be on your speed dial. Because she never, ever would talk to you about how good she was, but let her character speak through action. She was famous for taking the hard right over the easy wrong. And she was also famous for walking up to a 15-foot rope, climbing it using only her arms, and then shuffling away and apologizing, because she knew she was supposed to use both her arms and her legs, as the Rangers had trained them. (Laughter) Some of our heroes return home to tell their stories. And some of them don't. And on October 22, 2011, First Lieutenant Ashley White was killed alongside two Rangers, Christopher Horns and Kristoffer Domeij. Her death threw this program built for the shadows into a very public spotlight. Because after all, the ban on women in combat was still very much in place. And at her funeral, the head of Army Special Operations came, and gave a public testimony not just to the courage of Ashley White, but to all her team of sisters. "Make no mistake about it," he said, "these women are warriors, and they have written a new chapter in what it means to be a female in the United States Army." Ashley's mom is a teacher's aide and a school bus driver, who bakes cookies on the side. She doesn't remember much about that overwhelming set of days, in which grief — enormous grief — mixed with pride. But she does remember one moment. A stranger with a child in her hand came up to her and she said, "Mrs. White, I brought my daughter here today, because I wanted her to know what a hero was. And I wanted her to know that heroes could be women, too." It is time to celebrate all the unsung heroines who reach into their guts and find the heart and the grit to keep going and to test every limit. This very unlikely band of sisters bound forever in life and afterward did indeed become part of history, and they paved the way for so many who would come after them, as much as they stood on the shoulders of those who had come before. These women showed that warriors come in all shapes and sizes. And women can be heroes, too. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
The math behind basketball's wildest moves | {0: 'Using advanced data analysis tools, Rajiv Maheswaran and Second Spectrum help make basketball teams smarter.'} | TED2015 | My colleagues and I are fascinated by the science of moving dots. So what are these dots? Well, it's all of us. And we're moving in our homes, in our offices, as we shop and travel throughout our cities and around the world. And wouldn't it be great if we could understand all this movement? If we could find patterns and meaning and insight in it. And luckily for us, we live in a time where we're incredibly good at capturing information about ourselves. So whether it's through sensors or videos, or apps, we can track our movement with incredibly fine detail. So it turns out one of the places where we have the best data about movement is sports. So whether it's basketball or baseball, or football or the other football, we're instrumenting our stadiums and our players to track their movements every fraction of a second. So what we're doing is turning our athletes into — you probably guessed it — moving dots. So we've got mountains of moving dots and like most raw data, it's hard to deal with and not that interesting. But there are things that, for example, basketball coaches want to know. And the problem is they can't know them because they'd have to watch every second of every game, remember it and process it. And a person can't do that, but a machine can. The problem is a machine can't see the game with the eye of a coach. At least they couldn't until now. So what have we taught the machine to see? So, we started simply. We taught it things like passes, shots and rebounds. Things that most casual fans would know. And then we moved on to things slightly more complicated. Events like post-ups, and pick-and-rolls, and isolations. And if you don't know them, that's okay. Most casual players probably do. Now, we've gotten to a point where today, the machine understands complex events like down screens and wide pins. Basically things only professionals know. So we have taught a machine to see with the eyes of a coach. So how have we been able to do this? If I asked a coach to describe something like a pick-and-roll, they would give me a description, and if I encoded that as an algorithm, it would be terrible. The pick-and-roll happens to be this dance in basketball between four players, two on offense and two on defense. And here's kind of how it goes. So there's the guy on offense without the ball the ball and he goes next to the guy guarding the guy with the ball, and he kind of stays there and they both move and stuff happens, and ta-da, it's a pick-and-roll. (Laughter) So that is also an example of a terrible algorithm. So, if the player who's the interferer — he's called the screener — goes close by, but he doesn't stop, it's probably not a pick-and-roll. Or if he does stop, but he doesn't stop close enough, it's probably not a pick-and-roll. Or, if he does go close by and he does stop but they do it under the basket, it's probably not a pick-and-roll. Or I could be wrong, they could all be pick-and-rolls. It really depends on the exact timing, the distances, the locations, and that's what makes it hard. So, luckily, with machine learning, we can go beyond our own ability to describe the things we know. So how does this work? Well, it's by example. So we go to the machine and say, "Good morning, machine. Here are some pick-and-rolls, and here are some things that are not. Please find a way to tell the difference." And the key to all of this is to find features that enable it to separate. So if I was going to teach it the difference between an apple and orange, I might say, "Why don't you use color or shape?" And the problem that we're solving is, what are those things? What are the key features that let a computer navigate the world of moving dots? So figuring out all these relationships with relative and absolute location, distance, timing, velocities — that's really the key to the science of moving dots, or as we like to call it, spatiotemporal pattern recognition, in academic vernacular. Because the first thing is, you have to make it sound hard — because it is. The key thing is, for NBA coaches, it's not that they want to know whether a pick-and-roll happened or not. It's that they want to know how it happened. And why is it so important to them? So here's a little insight. It turns out in modern basketball, this pick-and-roll is perhaps the most important play. And knowing how to run it, and knowing how to defend it, is basically a key to winning and losing most games. So it turns out that this dance has a great many variations and identifying the variations is really the thing that matters, and that's why we need this to be really, really good. So, here's an example. There are two offensive and two defensive players, getting ready to do the pick-and-roll dance. So the guy with ball can either take, or he can reject. His teammate can either roll or pop. The guy guarding the ball can either go over or under. His teammate can either show or play up to touch, or play soft and together they can either switch or blitz and I didn't know most of these things when I started and it would be lovely if everybody moved according to those arrows. It would make our lives a lot easier, but it turns out movement is very messy. People wiggle a lot and getting these variations identified with very high accuracy, both in precision and recall, is tough because that's what it takes to get a professional coach to believe in you. And despite all the difficulties with the right spatiotemporal features we have been able to do that. Coaches trust our ability of our machine to identify these variations. We're at the point where almost every single contender for an NBA championship this year is using our software, which is built on a machine that understands the moving dots of basketball. So not only that, we have given advice that has changed strategies that have helped teams win very important games, and it's very exciting because you have coaches who've been in the league for 30 years that are willing to take advice from a machine. And it's very exciting, it's much more than the pick-and-roll. Our computer started out with simple things and learned more and more complex things and now it knows so many things. Frankly, I don't understand much of what it does, and while it's not that special to be smarter than me, we were wondering, can a machine know more than a coach? Can it know more than person could know? And it turns out the answer is yes. The coaches want players to take good shots. So if I'm standing near the basket and there's nobody near me, it's a good shot. If I'm standing far away surrounded by defenders, that's generally a bad shot. But we never knew how good "good" was, or how bad "bad" was quantitatively. Until now. So what we can do, again, using spatiotemporal features, we looked at every shot. We can see: Where is the shot? What's the angle to the basket? Where are the defenders standing? What are their distances? What are their angles? For multiple defenders, we can look at how the player's moving and predict the shot type. We can look at all their velocities and we can build a model that predicts what is the likelihood that this shot would go in under these circumstances? So why is this important? We can take something that was shooting, which was one thing before, and turn it into two things: the quality of the shot and the quality of the shooter. So here's a bubble chart, because what's TED without a bubble chart? (Laughter) Those are NBA players. The size is the size of the player and the color is the position. On the x-axis, we have the shot probability. People on the left take difficult shots, on the right, they take easy shots. On the [y-axis] is their shooting ability. People who are good are at the top, bad at the bottom. So for example, if there was a player who generally made 47 percent of their shots, that's all you knew before. But today, I can tell you that player takes shots that an average NBA player would make 49 percent of the time, and they are two percent worse. And the reason that's important is that there are lots of 47s out there. And so it's really important to know if the 47 that you're considering giving 100 million dollars to is a good shooter who takes bad shots or a bad shooter who takes good shots. Machine understanding doesn't just change how we look at players, it changes how we look at the game. So there was this very exciting game a couple of years ago, in the NBA finals. Miami was down by three, there was 20 seconds left. They were about to lose the championship. A gentleman named LeBron James came up and he took a three to tie. He missed. His teammate Chris Bosh got a rebound, passed it to another teammate named Ray Allen. He sank a three. It went into overtime. They won the game. They won the championship. It was one of the most exciting games in basketball. And our ability to know the shot probability for every player at every second, and the likelihood of them getting a rebound at every second can illuminate this moment in a way that we never could before. Now unfortunately, I can't show you that video. But for you, we recreated that moment at our weekly basketball game about 3 weeks ago. (Laughter) And we recreated the tracking that led to the insights. So, here is us. This is Chinatown in Los Angeles, a park we play at every week, and that's us recreating the Ray Allen moment and all the tracking that's associated with it. So, here's the shot. I'm going to show you that moment and all the insights of that moment. The only difference is, instead of the professional players, it's us, and instead of a professional announcer, it's me. So, bear with me. Miami. Down three. Twenty seconds left. Jeff brings up the ball. Josh catches, puts up a three! [Calculating shot probability] [Shot quality] [Rebound probability] Won't go! [Rebound probability] Rebound, Noel. Back to Daria. [Shot quality] Her three-pointer — bang! Tie game with five seconds left. The crowd goes wild. (Laughter) That's roughly how it happened. (Applause) Roughly. (Applause) That moment had about a nine percent chance of happening in the NBA and we know that and a great many other things. I'm not going to tell you how many times it took us to make that happen. (Laughter) Okay, I will! It was four. (Laughter) Way to go, Daria. But the important thing about that video and the insights we have for every second of every NBA game — it's not that. It's the fact you don't have to be a professional team to track movement. You do not have to be a professional player to get insights about movement. In fact, it doesn't even have to be about sports because we're moving everywhere. We're moving in our homes, in our offices, as we shop and we travel throughout our cities and around our world. What will we know? What will we learn? Perhaps, instead of identifying pick-and-rolls, a machine can identify the moment and let me know when my daughter takes her first steps. Which could literally be happening any second now. Perhaps we can learn to better use our buildings, better plan our cities. I believe that with the development of the science of moving dots, we will move better, we will move smarter, we will move forward. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A warrior’s cry against child marriage | {0: 'Memory Banda is a tireless leader for girls’ rights, in Malawi and around the world. '} | TEDWomen 2015 | I'll begin today by sharing a poem written by my friend from Malawi, Eileen Piri. Eileen is only 13 years old, but when we were going through the collection of poetry that we wrote, I found her poem so interesting, so motivating. So I'll read it to you. She entitled her poem "I'll Marry When I Want." (Laughter) "I'll marry when I want. My mother can't force me to marry. My father cannot force me to marry. My uncle, my aunt, my brother or sister, cannot force me to marry. No one in the world can force me to marry. I'll marry when I want. Even if you beat me, even if you chase me away, even if you do anything bad to me, I'll marry when I want. I'll marry when I want, but not before I am well educated, and not before I am all grown up. I'll marry when I want." This poem might seem odd, written by a 13-year-old girl, but where I and Eileen come from, this poem, which I have just read to you, is a warrior's cry. I am from Malawi. Malawi is one of the poorest countries, very poor, where gender equality is questionable. Growing up in that country, I couldn't make my own choices in life. I couldn't even explore personal opportunities in life. I will tell you a story of two different girls, two beautiful girls. These girls grew up under the same roof. They were eating the same food. Sometimes, they would share clothes, and even shoes. But their lives ended up differently, in two different paths. The other girl is my little sister. My little sister was only 11 years old when she got pregnant. It's a hurtful thing. Not only did it hurt her, even me. I was going through a hard time as well. As it is in my culture, once you reach puberty stage, you are supposed to go to initiation camps. In these initiation camps, you are taught how to sexually please a man. There is this special day, which they call "Very Special Day" where a man who is hired by the community comes to the camp and sleeps with the little girls. Imagine the trauma that these young girls go through every day. Most girls end up pregnant. They even contract HIV and AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. For my little sister, she ended up being pregnant. Today, she's only 16 years old and she has three children. Her first marriage did not survive, nor did her second marriage. On the other side, there is this girl. She's amazing. (Laughter) (Applause) I call her amazing because she is. She's very fabulous. That girl is me. (Laughter) When I was 13 years old, I was told, you are grown up, you have now reached of age, you're supposed to go to the initiation camp. I was like, "What? I'm not going to go to the initiation camps." You know what the women said to me? "You are a stupid girl. Stubborn. You do not respect the traditions of our society, of our community." I said no because I knew where I was going. I knew what I wanted in life. I had a lot of dreams as a young girl. I wanted to get well educated, to find a decent job in the future. I was imagining myself as a lawyer, seated on that big chair. Those were the imaginations that were going through my mind every day. And I knew that one day, I would contribute something, a little something to my community. But every day after refusing, women would tell me, "Look at you, you're all grown up. Your little sister has a baby. What about you?" That was the music that I was hearing every day, and that is the music that girls hear every day when they don't do something that the community needs them to do. When I compared the two stories between me and my sister, I said, "Why can't I do something? Why can't I change something that has happened for a long time in our community?" That was when I called other girls just like my sister, who have children, who have been in class but they have forgotten how to read and write. I said, "Come on, we can remind each other how to read and write again, how to hold the pen, how to read, to hold the book." It was a great time I had with them. Nor did I just learn a little about them, but they were able to tell me their personal stories, what they were facing every day as young mothers. That was when I was like, 'Why can't we take all these things that are happening to us and present them and tell our mothers, our traditional leaders, that these are the wrong things?" It was a scary thing to do, because these traditional leaders, they are already accustomed to the things that have been there for ages. A hard thing to change, but a good thing to try. So we tried. It was very hard, but we pushed. And I'm here to say that in my community, it was the first community after girls pushed so hard to our traditional leader, and our leader stood up for us and said no girl has to be married before the age of 18. (Applause) In my community, that was the first time a community, they had to call the bylaws, the first bylaw that protected girls in our community. We did not stop there. We forged ahead. We were determined to fight for girls not just in my community, but even in other communities. When the child marriage bill was being presented in February, we were there at the Parliament house. Every day, when the members of Parliament were entering, we were telling them, "Would you please support the bill?" And we don't have much technology like here, but we have our small phones. So we said, "Why can't we get their numbers and text them?" So we did that. It was a good thing. (Applause) So when the bill passed, we texted them back, "Thank you for supporting the bill." (Laughter) And when the bill was signed by the president, making it into law, it was a plus. Now, in Malawi, 18 is the legal marriage age, from 15 to 18. (Applause) It's a good thing to know that the bill passed, but let me tell you this: There are countries where 18 is the legal marriage age, but don't we hear cries of women and girls every day? Every day, girls' lives are being wasted away. This is high time for leaders to honor their commitment. In honoring this commitment, it means keeping girls' issues at heart every time. We don't have to be subjected as second, but they have to know that women, as we are in this room, we are not just women, we are not just girls, we are extraordinary. We can do more. And another thing for Malawi, and not just Malawi but other countries: The laws which are there, you know how a law is not a law until it is enforced? The law which has just recently passed and the laws that in other countries have been there, they need to be publicized at the local level, at the community level, where girls' issues are very striking. Girls face issues, difficult issues, at the community level every day. So if these young girls know that there are laws that protect them, they will be able to stand up and defend themselves because they will know that there is a law that protects them. And another thing I would say is that girls' voices and women's voices are beautiful, they are there, but we cannot do this alone. Male advocates, they have to jump in, to step in and work together. It's a collective work. What we need is what girls elsewhere need: good education, and above all, not to marry whilst 11. And furthermore, I know that together, we can transform the legal, the cultural and political framework that denies girls of their rights. I am standing here today and declaring that we can end child marriage in a generation. This is the moment where a girl and a girl, and millions of girls worldwide, will be able to say, "I will marry when I want." (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong | {0: 'Johann Hari is the author of two "New York Times" best-selling books.'} | TEDGlobalLondon | One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I was just a little kid, so I didn't really understand why, but as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family, including later cocaine addiction. I'd been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because it's now exactly 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States and Britain, and we then imposed that on the rest of the world. It's a century since we made this really fateful decision to take addicts and punish them and make them suffer, because we believed that would deter them; it would give them an incentive to stop. And a few years ago, I was looking at some of the addicts in my life who I love, and trying to figure out if there was some way to help them. And I realized there were loads of incredibly basic questions I just didn't know the answer to, like, what really causes addiction? Why do we carry on with this approach that doesn't seem to be working, and is there a better way out there that we could try instead? So I read loads of stuff about it, and I couldn't really find the answers I was looking for, so I thought, okay, I'll go and sit with different people around the world who lived this and studied this and talk to them and see if I could learn from them. And I didn't realize I would end up going over 30,000 miles at the start, but I ended up going and meeting loads of different people, from a transgender crack dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a scientist who spends a lot of time feeding hallucinogens to mongooses to see if they like them — it turns out they do, but only in very specific circumstances — to the only country that's ever decriminalized all drugs, from cannabis to crack, Portugal. And the thing I realized that really blew my mind is, almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong, and if we start to absorb the new evidence about addiction, I think we're going to have to change a lot more than our drug policies. But let's start with what we think we know, what I thought I knew. Let's think about this middle row here. Imagine all of you, for 20 days now, went off and used heroin three times a day. Some of you look a little more enthusiastic than others at this prospect. (Laughter) Don't worry, it's just a thought experiment. Imagine you did that, right? What would happen? Now, we have a story about what would happen that we've been told for a century. We think, because there are chemical hooks in heroin, as you took it for a while, your body would become dependent on those hooks, you'd start to physically need them, and at the end of those 20 days, you'd all be heroin addicts. Right? That's what I thought. First thing that alerted me to the fact that something's not right with this story is when it was explained to me. If I step out of this TED Talk today and I get hit by a car and I break my hip, I'll be taken to hospital and I'll be given loads of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It's actually much better heroin than you're going to buy on the streets, because the stuff you buy from a drug dealer is contaminated. Actually, very little of it is heroin, whereas the stuff you get from the doctor is medically pure. And you'll be given it for quite a long period of time. There are loads of people in this room, you may not realize it, you've taken quite a lot of heroin. And anyone who is watching this anywhere in the world, this is happening. And if what we believe about addiction is right — those people are exposed to all those chemical hooks — What should happen? They should become addicts. This has been studied really carefully. It doesn't happen; you will have noticed if your grandmother had a hip replacement, she didn't come out as a junkie. (Laughter) And when I learned this, it seemed so weird to me, so contrary to everything I'd been told, everything I thought I knew, I just thought it couldn't be right, until I met a man called Bruce Alexander. He's a professor of psychology in Vancouver who carried out an incredible experiment I think really helps us to understand this issue. Professor Alexander explained to me, the idea of addiction we've all got in our heads, that story, comes partly from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple. You can do them tonight at home if you feel a little sadistic. You get a rat and you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles: One is just water, and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself quite quickly. So there you go, right? That's how we think it works. In the '70s, Professor Alexander comes along and he looks at this experiment and he noticed something. He said ah, we're putting the rat in an empty cage. It's got nothing to do except use these drugs. Let's try something different. So Professor Alexander built a cage that he called "Rat Park," which is basically heaven for rats. They've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of colored balls, they've got loads of tunnels. Crucially, they've got loads of friends. They can have loads of sex. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water. But here's the fascinating thing: In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. They almost never use it. None of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose. You go from almost 100 percent overdose when they're isolated to zero percent overdose when they have happy and connected lives. Now, when he first saw this, Professor Alexander thought, maybe this is just a thing about rats, they're quite different to us. Maybe not as different as we'd like, but, you know — But fortunately, there was a human experiment into the exact same principle happening at the exact same time. It was called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, 20 percent of all American troops were using loads of heroin, and if you look at the news reports from the time, they were really worried, because they thought, my God, we're going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets of the United States when the war ends; it made total sense. Now, those soldiers who were using loads of heroin were followed home. The Archives of General Psychiatry did a really detailed study, and what happened to them? It turns out they didn't go to rehab. They didn't go into withdrawal. Ninety-five percent of them just stopped. Now, if you believe the story about chemical hooks, that makes absolutely no sense, but Professor Alexander began to think there might be a different story about addiction. He said, what if addiction isn't about your chemical hooks? What if addiction is about your cage? What if addiction is an adaptation to your environment? Looking at this, there was another professor called Peter Cohen in the Netherlands who said, maybe we shouldn't even call it addiction. Maybe we should call it bonding. Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when we're happy and healthy, we'll bond and connect with each other, but if you can't do that, because you're traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that's our nature. That's what we want as human beings. And at first, I found this quite a difficult thing to get my head around, but one way that helped me to think about it is, I can see, I've got over by my seat a bottle of water, right? I'm looking at lots of you, and lots of you have bottles of water with you. Forget the drugs. Forget the drug war. Totally legally, all of those bottles of water could be bottles of vodka, right? We could all be getting drunk — I might after this — (Laughter) — but we're not. Now, because you've been able to afford the approximately gazillion pounds that it costs to get into a TED Talk, I'm guessing you guys could afford to be drinking vodka for the next six months. You wouldn't end up homeless. You're not going to do that, and the reason you're not going to do that is not because anyone's stopping you. It's because you've got bonds and connections that you want to be present for. You've got work you love. You've got people you love. You've got healthy relationships. And a core part of addiction, I came to think, and I believe the evidence suggests, is about not being able to bear to be present in your life. Now, this has really significant implications. The most obvious implications are for the War on Drugs. In Arizona, I went out with a group of women who were made to wear t-shirts saying, "I was a drug addict," and go out on chain gangs and dig graves while members of the public jeer at them, and when those women get out of prison, they're going to have criminal records that mean they'll never work in the legal economy again. Now, that's a very extreme example, obviously, in the case of the chain gang, but actually almost everywhere in the world we treat addicts to some degree like that. We punish them. We shame them. We give them criminal records. We put barriers between them reconnecting. There was a doctor in Canada, Dr. Gabor Maté, an amazing man, who said to me, if you wanted to design a system that would make addiction worse, you would design that system. Now, there's a place that decided to do the exact opposite, and I went there to see how it worked. In the year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of mind-blowing, and every year, they tried the American way more and more. They punished people and stigmatized them and shamed them more, and every year, the problem got worse. And one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together, and basically said, look, we can't go on with a country where we're having ever more people becoming heroin addicts. Let's set up a panel of scientists and doctors to figure out what would genuinely solve the problem. And they set up a panel led by an amazing man called Dr. João Goulão, to look at all this new evidence, and they came back and they said, "Decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack, but" — and this is the crucial next step — "take all the money we used to spend on cutting addicts off, on disconnecting them, and spend it instead on reconnecting them with society." And that's not really what we think of as drug treatment in the United States and Britain. So they do do residential rehab, they do psychological therapy, that does have some value. But the biggest thing they did was the complete opposite of what we do: a massive program of job creation for addicts, and microloans for addicts to set up small businesses. So say you used to be a mechanic. When you're ready, they'll go to a garage, and they'll say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages. The goal was to make sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. And when I went and met the addicts in Portugal, what they said is, as they rediscovered purpose, they rediscovered bonds and relationships with the wider society. It'll be 15 years this year since that experiment began, and the results are in: injecting drug use is down in Portugal, according to the British Journal of Criminology, by 50 percent, five-zero percent. Overdose is massively down, HIV is massively down among addicts. Addiction in every study is significantly down. One of the ways you know it's worked so well is that almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back to the old system. Now, that's the political implications. I actually think there's a layer of implications to all this research below that. We live in a culture where people feel really increasingly vulnerable to all sorts of addictions, whether it's to their smartphones or to shopping or to eating. Before these talks began — you guys know this — we were told we weren't allowed to have our smartphones on, and I have to say, a lot of you looked an awful lot like addicts who were told their dealer was going to be unavailable for the next couple of hours. (Laughter) A lot of us feel like that, and it might sound weird to say, I've been talking about how disconnection is a major driver of addiction and weird to say it's growing, because you think we're the most connected society that's ever been, surely. But I increasingly began to think that the connections we have or think we have, are like a kind of parody of human connection. If you have a crisis in your life, you'll notice something. It won't be your Twitter followers who come to sit with you. It won't be your Facebook friends who help you turn it round. It'll be your flesh and blood friends who you have deep and nuanced and textured, face-to-face relationships with, and there's a study I learned about from Bill McKibben, the environmental writer, that I think tells us a lot about this. It looked at the number of close friends the average American believes they can call on in a crisis. That number has been declining steadily since the 1950s. The amount of floor space an individual has in their home has been steadily increasing, and I think that's like a metaphor for the choice we've made as a culture. We've traded floorspace for friends, we've traded stuff for connections, and the result is we are one of the loneliest societies there has ever been. And Bruce Alexander, the guy who did the Rat Park experiment, says, we talk all the time in addiction about individual recovery, and it's right to talk about that, but we need to talk much more about social recovery. Something's gone wrong with us, not just with individuals but as a group, and we've created a society where, for a lot of us, life looks a whole lot more like that isolated cage and a whole lot less like Rat Park. If I'm honest, this isn't why I went into it. I didn't go in to the discover the political stuff, the social stuff. I wanted to know how to help the people I love. And when I came back from this long journey and I'd learned all this, I looked at the addicts in my life, and if you're really candid, it's hard loving an addict, and there's going to be lots of people who know in this room. You are angry a lot of the time, and I think one of the reasons why this debate is so charged is because it runs through the heart of each of us, right? Everyone has a bit of them that looks at an addict and thinks, I wish someone would just stop you. And the kind of scripts we're told for how to deal with the addicts in our lives is typified by, I think, the reality show "Intervention," if you guys have ever seen it. I think everything in our lives is defined by reality TV, but that's another TED Talk. If you've ever seen the show "Intervention," it's a pretty simple premise. Get an addict, all the people in their life, gather them together, confront them with what they're doing, and they say, if you don't shape up, we're going to cut you off. So what they do is they take the connection to the addict, and they threaten it, they make it contingent on the addict behaving the way they want. And I began to think, I began to see why that approach doesn't work, and I began to think that's almost like the importing of the logic of the Drug War into our private lives. So I was thinking, how could I be Portuguese? And what I've tried to do now, and I can't tell you I do it consistently and I can't tell you it's easy, is to say to the addicts in my life that I want to deepen the connection with them, to say to them, I love you whether you're using or you're not. I love you, whatever state you're in, and if you need me, I'll come and sit with you because I love you and I don't want you to be alone or to feel alone. And I think the core of that message — you're not alone, we love you — has to be at every level of how we respond to addicts, socially, politically and individually. For 100 years now, we've been singing war songs about addicts. I think all along we should have been singing love songs to them, because the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. Thank you. (Applause) |
When to take a stand -- and when to let it go | {0: 'Ash Beckham approaches hard conversations from a place of compassion and empathy. '} | TEDxBoulder | This summer I was back in Ohio for a family wedding, and when I was there, there was a meet and greet with Anna and Elsa from "Frozen." Not the Anna and Elsa from "Frozen," as this was not a Disney-sanctioned event. These two entrepreneurs had a business of running princess parties. Your kid is turning five? They'll come sing some songs, sprinkle some fairy dust, it's great. And they were not about to miss out on the opportunity that was the phenomenon and that was "Frozen." So they get hired by a local toy store, kids come in on a Saturday morning, buy some Disney swag, get their picture taken with the princesses, call it a day. It's like Santa Claus without the seasonal restrictions. (Laughter) And my three-and-a-half-year-old niece Samantha was in the thick of it. She could care less that these two women were signing posters and coloring books as Snow Queen and Princess Ana with one N to avoid copyright lawsuits. (Laughter) According to my niece and the 200-plus kids in the parking lot that day, this was the Anna and Elsa from "Frozen." It is a blazing hot Saturday morning in August in Ohio. We get there at 10 o'clock, the scheduled start time, and we are handed number 59. By 11 o'clock they had called numbers 21 through 25; this was going to be a while, and there is no amount of free face painting or temporary tattoos that could prevent the meltdowns that were occurring outside of the store. (Laughter) So, by 12:30 we get called: "56 to 63, please." And as we walk in, it is a scene I can only describe you as saying it looked like Norway threw up. (Laughter) There were cardboard cut-out snowflakes covering the floor, glitter on every flat surface, and icicles all over the walls. And as we stood in line in an attempt to give my niece a better vantage point than the backside of the mother of number 58, I put her up on my shoulders, and she was instantly riveted by the sight of the princesses. And as we moved forward, her excitement only grew, and as we finally got to the front of the line, and number 58 unfurled her poster to be signed by the princesses, I could literally feel the excitement running through her body. And let's be honest, at that point, I was pretty excited too. (Laughter) I mean, the Scandinavian decadence was mesmerizing. (Laughter) So we get to the front of the line, and the haggard clerk turns to my niece and says, "Hi, honey. You're next! Do you want to get down, or you're going to stay on your dad's shoulders for the picture?' (Laughter) And I was, for a lack of a better word, frozen. (Laughter) It's amazing that in an unexpected instant we are faced with the question, who am I? Am I an aunt? Or am I an advocate? Millions of people have seen my video about how to have a hard conversation, and there one was, right in front of me. At the same time, there's nothing more important to me than the kids in my life, so I found myself in a situation that we so often find ourselves in, torn between two things, two impossible choices. Would I be an advocate? Would I take my niece off my shoulders and turn to the clerk and explain to her that I was in fact her aunt, not her father, and that she should be more careful and not to jump to gender conclusions based on haircuts and shoulder rides — (Laughter) — and while doing that, miss out on what was, to this point, the greatest moment of my niece's life. Or would I be an aunt? Would I brush off that comment, take a million pictures, and not be distracted for an instant from the pure joy of that moment, and by doing that, walk out with the shame that comes up for not standing up for myself, especially in front of my niece. Who was I? Which one was more important? Which role was more worth it? Was I an aunt? Or was I an advocate? And I had a split second to decide. We are taught right now that we are living in a world of constant and increasing polarity. It's so black and white, so us and them, so right and wrong. There is no middle, there is no gray, just polarity. Polarity is a state in which two ideas or opinions are completely opposite from each other; a diametrical opposition. Which side are you on? Are you unequivocally and without question antiwar, pro-choice, anti-death penalty, pro-gun regulation, proponent of open borders and pro-union? Or, are you absolutely and uncompromisingly pro-war, pro-life, pro-death penalty, a believer that the Second Amendment is absolute, anti-immigrant and pro-business? It's all or none, you're with us or against us. That is polarity. The problem with polarity and absolutes is that it eliminates the individuality of our human experience and that makes it contradictory to our human nature. But if we are pulled in these two directions, but it's not really where we exist — polarity is not our actual reality — where do we go from there? What's at the other end of that spectrum? I don't think it's an unattainable, harmonious utopia, I think the opposite of polarity is duality. Duality is a state of having two parts, but not in diametrical opposition, in simultaneous existence. Don't think it's possible? Here are the people I know: I know Catholics who are pro-choice, and feminists who wear hijabs, and veterans who are antiwar, and NRA members who think I should be able to get married. Those are the people I know, those are my friends and family, that is the majority of our society, that is you, that is me. (Applause) Duality is the ability to hold both things. But the question is: Can we own our duality? Can we have the courage to hold both things? I work at a restaurant in town, I became really good friends with the busser. I was a server and we had a great relationship, we had a really great time together. Her Spanish was great because she was from Mexico. (Laughter) That line actually went the other way. Her English was limited, but significantly better than my Spanish. But we were united by our similarities, not separated by our differences. And we were close, even though we came from very different worlds. She was from Mexico, she left her family behind so she could come here and afford them a better life back home. She was a devout conservative Catholic, a believer in traditional family values, stereotypical roles of men and women, and I was, well, me. (Laughter) But the things that bonded us were when she asked about my girlfriend, or she shared pictures that she had from her family back home. Those were the things that brought us together. So one day, we were in the back, scarfing down food as quickly as we could, gathered around a small table, during a very rare lull, and a new guy from the kitchen came over — who happened to be her cousin — and sat down with all the bravado and machismo that his 20-year-old body could hold. (Laughter) And he said to her, [in Spanish] "Does Ash have a boyfriend?" And she said, [in Spanish] "No, she has a girlfriend." And he said, [in Spanish] "A girlfriend?!?" And she set down her fork, and locked eyes with him, and said, [in Spanish] "Yes, a girlfriend. That is all." And his smug smile quickly dropped to one of maternal respect, grabbed his plate, walked off, went back to work. She never made eye contact with me. She left, did the same thing — it was a 10-second conversation, such a short interaction. And on paper, she had so much more in common with him: language, culture, history, family, her community was her lifeline here, but her moral compass trumped all of that. And a little bit later, they were joking around in the kitchen in Spanish, that had nothing to do with me, and that is duality. She didn't have to choose some P.C. stance on gayness over her heritage. She didn't have to choose her family over our friendship. It wasn't Jesus or Ash. (Laughter) (Applause) Her individual morality was so strongly rooted that she had the courage to hold both things. Our moral integrity is our responsibility and we must be prepared to defend it even when it's not convenient. That's what it means to be an ally, and if you're going to be an ally, you have to be an active ally: Ask questions, act when you hear something inappropriate, actually engage. I had a family friend who for years used to call my girlfriend my lover. Really? Lover? So overly sexual, so '70s gay porn. (Laughter) But she was trying, and she asked. She could have called her my friend, or my "friend," or my "special friend" — (Laughter) — or even worse, just not asked at all. Believe me, we would rather have you ask. I would rather have her say lover, than say nothing at all. People often say to me, "Well, Ash, I don't care. I don't see race or religion or sexuality. It doesn't matter to me. I don't see it." But I think the opposite of homophobia and racism and xenophobia is not love, it's apathy. If you don't see my gayness, then you don't see me. If it doesn't matter to you who I sleep with, then you cannot imagine what it feels like when I walk down the street late at night holding her hand, and approach a group of people and have to make the decision if I should hang on to it or if I should I drop it when all I want to do is squeeze it tighter. And the small victory I feel when I make it by and don't have to let go. And the incredible cowardice and disappointment I feel when I drop it. If you do not see that struggle that is unique to my human experience because I am gay, then you don't see me. If you are going to be an ally, I need you to see me. As individuals, as allies, as humans, we need to be able to hold both things: both the good and the bad, the easy and the hard. You don't learn how to hold two things just from the fluff, you learn it from the grit. And what if duality is just the first step? What if through compassion and empathy and human interaction we are able to learn to hold two things? And if we can hold two things, we can hold four, and if we can hold four, we can hold eight, and if we can hold eight, we can hold hundreds. We are complex individuals, swirls of contradiction. You are all holding so many things right now. What can you do to hold just a few more? So, back to Toledo, Ohio. I'm at the front of the line, niece on my shoulders, the frazzled clerk calls me Dad. Have you ever been mistaken for the wrong gender? Not even that. Have you ever been called something you are not? Here's what it feels like for me: I am instantly an internal storm of contrasting emotions. I break out into a sweat that is a combination of rage and humiliation, I feel like the entire store is staring at me, and I simultaneously feel invisible. I want to explode in a tirade of fury, and I want to crawl under a rock. And top all of that off with the frustration that I'm wearing an out-of-character tight-fitting purple t-shirt, so this whole store can see my boobs, to make sure this exact same thing doesn't happen. (Laughter) But, despite my best efforts to be seen as the gender I am, it still happens. And I hope with every ounce of my body that no one heard — not my sister, not my girlfriend, and certainly not my niece. I am accustomed to this familiar hurt, but I will do whatever I need to do to protect the people I love from it. But then I take my niece off my shoulders, and she runs to Elsa and Anna — the thing she's been waiting so long for — and all that stuff goes away. All that matters is the smile on her face. And as the 30 seconds we waited two and a half hours for comes to a close we gather up our things, and I lock eyes with the clerk again; and she gives me an apologetic smile and mouths, "I am so sorry!" (Laughter) And her humanity, her willingness to admit her mistake disarms me immediately, then I give her a: "It's okay, it happens. But thanks." And I realize in that moment that I don't have to be either an aunt or an advocate, I can be both. I can live in duality, and I can hold two things. And if I can hold two things in that environment, I can hold so many more things. As my girlfriend and my niece hold hands and skip out the front of the door, I turn to my sister and say, "Was it worth it?" And she said, "Are you kidding me? Did you see the look on her face? This was the greatest day of her life!" (Laughter) "It was worth the two and a half hours in the heat, it was worth the overpriced coloring book that we already had a copy of." (Laughter) "It was even worth you getting called Dad." (Laughter) And for the first time ever in my life, it actually was. Thank you, Boulder. Have a good night. (Applause) |
Human trafficking is all around you. This is how it works | {0: 'Noy Thrupkaew reports on human trafficking and the economics of exploitation through the lens of labor rights.'} | TED2015 | About 10 years ago, I went through a little bit of a hard time. So I decided to go see a therapist. I had been seeing her for a few months, when she looked at me one day and said, "Who actually raised you until you were three?" Seemed like a weird question. I said, "My parents." And she said, "I don't think that's actually the case; because if it were, we'd be dealing with things that are far more complicated than just this." It sounded like the setup to a joke, but I knew she was serious. Because when I first started seeing her, I was trying to be the funniest person in the room. And I would try and crack these jokes, but she caught on to me really quickly, and whenever I tried to make a joke, she would look at me and say, "That is actually really sad." (Laughter) It's terrible. So I knew I had to be serious, and I asked my parents who had actually raised me until I was three? And to my surprise, they said my primary caregiver had been a distant relative of the family. I had called her my auntie. I remember my auntie so clearly, it felt like she had been part of my life when I was much older. I remember the thick, straight hair, and how it would come around me like a curtain when she bent to pick me up; her soft, southern Thai accent; the way I would cling to her, even if she just wanted to go to the bathroom or get something to eat. I loved her, but [with] the ferocity that a child has sometimes before she understands that love also requires letting go. But my clearest and sharpest memory of my auntie, is also one of my first memories of life at all. I remember her being beaten and slapped by another member of my family. I remember screaming hysterically and wanting it to stop, as I did every single time it happened, for things as minor as wanting to go out with her friends, or being a little late. I became so hysterical over her treatment, that eventually, she was just beaten behind closed doors. Things got so bad for her that eventually she ran away. As an adult, I learned later that she had been just 19 when she was brought over from Thailand to the States to care for me, on a tourist visa. She wound up working in Illinois for a time, before eventually returning to Thailand, which is where I ran into her again, at a political rally in Bangkok. I clung to her again, as I had when I was a child, and I let go, and then I promised that I would call. I never did, though. Because I was afraid if I said everything that she meant to me — that I owed perhaps the best parts of who I became to her care, and that the words "I'm sorry" were like a thimble to bail out all the guilt and shame and rage I felt over everything she had endured to care for me for as long as she had — I thought if I said those words to her, I would never stop crying again. Because she had saved me. And I had not saved her. I'm a journalist, and I've been writing and researching human trafficking for the past eight years or so, and even so, I never put together this personal story with my professional life until pretty recently. I think this profound disconnect actually symbolizes most of our understanding about human trafficking. Because human trafficking is far more prevalent, complex and close to home than most of us realize. I spent time in jails and brothels, interviewed hundreds of survivors and law enforcement, NGO workers. And when I think about what we've done about human trafficking, I am hugely disappointed. Partly because we don't even talk about the problem right at all. When I say "human trafficking," most of you probably don't think about someone like my auntie. You probably think about a young girl or woman, who's been brutally forced into prostitution by a violent pimp. That is real suffering, and that is a real story. That story makes me angry for far more than just the reality of that situation, though. As a journalist, I really care about how we relate to each other through language, and the way we tell that story, with all the gory, violent detail, the salacious aspects — I call that "look at her scars" journalism. We use that story to convince ourselves that human trafficking is a bad man doing a bad thing to an innocent girl. That story lets us off the hook. It takes away all the societal context that we might be indicted for, for the structural inequality, or the poverty, or the barriers to migration. We let ourselves think that human trafficking is only about forced prostitution, when in reality, human trafficking is embedded in our everyday lives. Let me show you what I mean. Forced prostitution accounts for 22 percent of human trafficking. Ten percent is in state- imposed forced labor. but a whopping 68 percent is for the purpose of creating the goods and delivering the services that most of us rely on every day, in sectors like agricultural work, domestic work and construction. That is food and care and shelter. And somehow, these most essential workers are also among the world's most underpaid and exploited today. Human trafficking is the use of force, fraud or coercion to compel another person's labor. And it's found in cotton fields, and coltan mines, and even car washes in Norway and England. It's found in U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's found in Thailand's fishing industry. That country has become the largest exporter of shrimp in the world. But what are the circumstances behind all that cheap and plentiful shrimp? Thai military were caught selling Burmese and Cambodian migrants onto fishing boats. Those fishing boats were taken out, the men put to work, and they were thrown overboard if they made the mistake of falling sick, or trying to resist their treatment. Those fish were then used to feed shrimp, The shrimp were then sold to four major global retailers: Costco, Tesco, Walmart and Carrefour. Human trafficking is found on a smaller scale than just that, and in places you would never even imagine. Traffickers have forced young people to drive ice cream trucks, or to sing in touring boys' choirs. Trafficking has even been found in a hair braiding salon in New Jersey. The scheme in that case was incredible. The traffickers found young families who were from Ghana and Togo, and they told these families that "your daughters are going to get a fine education in the United States." They then located winners of the green card lottery, and they told them, "We'll help you out. We'll get you a plane ticket. We'll pay your fees. All you have to do is take this young girl with you, say that she's your sister or your spouse. Once everyone arrived in New Jersey, the young girls were taken away, and put to work for 14-hour days, seven days a week, for five years. They made their traffickers nearly four million dollars. This is a huge problem. So what have we done about it? We've mostly turned to the criminal justice system. But keep in mind, most victims of human trafficking are poor and marginalized. They're migrants, people of color. Sometimes they're in the sex trade. And for populations like these, the criminal justice system is too often part of the problem, rather than the solution. In study after study, in countries ranging from Bangladesh to the United States, between 20 and 60 percent of the people in the sex trade who were surveyed said that they had been raped or assaulted by the police in the past year alone. People in prostitution, including people who have been trafficked into it, regularly receive multiple convictions for prostitution. Having that criminal record makes it so much more difficult to leave poverty, leave abuse, or leave prostitution, if that person so desires. Workers outside of the sex sector — if they try and resist their treatment, they risk deportation. In case after case I've studied, employers have no problem calling on law enforcement to try and threaten or deport their striking trafficked workers. If those workers run away, they risk becoming part of the great mass of undocumented workers who are also subject to the whims of law enforcement if they're caught. Law enforcement is supposed to identify victims and prosecute traffickers. But out of an estimated 21 million victims of human trafficking in the world, they have helped and identified fewer than 50,000 people. That's like comparing the population of the world to the population of Los Angeles, proportionally speaking. As for convictions, out of an estimated 5,700 convictions in 2013, fewer than 500 were for labor trafficking. Keep in mind that labor trafficking accounts for 68 percent of all trafficking, but fewer than 10 percent of the convictions. I've heard one expert say that trafficking happens where need meets greed. I'd like to add one more element to that. Trafficking happens in sectors where workers are excluded from protections, and denied the right to organize. Trafficking doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens in systematically degraded work environments. You might be thinking, oh, she's talking about failed states, or war-torn states, or — I'm actually talking about the United States. Let me tell you what that looks like. I spent many months researching a trafficking case called Global Horizons, involving hundreds of Thai farm workers. They were sent all over the States, to work in Hawaii pineapple plantations, and Washington apple orchards, and anywhere the work was needed. They were promised three years of solid agricultural work. So they made a calculated risk. They sold their land, they sold their wives' jewelry, to make thousands in recruitment fees for this company, Global Horizons. But once they were brought over, their passports were confiscated. Some of the men were beaten and held at gunpoint. They worked so hard they fainted in the fields. This case hit me so hard. After I came back home, I was wandering through the grocery store, and I froze in the produce department. I was remembering the over-the-top meals the Global Horizons survivors would make for me every time I showed up to interview them. They finished one meal with this plate of perfect, long-stemmed strawberries, and as they handed them to me, they said, "Aren't these the kind of strawberries you eat with somebody special in the States? And don't they taste so much better when you know the people whose hands picked them for you?" As I stood in that grocery store weeks later, I realized I had no idea of who to thank for this plenty, and no idea of how they were being treated. So, like the journalist I am, I started digging into the agricultural sector. And I found there are too many fields, and too few labor inspectors. I found multiple layers of plausible deniability between grower and distributor and processor, and God knows who else. The Global Horizons survivors had been brought to the States on a temporary guest worker program. That guest worker program ties a person's legal status to his or her employer, and denies that worker the right to organize. Mind you, none of what I am describing about this agricultural sector or the guest worker program is actually human trafficking. It is merely what we find legally tolerable. And I would argue this is fertile ground for exploitation. And all of this had been hidden to me, before I had tried to understand it. I wasn't the only person grappling with these issues. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is one of the biggest anti-trafficking philanthropists in the world. And even he wound up accidentally investing nearly 10 million dollars in the pineapple plantation cited as having the worst working conditions in that Global Horizons case. When he found out, he and his wife were shocked and horrified, and they wound up writing an op-ed for a newspaper, saying that it was up to all of us to learn everything we can about the labor and supply chains of the products that we support. I totally agree. What would happen if each one of us decided that we are no longer going to support companies if they don't eliminate exploitation from their labor and supply chains? If we demanded laws calling for the same? If all the CEOs out there decided that they were going to go through their businesses and say, "no more"? If we ended recruitment fees for migrant workers? If we decided that guest workers should have the right to organize without fear of retaliation? These would be decisions heard around the world. This isn't a matter of buying a fair-trade peach and calling it a day, buying a guilt-free zone with your money. That's not how it works. This is the decision to change a system that is broken, and that we have unwittingly but willingly allowed ourselves to profit from and benefit from for too long. We often dwell on human trafficking survivors' victimization. But that is not my experience of them. Over all the years that I've been talking to them, they have taught me that we are more than our worst days. Each one of us is more than what we have lived through. Especially trafficking survivors. These people were the most resourceful and resilient and responsible in their communities. They were the people that you would take a gamble on. You'd say, I'm gong to sell my rings, because I have the chance to send you off to a better future. They were the emissaries of hope. These survivors don't need saving. They need solidarity, because they're behind some of the most exciting social justice movements out there today. The nannies and housekeepers who marched with their families and their employers' families — their activism got us an international treaty on domestic workers' rights. The Nepali women who were trafficked into the sex trade — they came together, and they decided that they were going to make the world's first anti-trafficking organization actually headed and run by trafficking survivors themselves. These Indian shipyard workers were trafficked to do post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction. They were threatened with deportation, but they broke out of their work compound and they marched from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., to protest labor exploitation. They cofounded an organization called the National Guest Worker Alliance, and through this organization, they have wound up helping other workers bring to light exploitation and abuses in supply chains in Walmart and Hershey's factories. And although the Department of Justice declined to take their case, a team of civil rights lawyers won the first of a dozen civil suits this February, and got their clients 14 million dollars. These survivors are fighting for people they don't even know yet, other workers, and for the possibility of a just world for all of us. This is our chance to do the same. This is our chance to make the decision that tells us who we are, as a people and as a society; that our prosperity is no longer prosperity, as long as it is pinned to other people's pain; that our lives are inextricably woven together; and that we have the power to make a different choice. I was so reluctant to share my story of my auntie with you. Before I started this TED process and climbed up on this stage, I had told literally a handful of people about it, because, like many a journalist, I am far more interested in learning about your stories than sharing much, if anything, about my own. I also haven't done my journalistic due diligence on this. I haven't issued my mountains of document requests, and interviewed everyone and their mother, and I haven't found my auntie yet. I don't know her story of what happened, and of her life now. The story as I've told it to you is messy and unfinished. But I think it mirrors the messy and unfinished situation we're all in, when it comes to human trafficking. We are all implicated in this problem. But that means we are all also part of its solution. Figuring out how to build a more just world is our work to do, and our story to tell. So let us tell it the way we should have done, from the very beginning. Let us tell this story together. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
A better way to talk about abortion | {0: 'As abortion debates have turned black-and-white, Aspen Baker advocates being "pro-voice" -- listening respectfully and compassionately to all kinds of experiences.'} | TEDWomen 2015 | It was the middle of summer and well past closing time in the downtown Berkeley bar where my friend Polly and I worked together as bartenders. Usually at the end of our shift we had a drink — but not that night. "I'm pregnant. Not sure what I'm going to do yet," I told Polly. Without hesitation, she replied, "I've had an abortion." Before Polly, no one had ever told me that she'd had an abortion. I'd graduated from college just a few months earlier and I was in a new relationship when I found out that I was pregnant. When I thought about my choices, I honestly did not know how to decide, what criteria I should use. How would I know what the right decision was? I worried that I would regret an abortion later. Coming of age on the beaches of Southern California, I grew up in the middle of our nation's abortion wars. I was born in a trailer on the third anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. Our community was surfing Christians. We cared about God, the less fortunate, and the ocean. Everyone was pro-life. As a kid, the idea of abortion made me so sad that I knew if I ever got pregnant I could never have one. And then I did. It was a step towards the unknown. But Polly had given me a very special gift: the knowledge that I wasn't alone and the realization that abortion was something that we can talk about. Abortion is common. According to the Guttmacher Institute, one in three women in America will have an abortion in their lifetime. But for the last few decades, the dialogue around abortion in the United States has left little room for anything beyond pro-life and pro-choice. It's political and polarizing. But as much as abortion is hotly debated, it's still rare for us, whether as fellow women or even just as fellow people, to talk with one another about the abortions that we have. There is a gap. Between what happens in politics and what happens in real life, and in that gap, a battlefield mentality. An "are you with us or against us?" stance takes root. This isn't just about abortion. There are so many important issues that we can't talk about. And so finding ways to shift the conflict to a place of conversation is the work of my life. There are two main ways to get started. One way is to listen closely. And the other way is to share stories. So, 15 years ago, I cofounded an organization called Exhale to start listening to people who have had abortions. The first thing we did was create a talk-line, where women and men could call to get emotional support. Free of judgment and politics, believe it or not, nothing like our sevice had ever existed. We needed a new framework that could hold all the experiences that we were hearing on our talk-line. The feminist who regrets her abortion. The Catholic who is grateful for hers. The personal experiences that weren't fitting neatly into one box or the other. We didn't think it was right to ask women to pick a side. We wanted to show them that the whole world was on their side, as they were going through this deeply personal experience. So we invented "pro-voice." Beyond abortion, pro-voice works on hard issues that we've struggled with globally for years, issues like immigration, religious tolerance, violence against women. It also works on deeply personal topics that might only matter to you and your immediate family and friends. They have a terminal illness, their mother just died, they have a child with special needs and they can't talk about it. Listening and storytelling are the hallmarks of pro-voice practice. Listening and storytelling. That sounds pretty nice. Sounds maybe, easy? We could all do that. It's not easy. It's very hard. Pro-voice is hard because we are talking about things everyone's fighting about or the things that no one wants to talk about. I wish I could tell you that when you decide to be pro-voice, that you'll find beautiful moments of breakthrough and gardens full of flowers, where listening and storytelling creates wonderful "a-ha" moments. I wish I could tell you that there would be a feminist welcoming party for you, or that there's a long-lost sisterhood of people who are just ready to have your back when you get slammed. But it can be vulnerable and exhausting to tell our own stories when it feels like nobody cares. And if we truly listen to one another, we will hear things that demand that we shift our own perceptions. There is no perfect time and there is no perfect place to start a difficult conversation. There's never a time when everyone will be on the same page, share the same lens, or know the same history. So, let's talk about listening and how to be a good listener. There's lots of ways to be a good listener and I'm going to give you just a couple. One is to ask open-ended questions. You can ask yourself or someone that you know, "How are you feeling?" "What was that like?" "What do you hope for, now?" Another way to be a good listener is to use reflective language. If someone is talking about their own personal experience, use the words that they use. If someone is talking about an abortion and they say the word "baby," you can say "baby." If they say "fetus," you can say "fetus." If someone describes themselves as gender queer to you, you can say "gender queer." If someone kind of looks like a he, but they say they're a she — it's cool. Call that person a she. When we reflect the language of the person who is sharing their own story, we are conveying that we are interested in understanding who they are and what they're going through. The same way that we hope people are interested in knowing us. So, I'll never forget being in one of the Exhale counselor meetings, listening to a volunteer talk about how she was getting a lot of calls from Christian women who were talking about God. Now, some of our volunteers are religious, but this particular one was not. At first, it felt a little weird for her to talk to callers about God. So, she decided to get comfortable. And she stood in front of her mirror at home, and she said the word "God." "God." "God." "God." "God." "God." "God." Over and over and over again until the word no longer felt strange coming out her mouth. Saying the word God did not turn this volunteer into a Christian, but it did make her a much better listener of Christian women. So, another way to be pro-voice is to share stories, and one risk that you take on, when you share your story with someone else, is that given the same set of circumstances as you they might actually make a different decision. For example, if you're telling a story about your abortion, realize that she might have had the baby. She might have placed for adoption. She might have told her parents and her partner — or not. She might have felt relief and confidence, even though you felt sad and lost. This is okay. Empathy gets created the moment we imagine ourselves in someone else's shoes. It doesn't mean we all have to end up in the same place. It's not agreement, it's not sameness that pro-voice is after. It creates a culture and a society that values what make us special and unique. It values what makes us human, our flaws and our imperfections. And this way of thinking allows us to see our differences with respect, instead of fear. And it generates the empathy that we need to overcome all the ways that we try to hurt one another. Stigma, shame, prejudice, discrimination, oppression. Pro-voice is contagious, and the more it's practiced the more it spreads. So, last year I was pregnant again. This time I was looking forward to the birth of my son. And while pregnant, I had never been asked how I was feeling so much in all my life. (Laughter) And however I replied, whether I was feeling wonderful and excited or scared and totally freaked out, there was always someone there giving me a "been there" response. It was awesome. It was a welcome, yet dramatic departure from what I experience when I talk about my mixed feelings of my abortion. Pro-voice is about the real stories of real people making an impact on the way abortion and so many other politicized and stigmatized issues are understood and discussed. From sexuality and mental health to poverty and incarceration. Far beyond definition as single right or wrong decisions, our experiences can exist on a spectrum. Pro-voice focuses that conversation on human experience and it makes support and respect possible for all. Thank you. (Applause) |
This is what enduring love looks like | {0: 'Stacey Baker assigns photography for the wide-ranging vision of the weekly New York Times Magazine.', 1: 'Alec Soth makes large-scale projects that are as much about dreams and heartache as they are about charting the landscape of Middle America.'} | TED2015 | Alec Soth: So about 10 years ago, I got a call from a woman in Texas, Stacey Baker, and she'd seen some of my photographs in an art exhibition and was wondering if she could commission me to take a portrait of her parents. Now, at the time I hadn't met Stacey, and I thought this was some sort of wealthy oil tycoon and I'd struck it rich, but it was only later that I found out she'd actually taken out a loan to make this happen. I took the picture of her parents, but I was actually more excited about photographing Stacey. The picture I made that day ended up becoming one of my best-known portraits. At the time I made this picture, Stacey was working as an attorney for the State of Texas. Not long after, she left her job to study photography in Maine, and while she was there, she ended up meeting the director of photography at the New York Times Magazine and was actually offered a job. Stacey Baker: In the years since, Alec and I have done a number of magazine projects together, and we've become friends. A few months ago, I started talking to Alec about a fascination of mine. I've always been obsessed with how couples meet. I asked Alec how he and his wife Rachel met, and he told me the story of a high school football game where she was 16 and he was 15, and he asked her out. He liked her purple hair. She said yes, and that was it. I then asked Alec if he'd be interested in doing a photography project exploring this question. AS: And I was interested in the question, but I was actually much more interested in Stacey's motivation for asking it, particularly since I'd never known Stacey to have a boyfriend. So as part of this project, I thought it'd be interesting if she tried to meet someone. So my idea was to have Stacey here go speed dating in Las Vegas on Valentine's Day. (Laughter) (Applause) (Music) SB: We ended up at what was advertised as the world's largest speed dating event. I had 19 dates and each date lasted three minutes. Participants were given a list of ice- breaker questions to get the ball rolling, things like, "If you could be any kind of animal, what would you be?" That sort of thing. My first date was Colin. He's from England, and he once married a woman he met after placing an ad for a Capricorn. Alec and I saw him at the end of the evening, and he said he'd kissed a woman in line at one of the concession stands. Zack and Chris came to the date-a-thon together. This is Carl. I asked Carl, "What's the first thing you notice about a woman?" He said, "Tits." (Laughter) Matthew is attracted to women with muscular calves. We talked about running. He does triathlons, I run half-marathons. Alec actually liked his eyes and asked if I was attracted to him, but I wasn't, and I don't think he was attracted to me either. Austin and Mike came together. Mike asked me a hypothetical question. He said, "You're in an elevator running late for a meeting. Someone makes a dash for the elevator. Do you hold it open for them?" And I said I would not. (Laughter) Cliff said the first thing he notices about a woman is her teeth, and we complimented each other's teeth. Because he's an open mouth sleeper, he says he has to floss more to help prevent gum disease, and so I asked him how often he flosses, and he said, "Every other day." (Laughter) Now, as someone who flosses twice a day, I wasn't really sure that that was flossing more but I don't think I said that out loud. Bill is an auditor, and we talked the entire three minutes about auditing. (Laughter) The first thing Spencer notices about a woman is her complexion. He feels a lot of women wear too much makeup, and that they should only wear enough to accentuate the features that they have. I told him I didn't wear any makeup at all and he seemed to think that that was a good thing. Craig told me he didn't think I was willing to be vulnerable. He was also frustrated when I couldn't remember my most embarrassing moment. He thought I was lying, but I wasn't. I didn't think he liked me at all, but at the end of the night, he came back to me and he gave me a box of chocolates. William was really difficult to talk to. I think he was drunk. (Laughter) Actor Chris McKenna was the MC of the event. He used to be on "The Young and the Restless." I didn't actually go on a date with him. Alec said he saw several women give their phone numbers to him. Needless to say, I didn't fall in love. I didn't feel a particular connection with any of the men that I went on dates with, and I didn't feel like they felt a particular connection with me either. AS: Now, the most beautiful thing to me — (Laughter) — as a photographer is the quality of vulnerability. The physical exterior reveals a crack in which you can get a glimpse at a more fragile interior. At this date-a-thon event, I saw so many examples of that, but as I watched Stacey's dates and talked to her about them, I realized how different photographic love is from real love. What is real love? How does it work? In order to work on this question and to figure out how someone goes from meeting on a date to having a life together, Stacey and I went to Sun City Summerlin, which is the largest retirement community in Las Vegas. Our contact there was George, who runs the community's photography club. He arranged for us to meet other couples in their makeshift photo studio. SB: After 45 years of marriage, Anastasia's husband died two years ago, so we asked if she had an old wedding picture. She met her husband when she was a 15-year-old waitress at a small barbecue place in Michigan. He was 30. She'd lied about her age. He was the first person she'd dated. Dean had been named photographer of the year in Las Vegas two years in a row, and this caught Alec's attention, as did the fact that he met his wife, Judy, at the same age when Alec met Rachel. Dean admitted that he likes to look at beautiful women, but he's never questioned his decision to marry Judy. AS: George met Josephine at a parish dance. He was 18, she was 15. Like a lot of the couples we met, they weren't especially philosophical about their early choices. George said something that really stuck with me. He said, "When you get that feeling, you just go with it." Bob and Trudy met on a blind date when she was still in high school. They said they weren't particularly attracted to each other when the first met. Nevertheless, they were married soon after. SB: The story that stayed with me the most was that of George, the photography club president, and his wife, Mary. This was George and Mary's second marriage. They met at a country-western club in Louisville, Kentucky called the Sahara. He was there alone drinking and she was with friends. When they started dating, he owed the IRS 9,000 dollars in taxes, and she offered to help him get out of debt, so for the next year, he turned his paychecks over to Mary, and she got him out of debt. George was actually an alcoholic when they married, and Mary knew it. At some point in their marriage, he says he consumed 54 beers in one day. Another time, when he was drunk, he threatened to kill Mary and her two kids, but they escaped and a SWAT team was called to the house. Amazingly, Mary took him back, and eventually things got better. George has been involved in Alcoholics Anonymous and hasn't had a drink in 36 years. (Music) At the end of the day, after we left Sun City, I told Alec that I didn't actually think that the stories of how these couples met were all that interesting. What was more interesting was how they managed to stay together. AS: They all had this beautiful quality of endurance, but that was true of the singles, too. The world is hard, and the singles were out there trying to connect with other people, and the couples were holding onto each other after all these decades. My favorite pictures on this trip were of Joe and Roseanne. Now, by the time we met Joe and Roseanne, we'd gotten in the habit of asking couples if they had an old wedding photograph. In their case, they simultaneously pulled out of their wallets the exact same photograph. What's more beautiful, I thought to myself, this image of a young couple who has just fallen in love or the idea of these two people holding onto this image for decades? Thank you. (Applause) |
What happened when I open-sourced my brain cancer | {0: 'An artist, hacker and interaction designer, Salvatore Iaconesi embarked on a bold open-source project in 2012. Subject: his own brain cancer'} | TEDMED 2013 | This back here was my brain cancer. Isn't it nice? (Laughter) The key phrase is "was," phew. (Applause) Having brain cancer was really, as you can imagine, shocking news for me. I knew nothing about cancer. In Western cultures, when you have cancer, it's as if you disappear in a way. Your life as a complex human being is replaced by medical data: Your images, your exams, your lab values, a list of medicines. And everyone changes as well. You suddenly become a disease on legs. Doctors start speaking a language which you don't understand. They start pointing their fingers at your body and your images. People start changing as well because they start dealing with the disease, instead of with the human being. They say, "What did the doctor say?" before even saying, "Hello." And in the meanwhile, you're left with questions to which nobody gives an answer. These are the "Can I?" questions: Can I work while I have cancer? Can I study? Can I make love? Can I be creative? And you wonder, "What have I done to deserve this?" You wonder, "Can I change something about my lifestyle?" You wonder, "Can I do something? Are there any other options?" And, obviously, doctors are the good guys in all these scenarios, because they are very professional and dedicated to curing you. But they also are very used to having to deal with patients, so I'd say that they sometimes lose the idea that this is torture for you and that you become, literally, a patient — "patient" means "the one who waits." (Laughter) Things are changing, but classically, they tend to not engage you in any way to learn about your condition, to get your friends and family engaged, or showing you ways in which you can change your lifestyle to minimize the risks of what you're going through. But instead, you're forced there to wait in the hands of a series of very professional strangers. While I was in the hospital, I asked for a printed-out picture of my cancer and I spoke with it. It was really hard to obtain, because it's not common practice to ask for a picture of your own cancer. I talked to it and I said, "Okay, cancer, you're not all there is to me. There's more to me. A cure, whichever it is, will have to deal with the whole of me." And so, the next day, I left the hospital against medical advice. I was determined to change my relationship with the cancer and I was determined to learn more about my cancer before doing anything as drastic as a surgery. I'm an artist, I use several forms of open-source technologies and open information in my practice. So my best bet was to get it all out there, get the information out there, and use it so that it could be accessed by anyone. So I created a website, which is called La Cura, on which I put my medical data, online. I actually had to hack it and that's a thing which we can talk about in another speech. (Laughter) I chose this word, La Cura — La Cura in Italian means "the cure" — because in many different cultures, the word "cure" can mean many different things. In our Western cultures, it means eradicating or reversing a disease, but in different cultures, for example, a culture from Asia, from the Mediterranean, from Latin countries, from Africa, it can mean many more things. Of course, I was interested in the opinions of doctors and healthcare providers, but I was also interested in the cure of the artist, of the poet, of the designer, of, who knows, the musicians. I was interested in the social cure, I was interested in the psychological cure, I was interested in the spiritual cure, I was interested in the emotional cure, I was interested in any form of cure. And, it worked. The La Cura website went viral. I received lots of media attention from Italy and from abroad and I quickly received more than 500,000 contacts — emails, social networking — most of them were a suggestion on how to cure my cancer, but more of them were about how to cure myself as a full individual. For example, many thousands of videos, images, pictures, art performances were produced for La Cura. For example, here we see Francesca Fini in her performance. Or, as artist Patrick Lichty has done: He produced a 3D sculpture of my tumor and put it on sale on Thingiverse. Now you can have my cancer, too! (Laughter) Which is a nice thing, if you think about it, we can share our cancer. And this was going on — scientists, the traditional medicine experts, several researchers, doctors — all connected with me to give advice. With all this information and support, I was able to form a team of several neurosurgeons, traditional doctors, oncologists, and several hundred volunteers with whom I was able to discuss the information I was receiving, which is very important. And together, we were able to form a strategy for my own cure in many languages, according to many cultures. And the current strategy spans the whole world and thousands of years of human history, which is quite remarkable for me. [Surgery] The follow-up MRIs showed, luckily, little to no growth of the cancer. So I was able to take my time and choose. I chose the doctor I wanted to work with, I chose the hospital I wanted to stay in, and in the meanwhile, I was supported by thousands of people, none of whom felt pity for me. Everyone felt like they could take an active role in helping me to get well, and this was the most important part of La Cura. What are the outcomes? I'm fine, as you can see, pretty fine. (Applause) I had excellent news after the surgery — I have — I had a very low-grade glioma, which is a "good" kind of cancer which doesn't grow a lot. I have completely changed my life and my lifestyle. Everything I did was thoughtfully designed to get me engaged. Up until the very last few minutes of the surgery, which was very intense, a matrix of electrodes was implanted in my brain from this side, to be able to build a functional map of what the brain controls. And right before the operation, we were able to discuss the functional map of my brain with the doctor, to understand which risks I was running into and if there were any I wanted to avoid. Obviously, there were. [Open] And this openness was really the fundamental part of La Cura. Thousands of people shared their stories, their experiences. Doctors got to talk with people they don't usually consult when they think about cancer. I'm a self-founding, continuous state of translation among many different languages, in which science meets emotion and conventional research meets traditional research. [Society] The most important thing of La Cura was to feel like a part of a really engaged and connected society whose wellness really depends on the wellness of all of its components. This global performance is my open-source cure for cancer. And from what I feel, it's a cure for me, but for us all. Thank you. (Applause). |
What we learn from insects' sex lives | {0: 'Marlene Zuk studies insect behavior -- and how humans use animal behavior to think about how we behave ourselves.'} | TEDWomen 2015 | So, people are more afraid of insects than they are of dying. (Laughter) At least, according to a 1973 "Book of Lists" survey which preceded all those online best, worst, funniest lists that you see today. Only heights and public speaking exceeded the six-legged as sources of fear. And I suspect if you had put spiders in there, the combinations of insects and spiders would have just topped the chart. Now, I am not one of those people. I really love insects. I think they're interesting and beautiful, and sometimes even cute. (Laughter) And I'm not alone. For centuries, some of the greatest minds in science, from Charles Darwin to E.O. Wilson, have drawn inspiration from studying some of the smallest minds on Earth. Well, why is that? What is that keeps us coming back to insects? Some of it, of course, is just the sheer magnitude of almost everything about them. They're more numerous than any other kind of animal. We don't even know how many species of insects there are, because new ones are being discovered all the time. There are at least a million, maybe as many as 10 million. This means that you could have an insect-of-the-month calendar and not have to reuse a species for over 80,000 years. (Laughter) Take that, pandas and kittens! (Laughter) More seriously, insects are essential. We need them. It's been estimated that 1 out of every 3 bites of food is made possible by a pollinator. Scientist use insects to make fundamental discoveries about everything from the structure of our nervous systems to how our genes and DNA work. But what I love most about insects is what they can tell us about our own behavior. Insects seem like they do everything that people do. They meet, they mate, they fight, they break up. And they do so with what looks like love or animosity. But what drives their behaviors is really different than what drives our own, and that difference can be really illuminating. There's nowhere where that's more true than when it comes to one of our most consuming interests — sex. Now, I will maintain. and I think I can defend, what may seem like a surprising statement. I think sex in insects is more interesting than sex in people. (Laughter) And the wild variety that we see makes us challenge some of our own assumptions about what it means to be male and female. Of course, to start with, a lot of insects don't need to have sex at all to reproduce. Female aphids can make little, tiny clones of themselves without ever mating. Virgin birth, right there. On your rose bushes. (Laughter) When they do have sex, even their sperm is more interesting than human sperm. There are some kinds of fruit flies whose sperm is longer than the male's own body. And that's important because the males use their sperm to compete. Now, male insects do compete with weapons, like the horns on these beetles. But they also compete after mating with their sperm. Dragonflies and damselflies have penises that look kind of like Swiss Army knives with all of the attachments pulled out. (Laughter) They use these formidable devices like scoops, to remove the sperm from previous males that the female has mated with. (Laughter) So, what can we learn from this? (Laughter) All right, it is not a lesson in the sense of us imitating them or of them setting an example for us to follow. Which, given this, is probably just as well. And also, did I mention sexual cannibalism is rampant among insects? So, no, that's not the point. But what I think insects do, is break a lot of the rules that we humans have about the sex roles. So, people have this idea that nature dictates kind of a 1950s sitcom version of what males and females are like. So that males are always supposed to be dominant and aggressive, and females are passive and coy. But that's just not the case. So for example, take katydids, which are relatives of crickets and grasshoppers. The males are very picky about who they mate with, because they not only transfer sperm during mating, they also give the female something called a nuptial gift. You can see two katydids mating in these photos. In both panels, the male's the one on the right, and that sword-like appendage is the female's egg-laying organ. The white blob is the sperm, the green blob is the nuptial gift, and the male manufactures this from his own body and it's extremely costly to produce. It can weigh up to a third of his body mass. I will now pause for a moment and let you think about what it would be like if human men, every time they had sex, had to produce something that weighed 50, 60, 70 pounds. (Laughter) Okay, they would not be able to do that very often. (Laughter) And indeed, neither can the katydids. And so what that means is the katydid males are very choosy about who they offer these nuptial gifts to. Now, the gift is very nutritious, and the female eats it during and after mating. So, the bigger it is, the better off the male is, because that means more time for his sperm to drain into her body and fertilize her eggs. But it also means that the males are very passive about mating, whereas the females are extremely aggressive and competitive, in an attempt to get as many of these nutritious nuptial gifts as they can. So, it's not exactly a stereotypical set of rules. Even more generally though, males are actually not all that important in the lives of a lot of insects. In the social insects — the bees and wasps and ants — the individuals that you see every day — the ants going back and forth to your sugar bowl, the honey bees that are flitting from flower to flower — all of those are always female. People have had a hard time getting their head around that idea for millennia. The ancient Greeks knew that there was a class of bees, the drones, that are larger than the workers, although they disapproved of the drones' laziness because they could see that the drones just hang around the hive until the mating flight — they're the males. They hang around until the mating flight, but they don't participate in gathering nectar or pollen. The Greeks couldn't figure out the drones' sex, and part of the confusion was that they were aware of the stinging ability of bees but they found it difficult to believe that any animals that bore such a weapon could possibly be a female. Aristotle tried to get involved as well. He suggested, "OK, if the stinging individuals are going to be the males ..." Then he got confused, because that would have meant the males were also taking care of the young in a colony, and he seemed to think that would be completely impossible. He then concluded that maybe bees had the organs of both sexes in the same individual, which is not that far-fetched, some animals do that, but he never really did get it figured out. And you know, even today, my students, for instance, call every animal they see, including insects, a male. And when I tell them that the ferocious army-ant soldiers with their giant jaws, used to defend the colony, are all always female, they seem to not quite believe me. (Laughter) And certainly all of the movies — Antz, Bee Movie — portray the main character in the social insects as being male. Well, what difference does this make? These are movies. They're fiction. They have talking animals in them. What difference does it make if they talk like Jerry Seinfeld? I think it does matter, and it's a problem that actually is part of a much deeper one that has implications for medicine and health and a lot of other aspects of our lives. You all know that scientists use what we call model systems, which are creatures — white rats or fruit flies — that are kind of stand-ins for all other animals, including people. And the idea is that what's true for a person will also be true for the white rat. And by and large, that turns out to be the case. But you can take the idea of a model system too far. And what I think we've done, is use males, in any species, as though they are the model system. The norm. The way things are supposed to be. And females as a kind of variant — something special that you only study after you get the basics down. And so, back to the insects. I think what that means is that people just couldn't see what was in front of them. Because they assumed that the world's stage was largely occupied by male players and females would only have minor, walk-on roles. But when we do that, we really miss out on a lot of what nature is like. And we can also miss out on the way natural, living things, including people, can vary. And I think that's why we've used males as models in a lot of medical research, something that we know now to be a problem if we want the results to apply to both men and women. Well, the last thing I really love about insects is something that a lot of people find unnerving about them. They have little, tiny brains with very little cognitive ability, the way we normally think of it. They have complicated behavior, but they lack complicated brains. And so, we can't just think of them as though they're little people because they don't do things the way that we do. I really love that it's difficult to anthropomorphize insects, to look at them and just think of them like they're little people in exoskeletons, with six legs. (Laughter) Instead, you really have to accept them on their own terms, because insects make us question what's normal and what's natural. Now, you know, people write fiction and talk about parallel universes. They speculate about the supernatural, maybe the spirits of the departed walking among us. The allure of another world is something that people say is part of why they want to dabble in the paranormal. But as far as I'm concerned, who needs to be able to see dead people, when you can see live insects? Thank you. (Applause) |
When online shaming goes too far | {0: 'Jon Ronson is a writer and documentary filmmaker who dips into every flavor of madness, extremism and obsession.'} | TEDGlobalLondon | In the early days of Twitter, it was like a place of radical de-shaming. People would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, "Oh my God, I'm exactly the same." Voiceless people realized that they had a voice, and it was powerful and eloquent. If a newspaper ran some racist or homophobic column, we realized we could do something about it. We could get them. We could hit them with a weapon that we understood but they didn't — a social media shaming. Advertisers would withdraw their advertising. When powerful people misused their privilege, we were going to get them. This was like the democratization of justice. Hierarchies were being leveled out. We were going to do things better. Soon after that, a disgraced pop science writer called Jonah Lehrer — he'd been caught plagiarizing and faking quotes, and he was drenched in shame and regret, he told me. And he had the opportunity to publicly apologize at a foundation lunch. This was going to be the most important speech of his life. Maybe it would win him some salvation. He knew before he arrived that the foundation was going to be live-streaming his event, but what he didn't know until he turned up, was that they'd erected a giant screen Twitter feed right next to his head. (Laughter) Another one in a monitor screen in his eye line. I don't think the foundation did this because they were monstrous. I think they were clueless: I think this was a unique moment when the beautiful naivety of Twitter was hitting the increasingly horrific reality. And here were some of the Tweets that were cascading into his eye line, as he was trying to apologize: "Jonah Lehrer, boring us into forgiving him." (Laughter) And, "Jonah Lehrer has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame." That one must have been written by the best psychiatrist ever, to know that about such a tiny figure behind a lectern. And, "Jonah Lehrer is just a frigging sociopath." That last word is a very human thing to do, to dehumanize the people we hurt. It's because we want to destroy people but not feel bad about it. Imagine if this was an actual court, and the accused was in the dark, begging for another chance, and the jury was yelling out, "Bored! Sociopath!" (Laughter) You know, when we watch courtroom dramas, we tend to identify with the kindhearted defense attorney, but give us the power, and we become like hanging judges. Power shifts fast. We were getting Jonah because he was perceived to have misused his privilege, but Jonah was on the floor then, and we were still kicking, and congratulating ourselves for punching up. And it began to feel weird and empty when there wasn't a powerful person who had misused their privilege that we could get. A day without a shaming began to feel like a day picking fingernails and treading water. Let me tell you a story. It's about a woman called Justine Sacco. She was a PR woman from New York with 170 Twitter followers, and she'd Tweet little acerbic jokes to them, like this one on a plane from New York to London: [Weird German Dude: You're in first class. It's 2014. Get some deodorant." -Inner monologue as inhale BO. Thank god for pharmaceuticals.] So Justine chuckled to herself, and pressed send, and got no replies, and felt that sad feeling that we all feel when the Internet doesn't congratulate us for being funny. (Laughter) Black silence when the Internet doesn't talk back. And then she got to Heathrow, and she had a little time to spare before her final leg, so she thought up another funny little acerbic joke: [Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!] And she chuckled to herself, pressed send, got on the plane, got no replies, turned off her phone, fell asleep, woke up 11 hours later, turned on her phone while the plane was taxiing on the runway, and straightaway there was a message from somebody that she hadn't spoken to since high school, that said, "I am so sorry to see what's happening to you." And then another message from a best friend, "You need to call me right now. You are the worldwide number one trending topic on Twitter." (Laughter) What had happened is that one of her 170 followers had sent the Tweet to a Gawker journalist, and he retweeted it to his 15,000 followers: [And now, a funny holiday joke from IAC's PR boss] And then it was like a bolt of lightning. A few weeks later, I talked to the Gawker journalist. I emailed him and asked him how it felt, and he said, "It felt delicious." And then he said, "But I'm sure she's fine." But she wasn't fine, because while she slept, Twitter took control of her life and dismantled it piece by piece. First there were the philanthropists: [If @JustineSacco's unfortunate words ... bother you, join me in supporting @CARE's work in Africa.] [In light of ... disgusting, racist tweet, I'm donating to @care today] Then came the beyond horrified: [... no words for that horribly disgusting racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond horrified.] Was anybody on Twitter that night? A few of you. Did Justine's joke overwhelm your Twitter feed the way it did mine? It did mine, and I thought what everybody thought that night, which was, "Wow, somebody's screwed! Somebody's life is about to get terrible!" And I sat up in my bed, and I put the pillow behind my head, and then I thought, I'm not entirely sure that joke was intended to be racist. Maybe instead of gleefully flaunting her privilege, she was mocking the gleeful flaunting of privilege. There's a comedy tradition of this, like South Park or Colbert or Randy Newman. Maybe Justine Sacco's crime was not being as good at it as Randy Newman. In fact, when I met Justine a couple of weeks later in a bar, she was just crushed, and I asked her to explain the joke, and she said, "Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the Third World. I was making of fun of that bubble." You know, another woman on Twitter that night, a New Statesman writer Helen Lewis, she reviewed my book on public shaming and wrote that she Tweeted that night, "I'm not sure that her joke was intended to be racist," and she said straightaway she got a fury of Tweets saying, "Well, you're just a privileged bitch, too." And so to her shame, she wrote, she shut up and watched as Justine's life got torn apart. It started to get darker: [Everyone go report this cunt @JustineSacco] Then came the calls for her to be fired. [Good luck with the job hunt in the new year. #GettingFired] Thousands of people around the world decided it was their duty to get her fired. [@JustineSacco last tweet of your career. #SorryNotSorry Corporations got involved, hoping to sell their products on the back of Justine's annihilation: [Next time you plan to tweet something stupid before you take off, make sure you are getting on a @Gogo flight!] (Laughter) A lot of companies were making good money that night. You know, Justine's name was normally Googled 40 times a month. That month, between December the 20th and the end of December, her name was Googled 1,220,000 times. And one Internet economist told me that that meant that Google made somewhere between 120,000 dollars and 468,000 dollars from Justine's annihilation, whereas those of us doing the actual shaming — we got nothing. (Laughter) We were like unpaid shaming interns for Google. (Laughter) And then came the trolls: [I'm actually kind of hoping Justine Sacco gets aids? lol] Somebody else on that wrote, "Somebody HIV-positive should rape this bitch and then we'll find out if her skin color protects her from AIDS." And that person got a free pass. Nobody went after that person. We were all so excited about destroying Justine, and our shaming brains are so simple-minded, that we couldn't also handle destroying somebody who was inappropriately destroying Justine. Justine was really uniting a lot of disparate groups that night, from philanthropists to "rape the bitch." [@JustineSacco I hope you get fired! You demented bitch... Just let the world know you're planning to ride bare back while in Africa.] Women always have it worse than men. When a man gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired." When a woman gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired and raped and cut out your uterus." And then Justine's employers got involved: [IAC on @JustineSacco tweet: This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight.] And that's when the anger turned to excitement: [All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco's face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail. #fired] [Oh man, @justinesacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands.] [We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she's getting fired.] What we had was a delightful narrative arc. We knew something that Justine didn't. Can you think of anything less judicial than this? Justine was asleep on a plane and unable to explain herself, and her inability was a huge part of the hilarity. On Twitter that night, we were like toddlers crawling towards a gun. Somebody worked out exactly which plane she was on, so they linked to a flight tracker website. [British Airways Flight 43 On-time - arrives in 1 hour 34 minutes] A hashtag began trending worldwide: # hasJustineLandedYet? [It is kinda wild to see someone self-destruct without them even being aware of it. #hasJustineLandedYet] [Seriously. I just want to go home to go to bed, but everyone at the bar is SO into #HasJustineLandedYet. Can't look away. Can't leave.] [#HasJustineLandedYet may be the best thing to happen to my Friday night.] [Is no one in Cape Town going to the airport to tweet her arrival? Come on, twitter! I'd like pictures] And guess what? Yes there was. [@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town international. And if you want to know what it looks like to discover that you've just been torn to shreds because of a misconstrued liberal joke, not by trolls, but by nice people like us, this is what it looks like: [... She's decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.] So why did we do it? I think some people were genuinely upset, but I think for other people, it's because Twitter is basically a mutual approval machine. We surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do, and we approve each other, and that's a really good feeling. And if somebody gets in the way, we screen them out. And do you know what that's the opposite of? It's the opposite of democracy. We wanted to show that we cared about people dying of AIDS in Africa. Our desire to be seen to be compassionate is what led us to commit this profoundly un-compassionate act. As Meghan O'Gieblyn wrote in the Boston Review, "This isn't social justice. It's a cathartic alternative." For the past three years, I've been going around the world meeting people like Justine Sacco — and believe me, there's a lot of people like Justine Sacco. There's more every day. And we want to think they're fine, but they're not fine. The people I met were mangled. They talked to me about depression, and anxiety and insomnia and suicidal thoughts. One woman I talked to, who also told a joke that landed badly, she stayed home for a year and a half. Before that, she worked with adults with learning difficulties, and was apparently really good at her job. Justine was fired, of course, because social media demanded it. But it was worse than that. She was losing herself. She was waking up in the middle of the night, forgetting who she was. She was got because she was perceived to have misused her privilege. And of course, that's a much better thing to get people for than the things we used to get people for, like having children out of wedlock. But the phrase "misuse of privilege" is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. It's becoming a devalued term, and it's making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions. Justine had 170 Twitter followers, and so to make it work, she had to be fictionalized. Word got around that she was the daughter the mining billionaire Desmond Sacco. [Let us not be fooled by #JustineSacco her father is a SA mining billionaire. She's not sorry. And neither is her father.] I thought that was true about Justine, until I met her at a bar, and I asked her about her billionaire father, and she said, "My father sells carpets." And I think back on the early days of Twitter, when people would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, "Oh my God, I'm exactly the same." These days, the hunt is on for people's shameful secrets. You can lead a good, ethical life, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all, become a clue to your secret inner evil. Maybe there's two types of people in the world: those people who favor humans over ideology, and those people who favor ideology over humans. I favor humans over ideology, but right now, the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas where everybody's either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain, even though we know that's not true about our fellow humans. What's true is that we are clever and stupid; what's true is that we're grey areas. The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people, but we're now creating a surveillance society, where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless. Let's not do that. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Jon. Jon Ronson: Thanks, Bruno. BG: Don't go away. What strikes me about Justine's story is also the fact that if you Google her name today, this story covers the first 100 pages of Google results — there is nothing else about her. In your book, you mention another story of another victim who actually got taken on by a reputation management firm, and by creating blogs and posting nice, innocuous stories about her love for cats and holidays and stuff, managed to get the story off the first couple pages of Google results, but it didn't last long. A couple of weeks later, they started creeping back up to the top result. Is this a totally lost battle? Jon Ronson: You know, I think the very best thing we can do, if you see a kind of unfair or an ambiguous shaming, is to speak up, because I think the worst thing that happened to Justine was that nobody supported her — like, everyone was against her, and that is profoundly traumatizing, to be told by tens of thousands of people that you need to get out. But if a shaming happens and there's a babble of voices, like in a democracy, where people are discussing it, I think that's much less damaging. So I think that's the way forward, but it's hard, because if you do stand up for somebody, it's incredibly unpleasant. BG: So let's talk about your experience, because you stood up by writing this book. By the way, it's mandatory reading for everybody, okay? You stood up because the book actually puts the spotlight on shamers. And I assume you didn't only have friendly reactions on Twitter. JR: It didn't go down that well with some people. (Laughter) I mean, you don't want to just concentrate — because lots of people understood, and were really nice about the book. But yeah, for 30 years I've been writing stories about abuses of power, and when I say the powerful people over there in the military, or in the pharmaceutical industry, everybody applauds me. As soon as I say, "We are the powerful people abusing our power now," I get people saying, "Well you must be a racist too." BG: So the other night — yesterday — we were at dinner, and there were two discussions going on. On one side you were talking with people around the table — and that was a nice, constructive discussion. On the other, every time you turned to your phone, there is this deluge of insults. JR: Yeah. This happened last night. We had like a TED dinner last night. We were chatting and it was lovely and nice, and I decided to check Twitter. Somebody said, "You are a white supremacist." And then I went back and had a nice conversation with somebody, and then I went back to Twitter, somebody said my very existence made the world a worse place. My friend Adam Curtis says that maybe the Internet is like a John Carpenter movie from the 1980s, when eventually everyone will start screaming at each other and shooting each other, and then eventually everybody would flee to somewhere safer, and I'm starting to think of that as a really nice option. BG: Jon, thank you. JR: Thank you, Bruno. (Applause) |
What my religion really says about women | {0: 'Alaa Murabit champions women’s participation in peace processes and conflict mediation.\r\n'} | TEDWomen 2015 | So on my way here, the passenger next to me and I had a very interesting conversation during my flight. He told me, "It seems like the United States has run out of jobs, because they're just making some up: cat psychologist, dog whisperer, tornado chaser." A couple of seconds later, he asked me, "So what do you do?" And I was like, "Peacebuilder?" (Laughter) Every day, I work to amplify the voices of women and to highlight their experiences and their participation in peace processes and conflict resolution, and because of my work, I recognize that the only way to ensure the full participation of women globally is by reclaiming religion. Now, this matter is vitally important to me. As a young Muslim woman, I am very proud of my faith. It gives me the strength and conviction to do my work every day. It's the reason I can be here in front of you. But I can't overlook the damage that has been done in the name of religion, not just my own, but all of the world's major faiths. The misrepresentation and misuse and manipulation of religious scripture has influenced our social and cultural norms, our laws, our daily lives, to a point where we sometimes don't recognize it. My parents moved from Libya, North Africa, to Canada in the early 1980s, and I am the middle child of 11 children. Yes, 11. But growing up, I saw my parents, both religiously devout and spiritual people, pray and praise God for their blessings, namely me of course, but among others. (Laughter) They were kind and funny and patient, limitlessly patient, the kind of patience that having 11 kids forces you to have. And they were fair. I was never subjected to religion through a cultural lens. I was treated the same, the same was expected of me. I was never taught that God judged differently based on gender. And my parents' understanding of God as a merciful and beneficial friend and provider shaped the way I looked at the world. Now, of course, my upbringing had additional benefits. Being one of 11 children is Diplomacy 101. (Laughter) To this day, I am asked where I went to school, like, "Did you go to Kennedy School of Government?" and I look at them and I'm like, "No, I went to the Murabit School of International Affairs." It's extremely exclusive. You would have to talk to my mom to get in. Lucky for you, she's here. But being one of 11 children and having 10 siblings teaches you a lot about power structures and alliances. It teaches you focus; you have to talk fast or say less, because you will always get cut off. It teaches you the importance of messaging. You have to ask questions in the right way to get the answers you know you want, and you have to say no in the right way to keep the peace. But the most important lesson I learned growing up was the importance of being at the table. When my mom's favorite lamp broke, I had to be there when she was trying to find out how and by who, because I had to defend myself, because if you're not, then the finger is pointed at you, and before you know it, you will be grounded. I am not speaking from experience, of course. When I was 15 in 2005, I completed high school and I moved from Canada — Saskatoon — to Zawiya, my parents' hometown in Libya, a very traditional city. Mind you, I had only ever been to Libya before on vacation, and as a seven-year-old girl, it was magic. It was ice cream and trips to the beach and really excited relatives. Turns out it's not the same as a 15-year-old young lady. I very quickly became introduced to the cultural aspect of religion. The words "haram" — meaning religiously prohibited — and "aib" — meaning culturally inappropriate — were exchanged carelessly, as if they meant the same thing and had the same consequences. And I found myself in conversation after conversation with classmates and colleagues, professors, friends, even relatives, beginning to question my own role and my own aspirations. And even with the foundation my parents had provided for me, I found myself questioning the role of women in my faith. So at the Murabit School of International Affairs, we go very heavy on the debate, and rule number one is do your research, so that's what I did, and it surprised me how easy it was to find women in my faith who were leaders, who were innovative, who were strong — politically, economically, even militarily. Khadija financed the Islamic movement in its infancy. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for her. So why weren't we learning about her? Why weren't we learning about these women? Why were women being relegated to positions which predated the teachings of our faith? And why, if we are equal in the eyes of God, are we not equal in the eyes of men? To me, it all came back to the lessons I had learned as a child. The decision maker, the person who gets to control the message, is sitting at the table, and unfortunately, in every single world faith, they are not women. Religious institutions are dominated by men and driven by male leadership, and they create policies in their likeness, and until we can change the system entirely, then we can't realistically expect to have full economic and political participation of women. Our foundation is broken. My mom actually says, you can't build a straight house on a crooked foundation. In 2011, the Libyan revolution broke out, and my family was on the front lines. And there's this amazing thing that happens in war, a cultural shift almost, very temporary. And it was the first time that I felt it was not only acceptable for me to be involved, but it was encouraged. It was demanded. Myself and other women had a seat at the table. We weren't holding hands or a medium. We were part of decision making. We were information sharing. We were crucial. And I wanted and needed for that change to be permanent. Turns out, that's not that easy. It only took a few weeks before the women that I had previously worked with were returning back to their previous roles, and most of them were driven by words of encouragement from religious and political leaders, most of whom cited religious scripture as their defense. It's how they gained popular support for their opinions. So initially, I focused on the economic and political empowerment of women. I thought that would lead to cultural and social change. It turns out, it does a little, but not a lot. I decided to use their defense as my offense, and I began to cite and highlight Islamic scripture as well. In 2012 and 2013, my organization led the single largest and most widespread campaign in Libya. We entered homes and schools and universities, even mosques. We spoke to 50,000 people directly, and hundreds of thousands more through billboards and television commercials, radio commercials and posters. And you're probably wondering how a women's rights organization was able to do this in communities which had previously opposed our sheer existence. I used scripture. I used verses from the Quran and sayings of the Prophet, Hadiths, his sayings which are, for example, "The best of you is the best to their family." "Do not let your brother oppress another." For the first time, Friday sermons led by local community imams promoted the rights of women. They discussed taboo issues, like domestic violence. Policies were changed. In certain communities, we actually had to go as far as saying the International Human Rights Declaration, which you opposed because it wasn't written by religious scholars, well, those same principles are in our book. So really, the United Nations just copied us. By changing the message, we were able to provide an alternative narrative which promoted the rights of women in Libya. It's something that has now been replicated internationally, and while I am not saying it's easy — believe me, it's not. Liberals will say you're using religion and call you a bad conservative. Conservatives will call you a lot of colorful things. I've heard everything from, "Your parents must be extremely ashamed of you" — false; they're my biggest fans — to "You will not make it to your next birthday" — again wrong, because I did. And I remain a very strong believer that women's rights and religion are not mutually exclusive. But we have to be at the table. We have to stop giving up our position, because by remaining silent, we allow for the continued persecution and abuse of women worldwide. By saying that we're going to fight for women's rights and fight extremism with bombs and warfare, we completely cripple local societies which need to address these issues so that they're sustainable. It is not easy, challenging distorted religious messaging. You will have your fair share of insults and ridicule and threats. But we have to do it. We have no other option than to reclaim the message of human rights, the principles of our faith, not for us, not for the women in your families, not for the women in this room, not even for the women out there, but for societies that would be transformed with the participation of women. And the only way we can do that, our only option, is to be, and remain, at the table. Thank you. (Applause) |
The nerd's guide to learning everything online | {0: 'The author of "The Fault in Our Stars" and "Paper Towns," John Green is a passionate online video maker.'} | TEDxIndianapolis | This is a map of New York State that was made in 1937 by the General Drafting Company. It's an extremely famous map among cartography nerds, because down here at the bottom of the Catskill Mountains, there is a little town called Roscoe — actually, this will go easier if I just put it up here — There's Roscoe, and then right above Roscoe is Rockland, New York, and then right above that is the tiny town of Agloe, New York. Agloe, New York, is very famous to cartographers, because it's a paper town. It's also known as a copyright trap. Mapmakers — because my map of New York and your map of New York are going to look very similar, on account of the shape of New York — often, mapmakers will insert fake places onto their maps, in order to protect their copyright. Because then, if my fake place shows up on your map, I can be well and truly sure that you have robbed me. Agloe is a scrabblization of the initials of the two guys who made this map, Ernest Alpers and Otto [G.] Lindberg, and they released this map in 1937. Decades later, Rand McNally releases a map with Agloe, New York, on it, at the same exact intersection of two dirt roads in the middle of nowhere. Well, you can imagine the delight over at General Drafting. They immediately call Rand McNally, and they say, "We've caught you! We made Agloe, New York, up. It is a fake place. It's a paper town. We're going to sue your pants off!" And Rand McNally says, "No, no, no, no, Agloe is real." Because people kept going to that intersection of two dirt roads — (Laughter) in the middle of nowhere, expecting there to be a place called Agloe — someone built a place called Agloe, New York. (Laughter) It had a gas station, a general store, two houses at its peak. (Laughter) And this is of course a completely irresistible metaphor to a novelist, because we would all like to believe that the stuff that we write down on paper can change the actual world in which we're actually living, which is why my third book is called "Paper Towns". But what interests me ultimately more than the medium in which this happened, is the phenomenon itself. It's easy enough to say that the world shapes our maps of the world, right? Like the overall shape of the world is obviously going to affect our maps. But what I find a lot more interesting is the way that the manner in which we map the world changes the world. Because the world would truly be a different place if North were down. And the world would be a truly different place if Alaska and Russia weren't on opposite sides of the map. And the world would be a different place if we projected Europe to show it in its actual size. The world is changed by our maps of the world. The way that we choose — sort of, our personal cartographic enterprise, also shapes the map of our lives, and that in turn shapes our lives. I believe that what we map changes the life we lead. And I don't mean that in some, like, secret-y Oprah's Angels network, like, you-can-think-your-way- out-of-cancer sense. But I do believe that while maps don't show you where you will go in your life, they show you where you might go. You very rarely go to a place that isn't on your personal map. So I was a really terrible student when I was a kid. My GPA was consistently in the low 2s. And I think the reason that I was such a terrible student is that I felt like education was just a series of hurdles that had been erected before me, and I had to jump over in order to achieve adulthood. And I didn't really want to jump over these hurdles, because they seemed completely arbitrary, so I often wouldn't, and then people would threaten me, you know, they'd threaten me with this "going on [my] permanent record," or "You'll never get a good job." I didn't want a good job! As far as I could tell at eleven or twelve years old, like, people with good jobs woke up very early in the morning, (Laughter) and the men who had good jobs, one of the first things they did was tie a strangulation item of clothing around their necks. They literally put nooses on themselves, and then they went off to their jobs, whatever they were. That's not a recipe for a happy life. These people — in my, symbol-obsessed, twelve year-old imagination — these people who are strangling themselves as one of the first things they do each morning, they can't possibly be happy. Why would I want to jump over all of these hurdles and have that be the end? That's a terrible end! And then, when I was in tenth grade, I went to this school, Indian Springs School, a small boarding school, outside of Birmingham, Alabama. And all at once I became a learner. And I became a learner, because I found myself in a community of learners. I found myself surrounded by people who celebrated intellectualism and engagement, and who thought that my ironic oh-so-cool disengagement wasn't clever, or funny, but, like, it was a simple and unspectacular response to very complicated and compelling problems. And so I started to learn, because learning was cool. I learned that some infinite sets are bigger than other infinite sets, and I learned that iambic pentameter is and why it sounds so good to human ears. I learned that the Civil War was a nationalizing conflict, I learned some physics, I learned that correlation shouldn't be confused with causation — all of these things, by the way, enriched my life on a literally daily basis. And it's true that I don't use most of them for my "job," but that's not what it's about for me. It's about cartography. What is the process of cartography? It's, you know, sailing upon some land, and thinking, "I think I'll draw that bit of land," and then wondering, "Maybe there's some more land to draw." And that's when learning really began for me. It's true that I had teachers that didn't give up on me, and I was very fortunate to have those teachers, because I often gave them cause to think there was no reason to invest in me. But a lot of the learning that I did in high school wasn't about what happened inside the classroom, it was about what happened outside of the classroom. For instance, I can tell you that "There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons — That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes —" not because I memorized Emily Dickinson in school when I was in high school, but because there was a girl when I was in high school, and her name was Amanda, and I had a crush on her, and she liked Emily Dickinson poetry. The reason I can tell you what opportunity cost is, is because one day when I was playing Super Mario Kart on my couch, my friend Emmet walked in, and he said, "How long have you been playing Super Mario Kart?" And I said, "I don't know, like, six hours?" and he said, "Do you realize that if you'd worked at Baskin-Robbins those six hours, you could have made 30 dollars, so in some ways, you just paid thirty dollars to play Super Mario Kart." And I was, like, "I'll take that deal." (Laughter) But I learned what opportunity cost is. And along the way, the map of my life got better. It got bigger; it contained more places. There were more things that might happen, more futures I might have. It wasn't a formal, organized learning process, and I'm happy to admit that. It was spotty, it was inconsistent, there was a lot I didn't know. I might know, you know, Cantor's idea that some infinite sets are larger than other infinite sets, but I didn't really understand the calculus behind that idea. I might know the idea of opportunity cost, but I didn't know the law of diminishing returns. But the great thing about imagining learning as cartography, instead of imagining it as arbitrary hurdles that you have to jump over, is that you see a bit of coastline, and that makes you want to see more. And so now I do know at least some of the calculus that underlies all of that stuff. So, I had one learning community in high school, then I went to another for college, and then I went to another, when I started working at a magazine called "Booklist," where I was an assistant, surrounded by astonishingly well-read people. And then I wrote a book. And like all authors dream of doing, I promptly quit my job. (Laughter) And for the first time since high school, I found myself without a learning community, and it was miserable. I hated it. I read many, many books during this two-year period. I read books about Stalin, and books about how the Uzbek people came to identify as Muslims, and I read books about how to make atomic bombs, but it just felt like I was creating my own hurdles, and then jumping over them myself, instead of feeling the excitement of being part of a community of learners, a community of people who are engaged together in the cartographic enterprise of trying to better understand and map the world around us. And then, in 2006, I met that guy. His name is Ze Frank. I didn't actually meet him, just on the Internet. Ze Frank was running, at the time, a show called "The Show with Ze Frank," and I discovered the show, and that was my way back into being a community learner again. Here's Ze talking about Las Vegas: (Video) Ze Frank: Las Vegas was built in the middle of a huge, hot desert. Almost everything here was brought from somewhere else — the sort of rocks, the trees, the waterfalls. These fish are almost as out of place as my pig that flew. Contrasted to the scorching desert that surrounds this place, so are these people. Things from all over the world have been rebuilt here, away from their histories, and away from the people that experience them differently. Sometimes improvements were made — even the Sphinx got a nose job. Here, there's no reason to feel like you're missing anything. This New York means the same to me as it does to everyone else. Everything is out of context, and that means context allows for everything: Self Parking, Events Center, Shark Reef. This fabrication of place could be one of the world's greatest achievements, because no one belongs here; everyone does. As I walked around this morning, I noticed most of the buildings were huge mirrors reflecting the sun back into the desert. But unlike most mirrors, which present you with an outside view of yourself embedded in a place, these mirrors come back empty. John Green: Makes me nostalgic for the days when you could see the pixels in online video. (Laughter) Ze isn't just a great public intellectual, he's also a brilliant community builder, and the community of people that built up around these videos was in many ways a community of learners. So we played Ze Frank at chess collaboratively, and we beat him. We organized ourselves to take a young man on a road trip across the United States. We turned the Earth into a sandwich, by having one person hold a piece of bread at one point on the Earth, and on the exact opposite point of the Earth, have another person holding a piece of bread. I realize that these are silly ideas, but they are also "learny" ideas, and that was what was so exciting to me, and if you go online, you can find communities like this all over the place. Follow the calculus tag on Tumblr, and yes, you will see people complaining about calculus, but you'll also see people re-blogging those complaints, making the argument that calculus is interesting and beautiful, and here's a way in to thinking about the problem that you find unsolvable. You can go to places like Reddit, and find sub-Reddits, like "Ask a Historian" or "Ask Science," where you can ask people who are in these fields a wide range of questions, from very serious ones to very silly ones. But to me, the most interesting communities of learners that are growing up on the Internet right now are on YouTube, and admittedly, I am biased. But I think in a lot of ways, the YouTube page resembles a classroom. Look for instance at "Minute Physics," a guy who's teaching the world about physics: (Video) Let's cut to the chase. As of July 4, 2012, the Higgs boson is the last fundamental piece of the standard model of particle physics to be discovered experimentally. But, you might ask, why was the Higgs boson included in the standard model, alongside well-known particles like electrons and photons and quarks, if it hadn't been discovered back then in the 1970s? Good question. There are two main reasons. First, just like the electron is an excitation in the electron field, the Higgs boson is simply a particle which is an excitation of the everywhere-permeating Higgs field. The Higgs field in turn plays an integral role in our model for the weak nuclear force. In particular, the Higgs field helps explain why it's so weak. We'll talk more about this in a later video, but even though weak nuclear theory was confirmed in the 1980s, in the equations, the Higgs field is so inextricably jumbled with the weak force, that until now we've been unable to confirm its actual and independent existence. JG: Or here's a video that I made as part of my show "Crash Course," talking about World War I: (Video) The immediate cause was of course the assassination in Sarajevo of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on June 28, 1914, by a Bosnian-Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. Quick aside: It's worth noting that the first big war of the twentieth century began with an act of terrorism. So Franz Ferdinand wasn't particularly well-liked by his uncle, the emperor Franz Joseph — now that is a mustache! But even so, the assassination led Austria to issue an ultimatum to Serbia, whereupon Serbia accepted some, but not all, of Austria's demands, leading Austria to declare war against Serbia. And then Russia, due to its alliance with the Serbs, mobilized its army. Germany, because it had an alliance with Austria, told Russia to stop mobilizing, which Russia failed to do, so then Germany mobilized its own army, declared war on Russia, cemented an alliance with the Ottomans, and then declared war on France, because, you know, France. (Laughter) And it's not just physics and world history that people are choosing to learn through YouTube. Here's a video about abstract mathematics. (Video) So you're me, and you're in math class yet again, because they make you go every single day. And you're learning about, I don't know, the sums of infinite series. That's a high school topic, right? Which is odd, because it's a cool topic, but they somehow manage to ruin it anyway. So I guess that's why they allow infinite series in the curriculum. So, in a quite understandable need for distraction, you're doodling and thinking more about what the plural of "series" should be than about the topic at hand: "serieses," "seriese," "seriesen," and "serii?" Or is it that the singular should be changed: one "serie," or "serum," just like the singular of "sheep" should be "shoop." But the whole concept of things like 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 and so on approaches one, is useful if, say, you want to draw a line of elephants, each holding the tail of the next one: normal elephant, young elephant, baby elephant, dog-sized elephant, puppy-sized elephant, all the way down to Mr. Tusks and beyond. Which is at least a tiny bit awesome, because you can get an infinite number of elephants in a line, and still have it fit across a single notebook page. JG: And lastly, here's Destin, from "Smarter Every Day," talking about the conservation of angular momentum, and, since it's YouTube, cats: (Video) Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to "Smarter Every Day." So you've probably observed that cats almost always land on their feet. Today's question is: why? Like most simple questions, there's a very complex answer. For instance, let me reword this question: How does a cat go from feet-up to feet-down in a falling reference frame, without violating the conservation of angular momentum? (Laughter) JG: So, here's something all four of these videos have in common: They all have more than half a million views on YouTube. And those are people watching not in classrooms, but because they are part of the communities of learning that are being set up by these channels. And I said earlier that YouTube is like a classroom to me, and in many ways it is, because here is the instructor — it's like the old-fashioned classroom: here's the instructor, and then beneath the instructor are the students, and they're all having a conversation. And I know that YouTube comments have a very bad reputation in the world of the Internet, but in fact, if you go on comments for these channels, what you'll find is people engaging the subject matter, asking difficult, complicated questions that are about the subject matter, and then other people answering those questions. And because the YouTube page is set up so that the page in which I'm talking to you is on the exact — the place where I'm talking to you is on the exact same page as your comments, you are participating in a live and real and active way in the conversation. And because I'm in comments usually, I get to participate with you. And you find this whether it's world history, or mathematics, or science, or whatever it is. You also see young people using the tools and the sort of genres of the Internet in order to create places for intellectual engagement, instead of the ironic detachment that maybe most of us associate with memes and other Internet conventions — you know, "Got bored. Invented calculus." Or, here's Honey Boo Boo criticizing industrial capitalism: ["Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism."] In case you can't see what she says ... yeah. I really believe that these spaces, these communities, have become for a new generation of learners, the kind of communities, the kind of cartographic communities that I had when I was in high school, and then again when I was in college. And as an adult, re-finding these communities has re-introduced me to a community of learners, and has encouraged me to continue to be a learner even in my adulthood, so that I no longer feel like learning is something reserved for the young. Vi Hart and "Minute Physics" introduced me to all kinds of things that I didn't know before. And I know that we all hearken back to the days of the Parisian salon in the Enlightenment, or to the Algonquin Round Table, and wish, "Oh, I wish I could have been a part of that, I wish I could have laughed at Dorothy Parker's jokes." But I'm here to tell you that these places exist, they still exist. They exist in corners of the Internet, where old men fear to tread. (Laughter) And I truly, truly believe that when we invented Agloe, New York, in the 1960s, when we made Agloe real, we were just getting started. Thank you. (Applause) |
Street art with a message of hope and peace | {0: 'French-Tunisian artist eL Seed blends the historic art of Arabic calligraphy with graffti to portray messages of beauty, poetry and peace across all continents.'} | TED2015 | In 2012, when I painted the minaret of Jara Mosque in my hometown of Gabés, in the south of Tunisia, I never thought that graffiti would bring so much attention to a city. At the beginning, I was just looking for a wall in my hometown, and it happened that the minaret was built in '94. And for 18 years, those 57 meters of concrete stayed grey. When I met the imam for the first time, and I told him what I wanted to do, he was like, "Thank God you finally came," and he told me that for years he was waiting for somebody to do something on it. The most amazing thing about this imam is that he didn't ask me anything — neither a sketch, or what I was going to write. In every work that I create, I write messages with my style of calligraffiti — a mix of calligraphy and graffiti. I use quotes or poetry. For the minaret, I thought that the most relevant message to be put on a mosque should come from the Quran, so I picked this verse: "Oh humankind, we have created you from a male and a female, and made you people and tribe, so you may know each other." It was a universal call for peace, tolerance, and acceptance coming from the side that we don't usually portray in a good way in the media. I was amazed to see how the local community reacted to the painting, and how it made them proud to see the minaret getting so much attention from international press all around the world. For the imam, it was not just the painting; it was really deeper than that. He hoped that this minaret would become a monument for the city, and attract people to this forgotten place of Tunisia. The universality of the message, the political context of Tunisia at this time, and the fact that I was writing Quran in a graffiti way were not insignificant. It reunited the community. Bringing people, future generations, together through Arabic calligraphy is what I do. Writing messages is the essence of my artwork. What is funny, actually, is that even Arabic-speaking people really need to focus a lot to decipher what I'm writing. You don't need to know the meaning to feel the piece. I think that Arabic script touches your soul before it reaches your eyes. There is a beauty in it that you don't need to translate. Arabic script speaks to anyone, I believe; to you, to you, to you, to anybody, and then when you get the meaning, you feel connected to it. I always make sure to write messages that are relevant to the place where I'm painting, but messages that have a universal dimension, so anybody around the world can connect to it. I was born and raised in France, in Paris, and I started learning how to write and read Arabic when I was 18. Today I only write messages in Arabic. One of the reasons this is so important to me, is because of all the reaction that I've experienced all around the world. In Rio de Janeiro, I translated this Portuguese poem from Gabriela Tôrres Barbosa, who was giving an homage to the poor people of the favela, and then I painted it on the rooftop. The local community were really intrigued by what I was doing, but as soon as I gave them the meaning of the calligraphy, they thanked me, as they felt connected to the piece. In South Africa, in Cape Town, the local community of Philippi offered me the only concrete wall of the slum. It was a school, and I wrote on it a quote from Nelson Mandela, saying, "[in Arabic]," which means, "It seems impossible until it's done." Then this guy came to me and said, "Man, why you don't write in English?" and I replied to him, "I would consider your concern legit if you asked me why I didn't write in Zulu." In Paris, once, there was this event, and someone gave his wall to be painted. And when he saw I was painting in Arabic, he got so mad — actually, hysterical — and he asked for the wall to be erased. I was mad and disappointed. But a week later, the organizer of the event asked me to come back, and he told me that there was a wall right in front of this guy's house. So, this guy — (Laughter) like, was forced to see it every day. At the beginning, I was going to write, "[In Arabic]," which means, "In your face," but — (Laughter) I decided to be smarter and I wrote, "[In Arabic]," which means, "Open your heart." I'm really proud of my culture, and I'm trying to be an ambassador of it through my artwork. And I hope that I can break the stereotypes we all know, with the beauty of Arabic script. Today, I don't write the translation of the message anymore on the wall. I don't want the poetry of the calligraphy to be broken, as it's art and you can appreciate it without knowing the meaning, as you can enjoy any music from other countries. Some people see that as a rejection or a closed door, but for me, it's more an invitation — to my language, to my culture, and to my art. Thank you. (Applause) |
What explains the rise of humans? | {0: 'In his book "Homo Deus," Yuval Noah Harari explores the future of humankind: the destinies we may set for ourselves and the quests we\'ll undertake.'} | TEDGlobalLondon | Seventy-thousand years ago, our ancestors were insignificant animals. The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were unimportant. Their impact on the world was not much greater than that of jellyfish or fireflies or woodpeckers. Today, in contrast, we control this planet. And the question is: How did we come from there to here? How did we turn ourselves from insignificant apes, minding their own business in a corner of Africa, into the rulers of planet Earth? Usually, we look for the difference between us and all the other animals on the individual level. We want to believe — I want to believe — that there is something special about me, about my body, about my brain, that makes me so superior to a dog or a pig, or a chimpanzee. But the truth is that, on the individual level, I'm embarrassingly similar to a chimpanzee. And if you take me and a chimpanzee and put us together on some lonely island, and we had to struggle for survival to see who survives better, I would definitely place my bet on the chimpanzee, not on myself. And this is not something wrong with me personally. I guess if they took almost any one of you, and placed you alone with a chimpanzee on some island, the chimpanzee would do much better. The real difference between humans and all other animals is not on the individual level; it's on the collective level. Humans control the planet because they are the only animals that can cooperate both flexibly and in very large numbers. Now, there are other animals — like the social insects, the bees, the ants — that can cooperate in large numbers, but they don't do so flexibly. Their cooperation is very rigid. There is basically just one way in which a beehive can function. And if there's a new opportunity or a new danger, the bees cannot reinvent the social system overnight. They cannot, for example, execute the queen and establish a republic of bees, or a communist dictatorship of worker bees. Other animals, like the social mammals — the wolves, the elephants, the dolphins, the chimpanzees — they can cooperate much more flexibly, but they do so only in small numbers, because cooperation among chimpanzees is based on intimate knowledge, one of the other. I'm a chimpanzee and you're a chimpanzee, and I want to cooperate with you. I need to know you personally. What kind of chimpanzee are you? Are you a nice chimpanzee? Are you an evil chimpanzee? Are you trustworthy? If I don't know you, how can I cooperate with you? The only animal that can combine the two abilities together and cooperate both flexibly and still do so in very large numbers is us, Homo sapiens. One versus one, or even 10 versus 10, chimpanzees might be better than us. But, if you pit 1,000 humans against 1,000 chimpanzees, the humans will win easily, for the simple reason that a thousand chimpanzees cannot cooperate at all. And if you now try to cram 100,000 chimpanzees into Oxford Street, or into Wembley Stadium, or Tienanmen Square or the Vatican, you will get chaos, complete chaos. Just imagine Wembley Stadium with 100,000 chimpanzees. Complete madness. In contrast, humans normally gather there in tens of thousands, and what we get is not chaos, usually. What we get is extremely sophisticated and effective networks of cooperation. All the huge achievements of humankind throughout history, whether it's building the pyramids or flying to the moon, have been based not on individual abilities, but on this ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Think even about this very talk that I'm giving now: I'm standing here in front of an audience of about 300 or 400 people, most of you are complete strangers to me. Similarly, I don't really know all the people who have organized and worked on this event. I don't know the pilot and the crew members of the plane that brought me over here, yesterday, to London. I don't know the people who invented and manufactured this microphone and these cameras, which are recording what I'm saying. I don't know the people who wrote all the books and articles that I read in preparation for this talk. And I certainly don't know all the people who might be watching this talk over the Internet, somewhere in Buenos Aires or in New Delhi. Nevertheless, even though we don't know each other, we can work together to create this global exchange of ideas. This is something chimpanzees cannot do. They communicate, of course, but you will never catch a chimpanzee traveling to some distant chimpanzee band to give them a talk about bananas or about elephants, or anything else that might interest chimpanzees. Now cooperation is, of course, not always nice; all the horrible things humans have been doing throughout history — and we have been doing some very horrible things — all those things are also based on large-scale cooperation. Prisons are a system of cooperation; slaughterhouses are a system of cooperation; concentration camps are a system of cooperation. Chimpanzees don't have slaughterhouses and prisons and concentration camps. Now suppose I've managed to convince you perhaps that yes, we control the world because we can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. The next question that immediately arises in the mind of an inquisitive listener is: How, exactly, do we do it? What enables us alone, of all the animals, to cooperate in such a way? The answer is our imagination. We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers, because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictions, fictional stories. And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction, everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values. All other animals use their communication system only to describe reality. A chimpanzee may say, "Look! There's a lion, let's run away!" Or, "Look! There's a banana tree over there! Let's go and get bananas!" Humans, in contrast, use their language not merely to describe reality, but also to create new realities, fictional realities. A human can say, "Look, there is a god above the clouds! And if you don't do what I tell you to do, when you die, God will punish you and send you to hell." And if you all believe this story that I've invented, then you will follow the same norms and laws and values, and you can cooperate. This is something only humans can do. You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him, "... after you die, you'll go to chimpanzee heaven ..." (Laughter) "... and you'll receive lots and lots of bananas for your good deeds. So now give me this banana." No chimpanzee will ever believe such a story. Only humans believe such stories, which is why we control the world, whereas the chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories. Now you may find it acceptable that yes, in the religious field, humans cooperate by believing in the same fictions. Millions of people come together to build a cathedral or a mosque or fight in a crusade or a jihad, because they all believe in the same stories about God and heaven and hell. But what I want to emphasize is that exactly the same mechanism underlies all other forms of mass-scale human cooperation, not only in the religious field. Take, for example, the legal field. Most legal systems today in the world are based on a belief in human rights. But what are human rights? Human rights, just like God and heaven, are just a story that we've invented. They are not an objective reality; they are not some biological effect about homo sapiens. Take a human being, cut him open, look inside, you will find the heart, the kidneys, neurons, hormones, DNA, but you won't find any rights. The only place you find rights are in the stories that we have invented and spread around over the last few centuries. They may be very positive stories, very good stories, but they're still just fictional stories that we've invented. The same is true of the political field. The most important factors in modern politics are states and nations. But what are states and nations? They are not an objective reality. A mountain is an objective reality. You can see it, you can touch it, you can even smell it. But a nation or a state, like Israel or Iran or France or Germany, this is just a story that we've invented and became extremely attached to. The same is true of the economic field. The most important actors today in the global economy are companies and corporations. Many of you today, perhaps, work for a corporation, like Google or Toyota or McDonald's. What exactly are these things? They are what lawyers call legal fictions. They are stories invented and maintained by the powerful wizards we call lawyers. (Laughter) And what do corporations do all day? Mostly, they try to make money. Yet, what is money? Again, money is not an objective reality; it has no objective value. Take this green piece of paper, the dollar bill. Look at it — it has no value. You cannot eat it, you cannot drink it, you cannot wear it. But then came along these master storytellers — the big bankers, the finance ministers, the prime ministers — and they tell us a very convincing story: "Look, you see this green piece of paper? It is actually worth 10 bananas." And if I believe it, and you believe it, and everybody believes it, it actually works. I can take this worthless piece of paper, go to the supermarket, give it to a complete stranger whom I've never met before, and get, in exchange, real bananas which I can actually eat. This is something amazing. You could never do it with chimpanzees. Chimpanzees trade, of course: "Yes, you give me a coconut, I'll give you a banana." That can work. But, you give me a worthless piece of paper and you except me to give you a banana? No way! What do you think I am, a human? (Laughter) Money, in fact, is the most successful story ever invented and told by humans, because it is the only story everybody believes. Not everybody believes in God, not everybody believes in human rights, not everybody believes in nationalism, but everybody believes in money, and in the dollar bill. Take, even, Osama Bin Laden. He hated American politics and American religion and American culture, but he had no objection to American dollars. He was quite fond of them, actually. (Laughter) To conclude, then: We humans control the world because we live in a dual reality. All other animals live in an objective reality. Their reality consists of objective entities, like rivers and trees and lions and elephants. We humans, we also live in an objective reality. In our world, too, there are rivers and trees and lions and elephants. But over the centuries, we have constructed on top of this objective reality a second layer of fictional reality, a reality made of fictional entities, like nations, like gods, like money, like corporations. And what is amazing is that as history unfolded, this fictional reality became more and more powerful so that today, the most powerful forces in the world are these fictional entities. Today, the very survival of rivers and trees and lions and elephants depends on the decisions and wishes of fictional entities, like the United States, like Google, like the World Bank — entities that exist only in our own imagination. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Yuval, you have a new book out. After Sapiens, you wrote another one, and it's out in Hebrew, but not yet translated into ... Yuval Noah Harari: I'm working on the translation as we speak. BG: In the book, if I understand it correctly, you argue that the amazing breakthroughs that we are experiencing right now not only will potentially make our lives better, but they will create — and I quote you — "... new classes and new class struggles, just as the industrial revolution did." Can you elaborate for us? YNH: Yes. In the industrial revolution, we saw the creation of a new class of the urban proletariat. And much of the political and social history of the last 200 years involved what to do with this class, and the new problems and opportunities. Now, we see the creation of a new massive class of useless people. (Laughter) As computers become better and better in more and more fields, there is a distinct possibility that computers will out-perform us in most tasks and will make humans redundant. And then the big political and economic question of the 21st century will be, "What do we need humans for?", or at least, "What do we need so many humans for?" BG: Do you have an answer in the book? YNH: At present, the best guess we have is to keep them happy with drugs and computer games ... (Laughter) but this doesn't sound like a very appealing future. BG: Ok, so you're basically saying in the book and now, that for all the discussion about the growing evidence of significant economic inequality, we are just kind of at the beginning of the process? YNH: Again, it's not a prophecy; it's seeing all kinds of possibilities before us. One possibility is this creation of a new massive class of useless people. Another possibility is the division of humankind into different biological castes, with the rich being upgraded into virtual gods, and the poor being degraded to this level of useless people. BG: I feel there is another TED talk coming up in a year or two. Thank you, Yuval, for making the trip. YNH: Thanks! (Applause) |
The surprising way groups like ISIS stay in power | {0: 'Benedetta Berti studies how conflicts impact civilians.'} | TED2015 | For the past decade, I've been studying non-state armed groups: armed organizations like terrorists, insurgents or militias. I document what these groups do when they're not shooting. My goal is to better understand these violent actors and to study ways to encourage transition from violent engagement to nonviolent confrontation. I work in the field, in the policy world and in the library. Understanding non-state armed groups is key to solving most ongoing conflict, because war has changed. It used to be a contest between states. No longer. It is now a conflict between states and non-state actors. For example, of the 216 peace agreements signed between 1975 and 2011, 196 of them were between a state and a non-state actor. So we need to understand these groups; we need to either engage them or defeat them in any conflict resolution process that has to be successful. So how do we do that? We need to know what makes these organizations tick. We know a lot about how they fight, why they fight, but no one looks at what they're doing when they're not fighting. Yet, armed struggle and unarmed politics are related. It is all part of the same organization. We cannot understand these groups, let alone defeat them, if we don't have the full picture. And armed groups today are complex organizations. Take the Lebanese Hezbollah, known for its violent confrontation against Israel. But since its creation in the early 1980s, Hezbollah has also set up a political party, a social-service network, and a military apparatus. Similarly, the Palestinian Hamas, known for its suicide attacks against Israel, also runs the Gaza Strip since 2007. So these groups do way more than just shoot. They multi-task. They set up complex communication machines — radio stations, TV channels, Internet websites and social media strategies. And up here, you have the ISIS magazine, printed in English and published to recruit. Armed groups also invest in complex fund-raising — not looting, but setting up profitable businesses; for example, construction companies. Now, these activities are keys. They allow these groups to increase their strength, increase their funds, to better recruit and to build their brand. Armed groups also do something else: they build stronger bonds with the population by investing in social services. They build schools, they run hospitals, they set up vocational-training programs or micro-loan programs. Hezbollah offers all of these services and more. Armed groups also seek to win the population over by offering something that the state is not providing: safety and security. The initial rise of the Taliban in war-torn Afghanistan, or even the beginning of the ascent of ISIS, can be understood also by looking at these groups' efforts to provide security. Now, unfortunately, in these cases, the provision of security came at an unbearably high price for the population. But in general, providing social services fills a gap, a governance gap left by the government, and allows these groups to increase their strength and their power. For example, the 2006 electoral victory of the Palestinian Hamas cannot be understood without acknowledging the group's social work. Now, this is a really complex picture, yet in the West, when we look at armed groups, we only think of the violent side. But that's not enough to understand these groups' strength, strategy or long-term vision. These groups are hybrid. They rise because they fill a gap left by the government, and they emerge to be both armed and political, engage in violent struggle and provide governance. And the more these organizations are complex and sophisticated, the less we can think of them as the opposite of a state. Now, what do you call a group like Hezbollah? They run part of a territory, they administer all their functions, they pick up the garbage, they run the sewage system. Is this a state? Is it a rebel group? Or maybe something else, something different and new? And what about ISIS? The lines are blurred. We live in a world of states, non-states, and in-between, and the more states are weak, like in the Middle East today, the more non-state actors step in and fill that gap. This matters for governments, because to counter these groups, they will have to invest more in non-military tools. Filling that governance gap has to be at the center of any sustainable approach. This also matters very much for peacemaking and peacebuilding. If we better understand armed groups, we will better know what incentives to offer to encourage the transition from violence to nonviolence. So in this new contest between states and non-states, military power can win some battles, but it will not give us peace nor stability. To achieve these objectives, what we need is a long-term investment in filling that security gap, in filling that governance gap that allowed these groups to thrive in the first place. Thank you. (Applause) |
My road trip through the whitest towns in America | {0: 'The author of "Whitopia," Rich Benjamin sharply observes modern society and politics.\r\n\r\n'} | TEDWomen 2015 | Imagine a place where your neighbors greet your children by name; a place with splendid vistas; a place where you can drive just 20 minutes and put your sailboat on the water. It's a seductive place, isn't it? I don't live there. (Laughter) But I did journey on a 27,000-mile trip for two years, to the fastest-growing and whitest counties in America. What is a Whitopia? I define Whitopia in three ways: First, a Whitopia has posted at least six percent population growth since 2000. Secondly, the majority of that growth comes from white migrants. And third, the Whitopia has an ineffable charm, a pleasant look and feel, a je Ne sais quoi. (Laughter) To learn how and why Whitopias are ticking, I immersed myself for several months apiece in three of them: first, St. George, Utah; second, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho; and third, Forsyth County, Georgia. First stop, St. George — a beautiful town of red rock landscapes. In the 1850s, Brigham Young dispatched families to St. George to grow cotton because of the hot, arid climate. And so they called it Utah's Dixie, and the name sticks to this day. I approached my time in each Whitopia like an anthropologist. I made detailed spreadsheets of all the power brokers in the communities, who I needed to meet, where I needed to be, and I threw myself with gusto in these communities. I went to zoning board meetings, I went to Democratic clubs and Republican clubs. I went to poker nights. In St. George, I rented a home at the Entrada, one of the town's premier gated communities. There were no Motel 6's or Howard Johnsons for me. I lived in Whitopia as a resident, and not like a visitor. I rented myself this home by phone. (Laughter) (Applause) Golf is the perfect seductive symbol of Whitopia. When I went on my journey, I had barely ever held a golf club. By the time I left, I was golfing at least three times a week. (Laughter) Golf helps people bond. Some of the best interviews I ever scored during my trip were on the golf courses. One venture capitalist, for example, invited me to golf in his private club that had no minority members. I also went fishing. (Laughter) Because I had never fished, this fellow had to teach me how to cast my line and what bait to use. I also played poker every weekend. It was Texas Hold 'em with a $10 buy-in. My poker mates may have been bluffing about the hands that they drew, but they weren't bluffing about their social beliefs. Some of the most raw, salty conversations I ever had during my journey were at the poker table. I'm a gung ho entertainer. I love to cook, I hosted many dinner parties, and in return, people invited me to their dinner parties, and to their barbecues, and to their pool parties, and to their birthday parties. But it wasn't all fun. Immigration turned out to be a big issue in this Whitopia. The St. George's Citizens Council on Illegal Immigration held regular and active protests against immigration, and so what I gleaned from this Whitopia is what a hot debate this would become. It was a real-time preview, and so it has become. Next stop: Almost Heaven, a cabin I rented for myself in Coeur d'Alene, in the beautiful North Idaho panhandle. I rented this place for myself, also by phone. (Laughter) The book "A Thousand Places To See Before You Die" lists Coeur d'Alene — it's a gorgeous paradise for huntsmen, boatmen and fishermen. My growing golf skills came in handy in Coeur d'Alene. I golfed with retired LAPD cops. In 1993, around 11,000 families and cops fled Los Angeles after the L.A. racial unrest, for North Idaho, and they've built an expatriated community. Given the conservatism of these cops, there's no surprise that North Idaho has a strong gun culture. In fact, it is said, North Idaho has more gun dealers than gas stations. So what's a resident to do to fit in? I hit the gun club. When I rented a gun, the gentleman behind the counter was perfectly pleasant and kind, until I showed him my New York City driver's license. That's when he got nervous. I'm not as bad a shot as I thought I might have been. What I learned from North Idaho is the peculiar brand of paranoia that can permeate a community when so many cops and guns are around. In North Idaho, in my red pickup truck, I kept a notepad. And in that notepad I counted more Confederate flags than black people. In North Idaho, I found Confederate flags on key chains, on cellphone paraphernalia, and on cars. About a seven-minute drive from my hidden lake cabin was the compound of Aryan Nations, the white supremacist group. America's Promise Ministries, the religious arm of Aryan Nations, happened to have a three-day retreat during my visit. So I decided to crash it. (Laughter) I'm the only non-Aryan journalist I'm aware of ever to have done so. (Laughter) Among the many memorable episodes of that retreat... (Laughter) ...is when Abe, an Aryan, sidled up next to me. He slapped my knee, and he said, "Hey Rich, I just want you to know one thing. We are not white supremacists. We are white separatists. We don't think we're better than you, we just want to be away from you." (Laughter) Indeed, most white people in Whitopia are neither white supremacists or white separatists; in fact, they're not there for explicitly racial reasons at all. Rather, they emigrate there for friendliness, comfort, security, safety — reasons that they implicitly associate to whiteness in itself. Next stop was Georgia. In Georgia, I stayed in an exurb north of Atlanta. In Utah, I found poker; in Idaho, I found guns; in Georgia, I found God. (Laughter) The way that I immersed myself in this Whitopia was to become active at First Redeemer Church, a megachurch that's so huge that it has golf carts to escort the congregants around its many parking lots on campus. I was active in the youth ministry. And for me, personally, I was more comfortable in this Whitopia than say, in a Colorado, or an Idaho, or even a suburban Boston. That is because [there], in Georgia, white people and black people are more historically familiar to one another. I was less exotic in this Whitopia. (Laughter) But what does it all mean? Whitopian dreaming, Whitopia migration, is a push-pull phenomenon, full of alarming pushes and alluring pulls, and Whitopia operates at the level of conscious and unconscious bias. It's possible for people to be in Whitopia not for racist reasons, though it has racist outcomes. Many Whitopians feel pushed by illegals, social welfare abuse, minorities, density, crowded schools. Many Whitopians feel pulled by merit, freedom, the allure of privatism — privatized places, privatized people, privatized things. And I learned in Whitopia how a country can have racism without racists. Many of my smug urban liberal friends couldn't believe I would go on such a venture. The reality is that many white Americans are affable and kind. Interpersonal race relations — how we treat each other as human beings — are vastly better than in my parents' generation. Can you imagine me going to Whitopia 40 years ago? What a journey that would have been. (Laughter) And yet, some things haven't changed. America is as residentially and educationally segregated today as it was in 1970. As Americans, we often find ways to cook for each other, to dance with each other, to host with each other, but why can't that translate into how we treat each other as communities? It's a devastating irony, how we have gone forward as individuals, and backwards as communities. One of the Whitopian outlooks that really hit me was a proverbial saying: "One black man is a delightful dinner guest; 50 black men is a ghetto." One of the big contexts animating my Whitopian journey was the year 2042. By 2042, white people will no longer be the American majority. As such, will there be more Whitopias? In looking at this, the danger of Whitopia is that the more segregation we have, the less we can look at and confront conscious and unconscious bias. I ventured on my two-year, 27,000 mile journey to learn where, why, and how white people are fleeing, but I didn't expect to have so much fun on my journey. (Laughter) I didn't expect to learn so much about myself. I don't expect I'll be living in a Whitopia — or a Blacktopia, for that matter. I do plan to continue golfing every chance I get. (Laughter) And I'll just have to leave the guns and megachurches back in Whitopia. Thank you. (Applause) |
A secret memorial for civilian casualties | {0: 'From a plant that lives or dies based on stock prices to an oilcan that flows backward, Matt Kenyon creates art that startles, amuses and challenges assumptions.'} | TED2015 | There's this quote by activist and punk rock musician Jello Biafra that I love. He says, "Don't hate the media. Be the media." I'm an artist. I like working with media and technology because A, I'm familiar with them and I like the power they hold. And B, I hate them and I'm terrified of the power they hold. (Laughter) I remember watching, in 2003, an interview between Fox News host Tony Snow and then-US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. They were talking about the recent invasion of Iraq, and Rumsfeld is asked the question, "Well, we're hear about our body counts, but we never hear about theirs, why?" And Rumsfeld's answer is, "Well, we don't do body counts on other people." Right? It's estimated that between 150,000 to one million Iraqis, civilians, have died as a result of the US-led invasion in 2003. That number is in stark contrast with the 4,486 US service members who died during that same window of time. I wanted to do more than just bring awareness to this terrifying number. I wanted to create a monument for the individual civilians who died as a result of the invasion. Monuments to war, such as Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial, are often enormous in scale. Very powerful and very one-sided. I wanted my monument to live in the world, and to circulate. I remember when I was a boy in school, my teacher assigned us this classic civics assignment where you take a sheet of paper and you write a member of your government. And we were told, if we wrote a really good letter, if we really thought about it, we would get back more than just a simple formed letter as a reply. This is my "Notepad." What looks like an everyday, yellow legal tablet of paper is actually a monument to the individual Iraqi civilians that died as a result of the US invasion. "Notepad" is an act of protest and an act of commemoration disguised as an everyday tablet of paper. The lines of the paper, when magnified, are revealed to be micro-printed text that contains the details, the names, the dates and locations of individual Iraqi civilians that died. So, for the last 5 years, I've been taking pads of this paper, tons of this stuff, and smuggling it into the stationery supplies of the United States and the Coalition governments. (Laughter) (Applause) I don't have to tell you guys this is not the place to discuss how I did that. (Laughter) But also, I've been meeting one-on-one with members and former members of the so-called Coalition of the Willing, who assisted in the invasion. And so, whenever I can, I meet with one of them, and I share the project with them. And last summer, I had the chance to meet with former United States Attorney General and Torture Memo author, Alberto Gonzales. (Video) Matt Kenyon: May I give this to you? This is a special legal tablet. It's actually part of an ongoing art project. Alberto Gonzalez: This is a special legal pad? MK: Yes. You won't believe me, but it's in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art; I'm an artist. MK: And all of the lines of the paper are actually — AG: Are they going to disappear? MK: No, they're micro-printed text that contains the names of individual Iraqi civilians who have died since the invasion of Iraq. AG: Yeah. OK. AG: Thank you. MK: Thank you. (Laughter) The way he says "thank you" really creeps me out. (Laughter) OK, so I'd like each of you to look under your chairs. There's an envelope. And please open it. The paper you're holding in your hand contains the details of Iraqi civilians that died as result of the invasion. I'd like you to use this paper and write a member of government. You can help to smuggle this civilian body count into government archives. Because every letter that's sent in to the government, and this is all across the world, of course — every letter that is sent in is archived, filed and recorded. Together, we can put this in the mailboxes and under the noses of people in power. Everything that's sent in eventually becomes part of the permanent archive of our government, our shared historical record. Thank you. (Applause) Tom Rielly: So, tell me Matt, how did this idea come into your head, of "Notepad"? Matt Kenyon: I'd just finished a project that dealt with the US Coalition side of the war and it was a black armband that was called the "Improvised Empathetic Device" which accumulated, in real time, the names, ranks, cause of death and location of US service members who had died overseas, and each time the Department of Defense or CENTCOM released their data, it would stab me in the arm. And so, I became aware that there was a spectacle associated with our own people who were dying overseas, but a disproportionate amount of casualties were the civilian casualties. TR: Thank you so much. MK: Thank you. (Applause) |
Could we cure HIV with lasers? | {0: 'Patience Mthunzi wants to use lasers to deliver medicines more effectively.'} | TED2015 | What do you do when you have a headache? You swallow an aspirin. But for this pill to get to your head, where the pain is, it goes through your stomach, intestines and various other organs first. Swallowing pills is the most effective and painless way of delivering any medication in the body. The downside, though, is that swallowing any medication leads to its dilution. And this is a big problem, particularly in HIV patients. When they take their anti-HIV drugs, these drugs are good for lowering the virus in the blood, and increasing the CD4 cell counts. But they are also notorious for their adverse side effects, but mostly bad, because they get diluted by the time they get to the blood, and worse, by the time they get to the sites where it matters most: within the HIV viral reservoirs. These areas in the body — such as the lymph nodes, the nervous system, as well as the lungs — where the virus is sleeping, and will not readily get delivered in the blood of patients that are under consistent anti-HIV drugs therapy. However, upon discontinuation of therapy, the virus can awake and infect new cells in the blood. Now, all this is a big problem in treating HIV with the current drug treatment, which is a life-long treatment that must be swallowed by patients. One day, I sat and thought, "Can we deliver anti-HIV directly within its reservoir sites, without the risk of drug dilution?" As a laser scientist, the answer was just before my eyes: Lasers, of course. If they can be used for dentistry, for diabetic wound-healing and surgery, they can be used for anything imaginable, including transporting drugs into cells. As a matter of fact, we are currently using laser pulses to poke or drill extremely tiny holes, which open and close almost immediately in HIV-infected cells, in order to deliver drugs within them. "How is that possible?" you may ask. Well, we shine a very powerful but super-tiny laser beam onto the membrane of HIV-infected cells while these cells are immersed in liquid containing the drug. The laser pierces the cell, while the cell swallows the drug in a matter of microseconds. Before you even know it, the induced hole becomes immediately repaired. Now, we are currently testing this technology in test tubes or in Petri dishes, but the goal is to get this technology in the human body, apply it in the human body. "How is that possible?" you may ask. Well, the answer is: through a three-headed device. Using the first head, which is our laser, we will make an incision in the site of infection. Using the second head, which is a camera, we meander to the site of infection. Finally, using a third head, which is a drug-spreading sprinkler, we deliver the drugs directly at the site of infection, while the laser is again used to poke those cells open. Well, this might not seem like much right now. But one day, if successful, this technology can lead to complete eradication of HIV in the body. Yes. A cure for HIV. This is every HIV researcher's dream — in our case, a cure lead by lasers. Thank you. (Applause) |
How I learned to communicate my inner life with Asperger's | {0: 'Alix Generous is a college student and biology researcher with Asperger syndrome. She stresses the importance of building accepting environments for all kinds of minds.'} | TEDWomen 2015 | Today, I want to talk to you about dreams. I have been a lucid dreamer my whole life, and it's cooler than in the movies. (Laughter) Beyond flying, breathing fire, and making hot men spontaneously appear ... (Laughter) I can do things like read and write music. Fun fact is that I wrote my personal statement to college in a dream. And I did accepted. So, yeah. I am a very visual thinker. I think in pictures, not words. To me, words are more like instincts and language. There are many people like me; Nikola Tesla, for example, who could visualize, design, test, and troubleshoot everything — all of his inventions — in his mind, accurately. Language is kind of exclusive to our species, anyway. I am a bit more primitive, like a beta version of Google Translate. (Laughter) My brain has the ability to hyper-focus on things that interest me. For example, once I had an affair with calculus that lasted longer than some celebrity marriages. (Laughter) There are some other unusual things about me. You may have noticed that I don't have much inflection in my voice. That's why people often confuse me with a GPS. (Laughter) This can make basic communication a challenge, unless you need directions. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) A few years ago, when I started doing presentations, I went to get head shots done for the first time. The photographer told me to look flirty. (Laughter) And I had no idea what she was talking about. (Laughter) She said, "Do that thing, you know, with your eyes, when you're flirting with guys." "What thing?" I asked. "You know, squint." And so I tried, really. It looked something like this. (Laughter) I looked like I was searching for Waldo. (Laughter) There's a reason for this, as there is a reason that Waldo is hiding. (Laughter) I have Asperger's, a high-functioning form of autism that impairs the basic social skills one is expected to display. It's made life difficult in many ways, and growing up, I struggled to fit in socially. My friends would tell jokes, but I didn't understand them. My personal heroes were George Carlin and Stephen Colbert — and they taught me humor. My personality switched from being shy and awkward to being defiant and cursing out a storm. Needless to say, I did not have many friends. I was also hypersensitive to texture. The feel of water on my skin was like pins and needles, and so for years, I refused to shower. I can assure you that my hygiene routine is up to standards now, though. (Laughter) I had to do a lot to get here, and my parents — things kind of got out of control when I was sexually assaulted by a peer, and on top of everything, it made a difficult situation worse. And I had to travel 2,000 miles across the country to get treatment, but within days of them prescribing a new medication, my life turned into an episode of the Walking Dead. I became paranoid, and began to hallucinate that rotting corpses were coming towards me. My family finally rescued me, but by that time, I had lost 19 pounds in those three weeks, as well as developing severe anemia, and was on the verge of suicide. I transferred to a new treatment center that understood my aversions, my trauma, and my social anxiety, and they knew how to treat it, and I got the help I finally needed. And after 18 months of hard work, I went on to do incredible things. One of the things with Asperger's is that oftentimes, these people have a very complex inner life, and I know for myself, I have a very colorful personality, rich ideas, and just a lot going on in my mind. But there's a gap between where that stands, and how I communicate it with the rest of the world. And this can make basic communication a challenge. Not many places would hire me, due to my lack of social skills, which is why I applied to Waffle House. (Laughter) Waffle House is an exceptional 24-hour diner — (Laughter) (Applause) thank you — where you can order your hash browns the many ways that someone would dispose of a human corpse ... (Laughter) Sliced, diced, peppered, chunked, topped, capped, and covered. (Laughter) As social norms would have it, you should only go to Waffle House at an ungodly hour in the night. (Laughter) So one time, at 2 am, I was chatting with a waitress, and I asked her, "What's the most ridiculous thing that's happened to you on the job?" And she told me that one time, a man walked in completely naked. (Laughter) I said, "Great! Sign me up for the graveyard shift!" (Laughter) Needless to say, Waffle House did not hire me. So in terms of having Asperger's, it can be viewed as a disadvantage, and sometimes it is a real pain in the butt, but it's also the opposite. It's a gift, and it allows me to think innovatively. At 19, I won a research competition for my research on coral reefs, and I ended up speaking at the UN Convention of Biological Diversity, presenting this research. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) And at 22, I'm getting ready to graduate college, and I am a co-founder of a biotech company called AutismSees. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) But consider what I had to do to get here: 25 therapists, 11 misdiagnoses, and years of pain and trauma. I spent a lot of time thinking if there's a better way, and I think there is: autism-assistive technology. This technology could play an integral role in helping people with autistic spectrum disorder, or ASD. The app Podium, released by my company, AutismSees, has the ability to independently assess and help develop communication skills. In addition to this, it tracks eye contact through camera and simulates a public-speaking and job-interview experience. And so maybe one day, Waffle House will hire me, after practicing on it some more. (Laughter) And one of the great things is that I've used Podium to help me prepare for today, and it's been a great help. But it's more than that. There's more that can be done. For people with ASD — it has been speculated that many innovative scientists, researchers, artists, and engineers have it; like, for example, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, Isaac Newton, and Bill Gates are some examples. But the problem that's encountered is that these brilliant ideas often can't be shared if there are communication roadblocks. And so, many people with autism are being overlooked every day, and they're being taken advantage of. So my dream for people with autism is to change that, to remove the roadblocks that prevent them from succeeding. One of the reasons I love lucid dreaming is because it allows me to be free, without judgment of social and physical consequences. When I'm flying over scenes that I create in my mind, I am at peace. I am free from judgment, and so I can do whatever I want, you know? I'm making out with Brad Pitt, and Angelina is totally cool with it. (Laughter) But the goal of autism-assistive technology is bigger than that, and more important. My goal is to shift people's perspective of autism and people with higher-functioning Asperger's because there is a lot they can do. I mean, look at Temple Grandin, for example. And by doing so, we allow people to share their talents with this world and move this world forward. In addition, we give them the courage to pursue their dreams in the real world, in real time. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
A visual history of human knowledge | {0: 'Manuel Lima studies how information can be organized -- into elegant and beautiful diagrams that illustrate the many unexpected twists of big data.'} | TED2015 | Over the past 10 years, I've been researching the way people organize and visualize information. And I've noticed an interesting shift. For a long period of time, we believed in a natural ranking order in the world around us, also known as the great chain of being, or "Scala naturae" in Latin, a top-down structure that normally starts with God at the very top, followed by angels, noblemen, common people, animals, and so on. This idea was actually based on Aristotle's ontology, which classified all things known to man in a set of opposing categories, like the ones you see behind me. But over time, interestingly enough, this concept adopted the branching schema of a tree in what became known as the Porphyrian tree, also considered to be the oldest tree of knowledge. The branching scheme of the tree was, in fact, such a powerful metaphor for conveying information that it became, over time, an important communication tool to map a variety of systems of knowledge. We can see trees being used to map morality, with the popular tree of virtues and tree of vices, as you can see here, with these beautiful illustrations from medieval Europe. We can see trees being used to map consanguinity, the various blood ties between people. We can also see trees being used to map genealogy, perhaps the most famous archetype of the tree diagram. I think many of you in the audience have probably seen family trees. Many of you probably even have your own family trees drawn in such a way. We can see trees even mapping systems of law, the various decrees and rulings of kings and rulers. And finally, of course, also a very popular scientific metaphor, we can see trees being used to map all species known to man. And trees ultimately became such a powerful visual metaphor because in many ways, they really embody this human desire for order, for balance, for unity, for symmetry. However, nowadays we are really facing new complex, intricate challenges that cannot be understood by simply employing a simple tree diagram. And a new metaphor is currently emerging, and it's currently replacing the tree in visualizing various systems of knowledge. It's really providing us with a new lens to understand the world around us. And this new metaphor is the metaphor of the network. And we can see this shift from trees into networks in many domains of knowledge. We can see this shift in the way we try to understand the brain. While before, we used to think of the brain as a modular, centralized organ, where a given area was responsible for a set of actions and behaviors, the more we know about the brain, the more we think of it as a large music symphony, played by hundreds and thousands of instruments. This is a beautiful snapshot created by the Blue Brain Project, where you can see 10,000 neurons and 30 million connections. And this is only mapping 10 percent of a mammalian neocortex. We can also see this shift in the way we try to conceive of human knowledge. These are some remarkable trees of knowledge, or trees of science, by Spanish scholar Ramon Llull. And Llull was actually the precursor, the very first one who created the metaphor of science as a tree, a metaphor we use every single day, when we say, "Biology is a branch of science," when we say, "Genetics is a branch of science." But perhaps the most beautiful of all trees of knowledge, at least for me, was created for the French encyclopedia by Diderot and d'Alembert in 1751. This was really the bastion of the French Enlightenment, and this gorgeous illustration was featured as a table of contents for the encyclopedia. And it actually maps out all domains of knowledge as separate branches of a tree. But knowledge is much more intricate than this. These are two maps of Wikipedia showing the inter-linkage of articles — related to history on the left, and mathematics on the right. And I think by looking at these maps and other ones that have been created of Wikipedia — arguably one of the largest rhizomatic structures ever created by man — we can really understand how human knowledge is much more intricate and interdependent, just like a network. We can also see this interesting shift in the way we map social ties between people. This is the typical organization chart. I'm assuming many of you have seen a similar chart as well, in your own corporations, or others. It's a top-down structure that normally starts with the CEO at the very top, and where you can drill down all the way to the individual workmen on the bottom. But humans sometimes are, well, actually, all humans are unique in their own way, and sometimes you really don't play well under this really rigid structure. I think the Internet is really changing this paradigm quite a lot. This is a fantastic map of online social collaboration between Perl developers. Perl is a famous programming language, and here, you can see how different programmers are actually exchanging files, and working together on a given project. And here, you can notice that this is a completely decentralized process — there's no leader in this organization, it's a network. We can also see this interesting shift when we look at terrorism. One of the main challenges of understanding terrorism nowadays is that we are dealing with decentralized, independent cells, where there's no leader leading the whole process. And here, you can actually see how visualization is being used. The diagram that you see behind me shows all the terrorists involved in the Madrid attack in 2004. And what they did here is, they actually segmented the network into three different years, represented by the vertical layers that you see behind me. And the blue lines tie together the people that were present in that network year after year. So even though there's no leader per se, these people are probably the most influential ones in that organization, the ones that know more about the past, and the future plans and goals of this particular cell. We can also see this shift from trees into networks in the way we classify and organize species. The image on the right is the only illustration that Darwin included in "The Origin of Species," which Darwin called the "Tree of Life." There's actually a letter from Darwin to the publisher, expanding on the importance of this particular diagram. It was critical for Darwin's theory of evolution. But recently, scientists discovered that overlaying this tree of life is a dense network of bacteria, and these bacteria are actually tying together species that were completely separated before, to what scientists are now calling not the tree of life, but the web of life, the network of life. And finally, we can really see this shift, again, when we look at ecosystems around our planet. No more do we have these simplified predator-versus-prey diagrams we have all learned at school. This is a much more accurate depiction of an ecosystem. This is a diagram created by Professor David Lavigne, mapping close to 100 species that interact with the codfish off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada. And I think here, we can really understand the intricate and interdependent nature of most ecosystems that abound on our planet. But even though recent, this metaphor of the network, is really already adopting various shapes and forms, and it's almost becoming a growing visual taxonomy. It's almost becoming the syntax of a new language. And this is one aspect that truly fascinates me. And these are actually 15 different typologies I've been collecting over time, and it really shows the immense visual diversity of this new metaphor. And here is an example. On the very top band, you have radial convergence, a visualization model that has become really popular over the last five years. At the top left, the very first project is a gene network, followed by a network of IP addresses — machines, servers — followed by a network of Facebook friends. You probably couldn't find more disparate topics, yet they are using the same metaphor, the same visual model, to map the never-ending complexities of its own subject. And here are a few more examples of the many I've been collecting, of this growing visual taxonomy of networks. But networks are not just a scientific metaphor. As designers, researchers, and scientists try to map a variety of complex systems, they are in many ways influencing traditional art fields, like painting and sculpture, and influencing many different artists. And perhaps because networks have this huge aesthetical force to them — they're immensely gorgeous — they are really becoming a cultural meme, and driving a new art movement, which I've called "networkism." And we can see this influence in this movement in a variety of ways. This is just one of many examples, where you can see this influence from science into art. The example on your left side is IP-mapping, a computer-generated map of IP addresses; again — servers, machines. And on your right side, you have "Transient Structures and Unstable Networks" by Sharon Molloy, using oil and enamel on canvas. And here are a few more paintings by Sharon Molloy, some gorgeous, intricate paintings. And here's another example of that interesting cross-pollination between science and art. On your left side, you have "Operation Smile." It is a computer-generated map of a social network. And on your right side, you have "Field 4," by Emma McNally, using only graphite on paper. Emma McNally is one of the main leaders of this movement, and she creates these striking, imaginary landscapes, where you can really notice the influence from traditional network visualization. But networkism doesn't happen only in two dimensions. This is perhaps one of my favorite projects of this new movement. And I think the title really says it all — it's called: "Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider's Web." And I just find this particular project to be immensely powerful. It was created by Tomás Saraceno, and he occupies these large spaces, creates these massive installations using only elastic ropes. As you actually navigate that space and bounce along those elastic ropes, the entire network kind of shifts, almost like a real organic network would. And here's yet another example of networkism taken to a whole different level. This was created by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota in a piece called "In Silence." And Chiharu, like Tomás Saraceno, fills these rooms with this dense network, this dense web of elastic ropes and black wool and thread, sometimes including objects, as you can see here, sometimes even including people, in many of her installations. But networks are also not just a new trend, and it's too easy for us to dismiss it as such. Networks really embody notions of decentralization, of interconnectedness, of interdependence. And this new way of thinking is critical for us to solve many of the complex problems we are facing nowadays, from decoding the human brain, to understanding the vast universe out there. On your left side, you have a snapshot of a neural network of a mouse — very similar to our own at this particular scale. And on your right side, you have the Millennium Simulation. It was the largest and most realistic simulation of the growth of cosmic structure. It was able to recreate the history of 20 million galaxies in approximately 25 terabytes of output. And coincidentally or not, I just find this particular comparison between the smallest scale of knowledge — the brain — and the largest scale of knowledge — the universe itself — to be really quite striking and fascinating. Because as Bruce Mau once said, "When everything is connected to everything else, for better or for worse, everything matters." Thank you so much. (Applause) |
How young blood might help reverse aging. Yes, really | {0: 'At his lab at Stanford School of Medicine, Tony Wyss-Coray studies aging -- and potential cures for it.'} | TEDGlobalLondon | This is a painting from the 16th century from Lucas Cranach the Elder. It shows the famous Fountain of Youth. If you drink its water or you bathe in it, you will get health and youth. Every culture, every civilization has dreamed of finding eternal youth. There are people like Alexander the Great or Ponce De León, the explorer, who spent much of their life chasing the Fountain of Youth. They didn't find it. But what if there was something to it? What if there was something to this Fountain of Youth? I will share an absolutely amazing development in aging research that could revolutionize the way we think about aging and how we may treat age-related diseases in the future. It started with experiments that showed, in a recent number of studies about growing, that animals — old mice — that share a blood supply with young mice can get rejuvenated. This is similar to what you might see in humans, in Siamese twins, and I know this sounds a bit creepy. But what Tom Rando, a stem-cell researcher, reported in 2007, was that old muscle from a mouse can be rejuvenated if it's exposed to young blood through common circulation. This was reproduced by Amy Wagers at Harvard a few years later, and others then showed that similar rejuvenating effects could be observed in the pancreas, the liver and the heart. But what I'm most excited about, and several other labs as well, is that this may even apply to the brain. So, what we found is that an old mouse exposed to a young environment in this model called parabiosis, shows a younger brain — and a brain that functions better. And I repeat: an old mouse that gets young blood through shared circulation looks younger and functions younger in its brain. So when we get older — we can look at different aspects of human cognition, and you can see on this slide here, we can look at reasoning, verbal ability and so forth. And up to around age 50 or 60, these functions are all intact, and as I look at the young audience here in the room, we're all still fine. (Laughter) But it's scary to see how all these curves go south. And as we get older, diseases such as Alzheimer's and others may develop. We know that with age, the connections between neurons — the way neurons talk to each other, the synapses — they start to deteriorate; neurons die, the brain starts to shrink, and there's an increased susceptibility for these neurodegenerative diseases. One big problem we have — to try to understand how this really works at a very molecular mechanistic level — is that we can't study the brains in detail, in living people. We can do cognitive tests, we can do imaging — all kinds of sophisticated testing. But we usually have to wait until the person dies to get the brain and look at how it really changed through age or in a disease. This is what neuropathologists do, for example. So, how about we think of the brain as being part of the larger organism. Could we potentially understand more about what happens in the brain at the molecular level if we see the brain as part of the entire body? So if the body ages or gets sick, does that affect the brain? And vice versa: as the brain gets older, does that influence the rest of the body? And what connects all the different tissues in the body is blood. Blood is the tissue that not only carries cells that transport oxygen, for example, the red blood cells, or fights infectious diseases, but it also carries messenger molecules, hormone-like factors that transport information from one cell to another, from one tissue to another, including the brain. So if we look at how the blood changes in disease or age, can we learn something about the brain? We know that as we get older, the blood changes as well, so these hormone-like factors change as we get older. And by and large, factors that we know are required for the development of tissues, for the maintenance of tissues — they start to decrease as we get older, while factors involved in repair, in injury and in inflammation — they increase as we get older. So there's this unbalance of good and bad factors, if you will. And to illustrate what we can do potentially with that, I want to talk you through an experiment that we did. We had almost 300 blood samples from healthy human beings 20 to 89 years of age, and we measured over 100 of these communication factors, these hormone-like proteins that transport information between tissues. And what we noticed first is that between the youngest and the oldest group, about half the factors changed significantly. So our body lives in a very different environment as we get older, when it comes to these factors. And using statistical or bioinformatics programs, we could try to discover those factors that best predict age — in a way, back-calculate the relative age of a person. And the way this looks is shown in this graph. So, on the one axis you see the actual age a person lived, the chronological age. So, how many years they lived. And then we take these top factors that I showed you, and we calculate their relative age, their biological age. And what you see is that there is a pretty good correlation, so we can pretty well predict the relative age of a person. But what's really exciting are the outliers, as they so often are in life. You can see here, the person I highlighted with the green dot is about 70 years of age but seems to have a biological age, if what we're doing here is really true, of only about 45. So is this a person that actually looks much younger than their age? But more importantly: Is this a person who is maybe at a reduced risk to develop an age-related disease and will have a long life — will live to 100 or more? On the other hand, the person here, highlighted with the red dot, is not even 40, but has a biological age of 65. Is this a person at an increased risk of developing an age-related disease? So in our lab, we're trying to understand these factors better, and many other groups are trying to understand, what are the true aging factors, and can we learn something about them to possibly predict age-related diseases? So what I've shown you so far is simply correlational, right? You can just say, "Well, these factors change with age," but you don't really know if they do something about aging. So what I'm going to show you now is very remarkable and it suggests that these factors can actually modulate the age of a tissue. And that's where we come back to this model called parabiosis. So, parabiosis is done in mice by surgically connecting the two mice together, and that leads then to a shared blood system, where we can now ask, "How does the old brain get influenced by exposure to the young blood?" And for this purpose, we use young mice that are an equivalency of 20-year-old people, and old mice that are roughly 65 years old in human years. What we found is quite remarkable. We find there are more neural stem cells that make new neurons in these old brains. There's an increased activity of the synapses, the connections between neurons. There are more genes expressed that are known to be involved in the formation of new memories. And there's less of this bad inflammation. But we observed that there are no cells entering the brains of these animals. So when we connect them, there are actually no cells going into the old brain, in this model. Instead, we've reasoned, then, that it must be the soluble factors, so we could collect simply the soluble fraction of blood which is called plasma, and inject either young plasma or old plasma into these mice, and we could reproduce these rejuvenating effects, but what we could also do now is we could do memory tests with mice. As mice get older, like us humans, they have memory problems. It's just harder to detect them, but I'll show you in a minute how we do that. But we wanted to take this one step further, one step closer to potentially being relevant to humans. What I'm showing you now are unpublished studies, where we used human plasma, young human plasma, and as a control, saline, and injected it into old mice, and asked, can we again rejuvenate these old mice? Can we make them smarter? And to do this, we used a test. It's called a Barnes maze. This is a big table that has lots of holes in it, and there are guide marks around it, and there's a bright light, as on this stage here. The mice hate this and they try to escape, and find the single hole that you see pointed at with an arrow, where a tube is mounted underneath where they can escape and feel comfortable in a dark hole. So we teach them, over several days, to find this space on these cues in the space, and you can compare this for humans, to finding your car in a parking lot after a busy day of shopping. (Laughter) Many of us have probably had some problems with that. So, let's look at an old mouse here. This is an old mouse that has memory problems, as you'll notice in a moment. It just looks into every hole, but it didn't form this spacial map that would remind it where it was in the previous trial or the last day. In stark contrast, this mouse here is a sibling of the same age, but it was treated with young human plasma for three weeks, with small injections every three days. And as you noticed, it almost looks around, "Where am I?" — and then walks straight to that hole and escapes. So, it could remember where that hole was. So by all means, this old mouse seems to be rejuvenated — it functions more like a younger mouse. And it also suggests that there is something not only in young mouse plasma, but in young human plasma that has the capacity to help this old brain. So to summarize, we find the old mouse, and its brain in particular, are malleable. They're not set in stone; we can actually change them. It can be rejuvenated. Young blood factors can reverse aging, and what I didn't show you — in this model, the young mouse actually suffers from exposure to the old. So there are old-blood factors that can accelerate aging. And most importantly, humans may have similar factors, because we can take young human blood and have a similar effect. Old human blood, I didn't show you, does not have this effect; it does not make the mice younger. So, is this magic transferable to humans? We're running a small clinical study at Stanford, where we treat Alzheimer's patients with mild disease with a pint of plasma from young volunteers, 20-year-olds, and do this once a week for four weeks, and then we look at their brains with imaging. We test them cognitively, and we ask their caregivers for daily activities of living. What we hope is that there are some signs of improvement from this treatment. And if that's the case, that could give us hope that what I showed you works in mice might also work in humans. Now, I don't think we will live forever. But maybe we discovered that the Fountain of Youth is actually within us, and it has just dried out. And if we can turn it back on a little bit, maybe we can find the factors that are mediating these effects, we can produce these factors synthetically and we can treat diseases of aging, such as Alzheimer's disease or other dementias. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How to avoid surveillance ... with the phone in your pocket | {0: 'Christopher Soghoian researches and exposes the high-tech surveillance tools that governments use to spy on their own citizens, and he is a champion of digital privacy rights.\r\n'} | TED2015 | For more than 100 years, the telephone companies have provided wiretapping assistance to governments. For much of this time, this assistance was manual. Surveillance took place manually and wires were connected by hand. Calls were recorded to tape. But as in so many other industries, computing has changed everything. The telephone companies built surveillance features into the very core of their networks. I want that to sink in for a second: Our telephones and the networks that carry our calls were wired for surveillance first. First and foremost. So what that means is that when you're talking to your spouse, your children, a colleague or your doctor on the telephone, someone could be listening. Now, that someone might be your own government; it could also be another government, a foreign intelligence service, or a hacker, or a criminal, or a stalker or any other party that breaks into the surveillance system, that hacks into the surveillance system of the telephone companies. But while the telephone companies have built surveillance as a priority, Silicon Valley companies have not. And increasingly, over the last couple years, Silicon Valley companies have built strong encryption technology into their communications products that makes surveillance extremely difficult. For example, many of you might have an iPhone, and if you use an iPhone to send a text message to other people who have an iPhone, those text messages cannot easily be wiretapped. And in fact, according to Apple, they're not able to even see the text messages themselves. Likewise, if you use FaceTime to make an audio call or a video call with one of your friends or loved ones, that, too, cannot be easily wiretapped. And it's not just Apple. WhatsApp, which is now owned by Facebook and used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, also has built strong encryption technology into its product, which means that people in the Global South can easily communicate without their governments, often authoritarian, wiretapping their text messages. So, after 100 years of being able to listen to any telephone call — anytime, anywhere — you might imagine that government officials are not very happy. And in fact, that's what's happening. Government officials are extremely mad. And they're not mad because these encryption tools are now available. What upsets them the most is that the tech companies have built encryption features into their products and turned them on by default. It's the default piece that matters. In short, the tech companies have democratized encryption. And so, government officials like British Prime Minister David Cameron, they believe that all communications — emails, texts, voice calls — all of these should be available to governments, and encryption is making that difficult. Now, look — I'm extremely sympathetic to their point of view. We live in a dangerous time in a dangerous world, and there really are bad people out there. There are terrorists and other serious national security threats that I suspect we all want the FBI and the NSA to monitor. But those surveillance features come at a cost. The reason for that is that there is no such thing as a terrorist laptop, or a drug dealer's cell phone. We all use the same communications devices. What that means is that if the drug dealers' telephone calls or the terrorists' telephone calls can be intercepted, then so can the rest of ours, too. And I think we really need to ask: Should a billion people around the world be using devices that are wiretap friendly? So the scenario of hacking of surveillance systems that I've described — this is not imaginary. In 2009, the surveillance systems that Google and Microsoft built into their networks — the systems that they use to respond to lawful surveillance requests from the police — those systems were compromised by the Chinese government, because the Chinese government wanted to figure out which of their own agents the US government was monitoring. By the same token, in 2004, the surveillance system built into the network of Vodafone Greece — Greece's largest telephone company — was compromised by an unknown entity, and that feature, the surveillance feature, was used to wiretap the Greek Prime Minister and members of the Greek cabinet. The foreign government or hackers who did that were never caught. And really, this gets to the very problem with these surveillance features, or backdoors. When you build a backdoor into a communications network or piece of technology, you have no way of controlling who's going to go through it. You have no way of controlling whether it'll be used by your side or the other side, by good guys, or by bad guys. And so for that reason, I think that it's better to build networks to be as secure as possible. Yes, this means that in the future, encryption is going to make wiretapping more difficult. It means that the police are going to have a tougher time catching bad guys. But the alternative would mean to live in a world where anyone's calls or anyone's text messages could be surveilled by criminals, by stalkers and by foreign intelligence agencies. And I don't want to live in that kind of world. And so right now, you probably have the tools to thwart many kinds of government surveillance already on your phones and already in your pockets, you just might not realize how strong and how secure those tools are, or how weak the other ways you've used to communicate really are. And so, my message to you is this: We need to use these tools. We need to secure our telephone calls. We need to secure our text messages. I want you to use these tools. I want you to tell your loved ones, I want you to tell your colleagues: Use these encrypted communications tools. Don't just use them because they're cheap and easy, but use them because they're secure. Thank you. (Applause) |
A journey through the mind of an artist | {0: 'Acclaimed for his monumental “sculptural paintings,” Dustin Yellin now nurtures voices in the art community with Pioneer Works, his mammoth Brooklyn art center.'} | TED@NYC | I was raised by lesbians in the mountains, and I sort of came like a forest gnome to New York City a while back. (Laughter) Really messed with my head, but I'll get into that later. I'll start with when I was eight years old. I took a wood box, and I buried a dollar bill, a pen and a fork inside this box in Colorado. And I thought some strange humanoids or aliens in 500 years would find this box and learn about the way our species exchanged ideas, maybe how we ate our spaghetti. I really didn't know. Anyway, this is kind of funny, because here I am, 30 years later, and I'm still making boxes. Now, at some point I was in Hawaii — I like to hike and surf and do all that weird stuff, and I was making a collage for my ma. And I took a dictionary and I ripped it up, and I made it into a sort of Agnes Martin grid, and I poured resin all over it and a bee got stuck. Now, she's afraid of bees and she's allergic to them, so I poured more resin on the canvas, thinking I could hide it or something. Instead, the opposite happened: It sort of created a magnification, like a magnifying glass, on the dictionary text. So what did I do? I built more boxes. This time, I started putting electronics, frogs, strange bottles I'd find in the street — anything I could find — because I was always finding things my whole life, and trying to make relationships and tell stories between these objects. So I started drawing around the objects, and I realized: Holy moly, I can draw in space! I can make free-floating lines, like the way you would draw around a dead body at a crime scene. So I took the objects out, and I created my own taxonomy of invented specimens. First, botanical — which you can kind of get a sense of. Then I made some weird insects and creatures. It was really fun; I was just drawing on the layers of resin. And it was cool, because I was actually starting to have shows and stuff, I was making some money, I could take my girlfriend for dinner, and like, go to Sizzler. It was some good shit, man. (Laughter) At some point, I got up to the human form, life-size resin sculptures with drawings of humans inside the layers. This was great, except for one thing: I was going to die. I didn't know what to do, because the resin was going to kill me. And I went to bed every night thinking about it. So I tried using glass. I started drawing on the layers of glass, almost like if you drew on a window, then you put another window, and another window, and you had all these windows together that made a three-dimensional composition. And this really worked, because I could stop using the resin. So I did this for years, which culminated in a very large work, which I call "The Triptych." "The Triptych" was largely inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's "[The] Garden of Earthly Delights," which is a painting in the [Museo del] Prado in Spain. Do you guys know this painting? Good, it's a cool painting. It's kind of ahead of its time, they say. So, "The Triptych." I'll walk you through this piece. It weighs 24,000 pounds. It's 18 feet long. It's double-sided, so it's 36 feet of composition. It's kind of weird. Well, that's the blood fountain. (Laughter) To the left, you have Jesus and the locusts. There's a cave where all these animal-headed creatures travel between two worlds. They go from the representational world, to this analog-mesh underworld, where they're hiding. This is where the animal-headed creatures are by the lighthouse, and they're all about to commit mass suicide into the ocean. The ocean is made up of thousands of elements. This is a bird god tied up to a battleship. (Laughter) Billy Graham is in the ocean; the Horizon from the oil spill; Waldo; Osama Bin Laden's shelter — there's all kinds of weird stuff that you can find if you look really hard, in the ocean. Anyway, this is a lady creature. She's coming out of the ocean, and she's spitting oil into one hand and she has clouds coming out of her other hand. Her hands are like scales, and she has the mythological reference of the Earth and cosmos in balance. So that's one side of "The Triptych." It's a little narrative thing. That's her hand that she's spitting into. And then, when you go to the other side, she has like a trunk, like a bird's beak, and she's spitting clouds out of her trunk. Then she has an 18-foot-long serpent's tail that connects "The Triptych." Anyway, her tail catches on fire from the back of the volcano. (Laughter) I don't know why that happened. (Laughter) That happens, you know. Her tail terminates in a cycloptic eyeball, made out of 1986 terrorist cards. Have you guys seen those? They were made in the 1980's, they're like baseball cards of terrorists. Way ahead of their time. (Laughter) That will bring you to my latest project. I'm in the middle of two projects: One's called "Psychogeographies." It's about a six-year project to make 100 of these humans. Each one is an archive of our culture, through our ripped-up media and matter, whether it's encyclopedias or dictionaries or magazines. But each one acts as a sort of an archive in the shape of a human, and they travel in groups of 20, 4, or 12 at a time. They're like cells — they come together, they divide. And you kind of walk through them. It's taking me years. Each one is basically a 3,000-pound microscope slide with a human stuck inside. This one has a little cave in his chest. That's his head; there's the chest, you can kind of see the beginning. I'm going to go down the body for you: There's a waterfall coming out of his chest, covering his penis — or not-penis, or whatever it is, a kind of androgynous thing. I'll take you quickly through these works, because I can't explain them for too long. There are the layers, you can kind of see it. That's a body getting split in half. This one has two heads, and it's communicating between the two heads. You can see the pills coming out, going into one head from this weird statue. There's a little forest scene inside the chest cavity. Can you see that? Anyway, this talk's all about these boxes, like the boxes we're in. This box we're in, the solar system is a box. This brings you to my latest box. It's a brick box. It's called Pioneer Works. (Cheers) Inside of this box is a physicist, a neuroscientist, a painter, a musician, a writer, a radio station, a museum, a school, a publishing arm to disseminate all the content we make there into the world; a garden. We shake this box up, and all these people kind of start hitting each other like particles. And I think that's the way you change the world. You redefine your insides and the box that you're living in. And you come together to realize that we're all in this together, that this delusion of difference — this idea of countries, of borders, of religion — doesn't work. We're all really made up of the same stuff, in the same box. And if we don't start exchanging that stuff sweetly and nicely, we're all going to die real soon. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How quantum biology might explain life's biggest questions | {0: 'Physicist Jim Al-Khalili and co-author Johnjoe McFadden, a biologist, explore the far edges of quantum biology in their book "Life on the Edge."'} | TEDGlobalLondon | I'd like to introduce you to an emerging area of science, one that is still speculative but hugely exciting, and certainly one that's growing very rapidly. Quantum biology asks a very simple question: Does quantum mechanics — that weird and wonderful and powerful theory of the subatomic world of atoms and molecules that underpins so much of modern physics and chemistry — also play a role inside the living cell? In other words: Are there processes, mechanisms, phenomena in living organisms that can only be explained with a helping hand from quantum mechanics? Now, quantum biology isn't new; it's been around since the early 1930s. But it's only in the last decade or so that careful experiments — in biochemistry labs, using spectroscopy — have shown very clear, firm evidence that there are certain specific mechanisms that require quantum mechanics to explain them. Quantum biology brings together quantum physicists, biochemists, molecular biologists — it's a very interdisciplinary field. I come from quantum physics, so I'm a nuclear physicist. I've spent more than three decades trying to get my head around quantum mechanics. One of the founders of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, said, If you're not astonished by it, then you haven't understood it. So I sort of feel happy that I'm still astonished by it. That's a good thing. But it means I study the very smallest structures in the universe — the building blocks of reality. If we think about the scale of size, start with an everyday object like the tennis ball, and just go down orders of magnitude in size — from the eye of a needle down to a cell, down to a bacterium, down to an enzyme — you eventually reach the nano-world. Now, nanotechnology may be a term you've heard of. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. My area is the atomic nucleus, which is the tiny dot inside an atom. It's even smaller in scale. This is the domain of quantum mechanics, and physicists and chemists have had a long time to try and get used to it. Biologists, on the other hand, have got off lightly, in my view. They are very happy with their balls-and-sticks models of molecules. (Laughter) The balls are the atoms, the sticks are the bonds between the atoms. And when they can't build them physically in the lab, nowadays, they have very powerful computers that will simulate a huge molecule. This is a protein made up of 100,000 atoms. It doesn't really require much in the way of quantum mechanics to explain it. Quantum mechanics was developed in the 1920s. It is a set of beautiful and powerful mathematical rules and ideas that explain the world of the very small. And it's a world that's very different from our everyday world, made up of trillions of atoms. It's a world built on probability and chance. It's a fuzzy world. It's a world of phantoms, where particles can also behave like spread-out waves. If we imagine quantum mechanics or quantum physics, then, as the fundamental foundation of reality itself, then it's not surprising that we say quantum physics underpins organic chemistry. After all, it gives us the rules that tell us how the atoms fit together to make organic molecules. Organic chemistry, scaled up in complexity, gives us molecular biology, which of course leads to life itself. So in a way, it's sort of not surprising. It's almost trivial. You say, "Well, of course life ultimately must depend of quantum mechanics." But so does everything else. So does all inanimate matter, made up of trillions of atoms. Ultimately, there's a quantum level where we have to delve into this weirdness. But in everyday life, we can forget about it. Because once you put together trillions of atoms, that quantum weirdness just dissolves away. Quantum biology isn't about this. Quantum biology isn't this obvious. Of course quantum mechanics underpins life at some molecular level. Quantum biology is about looking for the non-trivial — the counterintuitive ideas in quantum mechanics — and to see if they do, indeed, play an important role in describing the processes of life. Here is my perfect example of the counterintuitiveness of the quantum world. This is the quantum skier. He seems to be intact, he seems to be perfectly healthy, and yet, he seems to have gone around both sides of that tree at the same time. Well, if you saw tracks like that you'd guess it was some sort of stunt, of course. But in the quantum world, this happens all the time. Particles can multitask, they can be in two places at once. They can do more than one thing at the same time. Particles can behave like spread-out waves. It's almost like magic. Physicists and chemists have had nearly a century of trying to get used to this weirdness. I don't blame the biologists for not having to or wanting to learn quantum mechanics. You see, this weirdness is very delicate; and we physicists work very hard to maintain it in our labs. We cool our system down to near absolute zero, we carry out our experiments in vacuums, we try and isolate it from any external disturbance. That's very different from the warm, messy, noisy environment of a living cell. Biology itself, if you think of molecular biology, seems to have done very well in describing all the processes of life in terms of chemistry — chemical reactions. And these are reductionist, deterministic chemical reactions, showing that, essentially, life is made of the same stuff as everything else, and if we can forget about quantum mechanics in the macro world, then we should be able to forget about it in biology, as well. Well, one man begged to differ with this idea. Erwin Schrödinger, of Schrödinger's Cat fame, was an Austrian physicist. He was one of the founders of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. In 1944, he wrote a book called "What is Life?" It was tremendously influential. It influenced Francis Crick and James Watson, the discoverers of the double-helix structure of DNA. To paraphrase a description in the book, he says: At the molecular level, living organisms have a certain order, a structure to them that's very different from the random thermodynamic jostling of atoms and molecules in inanimate matter of the same complexity. In fact, living matter seems to behave in this order, in a structure, just like inanimate matter cooled down to near absolute zero, where quantum effects play a very important role. There's something special about the structure — the order — inside a living cell. So, Schrödinger speculated that maybe quantum mechanics plays a role in life. It's a very speculative, far-reaching idea, and it didn't really go very far. But as I mentioned at the start, in the last 10 years, there have been experiments emerging, showing where some of these certain phenomena in biology do seem to require quantum mechanics. I want to share with you just a few of the exciting ones. This is one of the best-known phenomena in the quantum world, quantum tunneling. The box on the left shows the wavelike, spread-out distribution of a quantum entity — a particle, like an electron, which is not a little ball bouncing off a wall. It's a wave that has a certain probability of being able to permeate through a solid wall, like a phantom leaping through to the other side. You can see a faint smudge of light in the right-hand box. Quantum tunneling suggests that a particle can hit an impenetrable barrier, and yet somehow, as though by magic, disappear from one side and reappear on the other. The nicest way of explaining it is if you want to throw a ball over a wall, you have to give it enough energy to get over the top of the wall. In the quantum world, you don't have to throw it over the wall, you can throw it at the wall, and there's a certain non-zero probability that it'll disappear on your side, and reappear on the other. This isn't speculation, by the way. We're happy — well, "happy" is not the right word — (Laughter) we are familiar with this. (Laughter) Quantum tunneling takes place all the time; in fact, it's the reason our Sun shines. The particles fuse together, and the Sun turns hydrogen into helium through quantum tunneling. Back in the 70s and 80s, it was discovered that quantum tunneling also takes place inside living cells. Enzymes, those workhorses of life, the catalysts of chemical reactions — enzymes are biomolecules that speed up chemical reactions in living cells, by many, many orders of magnitude. And it's always been a mystery how they do this. Well, it was discovered that one of the tricks that enzymes have evolved to make use of, is by transferring subatomic particles, like electrons and indeed protons, from one part of a molecule to another via quantum tunneling. It's efficient, it's fast, it can disappear — a proton can disappear from one place, and reappear on the other. Enzymes help this take place. This is research that's been carried out back in the 80s, particularly by a group in Berkeley, Judith Klinman. Other groups in the UK have now also confirmed that enzymes really do this. Research carried out by my group — so as I mentioned, I'm a nuclear physicist, but I've realized I've got these tools of using quantum mechanics in atomic nuclei, and so can apply those tools in other areas as well. One question we asked is whether quantum tunneling plays a role in mutations in DNA. Again, this is not a new idea; it goes all the way back to the early 60s. The two strands of DNA, the double-helix structure, are held together by rungs; it's like a twisted ladder. And those rungs of the ladder are hydrogen bonds — protons, that act as the glue between the two strands. So if you zoom in, what they're doing is holding these large molecules — nucleotides — together. Zoom in a bit more. So, this a computer simulation. The two white balls in the middle are protons, and you can see that it's a double hydrogen bond. One prefers to sit on one side; the other, on the other side of the two strands of the vertical lines going down, which you can't see. It can happen that these two protons can hop over. Watch the two white balls. They can jump over to the other side. If the two strands of DNA then separate, leading to the process of replication, and the two protons are in the wrong positions, this can lead to a mutation. This has been known for half a century. The question is: How likely are they to do that, and if they do, how do they do it? Do they jump across, like the ball going over the wall? Or can they quantum-tunnel across, even if they don't have enough energy? Early indications suggest that quantum tunneling can play a role here. We still don't know yet how important it is; this is still an open question. It's speculative, but it's one of those questions that is so important that if quantum mechanics plays a role in mutations, surely this must have big implications, to understand certain types of mutations, possibly even those that lead to turning a cell cancerous. Another example of quantum mechanics in biology is quantum coherence, in one of the most important processes in biology, photosynthesis: plants and bacteria taking sunlight, and using that energy to create biomass. Quantum coherence is the idea of quantum entities multitasking. It's the quantum skier. It's an object that behaves like a wave, so that it doesn't just move in one direction or the other, but can follow multiple pathways at the same time. Some years ago, the world of science was shocked when a paper was published showing experimental evidence that quantum coherence takes place inside bacteria, carrying out photosynthesis. The idea is that the photon, the particle of light, the sunlight, the quantum of light captured by a chlorophyll molecule, is then delivered to what's called the reaction center, where it can be turned into chemical energy. And in getting there, it doesn't just follow one route; it follows multiple pathways at once, to optimize the most efficient way of reaching the reaction center without dissipating as waste heat. Quantum coherence taking place inside a living cell. A remarkable idea, and yet evidence is growing almost weekly, with new papers coming out, confirming that this does indeed take place. My third and final example is the most beautiful, wonderful idea. It's also still very speculative, but I have to share it with you. The European robin migrates from Scandinavia down to the Mediterranean, every autumn, and like a lot of other marine animals and even insects, they navigate by sensing the Earth's magnetic field. Now, the Earth's magnetic field is very, very weak; it's 100 times weaker than a fridge magnet, and yet it affects the chemistry — somehow — within a living organism. That's not in doubt — a German couple of ornithologists, Wolfgang and Roswitha Wiltschko, in the 1970s, confirmed that indeed, the robin does find its way by somehow sensing the Earth's magnetic field, to give it directional information — a built-in compass. The puzzle, the mystery was: How does it do it? Well, the only theory in town — we don't know if it's the correct theory, but the only theory in town — is that it does it via something called quantum entanglement. Inside the robin's retina — I kid you not — inside the robin's retina is a protein called cryptochrome, which is light-sensitive. Within cryptochrome, a pair of electrons are quantum-entangled. Now, quantum entanglement is when two particles are far apart, and yet somehow remain in contact with each other. Even Einstein hated this idea; he called it "spooky action at a distance." (Laughter) So if Einstein doesn't like it, then we can all be uncomfortable with it. Two quantum-entangled electrons within a single molecule dance a delicate dance that is very sensitive to the direction the bird flies in the Earth's magnetic field. We don't know if it's the correct explanation, but wow, wouldn't it be exciting if quantum mechanics helps birds navigate? Quantum biology is still in it infancy. It's still speculative. But I believe it's built on solid science. I also think that in the coming decade or so, we're going to start to see that actually, it pervades life — that life has evolved tricks that utilize the quantum world. Watch this space. Thank you. (Applause) |
The troubling reason why vaccines are made too late ... if they're made at all | {0: 'Epidemiologist Seth Berkley is leading the charge to make sure vaccines are available to everyone, including those living in the developing world.'} | TED2015 | The child's symptoms begin with mild fever, headache, muscle pains, followed by vomiting and diarrhea, then bleeding from the mouth, nose and gums. Death follows in the form of organ failure from low blood pressure. Sounds familiar? If you're thinking this is Ebola, actually, in this case, it's not. It's an extreme form of dengue fever, a mosquito-born disease which also does not have an effective therapy or a vaccine, and kills 22,000 people each year. That is actually twice the number of people that have been killed by Ebola in the nearly four decades that we've known about it. As for measles, so much in the news recently, the death toll is actually tenfold higher. Yet for the last year, it has been Ebola that has stolen all of the headlines and the fear. Clearly, there is something deeply rooted about it, something which scares us and fascinates us more than other diseases. But what is it, exactly? Well, it's hard to acquire Ebola, but if you do, the risk of a horrible death is high. Why? Because right now, we don't have any effective therapy or vaccine available. And so, that's the clue. We may have it someday. So we rightfully fear Ebola, because it doesn't kill as many people as other diseases. In fact, it's much less transmissible than viruses such as flu or measles. We fear Ebola because of the fact that it kills us and we can't treat it. We fear the certain inevitability that comes with Ebola. Ebola has this inevitability that seems to defy modern medical science. But wait a second, why is that? We've known about Ebola since 1976. We've known what it's capable of. We've had ample opportunity to study it in the 24 outbreaks that have occurred. And in fact, we've actually had vaccine candidates available now for more than a decade. Why is that those vaccines are just going into clinical trials now? This goes to the fundamental problem we have with vaccine development for infectious diseases. It goes something like this: The people most at risk for these diseases are also the ones least able to pay for vaccines. This leaves little in the way of market incentives for manufacturers to develop vaccines, unless there are large numbers of people who are at risk in wealthy countries. It's simply too commercially risky. As for Ebola, there is absolutely no market at all, so the only reason we have two vaccines in late-stage clinical trials now, is actually because of a somewhat misguided fear. Ebola was relatively ignored until September 11 and the anthrax attacks, when all of a sudden, people perceived Ebola as, potentially, a bioterrorism weapon. Why is it that the Ebola vaccine wasn't fully developed at this point? Well, partially, because it was really difficult — or thought to be difficult — to weaponize the virus, but mainly because of the financial risk in developing it. And this is really the point. The sad reality is, we develop vaccines not based upon the risk the pathogen poses to people, but on how economically risky it is to develop these vaccines. Vaccine development is expensive and complicated. It can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to take even a well-known antigen and turn it into a viable vaccine. Fortunately for diseases like Ebola, there are things we can do to remove some of these barriers. The first is to recognize when there's a complete market failure. In that case, if we want vaccines, we have to provide incentives or some type of subsidy. We also need to do a better job at being able to figure out which are the diseases that most threaten us. By creating capabilities within countries, we then create the ability for those countries to create epidemiological and laboratory networks which are capable of collecting and categorizing these pathogens. The data from that then can be used to understand the geographic and genetic diversity, which then can be used to help us understand how these are being changed immunologically, and what type of reactions they promote. So these are the things that can be done, but to do this, if we want to deal with a complete market failure, we have to change the way we view and prevent infectious diseases. We have to stop waiting until we see evidence of a disease becoming a global threat before we consider it as one. So, for Ebola, the paranoid fear of an infectious disease, followed by a few cases transported to wealthy countries, led the global community to come together, and with the work of dedicated vaccine companies, we now have these: Two Ebola vaccines in efficacy trials in the Ebola countries — (Applause) and a pipeline of vaccines that are following behind. Every year, we spend billions of dollars, keeping a fleet of nuclear submarines permanently patrolling the oceans to protect us from a threat that almost certainly will never happen. And yet, we spend virtually nothing to prevent something as tangible and evolutionarily certain as epidemic infectious diseases. And make no mistake about it — it's not a question of "if," but "when." These bugs are going to continue to evolve and they're going to threaten the world. And vaccines are our best defense. So if we want to be able to prevent epidemics like Ebola, we need to take on the risk of investing in vaccine development and in stockpile creation. And we need to view this, then, as the ultimate deterrent — something we make sure is available, but at the same time, praying we never have to use it. Thank you. (Applause) |
These robots come to the rescue after a disaster | {0: 'Robin Murphy researches robots -- ground, aerial and marine -- that can help out during disasters.'} | TEDWomen 2015 | Over a million people are killed each year in disasters. Two and a half million people will be permanently disabled or displaced, and the communities will take 20 to 30 years to recover and billions of economic losses. If you can reduce the initial response by one day, you can reduce the overall recovery by a thousand days, or three years. See how that works? If the initial responders can get in, save lives, mitigate whatever flooding danger there is, that means the other groups can get in to restore the water, the roads, the electricity, which means then the construction people, the insurance agents, all of them can get in to rebuild the houses, which then means you can restore the economy, and maybe even make it better and more resilient to the next disaster. A major insurance company told me that if they can get a homeowner's claim processed one day earlier, it'll make a difference of six months in that person getting their home repaired. And that's why I do disaster robotics — because robots can make a disaster go away faster. Now, you've already seen a couple of these. These are the UAVs. These are two types of UAVs: a rotorcraft, or hummingbird; a fixed-wing, a hawk. And they're used extensively since 2005 — Hurricane Katrina. Let me show you how this hummingbird, this rotorcraft, works. Fantastic for structural engineers. Being able to see damage from angles you can't get from binoculars on the ground or from a satellite image, or anything flying at a higher angle. But it's not just structural engineers and insurance people who need this. You've got things like this fixed-wing, this hawk. Now, this hawk can be used for geospatial surveys. That's where you're pulling imagery together and getting 3D reconstruction. We used both of these at the Oso mudslides up in Washington State, because the big problem was geospatial and hydrological understanding of the disaster — not the search and rescue. The search and rescue teams had it under control and knew what they were doing. The bigger problem was that river and mudslide might wipe them out and flood the responders. And not only was it challenging to the responders and property damage, it's also putting at risk the future of salmon fishing along that part of Washington State. So they needed to understand what was going on. In seven hours, going from Arlington, driving from the Incident Command Post to the site, flying the UAVs, processing the data, driving back to Arlington command post — seven hours. We gave them in seven hours data that they could take only two to three days to get any other way — and at higher resolution. It's a game changer. And don't just think about the UAVs. I mean, they are sexy — but remember, 80 percent of the world's population lives by water, and that means our critical infrastructure is underwater — the parts that we can't get to, like the bridges and things like that. And that's why we have unmanned marine vehicles, one type of which you've already met, which is SARbot, a square dolphin. It goes underwater and uses sonar. Well, why are marine vehicles so important and why are they very, very important? They get overlooked. Think about the Japanese tsunami — 400 miles of coastland totally devastated, twice the amount of coastland devastated by Hurricane Katrina in the United States. You're talking about your bridges, your pipelines, your ports — wiped out. And if you don't have a port, you don't have a way to get in enough relief supplies to support a population. That was a huge problem at the Haiti earthquake. So we need marine vehicles. Now, let's look at a viewpoint from the SARbot of what they were seeing. We were working on a fishing port. We were able to reopen that fishing port, using her sonar, in four hours. That fishing port was told it was going to be six months before they could get a manual team of divers in, and it was going to take the divers two weeks. They were going to miss the fall fishing season, which was the major economy for that part, which is kind of like their Cape Cod. UMVs, very important. But you know, all the robots I've shown you have been small, and that's because robots don't do things that people do. They go places people can't go. And a great example of that is Bujold. Unmanned ground vehicles are particularly small, so Bujold — (Laughter) Say hello to Bujold. (Laughter) Bujold was used extensively at the World Trade Center to go through Towers 1, 2 and 4. You're climbing into the rubble, rappelling down, going deep in spaces. And just to see the World Trade Center from Bujold's viewpoint, look at this. You're talking about a disaster where you can't fit a person or a dog — and it's on fire. The only hope of getting to a survivor way in the basement, you have to go through things that are on fire. It was so hot, on one of the robots, the tracks began to melt and come off. Robots don't replace people or dogs, or hummingbirds or hawks or dolphins. They do things new. They assist the responders, the experts, in new and innovative ways. The biggest problem is not making the robots smaller, though. It's not making them more heat-resistant. It's not making more sensors. The biggest problem is the data, the informatics, because these people need to get the right data at the right time. So wouldn't it be great if we could have experts immediately access the robots without having to waste any time of driving to the site, so whoever's there, use their robots over the Internet. Well, let's think about that. Let's think about a chemical train derailment in a rural county. What are the odds that the experts, your chemical engineer, your railroad transportation engineers, have been trained on whatever UAV that particular county happens to have? Probably, like, none. So we're using these kinds of interfaces to allow people to use the robots without knowing what robot they're using, or even if they're using a robot or not. What the robots give you, what they give the experts, is data. The problem becomes: who gets what data when? One thing to do is to ship all the information to everybody and let them sort it out. Well, the problem with that is it overwhelms the networks, and worse yet, it overwhelms the cognitive abilities of each of the people trying to get that one nugget of information they need to make the decision that's going to make the difference. So we need to think about those kinds of challenges. So it's the data. Going back to the World Trade Center, we tried to solve that problem by just recording the data from Bujold only when she was deep in the rubble, because that's what the USAR team said they wanted. What we didn't know at the time was that the civil engineers would have loved, needed the data as we recorded the box beams, the serial numbers, the locations, as we went into the rubble. We lost valuable data. So the challenge is getting all the data and getting it to the right people. Now, here's another reason. We've learned that some buildings — things like schools, hospitals, city halls — get inspected four times by different agencies throughout the response phases. Now, we're looking, if we can get the data from the robots to share, not only can we do things like compress that sequence of phases to shorten the response time, but now we can begin to do the response in parallel. Everybody can see the data. We can shorten it that way. So really, "disaster robotics" is a misnomer. It's not about the robots. It's about the data. (Applause) So my challenge to you: the next time you hear about a disaster, look for the robots. They may be underground, they may be underwater, they may be in the sky, but they should be there. Look for the robots, because robots are coming to the rescue. (Applause) |
How too many rules at work keep you from getting things done | {0: "BCG's Yves Morieux researches how corporations can adapt to a modern and complex business landscape."} | TED@BCG London | Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize [winner] in economics, once wrote: "Productivity is not everything, but in the long run, it is almost everything." So this is serious. There are not that many things on earth that are "almost everything." Productivity is the principal driver of the prosperity of a society. So we have a problem. In the largest European economies, productivity used to grow five percent per annum in the '50s, '60s, early '70s. From '73 to '83: three percent per annum. From '83 to '95: two percent per annum. Since 1995: less than one percent per annum. The same profile in Japan. The same profile in the US, despite a momentary rebound 15 years ago, and despite all the technological innovations around us: the Internet, the information, the new information and communication technologies. When productivity grows three percent per annum, you double the standard of living every generation. Every generation is twice as well-off as its parents'. When it grows one percent per annum, it takes three generations to double the standard of living. And in this process, many people will be less well-off than their parents. They will have less of everything: smaller roofs, or perhaps no roof at all, less access to education, to vitamins, to antibiotics, to vaccination — to everything. Think of all the problems that we're facing at the moment. All. Chances are that they are rooted in the productivity crisis. Why this crisis? Because the basic tenets about efficiency — effectiveness in organizations, in management — have become counterproductive for human efforts. Everywhere in public services — in companies, in the way we work, the way we innovate, invest — try to learn to work better. Take the holy trinity of efficiency: clarity, measurement, accountability. They make human efforts derail. There are two ways to look at it, to prove it. One, the one I prefer, is rigorous, elegant, nice — math. But the full math version takes a little while, so there is another one. It is to look at a relay race. This is what we will do today. It's a bit more animated, more visual and also faster — it's a race. Hopefully, it's faster. (Laughter) World championship final — women. Eight teams in the final. The fastest team is the US team. They have the fastest women on earth. They are the favorite team to win. Notably, if you compare them to an average team, say, the French team, (Laughter) based on their best performances in the 100-meter race, if you add the individual times of the US runners, they arrive at the finish line 3.2 meters ahead of the French team. And this year, the US team is in great shape. Based on their best performance this year, they arrive 6.4 meters ahead of the French team, based on the data. We are going to look at the race. At some point you will see, towards the end, that Torri Edwards, the fourth US runner, is ahead. Not surprising — this year she got the gold medal in the 100-meter race. And by the way, Chryste Gaines, the second runner in the US team, is the fastest woman on earth. So, there are 3.5 billion women on earth. Where are the two fastest? On the US team. And the two other runners on the US team are not bad, either. (Laughter) So clearly, the US team has won the war for talent. But behind, the average team is trying to catch up. Let's watch the race. (Video: French sportscasters narrate race) (Video: Race narration ends) Yves Morieux: So what happened? The fastest team did not win; the slower one did. By the way, I hope you appreciate the deep historical research I did to make the French look good. (Laughter) But let's not exaggerate — it's not archeology, either. (Laughter) But why? Because of cooperation. When you hear this sentence: "Thanks to cooperation, the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts." This is not poetry; this is not philosophy. This is math. Those who carry the baton are slower, but their baton is faster. Miracle of cooperation: it multiplies energy, intelligence in human efforts. It is the essence of human efforts: how we work together, how each effort contributes to the efforts of others. With cooperation, we can do more with less. Now, what happens to cooperation when the holy grail — the holy trinity, even — of clarity, measurement, accountability — appears? Clarity. Management reports are full of complaints about the lack of clarity. Compliance audits, consultants' diagnostics. We need more clarity, we need to clarify the roles, the processes. It is as though the runners on the team were saying, "Let's be clear — where does my role really start and end? Am I supposed to run for 95 meters, 96, 97...?" It's important, let's be clear. If you say 97, after 97 meters, people will drop the baton, whether there is someone to take it or not. Accountability. We are constantly trying to put accountability in someone's hands. Who is accountable for this process? We need somebody accountable for this process. So in the relay race, since passing the baton is so important, then we need somebody clearly accountable for passing the baton. So between each runner, now we will have a new dedicated athlete, clearly dedicated to taking the baton from one runner, and passing it to the next runner. And we will have at least two like that. Well, will we, in that case, win the race? That I don't know, but for sure, we would have a clear interface, a clear line of accountability. We will know who to blame. But we'll never win the race. If you think about it, we pay more attention to knowing who to blame in case we fail, than to creating the conditions to succeed. All the human intelligence put in organization design — urban structures, processing systems — what is the real goal? To have somebody guilty in case they fail. We are creating organizations able to fail, but in a compliant way, with somebody clearly accountable when we fail. And we are quite effective at that — failing. Measurement. What gets measured gets done. Look, to pass the baton, you have to do it at the right time, in the right hand, at the right speed. But to do that, you have to put energy in your arm. This energy that is in your arm will not be in your legs. It will come at the expense of your measurable speed. You have to shout early enough to the next runner when you will pass the baton, to signal that you are arriving, so that the next runner can prepare, can anticipate. And you have to shout loud. But the blood, the energy that will be in your throat will not be in your legs. Because you know, there are eight people shouting at the same time. So you have to recognize the voice of your colleague. You cannot say, "Is it you?" Too late! (Laughter) Now, let's look at the race in slow motion, and concentrate on the third runner. Look at where she allocates her efforts, her energy, her attention. Not all in her legs — that would be great for her own speed — but in also in her throat, arm, eye, brain. That makes a difference in whose legs? In the legs of the next runner. But when the next runner runs super-fast, is it because she made a super effort, or because of the way the third runner passed the baton? There is no metric on earth that will give us the answer. And if we reward people on the basis of their measurable performance, they will put their energy, their attention, their blood in what can get measured — in their legs. And the baton will fall and slow down. To cooperate is not a super effort, it is how you allocate your effort. It is to take a risk, because you sacrifice the ultimate protection granted by objectively measurable individual performance. It is to make a super difference in the performance of others, with whom we are compared. It takes being stupid to cooperate, then. And people are not stupid; they don't cooperate. You know, clarity, accountability, measurement were OK when the world was simpler. But business has become much more complex. With my teams, we have measured the evolution of complexity in business. It is much more demanding today to attract and retain customers, to build advantage on a global scale, to create value. And the more business gets complex, the more, in the name of clarity, accountability, measurement we multiply structures, processes, systems. You know, this drive for clarity and accountability triggers a counterproductive multiplication of interfaces, middle offices, coordinators that do not only mobilize people and resources, but that also add obstacles. And the more complicated the organization, the more difficult it is to understand what is really happening. So we need summaries, proxies, reports, key performance indicators, metrics. So people put their energy in what can get measured, at the expense of cooperation. And as performance deteriorates, we add even more structure, process, systems. People spend their time in meetings, writing reports they have to do, undo and redo. Based on our analysis, teams in these organizations spend between 40 and 80 percent of their time wasting their time, but working harder and harder, longer and longer, on less and less value-adding activities. This is what is killing productivity, what makes people suffer at work. Our organizations are wasting human intelligence. They have turned against human efforts. When people don't cooperate, don't blame their mindsets, their mentalities, their personality — look at the work situations. Is it really in their personal interest to cooperate or not, if, when they cooperate, they are individually worse off? Why would they cooperate? When we blame personalities instead of the clarity, the accountability, the measurement, we add injustice to ineffectiveness. We need to create organizations in which it becomes individually useful for people to cooperate. Remove the interfaces, the middle offices — all these complicated coordination structures. Don't look for clarity; go for fuzziness. Fuzziness overlaps. Remove most of the quantitative metrics to assess performance. Speed the "what." Look at cooperation, the "how." How did you pass the baton? Did you throw it, or did you pass it effectively? Am I putting my energy in what can get measured — my legs, my speed — or in passing the baton? You, as leaders, as managers, are you making it individually useful for people to cooperate? The future of our organizations, our companies, our societies hinges on your answer to these questions. Thank you. (Applause) |
This telescope might show us the beginning of the universe | {0: 'Wendy Freedman led the construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope, a massive earthbound observatory.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | When I was 14 years old, I was interested in science — fascinated by it, excited to learn about it. And I had a high school science teacher who would say to the class, "The girls don't have to listen to this." Encouraging, yes. (Laughter) I chose not to listen — but to that statement alone. So let me take you to the Andes mountains in Chile, 500 kilometers, 300 miles northeast of Santiago. It's very remote, it's very dry and it's very beautiful. And there's not much there. There are condors, there are tarantulas, and at night, when the light dims, it reveals one of the darkest skies on Earth. It's kind of a magic place, the mountain. It's a wonderful combination of very remote mountaintop with exquisitely sophisticated technology. And our ancestors, for as long as there's been recorded history, have looked at the night sky and pondered the nature of our existence. And we're no exception, our generation. The only difficulty is that the night sky now is blocked by the glare of city lights. And so astronomers go to these very remote mountaintops to view and to study the cosmos. So telescopes are our window to the cosmos. It's no exaggeration to say that the Southern Hemisphere is going to be the future of astronomy for the 21st century. We have an array of existing telescopes already, in the Andes mountains in Chile, and that's soon to be joined by a really sensational array of new capability. There will be two international groups that are going to be building giant telescopes, sensitive to optical radiation, as our eyes are. There will be a survey telescope that will be scanning the sky every few nights. There will be radio telescopes, sensitive to long-wavelength radio radiation. And then there will be telescopes in space. There'll be a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope; it's called the James Webb Telescope, and it will be launched in 2018. There'll be a satellite called TESS that will discover planets outside of our solar system. For the last decade, I've been leading a group — a consortium — international group, to build what will be, when it's finished, the largest optical telescope in existence. It's called the Giant Magellan Telescope, or GMT. This telescope is going to have mirrors that are 8.4 meters in diameter — each of the mirrors. That's almost 27 feet. So it dwarfs this stage — maybe out to the fourth row in this audience. Each of the seven mirrors in this telescope will be almost 27 feet in diameter. Together, the seven mirrors in this telescope will comprise 80 feet in diameter. So, essentially the size of this entire auditorium. The whole telescope will stand about 43 meters high, and again, being in Rio, some of you have been to see the statue of the giant Christ. The scale is comparable in height; in fact, it's smaller than this telescope will be. It's comparable to the size of the Statue of Liberty. And it's going to be housed in an enclosure that's 22 stories — 60 meters high. But it's an unusual building to protect this telescope. It will have open windows to the sky, be able to point and look at the sky, and it will actually rotate on a base — 2,000 tons of rotating building. The Giant Magellan Telescope will have 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. It will be 20 million times more sensitive than the human eye. And it may, for the first time ever, be capable of finding life on planets outside of our solar system. It's going to allow us to look back at the first light in the universe — literally, the dawn of the cosmos. The cosmic dawn. It's a telescope that's going to allow us to peer back, witness galaxies as they were when they were actually assembling, the first black holes in the universe, the first galaxies. Now, for thousands of years, we have been studying the cosmos, we've been wondering about our place in the universe. The ancient Greeks told us that the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, Copernicus displaced the Earth, and put the Sun at the heart of the cosmos. And as we've learned over the centuries, since Galileo Galilei, the Italian scientist, first turned, in that time, a two-inch, very small telescope, to the sky, every time we have built larger telescopes, we have learned something about the universe; we've made discoveries, without exception. We've learned in the 20th century that the universe is expanding and that our own solar system is not at the center of that expansion. We know now that the universe is made of about 100 billion galaxies that are visible to us, and each one of those galaxies has 100 billion stars within it. So we're looking now at the deepest image of the cosmos that's ever been taken. It was taken using the Hubble Space Telescope, and by pointing the telescope at what was previously a blank region of sky, before the launch of Hubble. And if you can imagine this tiny area, it's only one-fiftieth of the size of the full moon. So, if you can imagine the full moon. And there are now 10,000 galaxies visible within that image. And the faintness of those images and the tiny size is only a result of the fact that those galaxies are so far away, the vast distances. And each of those galaxies may contain within it a few billion or even hundreds of billions of individual stars. Telescopes are like time machines. So the farther back we look in space, the further back we see in time. And they're like light buckets — literally, they collect light. So larger the bucket, the larger the mirror we have, the more light we can see, and the farther back we can view. So, we've learned in the last century that there are exotic objects in the universe — black holes. We've even learned that there's dark matter and dark energy that we can't see. So you're looking now at an actual image of dark matter. (Laughter) You got it. Not all audiences get that. (Laughter) So the way we infer the presence of dark matter — we can't see it — but there's an unmistakable tug, due to gravity. We now can look out, we see this sea of galaxies in a universe that's expanding. What I do myself is to measure the expansion of the universe, and one of the projects that I carried out in the 1990s used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure how fast the universe is expanding. We can now trace back to 14 billion years. We've learned over time that stars have individual histories; that is, they have birth, they have middle ages and some of them even have dramatic deaths. So the embers from those stars actually then form the new stars that we see, most of which turn out to have planets going around them. And one of the really surprising results in the last 20 years has been the discovery of other planets going around other stars. These are called exoplanets. And until 1995, we didn't even know the existence of any other planets, other than going around our own sun. But now, there are almost 2,000 other planets orbiting other stars that we can now detect, measure masses for. There are 500 of those that are multiple-planet systems. And there are 4,000 — and still counting — other candidates for planets orbiting other stars. They come in a bewildering variety of different kinds. There are Jupiter-like planets that are hot, there are other planets that are icy, there are water worlds and there are rocky planets like the Earth, so-called "super-Earths," and there have even been planets that have been speculated diamond worlds. So we know there's at least one planet, our own Earth, in which there is life. We've even found planets that are orbiting two stars. That's no longer the province of science fiction. So around our own planet, we know there's life, we've developed a complex life, we now can question our own origins. And given all that we've discovered, the overwhelming numbers now suggest that there may be millions, perhaps — maybe even hundreds of millions — of other [planets] that are close enough — just the right distance from their stars that they're orbiting — to have the existence of liquid water and maybe could potentially support life. So we marvel now at those odds, the overwhelming odds, and the amazing thing is that within the next decade, the GMT may be able to take spectra of the atmospheres of those planets, and determine whether or not they have the potential for life. So, what is the GMT project? It's an international project. It includes Australia, South Korea, and I'm happy to say, being here in Rio, that the newest partner in our telescope is Brazil. (Applause) It also includes a number of institutions across the United States, including Harvard University, the Smithsonian and the Carnegie Institutions, and the Universities of Arizona, Chicago, Texas-Austin and Texas A&M University. It also involves Chile. So, the making of the mirrors in this telescope is also fascinating in its own right. Take chunks of glass, melt them in a furnace that is itself rotating. This happens underneath the football stadium at the University of Arizona. It's tucked away under 52,000 seats. Nobody know it's happening. And there's essentially a rotating cauldron. The mirrors are cast and they're cooled very slowly, and then they're polished to an exquisite precision. And so, if you think about the precision of these mirrors, the bumps on the mirror, over the entire 27 feet, amount to less than one-millionth of an inch. So, can you visualize that? Ow! (Laughter) That's one five-thousandths of the width of one of my hairs, over this entire 27 feet. It's a spectacular achievement. It's what allows us to have the precision that we will have. So, what does that precision buy us? So the GMT, if you can imagine — if I were to hold up a coin, which I just happen to have, and I look at the face of that coin, I can see from here the writing on the coin; I can see the face on that coin. My guess that even in the front row, you can't see that. But if we were to turn the Giant Magellan Telescope, all 80-feet diameter that we see in this auditorium, and point it 200 miles away, if I were standing in São Paulo, we could resolve the face of this coin. That's the extraordinary resolution and power of this telescope. And if we were — (Applause) If an astronaut went up to the Moon, a quarter of a million miles away, and lit a candle — a single candle — then we would be able to detect it, using the GMT. Quite extraordinary. This is a simulated image of a cluster in a nearby galaxy. "Nearby" is astronomical, it's all relative. It's tens of millions of light-years away. This is what this cluster would look like. So look at those four bright objects, and now lets compare it with a camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. You can see faint detail that starts to come through. And now finally — and look how dramatic this is — this is what the GMT will see. So, keep your eyes on those bright images again. This is what we see on one of the most powerful existing telescopes on the Earth, and this, again, what the GMT will see. Extraordinary precision. So, where are we? We have now leveled the top of the mountaintop in Chile. We blasted that off. We've tested and polished the first mirror. We've cast the second and the third mirrors. And we're about to cast the fourth mirror. We had a series of reviews this year, international panels that came in and reviewed us, and said, "You're ready to go to construction." And so we plan on building this telescope with the first four mirrors. We want to get on the air quickly, and be taking science data — what we astronomers call "first light," in 2021. And the full telescope will be finished in the middle of the next decade, with all seven mirrors. So we're now poised to look back at the distant universe, the cosmic dawn. We'll be able to study other planets in exquisite detail. But for me, one of the most exciting things about building the GMT is the opportunity to actually discover something that we don't know about — that we can't even imagine at this point, something completely new. And my hope is that with the construction of this and other facilities, that many young women and men will be inspired to reach for the stars. Thank you very much. Obrigado. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Wendy. Stay with me, because I have a question for you. You mentioned different facilities. So the Magellan Telescope is going up, but also ALMA and others in Chile and elsewhere, including in Hawaii. Is it about cooperation and complementarity, or about competition? I know there's competition in terms of funding, but what about the science? Wendy Freedman: In terms of the science, they're very complementary. The telescopes that are in space, the telescopes on the ground, telescopes with different wavelength capability, telescopes even that are similar, but different instruments — they will all look at different parts of the questions that we're asking. So when we discover other planets, we'll be able to test those observations, we'll be able to measure the atmospheres, be able to look in space with very high resolution. So, they're very complementary. You're right about the funding, we compete; but scientifically, it's very complementary. BG: Wendy, thank you very much for coming to TEDGlobal. WF: Thank you. (Applause) |
An invitation to men who want a better world for women | {0: "Elizabeth Nyamayaro is the Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women, as well as head of UN Women's blockbuster HeForShe initiative."} | TEDWomen 2015 | I will always remember the first time I met the girl in the blue uniform. I was eight at the time, living in the village with my grandmother, who was raising me and other children. Famine had hit my country of Zimbabwe, and we just didn't have enough to eat. We were hungry. And that's when the girl in the blue uniform came to my village with the United Nations to feed the children. As she handed me my porridge, I asked her why she was there, and without hesitation, she said, "As Africans, we must uplift all the people of Africa." I had absolutely no idea what she meant. (Laughter) But her words stuck with me. Two years later, famine hit my country for the second time. My grandmother had no choice but to send me to the city to live with an aunt I had never met before. So at the age of 10, I found myself in school for the very first time. And there, at the city school, I would experience what it was to be unequal. You see, in the village, we were all equal. But in the eyes and the minds of the other kids, I was not their equal. I couldn't speak English, and I was way behind in terms of reading and writing. But this feeling of inequality would get even more complex. Every school holiday spent back in the village with my grandmother made me consciously aware of the inequalities this incredible opportunity had created within my own family. Suddenly, I had much more than the rest of my village. And in their eyes, I was no longer their equal. I felt guilty. But I thought about the girl in the blue uniform, and I remember thinking, "That's who I want to be — someone like her, someone who uplifts other people." This childhood experience led me to the United Nations, and to my current role with UN Women, where we are addressing one of the greatest inequalities that affects more than half of the world's population — women and girls. Today, I want to share with you a simple idea that seeks to uplift all of us together. Eight months ago, under the visionary leadership of Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, head of UN Women, we launched a groundbreaking initiative called HeForShe, inviting men and boys from around the world to stand in solidarity with each other and with women, to create a shared vision for gender equality. This is an invitation for those who believe in equality for women and men, and those who don't yet know that they believe. The initiative is based on a simple idea: that what we share is much more powerful than what divides us. We all feel the same things. We all want the same things, even when those things sometimes remain unspoken. HeForShe is about uplifting all of us, women and men together. It's moving us towards an inflection point for gender equality. Imagine a blank page with one horizontal line splitting it in half. Now imagine that women are represented here, and men are represented here. In our current population, HeForShe is about moving the 3.2 billion men, one man at a time, across that line, so that ultimately, men can stand alongside women and be on the right side of history, making gender equality a reality in the 21st century. However, engaging men in the movement would prove quite controversial. Why invite men? They are the problem. (Laughter) In fact, men don't care, we were told. But something incredible happened when we launched HeForShe. In just three days, more than 100,000 men had signed up and committed to be agents of change for equality. Within that first week, at least one man in every single country in the world stood up to be counted, and within that same week, HeForShe created more than 1.2 billion conversations on social media. And that's when the emails started pouring in, sometimes as many as a thousand a day. We heard from a man out of Zimbabwe, who, after hearing about HeForShe, created a "husband school." (Laughter) He literally went around his village, hand-picking all of the men that were abusive to their partners, and committed to turn them into better husbands and fathers. In Pune, India, a youth advocate organized an innovative bicycle rally, mobilizing 700 cyclists to share the HeForShe messages within their own community. In another impact story, a man sent a very personal note of something that had happened in his own community. He wrote, "Dear Madam, I have lived all of my life next door to a man who continuously beats up his wife. Two weeks ago, I was listening to my radio, and your voice came on, and you spoke about something called the HeForShe, and the need for men to play their role. Within a few hours, I heard the woman cry again next door, but for the first time, I didn't just sit there. I felt compelled to do something, so I went over and I confronted the husband. Madam, it has been two weeks, and the woman has not cried since. Thank you for giving me a voice." (Applause) Personal impact stories such as these show that we are tapping into something within men, but getting to a world where women and men are equal is not just a matter of bringing men to the cause. We want concrete, systematic, structural change that can equalize the political, economic and social realities for women and men. We are asking men to make concrete actions, calling them to intervene at a personal level, to change their behavior. We are calling upon governments, businesses, universities, to change their policies. We want male leaders to become role models and change agents within their own institutions. Already, a number of prominent men and leaders have stepped up and made some concrete HeForShe commitments. In a few early success stories, a leading French hospitality company, Accor, has committed to eliminate the pay gap for all of its 180,000 employees by 2020. (Applause) The government of Sweden, under its current feminist government, has committed to close both the employment and the pay gap for all of its citizens within the current electoral term. In Japan, the University of Nagoya is building, as part of their HeForShe commitments, what will become one of Japan's leading gender-research centers. Now, eight months later, a movement is building. We are seeing men sign up from every single walk of life, and from every single corner in the world, from the United Nations' own Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to the Secretary-Generals of NATO and the EU Council, from the prime minister of Bhutan to the president of Sierra Leone. In Europe alone, all the male EU Commissioners and the members of Parliament of the Swedish and Iceland governments have signed up to be HeForShe. In fact, one in 20 men in Iceland has joined the movement. The rallying call of our passionate goodwill ambassador, Emma Watson, has garnered more than five billion media impressions, mobilizing hundreds and thousands of students around the world to create more than a hundred HeForShe student associations. Now this is the beginning of the vision that HeForShe has for the world that we want to see. Einstein once said, "A human being is part of the whole ... but he experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest ... This delusion is a kind of prison for us ... Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion." If women and men are part of a greater whole, as Einstein suggests, it is my hope that HeForShe can help free us to realize that it is not our gender that defines us, but ultimately, our shared humanity. HeForShe is tapping into women's and men's dreams, the dreams that we have for ourselves, and the dreams that we have for our families, our children, friends, communities. So that's what it is about. HeForShe is about uplifting all of us together. Thank you. (Applause) |
How the mysterious dark net is going mainstream | {0: 'In his book "The Dark Net," Jamie Bartlett investigates Internet subcultures, both legal and illegal.'} | TEDGlobalLondon | If you want to buy high-quality, low-price cocaine, there really is only one place to go, and that is the dark net anonymous markets. Now, you can't get to these sites with a normal browser — Chrome or Firefox — because they're on this hidden part of the Internet, known as Tor hidden services, where URLs are a string of meaningless numbers and letters that end in .onion, and which you access with a special browser called the Tor browser. Now, the Tor browser was originally a U.S. Naval intelligence project. It then became open source, and it allows anybody to browse the net without giving away their location. And it does this by encrypting your IP address and then routing it via several other computers around the world that use the same software. You can use it on the normal Internet, but it's also your key to the dark net. And because of this fiendishly clever encryption system, the 20 or 30 — we don't know exactly — thousand sites that operate there are incredibly difficult to shut down. It is a censorship-free world visited by anonymous users. Little wonder, then, that it's a natural place to go for anybody with something to hide, and that something, of course, need not be illegal. On the dark net, you will find whistle-blower sites, The New Yorker. You will find political activism blogs. You will find libraries of pirated books. But you'll also find the drugs markets, illegal pornography, commercial hacking services, and much more besides. Now, the dark net is one of the most interesting, exciting places anywhere on the net. And the reason is, because although innovation, of course, takes place in big businesses, takes place in world-class universities, it also takes place in the fringes, because those on the fringes — the pariahs, the outcasts — they're often the most creative, because they have to be. In this part of the Internet, you will not find a single lolcat, a single pop-up advert anywhere. And that's one of the reasons why I think many of you here will be on the dark net fairly soon. (Laughter) Not that I'm suggesting anyone in this audience would use it to go and procure high-quality narcotics. But let's say for a moment that you were. (Laughter) Bear with me. The first thing you will notice on signing up to one of these sites is how familiar it looks. Every single product — thousands of products — has a glossy, high-res image, a detailed product description, a price. There's a "Proceed to checkout" icon. There is even, most beautifully of all, a "Report this item" button. (Laughter) Incredible. You browse through the site, you make your choice, you pay with the crypto-currency bitcoin, you enter an address — preferably not your home address — and you wait for your product to arrive in the post, which it nearly always does. And the reason it does is not because of the clever encryption. That's important. Something far simpler than that. It's the user reviews. (Laughter) You see, every single vendor on these sites uses a pseudonym, naturally enough, but they keep the same pseudonym to build up a reputation. And because it's easy for the buyer to change allegiance whenever they want, the only way of trusting a vendor is if they have a good history of positive feedback from other users of the site. And this introduction of competition and choice does exactly what the economists would predict. Prices tend to go down, product quality tends to go up, and the vendors are attentive, they're polite, they're consumer-centric, offering you all manner of special deals, one-offs, buy-one-get-one-frees, free delivery, to keep you happy. I spoke to Drugsheaven. Drugsheaven was offering excellent and consistent marijuana at a reasonable price. He had a very generous refund policy, detailed T's and C's, and good shipping times. "Dear Drugsheaven," I wrote, via the internal emailing system that's also encrypted, of course. "I'm new here. Do you mind if I buy just one gram of marijuana?" A couple of hours later, I get a reply. They always reply. "Hi there, thanks for your email. Starting small is a wise thing to do. I would, too, if I were you." (Laughter) "So no problem if you'd like to start with just one gram. I do hope we can do business together. Best wishes, Drugsheaven." (Laughter) I don't know why he had a posh English accent, but I assume he did. Now, this kind of consumer-centric attitude is the reason why, when I reviewed 120,000 pieces of feedback that had been left on one of these sites over a three-month period, 95 percent of them were five out of five. The customer, you see, is king. But what does that mean? Well, on the one hand, that means there are more drugs, more available, more easily, to more people. And by my reckoning, that is not a good thing. But, on the other hand, if you are going to take drugs, you have a reasonably good way of guaranteeing a certain level of purity and quality, which is incredibly important if you're taking drugs. And you can do so from the comfort of your own home, without the risks associated with buying on the streets. Now, as I said, you've got to be creative and innovative to survive in this marketplace. And the 20 or so sites that are currently in operation — by the way, they don't always work, they're not always perfect; the site that I showed you was shut down 18 months ago, but not before it had turned over a billion dollars' worth of trade. But these markets, because of the difficult conditions in which they are operating, the inhospitable conditions, are always innovating, always thinking of ways of getting smarter, more decentralized, harder to censor, and more customer-friendly. Let's take the payment system. You don't pay with your credit card, of course — that would lead directly back to you. So you use the crypto-currency bitcoin, which is easily exchanged for real-world currencies and gives quite a high degree of anonymity to its users. But at the beginning of these sites, people noticed a flaw. Some of the unscrupulous dealers were running away with peoples' bitcoin before they'd mailed the drugs out. The community came up with a solution, called multi-signature escrow payments. So on purchasing my item, I would send my bitcoin to a neutral, secure third digital wallet. The vendor, who would see that I'd sent it, would be confident that they could then send the product to me, and then when I received it, at least two of the three people engaged in the transaction — vendor, buyer, site administrator — would have to sign the transaction off with a unique digital signature, and then the money would be transferred. Brilliant! Elegant. It works. But then they realized there was a problem with bitcoin, because every bitcoin transaction is actually recorded publicly in a public ledger. So if you're clever, you can try and work out who's behind them. So they came up with a tumbling service. Hundreds of people send their bitcoin into one address, they're tumbled and jumbled up, and then the right amount is sent on to the right recipients, but they're different bitcoins: micro-laundering systems. (Laughter) It's incredible. Interested in what drugs are trending right now on the dark net markets? Check Grams, the search engine. You can even buy some advertising space. (Laughter) Are you an ethical consumer worried about what the drugs industry is doing? Yeah. One vendor will offer you fair trade organic cocaine. (Laughter) That's not being sourced from Colombian druglords, but Guatemalan farmers. They even promised to reinvest 20 percent of any profits into local education programs. (Laughter) There's even a mystery shopper. Now, whatever you think about the morality of these sites — and I submit that it's not actually an easy question — the creation of functioning, competitive, anonymous markets, where nobody knows who anybody else is, constantly at risk of being shut down by the authorities, is a staggering achievement, a phenomenal achievement. And it's that kind of innovation that's why those on the fringes are often the harbingers of what is to come. It's easy to forget that because of its short life, the Internet has actually changed many times over the last 30 years or so. It started in the '70s as a military project, morphed in the 1980s to an academic network, co-opted by commercial companies in the '90s, and then invaded by all of us via social media in the noughties, but I think it's going to change again. And I think things like the dark net markets — creative, secure, difficult to censor — I think that's the future. And the reason it's the future is because we're all worried about our privacy. Surveys consistently show concerns about privacy. The more time we spend online, the more we worry about them, and those surveys show our worries are growing. We're worried about what happens to our data. We're worried about who might be watching us. Since the revelations from Edward Snowden, there's been a huge increase in the number of people using various privacy-enhancing tools. There are now between two and three million daily users of the Tor browser, the majority of which use is perfectly legitimate, sometimes even mundane. And there are hundreds of activists around the world working on techniques and tools to keep you private online — default encrypted messaging services. Ethereum, which is a project which tries to link up the connected but unused hard drives of millions of computers around the world, to create a sort of distributed Internet that no one really controls. Now, we've had distributed computing before, of course. We use it for everything from Skype to the search for extraterrestrial life. But you add distributed computing and powerful encryption — that's very, very hard to censor and control. Another called MaidSafe works on similar principles. Another called Twister, and so on and so on. And here's the thing — the more of us join, the more interesting those sites become, and then the more of us join, and so on. And I think that's what's going to happen. In fact, it's already happening. The dark net is no longer a den for dealers and a hideout for whistle-blowers. It's already going mainstream. Just recently, the musician Aphex Twin released his album as a dark net site. Facebook has started a dark net site. A group of London architects have opened a dark net site for people worried about regeneration projects. Yes, the dark net is going mainstream, and I predict that fairly soon, every social media company, every major news outlet, and therefore most of you in this audience, will be using the dark net, too. So the Internet is about to get more interesting, more exciting, more innovative, more terrible, more destructive. That's good news if you care about liberty. It's good news if you care about freedom. It's good news if you care about democracy. It's also good news if you want to browse for illegal pornography and if you want to buy and sell drugs with impunity. Neither entirely dark, nor entirely light. It's not one side or the other that's going to win out, but both. Thank you very much, indeed. (Applause) |
The mathematician who cracked Wall Street | {0: 'After astonishing success as a mathematician, code breaker and billionaire hedge fund manager, Jim Simons is mastering yet another field: philanthropy.'} | TED2015 | Chris Anderson: You were something of a mathematical phenom. You had already taught at Harvard and MIT at a young age. And then the NSA came calling. What was that about? Jim Simons: Well the NSA — that's the National Security Agency — they didn't exactly come calling. They had an operation at Princeton, where they hired mathematicians to attack secret codes and stuff like that. And I knew that existed. And they had a very good policy, because you could do half your time at your own mathematics, and at least half your time working on their stuff. And they paid a lot. So that was an irresistible pull. So, I went there. CA: You were a code-cracker. JS: I was. CA: Until you got fired. JS: Well, I did get fired. Yes. CA: How come? JS: Well, how come? I got fired because, well, the Vietnam War was on, and the boss of bosses in my organization was a big fan of the war and wrote a New York Times article, a magazine section cover story, about how we would win in Vietnam. And I didn't like that war, I thought it was stupid. And I wrote a letter to the Times, which they published, saying not everyone who works for Maxwell Taylor, if anyone remembers that name, agrees with his views. And I gave my own views ... CA: Oh, OK. I can see that would — JS: ... which were different from General Taylor's. But in the end, nobody said anything. But then, I was 29 years old at this time, and some kid came around and said he was a stringer from Newsweek magazine and he wanted to interview me and ask what I was doing about my views. And I told him, "I'm doing mostly mathematics now, and when the war is over, then I'll do mostly their stuff." Then I did the only intelligent thing I'd done that day — I told my local boss that I gave that interview. And he said, "What'd you say?" And I told him what I said. And then he said, "I've got to call Taylor." He called Taylor; that took 10 minutes. I was fired five minutes after that. CA: OK. JS: But it wasn't bad. CA: It wasn't bad, because you went on to Stony Brook and stepped up your mathematical career. You started working with this man here. Who is this? JS: Oh, [Shiing-Shen] Chern. Chern was one of the great mathematicians of the century. I had known him when I was a graduate student at Berkeley. And I had some ideas, and I brought them to him and he liked them. Together, we did this work which you can easily see up there. There it is. CA: It led to you publishing a famous paper together. Can you explain at all what that work was? JS: No. (Laughter) JS: I mean, I could explain it to somebody. (Laughter) CA: How about explaining this? JS: But not many. Not many people. CA: I think you told me it had something to do with spheres, so let's start here. JS: Well, it did, but I'll say about that work — it did have something to do with that, but before we get to that — that work was good mathematics. I was very happy with it; so was Chern. It even started a little sub-field that's now flourishing. But, more interestingly, it happened to apply to physics, something we knew nothing about — at least I knew nothing about physics, and I don't think Chern knew a heck of a lot. And about 10 years after the paper came out, a guy named Ed Witten in Princeton started applying it to string theory and people in Russia started applying it to what's called "condensed matter." Today, those things in there called Chern-Simons invariants have spread through a lot of physics. And it was amazing. We didn't know any physics. It never occurred to me that it would be applied to physics. But that's the thing about mathematics — you never know where it's going to go. CA: This is so incredible. So, we've been talking about how evolution shapes human minds that may or may not perceive the truth. Somehow, you come up with a mathematical theory, not knowing any physics, discover two decades later that it's being applied to profoundly describe the actual physical world. How can that happen? JS: God knows. (Laughter) But there's a famous physicist named [Eugene] Wigner, and he wrote an essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Somehow, this mathematics, which is rooted in the real world in some sense — we learn to count, measure, everyone would do that — and then it flourishes on its own. But so often it comes back to save the day. General relativity is an example. [Hermann] Minkowski had this geometry, and Einstein realized, "Hey! It's the very thing in which I can cast general relativity." So, you never know. It is a mystery. It is a mystery. CA: So, here's a mathematical piece of ingenuity. Tell us about this. JS: Well, that's a ball — it's a sphere, and it has a lattice around it — you know, those squares. What I'm going to show here was originally observed by [Leonhard] Euler, the great mathematician, in the 1700s. And it gradually grew to be a very important field in mathematics: algebraic topology, geometry. That paper up there had its roots in this. So, here's this thing: it has eight vertices, 12 edges, six faces. And if you look at the difference — vertices minus edges plus faces — you get two. OK, well, two. That's a good number. Here's a different way of doing it — these are triangles covering — this has 12 vertices and 30 edges and 20 faces, 20 tiles. And vertices minus edges plus faces still equals two. And in fact, you could do this any which way — cover this thing with all kinds of polygons and triangles and mix them up. And you take vertices minus edges plus faces — you'll get two. Here's a different shape. This is a torus, or the surface of a doughnut: 16 vertices covered by these rectangles, 32 edges, 16 faces. Vertices minus edges comes out to be zero. It'll always come out to zero. Every time you cover a torus with squares or triangles or anything like that, you're going to get zero. So, this is called the Euler characteristic. And it's what's called a topological invariant. It's pretty amazing. No matter how you do it, you're always get the same answer. So that was the first sort of thrust, from the mid-1700s, into a subject which is now called algebraic topology. CA: And your own work took an idea like this and moved it into higher-dimensional theory, higher-dimensional objects, and found new invariances? JS: Yes. Well, there were already higher-dimensional invariants: Pontryagin classes — actually, there were Chern classes. There were a bunch of these types of invariants. I was struggling to work on one of them and model it sort of combinatorially, instead of the way it was typically done, and that led to this work and we uncovered some new things. But if it wasn't for Mr. Euler — who wrote almost 70 volumes of mathematics and had 13 children, who he apparently would dandle on his knee while he was writing — if it wasn't for Mr. Euler, there wouldn't perhaps be these invariants. CA: OK, so that's at least given us a flavor of that amazing mind in there. Let's talk about Renaissance. Because you took that amazing mind and having been a code-cracker at the NSA, you started to become a code-cracker in the financial industry. I think you probably didn't buy efficient market theory. Somehow you found a way of creating astonishing returns over two decades. The way it's been explained to me, what's remarkable about what you did wasn't just the size of the returns, it's that you took them with surprisingly low volatility and risk, compared with other hedge funds. So how on earth did you do this, Jim? JS: I did it by assembling a wonderful group of people. When I started doing trading, I had gotten a little tired of mathematics. I was in my late 30s, I had a little money. I started trading and it went very well. I made quite a lot of money with pure luck. I mean, I think it was pure luck. It certainly wasn't mathematical modeling. But in looking at the data, after a while I realized: it looks like there's some structure here. And I hired a few mathematicians, and we started making some models — just the kind of thing we did back at IDA [Institute for Defense Analyses]. You design an algorithm, you test it out on a computer. Does it work? Doesn't it work? And so on. CA: Can we take a look at this? Because here's a typical graph of some commodity. I look at that, and I say, "That's just a random, up-and-down walk — maybe a slight upward trend over that whole period of time." How on earth could you trade looking at that, and see something that wasn't just random? JS: In the old days — this is kind of a graph from the old days, commodities or currencies had a tendency to trend. Not necessarily the very light trend you see here, but trending in periods. And if you decided, OK, I'm going to predict today, by the average move in the past 20 days — maybe that would be a good prediction, and I'd make some money. And in fact, years ago, such a system would work — not beautifully, but it would work. You'd make money, you'd lose money, you'd make money. But this is a year's worth of days, and you'd make a little money during that period. It's a very vestigial system. CA: So you would test a bunch of lengths of trends in time and see whether, for example, a 10-day trend or a 15-day trend was predictive of what happened next. JS: Sure, you would try all those things and see what worked best. Trend-following would have been great in the '60s, and it was sort of OK in the '70s. By the '80s, it wasn't. CA: Because everyone could see that. So, how did you stay ahead of the pack? JS: We stayed ahead of the pack by finding other approaches — shorter-term approaches to some extent. The real thing was to gather a tremendous amount of data — and we had to get it by hand in the early days. We went down to the Federal Reserve and copied interest rate histories and stuff like that, because it didn't exist on computers. We got a lot of data. And very smart people — that was the key. I didn't really know how to hire people to do fundamental trading. I had hired a few — some made money, some didn't make money. I couldn't make a business out of that. But I did know how to hire scientists, because I have some taste in that department. So, that's what we did. And gradually these models got better and better, and better and better. CA: You're credited with doing something remarkable at Renaissance, which is building this culture, this group of people, who weren't just hired guns who could be lured away by money. Their motivation was doing exciting mathematics and science. JS: Well, I'd hoped that might be true. But some of it was money. CA: They made a lot of money. JS: I can't say that no one came because of the money. I think a lot of them came because of the money. But they also came because it would be fun. CA: What role did machine learning play in all this? JS: In a certain sense, what we did was machine learning. You look at a lot of data, and you try to simulate different predictive schemes, until you get better and better at it. It doesn't necessarily feed back on itself the way we did things. But it worked. CA: So these different predictive schemes can be really quite wild and unexpected. I mean, you looked at everything, right? You looked at the weather, length of dresses, political opinion. JS: Yes, length of dresses we didn't try. CA: What sort of things? JS: Well, everything. Everything is grist for the mill — except hem lengths. Weather, annual reports, quarterly reports, historic data itself, volumes, you name it. Whatever there is. We take in terabytes of data a day. And store it away and massage it and get it ready for analysis. You're looking for anomalies. You're looking for — like you said, the efficient market hypothesis is not correct. CA: But any one anomaly might be just a random thing. So, is the secret here to just look at multiple strange anomalies, and see when they align? JS: Any one anomaly might be a random thing; however, if you have enough data you can tell that it's not. You can see an anomaly that's persistent for a sufficiently long time — the probability of it being random is not high. But these things fade after a while; anomalies can get washed out. So you have to keep on top of the business. CA: A lot of people look at the hedge fund industry now and are sort of ... shocked by it, by how much wealth is created there, and how much talent is going into it. Do you have any worries about that industry, and perhaps the financial industry in general? Kind of being on a runaway train that's — I don't know — helping increase inequality? How would you champion what's happening in the hedge fund industry? JS: I think in the last three or four years, hedge funds have not done especially well. We've done dandy, but the hedge fund industry as a whole has not done so wonderfully. The stock market has been on a roll, going up as everybody knows, and price-earnings ratios have grown. So an awful lot of the wealth that's been created in the last — let's say, five or six years — has not been created by hedge funds. People would ask me, "What's a hedge fund?" And I'd say, "One and 20." Which means — now it's two and 20 — it's two percent fixed fee and 20 percent of profits. Hedge funds are all different kinds of creatures. CA: Rumor has it you charge slightly higher fees than that. JS: We charged the highest fees in the world at one time. Five and 44, that's what we charge. CA: Five and 44. So five percent flat, 44 percent of upside. You still made your investors spectacular amounts of money. JS: We made good returns, yes. People got very mad: "How can you charge such high fees?" I said, "OK, you can withdraw." But "How can I get more?" was what people were — (Laughter) But at a certain point, as I think I told you, we bought out all the investors because there's a capacity to the fund. CA: But should we worry about the hedge fund industry attracting too much of the world's great mathematical and other talent to work on that, as opposed to the many other problems in the world? JS: Well, it's not just mathematical. We hire astronomers and physicists and things like that. I don't think we should worry about it too much. It's still a pretty small industry. And in fact, bringing science into the investing world has improved that world. It's reduced volatility. It's increased liquidity. Spreads are narrower because people are trading that kind of stuff. So I'm not too worried about Einstein going off and starting a hedge fund. CA: You're at a phase in your life now where you're actually investing, though, at the other end of the supply chain — you're actually boosting mathematics across America. This is your wife, Marilyn. You're working on philanthropic issues together. Tell me about that. JS: Well, Marilyn started — there she is up there, my beautiful wife — she started the foundation about 20 years ago. I think '94. I claim it was '93, she says it was '94, but it was one of those two years. (Laughter) We started the foundation, just as a convenient way to give charity. She kept the books, and so on. We did not have a vision at that time, but gradually a vision emerged — which was to focus on math and science, to focus on basic research. And that's what we've done. Six years ago or so, I left Renaissance and went to work at the foundation. So that's what we do. CA: And so Math for America is basically investing in math teachers around the country, giving them some extra income, giving them support and coaching. And really trying to make that more effective and make that a calling to which teachers can aspire. JS: Yeah — instead of beating up the bad teachers, which has created morale problems all through the educational community, in particular in math and science, we focus on celebrating the good ones and giving them status. Yeah, we give them extra money, 15,000 dollars a year. We have 800 math and science teachers in New York City in public schools today, as part of a core. There's a great morale among them. They're staying in the field. Next year, it'll be 1,000 and that'll be 10 percent of the math and science teachers in New York [City] public schools. (Applause) CA: Jim, here's another project that you've supported philanthropically: Research into origins of life, I guess. What are we looking at here? JS: Well, I'll save that for a second. And then I'll tell you what you're looking at. Origins of life is a fascinating question. How did we get here? Well, there are two questions: One is, what is the route from geology to biology — how did we get here? And the other question is, what did we start with? What material, if any, did we have to work with on this route? Those are two very, very interesting questions. The first question is a tortuous path from geology up to RNA or something like that — how did that all work? And the other, what do we have to work with? Well, more than we think. So what's pictured there is a star in formation. Now, every year in our Milky Way, which has 100 billion stars, about two new stars are created. Don't ask me how, but they're created. And it takes them about a million years to settle out. So, in steady state, there are about two million stars in formation at any time. That one is somewhere along this settling-down period. And there's all this crap sort of circling around it, dust and stuff. And it'll form probably a solar system, or whatever it forms. But here's the thing — in this dust that surrounds a forming star have been found, now, significant organic molecules. Molecules not just like methane, but formaldehyde and cyanide — things that are the building blocks — the seeds, if you will — of life. So, that may be typical. And it may be typical that planets around the universe start off with some of these basic building blocks. Now does that mean there's going to be life all around? Maybe. But it's a question of how tortuous this path is from those frail beginnings, those seeds, all the way to life. And most of those seeds will fall on fallow planets. CA: So for you, personally, finding an answer to this question of where we came from, of how did this thing happen, that is something you would love to see. JS: Would love to see. And like to know — if that path is tortuous enough, and so improbable, that no matter what you start with, we could be a singularity. But on the other hand, given all this organic dust that's floating around, we could have lots of friends out there. It'd be great to know. CA: Jim, a couple of years ago, I got the chance to speak with Elon Musk, and I asked him the secret of his success, and he said taking physics seriously was it. Listening to you, what I hear you saying is taking math seriously, that has infused your whole life. It's made you an absolute fortune, and now it's allowing you to invest in the futures of thousands and thousands of kids across America and elsewhere. Could it be that science actually works? That math actually works? JS: Well, math certainly works. Math certainly works. But this has been fun. Working with Marilyn and giving it away has been very enjoyable. CA: I just find it — it's an inspirational thought to me, that by taking knowledge seriously, so much more can come from it. So thank you for your amazing life, and for coming here to TED. Thank you. Jim Simons! (Applause) |
I leapt from the stratosphere. Here's how I did it | {0: 'Alan Eustace leapt to Earth from the edge of the stratosphere wearing only a spacesuit, shattering skydiving records and potentially revolutionizing the commercial space industry.'} | TED2015 | So I grew up in Orlando, Florida. I was the son of an aerospace engineer. I lived and breathed the Apollo program. We either saw the launches from our backyard or we saw it by driving in the hour over to the Cape. I was impressed by, obviously, space and everything about it, but I was most impressed by the engineering that went into it. Behind me you see an amazing view, a picture that was taken from the International Space Station, and it shows a portion of our planet that's rarely seen and rarely studied and almost never explored. That place is called the stratosphere. If you start on the planet and you go up and up and up, it gets colder and colder and colder, until you reach the beginning of the stratosphere, and then an amazing thing happens. It gets colder at a much slower rate, and then it starts warming up, and then it gets warmer and warmer until the point where you can almost survive without any protection, about zero degrees, and then you end up getting colder and colder, and that's the top of the stratosphere. It is one of the least accessible places on our planet. Most often, when it's visited, it's by astronauts who are blazing up at it at probably several times the speed of sound, and they get a few seconds on the way up, and then they get this blazing ball of fire coming back in, on the way back in. But the question I asked is, is it possible to linger in the stratosphere? Is it possible to experience the stratosphere? Is it possible to explore the stratosphere? I studied this using my favorite search engine for quite a while, about a year, and then I made a scary phone call. It was a reference from a friend of mine to call Taber MacCallum from Paragon Space Development Corporation, and I asked him the question: is it possible to build a system to go into the stratosphere? And he said it was. And after a period of about three years, we proceeded to do just that. And on October 24 of last year, in this suit, I started on the ground, I went up in a balloon to 135,890 feet — but who's counting? (Laughter) Came back to Earth at speeds of up to 822 miles an hour. It was a four-minute and 27-second descent. And when I got to 10,000 feet, I opened a parachute and I landed. (Applause) But this is really a science talk, and it's really an engineering talk, and what was amazing to me about that experience is that Taber said, yes, I think we can build a stratospheric suit, and more than that, come down tomorrow and let's talk to the team that formed the core of the group that actually built it. And they did something which I think is important, which is they took the analogy of scuba diving. So in scuba diving, you have a self-contained system. You have everything that you could ever need. You have a scuba tank. You have a wetsuit. You have visibility. And that scuba is exactly this system, and we're going to launch it into the stratosphere. Three years later, this is what we have. We've got an amazing suit that was made by ILC Dover. ILC Dover was the company that made all of the Apollo suits and all of the extravehicular activity suits. They had never sold a suit commercially, only to the government, but they sold one to me, which I am very grateful for. Up here we have a parachute. This was all about safety. Everyone on the team knew that I have a wife and two small children — 10 and 15 — and I wanted to come back safely. So there's a main parachute and a reserve parachute, and if I do nothing, the reserve parachute is going to open because of an automatic opening device. The suit itself can protect me from the cold. This area in the front here has thermal protection. It will actually heat water that will wrap around my body. It has two redundant oxygen tanks. Even if I was to get a quarter-inch hole in this suit, which is extremely unlikely, this system would still protect me from the low pressure of space. The main advantage of this system is weight and complexity. So the system weighs about 500 pounds, and if you compare it to the other attempt recently to go up in the stratosphere, they used a capsule. And to do a capsule, there's an amazing amount of complexity that goes into it, and it weighed about 3,000 pounds, and to raise 3,000 pounds to an altitude of 135,000 feet, which was my target altitude, it would have taken a balloon that was 45 to 50 million cubic feet. Because I only weighed 500 pounds in this system, we could do it with a balloon that was five times smaller than that, and that allowed us to use a launch system that was dramatically simpler than what needs to be done for a much larger balloon. So with that, I want to take you to Roswell, New Mexico, on October 24. We had an amazing team that got up in the middle of the night. And here's the suit. Again, this is using the front loader that you'll see in a second, and I want to play you a video of the actual launch. Roswell's a great place to launch balloons, but it's a fantastic place to land under a parachute, especially when you're going to land 70 miles away from the place you started. That's a helium truck in the background. It's darkness. I've already spent about an hour and a half pre-breathing. And then here you see the suit going on. It takes about an hour to get the suit on. Astronauts get this really nice air-conditioned van to go to the launch pad, but I got a front loader. (Laughter) You can see the top. You can see the balloon up there. That's where the helium is. This is Dave clearing the airspace with the FAA for 15 miles. And there we go. (Laughter) That's me waving with my left hand. The reason I'm waving with my left hand is because on the right hand is the emergency cutaway. (Laughter) My team forbade me from using my right hand. So the trip up is beautiful. It's kind of like Google Earth in reverse. (Laughter) It took two hours and seven minutes to go up, and it was the most peaceful two hours and seven minutes. I was mostly trying to relax. My heart rate was very low and I was trying not to use very much oxygen. You can see how the fields in the background are relatively big at this point, and you can see me going up and up. It's interesting here, because if you look, I'm right over the airport, and I'm probably at 50,000 feet, but immediately I'm about to go into a stratospheric wind of over 120 miles an hour. This is my flight director telling me that I had just gone higher than anybody else had ever gone in a balloon, and I was about 4,000 feet from release. This is what it looks like. You can see the darkness of space, the curvature of the Earth, the fragile planet below. I'm practicing my emergency procedures mentally right now. If anything goes wrong, I want to be ready. And the main thing that I want to do here is to have a release and fall and stay completely stable. (Video) Ground control. Everyone ready? Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Alan Eustace: There's the balloon going by, fully inflated at this point. And there you can see a drogue parachute, which I'll demonstrate in just a second, because that's really important. There's the balloon going by a second time. Right now, I'm about at the speed of sound. There's nothing for me to tell it's the speed of sound, and very soon I will actually be as fast as I ever get, 822 miles an hour. (Video) Ground control: We lost the data. AE: So now I'm down low right now and you can basically see the parachute come out right there. At this point, I'm very happy that there's a parachute out. I thought I was the only one happy, but it turns out mission control was really happy as well. The really nice thing about this is the moment I opened — I had a close of friend of mine, Blikkies, my parachute guy. He flew in another airplane, and he actually jumped out and landed right next to me. He was my wingman on the descent. This is my landing, but it's probably more properly called a crash. (Laughter) I hate to admit it, but this wasn't even close to my worst landing. (Laughter) (Applause) (Video) Man: How are you doing? AE: Hi there! Yay. (Laughter) So I want to tell you one thing that you might not have seen in that video, but one of the most critical parts of the entire thing was the release and what happens right after you release. And what we tried to do was use something called a drogue parachute, and a drogue parachute was there to stabilize me. And I'll show you one of those right now. If any of you have ever gone tandem skydiving, you probably used one of these. But the problem with one of these things is right when you release, you're in zero gravity. So it's very easy for this to just turn right around you. And before you know it, you can be tangled up or spinning, or you can release this drogue late, in which case what happens is you're going down at 800 miles an hour, and this thing is going to destroy itself and not be very useful. But the guys at United Parachute Technologies came up with this idea, and it was a roll that looks like that, but watch what happens when I pull it out. It's forming a pipe. This pipe is so solid that you can take this drogue parachute and wrap it around, and there's no way it will ever tangle with you. And that prevented a very serious potential problem. So nothing is possible without an amazing team of people. The core of this was about 20 people that worked on this for the three years, and they were incredible. People asked me what the best part of this whole thing was, and it was a chance to work with the best experts in meteorology and ballooning and parachute technology and environmental systems and high altitude medicine. It was fantastic. It's an engineer's dream to work with that group of people. And I also at the same time wanted to thank my friends at Google, both for supporting me during this effort and also covering for me in the times that I was away. But there's one other group I wanted to thank, and that's my family. Yay. (Applause) I would constantly give them speeches about the safety of technology, and they weren't hearing any of it. It was super hard on them, and the only reason that my wife put up with it was because I came back incredibly happy after each of the 250 tests, and she didn't want to take that away from me. So I want to close with a story. My daughter Katelyn, my 15-year-old, she and I were in the car, and we were driving down the road, and she was sitting there, and she had this idea, and she goes, "Dad, I've got this idea." And so I listened to her idea and I said, "Katelyn, that's impossible." And she looks at me and she goes, "Dad, after what you just did, how can you call anything impossible?" And I laughed, and I said, "OK, it's not impossible, it's just very, very hard." And then I paused for a second, and I said, "Katelyn, it may not be impossible, it may not even be very, very hard, it's just that I don't know how to do it." Thank you. (Applause) |
The way we think about work is broken | {0: "Barry Schwartz studies the link between economics and psychology, offering startling insights into modern life. Lately, working with Ken Sharpe, he's studying wisdom."} | TED2014 | Today I'm going to talk about work. And the question I want to ask and answer is this: "Why do we work?" Why do we drag ourselves out of bed every morning instead of living our lives just filled with bouncing from one TED-like adventure to another? (Laughter) You may be asking yourselves that very question. Now, I know of course, we have to make a living, but nobody in this room thinks that that's the answer to the question, "Why do we work?" For folks in this room, the work we do is challenging, it's engaging, it's stimulating, it's meaningful. And if we're lucky, it might even be important. So, we wouldn't work if we didn't get paid, but that's not why we do what we do. And in general, I think we think that material rewards are a pretty bad reason for doing the work that we do. When we say of somebody that he's "in it for the money," we are not just being descriptive. (Laughter) Now, I think this is totally obvious, but the very obviousness of it raises what is for me an incredibly profound question. Why, if this is so obvious, why is it that for the overwhelming majority of people on the planet, the work they do has none of the characteristics that get us up and out of bed and off to the office every morning? How is it that we allow the majority of people on the planet to do work that is monotonous, meaningless and soul-deadening? Why is it that as capitalism developed, it created a mode of production, of goods and services, in which all the nonmaterial satisfactions that might come from work were eliminated? Workers who do this kind of work, whether they do it in factories, in call centers, or in fulfillment warehouses, do it for pay. There is certainly no other earthly reason to do what they do except for pay. So the question is, "Why?" And here's the answer: the answer is technology. Now, I know, I know — yeah, yeah, yeah, technology, automation screws people, blah blah — that's not what I mean. I'm not talking about the kind of technology that has enveloped our lives, and that people come to TED to hear about. I'm not talking about the technology of things, profound though that is. I'm talking about another technology. I'm talking about the technology of ideas. I call it, "idea technology" — how clever of me. (Laughter) In addition to creating things, science creates ideas. Science creates ways of understanding. And in the social sciences, the ways of understanding that get created are ways of understanding ourselves. And they have an enormous influence on how we think, what we aspire to, and how we act. If you think your poverty is God's will, you pray. If you think your poverty is the result of your own inadequacy, you shrink into despair. And if you think your poverty is the result of oppression and domination, then you rise up in revolt. Whether your response to poverty is resignation or revolution, depends on how you understand the sources of your poverty. This is the role that ideas play in shaping us as human beings, and this is why idea technology may be the most profoundly important technology that science gives us. And there's something special about idea technology, that makes it different from the technology of things. With things, if the technology sucks, it just vanishes, right? Bad technology disappears. With ideas — false ideas about human beings will not go away if people believe that they're true. Because if people believe that they're true, they create ways of living and institutions that are consistent with these very false ideas. And that's how the industrial revolution created a factory system in which there was really nothing you could possibly get out of your day's work, except for the pay at the end of the day. Because the father — one of the fathers of the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith — was convinced that human beings were by their very natures lazy, and wouldn't do anything unless you made it worth their while, and the way you made it worth their while was by incentivizing, by giving them rewards. That was the only reason anyone ever did anything. So we created a factory system consistent with that false view of human nature. But once that system of production was in place, there was really no other way for people to operate, except in a way that was consistent with Adam Smith's vision. So the work example is merely an example of how false ideas can create a circumstance that ends up making them true. It is not true that you "just can't get good help anymore." It is true that you "can't get good help anymore" when you give people work to do that is demeaning and soulless. And interestingly enough, Adam Smith — the same guy who gave us this incredible invention of mass production, and division of labor — understood this. He said, of people who worked in assembly lines, of men who worked in assembly lines, he says: "He generally becomes as stupid as it is possible for a human being to become." Now, notice the word here is "become." "He generally becomes as stupid as it is possible for a human being to become." Whether he intended it or not, what Adam Smith was telling us there, is that the very shape of the institution within which people work creates people who are fitted to the demands of that institution and deprives people of the opportunity to derive the kinds of satisfactions from their work that we take for granted. The thing about science — natural science — is that we can spin fantastic theories about the cosmos, and have complete confidence that the cosmos is completely indifferent to our theories. It's going to work the same damn way no matter what theories we have about the cosmos. But we do have to worry about the theories we have of human nature, because human nature will be changed by the theories we have that are designed to explain and help us understand human beings. The distinguished anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, said, years ago, that human beings are the "unfinished animals." And what he meant by that was that it is only human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society in which people live. That human nature, that is to say our human nature, is much more created than it is discovered. We design human nature by designing the institutions within which people live and work. And so you people — pretty much the closest I ever get to being with masters of the universe — you people should be asking yourself a question, as you go back home to run your organizations. Just what kind of human nature do you want to help design? Thank you. (Applause) Thanks. |
What really matters at the end of life | {0: 'Using empathy and a clear-eyed view of mortality, BJ Miller shines a light on healthcare’s most ignored facet: preparing for death. '} | TED2015 | Well, we all need a reason to wake up. For me, it just took 11,000 volts. I know you're too polite to ask, so I will tell you. One night, sophomore year of college, just back from Thanksgiving holiday, a few of my friends and I were horsing around, and we decided to climb atop a parked commuter train. It was just sitting there, with the wires that run overhead. Somehow, that seemed like a great idea at the time. We'd certainly done stupider things. I scurried up the ladder on the back, and when I stood up, the electrical current entered my arm, blew down and out my feet, and that was that. Would you believe that watch still works? Takes a licking! (Laughter) My father wears it now in solidarity. That night began my formal relationship with death — my death — and it also began my long run as a patient. It's a good word. It means one who suffers. So I guess we're all patients. Now, the American health care system has more than its fair share of dysfunction — to match its brilliance, to be sure. I'm a physician now, a hospice and palliative medicine doc, so I've seen care from both sides. And believe me: almost everyone who goes into healthcare really means well — I mean, truly. But we who work in it are also unwitting agents for a system that too often does not serve. Why? Well, there's actually a pretty easy answer to that question, and it explains a lot: because healthcare was designed with diseases, not people, at its center. Which is to say, of course, it was badly designed. And nowhere are the effects of bad design more heartbreaking or the opportunity for good design more compelling than at the end of life, where things are so distilled and concentrated. There are no do-overs. My purpose today is to reach out across disciplines and invite design thinking into this big conversation. That is, to bring intention and creativity to the experience of dying. We have a monumental opportunity in front of us, before one of the few universal issues as individuals as well as a civil society: to rethink and redesign how it is we die. So let's begin at the end. For most people, the scariest thing about death isn't being dead, it's dying, suffering. It's a key distinction. To get underneath this, it can be very helpful to tease out suffering which is necessary as it is, from suffering we can change. The former is a natural, essential part of life, part of the deal, and to this we are called to make space, adjust, grow. It can be really good to realize forces larger than ourselves. They bring proportionality, like a cosmic right-sizing. After my limbs were gone, that loss, for example, became fact, fixed — necessarily part of my life, and I learned that I could no more reject this fact than reject myself. It took me a while, but I learned it eventually. Now, another great thing about necessary suffering is that it is the very thing that unites caregiver and care receiver — human beings. This, we are finally realizing, is where healing happens. Yes, compassion — literally, as we learned yesterday — suffering together. Now, on the systems side, on the other hand, so much of the suffering is unnecessary, invented. It serves no good purpose. But the good news is, since this brand of suffering is made up, well, we can change it. How we die is indeed something we can affect. Making the system sensitive to this fundamental distinction between necessary and unnecessary suffering gives us our first of three design cues for the day. After all, our role as caregivers, as people who care, is to relieve suffering — not add to the pile. True to the tenets of palliative care, I function as something of a reflective advocate, as much as prescribing physician. Quick aside: palliative care — a very important field but poorly understood — while it includes, it is not limited to end of life care. It is not limited to hospice. It's simply about comfort and living well at any stage. So please know that you don't have to be dying anytime soon to benefit from palliative care. Now, let me introduce you to Frank. Sort of makes this point. I've been seeing Frank now for years. He's living with advancing prostate cancer on top of long-standing HIV. We work on his bone pain and his fatigue, but most of the time we spend thinking out loud together about his life — really, about our lives. In this way, Frank grieves. In this way, he keeps up with his losses as they roll in, so that he's ready to take in the next moment. Loss is one thing, but regret, quite another. Frank has always been an adventurer — he looks like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting — and no fan of regret. So it wasn't surprising when he came into clinic one day, saying he wanted to raft down the Colorado River. Was this a good idea? With all the risks to his safety and his health, some would say no. Many did, but he went for it, while he still could. It was a glorious, marvelous trip: freezing water, blistering dry heat, scorpions, snakes, wildlife howling off the flaming walls of the Grand Canyon — all the glorious side of the world beyond our control. Frank's decision, while maybe dramatic, is exactly the kind so many of us would make, if we only had the support to figure out what is best for ourselves over time. So much of what we're talking about today is a shift in perspective. After my accident, when I went back to college, I changed my major to art history. Studying visual art, I figured I'd learn something about how to see — a really potent lesson for a kid who couldn't change so much of what he was seeing. Perspective, that kind of alchemy we humans get to play with, turning anguish into a flower. Flash forward: now I work at an amazing place in San Francisco called the Zen Hospice Project, where we have a little ritual that helps with this shift in perspective. When one of our residents dies, the mortuary men come, and as we're wheeling the body out through the garden, heading for the gate, we pause. Anyone who wants — fellow residents, family, nurses, volunteers, the hearse drivers too, now — shares a story or a song or silence, as we sprinkle the body with flower petals. It takes a few minutes; it's a sweet, simple parting image to usher in grief with warmth, rather than repugnance. Contrast that with the typical experience in the hospital setting, much like this — floodlit room lined with tubes and beeping machines and blinking lights that don't stop even when the patient's life has. Cleaning crew swoops in, the body's whisked away, and it all feels as though that person had never really existed. Well-intended, of course, in the name of sterility, but hospitals tend to assault our senses, and the most we might hope for within those walls is numbness — anesthetic, literally the opposite of aesthetic. I revere hospitals for what they can do; I am alive because of them. But we ask too much of our hospitals. They are places for acute trauma and treatable illness. They are no place to live and die; that's not what they were designed for. Now mind you — I am not giving up on the notion that our institutions can become more humane. Beauty can be found anywhere. I spent a few months in a burn unit at St. Barnabas Hospital in Livingston, New Jersey, where I got really great care at every turn, including good palliative care for my pain. And one night, it began to snow outside. I remember my nurses complaining about driving through it. And there was no window in my room, but it was great to just imagine it coming down all sticky. Next day, one of my nurses smuggled in a snowball for me. She brought it in to the unit. I cannot tell you the rapture I felt holding that in my hand, and the coldness dripping onto my burning skin; the miracle of it all, the fascination as I watched it melt and turn into water. In that moment, just being any part of this planet in this universe mattered more to me than whether I lived or died. That little snowball packed all the inspiration I needed to both try to live and be OK if I did not. In a hospital, that's a stolen moment. In my work over the years, I've known many people who were ready to go, ready to die. Not because they had found some final peace or transcendence, but because they were so repulsed by what their lives had become — in a word, cut off, or ugly. There are already record numbers of us living with chronic and terminal illness, and into ever older age. And we are nowhere near ready or prepared for this silver tsunami. We need an infrastructure dynamic enough to handle these seismic shifts in our population. Now is the time to create something new, something vital. I know we can because we have to. The alternative is just unacceptable. And the key ingredients are known: policy, education and training, systems, bricks and mortar. We have tons of input for designers of all stripes to work with. We know, for example, from research what's most important to people who are closer to death: comfort; feeling unburdened and unburdening to those they love; existential peace; and a sense of wonderment and spirituality. Over Zen Hospice's nearly 30 years, we've learned much more from our residents in subtle detail. Little things aren't so little. Take Janette. She finds it harder to breathe one day to the next due to ALS. Well, guess what? She wants to start smoking again — and French cigarettes, if you please. Not out of some self-destructive bent, but to feel her lungs filled while she has them. Priorities change. Or Kate — she just wants to know her dog Austin is lying at the foot of her bed, his cold muzzle against her dry skin, instead of more chemotherapy coursing through her veins — she's done that. Sensuous, aesthetic gratification, where in a moment, in an instant, we are rewarded for just being. So much of it comes down to loving our time by way of the senses, by way of the body — the very thing doing the living and the dying. Probably the most poignant room in the Zen Hospice guest house is our kitchen, which is a little strange when you realize that so many of our residents can eat very little, if anything at all. But we realize we are providing sustenance on several levels: smell, a symbolic plane. Seriously, with all the heavy-duty stuff happening under our roof, one of the most tried and true interventions we know of, is to bake cookies. As long as we have our senses — even just one — we have at least the possibility of accessing what makes us feel human, connected. Imagine the ripples of this notion for the millions of people living and dying with dementia. Primal sensorial delights that say the things we don't have words for, impulses that make us stay present — no need for a past or a future. So, if teasing unnecessary suffering out of the system was our first design cue, then tending to dignity by way of the senses, by way of the body — the aesthetic realm — is design cue number two. Now this gets us quickly to the third and final bit for today; namely, we need to lift our sights, to set our sights on well-being, so that life and health and healthcare can become about making life more wonderful, rather than just less horrible. Beneficence. Here, this gets right at the distinction between a disease-centered and a patient- or human-centered model of care, and here is where caring becomes a creative, generative, even playful act. "Play" may sound like a funny word here. But it is also one of our highest forms of adaptation. Consider every major compulsory effort it takes to be human. The need for food has birthed cuisine. The need for shelter has given rise to architecture. The need for cover, fashion. And for being subjected to the clock, well, we invented music. So, since dying is a necessary part of life, what might we create with this fact? By "play" I am in no way suggesting we take a light approach to dying or that we mandate any particular way of dying. There are mountains of sorrow that cannot move, and one way or another, we will all kneel there. Rather, I am asking that we make space — physical, psychic room, to allow life to play itself all the way out — so that rather than just getting out of the way, aging and dying can become a process of crescendo through to the end. We can't solve for death. I know some of you are working on this. (Laughter) Meanwhile, we can — (Laughter) We can design towards it. Parts of me died early on, and that's something we can all say one way or another. I got to redesign my life around this fact, and I tell you it has been a liberation to realize you can always find a shock of beauty or meaning in what life you have left, like that snowball lasting for a perfect moment, all the while melting away. If we love such moments ferociously, then maybe we can learn to live well — not in spite of death, but because of it. Let death be what takes us, not lack of imagination. Thank you. (Applause) |
This tennis icon paved the way for women in sports | {0: 'Billie Jean King won 39 Grand Slam titles during her tennis career, and has long been a pioneer for equality and social justice.'} | TEDWomen 2015 | Billie Jean King: Hi, everyone! (Applause) Thanks, Pat. Thank you! Getting me all wound up, now! (Laughter) Pat Mitchell: Good! You know, when I was watching the video again of the match, you must have felt like the fate of the world's women was on every stroke you took. Were you feeling that? BJK: First of all, Bobby Riggs — he was the former number one player, he wasn't just some hacker, by the way. He was one of my heroes and I admired him. And that's the reason I beat him, actually, because I respected him. (Laughter) It's true — my mom and especially my dad always said: "Respect your opponent, and never underestimate them, ever." And he was correct. He was absolutely correct. But I knew it was about social change. And I was really nervous whenever we announced it, and I felt like the whole world was on my shoulders. And I thought, "If I lose, it's going to put women back 50 years, at least." Title IX had just been passed the year before — June 23, 1972. And women's professional tennis — there were nine of us who signed a one-dollar contract in 1970 — now remember, the match is in '73. So we were only in our third year of having a tour where we could actually play, have a place to compete and make a living. So there were nine of us that signed that one-dollar contract. And our dream was for any girl, born any place in the world — if she was good enough — there would be a place for her to compete and for us to make a living. Because before 1968, we made 14 dollars a day, and we were under the control of organizations. So we really wanted to break away from that. But we knew it wasn't really about our generation so much; we knew it was about the future generations. We do stand on the shoulders of the people that came before us, there is no question. But every generation has the chance to make it better. That was really on my mind. I really wanted to start matching the hearts and minds to Title IX. Title IX, in case anybody doesn't know, which a lot of people probably don't, said that any federal funds given to a high school, college or university, either public or private, had to — finally — give equal monies to boys and girls. And that changed everything. (Applause) So you can have a law, but it's changing the hearts and minds to match up with it. That's when it really rocks, totally. So that was on my mind. I wanted to start that change in the hearts and minds. But two things came out of that match. For women: self-confidence, empowerment. They actually had enough nerve to ask for a raise. Some women have waited 10, 15 years to ask. I said, "More importantly, did you get it?" (Laughter) And they did! And for the men? A lot of the men today don't realize it, but if you're in your 50s, 60s or whatever, late 40s, you're the first generation of men of the Women's Movement — whether you like it or not! (Laughter) (Applause) And for the men, what happened for the men, they'd come up to me — and most times, the men are the ones who have tears in their eyes, it's very interesting. They go, "Billie, I was very young when I saw that match, and now I have a daughter. And I am so happy I saw that as a young man." And one of those young men, at 12 years old, was President Obama. And he actually told me that when I met him, he said: "You don't realize it, but I saw that match at 12. And now I have two daughters, and it has made a difference in how I raise them." So both men and women got a lot out of it, but different things. PM: And now there are generations — at least one or two — who have experienced the equality that Title IX and other fights along the way made possible. And for women, there are generations who have also experienced teamwork. They got to play team sports in a way they hadn't before. So you had a legacy already built in terms of being an athlete, a legacy of the work you did to lobby for equal pay for women athletes and the Women's Sports Foundation. What now are you looking to accomplish with The Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative? BJK: I think it goes back to an epiphany I had at 12. At 11, I wanted to be the number one tennis player in the world, and a friend had asked me to play and I said, "What's that?" Tennis was not in my family — basketball was, other sports. Fast forward to 12 years old, (Laughter) and I'm finally starting to play in tournaments where you get a ranking at the end of the year. So I was daydreaming at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, and I started thinking about my sport and how tiny it was, but also that everybody who played wore white shoes, white clothes, played with white balls — everybody who played was white. And I said to myself, at 12 years old, "Where is everyone else?" And that just kept sticking in my brain. And that moment, I promised myself I'd fight for equal rights and opportunities for boys and girls, men and women, the rest of my life. And that tennis, if I was fortunate enough to become number one — and I knew, being a girl, it would be harder to have influence, already at that age — that I had this platform. And tennis is global. And I thought, "You know what? I've been given an opportunity that very few people have had." I didn't know if I was going to make it — this was only 12. I sure wanted it, but making it is a whole other discussion. I just remember I promised myself, and I really try to keep my word. That's who I truly am, just fighting for people. And, unfortunately, women have had less. And we are considered less. And so my attentions, where did they have to go? It was just ... you have to. And learn to stick up for yourself, hear your own voice. You hear the same words keep coming out all the time, and I got really lucky because I had an education. And I think if you can see it you can be it, you know? If you can see it, you can be it. You look at Pat, you look at other leaders, you look at these speakers, look at yourself, because everyone — everyone — can do something extraordinary. Every single person. PM: And your story, Billie, has inspired so many women everywhere. Now with the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, you're taking on an even bigger cause. Because one thing we hear a lot about is women taking their voice, working to find their way into leadership positions. But what you're talking about is even bigger than that. It's inclusive leadership. And this is a generation that has grown up thinking more inclusively — BJK: Isn't it great? Look at the technology! It's amazing how it connects us all! It's about connection. It's simply amazing what's possible because of it. But the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative is really about the workforce mostly, and trying to change it, so people can actually go to work and be their authentic selves. Because most of us have two jobs: One, to fit in — I'll give you a perfect example. An African American woman gets up an hour earlier to go to work, straightens her hair in the bathroom, goes to the bathroom probably four, five, six times a day to keep straightening her hair, to keep making sure she fits in. So she's working two jobs. She's got this other job, whatever that may be, but she's also trying to fit in. Or this poor man who kept his diploma — he went to University of Michigan, but he never would talk about his poverty as a youngster, ever — just would not mention it. So he made sure they saw he was well-educated. And then you see a gay guy who has an NFL — which means American football for all of you out there, it's a big deal, it's very macho — and he talked about football all the time, because he was gay and he didn't want anybody to know. It just goes on and on. So my wish for everyone is to be able to be their authentic self 24/7, that would be the ultimate. And we catch ourselves — I mean, I catch myself to this day. Even being gay I catch myself, you know, like, (Gasp) a little uncomfortable, a little surge in my gut, feeling not totally comfortable in my own skin. So, I think you have to ask yourself — I want people to be themselves, whatever that is, just let it be. PM: And the first research the Leadership Initiative did showed that, that these examples you just used — that many of us have the problem of being authentic. But what you've just looked at is this millennial generation, who have benefited from all these equal opportunities — which may not be equal but exist everywhere — BJK: First of all, I'm really lucky. Partnership with Teneo, a strategic company that's amazing. That's really the reason I'm able to do this. I've had two times in my life where I've actually had men really behind me with power. And that was in the old days with Philip Morris with Virginia Slims, and this is the second time in my entire life. And then Deloitte. The one thing I wanted was data — facts. So Deloitte sent out a survey, and over 4,000 people now have answered, and we're continuing in the workplace. And what do the millennials feel? Well, they feel a lot, but what they're so fantastic about is — you know, our generation was like, "Oh, we're going to get representation." So if you walk into a room, you see everybody represented. That's not good enough anymore, which is so good! So the millennials are fantastic; they want connection, engagement. They just want you to tell us what you're feeling, what you're thinking, and get into the solution. They're problem-solvers, and of course, you've got the information at your fingertips, compared to when I was growing up. PM: What did the research show you about millennials? Are they going to make a difference? Are they going to create a world where there is really an inclusive work force? BJK: Well, in 2025, 75 percent of the global workforce is going to be millennials. I think they are going to help solve problems. I think they have the wherewithal to do it. I know they care a lot. They have big ideas and they can make big things happen. I want to stay in the now with the young people, I don't want to get behind. (Laughter) PM: I don't think there's any chance! But what you found out in the research about millennials is not really the experience that a lot of people have with millennials. BJK: No, well, if we want to talk — OK, I've been doing my little mini-survey. I've been talking to the Boomers, who are their bosses, and I go, "What do you think about the millennials?" And I'm pretty excited, like it's good, and they get this face — (Laughter) "Oh, you mean the 'Me' generation?" (Laughter) I say, "Do you really think so? Because I do think they care about the environment and all these things." And they go, "Oh, Billie, they cannot focus." (Laughter) They actually have proven that the average focus for an 18-year-old is 37 seconds. (Laughter) They can't focus. And they don't really care. I just heard a story the other night: a woman owns a gallery and she has these workers. She gets a text from one of the workers, like an intern, she's just starting — she goes, "Oh, by the way, I'm going to be late because I'm at the hairdresser's." (Laughter) So she arrives, and this boss says, "What's going on?" And she says, "Oh, I was late, sorry, how's it going?" She says, "Well, guess what? I'd like you leave, you're finished." She goes, "OK." (Laughter) No problem! PM: Now Billie, that story — I know, but that's what scares the boomers — I'm just telling you — so I think it's good for us to share. (Laughter) No, it is good for us to share, because we're our authentic selves and what we're really feeling, so we've got to take it both ways, you know? But I have great faith because — if you've been in sports like I have — every generation gets better. It's a fact. With the Women's Sports Foundation being the advocates for Title IX still, because we're trying to keep protecting the law, because it's in a tenuous position always, so we really are concerned, and we do a lot of research. That's very important to us. And I want to hear from people. But we really have to protect what Title IX stands for worldwide. And you heard President Carter talk about how Title IX is protected. And do you know that every single lawsuit that girls, at least in sports, have gone up against — whatever institutions — has won? Title IX is there to protect us. And it is amazing. But we still have to get the hearts and minds — the hearts and minds to match the legislation is huge. PM: So what gets you up every morning? What keeps you sustaining your work, sustaining the fight for equality, extending it, always exploring new areas, trying to find new ways ... ? BJK: Well, I always drove my parents crazy because I was always the curious one. I'm highly motivated. My younger brother was a Major League Baseball player. My poor parents did not care if we were any good. (Laughter) And we drove them crazy because we pushed, we pushed because we wanted to be the best. And I think it's because of what I'm hearing today in TED talks. I think to listen to these different women, to listen to different people, to listen to President Carter — 90 years old, by the way, and he we was throwing these figures out that I would never — I'd have to go, "Excuse me, wait a minute, I need to get a list out of these figures." He was rattling off — I mean, that's amazing, I'm sorry. PM: He's an amazing man. (Applause) BJK: And then you're going to have President Mary Robinson, who's a former president — Thank you, Irish! 62 percent! LGBTQ! Yes! (Applause) Congress is voting in June on same-sex marriage, so these are things that for some people are very hard to hear. But always remember, every one of us is an individual, a human being with a beating heart, who cares and wants to live their authentic life. OK? You don't have to agree with somebody, but everyone has the opportunity. I think we all have an obligation to continue to keep moving the needle forward, always. And these people have been so inspiring. Everyone matters. And every one of you is an influencer. You out there listening, out there in the world, plus the people here — every single person's an influencer. Never, ever forget that. OK? So don't ever give up on yourself. PM: Billie, you have been an inspiration for us. BJK: Thanks, Pat! (Applause) Thanks, TED! (Applause) Thanks a lot! |
How fear drives American politics | {0: 'With books and strategies, David Rothkopf helps people navigate the perils and opportunities of our contemporary geopolitical landscape.'} | TED2015 | What I'd like to do is talk to you a little bit about fear and the cost of fear and the age of fear from which we are now emerging. I would like you to feel comfortable with my doing that by letting you know that I know something about fear and anxiety. I'm a Jewish guy from New Jersey. (Laughter) I could worry before I could walk. (Laughter) Please, applaud that. (Applause) Thank you. But I also grew up in a time where there was something to fear. We were brought out in the hall when I was a little kid and taught how to put our coats over our heads to protect us from global thermonuclear war. Now even my seven-year-old brain knew that wasn't going to work. But I also knew that global thermonuclear war was something to be concerned with. And yet, despite the fact that we lived for 50 years with the threat of such a war, the response of our government and of our society was to do wonderful things. We created the space program in response to that. We built our highway system in response to that. We created the Internet in response to that. So sometimes fear can produce a constructive response. But sometimes it can produce an un-constructive response. On September 11, 2001, 19 guys took over four airplanes and flew them into a couple of buildings. They exacted a horrible toll. It is not for us to minimize what that toll was. But the response that we had was clearly disproportionate — disproportionate to the point of verging on the unhinged. We rearranged the national security apparatus of the United States and of many governments to address a threat that, at the time that those attacks took place, was quite limited. In fact, according to our intelligence services, on September 11, 2001, there were 100 members of core Al-Qaeda. There were just a few thousand terrorists. They posed an existential threat to no one. But we rearranged our entire national security apparatus in the most sweeping way since the end of the Second World War. We launched two wars. We spent trillions of dollars. We suspended our values. We violated international law. We embraced torture. We embraced the idea that if these 19 guys could do this, anybody could do it. And therefore, for the first time in history, we were seeing everybody as a threat. And what was the result of that? Surveillance programs that listened in on the emails and phone calls of entire countries — hundreds of millions of people — setting aside whether those countries were our allies, setting aside what our interests were. I would argue that 15 years later, since today there are more terrorists, more terrorist attacks, more terrorist casualties — this by the count of the U.S. State Department — since today the region from which those attacks emanate is more unstable than at any time in its history, since the Flood, perhaps, we have not succeeded in our response. Now you have to ask, where did we go wrong? What did we do? What was the mistake that was made? And you might say, well look, Washington is a dysfunctional place. There are political food fights. We've turned our discourse into a cage match. And that's true. But there are bigger problems, believe it or not, than that dysfunction, even though I would argue that dysfunction that makes it impossible to get anything done in the richest and most powerful country in the world is far more dangerous than anything that a group like ISIS could do, because it stops us in our tracks and it keeps us from progress. But there are other problems. And the other problems came from the fact that in Washington and in many capitals right now, we're in a creativity crisis. In Washington, in think tanks, where people are supposed to be thinking of new ideas, you don't get bold new ideas, because if you offer up a bold new idea, not only are you attacked on Twitter, but you will not get confirmed in a government job. Because we are reactive to the heightened venom of the political debate, you get governments that have an us-versus-them mentality, tiny groups of people making decisions. When you sit in a room with a small group of people making decisions, what do you get? You get groupthink. Everybody has the same worldview, and any view from outside of the group is seen as a threat. That's a danger. You also have processes that become reactive to news cycles. And so the parts of the U.S. government that do foresight, that look forward, that do strategy — the parts in other governments that do this — can't do it, because they're reacting to the news cycle. And so we're not looking ahead. On 9/11, we had a crisis because we were looking the wrong way. Today we have a crisis because, because of 9/11, we are still looking in the wrong direction, and we know because we see transformational trends on the horizon that are far more important than what we saw on 9/11; far more important than the threat posed by these terrorists; far more important even than the instability that we've got in some areas of the world that are racked by instability today. In fact, the things that we are seeing in those parts of the world may be symptoms. They may be a reaction to bigger trends. And if we are treating the symptom and ignoring the bigger trend, then we've got far bigger problems to deal with. And so what are those trends? Well, to a group like you, the trends are apparent. We are living at a moment in which the very fabric of human society is being rewoven. If you saw the cover of The Economist a couple of days ago — it said that 80 percent of the people on the planet, by the year 2020, would have a smartphone. They would have a small computer connected to the Internet in their pocket. In most of Africa, the cell phone penetration rate is 80 percent. We passed the point last October when there were more mobile cellular devices, SIM cards, out in the world than there were people. We are within years of a profound moment in our history, when effectively every single human being on the planet is going to be part of a man-made system for the first time, able to touch anyone else — touch them for good, touch them for ill. And the changes associated with that are changing the very nature of every aspect of governance and life on the planet in ways that our leaders ought to be thinking about, when they're thinking about these immediate threats. On the security side, we've come out of a Cold War in which it was too costly to fight a nuclear war, and so we didn't, to a period that I call Cool War, cyber war, where the costs of conflict are actually so low, that we may never stop. We may enter a period of constant warfare, and we know this because we've been in it for several years. And yet, we don't have the basic doctrines to guide us in this regard. We don't have the basic ideas formulated. If someone attacks us with a cyber attack, do have the ability to respond with a kinetic attack? We don't know. If somebody launches a cyber attack, how do we deter them? When China launched a series of cyber attacks, what did the U.S. government do? It said, we're going to indict a few of these Chinese guys, who are never coming to America. They're never going to be anywhere near a law enforcement officer who's going to take them into custody. It's a gesture — it's not a deterrent. Special forces operators out there in the field today discover that small groups of insurgents with cell phones have access to satellite imagery that once only superpowers had. In fact, if you've got a cell phone, you've got access to power that a superpower didn't have, and would have highly classified 10 years ago. In my cell phone, I have an app that tells me where every plane in the world is, and its altitude, and its speed, and what kind of aircraft it is, and where it's going and where it's landing. They have apps that allow them to know what their adversary is about to do. They're using these tools in new ways. When a cafe in Sydney was taken over by a terrorist, he went in with a rifle... and an iPad. And the weapon was the iPad. Because he captured people, he terrorized them, he pointed the iPad at them, and then he took the video and he put it on the Internet, and he took over the world's media. But it doesn't just affect the security side. The relations between great powers — we thought we were past the bipolar era. We thought we were in a unipolar world, where all the big issues were resolved. Remember? It was the end of history. But we're not. We're now seeing that our basic assumptions about the Internet — that it was going to connect us, weave society together — are not necessarily true. In countries like China, you have the Great Firewall of China. You've got countries saying no, if the Internet happens within our borders we control it within our borders. We control the content. We are going to control our security. We are going to manage that Internet. We are going to say what can be on it. We're going to set a different set of rules. Now you might think, well, that's just China. But it's not just China. It's China, India, Russia. It's Saudi Arabia, it's Singapore, it's Brazil. After the NSA scandal, the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians, they said, let's create a new Internet backbone, because we can't be dependent on this other one. And so all of a sudden, what do you have? You have a new bipolar world in which cyber-internationalism, our belief, is challenged by cyber-nationalism, another belief. We are seeing these changes everywhere we look. We are seeing the advent of mobile money. It's happening in the places you wouldn't expect. It's happening in Kenya and Tanzania, where millions of people who haven't had access to financial services now conduct all those services on their phones. There are 2.5 million people who don't have financial service access that are going to get it soon. A billion of them are going to have the ability to access it on their cell phone soon. It's not just going to give them the ability to bank. It's going to change what monetary policy is. It's going to change what money is. Education is changing in the same way. Healthcare is changing in the same way. How government services are delivered is changing in the same way. And yet, in Washington, we are debating whether to call the terrorist group that has taken over Syria and Iraq ISIS or ISIL or Islamic State. We are trying to determine how much we want to give in a negotiation with the Iranians on a nuclear deal which deals with the technologies of 50 years ago, when in fact, we know that the Iranians right now are engaged in cyber war with us and we're ignoring it, partially because businesses are not willing to talk about the attacks that are being waged on them. And that gets us to another breakdown that's crucial, and another breakdown that couldn't be more important to a group like this, because the growth of America and real American national security and all of the things that drove progress even during the Cold War, was a public-private partnership between science, technology and government that began when Thomas Jefferson sat alone in his laboratory inventing new things. But it was the canals and railroads and telegraph; it was radar and the Internet. It was Tang, the breakfast drink — probably not the most important of those developments. But what you had was a partnership and a dialogue, and the dialogue has broken down. It's broken down because in Washington, less government is considered more. It's broken down because there is, believe it or not, in Washington, a war on science — despite the fact that in all of human history, every time anyone has waged a war on science, science has won. (Applause) But we have a government that doesn't want to listen, that doesn't have people at the highest levels that understand this. In the nuclear age, when there were people in senior national security jobs, they were expected to speak throw-weight. They were expected to know the lingo, the vocabulary. If you went to the highest level of the U.S. government now and said, "Talk to me about cyber, about neuroscience, about the things that are going to change the world of tomorrow," you'd get a blank stare. I know, because when I wrote this book, I talked to 150 people, many from the science and tech side, who felt like they were being shunted off to the kids' table. Meanwhile, on the tech side, we have lots of wonderful people creating wonderful things, but they started in garages and they didn't need the government and they don't want the government. Many of them have a political view that's somewhere between libertarian and anarchic: leave me alone. But the world's coming apart. All of a sudden, there are going to be massive regulatory changes and massive issues associated with conflict and massive issues associated with security and privacy. And we haven't even gotten to the next set of issues, which are philosophical issues. If you can't vote, if you can't have a job, if you can't bank, if you can't get health care, if you can't be educated without Internet access, is Internet access a fundamental right that should be written into constitutions? If Internet access is a fundamental right, is electricity access for the 1.2 billion who don't have access to electricity a fundamental right? These are fundamental issues. Where are the philosophers? Where's the dialogue? And that brings me to the reason that I'm here. I live in Washington. Pity me. (Laughter) The dialogue isn't happening there. These big issues that will change the world, change national security, change economics, create hope, create threats, can only be resolved when you bring together groups of people who understand science and technology back together with government. Both sides need each other. And until we recreate that connection, until we do what helped America grow and helped other countries grow, then we are going to grow ever more vulnerable. The risks associated with 9/11 will not be measured in terms of lives lost by terror attacks or buildings destroyed or trillions of dollars spent. They'll be measured in terms of the costs of our distraction from critical issues and our inability to get together scientists, technologists, government leaders, at a moment of transformation akin to the beginning of the Renaissance, akin to the beginning of the major transformational eras that have happened on Earth, and start coming up with, if not the right answers, then at least the right questions. We are not there yet, but discussions like this and groups like you are the places where those questions can be formulated and posed. And that's why I believe that groups like TED, discussions like this around the planet, are the place where the future of foreign policy, of economic policy, of social policy, of philosophy, will ultimately take place. And that's why it's been a pleasure speaking to you. Thank you very, very much. (Applause) |
The story we tell about poverty isn't true | {0: 'Mia Birdsong advocates for strong communities and the self-determination of everyday people.\r\n'} | TEDWomen 2015 | For the last 50 years, a lot of smart, well-resourced people — some of you, no doubt — have been trying to figure out how to reduce poverty in the United States. People have created and invested millions of dollars into non-profit organizations with the mission of helping people who are poor. They've created think tanks that study issues like education, job creation and asset-building, and then advocated for policies to support our most marginalized communities. They've written books and columns and given passionate speeches, decrying the wealth gap that is leaving more and more people entrenched at the bottom end of the income scale. And that effort has helped. But it's not enough. Our poverty rates haven't changed that much in the last 50 years, since the War on Poverty was launched. I'm here to tell you that we have overlooked the most powerful and practical resource. Here it is: people who are poor. Up in the left-hand corner is Jobana, Sintia and Bertha. They met when they all had small children, through a parenting class at a family resource center in San Francisco. As they grew together as parents and friends, they talked a lot about how hard it was to make money when your kids are little. Child care is expensive, more than they'd earn in a job. Their husbands worked, but they wanted to contribute financially, too. So they hatched a plan. They started a cleaning business. They plastered neighborhoods with flyers and handed business cards out to their families and friends, and soon, they had clients calling. Two of them would clean the office or house and one of them would watch the kids. They'd rotate who'd cleaned and who'd watch the kids. (Laughs) It's awesome, right? (Laughter) And they split the money three ways. It was not a full-time gig, no one could watch the little ones all day. But it made a difference for their families. Extra money to pay for bills when a husband's work hours were cut. Money to buy the kids clothes as they were growing. A little extra money in their pockets to make them feel some independence. Up in the top-right corner is Theresa and her daughter, Brianna. Brianna is one of those kids with this sparkly, infectious, outgoing personality. For example, when Rosie, a little girl who spoke only Spanish, moved in next door, Brianna, who spoke only English, borrowed her mother's tablet and found a translation app so the two of them could communicate. (Laughter) I know, right? Rosie's family credits Brianna with helping Rosie to learn English. A few years ago, Brianna started to struggle academically. She was growing frustrated and kind of withdrawn and acting out in class. And her mother was heartbroken over what was happening. Then they found out that she was going to have to repeat second grade and Brianna was devastated. Her mother felt hopeless and overwhelmed and alone because she knew that her daughter was not getting the support she needed, and she did not know how to help her. One afternoon, Theresa was catching up with a group of friends, and one of them said, "Theresa, how are you?" And she burst into tears. After she shared her story, one of her friends said, "I went through the exact same thing with my son about a year ago." And in that moment, Theresa realized that so much of her struggle was not having anybody to talk with about it. So she created a support group for parents like her. The first meeting was her and two other people. But word spread, and soon 20 people, 30 people were showing up for these monthly meetings that she put together. She went from feeling helpless to realizing how capable she was of supporting her daughter, with the support of other people who were going through the same struggle. And Brianna is doing fantastic — she's doing great academically and socially. That in the middle is my man Baakir, standing in front of BlackStar Books and Caffe, which he runs out of part of his house. As you walk in the door, Baakir greets you with a "Welcome black home." (Laughter) Once inside, you can order some Algiers jerk chicken, perhaps a vegan walnut burger, or jive turkey sammich. And that's sammich — not sandwich. You must finish your meal with a buttermilk drop, which is several steps above a donut hole and made from a very secret family recipe. For real, it's very secret, he won't tell you about it. But BlackStar is much more than a café. For the kids in the neighborhood, it's a place to go after school to get help with homework. For the grown-ups, it's where they go to find out what's going on in the neighborhood and catch up with friends. It's a performance venue. It's a home for poets, musicians and artists. Baakir and his partner Nicole, with their baby girl strapped to her back, are there in the mix of it all, serving up a cup of coffee, teaching a child how to play Mancala, or painting a sign for an upcoming community event. I have worked with and learned from people just like them for more than 20 years. I have organized against the prison system, which impacts poor folks, especially black, indigenous and Latino folks, at an alarming rate. I have worked with young people who manifest hope and promise, despite being at the effect of racist discipline practices in their schools, and police violence in their communities. I have learned from families who are unleashing their ingenuity and tenacity to collectively create their own solutions. And they're not just focused on money. They're addressing education, housing, health, community — the things that we all care about. Everywhere I go, I see people who are broke but not broken. I see people who are struggling to realize their good ideas, so that they can create a better life for themselves, their families, their communities. Jobana, Sintia, Bertha, Theresa and Baakir are the rule, not the shiny exception. I am the exception. I was raised by a quietly fierce single mother in Rochester, New York. I was bussed to a school in the suburbs, from a neighborhood that many of my classmates and their parents considered dangerous. At eight, I was a latchkey kid. I'd get myself home after school every day and do homework and chores, and wait for my mother to come home. After school, I'd go to the corner store and buy a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli, which I'd heat up on the stove as my afternoon snack. If I had a little extra money, I'd buy a Hostess Fruit Pie. (Laughter) Cherry. Not as good as a buttermilk drop. (Laughter) We were poor when I was a kid. But now, I own a home in a quickly gentrifying neighborhood in Oakland, California. I've built a career. My husband is a business owner. I have a retirement account. My daughter is not even allowed to turn on the stove unless there's a grown-up at home and she doesn't have to, because she does not have to have the same kind of self-reliance that I had to at her age. My kids' raviolis are organic and full of things like spinach and ricotta, because I have the luxury of choice when it comes to what my children eat. I am the exception, not because I'm more talented than Baakir or my mother worked any harder than Jobana, Sintia or Bertha, or cared any more than Theresa. Marginalized communities are full of smart, talented people, hustling and working and innovating, just like our most revered and most rewarded CEOs. They are full of people tapping into their resilience to get up every day, get the kids off to school and go to jobs that don't pay enough, or get educations that are putting them in debt. They are full of people applying their savvy intelligence to stretch a minimum wage paycheck, or balance a job and a side hustle to make ends meet. They are full of people doing for themselves and for others, whether it's picking up medication for an elderly neighbor, or letting a sibling borrow some money to pay the phone bill, or just watching out for the neighborhood kids from the front stoop. I am the exception because of luck and privilege, not hard work. And I'm not being modest or self-deprecating — I am amazing. (Laughter) But most people work hard. Hard work is the common denominator in this equation, and I'm tired of the story we tell that hard work leads to success, because that allows — Thank you. (Applause) ... because that story allows those of us who make it to believe we deserve it, and by implication, those who don't make it don't deserve it. We tell ourselves, in the back of our minds, and sometimes in the front of our mouths, "There must be something a little wrong with those poor people." We have a wide range of beliefs about what that something wrong is. Some people tell the story that poor folks are lazy freeloaders who would cheat and lie to get out of an honest day's work. Others prefer the story that poor people are helpless and probably had neglectful parents that didn't read to them enough, and if they were just told what to do and shown the right path, they could make it. For every story I hear demonizing low-income single mothers or absentee fathers, which is how people might think of my parents, I've got 50 that tell a different story about the same people, showing up every day and doing their best. I'm not saying that some of the negative stories aren't true, but those stories allow us to not really see who people really are, because they don't paint a full picture. The quarter-truths and limited plot lines have us convinced that poor people are a problem that needs fixing. What if we recognized that what's working is the people and what's broken is our approach? What if we realized that the experts we are looking for, the experts we need to follow, are poor people themselves? What if, instead of imposing solutions, we just added fire to the already-burning flame that they have? Not directing — not even empowering — but just fueling their initiative. Just north of here, we have an example of what this could look like: Silicon Valley. A whole venture capital industry has grown up around the belief that if people have good ideas and the desire to manifest them, we should give them lots and lots and lots of money. (Laughter) Right? But where is our strategy for Theresa and Baakir? There are no incubators for them, no accelerators, no fellowships. How are Jobana, Sintia and Bertha really all that different from the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world? Baakir has experience and a track record. I'd put my money on him. So, consider this an invitation to rethink a flawed strategy. Let's grasp this opportunity to let go of a tired, faulty narrative and listen and look for true stories, more beautifully complex stories, about who marginalized people and families and communities are. I'm going to take a minute to speak to my people. We cannot wait for somebody else to get it right. Let us remember what we are capable of; all that we have built with blood, sweat and dreams; all the cogs that keep turning; and the people kept afloat because of our backbreaking work. Let us remember that we are magic. If you need some inspiration to jog your memory, read Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower." Listen to Reverend King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Listen to Suheir Hammad recite "First Writing Since," or Esperanza Spalding perform "Black Gold." Set your gaze upon the art of Kehinde Wiley or Favianna Rodriguez. Look at the hands of your grandmother or into the eyes of someone who loves you. We are magic. Individually, we don't have a lot of wealth and power, but collectively, we are unstoppable. And we spend a lot of our time and energy organizing our power to demand change from systems that were not made for us. Instead of trying to alter the fabric of existing ways, let's weave and cut some fierce new cloth. Let's use some of our substantial collective power toward inventing and bringing to life new ways of being that work for us. Desmond Tutu talks about the concept of ubuntu, in the context of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation process that they embarked on after apartheid. He says it means, "My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours; we belong to a bundle of life." A bundle of life. The Truth and Reconciliation process started by elevating the voices of the unheard. If this country is going to live up to its promise of liberty and justice for all, then we need to elevate the voices of our unheard, of people like Jobana, Sintia and Bertha, Theresa and Baakir. We must leverage their solutions and their ideas. We must listen to their true stories, their more beautifully complex stories. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why gender equality is good for everyone — men included | {0: 'The author of "Angry White Men," Michael Kimmel is a pre-eminent scholar of men and masculinity.\r\n\r\n'} | TEDWomen 2015 | I'm here to recruit men to support gender equality. (Cheers) Wait, wait. What? What do men have to do with gender equality? Gender equality is about women, right? I mean, the word gender is about women. Actually, I'm even here speaking as a middle class white man. Now, I wasn't always a middle class white man. It all happened for me about 30 years ago when I was in graduate school, and a bunch of us graduate students got together one day, and we said, you know, there's an explosion of writing and thinking in feminist theory, but there's no courses yet. So we did what graduate students typically do in a situation like that. We said, OK, let's have a study group. We'll read a text, we'll talk about it, we'll have a potluck dinner. (Laughter) So every week, 11 women and me got together. (Laughter) We would read some text in feminist theory and have a conversation about it. And during one of our conversations, I witnessed an interaction that changed my life forever. It was a conversation between two women. One of the women was white, and one was black. And the white woman said — this is going to sound very anachronistic now — the white woman said, "All women face the same oppression as women. All women are similarly situated in patriarchy, and therefore all women have a kind of intuitive solidarity or sisterhood." And the black woman said, "I'm not so sure. Let me ask you a question." So the black woman says to the white woman, "When you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror, what do you see?" And the white woman said, "I see a woman." And the black woman said, "You see, that's the problem for me. Because when I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror," she said, "I see a black woman. To me, race is visible. But to you, race is invisible. You don't see it." And then she said something really startling. She said, "That's how privilege works. Privilege is invisible to those who have it." It is a luxury, I will say to the white people sitting in this room, not to have to think about race every split second of our lives. Privilege is invisible to those who have it. Now remember, I was the only man in this group, so when I witnessed this, I went, "Oh no." (Laughter) And somebody said, "Well what was that reaction?" And I said, "Well, when I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror, I see a human being. I'm kind of the generic person. You know, I'm a middle class white man. I have no race, no class, no gender. I'm universally generalizable." (Laughter) So I like to think that was the moment I became a middle class white man, that class and race and gender were not about other people, they were about me. I had to start thinking about them, and it had been privilege that had kept it invisible to me for so long. Now, I wish I could tell you this story ends 30 years ago in that little discussion group, but I was reminded of it quite recently at my university where I teach. I have a colleague, and she and I both teach the sociology of gender course on alternate semesters. So she gives a guest lecture for me when I teach. I give a guest lecture for her when she teaches. So I walk into her class to give a guest lecture, about 300 students in the room, and as I walk in, one of the students looks up and says, "Oh, finally, an objective opinion." All that semester, whenever my colleague opened her mouth, what my students saw was a woman. I mean, if you were to say to my students, "There is structural inequality based on gender in the United States," they'd say, "Well of course you'd say that. You're a woman. You're biased." When I say it, they go, "Wow, is that interesting. Is that going to be on the test? How do you spell 'structural'?" (Laughter) So I hope you all can see, this is what objectivity looks like. (Laughter) (Applause) Disembodied Western rationality. (Laughter) And that, by the way, is why I think men so often wear ties. (Laughter) Because if you are going to embody disembodied Western rationality, you need a signifier, and what could be a better signifier of disembodied Western rationality than a garment that at one end is a noose and the other end points to the genitals? (Laughter) (Applause) That is mind-body dualism right there. So making gender visible to men is the first step to engaging men to support gender equality. Now, when men first hear about gender equality, when they first start thinking about it, they often think, many men think, well, that's right, that's fair, that's just, that's the ethical imperative. But not all men. Some men think — the lightning bolt goes off, and they go, "Oh my God, yes, gender equality," and they will immediately begin to mansplain to you your oppression. They see supporting gender equality something akin to the cavalry, like, "Thanks very much for bringing this to our attention, ladies, we'll take it from here." This results in a syndrome that I like to call 'premature self-congratulation.' (Laughter) (Applause) There's another group, though, that actively resists gender equality, that sees gender equality as something that is detrimental to men. I was on a TV talk show opposite four white men. This is the beginning of the book I wrote, 'Angry White Men.' These were four angry white men who believed that they, white men in America, were the victims of reverse discrimination in the workplace. And they all told stories about how they were qualified for jobs, qualified for promotions, they didn't get them, they were really angry. And the reason I'm telling you this is I want you to hear the title of this particular show. It was a quote from one of the men, and the quote was, "A Black Woman Stole My Job." And they all told their stories, qualified for jobs, qualified for promotions, didn't get it, really angry. And then it was my turn to speak, and I said, "I have just one question for you guys, and it's about the title of the show, 'A Black Woman Stole My Job.' Actually, it's about one word in the title. I want to know about the word 'my.' Where did you get the idea it was your job? Why isn't the title of the show, 'A Black Woman Got the Job?' or 'A Black Woman Got A Job?'" Because without confronting men's sense of entitlement, I don't think we'll ever understand why so many men resist gender equality. (Applause) Look, we think this is a level playing field, so any policy that tilts it even a little bit, we think, "Oh my God, water's rushing uphill. It's reverse discrimination against us." (Laughter) So let me be very clear: white men in Europe and the United States are the beneficiaries of the single greatest affirmative action program in the history of the world. It is called "the history of the world." (Laughter) (Applause) So, now I've established some of the obstacles to engaging men, but why should we support gender equality? Of course, it's fair, it's right and it's just. But more than that, gender equality is also in our interest as men. If you listen to what men say about what they want in their lives, gender equality is actually a way for us to get the lives we want to live. Gender equality is good for countries. It turns out, according to most studies, that those countries that are the most gender equal are also the countries that score highest on the happiness scale. And that's not just because they're all in Europe. (Laughter) Even within Europe, those countries that are more gender equal also have the highest levels of happiness. It is also good for companies. Research by Catalyst and others has shown conclusively that the more gender-equal companies are, the better it is for workers, the happier their labor force is. They have lower job turnover. They have lower levels of attrition. They have an easier time recruiting. They have higher rates of retention, higher job satisfaction, higher rates of productivity. So the question I'm often asked in companies is, "Boy, this gender equality thing, that's really going to be expensive, huh?" And I say, "Oh no, in fact, what you have to start calculating is how much gender inequality is already costing you. It is extremely expensive." So it is good for business. And the other thing is, it's good for men. It is good for the kind of lives we want to live, because young men especially have changed enormously, and they want to have lives that are animated by terrific relationships with their children. They expect their partners, their spouses, their wives, to work outside the home and be just as committed to their careers as they are. I was talking, to give you an illustration of this change — Some of you may remember this. When I was a lot younger, there was a riddle that was posed to us. Some of you may wince to remember this riddle. This riddle went something like this. A man and his son are driving on the freeway, and they're in a terrible accident, and the father is killed, and the son is brought to the hospital emergency room, and as they're bringing the son into the hospital emergency room, the emergency room attending physician sees the boy and says, "Oh, I can't treat him, that's my son." How is this possible? We were flummoxed by this. We could not figure this out. (Laughter) Well, I decided to do a little experiment with my 16-year old son. He had a bunch of his friends hanging out at the house watching a game on TV recently. So I decided I would pose this riddle to them, just to see, to gauge the level of change. Well, 16-year-old boys, they immediately turned to me and said, "It's his mom." Right? No problem. Just like that. Except for my son, who said, "Well, he could have two dads." (Laughter) (Applause) That's an index, an indicator of how things have changed. Younger men today expect to be able to balance work and family. They want to be dual-career, dual-carer couples. They want to be able to balance work and family with their partners. They want to be involved fathers. Now, it turns out that the more egalitarian our relationships, the happier both partners are. Data from psychologists and sociologists are quite persuasive here. I think we have the persuasive numbers, the data, to prove to men that gender equality is not a zero-sum game, but a win-win. Here's what the data show. Now, when men begin the process of engaging with balancing work and family, we often have two phrases that we use to describe what we do. We pitch in and we help out. (Laughter) And I'm going to propose something a little bit more radical, one word: "share." (Laughter) Because here's what the data show: when men share housework and childcare, their children do better in school. Their children have lower rates of absenteeism, higher rates of achievement. They are less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. They are less likely to see a child psychiatrist. They are less likely to be put on medication. So when men share housework and childcare, their children are happier and healthier, and men want this. When men share housework and childcare, their wives are happier. Duh. Not only that, their wives are healthier. Their wives are less likely to see a therapist, less likely to be diagnosed with depression, less likely to be put on medication, more likely to go to the gym, report higher levels of marital satisfaction. So when men share housework and childcare, their wives are happier and healthier, and men certainly want this as well. When men share housework and childcare, the men are healthier. They smoke less, drink less, take recreational drugs less often. They are less likely to go to the ER but more like to go to a doctor for routine screenings. They are less likely to see a therapist, less likely to be diagnosed with depression, less likely to be taking prescription medication. So when men share housework and childcare, the men are happier and healthier. And who wouldn't want that? And finally, when men share housework and childcare, they have more sex. (Laughter) Now, of these four fascinating findings, which one do you think Men's Health magazine put on its cover? (Laughter) "Housework Makes Her Horny. (Not When She Does It.)" (Laughter) Now, I will say, just to remind the men in the audience, these data were collected over a really long period of time, so I don't want listeners to say, "Hmm, OK, I think I'll do the dishes tonight." These data were collected over a really long period of time. But I think it shows something important, that when Men's Health magazine put it on their cover, they also called, you'll love this, "Choreplay." So, what we found is something really important, that gender equality is in the interest of countries, of companies, and of men, and their children and their partners, that gender equality is not a zero-sum game. It's not a win-lose. It is a win-win for everyone. And what we also know is we cannot fully empower women and girls unless we engage boys and men. We know this. And my position is that men need the very things that women have identified that they need to live the lives they say they want to live in order to live the lives that we say we want to live. In 1915, on the eve of one of the great suffrage demonstrations down Fifth Avenue in New York City, a writer in New York wrote an article in a magazine, and the title of the article was, "Feminism for Men." And this was the first line of that article: "Feminism will make it possible for the first time for men to be free." Thank you. (Applause) |
Falling in love is the easy part | {0: 'Mandy Len Catron explores love stories.'} | TEDxChapmanU | I published this article in the New York Times Modern Love column in January of this year. "To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This." And the article is about a psychological study designed to create romantic love in the laboratory, and my own experience trying the study myself one night last summer. So the procedure is fairly simple: two strangers take turns asking each other 36 increasingly personal questions and then they stare into each other's eyes without speaking for four minutes. So here are a couple of sample questions. Number 12: If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be? Number 28: When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself? As you can see, they really do get more personal as they go along. Number 30, I really like this one: Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things you might not say to someone you just met. So when I first came across this study a few years earlier, one detail really stuck out to me, and that was the rumor that two of the participants had gotten married six months later, and they'd invited the entire lab to the ceremony. So I was of course very skeptical about this process of just manufacturing romantic love, but of course I was intrigued. And when I got the chance to try this study myself, with someone I knew but not particularly well, I wasn't expecting to fall in love. But then we did, and — (Laughter) And I thought it made a good story, so I sent it to the Modern Love column a few months later. Now, this was published in January, and now it is August, so I'm guessing that some of you are probably wondering, are we still together? And the reason I think you might be wondering this is because I have been asked this question again and again and again for the past seven months. And this question is really what I want to talk about today. But let's come back to it. (Laughter) So the week before the article came out, I was very nervous. I had been working on a book about love stories for the past few years, so I had gotten used to writing about my own experiences with romantic love on my blog. But a blog post might get a couple hundred views at the most, and those were usually just my Facebook friends, and I figured my article in the New York Times would probably get a few thousand views. And that felt like a lot of attention on a relatively new relationship. But as it turned out, I had no idea. So the article was published online on a Friday evening, and by Saturday, this had happened to the traffic on my blog. And by Sunday, both the Today Show and Good Morning America had called. Within a month, the article would receive over 8 million views, and I was, to say the least, underprepared for this sort of attention. It's one thing to work up the confidence to write honestly about your experiences with love, but it is another thing to discover that your love life has made international news — (Laughter) and to realize that people across the world are genuinely invested in the status of your new relationship. (Laughter) And when people called or emailed, which they did every day for weeks, they always asked the same question first: are you guys still together? In fact, as I was preparing this talk, I did a quick search of my email inbox for the phrase "Are you still together?" and several messages popped up immediately. They were from students and journalists and friendly strangers like this one. I did radio interviews and they asked. I even gave a talk, and one woman shouted up to the stage, "Hey Mandy, where's your boyfriend?" And I promptly turned bright red. I understand that this is part of the deal. If you write about your relationship in an international newspaper, you should expect people to feel comfortable asking about it. But I just wasn't prepared for the scope of the response. The 36 questions seem to have taken on a life of their own. In fact, the New York Times published a follow-up article for Valentine's Day, which featured readers' experiences of trying the study themselves, with varying degrees of success. So my first impulse in the face of all of this attention was to become very protective of my own relationship. I said no to every request for the two of us to do a media appearance together. I turned down TV interviews, and I said no to every request for photos of the two us. I think I was afraid that we would become inadvertent icons for the process of falling in love, a position I did not at all feel qualified for. And I get it: people didn't just want to know if the study worked, they wanted to know if it really worked: that is, if it was capable of producing love that would last, not just a fling, but real love, sustainable love. But this was a question I didn't feel capable of answering. My own relationship was only a few months old, and I felt like people were asking the wrong question in the first place. What would knowing whether or not we were still together really tell them? If the answer was no, would it make the experience of doing these 36 questions any less worthwhile? Dr. Arthur Aron first wrote about these questions in this study here in 1997, and here, the researcher's goal was not to produce romantic love. Instead, they wanted to foster interpersonal closeness among college students, by using what Aron called "sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure." Sounds romantic, doesn't it? But the study did work. The participants did feel closer after doing it, and several subsequent studies have also used Aron's fast friends protocol as a way to quickly create trust and intimacy between strangers. They've used it between members of the police and members of community, and they've used it between people of opposing political ideologies. The original version of the story, the one that I tried last summer, that pairs the personal questions with four minutes of eye contact, was referenced in this article, but unfortunately it was never published. So a few months ago, I was giving a talk at a small liberal arts college, and a student came up to me afterwards and he said, kind of shyly, "So, I tried your study, and it didn't work." He seemed a little mystified by this. "You mean, you didn't fall in love with the person you did it with?" I asked. "Well..." He paused. "I think she just wants to be friends." "But did you become better friends?" I asked. "Did you feel like you got to really know each other after doing the study?" He nodded. "So, then it worked," I said. I don't think this is the answer he was looking for. In fact, I don't think this is the answer that any of us are looking for when it comes to love. I first came across this study when I was 29 and I was going through a really difficult breakup. I had been in the relationship since I was 20, which was basically my entire adult life, and he was my first real love, and I had no idea how or if I could make a life without him. So I turned to science. I researched everything I could find about the science of romantic love, and I think I was hoping that it might somehow inoculate me from heartache. I don't know if I realized this at the time — I thought I was just doing research for this book I was writing — but it seems really obvious in retrospect. I hoped that if I armed myself with the knowledge of romantic love, I might never have to feel as terrible and lonely as I did then. And all this knowledge has been useful in some ways. I am more patient with love. I am more relaxed. I am more confident about asking for what I want. But I can also see myself more clearly, and I can see that what I want is sometimes more than can reasonably be asked for. What I want from love is a guarantee, not just that I am loved today and that I will be loved tomorrow, but that I will continue to be loved by the person I love indefinitely. Maybe it's this possibility of a guarantee that people were really asking about when they wanted to know if we were still together. So the story that the media told about the 36 questions was that there might be a shortcut to falling in love. There might be a way to somehow mitigate some of the risk involved, and this is a very appealing story, because falling in love feels amazing, but it's also terrifying. The moment you admit to loving someone, you admit to having a lot to lose, and it's true that these questions do provide a mechanism for getting to know someone quickly, which is also a mechanism for being known, and I think this is the thing that most of us really want from love: to be known, to be seen, to be understood. But I think when it comes to love, we are too willing to accept the short version of the story. The version of the story that asks, "Are you still together?" and is content with a yes or no answer. So rather than that question, I would propose we ask some more difficult questions, questions like: How do you decide who deserves your love and who does not? How do you stay in love when things get difficult, and how do you know when to just cut and run? How do you live with the doubt that inevitably creeps into every relationship, or even harder, how do you live with your partner's doubt? I don't necessarily know the answers to these questions, but I think they're an important start at having a more thoughtful conversation about what it means to love someone. So, if you want it, the short version of the story of my relationship is this: a year ago, an acquaintance and I did a study designed to create romantic love, and we fell in love, and we are still together, and I am so glad. But falling in love is not the same thing as staying in love. Falling in love is the easy part. So at the end of my article, I wrote, "Love didn't happen to us. We're in love because we each made the choice to be." And I cringe a little when I read that now, not because it isn't true, but because at the time, I really hadn't considered everything that was contained in that choice. I didn't consider how many times we would each have to make that choice, and how many times I will continue to have to make that choice without knowing whether or not he will always choose me. I want it to be enough to have asked and answered 36 questions, and to have chosen to love someone so generous and kind and fun and to have broadcast that choice in the biggest newspaper in America. But what I have done instead is turn my relationship into the kind of myth I don't quite believe in. And what I want, what perhaps I will spend my life wanting, is for that myth to be true. I want the happy ending implied by the title to my article, which is, incidentally, the only part of the article that I didn't actually write. (Laughter) But what I have instead is the chance to make the choice to love someone, and the hope that he will choose to love me back, and it is terrifying, but that's the deal with love. Thank you. |
How to find work you love | {0: 'Scott Dinsmore founded Live Your Legend, a career and connection platform to inspire people to find their passion.'} | TEDxGoldenGatePark 2012 | Wow, what an honor. I always wondered what this would feel like. So eight years ago, I got the worst career advice of my life. I had a friend tell me, "Don't worry about how much you like the work you're doing now. It's all about just building your resume." And I'd just come back from living in Spain for a while, and I'd joined this Fortune 500 company. I thought, "This is fantastic. I'm going to have big impact on the world." I had all these ideas. And within about two months, I noticed at about 10am every morning I had this strange urge to want to slam my head through the monitor of my computer. I don't know if anyone's ever felt that. And I noticed pretty soon after that that all the competitors in our space had already automated my job role. And this is right about when I got this sage advice to build up my resume. Well, as I'm trying to figure out what two-story window I'm going to jump out of and change things up, I read some altogether different advice from Warren Buffett, and he said, "Taking jobs to build up your resume is the same as saving up sex for old age." (Laughter) And I heard that, and that was all I needed. Within two weeks, I was out of there, and I left with one intention: to find something that I could screw up. That's how tough it was. I wanted to have some type of impact. It didn't matter what it was. And I found pretty quickly that I wasn't alone: it turns out that over 80 percent of the people around don't enjoy their work. I'm guessing this room is different, but that's the average that Deloitte has done with their studies. So I wanted to find out, what is it that sets these people apart, the people who do the passionate, world-changing work, that wake up inspired every day, and then these people, the other 80 percent who lead these lives of quiet desperation. So I started to interview all these people doing this inspiring work, and I read books and did case studies, 300 books altogether on purpose and career and all this, totally just self-immersion, really for the selfish reason of — I wanted to find the work that I couldn't not do, what that was for me. But as I was doing this, more and more people started to ask me, "You're into this career thing. I don't like my job. Can we sit down for lunch?" I'd say, "Sure." But I would have to warn them, because at this point, my quit rate was also 80 percent. Of the people I'd sit down with for lunch, 80 percent would quit their job within two months. I was proud of this, and it wasn't that I had any special magic. It was that I would ask one simple question. It was, "Why are you doing the work that you're doing?" And so often their answer would be, "Well, because somebody told me I'm supposed to." And I realized that so many people around us are climbing their way up this ladder that someone tells them to climb, and it ends up being leaned up against the wrong wall, or no wall at all. The more time I spent around these people and saw this problem, I thought, what if we could create a community, a place where people could feel like they belonged and that it was OK to do things differently, to take the road less traveled, where that was encouraged, and inspire people to change? And that later became what I now call Live Your Legend, which I'll explain in a little bit. But as I've made these discoveries, I noticed a framework of really three simple things that all these different passionate world-changers have in common, whether you're a Steve Jobs or if you're just, you know, the person that has the bakery down the street. But you're doing work that embodies who you are. I want to share those three with you, so we can use them as a lens for the rest of today and hopefully the rest of our life. The first part of this three-step passionate work framework is becoming a self-expert and understanding yourself, because if you don't know what you're looking for, you're never going to find it. And the thing is that no one is going to do this for us. There's no major in university on passion and purpose and career. I don't know how that's not a required double major, but don't even get me started on that. I mean, you spend more time picking out a dorm room TV set than you do you picking your major and your area of study. But the point is, it's on us to figure that out, and we need a framework, we need a way to navigate through this. And so the first step of our compass is finding out what our unique strengths are. What are the things that we wake up loving to do no matter what, whether we're paid or we're not paid, the things that people thank us for? And the Strengths Finder 2.0 is a book and also an online tool. I highly recommend it for sorting out what it is that you're naturally good at. And next, what's our framework or our hierarchy for making decisions? Do we care about the people, our family, health, or is it achievement, success, all this stuff? We have to figure out what it is to make these decisions, so we know what our soul is made of, so that we don't go selling it to some cause we don't give a shit about. And then the next step is our experiences. All of us have these experiences. We learn things every day, every minute about what we love, what we hate, what we're good at, what we're terrible at. And if we don't spend time paying attention to that and assimilating that learning and applying it to the rest of our lives, it's all for nothing. Every day, every week, every month of every year I spend some time just reflecting on what went right, what went wrong, and what do I want to repeat, what can I apply more to my life. And even more so than that, as you see people, especially today, who inspire you, who are doing things where you say "Oh God, what Jeff is doing, I want to be like him." Why are you saying that? Open up a journal. Write down what it is about them that inspires you. It's not going to be everything about their life, but whatever it is, take note on that, so over time we'll have this repository of things that we can use to apply to our life and have a more passionate existence and make a better impact. Because when we start to put these things together, we can then define what success actually means to us, and without these different parts of the compass, it's impossible. We end up in the situation — we have that scripted life that everybody seems to be living going up this ladder to nowhere. It's kind of like in Wall Street 2, if anybody saw that, the peon employee asks the big Wall Street banker CEO, "What's your number? Everyone's got a number, where if they make this money, they'll leave it all." He says, "Oh, it's simple. More." And he just smiles. And it's the sad state of most of the people that haven't spent time understanding what matters for them, who keep reaching for something that doesn't mean anything to us, but we're doing it because everyone said we're supposed to. But once we have this framework together, we can start to identify the things that make us come alive. You know, before this, a passion could come and hit you in the face, or maybe in your possible line of work, you might throw it away because you don't have a way of identifying it. But once you do, you can see something that's congruent with my strengths, my values, who I am as a person, so I'm going to grab ahold of this, I'm going to do something with it, and I'm going to pursue it and try to make an impact with it. And Live Your Legend and the movement we've built wouldn't exist if I didn't have this compass to identify, "Wow, this is something I want to pursue and make a difference with." If we don't know what we're looking for, we're never going to find it, but once we have this framework, this compass, then we can move on to what's next — and that's not me up there — doing the impossible and pushing our limits. There's two reasons why people don't do things. One is they tell themselves they can't do them, or people around them tell them they can't do them. Either way, we start to believe it. Either we give up, or we never start in the first place. The things is, everything was impossible until somebody did it. Every invention, every new thing in the world, people thought were crazy at first. Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile, it was a physical impossibility to break the four-minute mile in a foot race until Roger Bannister stood up and did it. And then what happened? Two months later, 16 people broke the four-minute mile. The things that we have in our head that we think are impossible are often just milestones waiting to be accomplished if we can push those limits a bit. And I think this starts with probably your physical body and fitness more than anything, because we can control that. If you don't think you can run a mile, you show yourself you can run a mile or two, or a marathon, or lose five pounds, or whatever it is, you realize that confidence compounds and can be transferred into the rest of your world. And I've actually gotten into the habit of this a little bit with my friends. We have this little group. We go on physical adventures, and recently, I found myself in a kind of precarious spot. I'm terrified of deep, dark, blue water. I don't know if anyone's ever had that same fear ever since they watched Jaws 1, 2, 3 and 4 like six times when I was a kid. But anything above here, if it's murky, I can already feel it right now. I swear there's something in there. Even if it's Lake Tahoe, it's fresh water, totally unfounded fear, ridiculous, but it's there. Anyway, three years ago I find myself on this tugboat right down here in the San Francisco Bay. It's a rainy, stormy, windy day, and people are getting sick on the boat, and I'm sitting there wearing a wetsuit, and I'm looking out the window in pure terror thinking I'm about to swim to my death. I'm going to try to swim across the Golden Gate. And my guess is some people in this room might have done that before. I'm sitting there, and my buddy Jonathan, who had talked me into it, he comes up to me and he could see the state I was in. And he says, "Scott, hey man, what's the worst that could happen? You're wearing a wetsuit. You're not going to sink. And If you can't make it, just hop on one of the 20 kayaks. Plus, if there's a shark attack, why are they going to pick you over the 80 people in the water?" So thanks, that helps. He's like, "But really, just have fun with this. Good luck." And he dives in, swims off. OK. Turns out, the pep talk totally worked, and I felt this total feeling of calm, and I think it was because Jonathan was 13 years old. (Laughter) And of the 80 people swimming that day, 65 of them were between the ages of nine and 13. Think how you would have approached your world differently if at nine years old you found out you could swim a mile and a half in 56-degree water from Alcatraz to San Francisco. What would you have said yes to? What would you have not given up on? What would you have tried? As I'm finishing this swim, I get to Aquatic Park, and I'm getting out of the water and of course half the kids are already finished, so they're cheering me on and they're all excited. And I got total popsicle head, if anyone's ever swam in the Bay, and I'm trying to just thaw my face out, and I'm watching people finish. And I see this one kid, something didn't look right. And he's just flailing like this. And he's barely able to sip some air before he slams his head back down. And I notice other parents were watching too, and I swear they were thinking the same thing I was: this is why you don't let nine-year-olds swim from Alcatraz. This was not fatigue. All of a sudden, two parents run up and grab him, and they put him on their shoulders, and they're dragging him like this, totally limp. And then all of a sudden they walk a few more feet and they plop him down in his wheelchair. And he puts his fists up in the most insane show of victory I've ever seen. I can still feel the warmth and the energy on this guy when he made this accomplishment. I had seen him earlier that day in his wheelchair. I just had no idea he was going to swim. I mean, where is he going to be in 20 years? How many people told him he couldn't do that, that he would die if he tried that? You prove people wrong, you prove yourself wrong, that you can make little incremental pushes of what you believe is possible. You don't have to be the fastest marathoner in the world, just your own impossibilities, to accomplish those, and it starts with little bitty steps. And the best way to do this is to surround yourself with passionate people. The fastest things to do things you don't think can be done is to surround yourself with people already doing them. There's this quote by Jim Rohn and it says. "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." And there is no bigger lifehack in the history of the world from getting where you are today to where you want to be than the people you choose to put in your corner. They change everything, and it's a proven fact. In 1898, Norman Triplett did this study with a bunch of cyclists, and he would measure their times around the track in a group, and also individually. And he found that every time the cyclists in the group would cycle faster. And it's been repeated in all kinds of walks of life since then, and it proves the same thing over again, that the people around you matter, and environment is everything. But it's on you to control it, because it can go both ways. With 80 percent of people who don't like the work they do, that means most people around us, not in this room, but everywhere else, are encouraging complacency and keeping us from pursuing the things that matter to us so we have to manage those surroundings. I found myself in this situation — personal example, a couple years ago. Has anyone ever had a hobby or a passion they poured their heart and soul into, unbelievable amount of time, and they so badly want to call it a business, but no one's paying attention and it doesn't make a dime? OK, I was there for four years trying to build this Live Your Legend movement to help people do work that they genuinely cared about and that inspired them, and I was doing all I could, and there were only three people paying attention, and they're all right there: my mother, father and my wife, Chelsea. Thank you guys for the support. (Applause) And this is how badly I wanted it, it grew at zero percent for four years, and I was about to shut it down, and right about then, I moved to San Francisco and started to meet some pretty interesting people who had these crazy lifestyles of adventure, of businesses and websites and blogs that surrounded their passions and helped people in a meaningful way. And one of my friends, now, he has a family of eight, and he supports his whole family with a blog that he writes for twice a week. They just came back from a month in Europe, all of them together. This blew my mind. How does this even exist? And I got unbelievably inspired by seeing this, and instead of shutting it down, I decided, let's take it seriously. And I did everything I could to spend my time, every waking hour possible trying to hound these guys, hanging out and having beers and workouts, whatever it was. And after four years of zero growth, within six months of hanging around these people, the community at Live Your Legend grew by 10 times. In another 12 months, it grew by 160 times. And today over 30,000 people from 158 countries use our career and connection tools on a monthly basis. And those people have made up that community of passionate folks who inspired that possibility that I dreamed of for Live Your Legend so many years back. The people change everything, and this is why — you know, you ask what was going on. Well, for four years, I knew nobody in this space, and I didn't even know it existed, that people could do this stuff, that you could have movements like this. And then I'm over here in San Francisco, and everyone around me was doing it. It became normal, so my thinking went from how could I possibly do this to how could I possibly not. And right then, when that happens, that switch goes on in your head, it ripples across your whole world. And without even trying, your standards go from here to here. You don't need to change your goals. You just need to change your surroundings. That's it, and that's why I love being around this whole group of people, why I go to every TED event I can, and watch them on my iPad on the way to work, whatever it is. Because this is the group of people that inspires possibility. We have a whole day to spend together and plenty more. To sum things up, in terms of these three pillars, they all have one thing in common more than anything else. They are 100 percent in our control. No one can tell you you can't learn about yourself. No one can tell you you can't push your limits and learn your own impossible and push that. No one can tell you you can't surround yourself with inspiring people or get away from the people who bring you down. You can't control a recession. You can't control getting fired or getting in a car accident. Most things are totally out of our hands. These three things are totally on us, and they can change our whole world if we decide to do something about it. And the thing is, it's starting to happen on a widespread level. I just read in Forbes, the US Government reported for the first time in a month where more people had quit their jobs than had been laid off. They thought this was an anomaly, but it's happened three months straight. In a time where people claim it's kind of a tough environment, people are giving a middle finger to this scripted life, the things that people say you're supposed to do, in exchange for things that matter to them and do the things that inspire them. And the thing is, people are waking up to this possibility, that really the only thing that limits possibility now is imagination. That's not a cliché anymore. I don't care what it is that you're into, what passion, what hobby. If you're into knitting, you can find someone who is killing it knitting, and you can learn from them. It's wild. And that's what this whole day is about, to learn from the folks speaking, and we profile these people on Live Your Legend every day, because when ordinary people are doing the extraordinary, and we can be around that, it becomes normal. And this isn't about being Gandhi or Steve Jobs, doing something crazy. It's just about doing something that matters to you, and makes an impact that only you can make. Speaking of Gandhi, he was a recovering lawyer, as I've heard the term, and he was called to a greater cause, something that mattered to him, he couldn't not do. And he has this quote that I absolutely live by. "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Everything was impossible until somebody did it. You can either hang around the people who tell you it can't be done and tell you you're stupid for trying, or surround yourself with the people who inspire possibility, the people who are in this room. Because I see it as our responsibility to show the world that what's seen as impossible can become that new normal. And that's already starting to happen. First, do the things that inspire us, so we can inspire other people to do the things that inspire them. But we can't find that unless we know what we're looking for. We have to do our work on ourself, be intentional about that, and make those discoveries. Because I imagine a world where 80 percent of people love the work they do. What would that look like? What would the innovation be like? How would you treat the people around you? Things would start to change. And as we finish up, I have just one question to ask you guys, and I think it's the only question that matters. And it's what is the work you can't not do? Discover that, live it, not just for you, but for everybody around you, because that is what starts to change the world. What is the work you can't not do? Thank you guys. (Applause) |
How I stopped the Taliban from shutting down my school | {0: 'At the Afghan Institute of Learning, Sakena Yacoobi provides teacher training to Afghan women, supporting education for girls and boys throughout the country.\r\n'} | TEDWomen 2015 | (Arabic) I seek refuge in Allah from cursed Satan. In the Name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. (English) I was born in a middle class family. My father was five years old when he lost his father, but by the time I was born, he was already a businessman. But it didn't make a difference to him if his children were going to be a boy or a girl: they were going to go to school. So I guess I was the lucky one. My mother had 16 pregnancies. From 16 pregnancies, five of us are alive. You can imagine as a child what I went through. Day to day, I watched women being carried to a graveyard, or watched children going to a graveyard. At that time, when I finished my high school, I really wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a doctor to help women and children. So I completed my education, but I wanted to go to university. Unfortunately, in my country, there wasn't a dormitory for girls, so I was accepted in medical school, but I could not go there. So as a result, my father sent me to America. I came to America. I completed my education. While I was completing my education, my country was invaded by Russia. And do you know that at the time I was completing my education, I didn't know what was going on with my family or with my country. There were months, years, I didn't know about it. My family was in a refugee camp. So as soon as I completed my education, I brought my family to America. I wanted them to be safe. But where was my heart? My heart was in Afghanistan. Day after day, when I listened to the news, when I followed what was going on with my country, my heart was breaking up. I really wanted to go back to my country, but at the same time I knew I could not go there, because there was no place for me. I had a good job. I was a professor at a university. I earned good money. I had a good life. My family was here. I could live with them. But I wasn't happy. I wanted to go back home. So I went to the refugee camp. And when I went to the refugee camp in Pakistan, there were 7.5 million refugees. 7.5 million refugees. About 90 percent of them were women and children. Most of the men have been killed or they were in war. And you know, in the refugee camp, when I went day-to-day to do a survey, I found things you never could imagine. I saw a widow with five to eight children sitting there and weeping and not knowing what to do. I saw a young woman have no way to go anywhere, no education, no entertainment, no place to even live. I saw young men that had lost their father and their home, and they are supporting the family as a 10-to-12-year old boy — being the head of the household, trying to protect their sister and their mother and their children. So it was a very devastating situation. My heart was beating for my people, and I didn't know what to do. At that moment, we talk about momentum. At that moment, I felt, what can I do for these people? How could I help these people? I am one individual. What can I do for them? But at that moment, I knew that education changed my life. It transformed me. It gave me status. It gave me confidence. It gave me a career. It helped me to support my family, to bring my family to another country, to be safe. And I knew that at that moment that what I should give to my people is education and health, and that's what I went after. But do you think it was easy? No, because at that time, education was banned for girls, completely. And also, by Russia invading Afghanistan, people were not trusting anyone. It was very hard to come and say, "I want to do this." Who am I? Somebody who comes from the United States. Somebody who got educated here. Did they trust me? Of course not. So I really needed to build the trust in this community. How am I going to do that? I went and surveyed and looked and looked. I asked. Finally, I found one man. He was 80 years old. He was a mullah. I went to his tent in the camp, and I asked him, "I want to make you a teacher." And he looked at me, and he said, "Crazy woman, crazy woman, how do you think I can be a teacher?" And I told him, "I will make you a teacher." Finally, he accepted my offer, and once I started a class in his compound, the word spread all over. In a matter of one year, we had 25 schools set up, 15,000 children going to school, and it was amazing. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. But of course, we're doing all our work, we were giving teacher training. We were training women's rights, human rights, democracy, rule of law. We were giving all kinds of training. And one day, I tell you, one day I was in the office in Peshawar, Pakistan. All of a sudden, I saw my staff running to rooms and locking the doors and telling me, "Run away, hide!" And you know, as a leader, what do you do? You're scared. You know it's dangerous. You know your life is on the line. But as a leader, you have to hold it together. You have to hold it together and show strength. So I said, "What's going on?" And these people were pouring into my office. So I invited them to the office. They came, and there were nine of them — nine Taliban. They were the ugliest looking men you can ever see. (Laughter) Very mean-looking people, black clothes, black turban, and they pour into my office. And I invited them to have a seat and have tea. They said no. They are not going to drink tea. And of course, with the tone of voice they were using, it was very scary, but I was really shaking up. But also I was strong, holding myself up. And, of course, by that time, you know how I dress — I dress from head to toe in a black hijab. The only thing you could see, my eyes. They asked me, "What are you doing? Don't you know that school is banned for girls? What are you doing here?" And you know, I just looked at them, and I said, "What school? Where is the school?" (Laughter) (Applause) And they look at my face, and they said, "You are teaching girls here." I said, "This is a house of somebody. We have some students coming, and they are all learning Koran, Holy Book. And you know, Koran says that if you learn the Holy Book, the woman, they can be a good wife, and they can obey their husband." (Laughter) And I tell you one thing: that's the way you work with those people, and you know — (Laughter) So by that time, they started speaking Pashto. They talked to each other, and they said, "Let's go, leave her alone, she's OK." And you know, this time, I offered them tea again, and they took a sip and they left. By that time, my staff poured into my office. They were scared to death. They didn't know why they didn't kill me. They didn't know why they didn't take me away. But everybody was happy to see me. Very happy, and I was happy to be alive, of course. (Laughter) Of course, I was happy to be alive. But also, as we continuously gave training during the fall of the Taliban — of course during the Taliban there is another story. We went underground and we provided education for 80 schoolgirls, 3,000 students underground, and continuously we trained. With the fall of the Taliban, we went into the country, and we opened school after school. We opened women's learning center. We continuously opened clinics. We worked with mothers and children. We had reproductive health training. We had all kinds of training that you can imagine. I was very happy. I was delighted with the outcome of my work. And one day, with four trainers and one bodyguard, I was going up north of Kabul, and all of a sudden, again, I was stopped in the middle of the road by 19 young men. Rifles on their shoulders, they blocked the road. And I told my driver, "What's going on?" And the driver said, "I don't know." He asked them. They said, "We have nothing to do with you." They called my name. They said, "We want her." My bodyguard got out, said, "I can answer you. What do you want?" They said, "Nothing." They called my name. And by that time, the women are yelling and screaming inside the car. I am very shaken up, and I told myself, this is it. This time, we all are going to be killed. There is no doubt in my mind. But still, the moment comes, and you take strength from whatever you believe and whatever you do. It's in your heart. You believe in your worth, and you can walk on it. So I just hold myself on the side of the car. My leg was shaking, and I got outside. And I asked them, "What can I do for you?" You know what they said to me? They said, "We know who you are. We know where you are going. Every day you go up north here and there. You train women, you teach them and also you give them an opportunity to have a job. You build their skills. How about us?" (Laughter) (Applause) "And you know, how about us? What are we going to do?" I looked at them, and I said, "I don't know." (Laughter) They said, "It's OK. The only thing we can do, what we know, from the time we're born, we just hold the gun and kill. That's all we know." And you know what that means. It's a trap to me, of course. So I walk out of there. They said, "We'll let you go, go." And so I walked into the car, I sit in the car, and I told the driver, "Turn around and go back to the office." At that time, we only were supporting girls. We only had money for women to train them, to send them to school, and nothing else. By the time I came to the office, of course my trainers were gone. They ran away home. Nobody stayed there. My bodyguard was the only one there, and my voice was completely gone. I was shaken up, and I sat on my table, and I said, "What am I going to do?" How am I going to solve this problem? Because we had training going on up north already. Hundreds of women were there coming to get training. So I was sitting there, all of a sudden, at this moment, talking about momentum, we are, at that moment, one of my wonderful donors called me about a report. And she asked me, "Sakena?" And I answered her. She said, "It's not you. What's wrong with you?" I said, "Nothing." I tried to cover. No matter what I tried to do, she didn't believe me, and she asked me again. "OK, tell me what's going on?" I told her the whole story. At that time, she said, "OK, you go next time, and you will help them. You will help them." And when, two days later, I went the same route, and do you know, they were not in here, they were a little back further, the same young men, standing up there and holding the rifle and pointing to us to stop the car. So we stopped the car. I got out. I said, "OK, let's go with me." And they said, "Yes." I said, "On one condition, that whatever I say, you accept it." And they said, yes, they do. So I took them to the mosque, and to make a long story short, I told them I'd give them teachers. Today, they are the best trainers. They learn English, they learn how to be teachers, they learn computers, and they are my guides. Every area that is unknown to us in the mountain areas, they go with me. They are ahead, and we go. And they protect us. And — (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) That tells you that education transforms people. When you educate people, they are going to be different, and today all over, we need to work for gender equality. We cannot only train women but forget about the men, because the men are the real people who are giving women the hardest time. (Laughter) So we started training men because the men should know the potential of women, know how much these potential men has, and how much these women can do the same job they are doing. So we are continuously giving training to men, and I really believe strongly. I live in a country that was a beautiful country. I just want to share this with you. It was a beautiful country, beautiful, peaceful country. We were going everywhere. Women were getting education: lawyer, engineer, teacher, and we were going from house to house. We never locked our doors. But you know what happened to my country. Today, people cannot walk out of their door without security issues. But we want the same Afghanistan we had before. And I want to tell you the other side. Today, the women of Afghanistan are working very, very hard. They are earning degrees. They are training to be lawyers. They are training to be doctors, back again. They are training to be teachers, and they are running businesses. So it is so wonderful to see people like that reach their complete potential, and all of this is going to happen. I want to share this with you, because of love, because of compassion, and because of trust and honesty. If you have these few things with you, you will accomplish. We have one poet, Mawlānā Rūmī. He said that by having compassion and having love, you can conquer the world. And I tell you, we could. And if we could do it in Afghanistan, I am sure 100 percent that everyone can do it in any part of the world. Thank you very, very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why public beheadings get millions of views | {0: 'Frances Larson explores the dark and varied obsessions that our culture has had with decapitated heads and skulls throughout history. '} | TEDGlobalLondon | For the last year, everyone's been watching the same show, and I'm not talking about "Game of Thrones," but a horrifying, real-life drama that's proved too fascinating to turn off. It's a show produced by murderers and shared around the world via the Internet. Their names have become familiar: James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning, Peter Kassig, Haruna Yukawa, Kenji Goto Jogo. Their beheadings by the Islamic State were barbaric, but if we think they were archaic, from a remote, obscure age, then we're wrong. They were uniquely modern, because the murderers acted knowing well that millions of people would tune in to watch. The headlines called them savages and barbarians, because the image of one man overpowering another, killing him with a knife to the throat, conforms to our idea of ancient, primitive practices, the polar opposite of our urban, civilized ways. We don't do things like that. But that's the irony. We think a beheading has nothing to do with us, even as we click on the screen to watch. But it is to do with us. The Islamic State beheadings are not ancient or remote. They're a global, 21st century event, a 21st century event that takes place in our living rooms, at our desks, on our computer screens. They're entirely dependent on the power of technology to connect us. And whether we like it or not, everyone who watches is a part of the show. And lots of people watch. We don't know exactly how many. Obviously, it's difficult to calculate. But a poll taken in the UK, for example, in August 2014, estimated that 1.2 million people had watched the beheading of James Foley in the few days after it was released. And that's just the first few days, and just Britain. A similar poll taken in the United States in November 2014 found that nine percent of those surveyed had watched beheading videos, and a further 23 percent had watched the videos but had stopped just before the death was shown. Nine percent may be a small minority of all the people who could watch, but it's still a very large crowd. And of course that crowd is growing all the time, because every week, every month, more people will keep downloading and keep watching. If we go back 11 years, before sites like YouTube and Facebook were born, it was a similar story. When innocent civilians like Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, were beheaded, those videos were shown during the Iraq War. Nick Berg's beheading quickly became one of the most searched for items on the Internet. Within a day, it was the top search term across search engines like Google, Lycos, Yahoo. In the week after Nick Berg's beheading, these were the top 10 search terms in the United States. The Berg beheading video remained the most popular search term for a week, and it was the second most popular search term for the whole month of May, runner-up only to "American Idol." The al-Qaeda-linked website that first showed Nick Berg's beheading had to close down within a couple of days due to overwhelming traffic to the site. One Dutch website owner said that his daily viewing figures rose from 300,000 to 750,000 every time a beheading in Iraq was shown. He told reporters 18 months later that it had been downloaded many millions of times, and that's just one website. A similar pattern was seen again and again when videos of beheadings were released during the Iraq War. Social media sites have made these images more accessible than ever before, but if we take another step back in history, we'll see that it was the camera that first created a new kind of crowd in our history of beheadings as public spectacle. As soon as the camera appeared on the scene, a full lifetime ago on June 17, 1939, it had an immediate and unequivocal effect. That day, the first film of a public beheading was created in France. It was the execution, the guillotining, of a German serial killer, Eugen Weidmann, outside the prison Saint-Pierre in Versailles. Weidmann was due to be executed at the crack of dawn, as was customary at the time, but his executioner was new to the job, and he'd underestimated how long it would take him to prepare. So Weidmann was executed at 4:30 in the morning, by which time on a June morning, there was enough light to take photographs, and a spectator in the crowd filmed the event, unbeknownst to the authorities. Several still photographs were taken as well, and you can still watch the film online today and look at the photographs. The crowd on the day of Weidmann's execution was called "unruly" and "disgusting" by the press, but that was nothing compared to the untold thousands of people who could now study the action over and over again, freeze-framed in every detail. The camera may have made these scenes more accessible than ever before, but it's not just about the camera. If we take a bigger leap back in history, we'll see that for as long as there have been public judicial executions and beheadings, there have been the crowds to see them. In London, as late as the early 19th century, there might be four or five thousand people to see a standard hanging. There could be 40,000 or 50,000 to see a famous criminal killed. And a beheading, which was a rare event in England at the time, attracted even more. In May 1820, five men known as the Cato Street Conspirators were executed in London for plotting to assassinate members of the British government. They were hung and then decapitated. It was a gruesome scene. Each man's head was hacked off in turn and held up to the crowd. And 100,000 people, that's 10,000 more than can fit into Wembley Stadium, had turned out to watch. The streets were packed. People had rented out windows and rooftops. People had climbed onto carts and wagons in the street. People climbed lamp posts. People had been known to have died in the crush on popular execution days. Evidence suggests that throughout our history of public beheadings and public executions, the vast majority of the people who come to see are either enthusiastic or, at best, unmoved. Disgust has been comparatively rare, and even when people are disgusted and are horrified, it doesn't always stop them from coming out all the same to watch. Perhaps the most striking example of the human ability to watch a beheading and remain unmoved and even be disappointed was the introduction in France in 1792 of the guillotine, that famous decapitation machine. To us in the 21st century, the guillotine may seem like a monstrous contraption, but to the first crowds who saw it, it was actually a disappointment. They were used to seeing long, drawn-out, torturous executions on the scaffold, where people were mutilated and burned and pulled apart slowly. To them, watching the guillotine in action, it was so quick, there was nothing to see. The blade fell, the head fell into a basket, out of sight immediately, and they called out, "Give me back my gallows, give me back my wooden gallows." The end of torturous public judicial executions in Europe and America was partly to do with being more humane towards the criminal, but it was also partly because the crowd obstinately refused to behave in the way that they should. All too often, execution day was more like a carnival than a solemn ceremony. Today, a public judicial execution in Europe or America is unthinkable, but there are other scenarios that should make us cautious about thinking that things are different now and we don't behave like that anymore. Take, for example, the incidents of suicide baiting. This is when a crowd gathers to watch a person who has climbed to the top of a public building in order to kill themselves, and people in the crowd shout and jeer, "Get on with it! Go on and jump!" This is a well-recognized phenomenon. One paper in 1981 found that in 10 out of 21 threatened suicide attempts, there was incidents of suicide baiting and jeering from a crowd. And there have been incidents reported in the press this year. This was a very widely reported incident in Telford and Shropshire in March this year. And when it happens today, people take photographs and they take videos on their phones and they post those videos online. When it comes to brutal murderers who post their beheading videos, the Internet has created a new kind of crowd. Today, the action takes place in a distant time and place, which gives the viewer a sense of detachment from what's happening, a sense of separation. It's nothing to do with me. It's already happened. We are also offered an unprecedented sense of intimacy. Today, we are all offered front row seats. We can all watch in private, in our own time and space, and no one need ever know that we've clicked on the screen to watch. This sense of separation — from other people, from the event itself — seems to be key to understanding our ability to watch, and there are several ways in which the Internet creates a sense of detachment that seems to erode individual moral responsibility. Our activities online are often contrasted with real life, as though the things we do online are somehow less real. We feel less accountable for our actions when we interact online. There's a sense of anonymity, a sense of invisibility, so we feel less accountable for our behavior. The Internet also makes it far easier to stumble upon things inadvertently, things that we would usually avoid in everyday life. Today, a video can start playing before you even know what you're watching. Or you may be tempted to look at material that you wouldn't look at in everyday life or you wouldn't look at if you were with other people at the time. And when the action is pre-recorded and takes place in a distant time and space, watching seems like a passive activity. There's nothing I can do about it now. It's already happened. All these things make it easier as an Internet user for us to give in to our sense of curiosity about death, to push our personal boundaries, to test our sense of shock, to explore our sense of shock. But we're not passive when we watch. On the contrary, we're fulfilling the murderer's desire to be seen. When the victim of a decapitation is bound and defenseless, he or she essentially becomes a pawn in their killer's show. Unlike a trophy head that's taken in battle, that represents the luck and skill it takes to win a fight, when a beheading is staged, when it's essentially a piece of theater, the power comes from the reception the killer receives as he performs. In other words, watching is very much part of the event. The event no longer takes place in a single location at a certain point in time as it used to and as it may still appear to. Now the event is stretched out in time and place, and everyone who watches plays their part. We should stop watching, but we know we won't. History tells us we won't, and the killers know it too. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Let me get this back. Thank you. Let's move here. While they install for the next performance, I want to ask you the question that probably many here have, which is how did you get interested in this topic? Frances Larson: I used to work at a museum called the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which was famous for its display of shrunken heads from South America. People used to say, "Oh, the shrunken head museum, the shrunken head museum!" And at the time, I was working on the history of scientific collections of skulls. I was working on the cranial collections, and it just struck me as ironic that here were people coming to see this gory, primitive, savage culture that they were almost fantasizing about and creating without really understanding what they were seeing, and all the while these vast — I mean hundreds of thousands of skulls in our museums, all across Europe and the States — were kind of upholding this Enlightenment pursuit of scientific rationality. So I wanted to kind of twist it round and say, "Let's look at us." We're looking through the glass case at these shrunken heads. Let's look at our own history and our own cultural fascination with these things. BG: Thank you for sharing that. FL: Thank you. (Applause) |
Why climate change is a threat to human rights | {0: 'Mary Robinson served as president of Ireland from 1990 to 1997, and as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002. She now leads a foundation devoted to climate justice.'} | TEDWomen 2015 | A question I'm often asked is, where did I get my passion for human rights and justice? It started early. I grew up in the west of Ireland, wedged between four brothers, two older than me and two younger than me. So of course I had to be interested in human rights, and equality and justice, and using my elbows! (Laughter) And those issues stayed with me and guided me, and in particular, when I was elected the first woman President of Ireland, from 1990 to 1997. I dedicated my presidency to having a space for those who felt marginalized on the island of Ireland, and bringing together communities from Northern Ireland with those from the Republic, trying to build peace. And I went as the first Irish president to the United Kingdom and met with Queen Elizabeth II, and also welcomed to my official residence — which we call "Áras an Uachtaráin," the house of the president — members of the royal family, including, notably, the Prince of Wales. And I was aware that at the time of my presidency, Ireland was a country beginning a rapid economic progress. We were a country that was benefiting from the solidarity of the European Union. Indeed, when Ireland first joined the European Union in 1973, there were parts of the country that were considered developing, including my own beloved native county, County Mayo. I led trade delegations here to the United States, to Japan, to India, to encourage investment, to help to create jobs, to build up our economy, to build up our health system, our education — our development. What I didn't have to do as president was buy land on mainland Europe, so that Irish citizens could go there because our island was going underwater. What I didn't have to think about, either as president or as a constitutional lawyer, was the implications for the sovereignty of the territory because of the impact of climate change. But that is what President Tong, of the Republic of Kiribati, has to wake up every morning thinking about. He has bought land in Fiji as an insurance policy, what he calls, "migration with dignity," because he knows that his people may have to leave their islands. As I listened to President Tong describing the situation, I really felt that this was a problem that no leader should have to face. And as I heard him speak about the pain of his problems, I thought about Eleanor Roosevelt. I thought about her and those who worked with her on the Commission on Human Rights, which she chaired in 1948, and drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For them, it would have been unimaginable that a whole country could go out of existence because of human-induced climate change. I came to climate change not as a scientist or an environmental lawyer, and I wasn't really impressed by the images of polar bears or melting glaciers. It was because of the impact on people, and the impact on their rights — their rights to food and safe water, health, education and shelter. And I say this with humility, because I came late to the issue of climate change. When I served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002, climate change wasn't at the front of my mind. I don't remember making a single speech on climate change. I knew that there was another part of the United Nations — the UN Convention on Climate Change — that was dealing with the issue of climate change. It was later when I started to work in African countries on issues of development and human rights. And I kept hearing this pervasive sentence: "Oh, but things are so much worse now, things are so much worse." And then I explored what was behind that; it was about changes in the climate — climate shocks, changes in the weather. I met Constance Okollet, who had formed a women's group in Eastern Uganda, and she told me that when she was growing up, she had a very normal life in her village and they didn't go hungry, they knew that the seasons would come as they were predicted to come, they knew when to sow and they knew when to harvest, and so they had enough food. But, in recent years, at the time of this conversation, they had nothing but long periods of drought, and then flash flooding, and then more drought. The school had been destroyed, livelihoods had been destroyed, their harvest had been destroyed. She forms this women's group to try to keep her community together. And this was a reality that really struck me, because of course, Constance Okollet wasn't responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that were causing this problem. Indeed, I was very struck about the situation in Malawi in January of this year. There was an unprecedented flooding in the country, it covered about a third of the country, over 300 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands lost their livelihoods. And the average person in Malawi emits about 80 kg of CO2 a year. The average US citizen emits about 17.5 metric tons. So those who are suffering disproportionately don't drive cars, don't have electricity, don't consume very significantly, and yet they are feeling more and more the impacts of the changes in the climate, the changes that are preventing them from knowing how to grow food properly, and knowing how to look after their future. I think it was really the importance of the injustice that really struck me very forcibly. And I know that we're not able to address some of that injustice because we're not on course for a safe world. Governments around the world agreed at the conference in Copenhagen, and have repeated it at every conference on climate, that we have to stay below two degrees Celsius of warming above pre-Industrial standards. But we're on course for about four degrees. So we face an existential threat to the future of our planet. And that made me realize that climate change is the greatest threat to human rights in the 21st century. And that brought me then to climate justice. Climate justice responds to the moral argument — both sides of the moral argument — to address climate change. First of all, to be on the side of those who are suffering most and are most effected. And secondly, to make sure that they're not left behind again, when we start to move and start to address climate change with climate action, as we are doing. In our very unequal world today, it's very striking how many people are left behind. In our world of 7.2 billion people, about 3 billion are left behind. 1.3 billion don't have access to electricity, and they light their homes with kerosene and candles, both of which are dangerous. And in fact they spend a lot of their tiny income on that form of lighting. 2.6 billion people cook on open fires — on coal, wood and animal dung. And this causes about 4 million deaths a year from indoor smoke inhalation, and of course, most of those who die are women. So we have a very unequal world, and we need to change from "business as usual." And we shouldn't underestimate the scale and the transformative nature of the change which will be needed, because we have to go to zero carbon emissions by about 2050, if we're going to stay below two degrees Celsius of warming. And that means we have to leave about two-thirds of the known resources of fossil fuels in the ground. It's a very big change, and it means that obviously, industrialized countries must cut their emissions, must become much more energy-efficient, and must move as quickly as possible to renewable energy. For developing countries and emerging economies, the problem and the challenge is to grow without emissions, because they must develop; they have very poor populations. So they must develop without emissions, and that is a different kind of problem. Indeed, no country in the world has actually grown without emissions. All the countries have developed with fossil fuels, and then may be moving to renewable energy. So it is a very big challenge, and it requires the total support of the international community, with the necessary finance and technology, and systems and support, because no country can make itself safe from the dangers of climate change. This is an issue that requires complete human solidarity. Human solidarity, if you like, based on self-interest — because we are all in this together, and we have to work together to ensure that we reach zero carbon by 2050. The good news is that change is happening, and it's happening very fast. Here in California, there's a very ambitious emissions target to cut emissions. In Hawaii, they're passing legislation to have 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. And governments are very ambitious around the world. In Costa Rica, they have committed to being carbon-neutral by 2021. In Ethiopia, the commitment is to be carbon-neutral by 2027. Apple have pledged that their factories in China will use renewable energy. And there is a race on at the moment to convert electricity from tidal and wave power, in order that we can leave the coal in the ground. And that change is both welcome and is happening very rapidly. But it's still not enough, and the political will is still not enough. Let me come back to President Tong and his people in Kiribati. They actually could be able to live on their island and have a solution, but it would take a lot of political will. President Tong told me about his ambitious idea to either build up or even float the little islands where his people live. This, of course, is beyond the resources of Kiribati itself. It would require great solidarity and support from other countries, and it would require the kind of imaginative idea that we bring together when we want to have a space station in the air. But wouldn't it be wonderful to have this engineering wonder and to allow a people to remain in their sovereign territory, and be part of the community of nations? That is the kind of idea that we should be thinking about. Yes, the challenges of the transformation we need are big, but they can be solved. We are actually, as a people, very capable of coming together to solve problems. I was very conscious of this as I took part this year in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 1945. 1945 was an extraordinary year. It was a year when the world faced what must have seemed almost insoluble problems — the devastation of the world wars, particularly the Second World War; the fragile peace that had been brought about; the need for a whole economic regeneration. But the leaders of that time didn't flinch from this. They had the capacity, they had a sense of being driven by never again must the world have this kind of problem. And they had to build structures for peace and security. And what did we get? What did they achieve? The Charter of the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, as they're called, The World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. A Marshall Plan for Europe, a devastated Europe, to reconstruct it. And indeed a few years later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 2015 is a year that is similar in its importance to 1945, with similar challenges and similar potential. There will be two big summits this year: the first one, in September in New York, is the summit for the sustainable development goals. And then the summit in Paris in December, to give us a climate agreement. The sustainable development goals are intended to help countries to live sustainably, in tune with Mother Earth, not to take out of Mother Earth and destroy ecosystems, but rather, to live in harmony with Mother Earth, by living under sustainable development. And the sustainable development goals will come into operation for all countries on January 1, 2016. The climate agreement — a binding climate agreement — is needed because of the scientific evidence that we're on a trajectory for about a four-degree world and we have to change course to stay below two degrees. So we need to take steps that will be monitored and reviewed, so that we can keep increasing the ambition of how we cut emissions, and how we move more rapidly to renewable energy, so that we have a safe world. The reality is that this issue is much too important to be left to politicians and to the United Nations. (Laughter) It's an issue for all of us, and it's an issue where we need more and more momentum. Indeed, the face of the environmentalist has changed, because of the justice dimension. It's now an issue for faith-based organizations, under very good leadership from Pope Francis, and indeed, the Church of England, which is divesting from fossil fuels. It's an issue for the business community, and the good news is that the business community is changing very rapidly — except for the fossil fuel industries — (Laughter) Even they are beginning to slightly change their language — but only slightly. But business is not only moving rapidly to the benefits of renewable energy, but is urging politicians to give them more signals, so that they can move even more rapidly. It's an issue for the trade union movement. It's an issue for the women's movement. It's an issue for young people. I was very struck when I learned that Jibreel Khazan, one of the Greensboro Four who had taken part in the Woolworth sit-ins, said quite recently that climate change is the lunch counter moment for young people. So, lunch counter moment for young people of the 21st century — the sort of real human rights issue of the 21st century, because he said it is the greatest challenge to humanity and justice in our world. I recall very much the Climate March last September, and that was a huge momentum, not just in New York, but all around the world. and we have to build on that. I was marching with some of The Elders family, and I saw a placard a little bit away from me, but we were wedged so closely together — because after all, there were 400,000 people out in the streets of New York — so I couldn't quite get to that placard, I would have just liked to have been able to step behind it, because it said, "Angry Grannies!" (Laughter) That's what I felt. And I have five grandchildren now, I feel very happy as an Irish grandmother to have five grandchildren, and I think about their world, and what it will be like when they will share that world with about 9 billion other people in 2050. We know that inevitably it will be a climate-constrained world, because of the emissions we've already put up there, but it could be a world that is much more equal and much fairer, and much better for health, and better for jobs and better for energy security, than the world we have now, if we have switched sufficiently and early enough to renewable energy, and no one is left behind. No one is left behind. And just as we've been looking back this year — in 2015 to 1945, looking back 70 years — I would like to think that they will look back, that world will look back 35 years from 2050, 35 years to 2015, and that they will say, "Weren't they good to do what they did in 2015? We really appreciate that they took the decisions that made a difference, and that put the world on the right pathway, and we benefit now from that pathway," that they will feel that somehow we took our responsibilities, we did what was done in 1945 in similar terms, we didn't miss the opportunity, we lived up to our responsibilities. That's what this year is about. And somehow for me, it's captured in words of somebody that I admired very much. She was a mentor of mine, she was a friend, she died much too young, she was an extraordinary personality, a great champion of the environment: Wangari Maathai. Wangari said once, "In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called upon to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground." And that's what we have to do. We have to reach a new level of consciousness, a higher moral ground. And we have to do it this year in those two big summits. And that won't happen unless we have the momentum from people around the world who say: "We want action now, we want to change course, we want a safe world, a safe world for future generations, a safe world for our children and our grandchildren, and we're all in this together." Thank you. (Applause) |
Subsets and Splits
No saved queries yet
Save your SQL queries to embed, download, and access them later. Queries will appear here once saved.