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4 powerful poems about Parkinson's and growing older	{0: 'The former editor-in-chief of Ms., Robin Morgan published the classic "Sisterhood Is Powerful" anthologies.'}	TEDWomen 2015	When I was only three or four, I fell in love with poetry, with the rhythms and the music of language; with the power of metaphor and of imagery, poetry being the essence of communication — the discipline, the distillation. And all these years later, the poems I'll read today are from my just-finished seventh book of poetry. Well, five years ago, I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Though there's no cure yet, advances in treatment are really impressive. But you can imagine that I was appalled to learn that women are largely left out of research trials, despite gender-specific medical findings having demonstrated that we are not actually just small men — (Laughter) who happen to have different reproductive systems. Gender-specific medicine is good for men, too. But you bring to a crisis the person you already are, including the, yes, momentum that you've learned to invoke through passionate caring and through action, both of which require but also create energy. So as an activist, I began working with the Parkinson's Disease Foundation — that's pdf.org — to create a major initiative to put women on the Parkinson's disease map. And as a poet, I began working with this subject matter, finding it tragic, hilarious, sometimes even joyful. I do not feel diminished by Parkinson's; I feel distilled by it, and I actually very much like the woman I'm distilling into. "No Signs of Struggle" Growing small requires enormity of will: just sitting still in the doctor's waiting room watching the future shuffle in and out, watching it stoop; stare at you while you try not to look. Rare is an exchange: a smile of brief, wry recognition. You are the new kid on the block. Everyone here was you once. You are still learning that growing small requires a largeness of spirit you can't fit into yet: acceptance of irritating help from those who love you; giving way and over, but not up. You've swallowed hard the contents of the "Drink Me" bottle, and felt yourself shrink. Now, familiar furniture looms, floors tilt, and doorknobs yield only when wrestled round with both hands. It demands colossal patience, all this growing small: your diminished sleep at night, your handwriting, your voice, your height. You are more the incredible shrinking woman than the Buddhist mystic, serene, making do with less. Less is not always more. Yet in this emptying space, space glimmers, becoming visible. Here is a place behind the eyes of those accustomed by what some would call diminishment. It is a place of merciless poetry, a gift of presence previously ignored, drowned in the daily clutter. Here every gesture needs intention, is alive with consciousness. Nothing is automatic. You can spot it in the provocation of a button, an arm poking at a sleeve, a balancing act at a night-time curb while negotiating the dark. Feats of such modest valor, who would suspect them to be exercises in an intimate, fierce discipline, a metaphysics of being relentlessly aware? Such understated power here, in these tottering dancers who exert stupendous effort on tasks most view as insignificant. Such quiet beauty here, in these, my soft-voiced, stiff-limbed people; such resolve masked by each placid face. There is immensity required in growing small, so bent on such unbending grace. (Applause) Thank you. This one is called "On Donating My Brain to Science." (Laughter) Not a problem. Skip over all the pages reassuring religious people. Already a universal donor: kidneys, corneas, liver, lungs, tissue, heart, veins, whatever. Odd that the modest brain never imagined its unique value in research, maybe saving someone else from what it is they're not quite sure I have. Flattering, that. So fill in the forms, drill through the answers, trill out a blithe spirit. And slice me, dice me, spread me on your slides. Find what I'm trying to tell you. Earn me, learn me, scan me, squint through your lens. Uncover what I'd hint at if I could. Be my guest, do your best, harvest me, track the clues. This was a good brain while alive. This was a brain that paid its dues. So slice me, dice me, smear me on your slides, stain me, explain me, drain me like a cup. Share me, hear me: I want to be used I want to be used I want to be used up. (Applause) (Applause ends) And this one's called "The Ghost Light." Lit from within is the sole secure way to traverse dark matter. Some life forms — certain mushrooms, snails, jellyfish, worms — glow bioluminescent, and people as well; we emit infra-red light from our most lucent selves. Our tragedy is we can't see it. We see by reflecting. We need biofluorescence to show our true colors. External illumination can distort, though. When gravity bends light, huge galaxy clusters can act as telescopes, elongating background images of star systems to faint arcs — a lensing effect like viewing distant street lamps through a glass of wine. A glass of wine or two now makes me weave as if acting the drunkard's part; as if, besotted with unrequited love for the dynamic Turner canvasses spied out by the Hubble, I could lurch down a city street set without provoking every pedestrian walk-on stare. Stare as long as you need to. If you think about it, walking, even standing, is illogical — such tiny things, feet! — (Laughter) especially when one's body is not al dente anymore. (Laughter) Besides, creature of extremes and excess, I've always thought Apollo beautiful but boring, and a bit of a dumb blonde. Dionysians don't do balance. Balance, in other words, has never been my strong point. But I digress. More and more these days, digression seems the most direct route through from where I've lost or found myself out of place, mind, turn, time. Place your foot just so, mind how you turn: too swift a swivel can bring you down. Take your time ushering the audience out, saying goodbye to the actors. The ghost light is what they call the single bulb hanging above the bare stage in an empty theater. In the empty theater of such a night, waking to meet no external radiance, this is the final struggle left to win, this the sole beacon to beckon the darkness in and let the rest begin, this the lens through which at last to see both Self and Other arrayed with the bright stain of original sin: lit from within. (Applause) And this is the last one. "This Dark Hour" Late summer, 4 A.M. The rain slows to a stop, dripping still from the broad leaves of blue hostas unseen in the garden's dark. Barefoot, careful on the slick slate slabs, I need no light, I know the way, stoop by the mint bed, scoop a fistful of moist earth, then grope for a chair, spread a shawl, and sit, breathing in the wet green August air. This is the small, still hour before the newspaper lands in the vestibule like a grenade, the phone shrills, the computer screen blinks and glares awake. There is this hour: poem in my head, soil in my hand: unnamable fullness. This hour, when blood of my blood bone of bone, child grown to manhood now — stranger, intimate, not distant but apart — lies safe, off dreaming melodies while love sleeps, safe, in his arms. To have come to this place, lived to this moment: immeasurable lightness. The density of black starts to blur umber. Tentative, a cardinal's coloratura, then the mourning dove's elegy. Sable glimmers toward grey; objects emerge, trailing shadows; night ages toward day. The city stirs. There will be other dawns, nights, gaudy noons. Likely, I'll lose my way. There will be stumbling, falling, cursing the dark. Whatever comes, there was this hour when nothing mattered, all was unbearably dear. And when I'm done with daylights, should those who loved me grieve too long a while, let them remember that I had this hour — this dark, perfect hour — and smile. Thank you. (Applause)
Alzheimer's is not normal aging — and we can cure it	{0: "Samuel Cohen researches Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders."}	TED@BCG London	In the year 1901, a woman called Auguste was taken to a medical asylum in Frankfurt. Auguste was delusional and couldn't remember even the most basic details of her life. Her doctor was called Alois. Alois didn't know how to help Auguste, but he watched over her until, sadly, she passed away in 1906. After she died, Alois performed an autopsy and found strange plaques and tangles in Auguste's brain — the likes of which he'd never seen before. Now here's the even more striking thing. If Auguste had instead been alive today, we could offer her no more help than Alois was able to 114 years ago. Alois was Dr. Alois Alzheimer. And Auguste Deter was the first patient to be diagnosed with what we now call Alzheimer's disease. Since 1901, medicine has advanced greatly. We've discovered antibiotics and vaccines to protect us from infections, many treatments for cancer, antiretrovirals for HIV, statins for heart disease and much more. But we've made essentially no progress at all in treating Alzheimer's disease. I'm part of a team of scientists who has been working to find a cure for Alzheimer's for over a decade. So I think about this all the time. Alzheimer's now affects 40 million people worldwide. But by 2050, it will affect 150 million people — which, by the way, will include many of you. If you're hoping to live to be 85 or older, your chance of getting Alzheimer's will be almost one in two. In other words, odds are you'll spend your golden years either suffering from Alzheimer's or helping to look after a friend or loved one with Alzheimer's. Already in the United States alone, Alzheimer's care costs 200 billion dollars every year. One out of every five Medicare dollars get spent on Alzheimer's. It is today the most expensive disease, and costs are projected to increase fivefold by 2050, as the baby boomer generation ages. It may surprise you that, put simply, Alzheimer's is one of the biggest medical and social challenges of our generation. But we've done relatively little to address it. Today, of the top 10 causes of death worldwide, Alzheimer's is the only one we cannot prevent, cure or even slow down. We understand less about the science of Alzheimer's than other diseases because we've invested less time and money into researching it. The US government spends 10 times more every year on cancer research than on Alzheimer's despite the fact that Alzheimer's costs us more and causes a similar number of deaths each year as cancer. The lack of resources stems from a more fundamental cause: a lack of awareness. Because here's what few people know but everyone should: Alzheimer's is a disease, and we can cure it. For most of the past 114 years, everyone, including scientists, mistakenly confused Alzheimer's with aging. We thought that becoming senile was a normal and inevitable part of getting old. But we only have to look at a picture of a healthy aged brain compared to the brain of an Alzheimer's patient to see the real physical damage caused by this disease. As well as triggering severe loss of memory and mental abilities, the damage to the brain caused by Alzheimer's significantly reduces life expectancy and is always fatal. Remember Dr. Alzheimer found strange plaques and tangles in Auguste's brain a century ago. For almost a century, we didn't know much about these. Today we know they're made from protein molecules. You can imagine a protein molecule as a piece of paper that normally folds into an elaborate piece of origami. There are spots on the paper that are sticky. And when it folds correctly, these sticky bits end up on the inside. But sometimes things go wrong, and some sticky bits are on the outside. This causes the protein molecules to stick to each other, forming clumps that eventually become large plaques and tangles. That's what we see in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. We've spent the past 10 years at the University of Cambridge trying to understand how this malfunction works. There are many steps, and identifying which step to try to block is complex — like defusing a bomb. Cutting one wire might do nothing. Cutting others might make the bomb explore. We have to find the right step to block, and then create a drug that does it. Until recently, we for the most part have been cutting wires and hoping for the best. But now we've got together a diverse group of people — medics, biologists, geneticists, chemists, physicists, engineers and mathematicians. And together, we've managed to identify a critical step in the process and are now testing a new class of drugs which would specifically block this step and stop the disease. Now let me show you some of our latest results. No one outside of our lab has seen these yet. Let's look at some videos of what happened when we tested these new drugs in worms. So these are healthy worms, and you can see they're moving around normally. These worms, on the other hand, have protein molecules sticking together inside them — like humans with Alzheimer's. And you can see they're clearly sick. But if we give our new drugs to these worms at an early stage, then we see that they're healthy, and they live a normal lifespan. This is just an initial positive result, but research like this shows us that Alzheimer's is a disease that we can understand and we can cure. After 114 years of waiting, there's finally real hope for what can be achieved in the next 10 or 20 years. But to grow that hope, to finally beat Alzheimer's, we need help. This isn't about scientists like me — it's about you. We need you to raise awareness that Alzheimer's is a disease and that if we try, we can beat it. In the case of other diseases, patients and their families have led the charge for more research and put pressure on governments, the pharmaceutical industry, scientists and regulators. That was essential for advancing treatment for HIV in the late 1980s. Today, we see that same drive to beat cancer. But Alzheimer's patients are often unable to speak up for themselves. And their families, the hidden victims, caring for their loved ones night and day, are often too worn out to go out and advocate for change. So, it really is down to you. Alzheimer's isn't, for the most part, a genetic disease. Everyone with a brain is at risk. Today, there are 40 million patients like Auguste, who can't create the change they need for themselves. Help speak up for them, and help demand a cure. Thank you. (Applause)
Don't ask where I'm from, ask where I'm a local	{0: 'In her writings, Taiye Selasi explores our relationship to our multiple identities.'}	TEDGlobal 2014	Last year, I went on my first book tour. In 13 months, I flew to 14 countries and gave some hundred talks. Every talk in every country began with an introduction, and every introduction began, alas, with a lie: "Taiye Selasi comes from Ghana and Nigeria," or "Taiye Selasi comes from England and the States." Whenever I heard this opening sentence, no matter the country that concluded it — England, America, Ghana, Nigeria — I thought, "But that's not true." Yes, I was born in England and grew up in the United States. My mum, born in England, and raised in Nigeria, currently lives in Ghana. My father was born in Gold Coast, a British colony, raised in Ghana, and has lived for over 30 years in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. For this reason, my introducers also called me "multinational." "But Nike is multinational," I thought, "I'm a human being." Then, one fine day, mid-tour, I went to Louisiana, a museum in Denmark where I shared the stage with the writer Colum McCann. We were discussing the role of locality in writing, when suddenly it hit me. I'm not multinational. I'm not a national at all. How could I come from a nation? How can a human being come from a concept? It's a question that had been bothering me for going on two decades. From newspapers, textbooks, conversations, I had learned to speak of countries as if they were eternal, singular, naturally occurring things, but I wondered: to say that I came from a country suggested that the country was an absolute, some fixed point in place in time, a constant thing, but was it? In my lifetime, countries had disappeared — Czechoslovakia; appeared — Timor-Leste; failed — Somalia. My parents came from countries that didn't exist when they were born. To me, a country — this thing that could be born, die, expand, contract — hardly seemed the basis for understanding a human being. And so it came as a huge relief to discover the sovereign state. What we call countries are actually various expressions of sovereign statehood, an idea that came into fashion only 400 years ago. When I learned this, beginning my masters degree in international relations, I felt a sort of surge of relief. It was as I had suspected. History was real, cultures were real, but countries were invented. For the next 10 years, I sought to re- or un-define myself, my world, my work, my experience, beyond the logic of the state. In 2005, I wrote an essay, "What is an Afropolitan," sketching out an identity that privileged culture over country. It was thrilling how many people could relate to my experience, and instructional how many others didn't buy my sense of self. "How can Selasi claim to come from Ghana," one such critic asked, "when she's never known the indignities of traveling abroad on a Ghanian passport?" Now, if I'm honest, I knew just what she meant. I've got a friend named Layla who was born and raised in Ghana. Her parents are third-generation Ghanians of Lebanese descent. Layla, who speaks fluent Twi, knows Accra like the back of her hand, but when we first met years ago, I thought, "She's not from Ghana." In my mind, she came from Lebanon, despite the patent fact that all her formative experience took place in suburban Accra. I, like my critics, was imagining some Ghana where all Ghanaians had brown skin or none held U.K. passports. I'd fallen into the limiting trap that the language of coming from countries sets — the privileging of a fiction, the singular country, over reality: human experience. Speaking with Colum McCann that day, the penny finally dropped. "All experience is local," he said. "All identity is experience," I thought. "I'm not a national," I proclaimed onstage. "I'm a local. I'm multi-local." See, "Taiye Selasi comes from the United States," isn't the truth. I have no relationship with the United States, all 50 of them, not really. My relationship is with Brookline, the town where I grew up; with New York City, where I started work; with Lawrenceville, where I spend Thanksgiving. What makes America home for me is not my passport or accent, but these very particular experiences and the places they occur. Despite my pride in Ewe culture, the Black Stars, and my love of Ghanaian food, I've never had a relationship with the Republic of Ghana, writ large. My relationship is with Accra, where my mother lives, where I go each year, with the little garden in Dzorwulu where my father and I talk for hours. These are the places that shape my experience. My experience is where I'm from. What if we asked, instead of "Where are you from?" — "Where are you a local?" This would tell us so much more about who and how similar we are. Tell me you're from France, and I see what, a set of clichés? Adichie's dangerous single story, the myth of the nation of France? Tell me you're a local of Fez and Paris, better yet, Goutte d'Or, and I see a set of experiences. Our experience is where we're from. So, where are you a local? I propose a three-step test. I call these the three "R’s": rituals, relationships, restrictions. First, think of your daily rituals, whatever they may be: making your coffee, driving to work, harvesting your crops, saying your prayers. What kind of rituals are these? Where do they occur? In what city or cities in the world do shopkeepers know your face? As a child, I carried out fairly standard suburban rituals in Boston, with adjustments made for the rituals my mother brought from London and Lagos. We took off our shoes in the house, we were unfailingly polite with our elders, we ate slow-cooked, spicy food. In snowy North America, ours were rituals of the global South. The first time I went to Delhi or to southern parts of Italy, I was shocked by how at home I felt. The rituals were familiar. "R" number one, rituals. Now, think of your relationships, of the people who shape your days. To whom do you speak at least once a week, be it face to face or on FaceTime? Be reasonable in your assessment; I'm not talking about your Facebook friends. I'm speaking of the people who shape your weekly emotional experience. My mother in Accra, my twin sister in Boston, my best friends in New York: these relationships are home for me. "R" number two, relationships. We're local where we carry out our rituals and relationships, but how we experience our locality depends in part on our restrictions. By restrictions, I mean, where are you able to live? What passport do you hold? Are you restricted by, say, racism, from feeling fully at home where you live? By civil war, dysfunctional governance, economic inflation, from living in the locality where you had your rituals as a child? This is the least sexy of the R’s, less lyric than rituals and relationships, but the question takes us past "Where are you now?" to "Why aren't you there, and why?" Rituals, relationships, restrictions. Take a piece of paper and put those three words on top of three columns, then try to fill those columns as honestly as you can. A very different picture of your life in local context, of your identity as a set of experiences, may emerge. So let's try it. I have a friend named Olu. He's 35 years old. His parents, born in Nigeria, came to Germany on scholarships. Olu was born in Nuremberg and lived there until age 10. When his family moved to Lagos, he studied in London, then came to Berlin. He loves going to Nigeria — the weather, the food, the friends — but hates the political corruption there. Where is Olu from? I have another friend named Udo. He's also 35 years old. Udo was born in Córdoba, in northwest Argentina, where his grandparents migrated from Germany, what is now Poland, after the war. Udo studied in Buenos Aires, and nine years ago came to Berlin. He loves going to Argentina — the weather, the food, the friends — but hates the economic corruption there. Where is Udo from? With his blonde hair and blue eyes, Udo could pass for German, but holds an Argentinian passport, so needs a visa to live in Berlin. That Udo is from Argentina has largely to do with history. That he's a local of Buenos Aires and Berlin, that has to do with life. Olu, who looks Nigerian, needs a visa to visit Nigeria. He speaks Yoruba with an English accent, and English with a German one. To claim that he's "not really Nigerian," though, denies his experience in Lagos, the rituals he practiced growing up, his relationship with family and friends. Meanwhile, though Lagos is undoubtedly one of his homes, Olu always feels restricted there, not least by the fact that he's gay. Both he and Udo are restricted by the political conditions of their parents' countries, from living where some of their most meaningful rituals and relationships occur. To say Olu is from Nigeria and Udo is from Argentina distracts from their common experience. Their rituals, their relationships, and their restrictions are the same. Of course, when we ask, "Where are you from?" we're using a kind of shorthand. It's quicker to say "Nigeria" than "Lagos and Berlin," and as with Google Maps, we can always zoom in closer, from country to city to neighborhood. But that's not quite the point. The difference between "Where are you from?" and "Where are you a local?" isn't the specificity of the answer; it's the intention of the question. Replacing the language of nationality with the language of locality asks us to shift our focus to where real life occurs. Even that most glorious expression of countryhood, the World Cup, gives us national teams comprised mostly of multilocal players. As a unit of measurement for human experience, the country doesn't quite work. That's why Olu says, "I'm German, but my parents come from Nigeria." The "but" in that sentence belies the inflexibility of the units, one fixed and fictional entity bumping up against another. "I'm a local of Lagos and Berlin," suggests overlapping experiences, layers that merge together, that can't be denied or removed. You can take away my passport, but you can't take away my experience. That I carry within me. Where I'm from comes wherever I go. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we do away with countries. There's much to be said for national history, more for the sovereign state. Culture exists in community, and community exists in context. Geography, tradition, collective memory: these things are important. What I'm questioning is primacy. All of those introductions on tour began with reference to nation, as if knowing what country I came from would tell my audience who I was. What are we really seeking, though, when we ask where someone comes from? And what are we really seeing when we hear an answer? Here's one possibility: basically, countries represent power. "Where are you from?" Mexico. Poland. Bangladesh. Less power. America. Germany. Japan. More power. China. Russia. Ambiguous. (Laughter) It's possible that without realizing it, we're playing a power game, especially in the context of multi-ethnic countries. As any recent immigrant knows, the question "Where are you from?" or "Where are you really from?" is often code for "Why are you here?" Then we have the scholar William Deresiewicz's writing of elite American colleges. "Students think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri and another from Pakistan — never mind that all of their parents are doctors or bankers." I'm with him. To call one student American, another Pakistani, then triumphantly claim student body diversity ignores the fact that these students are locals of the same milieu. The same holds true on the other end of the economic spectrum. A Mexican gardener in Los Angeles and a Nepali housekeeper in Delhi have more in common in terms of rituals and restrictions than nationality implies. Perhaps my biggest problem with coming from countries is the myth of going back to them. I'm often asked if I plan to "go back" to Ghana. I go to Accra every year, but I can't "go back" to Ghana. It's not because I wasn't born there. My father can't go back, either. The country in which he was born, that country no longer exists. We can never go back to a place and find it exactly where we left it. Something, somewhere will always have changed, most of all, ourselves. People. Finally, what we're talking about is human experience, this notoriously and gloriously disorderly affair. In creative writing, locality bespeaks humanity. The more we know about where a story is set, the more local color and texture, the more human the characters start to feel, the more relatable, not less. The myth of national identity and the vocabulary of coming from confuses us into placing ourselves into mutually exclusive categories. In fact, all of us are multi — multi-local, multi-layered. To begin our conversations with an acknowledgement of this complexity brings us closer together, I think, not further apart. So the next time that I'm introduced, I'd love to hear the truth: "Taiye Selasi is a human being, like everybody here. She isn't a citizen of the world, but a citizen of worlds. She is a local of New York, Rome and Accra." Thank you. (Applause)
Stunning photos of the endangered Everglades	{0: 'Florida-based photographer Mac Stone specializes in documenting the Everglades, an area he prizes for its wildlife and flora.'}	TEDxUF	So I've had the great privilege of traveling to some incredible places, photographing these distant landscapes and remote cultures all over the world. I love my job. But people think it's this string of epiphanies and sunrises and rainbows, when in reality, it looks more something like this. (Laughter) This is my office. We can't afford the fanciest places to stay at night, so we tend to sleep a lot outdoors. As long as we can stay dry, that's a bonus. We also can't afford the fanciest restaurants. So we tend to eat whatever's on the local menu. And if you're in the Ecuadorian Páramo, you're going to eat a large rodent called a cuy. (Laughter) But what makes our experiences perhaps a little bit different and a little more unique than that of the average person is that we have this gnawing thing in the back of our mind that even in our darkest moments, and those times of despair, we think, "Hey, there might be an image to be made here, there might be a story to be told." And why is storytelling important? Well, it helps us to connect with our cultural and our natural heritage. And in the Southeast, there's an alarming disconnect between the public and the natural areas that allow us to be here in the first place. We're visual creatures, so we use what we see to teach us what we know. Now the majority of us aren't going to willingly go way down to a swamp. So how can we still expect those same people to then advocate on behalf of their protection? We can't. So my job, then, is to use photography as a communication tool, to help bridge the gap between the science and the aesthetics, to get people talking, to get them thinking, and to hopefully, ultimately, get them caring. I started doing this 15 years ago right here in Gainesville, right here in my backyard. And I fell in love with adventure and discovery, going to explore all these different places that were just minutes from my front doorstep. There are a lot of beautiful places to find. Despite all these years that have passed, I still see the world through the eyes of a child and I try to incorporate that sense of wonderment and that sense of curiosity into my photography as often as I can. And we're pretty lucky because here in the South, we're still blessed with a relatively blank canvas that we can fill with the most fanciful adventures and incredible experiences. It's just a matter of how far our imagination will take us. See, a lot of people look at this and they say, "Oh yeah, wow, that's a pretty tree." But I don't just see a tree — I look at this and I see opportunity. I see an entire weekend. Because when I was a kid, these were the types of images that got me off the sofa and dared me to explore, dared me to go find the woods and put my head underwater and see what we have. And folks, I've been photographing all over the world and I promise you, what we have here in the South, what we have in the Sunshine State, rivals anything else that I've seen. But yet our tourism industry is busy promoting all the wrong things. Before most kids are 12, they'll have been to Disney World more times than they've been in a canoe or camping under a starry sky. And I have nothing against Disney or Mickey; I used to go there, too. But they're missing out on those fundamental connections that create a real sense of pride and ownership for the place that they call home. And this is compounded by the issue that the landscapes that define our natural heritage and fuel our aquifer for our drinking water have been deemed as scary and dangerous and spooky. When our ancestors first came here, they warned, "Stay out of these areas, they're haunted. They're full of evil spirits and ghosts." I don't know where they came up with that idea. But it's actually led to a very real disconnect, a very real negative mentality that has kept the public disinterested, silent, and ultimately, our environment at risk. We're a state that's surrounded and defined by water, and yet for centuries, swamps and wetlands have been regarded as these obstacles to overcome. And so we've treated them as these second-class ecosystems, because they have very little monetary value and of course, they're known to harbor alligators and snakes — which, I'll admit, these aren't the most cuddly of ambassadors. (Laughter) So it became assumed, then, that the only good swamp was a drained swamp. And in fact, draining a swamp to make way for agriculture and development was considered the very essence of conservation not too long ago. But now we're backpedaling, because the more we come to learn about these sodden landscapes, the more secrets we're starting to unlock about interspecies relationships and the connectivity of habitats, watersheds and flyways. Take this bird, for example: this is the prothonotary warbler. I love this bird because it's a swamp bird, through and through, a swamp bird. They nest and they mate and they breed in these old-growth swamps in these flooded forests. And so after the spring, after they raise their young, they then fly thousand of miles over the Gulf of Mexico into Central and South America. And then after the winter, the spring rolls around and they come back. They fly thousands of miles over the Gulf of Mexico. And where do they go? Where do they land? Right back in the same tree. That's nuts. This is a bird the size of a tennis ball — I mean, that's crazy! I used a GPS to get here today, and this is my hometown. (Laughter) It's crazy. So what happens, then, when this bird flies over the Gulf of Mexico into Central America for the winter and then the spring rolls around and it flies back, and it comes back to this: a freshly sodded golf course? This is a narrative that's all too commonly unraveling here in this state. And this is a natural process that's occurred for thousands of years and we're just now learning about it. So you can imagine all else we have to learn about these landscapes if we just preserve them first. Now despite all this rich life that abounds in these swamps, they still have a bad name. Many people feel uncomfortable with the idea of wading into Florida's blackwater. I can understand that. But what I loved about growing up in the Sunshine State is that for so many of us, we live with this latent but very palpable fear that when we put our toes into the water, there might be something much more ancient and much more adapted than we are. Knowing that you're not top dog is a welcomed discomfort, I think. How often in this modern and urban and digital age do you actually get the chance to feel vulnerable, or consider that the world may not have been made for just us? So for the last decade, I began seeking out these areas where the concrete yields to forest and the pines turn to cypress, and I viewed all these mosquitoes and reptiles, all these discomforts, as affirmations that I'd found true wilderness, and I embrace them wholly. Now as a conservation photographer obsessed with blackwater, it's only fitting that I'd eventually end up in the most famous swamp of all: the Everglades. Growing up here in North Central Florida, it always had these enchanted names, places like Loxahatchee and Fakahatchee, Corkscrew, Big Cypress. I started what turned into a five-year project to hopefully reintroduce the Everglades in a new light, in a more inspired light. But I knew this would be a tall order, because here you have an area that's roughly a third the size the state of Florida, it's huge. And when I say Everglades, most people are like, "Oh, yeah, the national park." But the Everglades is not just a park; it's an entire watershed, starting with the Kissimmee chain of lakes in the north, and then as the rains would fall in the summer, these downpours would flow into Lake Okeechobee, and Lake Okeechobee would fill up and it would overflow its banks and spill southward, ever slowly, with the topography, and get into the river of grass, the Sawgrass Prairies, before meting into the cypress slews, until going further south into the mangrove swamps, and then finally — finally — reaching Florida Bay, the emerald gem of the Everglades, the great estuary, the 850 square-mile estuary. So sure, the national park is the southern end of this system, but all the things that make it unique are these inputs that come in, the fresh water that starts 100 miles north. So no manner of these political or invisible boundaries protect the park from polluted water or insufficient water. And unfortunately, that's precisely what we've done. Over the last 60 years, we have drained, we have dammed, we have dredged the Everglades to where now only one third of the water that used to reach the bay now reaches the bay today. So this story is not all sunshine and rainbows, unfortunately. For better or for worse, the story of the Everglades is intrinsically tied to the peaks and the valleys of mankind's relationship with the natural world. But I'll show you these beautiful pictures, because it gets you on board. And while I have your attention, I can tell you the real story. It's that we're taking this, and we're trading it for this, at an alarming rate. And what's lost on so many people is the sheer scale of which we're discussing. Because the Everglades is not just responsible for the drinking water for 7 million Floridians; today it also provides the agricultural fields for the year-round tomatoes and oranges for over 300 million Americans. And it's that same seasonal pulse of water in the summer that built the river of grass 6,000 years ago. Ironically, today, it's also responsible for the over half a million acres of the endless river of sugarcane. These are the same fields that are responsible for dumping exceedingly high levels of fertilizers into the watershed, forever changing the system. But in order for you to not just understand how this system works, but to also get personally connected to it, I decided to break the story down into several different narratives. And I wanted that story to start in Lake Okeechobee, the beating heart of the Everglade system. And to do that, I picked an ambassador, an iconic species. This is the Everglade snail kite. It's a great bird, and they used to nest in the thousands, thousands in the northern Everglades. And then they've gone down to about 400 nesting pairs today. And why is that? Well, it's because they eat one source of food, an apple snail, about the size of a ping-pong ball, an aquatic gastropod. So as we started damming up the Everglades, as we started diking Lake Okeechobee and draining the wetlands, we lost the habitat for the snail. And thus, the population of the kites declined. And so, I wanted a photo that would not only communicate this relationship between wetland, snail and bird, but I also wanted a photo that would communicate how incredible this relationship was, and how very important it is that they've come to depend on each other, this healthy wetland and this bird. And to do that, I brainstormed this idea. I started sketching out these plans to make a photo, and I sent it to the wildlife biologist down in Okeechobee — this is an endangered bird, so it takes special permission to do. So I built this submerged platform that would hold snails just right under the water. And I spent months planning this crazy idea. And I took this platform down to Lake Okeechobee and I spent over a week in the water, wading waist-deep, 9-hour shifts from dawn until dusk, to get one image that I thought might communicate this. And here's the day that it finally worked: [Video: (Mac Stone narrating) After setting up the platform, I look off and I see a kite coming over the cattails. And I see him scanning and searching. And he gets right over the trap, and I see that he's seen it. And he beelines, he goes straight for the trap. And in that moment, all those months of planning, waiting, all the sunburn, mosquito bites — suddenly, they're all worth it. (Mac Stone in film) Oh my gosh, I can't believe it!] You can believe how excited I was when that happened. But what the idea was, is that for someone who's never seen this bird and has no reason to care about it, these photos, these new perspectives, will help shed a little new light on just one species that makes this watershed so incredible, so valuable, so important. Now, I know I can't come here to Gainesville and talk to you about animals in the Everglades without talking about gators. I love gators, I grew up loving gators. My parents always said I had an unhealthy relationship with gators. But what I like about them is, they're like the freshwater equivalent of sharks. They're feared, they're hated, and they are tragically misunderstood. Because these are a unique species, they're not just apex predators. In the Everglades, they are the very architects of the Everglades, because as the water drops down in the winter during the dry season, they start excavating these holes called gator holes. And they do this because as the water drops down, they'll be able to stay wet and they'll be able to forage. And now this isn't just affecting them, other animals also depend on this relationship, so they become a keystone species as well. So how do you make an apex predator, an ancient reptile, at once look like it dominates the system, but at the same time, look vulnerable? Well, you wade into a pit of about 120 of them, then you hope that you've made the right decision. (Laughter) I still have all my fingers, it's cool. But I understand, I know I'm not going to rally you guys, I'm not going to rally the troops to "Save the Everglades for the gators!" It won't happen because they're so ubiquitous, we see them now, they're one of the great conservation success stories of the US. But there is one species in the Everglades that no matter who you are, you can't help but love, too, and that's the roseate spoonbill. These birds are great, but they've had a really tough time in the Everglades, because they started out with thousands of nesting pairs in Florida Bay, and at the turn of the 20th century, they got down to two — two nesting pairs. And why? That's because women thought they looked better on their hats then they did flying in the sky. Then we banned the plume trade, and their numbers started rebounding. And as their numbers started rebounding, scientists began to pay attention, they started studying these birds. And what they found out is that these birds' behavior is intrinsically tied to the annual draw-down cycle of water in the Everglades, the thing that defines the Everglades watershed. What they found out is that these birds started nesting in the winter as the water drew down, because they're tactile feeders, so they have to touch whatever they eat. And so they wait for these concentrated pools of fish to be able to feed enough to feed their young. So these birds became the very icon of the Everglades — an indicator species of the overall health of the system. And just as their numbers were rebounding in the mid-20th century — shooting up to 900, 1,000, 1,100, 1,200 — just as that started happening, we started draining the southern Everglades. And we stopped two-thirds of that water from moving south. And it had drastic consequences. And just as those numbers started reaching their peak, unfortunately, today, the real spoonbill story, the real photo of what it looks like is more something like this. And we're down to less than 70 nesting pairs in Florida Bay today, because we've disrupted the system so much. So all these different organizations are shouting, they're screaming, "The Everglades is fragile! It's fragile!" It is not. It is resilient. Because despite all we've taken, despite all we've done and we've drained and we've dammed and we've dredged it, pieces of it are still here, waiting to be put back together. And this is what I've loved about South Florida, that in one place, you have this unstoppable force of mankind meeting the immovable object of tropical nature. And it's at this new frontier that we are forced with a new appraisal. What is wilderness worth? What is the value of biodiversity, or our drinking water? And fortunately, after decades of debate, we're finally starting to act on those questions. We're slowly undertaking these projects to bring more freshwater back to the bay. But it's up to us as citizens, as residents, as stewards to hold our elected officials to their promises. What can you do to help? It's so easy. Just get outside, get out there. Take your friends out, take your kids out, take your family out. Hire a fishing guide. Show the state that protecting wilderness not only makes ecological sense, but economic sense as well. It's a lot of fun, just do it — put your feet in the water. The swamp will change you, I promise. Over the years, we've been so generous with these other landscapes around the country, cloaking them with this American pride, places that we now consider to define us: Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone. And we use these parks and these natural areas as beacons and as cultural compasses. And sadly, the Everglades is very commonly left out of that conversation. But I believe it's every bit as iconic and emblematic of who we are as a country as any of these other wildernesses. It's just a different kind of wild. But I'm encouraged, because maybe we're finally starting to come around, because what was once deemed this swampy wasteland, today is a World Heritage site. It's a wetland of international importance. And we've come a long way in the last 60 years. And as the world's largest and most ambitious wetland restoration project, the international spotlight is on us in the Sunshine State. Because if we can heal this system, it's going to become an icon for wetland restoration all over the world. But it's up to us to decide which legacy we want to attach our flag to. They say that the Everglades is our greatest test. If we pass it, we get to keep the planet. I love that quote, because it's a challenge, it's a prod. Can we do it? Will we do it? We have to, we must. But the Everglades is not just a test. It's also a gift, and ultimately, our responsibility. Thank you. (Applause)
How my mind came back to life — and no one knew	{0: 'At age 12, Martin Pistorius fell into a coma, and spent 13 years locked inside his body, unable to communicate -- until a caregiver noticed his eyes responded to her. His book "Ghost Boy" tells his story.'}	TEDxKC	Imagine being unable to say, "I am hungry," "I am in pain," "thank you," or "I love you." Being trapped inside your body, a body that doesn't respond to commands. Surrounded by people, yet utterly alone. Wishing you could reach out, to connect, to comfort, to participate. For 13 long years, that was my reality. Most of us never think twice about talking, about communicating. I've thought a lot about it. I've had a lot of time to think. For the first 12 years of my life, I was a normal, happy, healthy little boy. Then everything changed. I contracted a brain infection. The doctors weren't sure what it was, but they treated me the best they could. However, I progressively got worse. Eventually, I lost my ability to control my movements, make eye contact, and finally, my ability to speak. While in hospital, I desperately wanted to go home. I said to my mother, "When home?" Those were the last words I ever spoke with my own voice. I would eventually fail every test for mental awareness. My parents were told I was as good as not there. A vegetable, having the intelligence of a three-month-old baby. They were told to take me home and try to keep me comfortable until I died. My parents, in fact my entire family's lives, became consumed by taking care of me the best they knew how. Their friends drifted away. One year turned to two, two turned to three. It seemed like the person I once was began to disappear. The Lego blocks and electronic circuits I'd loved as a boy were put away. I had been moved out of my bedroom into another more practical one. I had become a ghost, a faded memory of a boy people once knew and loved. Meanwhile, my mind began knitting itself back together. Gradually, my awareness started to return. But no one realized that I had come back to life. I was aware of everything, just like any normal person. I could see and understand everything, but I couldn't find a way to let anybody know. My personality was entombed within a seemingly silent body, a vibrant mind hidden in plain sight within a chrysalis. The stark reality hit me that I was going to spend the rest of my life locked inside myself, totally alone. I was trapped with only my thoughts for company. I would never be rescued. No one would ever show me tenderness. I would never talk to a friend. No one would ever love me. I had no dreams, no hope, nothing to look forward to. Well, nothing pleasant. I lived in fear, and, to put it bluntly, was waiting for death to finally release me, expecting to die all alone in a care home. I don't know if it's truly possible to express in words what it's like not to be able to communicate. Your personality appears to vanish into a heavy fog and all of your emotions and desires are constricted, stifled and muted within you. For me, the worst was the feeling of utter powerlessness. I simply existed. It's a very dark place to find yourself because in a sense, you have vanished. Other people controlled every aspect of my life. They decided what I ate and when. Whether I was laid on my side or strapped into my wheelchair. I often spent my days positioned in front of the TV watching Barney reruns. I think because Barney is so happy and jolly, and I absolutely wasn't, it made it so much worse. I was completely powerless to change anything in my life or people's perceptions of me. I was a silent, invisible observer of how people behaved when they thought no one was watching. Unfortunately, I wasn't only an observer. With no way to communicate, I became the perfect victim: a defenseless object, seemingly devoid of feelings that people used to play out their darkest desires. For more than 10 years, people who were charged with my care abused me physically, verbally and sexually. Despite what they thought, I did feel. The first time it happened, I was shocked and filled with disbelief. How could they do this to me? I was confused. What had I done to deserve this? Part of me wanted to cry and another part wanted to fight. Hurt, sadness and anger flooded through me. I felt worthless. There was no one to comfort me. But neither of my parents knew this was happening. I lived in terror, knowing it would happen again and again. I just never knew when. All I knew was that I would never be the same. I remember once listening to Whitney Houston singing, "No matter what they take from me, they can't take away my dignity." And I thought to myself, "You want to bet?" Perhaps my parents could have found out and could have helped. But the years of constant caretaking, having to wake up every two hours to turn me, combined with them essentially grieving the loss of their son, had taken a toll on my mother and father. Following yet another heated argument between my parents, in a moment of despair and desperation, my mother turned to me and told me that I should die. I was shocked, but as I thought about what she had said, I was filled with enormous compassion and love for my mother, yet I could do nothing about it. There were many moments when I gave up, sinking into a dark abyss. I remember one particularly low moment. My dad left me alone in the car while he quickly went to buy something from the store. A random stranger walked past, looked at me and he smiled. I may never know why, but that simple act, the fleeting moment of human connection, transformed how I was feeling, making me want to keep going. My existence was tortured by monotony, a reality that was often too much to bear. Alone with my thoughts, I constructed intricate fantasies about ants running across the floor. I taught myself to tell the time by noticing where the shadows were. As I learned how the shadows moved as the hours of the day passed, I understood how long it would be before I was picked up and taken home. Seeing my father walk through the door to collect me was the best moment of the day. My mind became a tool that I could use to either close down to retreat from my reality or enlarge into a gigantic space that I could fill with fantasies. I hoped that my reality would change and someone would see that I had come back to life. But I had been washed away like a sand castle built too close to the waves, and in my place was the person people expected me to be. To some I was Martin, a vacant shell, the vegetable, deserving of harsh words, dismissal and even abuse. To others, I was the tragically brain-damaged boy who had grown to become a man. Someone they were kind to and cared for. Good or bad, I was a blank canvas onto which different versions of myself were projected. It took someone new to see me in a different way. An aromatherapist began coming to the care home about once a week. Whether through intuition or her attention to details that others failed to notice, she became convinced that I could understand what was being said. She urged my parents to have me tested by experts in augmentative and alternative communication. And within a year, I was beginning to use a computer program to communicate. It was exhilarating, but frustrating at times. I had so many words in my mind, that I couldn't wait to be able to share them. Sometimes, I would say things to myself simply because I could. In myself, I had a ready audience, and I believed that by expressing my thoughts and wishes, others would listen, too. But as I began to communicate more, I realized that it was in fact only just the beginning of creating a new voice for myself. I was thrust into a world I didn't quite know how to function in. I stopped going to the care home and managed to get my first job making photocopies. As simple as this may sound, it was amazing. My new world was really exciting but often quite overwhelming and frightening. I was like a man-child, and as liberating as it often was, I struggled. I also learned that many of those who had known me for a long time found it impossible to abandon the idea of Martin they had in their heads. While those I had only just met struggled to look past the image of a silent man in a wheelchair. I realized that some people would only listen to me if what I said was in line with what they expected. Otherwise, it was disregarded and they did what they felt was best. I discovered that true communication is about more than merely physically conveying a message. It is about getting the message heard and respected. Still, things were going well. My body was slowly getting stronger. I had a job in computing that I loved, and had even got Kojak, the dog I had been dreaming about for years. However, I longed to share my life with someone. I remember staring out the window as my dad drove me home from work, thinking I have so much love inside of me and nobody to give it to. Just as I had resigned myself to being single for the rest of my life, I met Joan. Not only is she the best thing that has ever happened to me, but Joan helped me to challenge my own misconceptions about myself. Joan said it was through my words that she fell in love with me. However, after all I had been through, I still couldn't shake the belief that nobody could truly see beyond my disability and accept me for who I am. I also really struggled to comprehend that I was a man. The first time someone referred to me as a man, it stopped me in my tracks. I felt like looking around and asking, "Who, me?" That all changed with Joan. We have an amazing connection and I learned how important it is to communicate openly and honestly. I felt safe, and it gave me the confidence to truly say what I thought. I started to feel whole again, a man worthy of love. I began to reshape my destiny. I spoke up a little more at work. I asserted my need for independence to the people around me. Being given a means of communication changed everything. I used the power of words and will to challenge the preconceptions of those around me and those I had of myself. Communication is what makes us human, enabling us to connect on the deepest level with those around us — telling our own stories, expressing wants, needs and desires, or hearing those of others by really listening. All this is how the world knows who we are. So who are we without it? True communication increases understanding and creates a more caring and compassionate world. Once, I was perceived to be an inanimate object, a mindless phantom of a boy in a wheelchair. Today, I am so much more. A husband, a son, a friend, a brother, a business owner, a first-class honors graduate, a keen amateur photographer. It is my ability to communicate that has given me all this. We are told that actions speak louder than words. But I wonder, do they? Our words, however we communicate them, are just as powerful. Whether we speak the words with our own voices, type them with our eyes, or communicate them non-verbally to someone who speaks them for us, words are among our most powerful tools. I have come to you through a terrible darkness, pulled from it by caring souls and by language itself. The act of you listening to me today brings me farther into the light. We are shining here together. If there is one most difficult obstacle to my way of communicating, it is that sometimes I want to shout and other times simply to whisper a word of love or gratitude. It all sounds the same. But if you will, please imagine these next two words as warmly as you can: Thank you. (Applause)
Why some of us don't have one true calling	{0: 'Career coach Emilie Wapnick celebrates the "multipotentialite" -- those of us with many interests, many jobs over a lifetime, and many interlocking potentials.'}	TEDxBend	Raise your hand if you've ever been asked the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Now if you had to guess, how old would you say you were when you were first asked this question? You can just hold up fingers. Three. Five. Three. Five. Five. OK. Now, raise your hand if the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" has ever caused you any anxiety. (Laughter) Any anxiety at all. I'm someone who's never been able to answer the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" See, the problem wasn't that I didn't have any interests — it's that I had too many. In high school, I liked English and math and art and I built websites and I played guitar in a punk band called Frustrated Telephone Operator. Maybe you've heard of us. (Laughter) This continued after high school, and at a certain point, I began to notice this pattern in myself where I would become interested in an area and I would dive in, become all-consumed, and I'd get to be pretty good at whatever it was, and then I would hit this point where I'd start to get bored. And usually I would try and persist anyway, because I had already devoted so much time and energy and sometimes money into this field. But eventually this sense of boredom, this feeling of, like, yeah, I got this, this isn't challenging anymore — it would get to be too much. And I would have to let it go. But then I would become interested in something else, something totally unrelated, and I would dive into that, and become all-consumed, and I'd be like, "Yes! I found my thing," and then I would hit this point again where I'd start to get bored. And eventually, I would let it go. But then I would discover something new and totally different, and I would dive into that. This pattern caused me a lot of anxiety, for two reasons. The first was that I wasn't sure how I was going to turn any of this into a career. I thought that I would eventually have to pick one thing, deny all of my other passions, and just resign myself to being bored. The other reason it caused me so much anxiety was a little bit more personal. I worried that there was something wrong with this, and something wrong with me for being unable to stick with anything. I worried that I was afraid of commitment, or that I was scattered, or that I was self-sabotaging, afraid of my own success. If you can relate to my story and to these feelings, I'd like you to ask yourself a question that I wish I had asked myself back then. Ask yourself where you learned to assign the meaning of wrong or abnormal to doing many things. I'll tell you where you learned it: you learned it from the culture. We are first asked the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" when we're about five years old. And the truth is that no one really cares what you say when you're that age. (Laughter) It's considered an innocuous question, posed to little kids to elicit cute replies, like, "I want to be an astronaut," or "I want to be a ballerina," or "I want to be a pirate." Insert Halloween costume here. (Laughter) But this question gets asked of us again and again as we get older in various forms — for instance, high school students might get asked what major they're going to pick in college. And at some point, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" goes from being the cute exercise it once was to the thing that keeps us up at night. Why? See, while this question inspires kids to dream about what they could be, it does not inspire them to dream about all that they could be. In fact, it does just the opposite, because when someone asks you what you want to be, you can't reply with 20 different things, though well-meaning adults will likely chuckle and be like, "Oh, how cute, but you can't be a violin maker and a psychologist. You have to choose." This is Dr. Bob Childs — (Laughter) and he's a luthier and psychotherapist. And this is Amy Ng, a magazine editor turned illustrator, entrepreneur, teacher and creative director. But most kids don't hear about people like this. All they hear is that they're going to have to choose. But it's more than that. The notion of the narrowly focused life is highly romanticized in our culture. It's this idea of destiny or the one true calling, the idea that we each have one great thing we are meant to do during our time on this earth, and you need to figure out what that thing is and devote your life to it. But what if you're someone who isn't wired this way? What if there are a lot of different subjects that you're curious about, and many different things you want to do? Well, there is no room for someone like you in this framework. And so you might feel alone. You might feel like you don't have a purpose. And you might feel like there's something wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you. What you are is a multipotentialite. (Laughter) (Applause) A multipotentialite is someone with many interests and creative pursuits. It's a mouthful to say. It might help if you break it up into three parts: multi, potential, and ite. You can also use one of the other terms that connote the same idea, such as polymath, the Renaissance person. Actually, during the Renaissance period, it was considered the ideal to be well-versed in multiple disciplines. Barbara Sher refers to us as "scanners." Use whichever term you like, or invent your own. I have to say I find it sort of fitting that as a community, we cannot agree on a single identity. (Laughter) It's easy to see your multipotentiality as a limitation or an affliction that you need to overcome. But what I've learned through speaking with people and writing about these ideas on my website, is that there are some tremendous strengths to being this way. Here are three multipotentialite super powers. One: idea synthesis. That is, combining two or more fields and creating something new at the intersection. Sha Hwang and Rachel Binx drew from their shared interests in cartography, data visualization, travel, mathematics and design, when they founded Meshu. Meshu is a company that creates custom geographically-inspired jewelry. Sha and Rachel came up with this unique idea not despite, but because of their eclectic mix of skills and experiences. Innovation happens at the intersections. That's where the new ideas come from. And multipotentialites, with all of their backgrounds, are able to access a lot of these points of intersection. The second multipotentialite superpower is rapid learning. When multipotentialites become interested in something, we go hard. We observe everything we can get our hands on. We're also used to being beginners, because we've been beginners so many times in the past, and this means that we're less afraid of trying new things and stepping out of our comfort zones. What's more, many skills are transferable across disciplines, and we bring everything we've learned to every new area we pursue, so we're rarely starting from scratch. Nora Dunn is a full-time traveler and freelance writer. As a child concert pianist, she honed an incredible ability to develop muscle memory. Now, she's the fastest typist she knows. (Laughter) Before becoming a writer, Nora was a financial planner. She had to learn the finer mechanics of sales when she was starting her practice, and this skill now helps her write compelling pitches to editors. It is rarely a waste of time to pursue something you're drawn to, even if you end up quitting. You might apply that knowledge in a different field entirely, in a way that you couldn't have anticipated. The third multipotentialite superpower is adaptability; that is, the ability to morph into whatever you need to be in a given situation. Abe Cajudo is sometimes a video director, sometimes a web designer, sometimes a Kickstarter consultant, sometimes a teacher, and sometimes, apparently, James Bond. (Laughter) He's valuable because he does good work. He's even more valuable because he can take on various roles, depending on his clients' needs. Fast Company magazine identified adaptability as the single most important skill to develop in order to thrive in the 21st century. The economic world is changing so quickly and unpredictably that it is the individuals and organizations that can pivot in order to meet the needs of the market that are really going to thrive. Idea synthesis, rapid learning and adaptability: three skills that multipotentialites are very adept at, and three skills that they might lose if pressured to narrow their focus. As a society, we have a vested interest in encouraging multipotentialites to be themselves. We have a lot of complex, multidimensional problems in the world right now, and we need creative, out-of-the-box thinkers to tackle them. Now, let's say that you are, in your heart, a specialist. You came out of the womb knowing you wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon. Don't worry — there's nothing wrong with you, either. (Laughter) In fact, some of the best teams are comprised of a specialist and multipotentialite paired together. The specialist can dive in deep and implement ideas, while the multipotentialite brings a breadth of knowledge to the project. It's a beautiful partnership. But we should all be designing lives and careers that are aligned with how we're wired. And sadly, multipotentialites are largely being encouraged simply to be more like their specialist peers. So with that said, if there is one thing you take away from this talk, I hope that it is this: embrace your inner wiring, whatever that may be. If you're a specialist at heart, then by all means, specialize. That is where you'll do your best work. But to the multipotentialites in the room, including those of you who may have just realized in the last 12 minutes that you are one — (Laughter) to you I say: embrace your many passions. Follow your curiosity down those rabbit holes. Explore your intersections. Embracing our inner wiring leads to a happier, more authentic life. And perhaps more importantly — multipotentialites, the world needs us. Thank you. (Applause)
Climate change is happening. Here's how we adapt	{0: 'Climate researcher Alice Bows-Larkin connects her academic research to the broader policy context, helping create policies to deal with our changing planet.'}	TEDGlobalLondon	Over our lifetimes, we've all contributed to climate change. Actions, choices and behaviors will have led to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. And I think that that's quite a powerful thought. But it does have the potential to make us feel guilty when we think about decisions we might have made around where to travel to, how often and how, about the energy that we choose to use in our homes or in our workplaces, or quite simply the lifestyles that we lead and enjoy. But we can also turn that thought on its head, and think that if we've had such a profound but a negative impact on our climate already, then we have an opportunity to influence the amount of future climate change that we will need to adapt to. So we have a choice. We can either choose to start to take climate change seriously, and significantly cut and mitigate our greenhouse gas emissions, and then we will have to adapt to less of the climate change impacts in future. Alternatively, we can continue to really ignore the climate change problem. But if we do that, we are also choosing to adapt to very much more powerful climate impacts in future. And not only that. As people who live in countries with high per capita emissions, we're making that choice on behalf of others as well. But the choice that we don't have is a no climate change future. Over the last two decades, our government negotiators and policymakers have been coming together to discuss climate change, and they've been focused on avoiding a two-degree centigrade warming above pre-industrial levels. That's the temperature that's associated with dangerous impacts across a range of different indicators, to humans and to the environment. So two degrees centigrade constitutes dangerous climate change. But dangerous climate change can be subjective. So if we think about an extreme weather event that might happen in some part of the world, and if that happens in a part of the world where there is good infrastructure, where there are people that are well-insured and so on, then that impact can be disruptive. It can cause upset, it could cause cost. It could even cause some deaths. But if that exact same weather event happens in a part of the world where there is poor infrastructure, or where people are not well-insured, or they're not having good support networks, then that same climate change impact could be devastating. It could cause a significant loss of home, but it could also cause significant amounts of death. So this is a graph of the CO2 emissions at the left-hand side from fossil fuel and industry, and time from before the Industrial Revolution out towards the present day. And what's immediately striking about this is that emissions have been growing exponentially. If we focus in on a shorter period of time from 1950, we have established in 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, then rolling on a few years, in 2009 we had the Copenhagen Accord, where it established avoiding a two-degree temperature rise in keeping with the science and on the basis of equity. And then in 2012, we had the Rio+20 event. And all the way through, during all of these meetings and many others as well, emissions have continued to rise. And if we focus on our historical emission trend in recent years, and we put that together with our understanding of the direction of travel in our global economy, then we are much more on track for a four-degree centigrade global warming than we are for the two-degree centigrade. Now, let's just pause for a moment and think about this four-degree global average temperature. Most of our planet is actually made up of the sea. Now, because the sea has a greater thermal inertia than the land, the average temperatures over land are actually going to be higher than they are over the sea. The second thing is that we as human beings don't experience global average temperatures. We experience hot days, cold days, rainy days, especially if you live in Manchester like me. So now put yourself in a city center. Imagine somewhere in the world: Mumbai, Beijing, New York, London. It's the hottest day that you've ever experienced. There's sun beating down, there's concrete and glass all around you. Now imagine that same day — but it's six, eight, maybe 10 to 12 degrees warmer on that day during that heat wave. That's the kind of thing we're going to experience under a four-degree global average temperature scenario. And the problem with these extremes, and not just the temperature extremes, but also the extremes in terms of storms and other climate impacts, is our infrastructure is just not set up to deal with these sorts of events. So our roads and our rail networks have been designed to last for a long time and withstand only certain amounts of impacts in different parts of the world. And this is going to be extremely challenged. Our power stations are expected to be cooled by water to a certain temperature to remain effective and resilient. And our buildings are designed to be comfortable within a particular temperature range. And this is all going to be significantly challenged under a four-degree-type scenario. Our infrastructure has not been designed to cope with this. So if we go back, also thinking about four degrees, it's not just the direct impacts, but also some indirect impacts. So if we take food security, for example. Maize and wheat yields in some parts of the world are expected to be up to 40 percent lower under a four-degree scenario, rice up to 30 percent lower. This will be absolutely devastating for global food security. So all in all, the kinds of impacts anticipated under this four-degree centigrade scenario are going to be incompatible with global organized living. So back to our trajectories and our graphs of four degrees and two degrees. Is it reasonable still to focus on the two-degree path? There are quite a lot of my colleagues and other scientists who would say that it's now too late to avoid a two-degree warming. But I would just like to draw on my own research on energy systems, on food systems, aviation and also shipping, just to say that I think there is still a small fighting chance of avoiding this two-degree dangerous climate change. But we really need to get to grips with the numbers to work out how to do it. So if you focus in on this trajectory and these graphs, the yellow circle there highlights that the departure from the red four-degree pathway to the two-degree green pathway is immediate. And that's because of cumulative emissions, or the carbon budget. So in other words, because of the lights and the projectors that are on in this room right now, the CO2 that is going into our atmosphere as a result of that electricity consumption lasts a very long time. Some of it will be in our atmosphere for a century, maybe much longer. It will accumulate, and greenhouse gases tend to be cumulative. And that tells us something about these trajectories. First of all, it tells us that it's the area under these curves that matter, not where we reach at a particular date in future. And that's important, because it doesn't matter if we come up with some amazing whiz-bang technology to sort out our energy problem on the last day of 2049, just in the nick of time to sort things out. Because in the meantime, emissions will have accumulated. So if we continue on this red, four-degree centigrade scenario pathway, the longer we continue on it, that will need to be made up for in later years to keep the same carbon budget, to keep the same area under the curve, which means that that trajectory, the red one there, becomes steeper. So in other words, if we don't reduce emissions in the short to medium term, then we'll have to make more significant year-on-year emission reductions. We also know that we have to decarbonize our energy system. But if we don't start to cut emissions in the short to medium term, then we will have to do that even sooner. So this poses really big challenges for us. The other thing it does is tells us something about energy policy. If you live in a part of the world where per capita emissions are already high, it points us towards reducing energy demand. And that's because with all the will in the world, the large-scale engineering infrastructure that we need to roll out rapidly to decarbonize the supply side of our energy system is just simply not going to happen in time. So it doesn't matter whether we choose nuclear power or carbon capture and storage, upscale our biofuel production, or go for a much bigger roll-out of wind turbines and wave turbines. All of that will take time. So because it's the area under the curve that matters, we need to focus on energy efficiency, but also on energy conservation — in other words, using less energy. And if we do that, that also means that as we continue to roll out the supply-side technology, we will have less of a job to do if we've actually managed to reduce our energy consumption, because we will then need less infrastructure on the supply side. Another issue that we really need to grapple with is the issue of well-being and equity. There are many parts of the world where the standard of living needs to rise. Bbut with energy systems currently reliant on fossil fuel, as those economies grow so will emissions. And now, if we're all constrained by the same amount of carbon budget, that means that if some parts of the world's emissions are needing to rise, then other parts of the world's emissions need to reduce. So that poses very significant challenges for wealthy nations. Because according to our research, if you're in a country where per capita emissions are really high — so North America, Europe, Australia — emissions reductions of the order of 10 percent per year, and starting immediately, will be required for a good chance of avoiding the two-degree target. Let me just put that into context. The economist Nicholas Stern said that emission reductions of more than one percent per year had only ever been associated with economic recession or upheaval. So this poses huge challenges for the issue of economic growth, because if we have our high carbon infrastructure in place, it means that if our economies grow, then so do our emissions. So I'd just like to take a quote from a paper by myself and Kevin Anderson back in 2011 where we said that to avoid the two-degree framing of dangerous climate change, economic growth needs to be exchanged at least temporarily for a period of planned austerity in wealthy nations. This is a really difficult message to take, because what it suggests is that we really need to do things differently. This is not about just incremental change. This is about doing things differently, about whole system change, and sometimes it's about doing less things. And this applies to all of us, whatever sphere of influence we have. So it could be from writing to our local politician to talking to our boss at work or being the boss at work, or talking with our friends and family, or, quite simply, changing our lifestyles. Because we really need to make significant change. At the moment, we're choosing a four-degree scenario. If we really want to avoid the two-degree scenario, there really is no time like the present to act. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Alice, basically what you're saying, the talk is, unless wealthy nations start cutting 10 percent per year the emissions now, this year, not in 2020 or '25, we are going to go straight to the four-plus-degree scenario. I am wondering what's your take on the cut by 70 percent for 2070. Alice Bows-Larkin: Yeah, it's just nowhere near enough to avoid two degrees. One of the things that often — when there are these modeling studies that look at what we need to do, is they tend to hugely overestimate how quickly other countries in the world can start to reduce emissions. So they make kind of heroic assumptions about that. The more we do that, because it's the cumulative emissions, the short-term stuff that really matters. So it does make a huge difference. If a big country like China, for example, continues to grow even for just a few extra years, that will make a big difference to when we need to decarbonize. So I don't think we can even say when it will be, because it all depends on what we have to do in the short term. But I think we've just got huge scope, and we don't pull those levers that allow us to reduce the energy demand, which is a shame. BG: Alice, thank you for coming to TED and sharing this data. ABL: Thank you. (Applause)
Soon we'll cure diseases with a cell, not a pill	{0: 'When he’s not ferreting out the links between stem cells and malignant blood disease, Siddhartha Mukherjee writes and lectures on the history (and future) of medicine.'}	TED2015	I want to talk to you about the future of medicine. But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about the past. Now, throughout much of the recent history of medicine, we've thought about illness and treatment in terms of a profoundly simple model. In fact, the model is so simple that you could summarize it in six words: have disease, take pill, kill something. Now, the reason for the dominance of this model is of course the antibiotic revolution. Many of you might not know this, but we happen to be celebrating the hundredth year of the introduction of antibiotics into the United States. But what you do know is that that introduction was nothing short of transformative. Here you had a chemical, either from the natural world or artificially synthesized in the laboratory, and it would course through your body, it would find its target, lock into its target — a microbe or some part of a microbe — and then turn off a lock and a key with exquisite deftness, exquisite specificity. And you would end up taking a previously fatal, lethal disease — a pneumonia, syphilis, tuberculosis — and transforming that into a curable, or treatable illness. You have a pneumonia, you take penicillin, you kill the microbe and you cure the disease. So seductive was this idea, so potent the metaphor of lock and key and killing something, that it really swept through biology. It was a transformation like no other. And we've really spent the last 100 years trying to replicate that model over and over again in noninfectious diseases, in chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension and heart disease. And it's worked, but it's only worked partly. Let me show you. You know, if you take the entire universe of all chemical reactions in the human body, every chemical reaction that your body is capable of, most people think that that number is on the order of a million. Let's call it a million. And now you ask the question, what number or fraction of reactions can actually be targeted by the entire pharmacopoeia, all of medicinal chemistry? That number is 250. The rest is chemical darkness. In other words, 0.025 percent of all chemical reactions in your body are actually targetable by this lock and key mechanism. You know, if you think about human physiology as a vast global telephone network with interacting nodes and interacting pieces, then all of our medicinal chemistry is operating on one tiny corner at the edge, the outer edge, of that network. It's like all of our pharmaceutical chemistry is a pole operator in Wichita, Kansas who is tinkering with about 10 or 15 telephone lines. So what do we do about this idea? What if we reorganized this approach? In fact, it turns out that the natural world gives us a sense of how one might think about illness in a radically different way, rather than disease, medicine, target. In fact, the natural world is organized hierarchically upwards, not downwards, but upwards, and we begin with a self-regulating, semi-autonomous unit called a cell. These self-regulating, semi-autonomous units give rise to self-regulating, semi-autonomous units called organs, and these organs coalesce to form things called humans, and these organisms ultimately live in environments, which are partly self-regulating and partly semi-autonomous. What's nice about this scheme, this hierarchical scheme building upwards rather than downwards, is that it allows us to think about illness as well in a somewhat different way. Take a disease like cancer. Since the 1950s, we've tried rather desperately to apply this lock and key model to cancer. We've tried to kill cells using a variety of chemotherapies or targeted therapies, and as most of us know, that's worked. It's worked for diseases like leukemia. It's worked for some forms of breast cancer, but eventually you run to the ceiling of that approach. And it's only in the last 10 years or so that we've begun to think about using the immune system, remembering that in fact the cancer cell doesn't grow in a vacuum. It actually grows in a human organism. And could you use the organismal capacity, the fact that human beings have an immune system, to attack cancer? In fact, it's led to the some of the most spectacular new medicines in cancer. And finally there's the level of the environment, isn't there? You know, we don't think of cancer as altering the environment. But let me give you an example of a profoundly carcinogenic environment. It's called a prison. You take loneliness, you take depression, you take confinement, and you add to that, rolled up in a little white sheet of paper, one of the most potent neurostimulants that we know, called nicotine, and you add to that one of the most potent addictive substances that you know, and you have a pro-carcinogenic environment. But you can have anti-carcinogenic environments too. There are attempts to create milieus, change the hormonal milieu for breast cancer, for instance. We're trying to change the metabolic milieu for other forms of cancer. Or take another disease, like depression. Again, working upwards, since the 1960s and 1970s, we've tried, again, desperately to turn off molecules that operate between nerve cells — serotonin, dopamine — and tried to cure depression that way, and that's worked, but then that reached the limit. And we now know that what you really probably need to do is to change the physiology of the organ, the brain, rewire it, remodel it, and that, of course, we know study upon study has shown that talk therapy does exactly that, and study upon study has shown that talk therapy combined with medicines, pills, really is much more effective than either one alone. Can we imagine a more immersive environment that will change depression? Can you lock out the signals that elicit depression? Again, moving upwards along this hierarchical chain of organization. What's really at stake perhaps here is not the medicine itself but a metaphor. Rather than killing something, in the case of the great chronic degenerative diseases — kidney failure, diabetes, hypertension, osteoarthritis — maybe what we really need to do is change the metaphor to growing something. And that's the key, perhaps, to reframing our thinking about medicine. Now, this idea of changing, of creating a perceptual shift, as it were, came home to me to roost in a very personal manner about 10 years ago. About 10 years ago — I've been a runner most of my life — I went for a run, a Saturday morning run, I came back and woke up and I basically couldn't move. My right knee was swollen up, and you could hear that ominous crunch of bone against bone. And one of the perks of being a physician is that you get to order your own MRIs. And I had an MRI the next week, and it looked like that. Essentially, the meniscus of cartilage that is between bone had been completely torn and the bone itself had been shattered. Now, if you're looking at me and feeling sorry, let me tell you a few facts. If I was to take an MRI of every person in this audience, 60 percent of you would show signs of bone degeneration and cartilage degeneration like this. 85 percent of all women by the age of 70 would show moderate to severe cartilage degeneration. 50 to 60 percent of the men in this audience would also have such signs. So this is a very common disease. Well, the second perk of being a physician is that you can get to experiment on your own ailments. So about 10 years ago we began, we brought this process into the laboratory, and we began to do simple experiments, mechanically trying to fix this degeneration. We tried to inject chemicals into the knee spaces of animals to try to reverse cartilage degeneration, and to put a short summary on a very long and painful process, essentially it came to naught. Nothing happened. And then about seven years ago, we had a research student from Australia. The nice thing about Australians is that they're habitually used to looking at the world upside down. (Laughter) And so Dan suggested to me, "You know, maybe it isn't a mechanical problem. Maybe it isn't a chemical problem. Maybe it's a stem cell problem." In other words, he had two hypotheses. Number one, there is such a thing as a skeletal stem cell — a skeletal stem cell that builds up the entire vertebrate skeleton, bone, cartilage and the fibrous elements of skeleton, just like there's a stem cell in blood, just like there's a stem cell in the nervous system. And two, that maybe that, the degeneration or dysfunction of this stem cell is what's causing osteochondral arthritis, a very common ailment. So really the question was, were we looking for a pill when we should have really been looking for a cell. So we switched our models, and now we began to look for skeletal stem cells. And to cut again a long story short, about five years ago, we found these cells. They live inside the skeleton. Here's a schematic and then a real photograph of one of them. The white stuff is bone, and these red columns that you see and the yellow cells are cells that have arisen from one single skeletal stem cell — columns of cartilage, columns of bone coming out of a single cell. These cells are fascinating. They have four properties. Number one is that they live where they're expected to live. They live just underneath the surface of the bone, underneath cartilage. You know, in biology, it's location, location, location. And they move into the appropriate areas and form bone and cartilage. That's one. Here's an interesting property. You can take them out of the vertebrate skeleton, you can culture them in petri dishes in the laboratory, and they are dying to form cartilage. Remember how we couldn't form cartilage for love or money? These cells are dying to form cartilage. They form their own furls of cartilage around themselves. They're also, number three, the most efficient repairers of fractures that we've ever encountered. This is a little bone, a mouse bone that we fractured and then let it heal by itself. These stem cells have come in and repaired, in yellow, the bone, in white, the cartilage, almost completely. So much so that if you label them with a fluorescent dye you can see them like some kind of peculiar cellular glue coming into the area of a fracture, fixing it locally and then stopping their work. Now, the fourth one is the most ominous, and that is that their numbers decline precipitously, precipitously, tenfold, fiftyfold, as you age. And so what had happened, really, is that we found ourselves in a perceptual shift. We had gone hunting for pills but we ended up finding theories. And in some ways we had hooked ourselves back onto this idea: cells, organisms, environments, because we were now thinking about bone stem cells, we were thinking about arthritis in terms of a cellular disease. And then the next question was, are there organs? Can you build this as an organ outside the body? Can you implant cartilage into areas of trauma? And perhaps most interestingly, can you ascend right up and create environments? You know, we know that exercise remodels bone, but come on, none of us is going to exercise. So could you imagine ways of passively loading and unloading bone so that you can recreate or regenerate degenerating cartilage? And perhaps more interesting, and more importantly, the question is, can you apply this model more globally outside medicine? What's at stake, as I said before, is not killing something, but growing something. And it raises a series of, I think, some of the most interesting questions about how we think about medicine in the future. Could your medicine be a cell and not a pill? How would we grow these cells? What we would we do to stop the malignant growth of these cells? We heard about the problems of unleashing growth. Could we implant suicide genes into these cells to stop them from growing? Could your medicine be an organ that's created outside the body and then implanted into the body? Could that stop some of the degeneration? What if the organ needed to have memory? In cases of diseases of the nervous system some of those organs had memory. How could we implant those memories back in? Could we store these organs? Would each organ have to be developed for an individual human being and put back? And perhaps most puzzlingly, could your medicine be an environment? Could you patent an environment? You know, in every culture, shamans have been using environments as medicines. Could we imagine that for our future? I've talked a lot about models. I began this talk with models. So let me end with some thoughts about model building. That's what we do as scientists. You know, when an architect builds a model, he or she is trying to show you a world in miniature. But when a scientist is building a model, he or she is trying to show you the world in metaphor. He or she is trying to create a new way of seeing. The former is a scale shift. The latter is a perceptual shift. Now, antibiotics created such a perceptual shift in our way of thinking about medicine that it really colored, distorted, very successfully, the way we've thought about medicine for the last hundred years. But we need new models to think about medicine in the future. That's what's at stake. You know, there's a popular trope out there that the reason we haven't had the transformative impact on the treatment of illness is because we don't have powerful-enough drugs, and that's partly true. But perhaps the real reason is that we don't have powerful-enough ways of thinking about medicines. It's certainly true that it would be lovely to have new medicines. But perhaps what's really at stake are three more intangible M's: mechanisms, models, metaphors. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: I really like this metaphor. How does it link in? There's a lot of talk in technologyland about the personalization of medicine, that we have all this data and that medical treatments of the future will be for you specifically, your genome, your current context. Does that apply to this model you've got here? Siddhartha Mukherjee: It's a very interesting question. We've thought about personalization of medicine very much in terms of genomics. That's because the gene is such a dominant metaphor, again, to use that same word, in medicine today, that we think the genome will drive the personalization of medicine. But of course the genome is just the bottom of a long chain of being, as it were. That chain of being, really the first organized unit of that, is the cell. So, if we are really going to deliver in medicine in this way, we have to think of personalizing cellular therapies, and then personalizing organ or organismal therapies, and ultimately personalizing immersion therapies for the environment. So I think at every stage, you know — there's that metaphor, there's turtles all the way. Well, in this, there's personalization all the way. CA: So when you say medicine could be a cell and not a pill, you're talking about potentially your own cells. SM: Absolutely. CA: So converted to stem cells, perhaps tested against all kinds of drugs or something, and prepared. SM: And there's no perhaps. This is what we're doing. This is what's happening, and in fact, we're slowly moving, not away from genomics, but incorporating genomics into what we call multi-order, semi-autonomous, self-regulating systems, like cells, like organs, like environments. CA: Thank you so much. SM: Pleasure. Thanks.
Design at the intersection of technology and biology	{0: 'From the micro scale to the building scale, Neri Oxman imagines and creates structures and objects that are inspired, informed and engineered by, for and with nature.'}	TED2015	Two twin domes, two radically opposed design cultures. One is made of thousands of steel parts, the other of a single silk thread. One is synthetic, the other organic. One is imposed on the environment, the other creates it. One is designed for nature, the other is designed by her. Michelangelo said that when he looked at raw marble, he saw a figure struggling to be free. The chisel was Michelangelo's only tool. But living things are not chiseled. They grow. And in our smallest units of life, our cells, we carry all the information that's required for every other cell to function and to replicate. Tools also have consequences. At least since the Industrial Revolution, the world of design has been dominated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production. Assembly lines have dictated a world made of parts, framing the imagination of designers and architects who have been trained to think about their objects as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions. But you don't find homogenous material assemblies in nature. Take human skin, for example. Our facial skins are thin with large pores. Our back skins are thicker, with small pores. One acts mainly as filter, the other mainly as barrier, and yet it's the same skin: no parts, no assemblies. It's a system that gradually varies its functionality by varying elasticity. So here this is a split screen to represent my split world view, the split personality of every designer and architect operating today between the chisel and the gene, between machine and organism, between assembly and growth, between Henry Ford and Charles Darwin. These two worldviews, my left brain and right brain, analysis and synthesis, will play out on the two screens behind me. My work, at its simplest level, is about uniting these two worldviews, moving away from assembly and closer into growth. You're probably asking yourselves: Why now? Why was this not possible 10 or even five years ago? We live in a very special time in history, a rare time, a time when the confluence of four fields is giving designers access to tools we've never had access to before. These fields are computational design, allowing us to design complex forms with simple code; additive manufacturing, letting us produce parts by adding material rather than carving it out; materials engineering, which lets us design the behavior of materials in high resolution; and synthetic biology, enabling us to design new biological functionality by editing DNA. And at the intersection of these four fields, my team and I create. Please meet the minds and hands of my students. We design objects and products and structures and tools across scales, from the large-scale, like this robotic arm with an 80-foot diameter reach with a vehicular base that will one day soon print entire buildings, to nanoscale graphics made entirely of genetically engineered microorganisms that glow in the dark. Here we've reimagined the mashrabiya, an archetype of ancient Arabic architecture, and created a screen where every aperture is uniquely sized to shape the form of light and heat moving through it. In our next project, we explore the possibility of creating a cape and skirt — this was for a Paris fashion show with Iris van Herpen — like a second skin that are made of a single part, stiff at the contours, flexible around the waist. Together with my long-term 3D printing collaborator Stratasys, we 3D-printed this cape and skirt with no seams between the cells, and I'll show more objects like it. This helmet combines stiff and soft materials in 20-micron resolution. This is the resolution of a human hair. It's also the resolution of a CT scanner. That designers have access to such high-resolution analytic and synthetic tools, enables to design products that fit not only the shape of our bodies, but also the physiological makeup of our tissues. Next, we designed an acoustic chair, a chair that would be at once structural, comfortable and would also absorb sound. Professor Carter, my collaborator, and I turned to nature for inspiration, and by designing this irregular surface pattern, it becomes sound-absorbent. We printed its surface out of 44 different properties, varying in rigidity, opacity and color, corresponding to pressure points on the human body. Its surface, as in nature, varies its functionality not by adding another material or another assembly, but by continuously and delicately varying material property. But is nature ideal? Are there no parts in nature? I wasn't raised in a religious Jewish home, but when I was young, my grandmother used to tell me stories from the Hebrew Bible, and one of them stuck with me and came to define much of what I care about. As she recounts: "On the third day of Creation, God commands the Earth to grow a fruit-bearing fruit tree." For this first fruit tree, there was to be no differentiation between trunk, branches, leaves and fruit. The whole tree was a fruit. Instead, the land grew trees that have bark and stems and flowers. The land created a world made of parts. I often ask myself, "What would design be like if objects were made of a single part? Would we return to a better state of creation?" So we looked for that biblical material, that fruit-bearing fruit tree kind of material, and we found it. The second-most abundant biopolymer on the planet is called chitin, and some 100 million tons of it are produced every year by organisms such as shrimps, crabs, scorpions and butterflies. We thought if we could tune its properties, we could generate structures that are multifunctional out of a single part. So that's what we did. We called Legal Seafood — (Laughter) we ordered a bunch of shrimp shells, we grinded them and we produced chitosan paste. By varying chemical concentrations, we were able to achieve a wide array of properties — from dark, stiff and opaque, to light, soft and transparent. In order to print the structures in large scale, we built a robotically controlled extrusion system with multiple nozzles. The robot would vary material properties on the fly and create these 12-foot-long structures made of a single material, 100 percent recyclable. When the parts are ready, they're left to dry and find a form naturally upon contact with air. So why are we still designing with plastics? The air bubbles that were a byproduct of the printing process were used to contain photosynthetic microorganisms that first appeared on our planet 3.5 billion year ago, as we learned yesterday. Together with our collaborators at Harvard and MIT, we embedded bacteria that were genetically engineered to rapidly capture carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into sugar. For the first time, we were able to generate structures that would seamlessly transition from beam to mesh, and if scaled even larger, to windows. A fruit-bearing fruit tree. Working with an ancient material, one of the first lifeforms on the planet, plenty of water and a little bit of synthetic biology, we were able to transform a structure made of shrimp shells into an architecture that behaves like a tree. And here's the best part: for objects designed to biodegrade, put them in the sea, and they will nourish marine life; place them in soil, and they will help grow a tree. The setting for our next exploration using the same design principles was the solar system. We looked for the possibility of creating life-sustaining clothing for interplanetary voyages. To do that, we needed to contain bacteria and be able to control their flow. So like the periodic table, we came up with our own table of the elements: new lifeforms that were computationally grown, additively manufactured and biologically augmented. I like to think of synthetic biology as liquid alchemy, only instead of transmuting precious metals, you're synthesizing new biological functionality inside very small channels. It's called microfluidics. We 3D-printed our own channels in order to control the flow of these liquid bacterial cultures. In our first piece of clothing, we combined two microorganisms. The first is cyanobacteria. It lives in our oceans and in freshwater ponds. And the second, E. coli, the bacterium that inhabits the human gut. One converts light into sugar, the other consumes that sugar and produces biofuels useful for the built environment. Now, these two microorganisms never interact in nature. In fact, they never met each other. They've been here, engineered for the first time, to have a relationship inside a piece of clothing. Think of it as evolution not by natural selection, but evolution by design. In order to contain these relationships, we've created a single channel that resembles the digestive tract, that will help flow these bacteria and alter their function along the way. We then started growing these channels on the human body, varying material properties according to the desired functionality. Where we wanted more photosynthesis, we would design more transparent channels. This wearable digestive system, when it's stretched end to end, spans 60 meters. This is half the length of a football field, and 10 times as long as our small intestines. And here it is for the first time unveiled at TED — our first photosynthetic wearable, liquid channels glowing with life inside a wearable clothing. (Applause) Thank you. Mary Shelley said, "We are unfashioned creatures, but only half made up." What if design could provide that other half? What if we could create structures that would augment living matter? What if we could create personal microbiomes that would scan our skins, repair damaged tissue and sustain our bodies? Think of this as a form of edited biology. This entire collection, Wanderers, that was named after planets, was not to me really about fashion per se, but it provided an opportunity to speculate about the future of our race on our planet and beyond, to combine scientific insight with lots of mystery and to move away from the age of the machine to a new age of symbiosis between our bodies, the microorganisms that we inhabit, our products and even our buildings. I call this material ecology. To do this, we always need to return back to nature. By now, you know that a 3D printer prints material in layers. You also know that nature doesn't. It grows. It adds with sophistication. This silkworm cocoon, for example, creates a highly sophisticated architecture, a home inside which to metamorphisize. No additive manufacturing today gets even close to this level of sophistication. It does so by combining not two materials, but two proteins in different concentrations. One acts as the structure, the other is the glue, or the matrix, holding those fibers together. And this happens across scales. The silkworm first attaches itself to the environment — it creates a tensile structure — and it then starts spinning a compressive cocoon. Tension and compression, the two forces of life, manifested in a single material. In order to better understand how this complex process works, we glued a tiny earth magnet to the head of a silkworm, to the spinneret. We placed it inside a box with magnetic sensors, and that allowed us to create this 3-dimensional point cloud and visualize the complex architecture of the silkworm cocoon. However, when we placed the silkworm on a flat patch, not inside a box, we realized it would spin a flat cocoon and it would still healthily metamorphisize. So we started designing different environments, different scaffolds, and we discovered that the shape, the composition, the structure of the cocoon, was directly informed by the environment. Silkworms are often boiled to death inside their cocoons, their silk unraveled and used in the textile industry. We realized that designing these templates allowed us to give shape to raw silk without boiling a single cocoon. (Applause) They would healthily metamorphisize, and we would be able to create these things. So we scaled this process up to architectural scale. We had a robot spin the template out of silk, and we placed it on our site. We knew silkworms migrated toward darker and colder areas, so we used a sun path diagram to reveal the distribution of light and heat on our structure. We then created holes, or apertures, that would lock in the rays of light and heat, distributing those silkworms on the structure. We were ready to receive the caterpillars. We ordered 6,500 silkworms from an online silk farm. And after four weeks of feeding, they were ready to spin with us. We placed them carefully at the bottom rim of the scaffold, and as they spin they pupate, they mate, they lay eggs, and life begins all over again — just like us but much, much shorter. Bucky Fuller said that tension is the great integrity, and he was right. As they spin biological silk over robotically spun silk, they give this entire pavilion its integrity. And over two to three weeks, 6,500 silkworms spin 6,500 kilometers. In a curious symmetry, this is also the length of the Silk Road. The moths, after they hatch, produce 1.5 million eggs. This could be used for 250 additional pavilions for the future. So here they are, the two worldviews. One spins silk out of a robotic arm, the other fills in the gaps. If the final frontier of design is to breathe life into the products and the buildings around us, to form a two-material ecology, then designers must unite these two worldviews. Which brings us back, of course, to the beginning. Here's to a new age of design, a new age of creation, that takes us from a nature-inspired design to a design-inspired nature, and that demands of us for the first time that we mother nature. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)
You can grow new brain cells. Here's how	{0: 'Sandrine Thuret studies the way adult brains create new nerve cells in the hippocampus -- a brain area involved in memory and mood.'}	TED@BCG London	Can we, as adults, grow new nerve cells? There's still some confusion about that question, as this is a fairly new field of research. For example, I was talking to one of my colleagues, Robert, who is an oncologist, and he was telling me, "Sandrine, this is puzzling. Some of my patients that have been told they are cured of their cancer still develop symptoms of depression." And I responded to him, "Well, from my point of view that makes sense. The drug you give to your patients that stops the cancer cells multiplying also stops the newborn neurons being generated in their brain." And then Robert looked at me like I was crazy and said, "But Sandrine, these are adult patients — adults do not grow new nerve cells." And much to his surprise, I said, "Well actually, we do." And this is a phenomenon that we call neurogenesis. [Neurogenesis] Now Robert is not a neuroscientist, and when he went to medical school he was not taught what we know now — that the adult brain can generate new nerve cells. So Robert, you know, being the good doctor that he is, wanted to come to my lab to understand the topic a little bit better. And I took him for a tour of one of the most exciting parts of the brain when it comes to neurogenesis — and this is the hippocampus. So this is this gray structure in the center of the brain. And what we've known already for very long, is that this is important for learning, memory, mood and emotion. However, what we have learned more recently is that this is one of the unique structures of the adult brain where new neurons can be generated. And if we slice through the hippocampus and zoom in, what you actually see here in blue is a newborn neuron in an adult mouse brain. So when it comes to the human brain — my colleague Jonas Frisén from the Karolinska Institutet, has estimated that we produce 700 new neurons per day in the hippocampus. You might think this is not much, compared to the billions of neurons we have. But by the time we turn 50, we will have all exchanged the neurons we were born with in that structure with adult-born neurons. So why are these new neurons important and what are their functions? First, we know that they're important for learning and memory. And in the lab we have shown that if we block the ability of the adult brain to produce new neurons in the hippocampus, then we block certain memory abilities. And this is especially new and true for spatial recognition — so like, how you navigate your way in the city. We are still learning a lot, and neurons are not only important for memory capacity, but also for the quality of the memory. And they will have been helpful to add time to our memory and they will help differentiate very similar memories, like: how do you find your bike that you park at the station every day in the same area, but in a slightly different position? And more interesting to my colleague Robert is the research we have been doing on neurogenesis and depression. So in an animal model of depression, we have seen that we have a lower level of neurogenesis. And if we give antidepressants, then we increase the production of these newborn neurons, and we decrease the symptoms of depression, establishing a clear link between neurogenesis and depression. But moreover, if you just block neurogenesis, then you block the efficacy of the antidepressant. So by then, Robert had understood that very likely his patients were suffering from depression even after being cured of their cancer, because the cancer drug had stopped newborn neurons from being generated. And it will take time to generate new neurons that reach normal functions. So, collectively, now we think we have enough evidence to say that neurogenesis is a target of choice if we want to improve memory formation or mood, or even prevent the decline associated with aging, or associated with stress. So the next question is: can we control neurogenesis? The answer is yes. And we are now going to do a little quiz. I'm going to give you a set of behaviors and activities, and you tell me if you think they will increase neurogenesis or if they will decrease neurogenesis. Are we ready? OK, let's go. So what about learning? Increasing? Yes. Learning will increase the production of these new neurons. How about stress? Yes, stress will decrease the production of new neurons in the hippocampus. How about sleep deprivation? Indeed, it will decrease neurogenesis. How about sex? Oh, wow! (Laughter) Yes, you are right, it will increase the production of new neurons. However, it's all about balance here. We don't want to fall in a situation — (Laughter) about too much sex leading to sleep deprivation. (Laughter) How about getting older? So the neurogenesis rate will decrease as we get older, but it is still occurring. And then finally, how about running? I will let you judge that one by yourself. So this is one of the first studies that was carried out by one of my mentors, Rusty Gage from the Salk Institute, showing that the environment can have an impact on the production of new neurons. And here you see a section of the hippocampus of a mouse that had no running wheel in its cage. And the little black dots you see are actually newborn neurons-to-be. And now, you see a section of the hippocampus of a mouse that had a running wheel in its cage. So you see the massive increase of the black dots representing the new neurons-to-be. So activity impacts neurogenesis, but that's not all. What you eat will have an effect on the production of new neurons in the hippocampus. So here we have a sample of diet — of nutrients that have been shown to have efficacy. And I'm just going to point a few out to you: Calorie restriction of 20 to 30 percent will increase neurogenesis. Intermittent fasting — spacing the time between your meals — will increase neurogenesis. Intake of flavonoids, which are contained in dark chocolate or blueberries, will increase neurogenesis. Omega-3 fatty acids, present in fatty fish, like salmon, will increase the production of these new neurons. Conversely, a diet rich in high saturated fat will have a negative impact on neurogenesis. Ethanol — intake of alcohol — will decrease neurogenesis. However, not everything is lost; resveratrol, which is contained in red wine, has been shown to promote the survival of these new neurons. So next time you are at a dinner party, you might want to reach for this possibly "neurogenesis-neutral" drink. (Laughter) And then finally, let me point out the last one — a quirky one. So Japanese groups are fascinated with food textures, and they have shown that actually soft diet impairs neurogenesis, as opposed to food that requires mastication — chewing — or crunchy food. So all of this data, where we need to look at the cellular level, has been generated using animal models. But this diet has also been given to human participants, and what we could see is that the diet modulates memory and mood in the same direction as it modulates neurogenesis, such as: calorie restriction will improve memory capacity, whereas a high-fat diet will exacerbate symptoms of depression — as opposed to omega-3 fatty acids, which increase neurogenesis, and also help to decrease the symptoms of depression. So we think that the effect of diet on mental health, on memory and mood, is actually mediated by the production of the new neurons in the hippocampus. And it's not only what you eat, but it's also the texture of the food, when you eat it and how much of it you eat. On our side — neuroscientists interested in neurogenesis — we need to understand better the function of these new neurons, and how we can control their survival and their production. We also need to find a way to protect the neurogenesis of Robert's patients. And on your side — I leave you in charge of your neurogenesis. Thank you. (Applause) Margaret Heffernan: Fantastic research, Sandrine. Now, I told you you changed my life — I now eat a lot of blueberries. Sandrine Thuret: Very good. MH: I'm really interested in the running thing. Do I have to run? Or is it really just about aerobic exercise, getting oxygen to the brain? Could it be any kind of vigorous exercise? ST: So for the moment, we can't really say if it's just the running itself, but we think that anything that indeed will increase the production — or moving the blood flow to the brain, should be beneficial. MH: So I don't have to get a running wheel in my office? ST: No, you don't! MH: Oh, what a relief! That's wonderful. Sandrine Thuret, thank you so much. ST: Thank you, Margaret. (Applause)
Home is a song I've always remembered	{0: 'Whether they’re sung in in English or his native Faroese, Teitur laces his deceptively innocent songs with often stinging hooks.'}	TED2015	(Guitar music) I was just thinking that I have been missing you way too long There's something inside this weary head that wants us to love just instead But I was just thinking, merely thinking I've got loads of pictures, I've got the one of you in that dancing dress But man I feel silly in that dim light Just after doing you by the sight of my Kodak delights, I am sinking, merely sinking I think about long distance rates instead of kissing you babe I'm a singer without a song If I wait for you longer my affection is stronger and I ... I was just thinking, merely thinking that this boat is sinking I'm tired of postcards, especially the ones with cute dogs and cupids I'm tired of calling you and missing you and dreaming I slept with you Don't get me wrong I still desperately love you inside this weary head I just want us to love just instead But I was just thinking and thinking, merely thinking I think about long distance rates instead of kissing you babe and time is running me still If I wait for you longer my affection is stronger I ... I was just thinking I ... I was just thinking that I'm tired of calling you once a week thinking of long distance rates instead of kissing you So baby I'm sinking, merely sinking (Guitar music ends) (Applause) Thank you. Singing is sharing. When you sing, you have to know what you're talking about intimately, and you have to be willing to share this insight and give away a piece of yourself. I look for this intention to share in everything, and I ask: what are the intentions behind this architecture or this product or this restaurant or this meal? And if your intentions are to impress people or to get the big applause at the end, then you are taking, not giving. And this is a song that's about — it's the kind of song that everyone has their version of. This song is called "Home," and it's sort of a "This is where I'm from, nice to meet you all," kind of song. (Laughter) (Applause) (Piano music) Home is the sound of birds early in the morning Home is a song I've always remembered Home is the memory of my first day in school Home is the books that I carry around Home is an alley in a faraway town Home is the places I’ve been and where I’d like to go Home I'm always gonna feel at home No matter where I may roam I'm always gonna find my way back home No matter how far I’m gone I’m always gonna feel this longing No matter where I might stay Home is a feather twirling in the air Home is flowers in a windowsill Home is all the things she said to me Home is a photo I never threw away Home is the smile on my face when I die Home is the taste of an apple pie I met a woman, she always lived in the same place And she said home is where you’re born and raised And I met a man, he sat looking out to the sea And he said home is where you want to be I met a girl in some downtown bar And she said I'll have whatever he's having And I asked her how come we never met before? And she said all my life I’ve been trying to get a place of my own I’m always gonna feel at home No matter where I may roam Always gonna find my way back home No matter how far I’m gone I'm always gonna feel this longing No matter where I might stay (Piano music) (Piano music ends) (Applause)
How we can make the world a better place by 2030	{0: 'Michael Green is part of the team that has created the Social Progress Index, a standard to rank societies based on how they meet the needs of citizens.'}	TEDGlobal>London	Do you think the world is going to be a better place next year? In the next decade? Can we end hunger, achieve gender equality, halt climate change, all in the next 15 years? Well, according to the governments of the world, yes we can. In the last few days, the leaders of the world, meeting at the UN in New York, agreed a new set of Global Goals for the development of the world to 2030. And here they are: these goals are the product of a massive consultation exercise. The Global Goals are who we, humanity, want to be. Now that's the plan, but can we get there? Can this vision for a better world really be achieved? Well, I'm here today because we've run the numbers, and the answer, shockingly, is that maybe we actually can. But not with business as usual. Now, the idea that the world is going to get a better place may seem a little fanciful. Watch the news every day and the world seems to be going backwards, not forwards. And let's be frank: it's pretty easy to be skeptical about grand announcements coming out of the UN. But please, I invite you to suspend your disbelief for just a moment. Because back in 2001, the UN agreed another set of goals, the Millennium Development Goals. And the flagship target there was to halve the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015. The target was to take from a baseline of 1990, when 36 percent of the world's population lived in poverty, to get to 18 percent poverty this year. Did we hit this target? Well, no, we didn't. We exceeded it. This year, global poverty is going to fall to 12 percent. Now, that's still not good enough, and the world does still have plenty of problems. But the pessimists and doomsayers who say that the world can't get better are simply wrong. So how did we achieve this success? Well, a lot of it was because of economic growth. Some of the biggest reductions in poverty were in countries such as China and India, which have seen rapid economic growth in recent years. So can we pull off the same trick again? Can economic growth get us to the Global Goals? Well, to answer that question, we need to benchmark where the world is today against the Global Goals and figure out how far we have to travel. But that ain't easy, because the Global Goals aren't just ambitious, they're also pretty complicated. Over 17 goals, there are then 169 targets and literally hundreds of indicators. Also, while some of the goals are pretty specific — end hunger — others are a lot vaguer — promote peaceful and tolerant societies. So to help us with this benchmarking, I'm going to use a tool called the Social Progress Index. What this does is measures all the stuff the Global Goals are trying to achieve, but sums it up into a single number that we can use as our benchmark and track progress over time. The Social Progress Index basically asks three fundamental questions about a society. First of all, does everyone have the basic needs of survival: food, water, shelter, safety? Secondly, does everyone have the building blocks of a better life: education, information, health and a sustainable environment? And does everyone have the opportunity to improve their lives, through rights, freedom of choice, freedom from discrimination, and access to the world's most advanced knowledge? The Social Progress Index sums all this together using 52 indicators to create an aggregate score on a scale of 0 to 100. And what we find is that there's a wide diversity of performance in the world today. The highest performing country, Norway, scores 88. The lowest performing country, Central African Republic, scores 31. And we can add up all the countries together, weighting for the different population sizes, and that global score is 61. In concrete terms, that means that the average human being is living on a level of social progress about the same of Cuba or Kazakhstan today. That's where we are today: 61 out of 100. What do we have to get to to achieve the Global Goals? Now, the Global Goals are certainly ambitious, but they're not about turning the world into Norway in just 15 years. So having looked at the numbers, my estimate is that a score of 75 would not only be a giant leap forward in human well-being, it would also count as hitting the Global Goals target. So there's our target, 75 out of 100. Can we get there? Well, the Social Progress Index can help us calculate this, because as you might have noticed, there are no economic indicators in there; there's no GDP or economic growth in the Social Progress Index model. And what that lets us do is understand the relationship between economic growth and social progress. Let me show you on this chart. So here on the vertical axis, I've put social progress, the stuff the Global Goals are trying to achieve. Higher is better. And then on the horizontal axis, is GDP per capita. Further to the right means richer. And in there, I'm now going to put all the countries of the world, each one represented by a dot, and on top of that I'm going to put the regression line that shows the average relationship. And what this tells us is that as we get richer, social progress does tend to improve. However, as we get richer, each extra dollar of GDP is buying us less and less social progress. And now we can use this information to start building our forecast. So here is the world in 2015. We have a social progress score of 61 and a GDP per capita of $14,000. And the place we're trying to get to, remember, is 75, that Global Goals target. So here we are today, $14,000 per capita GDP. How rich are we going to be in 2030? That's what we need to know next. Well, the best forecast we can find comes from the US Department of Agriculture, which forecasts 3.1 percent average global economic growth over the next 15 years, which means that in 2030, if they're right, per capita GDP will be about $23,000. So now the question is: if we get that much richer, how much social progress are we going to get? Well, we asked a team of economists at Deloitte who checked and crunched the numbers, and they came back and said, well, look: if the world's average wealth goes from $14,000 a year to $23,000 a year, social progress is going to increase from 61 to 62.4. (Laughter) Just 62.4. Just a tiny increase. Now this seems a bit strange. Economic growth seems to have really helped in the fight against poverty, but it doesn't seem to be having much impact on trying to get to the Global Goals. So what's going on? Well, I think there are two things. The first is that in a way, we're the victims of our own success. We've used up the easy wins from economic growth, and now we're moving on to harder problems. And also, we know that economic growth comes with costs as well as benefits. There are costs to the environment, costs from new health problems like obesity. So that's the bad news. We're not going to get to the Global Goals just by getting richer. So are the pessimists right? Well, maybe not. Because the Social Progress Index also has some very good news. Let me take you back to that regression line. So this is the average relationship between GDP and social progress, and this is what our last forecast was based on. But as you saw already, there is actually lots of noise around this trend line. What that tells us, quite simply, is that GDP is not destiny. We have countries that are underperforming on social progress, relative to their wealth. Russia has lots of natural resource wealth, but lots of social problems. China has boomed economically, but hasn't made much headway on human rights or environmental issues. India has a space program and millions of people without toilets. Now, on the other hand, we have countries that are overperforming on social progress relative to their GDP. Costa Rica has prioritized education, health and environmental sustainability, and as a result, it's achieving a very high level of social progress, despite only having a rather modest GDP. And Costa Rica's not alone. From poor countries like Rwanda to richer countries like New Zealand, we see that it's possible to get lots of social progress, even if your GDP is not so great. And that's really important, because it tells us two things. First of all, it tells us that we already in the world have the solutions to many of the problems that the Global Goals are trying to solve. It also tells us that we're not slaves to GDP. Our choices matter: if we prioritize the well-being of people, then we can make a lot more progress than our GDP might expect. How much? Enough to get us to the Global Goals? Well, let's look at some numbers. What we know already: the world today is scoring 61 on social progress, and the place we want to get to is 75. If we rely on economic growth alone, we're going to get to 62.4. So let's assume now that we can get the countries that are currently underperforming on social progress — the Russia, China, Indias — just up to the average. How much social progress does that get us? Well, that takes us to 65. It's a bit better, but still quite a long way to go. So let's get a little bit more optimistic and say, what if every country gets a little bit better at turning its wealth into well-being? Well then, we get to 67. And now let's be even bolder still. What if every country in the world chose to be like Costa Rica in prioritizing human well-being, using its wealth for the well-being of its citizens? Well then, we get to nearly 73, very close to the Global Goals. Can we achieve the Global Goals? Certainly not with business as usual. Even a flood tide of economic growth is not going to get us there, if it just raises the mega-yachts and the super-wealthy and leaves the rest behind. If we're going to achieve the Global Goals we have to do things differently. We have to prioritize social progress, and really scale solutions around the world. I believe the Global Goals are a historic opportunity, because the world's leaders have promised to deliver them. Let's not dismiss the goals or slide into pessimism; let's hold them to that promise. And we need to hold them to that promise by holding them accountable, tracking their progress all the way through the next 15 years. And I want to finish by showing you a way to do that, called the People's Report Card. The People's Report Card brings together all this data into a simple framework that we'll all be familiar with from our school days, to hold them to account. It grades our performance on the Global Goals on a scale from F to A, where F is humanity at its worst, and A is humanity at its best. Our world today is scoring a C-. The Global Goals are all about getting to an A, and that's why we're going to be updating the People's Report Card annually, for the world and for all the countries of the world, so we can hold our leaders to account to achieve this target and fulfill this promise. Because getting to the Global Goals will only happen if we do things differently, if our leaders do things differently, and for that to happen, that needs us to demand it. So let's reject business as usual. Let's demand a different path. Let's choose the world that we want. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Michael. Michael, just one question: the Millennium Development Goals established 15 years ago, they were kind of applying to every country but it turned out to be really a scorecard for emerging countries. Now the new Global Goals are explicitly universal. They ask for every country to show action and to show progress. How can I, as a private citizen, use the report card to create pressure for action? Michael Green: This is a really important point; it's a big shift in priorities — it's no longer about poor countries and just poverty. It's about every country. And every country is going to have challenges in getting to the Global Goals. Even, I'm sorry to say, Bruno, Switzerland has got to work to do. And so that's why we're going to produce these report cards in 2016 for every country in the world. Then we can really see, how are we doing? And it's not going to be rich countries scoring straight A's. And that, then, I think, is to provide a point of focus for people to start demanding action and start demanding progress. BG: Thank you very much. (Applause)
The future of flying robots	{0: "As the dean of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science, Vijay Kumar studies the control and coordination of multi-robot formations."}	TEDxPenn	In my lab, we build autonomous aerial robots like the one you see flying here. Unlike the commercially available drones that you can buy today, this robot doesn't have any GPS on board. So without GPS, it's hard for robots like this to determine their position. This robot uses onboard sensors, cameras and laser scanners, to scan the environment. It detects features from the environment, and it determines where it is relative to those features, using a method of triangulation. And then it can assemble all these features into a map, like you see behind me. And this map then allows the robot to understand where the obstacles are and navigate in a collision-free manner. What I want to show you next is a set of experiments we did inside our laboratory, where this robot was able to go for longer distances. So here you'll see, on the top right, what the robot sees with the camera. And on the main screen — and of course this is sped up by a factor of four — on the main screen you'll see the map that it's building. So this is a high-resolution map of the corridor around our laboratory. And in a minute you'll see it enter our lab, which is recognizable by the clutter that you see. (Laughter) But the main point I want to convey to you is that these robots are capable of building high-resolution maps at five centimeters resolution, allowing somebody who is outside the lab, or outside the building to deploy these without actually going inside, and trying to infer what happens inside the building. Now there's one problem with robots like this. The first problem is it's pretty big. Because it's big, it's heavy. And these robots consume about 100 watts per pound. And this makes for a very short mission life. The second problem is that these robots have onboard sensors that end up being very expensive — a laser scanner, a camera and the processors. That drives up the cost of this robot. So we asked ourselves a question: what consumer product can you buy in an electronics store that is inexpensive, that's lightweight, that has sensing onboard and computation? And we invented the flying phone. (Laughter) So this robot uses a Samsung Galaxy smartphone that you can buy off the shelf, and all you need is an app that you can download from our app store. And you can see this robot reading the letters, "TED" in this case, looking at the corners of the "T" and the "E" and then triangulating off of that, flying autonomously. That joystick is just there to make sure if the robot goes crazy, Giuseppe can kill it. (Laughter) In addition to building these small robots, we also experiment with aggressive behaviors, like you see here. So this robot is now traveling at two to three meters per second, pitching and rolling aggressively as it changes direction. The main point is we can have smaller robots that can go faster and then travel in these very unstructured environments. And in this next video, just like you see this bird, an eagle, gracefully coordinating its wings, its eyes and feet to grab prey out of the water, our robot can go fishing, too. (Laughter) In this case, this is a Philly cheesesteak hoagie that it's grabbing out of thin air. (Laughter) So you can see this robot going at about three meters per second, which is faster than walking speed, coordinating its arms, its claws and its flight with split-second timing to achieve this maneuver. In another experiment, I want to show you how the robot adapts its flight to control its suspended payload, whose length is actually larger than the width of the window. So in order to accomplish this, it actually has to pitch and adjust the altitude and swing the payload through. But of course we want to make these even smaller, and we're inspired in particular by honeybees. So if you look at honeybees, and this is a slowed down video, they're so small, the inertia is so lightweight — (Laughter) that they don't care — they bounce off my hand, for example. This is a little robot that mimics the honeybee behavior. And smaller is better, because along with the small size you get lower inertia. Along with lower inertia — (Robot buzzing, laughter) along with lower inertia, you're resistant to collisions. And that makes you more robust. So just like these honeybees, we build small robots. And this particular one is only 25 grams in weight. It consumes only six watts of power. And it can travel up to six meters per second. So if I normalize that to its size, it's like a Boeing 787 traveling ten times the speed of sound. (Laughter) And I want to show you an example. This is probably the first planned mid-air collision, at one-twentieth normal speed. These are going at a relative speed of two meters per second, and this illustrates the basic principle. The two-gram carbon fiber cage around it prevents the propellers from entangling, but essentially the collision is absorbed and the robot responds to the collisions. And so small also means safe. In my lab, as we developed these robots, we start off with these big robots and then now we're down to these small robots. And if you plot a histogram of the number of Band-Aids we've ordered in the past, that sort of tailed off now. Because these robots are really safe. The small size has some disadvantages, and nature has found a number of ways to compensate for these disadvantages. The basic idea is they aggregate to form large groups, or swarms. So, similarly, in our lab, we try to create artificial robot swarms. And this is quite challenging because now you have to think about networks of robots. And within each robot, you have to think about the interplay of sensing, communication, computation — and this network then becomes quite difficult to control and manage. So from nature we take away three organizing principles that essentially allow us to develop our algorithms. The first idea is that robots need to be aware of their neighbors. They need to be able to sense and communicate with their neighbors. So this video illustrates the basic idea. You have four robots — one of the robots has actually been hijacked by a human operator, literally. But because the robots interact with each other, they sense their neighbors, they essentially follow. And here there's a single person able to lead this network of followers. So again, it's not because all the robots know where they're supposed to go. It's because they're just reacting to the positions of their neighbors. (Laughter) So the next experiment illustrates the second organizing principle. And this principle has to do with the principle of anonymity. Here the key idea is that the robots are agnostic to the identities of their neighbors. They're asked to form a circular shape, and no matter how many robots you introduce into the formation, or how many robots you pull out, each robot is simply reacting to its neighbor. It's aware of the fact that it needs to form the circular shape, but collaborating with its neighbors it forms the shape without central coordination. Now if you put these ideas together, the third idea is that we essentially give these robots mathematical descriptions of the shape they need to execute. And these shapes can be varying as a function of time, and you'll see these robots start from a circular formation, change into a rectangular formation, stretch into a straight line, back into an ellipse. And they do this with the same kind of split-second coordination that you see in natural swarms, in nature. So why work with swarms? Let me tell you about two applications that we are very interested in. The first one has to do with agriculture, which is probably the biggest problem that we're facing worldwide. As you well know, one in every seven persons in this earth is malnourished. Most of the land that we can cultivate has already been cultivated. And the efficiency of most systems in the world is improving, but our production system efficiency is actually declining. And that's mostly because of water shortage, crop diseases, climate change and a couple of other things. So what can robots do? Well, we adopt an approach that's called Precision Farming in the community. And the basic idea is that we fly aerial robots through orchards, and then we build precision models of individual plants. So just like personalized medicine, while you might imagine wanting to treat every patient individually, what we'd like to do is build models of individual plants and then tell the farmer what kind of inputs every plant needs — the inputs in this case being water, fertilizer and pesticide. Here you'll see robots traveling through an apple orchard, and in a minute you'll see two of its companions doing the same thing on the left side. And what they're doing is essentially building a map of the orchard. Within the map is a map of every plant in this orchard. (Robot buzzing) Let's see what those maps look like. In the next video, you'll see the cameras that are being used on this robot. On the top-left is essentially a standard color camera. On the left-center is an infrared camera. And on the bottom-left is a thermal camera. And on the main panel, you're seeing a three-dimensional reconstruction of every tree in the orchard as the sensors fly right past the trees. Armed with information like this, we can do several things. The first and possibly the most important thing we can do is very simple: count the number of fruits on every tree. By doing this, you tell the farmer how many fruits she has in every tree and allow her to estimate the yield in the orchard, optimizing the production chain downstream. The second thing we can do is take models of plants, construct three-dimensional reconstructions, and from that estimate the canopy size, and then correlate the canopy size to the amount of leaf area on every plant. And this is called the leaf area index. So if you know this leaf area index, you essentially have a measure of how much photosynthesis is possible in every plant, which again tells you how healthy each plant is. By combining visual and infrared information, we can also compute indices such as NDVI. And in this particular case, you can essentially see there are some crops that are not doing as well as other crops. This is easily discernible from imagery, not just visual imagery but combining both visual imagery and infrared imagery. And then lastly, one thing we're interested in doing is detecting the early onset of chlorosis — and this is an orange tree — which is essentially seen by yellowing of leaves. But robots flying overhead can easily spot this autonomously and then report to the farmer that he or she has a problem in this section of the orchard. Systems like this can really help, and we're projecting yields that can improve by about ten percent and, more importantly, decrease the amount of inputs such as water by 25 percent by using aerial robot swarms. Lastly, I want you to applaud the people who actually create the future, Yash Mulgaonkar, Sikang Liu and Giuseppe Loianno, who are responsible for the three demonstrations that you saw. Thank you. (Applause)
Why medicine often has dangerous side effects for women	{0: "Alyson McGregor studies women's health, especially as it relates to emergency care -- when time-sensitive, life-or-death decisions are made using drugs and treatments mainly tested on men."}	TEDxProvidence	We all go to doctors. And we do so with trust and blind faith that the test they are ordering and the medications they're prescribing are based upon evidence — evidence that's designed to help us. However, the reality is that that hasn't always been the case for everyone. What if I told you that the medical science discovered over the past century has been based on only half the population? I'm an emergency medicine doctor. I was trained to be prepared in a medical emergency. It's about saving lives. How cool is that? OK, there's a lot of runny noses and stubbed toes, but no matter who walks through the door to the ER, we order the same tests, we prescribe the same medication, without ever thinking about the sex or gender of our patients. Why would we? We were never taught that there were any differences between men and women. A recent Government Accountability study revealed that 80 percent of the drugs withdrawn from the market are due to side effects on women. So let's think about that for a minute. Why are we discovering side effects on women only after a drug has been released to the market? Do you know that it takes years for a drug to go from an idea to being tested on cells in a laboratory, to animal studies, to then clinical trials on humans, finally to go through a regulatory approval process, to be available for your doctor to prescribe to you? Not to mention the millions and billions of dollars of funding it takes to go through that process. So why are we discovering unacceptable side effects on half the population after that has gone through? What's happening? Well, it turns out that those cells used in that laboratory, they're male cells, and the animals used in the animal studies were male animals, and the clinical trials have been performed almost exclusively on men. How is it that the male model became our framework for medical research? Let's look at an example that has been popularized in the media, and it has to do with the sleep aid Ambien. Ambien was released on the market over 20 years ago, and since then, hundreds of millions of prescriptions have been written, primarily to women, because women suffer more sleep disorders than men. But just this past year, the Food and Drug Administration recommended cutting the dose in half for women only, because they just realized that women metabolize the drug at a slower rate than men, causing them to wake up in the morning with more of the active drug in their system. And then they're drowsy and they're getting behind the wheel of the car, and they're at risk for motor vehicle accidents. And I can't help but think, as an emergency physician, how many of my patients that I've cared for over the years were involved in a motor vehicle accident that possibly could have been prevented if this type of analysis was performed and acted upon 20 years ago when this drug was first released. How many other things need to be analyzed by gender? What else are we missing? World War II changed a lot of things, and one of them was this need to protect people from becoming victims of medical research without informed consent. So some much-needed guidelines or rules were set into place, and part of that was this desire to protect women of childbearing age from entering into any medical research studies. There was fear: what if something happened to the fetus during the study? Who would be responsible? And so the scientists at this time actually thought this was a blessing in disguise, because let's face it — men's bodies are pretty homogeneous. They don't have the constantly fluctuating levels of hormones that could disrupt clean data they could get if they had only men. It was easier. It was cheaper. Not to mention, at this time, there was a general assumption that men and women were alike in every way, apart from their reproductive organs and sex hormones. So it was decided: medical research was performed on men, and the results were later applied to women. What did this do to the notion of women's health? Women's health became synonymous with reproduction: breasts, ovaries, uterus, pregnancy. It's this term we now refer to as "bikini medicine." And this stayed this way until about the 1980s, when this concept was challenged by the medical community and by the public health policymakers when they realized that by excluding women from all medical research studies we actually did them a disservice, in that apart from reproductive issues, virtually nothing was known about the unique needs of the female patient. Since that time, an overwhelming amount of evidence has come to light that shows us just how different men and women are in every way. You know, we have this saying in medicine: children are not just little adults. And we say that to remind ourselves that children actually have a different physiology than normal adults. And it's because of this that the medical specialty of pediatrics came to light. And we now conduct research on children in order to improve their lives. And I know the same thing can be said about women. Women are not just men with boobs and tubes. But they have their own anatomy and physiology that deserves to be studied with the same intensity. Let's take the cardiovascular system, for example. This area in medicine has done the most to try to figure out why it seems men and women have completely different heart attacks. Heart disease is the number one killer for both men and women, but more women die within the first year of having a heart attack than men. Men will complain of crushing chest pain — an elephant is sitting on their chest. And we call this typical. Women have chest pain, too. But more women than men will complain of "just not feeling right," "can't seem to get enough air in," "just so tired lately." And for some reason we call this atypical, even though, as I mentioned, women do make up half the population. And so what is some of the evidence to help explain some of these differences? If we look at the anatomy, the blood vessels that surround the heart are smaller in women compared to men, and the way that those blood vessels develop disease is different in women compared to men. And the test that we use to determine if someone is at risk for a heart attack, well, they were initially designed and tested and perfected in men, and so aren't as good at determining that in women. And then if we think about the medications — common medications that we use, like aspirin. We give aspirin to healthy men to help prevent them from having a heart attack, but do you know that if you give aspirin to a healthy woman, it's actually harmful? What this is doing is merely telling us that we are scratching the surface. Emergency medicine is a fast-paced business. In how many life-saving areas of medicine, like cancer and stroke, are there important differences between men and women that we could be utilizing? Or even, why is it that some people get those runny noses more than others, or why the pain medication that we give to those stubbed toes work in some and not in others? The Institute of Medicine has said every cell has a sex. What does this mean? Sex is DNA. Gender is how someone presents themselves in society. And these two may not always match up, as we can see with our transgendered population. But it's important to realize that from the moment of conception, every cell in our bodies — skin, hair, heart and lungs — contains our own unique DNA, and that DNA contains the chromosomes that determine whether we become male or female, man or woman. It used to be thought that those sex-determining chromosomes pictured here — XY if you're male, XX if you're female — merely determined whether you would be born with ovaries or testes, and it was the sex hormones that those organs produced that were responsible for the differences we see in the opposite sex. But we now know that that theory was wrong — or it's at least a little incomplete. And thankfully, scientists like Dr. Page from the Whitehead Institute, who works on the Y chromosome, and Doctor Yang from UCLA, they have found evidence that tells us that those sex-determining chromosomes that are in every cell in our bodies continue to remain active for our entire lives and could be what's responsible for the differences we see in the dosing of drugs, or why there are differences between men and women in the susceptibility and severity of diseases. This new knowledge is the game-changer, and it's up to those scientists that continue to find that evidence, but it's up to the clinicians to start translating this data at the bedside, today. Right now. And to help do this, I'm a co-founder of a national organization called Sex and Gender Women's Health Collaborative, and we collect all of this data so that it's available for teaching and for patient care. And we're working to bring together the medical educators to the table. That's a big job. It's changing the way medical training has been done since its inception. But I believe in them. I know they're going to see the value of incorporating the gender lens into the current curriculum. It's about training the future health care providers correctly. And regionally, I'm a co-creator of a division within the Department of Emergency Medicine here at Brown University, called Sex and Gender in Emergency Medicine, and we conduct the research to determine the differences between men and women in emergent conditions, like heart disease and stroke and sepsis and substance abuse, but we also believe that education is paramount. We've created a 360-degree model of education. We have programs for the doctors, for the nurses, for the students and for the patients. Because this cannot just be left up to the health care leaders. We all have a role in making a difference. But I must warn you: this is not easy. In fact, it's hard. It's essentially changing the way we think about medicine and health and research. It's changing our relationship to the health care system. But there's no going back. We now know just enough to know that we weren't doing it right. Martin Luther King, Jr. has said, "Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle." And the first step towards change is awareness. This is not just about improving medical care for women. This is about personalized, individualized health care for everyone. This awareness has the power to transform medical care for men and women. And from now on, I want you to ask your doctors whether the treatments you are receiving are specific to your sex and gender. They may not know the answer — yet. But the conversation has begun, and together we can all learn. Remember, for me and my colleagues in this field, your sex and gender matter. Thank you. (Applause)
Two nameless bodies washed up on the beach. Here are their stories	{0: 'For the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, Anders Fjellberg investigated the story of "The Wetsuitman," along with his co-author, photographer Tomm Christiansen.'}	TEDGlobal>London	So this right here is the tiny village of Elle, close to Lista. It's right at the southernmost tip of Norway. And on January 2 this year, an elderly guy who lives in the village, he went out to see what was cast ashore during a recent storm. And on a patch of grass right next to the water's edge, he found a wetsuit. It was grey and black, and he thought it looked cheap. Out of each leg of the wetsuit there were sticking two white bones. It was clearly the remains of a human being. And usually, in Norway, dead people are identified quickly. So the police started searching through missing reports from the local area, national missing reports, and looked for accidents with a possible connection. They found nothing. So they ran a DNA profile, and they started searching internationally through Interpol. Nothing. This was a person that nobody seemed to be missing. It was an invisible life heading for a nameless grave. But then, after a month, the police in Norway got a message from the police in the Netherlands. A couple of months earlier, they had found a body, in an identical wetsuit, and they had no idea who this person was. But the police in the Netherlands managed to trace the wetsuit by an RFID chip that was sewn in the suit. So they were then able to tell that both wetsuits were bought by the same customer at the same time, October 7, 2014, in the French city of Calais by the English Channel. But this was all they were able to figure out. The customer paid cash. There was no surveillance footage from the shop. So it became a cold case. We heard this story, and it triggered me and my colleague, photographer Tomm Christiansen, and we of course had the obvious question: who were these people? At the time, I'd barely heard about Calais, but it took about two or three seconds to figure out Calais is basically known for two things. It's the spot in continental Europe closest to Britain, and a lot of migrants and refugees are staying in this camp and are trying desperately to cross over to Britain. And right there was a plausible theory about the identity of the two people, and the police made this theory as well. Because if you or I or anybody else with a firm connection to Europe goes missing off the coast of France, people would just know. Your friends or family would report you missing, the police would come search for you, the media would know, and there would be pictures of you on lampposts. It's difficult to disappear without a trace. But if you just fled the war in Syria, and your family, if you have any family left, don't necessarily know where you are, and you're staying here illegally amongst thousands of others who come and go every day. Well, if you disappear one day, nobody will notice. The police won't come search for you because nobody knows you're gone. And this is what happened to Shadi Omar Kataf and Mouaz Al Balkhi from Syria. Me and Tomm went to Calais for the first time in April this year, and after three months of investigation, we were able to tell the story about how these two young men fled the war in Syria, ended up stuck in Calais, bought wetsuits and drowned in what seems to have been an attempt to swim across the English Channel in order to reach England. It is a story about the fact that everybody has a name, everybody has a story, everybody is someone. But it is also a story about what it's like to be a refugee in Europe today. So this is where we started our search. This is in Calais. Right now, between 3,500 and 5,000 people are living here under horrible conditions. It has been dubbed the worst refugee camp in Europe. Limited access to food, limited access to water, limited access to health care. Disease and infections are widespread. And they're all stuck here because they're trying to get to England in order to claim asylum. And they do that by hiding in the back of trucks headed for the ferry, or the Eurotunnel, or they sneak inside the tunnel terminal at night to try to hide on the trains. Most want to go to Britain because they know the language, and so they figure it would be easier to restart their lives from there. They want to work, they want to study, they want to be able to continue their lives. A lot of these people are highly educated and skilled workers. If you go to Calais and talk to refugees, you'll meet lawyers, politicians, engineers, graphic designers, farmers, soldiers. You've got the whole spectrum. But who all of these people are usually gets lost in the way we talk about refugees and migrants, because we usually do that in statistics. So you have 60 million refugees globally. About half a million have made the crossing over the Mediterranean into Europe so far this year, and roughly 4,000 are staying in Calais. But these are numbers, and the numbers don't say anything about who these people are, where they came from, or why they're here. And first, I want to tell you about one of them. This is 22-year-old Mouaz Al Balkhi from Syria. We first heard about him after being in Calais the first time looking for answers to the theory of the two dead bodies. And after a while, we heard this story about a Syrian man who was living in Bradford in England, and had been desperately searching for his nephew Mouaz for months. And it turned out the last time anybody had heard anything from Mouaz was October 7, 2014. That was the same date the wetsuits were bought. So we flew over there and we met the uncle and we did DNA samples of him, and later on got additional DNA samples from Mouaz's closest relative who now lives in Jordan. The analysis concluded the body who was found in a wetsuit on a beach in the Netherlands was actually Mouaz Al Balkhi. And while we were doing all this investigation, we got to know Mouaz's story. He was born in the Syrian capital of Damascus in 1991. He was raised in a middle class family, and his father in the middle there is a chemical engineer who spent 11 years in prison for belonging to the political opposition in Syria. While his father was in prison, Mouaz took responsibility and he cared for his three sisters. They said he was that kind of guy. Mouaz studied to become an electrical engineer at the University of Damascus. So a couple of years into the Syrian war, the family fled Damascus and went to the neighboring country, Jordan. Their father had problems finding work in Jordan, and Mouaz could not continue his studies, so he figured, "OK, the best thing I can do to help my family would be to go somewhere where I can finish my studies and find work." So he goes to Turkey. In Turkey, he's not accepted at a university, and once he had left Jordan as a refugee, he was not allowed to reenter. So then he decides to head for the UK, where his uncle lives. He makes it into Algeria, walks into Libya, pays a people smuggler to help him with the crossing into Italy by boat, and from there on he heads to Dunkirk, the city right next to Calais by the English Channel. We know he made at least 12 failed attempts to cross the English Channel by hiding in a truck. But at some point, he must have given up all hope. The last night we know he was alive, he spent at a cheap hotel close to the train station in Dunkirk. We found his name in the records, and he seems to have stayed there alone. The day after, he went into Calais, entered a sports shop a couple of minutes before 8 o'clock in the evening, along with Shadi Kataf. They both bought wetsuits, and the woman in the shop was the last person we know of to have seen them alive. We have tried to figure out where Shadi met Mouaz, but we weren't able to do that. But they do have a similar story. We first heard about Shadi after a cousin of his, living in Germany, had read an Arabic translation of the story made of Mouaz on Facebook. So we got in touch with him. Shadi, a couple of years older than Mouaz, was also raised in Damascus. He was a working kind of guy. He ran a tire repair shop and later worked in a printing company. He lived with his extended family, but their house got bombed early in the war. So the family fled to an area of Damascus known as Camp Yarmouk. Yarmouk is being described as the worst place to live on planet Earth. They've been bombed by the military, they've been besieged, they've been stormed by ISIS and they've been cut off from supplies for years. There was a UN official who visited last year, and he said, "They ate all the grass so there was no grass left." Out of a population of 150,000, only 18,000 are believed to still be left in Yarmouk. Shadi and his sisters got out. The parents are still stuck inside. So Shadi and one of his sisters, they fled to Libya. This was after the fall of Gaddafi, but before Libya turned into full-blown civil war. And in this last remaining sort of stability in Libya, Shadi took up scuba diving, and he seemed to spend most of his time underwater. He fell completely in love with the ocean, so when he finally decided that he could no longer be in Libya, late August 2014, he hoped to find work as a diver when he reached Italy. Reality was not that easy. We don't know much about his travels because he had a hard time communicating with his family, but we do know that he struggled. And by the end of September, he was living on the streets somewhere in France. On October 7, he calls his cousin in Belgium, and explains his situation. He said, "I'm in Calais. I need you to come get my backpack and my laptop. I can't afford to pay the people smugglers to help me with the crossing to Britain, but I will go buy a wetsuit and I will swim." His cousin, of course, tried to warn him not to, but Shadi's battery on the phone went flat, and his phone was never switched on again. What was left of Shadi was found nearly three months later, 800 kilometers away in a wetsuit on a beach in Norway. He's still waiting for his funeral in Norway, and none of his family will be able to attend. Many may think that the story about Shadi and Mouaz is a story about death, but I don't agree. To me, this is a story about two questions that I think we all share: what is a better life, and what am I willing to do to achieve it? And to me, and probably a lot of you, a better life would mean being able to do more of what we think of as meaningful, whether that be spending more time with your family and friends, travel to an exotic place, or just getting money to buy that cool new device or a pair of new sneakers. And this is all within our reach pretty easily. But if you are fleeing a war zone, the answers to those two questions are dramatically different. A better life is a life in safety. It's a life in dignity. A better life means not having your house bombed, not fearing being kidnapped. It means being able to send your children to school, go to university, or just find work to be able to provide for yourself and the ones you love. A better life would be a future of some possibilities compared to nearly none, and that's a strong motivation. And I have no trouble imagining that after spending weeks or even months as a second-grade citizen, living on the streets or in a horrible makeshift camp with a stupid, racist name like "The Jungle," most of us would be willing to do just about anything. If I could ask Shadi and Mouaz the second they stepped into the freezing waters of the English Channel, they would probably say, "This is worth the risk," because they could no longer see any other option. And that's desperation, but that's the reality of living as a refugee in Western Europe in 2015. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Anders. This is Tomm Christiansen, who took most of the pictures you have seen and they've done reporting together. Tomm, you two have been back to Calais recently. This was the third trip. It was after the publication of the article. What has changed? What have you seen there? Tomm Christiansen: The first time we were in Calais, it was about 1,500 refugees there. They had a difficult time, but they were positive, they had hope. The last time, the camp has grown, maybe four or five thousand people. It seemed more permanent, NGOs have arrived, a small school has opened. But the thing is that the refugees have stayed for a longer time, and the French government has managed to seal off the borders better, so now The Jungle is growing, along with the despair and hopelessness among the refugees. BG: Are you planning to go back? And continue the reporting? TC: Yes. BG: Anders, I'm a former journalist, and to me, it's amazing that in the current climate of slashing budgets and publishers in crisis, Dagbladet has consented so many resources for this story, which tells a lot about newspapers taking the responsibility, but how did you sell it to your editors? Anders Fjellberg: It wasn't easy at first, because we weren't able to know what we actually could figure out. As soon as it became clear that we actually could be able to identify who the first one was, we basically got the message that we could do whatever we wanted, just travel wherever you need to go, do whatever you need to do, just get this done. BG: That's an editor taking responsibility. The story, by the way, has been translated and published across several European countries, and certainly will continue to do. And we want to read the updates from you. Thank you Anders. Thank you Tomm. (Applause)
The unexpected beauty of everyday sounds	{0: 'Meklit Hadero is an Ethiopian-American singer-songwriter living the cultural in-between, both in her own luminous compositions and as a co-founder of the Nile Project. '}	TED Fellows Retreat 2015	As a singer-songwriter, people often ask me about my influences or, as I like to call them, my sonic lineages. And I could easily tell you that I was shaped by the jazz and hip hop that I grew up with, by the Ethiopian heritage of my ancestors, or by the 1980s pop on my childhood radio stations. But beyond genre, there is another question: how do the sounds we hear every day influence the music that we make? I believe that everyday soundscape can be the most unexpected inspiration for songwriting, and to look at this idea a little bit more closely, I'm going to talk today about three things: nature, language and silence — or rather, the impossibility of true silence. And through this I hope to give you a sense of a world already alive with musical expression, with each of us serving as active participants, whether we know it or not. I'm going to start today with nature, but before we do that, let's quickly listen to this snippet of an opera singer warming up. Here it is. (Singing) (Singing ends) It's beautiful, isn't it? Gotcha! That is actually not the sound of an opera singer warming up. That is the sound of a bird slowed down to a pace that the human ear mistakenly recognizes as its own. It was released as part of Peter Szöke's 1987 Hungarian recording "The Unknown Music of Birds," where he records many birds and slows down their pitches to reveal what's underneath. Let's listen to the full-speed recording. (Bird singing) Now, let's hear the two of them together so your brain can juxtapose them. (Bird singing at slow then full speed) (Singing ends) It's incredible. Perhaps the techniques of opera singing were inspired by birdsong. As humans, we intuitively understand birds to be our musical teachers. In Ethiopia, birds are considered an integral part of the origin of music itself. The story goes like this: 1,500 years ago, a young man was born in the Empire of Aksum, a major trading center of the ancient world. His name was Yared. When Yared was seven years old his father died, and his mother sent him to go live with an uncle, who was a priest of the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, one of the oldest churches in the world. Now, this tradition has an enormous amount of scholarship and learning, and Yared had to study and study and study and study, and one day he was studying under a tree, when three birds came to him. One by one, these birds became his teachers. They taught him music — scales, in fact. And Yared, eventually recognized as Saint Yared, used these scales to compose five volumes of chants and hymns for worship and celebration. And he used these scales to compose and to create an indigenous musical notation system. And these scales evolved into what is known as kiñit, the unique, pentatonic, five-note, modal system that is very much alive and thriving and still evolving in Ethiopia today. Now, I love this story because it's true at multiple levels. Saint Yared was a real, historical figure, and the natural world can be our musical teacher. And we have so many examples of this: the Pygmies of the Congo tune their instruments to the pitches of the birds in the forest around them. Musician and natural soundscape expert Bernie Krause describes how a healthy environment has animals and insects taking up low, medium and high-frequency bands, in exactly the same way as a symphony does. And countless works of music were inspired by bird and forest song. Yes, the natural world can be our cultural teacher. So let's go now to the uniquely human world of language. Every language communicates with pitch to varying degrees, whether it's Mandarin Chinese, where a shift in melodic inflection gives the same phonetic syllable an entirely different meaning, to a language like English, where a raised pitch at the end of a sentence ... (Going up in pitch) implies a question? (Laughter) As an Ethiopian-American woman, I grew up around the language of Amharic, Amhariña. It was my first language, the language of my parents, one of the main languages of Ethiopia. And there are a million reasons to fall in love with this language: its depth of poetics, its double entendres, its wax and gold, its humor, its proverbs that illuminate the wisdom and follies of life. But there's also this melodicism, a musicality built right in. And I find this distilled most clearly in what I like to call emphatic language — language that's meant to highlight or underline or that springs from surprise. Take, for example, the word: "indey." Now, if there are Ethiopians in the audience, they're probably chuckling to themselves, because the word means something like "No!" or "How could he?" or "No, he didn't." It kind of depends on the situation. But when I was a kid, this was my very favorite word, and I think it's because it has a pitch. It has a melody. You can almost see the shape as it springs from someone's mouth. "Indey" — it dips, and then raises again. And as a musician and composer, when I hear that word, something like this is floating through my mind. (Music and singing "Indey") (Music ends) Or take, for example, the phrase for "It is right" or "It is correct" — "Lickih nehu ... Lickih nehu." It's an affirmation, an agreement. "Lickih nehu." When I hear that phrase, something like this starts rolling through my mind. (Music and singing "Lickih nehu") (Music ends) And in both of those cases, what I did was I took the melody and the phrasing of those words and phrases and I turned them into musical parts to use in these short compositions. And I like to write bass lines, so they both ended up kind of as bass lines. Now, this is based on the work of Jason Moran and others who work intimately with music and language, but it's also something I've had in my head since I was a kid, how musical my parents sounded when they were speaking to each other and to us. It was from them and from Amhariña that I learned that we are awash in musical expression with every word, every sentence that we speak, every word, every sentence that we receive. Perhaps you can hear it in the words I'm speaking even now. Finally, we go to the 1950s United States and the most seminal work of 20th century avant-garde composition: John Cage's "4:33," written for any instrument or combination of instruments. The musician or musicians are invited to walk onto the stage with a stopwatch and open the score, which was actually purchased by the Museum of Modern Art — the score, that is. And this score has not a single note written and there is not a single note played for four minutes and 33 seconds. And, at once enraging and enrapturing, Cage shows us that even when there are no strings being plucked by fingers or hands hammering piano keys, still there is music, still there is music, still there is music. And what is this music? It was that sneeze in the back. (Laughter) It is the everyday soundscape that arises from the audience themselves: their coughs, their sighs, their rustles, their whispers, their sneezes, the room, the wood of the floors and the walls expanding and contracting, creaking and groaning with the heat and the cold, the pipes clanking and contributing. And controversial though it was, and even controversial though it remains, Cage's point is that there is no such thing as true silence. Even in the most silent environments, we still hear and feel the sound of our own heartbeats. The world is alive with musical expression. We are already immersed. Now, I had my own moment of, let's say, remixing John Cage a couple of months ago when I was standing in front of the stove cooking lentils. And it was late one night and it was time to stir, so I lifted the lid off the cooking pot, and I placed it onto the kitchen counter next to me, and it started to roll back and forth making this sound. (Sound of metal lid clanking against a counter) (Clanking ends) And it stopped me cold. I thought, "What a weird, cool swing that cooking pan lid has." So when the lentils were ready and eaten, I hightailed it to my backyard studio, and I made this. (Music, including the sound of the lid, and singing) (Music ends) Now, John Cage wasn't instructing musicians to mine the soundscape for sonic textures to turn into music. He was saying that on its own, the environment is musically generative, that it is generous, that it is fertile, that we are already immersed. Musician, music researcher, surgeon and human hearing expert Charles Limb is a professor at Johns Hopkins University and he studies music and the brain. And he has a theory that it is possible — it is possible — that the human auditory system actually evolved to hear music, because it is so much more complex than it needs to be for language alone. And if that's true, it means that we're hard-wired for music, that we can find it anywhere, that there is no such thing as a musical desert, that we are permanently hanging out at the oasis, and that is marvelous. We can add to the soundtrack, but it's already playing. And it doesn't mean don't study music. Study music, trace your sonic lineages and enjoy that exploration. But there is a kind of sonic lineage to which we all belong. So the next time you are seeking percussion inspiration, look no further than your tires, as they roll over the unusual grooves of the freeway, or the top-right burner of your stove and that strange way that it clicks as it is preparing to light. When seeking melodic inspiration, look no further than dawn and dusk avian orchestras or to the natural lilt of emphatic language. We are the audience and we are the composers and we take from these pieces we are given. We make, we make, we make, we make, knowing that when it comes to nature or language or soundscape, there is no end to the inspiration — if we are listening. Thank you. (Applause)
The secret US prisons you've never heard of before	{0: 'Award-winning journalist and author, Will Potter focuses on the animal rights and environmental movements, and civil liberties in the post-9/11 era.'}	TED Fellows Retreat 2015	Father Daniel Berrigan once said that "writing about prisoners is a little like writing about the dead." I think what he meant is that we treat prisoners as ghosts. They're unseen and unheard. It's easy to simply ignore them and it's even easier when the government goes to great lengths to keep them hidden. As a journalist, I think these stories of what people in power do when no one is watching, are precisely the stories that we need to tell. That's why I began investigating the most secretive and experimental prison units in the United States, for so-called "second-tier" terrorists. The government calls these units Communications Management Units or CMUs. Prisoners and guards call them "Little Guantanamo." They are islands unto themselves. But unlike Gitmo they exist right here, at home, floating within larger federal prisons. There are 2 CMUs. One was opened inside the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, and the other is inside this prison, in Marion, Illinois. Neither of them underwent the formal review process that is required by law when they were opened. CMU prisoners have all been convicted of crimes. Some of their cases are questionable and some involve threats and violence. I'm not here to argue the guilt or innocence of any prisoner. I'm here because as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall said, "When the prisons and gates slam shut, prisoners do not lose their human quality." Every prisoner I've interviewed has said there are three flecks of light in the darkness of prison: phone calls, letters and visits from family. CMUs aren't solitary confinement, but they radically restrict all of these to levels that meet or exceed the most extreme prisons in the United States. Their phone calls can be limited to 45 minutes a month, compared to the 300 minutes other prisoners receive. Their letters can be limited to six pieces of paper. Their visits can be limited to four hours per month, compared to the 35 hours that people like Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph receive in the supermax. On top of that, CMU visits are non-contact which means prisoners are not allowed to even hug their family. As one CMU prisoner said, "We're not being tortured here, except psychologically." The government won't say who is imprisoned here. But through court documents, open records requests and interviews with current and former prisoners, some small windows into the CMUs have opened. There's an estimated 60 to 70 prisoners here, and they're overwhelmingly Muslim. They include people like Dr. Rafil Dhafir, who violated the economic sanctions on Iraq by sending medical supplies for the children there. They've included people like Yassin Aref. Aref and his family fled to New York from Saddam Hussein's Iraq as refugees. He was arrested in 2004 as part of an FBI sting. Aref is an imam and he was asked to bear witness to a loan, which is a tradition in Islamic culture. It turned out that one of the people involved in the loan was trying to enlist someone else in a fake attack. Aref didn't know. For that, he was convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist group. The CMUs also include some non-Muslim prisoners. The guards call them "balancers," meaning they help balance out the racial numbers, in hopes of deflecting law suits. These balancers include animal rights and environmental activists like Daniel McGowan. McGowan was convicted of participating in two arsons in the name of defending the environment as part of the Earth Liberation Front. During his sentencing, he was afraid that he would be sent to a rumored secret prison for terrorists. The judge dismissed all those fears, saying that they weren't supported by any facts. But that might be because the government hasn't fully explained why some prisoners end up in a CMU, and who is responsible for these decisions. When McGowan was transferred, he was told it's because he is a "domestic terrorist," a term the FBI uses repeatedly when talking about environmental activists. Now, keep in mind there are about 400 prisoners in US prisons who are classified as terrorists, and only a handful of them are in the CMUs. In McGowan's case, he was previously at a low-security prison and he had no communications violations. So, why was he moved? Like other CMU prisoners, McGowan repeatedly asked for an answer, a hearing, or some opportunity for an appeal. This example from another prisoner shows how those requests are viewed. "Wants a transfer." "Told him no." At one point, the prison warden himself recommended McGowan's transfer out of the CMU citing his good behavior, but the warden was overruled by the Bureau of Prison's Counterterrorism Unit, working with the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the FBI. Later I found out that McGowan was really sent to a CMU not because of what he did, but what he has said. A memo from the Counterterrorism Unit cited McGowan's "anti-government beliefs." While imprisoned, he continued writing about environmental issues, saying that activists must reflect on their mistakes and listen to each other. Now, in fairness, if you've spent any time at all in Washington, DC, you know this is really a radical concept for the government. (Laughter) I actually asked to visit McGowan in the CMU. And I was approved. That came as quite a shock. First, because as I've discussed on this stage before, I learned that the FBI has been monitoring my work. Second, because it would make me the first and only journalist to visit a CMU. I had even learned through the Bureau of Prisons Counterterrorism Unit, that they had been monitoring my speeches about CMUs, like this one. So how could I possibly be approved to visit? A few days before I went out to the prison, I got an answer. I was allowed to visit McGowan as a friend, not a journalist. Journalists are not allowed here. McGowan was told by CMU officials that if I asked any questions or published any story, that he would be punished for my reporting. When I arrived for our visit, the guards reminded me that they knew who I was and knew about my work. And they said that if I attempted to interview McGowan, the visit would be terminated. The Bureau of Prisons describes CMUs as "self-contained housing units." But I think that's an Orwellian way of describing black holes. When you visit a CMU, you go through all the security checkpoints that you would expect. But then the walk to the visitation room is silent. When a CMU prisoner has a visit, the rest of the prison is on lockdown. I was ushered into a small room, so small my outstretched arms could touch each wall. There was a grapefruit-sized orb in the ceiling for the visit to be live-monitored by the Counterterrorism Unit in West Virginia. The unit insists that all the visits have to be in English for CMU prisoners, which is an additional hardship for many of the Muslim families. There is a thick sheet of foggy, bulletproof glass and on the other side was Daniel McGowan. We spoke through these handsets attached to the wall and talked about books and movies. We did our best to find reasons to laugh. To fight boredom and amuse himself while in the CMU, McGowan had been spreading a rumor that I was secretly the president of a Twilight fan club in Washington, DC (Laughter) For the record, I'm not. (Laughter) But I kind of the hope the FBI now thinks that Bella and Edward are terrorist code names. (Laughter) During our visit, McGowan spoke most and at length about his niece Lily, his wife Jenny and how torturous it feels to never be able to hug them, to never be able to hold their hands. Three months after our visit, McGowan was transferred out of the CMU and then, without warning, he was sent back again. I had published leaked CMU documents on my website and the Counterterrorism Unit said that McGowan had called his wife and asked her to mail them. He wanted to see what the government was saying about him, and for that he was sent back to the CMU. When he was finally released at the end of his sentence, his story got even more Kafkaesque. He wrote an article for the Huffington Post headlined, "Court Documents Prove I was Sent to a CMU for my Political Speech." The next day he was thrown back in jail for his political speech. His attorneys quickly secured his release, but the message was very clear: Don't talk about this place. Today, nine years after they were opened by the Bush administration, the government is codifying how and why CMUs were created. According to the Bureau of Prisons, they are for prisoners with "inspirational significance." I think that is very nice way of saying these are political prisons for political prisoners. Prisoners are sent to a CMU because of their race, their religion or their political beliefs. Now, if you think that characterization is too strong, just look at some of the government's own documents. When some of McGowan's mail was rejected by the CMU, the sender was told it's because the letters were intended "for political prisoners." When another prisoner, animal rights activist Andy Stepanian, was sent to a CMU, it was because of his anti-government and anti-corporate views. Now, I know all of this may be hard to believe, that it's happening right now, and in the United States. But the unknown reality is that the US has a dark history of disproportionately punishing people because of their political beliefs. In the 1960s, before Marion was home to the CMU, it was home to the notorious Control Unit. Prisoners were locked down in solitary for 22 hours a day. The warden said the unit was to "control revolutionary attitudes." In the 1980s, another experiment called the Lexington High Security Unit held women connected to the Weather Underground, Black Liberation and Puerto Rican independent struggles. The prison radically restricted communication and used sleep deprivation, and constant light for so-called "ideological conversion." Those prisons were eventually shut down, but only through the campaigning of religious groups and human rights advocates, like Amnesty International. Today, civil rights lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights are challenging CMUs in court for depriving prisoners of their due process rights and for retaliating against them for their protected political and religious speech. Many of these documents would have never come to light without this lawsuit. The message of these groups and my message for you today is that we must bear witness to what is being done to these prisoners. Their treatment is a reflection of the values held beyond prison walls. This story is not just about prisoners. It is about us. It is about our own commitment to human rights. It is about whether we will choose to stop repeating the mistakes of our past. If we don't listen to what Father Berrigan described as the stories of the dead, they will soon become the stories of ourselves. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause ends) Tom Rielly: I have a couple questions. When I was in high school, I learned about the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, freedom of speech, due process and about 25 other laws and rights that seem to be violated by this. How could this possibly be happening? Will Potter: I think that's the number one question I get throughout all of my work, and the short answer is that people don't know. I think the solution to any of these types of situations, any rights abuses, are really dependent on two things. They're dependent on knowledge that it's actually happening and then a means and efficacy to actually make a change. And unfortunately with these prisoners, one, people don't know what's happening at all and then they're already disenfranchised populations who don't have access to attorneys, not native English speakers. In some of these cases, they have great representation that I mentioned, but there's just not a public awareness of what's happening. TR: Isn't it guaranteed in prison that you have right to council or access to council? WP: There's a tendency in our culture to see when people have been convicted of a crime, no matter if that charge was bogus or legitimate, that whatever happens to them after that is warranted. And I think that's a really damaging and dangerous narrative that we have, that allows these types of things to happen, as the general public just kind of turns a blind eye to it. TR: All those documents on screen were all real documents, word for word, unchanged at all, right? WP: Absolutely. I've actually uploaded all of them to my website. It's willpotter.com/CMU and it's a footnoted version of the talk, so you can see the documents for yourself without the little snippets. You can see the full version. I relied overwhelmingly on primary source documents or on primary interviews with former and current prisoners, with people that are dealing with this situation every day. And like I said, I've been there myself, as well. TR: You're doing courageous work. WP: Thank you very much. Thank you all. (Applause)
How CRISPR lets us edit our DNA	{0: 'Jennifer Doudna was part of inventing a potentially world-changing genetic technology: the gene editing technology CRISPR-Cas9.'}	TEDGlobal>London	A few years ago, with my colleague, Emmanuelle Charpentier, I invented a new technology for editing genomes. It's called CRISPR-Cas9. The CRISPR technology allows scientists to make changes to the DNA in cells that could allow us to cure genetic disease. You might be interested to know that the CRISPR technology came about through a basic research project that was aimed at discovering how bacteria fight viral infections. Bacteria have to deal with viruses in their environment, and we can think about a viral infection like a ticking time bomb — a bacterium has only a few minutes to defuse the bomb before it gets destroyed. So, many bacteria have in their cells an adaptive immune system called CRISPR, that allows them to detect viral DNA and destroy it. Part of the CRISPR system is a protein called Cas9, that's able to seek out, cut and eventually degrade viral DNA in a specific way. And it was through our research to understand the activity of this protein, Cas9, that we realized that we could harness its function as a genetic engineering technology — a way for scientists to delete or insert specific bits of DNA into cells with incredible precision — that would offer opportunities to do things that really haven't been possible in the past. The CRISPR technology has already been used to change the DNA in the cells of mice and monkeys, other organisms as well. Chinese scientists showed recently that they could even use the CRISPR technology to change genes in human embryos. And scientists in Philadelphia showed they could use CRISPR to remove the DNA of an integrated HIV virus from infected human cells. The opportunity to do this kind of genome editing also raises various ethical issues that we have to consider, because this technology can be employed not only in adult cells, but also in the embryos of organisms, including our own species. And so, together with my colleagues, I've called for a global conversation about the technology that I co-invented, so that we can consider all of the ethical and societal implications of a technology like this. What I want to do now is tell you what the CRISPR technology is, what it can do, where we are today and why I think we need to take a prudent path forward in the way that we employ this technology. When viruses infect a cell, they inject their DNA. And in a bacterium, the CRISPR system allows that DNA to be plucked out of the virus, and inserted in little bits into the chromosome — the DNA of the bacterium. And these integrated bits of viral DNA get inserted at a site called CRISPR. CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. (Laughter) A big mouthful — you can see why we use the acronym CRISPR. It's a mechanism that allows cells to record, over time, the viruses they have been exposed to. And importantly, those bits of DNA are passed on to the cells' progeny, so cells are protected from viruses not only in one generation, but over many generations of cells. This allows the cells to keep a record of infection, and as my colleague, Blake Wiedenheft, likes to say, the CRISPR locus is effectively a genetic vaccination card in cells. Once those bits of DNA have been inserted into the bacterial chromosome, the cell then makes a little copy of a molecule called RNA, which is orange in this picture, that is an exact replicate of the viral DNA. RNA is a chemical cousin of DNA, and it allows interaction with DNA molecules that have a matching sequence. So those little bits of RNA from the CRISPR locus associate — they bind — to protein called Cas9, which is white in the picture, and form a complex that functions like a sentinel in the cell. It searches through all of the DNA in the cell, to find sites that match the sequences in the bound RNAs. And when those sites are found — as you can see here, the blue molecule is DNA — this complex associates with that DNA and allows the Cas9 cleaver to cut up the viral DNA. It makes a very precise break. So we can think of the Cas9 RNA sentinel complex like a pair of scissors that can cut DNA — it makes a double-stranded break in the DNA helix. And importantly, this complex is programmable, so it can be programmed to recognize particular DNA sequences, and make a break in the DNA at that site. As I'm going to tell you now, we recognized that that activity could be harnessed for genome engineering, to allow cells to make a very precise change to the DNA at the site where this break was introduced. That's sort of analogous to the way that we use a word-processing program to fix a typo in a document. The reason we envisioned using the CRISPR system for genome engineering is because cells have the ability to detect broken DNA and repair it. So when a plant or an animal cell detects a double-stranded break in its DNA, it can fix that break, either by pasting together the ends of the broken DNA with a little, tiny change in the sequence of that position, or it can repair the break by integrating a new piece of DNA at the site of the cut. So if we have a way to introduce double-stranded breaks into DNA at precise places, we can trigger cells to repair those breaks, by either the disruption or incorporation of new genetic information. So if we were able to program the CRISPR technology to make a break in DNA at the position at or near a mutation causing cystic fibrosis, for example, we could trigger cells to repair that mutation. Genome engineering is actually not new, it's been in development since the 1970s. We've had technologies for sequencing DNA, for copying DNA, and even for manipulating DNA. And these technologies were very promising, but the problem was that they were either inefficient, or they were difficult enough to use that most scientists had not adopted them for use in their own laboratories, or certainly for many clinical applications. So, the opportunity to take a technology like CRISPR and utilize it has appeal, because of its relative simplicity. We can think of older genome engineering technologies as similar to having to rewire your computer each time you want to run a new piece of software, whereas the CRISPR technology is like software for the genome, we can program it easily, using these little bits of RNA. So once a double-stranded break is made in DNA, we can induce repair, and thereby potentially achieve astounding things, like being able to correct mutations that cause sickle cell anemia or cause Huntington's Disease. I actually think that the first applications of the CRISPR technology are going to happen in the blood, where it's relatively easier to deliver this tool into cells, compared to solid tissues. Right now, a lot of the work that's going on applies to animal models of human disease, such as mice. The technology is being used to make very precise changes that allow us to study the way that these changes in the cell's DNA affect either a tissue or, in this case, an entire organism. Now in this example, the CRISPR technology was used to disrupt a gene by making a tiny change in the DNA in a gene that is responsible for the black coat color of these mice. Imagine that these white mice differ from their pigmented litter-mates by just a tiny change at one gene in the entire genome, and they're otherwise completely normal. And when we sequence the DNA from these animals, we find that the change in the DNA has occurred at exactly the place where we induced it, using the CRISPR technology. Additional experiments are going on in other animals that are useful for creating models for human disease, such as monkeys. And here we find that we can use these systems to test the application of this technology in particular tissues, for example, figuring out how to deliver the CRISPR tool into cells. We also want to understand better how to control the way that DNA is repaired after it's cut, and also to figure out how to control and limit any kind of off-target, or unintended effects of using the technology. I think that we will see clinical application of this technology, certainly in adults, within the next 10 years. I think that it's likely that we will see clinical trials and possibly even approved therapies within that time, which is a very exciting thing to think about. And because of the excitement around this technology, there's a lot of interest in start-up companies that have been founded to commercialize the CRISPR technology, and lots of venture capitalists that have been investing in these companies. But we have to also consider that the CRISPR technology can be used for things like enhancement. Imagine that we could try to engineer humans that have enhanced properties, such as stronger bones, or less susceptibility to cardiovascular disease or even to have properties that we would consider maybe to be desirable, like a different eye color or to be taller, things like that. "Designer humans," if you will. Right now, the genetic information to understand what types of genes would give rise to these traits is mostly not known. But it's important to know that the CRISPR technology gives us a tool to make such changes, once that knowledge becomes available. This raises a number of ethical questions that we have to carefully consider, and this is why I and my colleagues have called for a global pause in any clinical application of the CRISPR technology in human embryos, to give us time to really consider all of the various implications of doing so. And actually, there is an important precedent for such a pause from the 1970s, when scientists got together to call for a moratorium on the use of molecular cloning, until the safety of that technology could be tested carefully and validated. So, genome-engineered humans are not with us yet, but this is no longer science fiction. Genome-engineered animals and plants are happening right now. And this puts in front of all of us a huge responsibility, to consider carefully both the unintended consequences as well as the intended impacts of a scientific breakthrough. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause ends) Bruno Giussani: Jennifer, this is a technology with huge consequences, as you pointed out. Your attitude about asking for a pause or a moratorium or a quarantine is incredibly responsible. There are, of course, the therapeutic results of this, but then there are the un-therapeutic ones and they seem to be the ones gaining traction, particularly in the media. This is one of the latest issues of The Economist — "Editing humanity." It's all about genetic enhancement, it's not about therapeutics. What kind of reactions did you get back in March from your colleagues in the science world, when you asked or suggested that we should actually pause this for a moment and think about it? Jennifer Doudna: My colleagues were actually, I think, delighted to have the opportunity to discuss this openly. It's interesting that as I talk to people, my scientific colleagues as well as others, there's a wide variety of viewpoints about this. So clearly it's a topic that needs careful consideration and discussion. BG: There's a big meeting happening in December that you and your colleagues are calling, together with the National Academy of Sciences and others, what do you hope will come out of the meeting, practically? JD: Well, I hope that we can air the views of many different individuals and stakeholders who want to think about how to use this technology responsibly. It may not be possible to come up with a consensus point of view, but I think we should at least understand what all the issues are as we go forward. BG: Now, colleagues of yours, like George Church, for example, at Harvard, they say, "Yeah, ethical issues basically are just a question of safety. We test and test and test again, in animals and in labs, and then once we feel it's safe enough, we move on to humans." So that's kind of the other school of thought, that we should actually use this opportunity and really go for it. Is there a possible split happening in the science community about this? I mean, are we going to see some people holding back because they have ethical concerns, and some others just going forward because some countries under-regulate or don't regulate at all? JD: Well, I think with any new technology, especially something like this, there are going to be a variety of viewpoints, and I think that's perfectly understandable. I think that in the end, this technology will be used for human genome engineering, but I think to do that without careful consideration and discussion of the risks and potential complications would not be responsible. BG: There are a lot of technologies and other fields of science that are developing exponentially, pretty much like yours. I'm thinking about artificial intelligence, autonomous robots and so on. No one seems — aside from autonomous warfare robots — nobody seems to have launched a similar discussion in those fields, in calling for a moratorium. Do you think that your discussion may serve as a blueprint for other fields? JD: Well, I think it's hard for scientists to get out of the laboratory. Speaking for myself, it's a little bit uncomfortable to do that. But I do think that being involved in the genesis of this really puts me and my colleagues in a position of responsibility. And I would say that I certainly hope that other technologies will be considered in the same way, just as we would want to consider something that could have implications in other fields besides biology. BG: Jennifer, thanks for coming to TED. JD: Thank you. (Applause)
An Internet without screens might look like this	{0: "Tea Uglow leads part of Google's Creative Lab specializing in work with cultural organizations, artists, writers and producers on experiments using digital technology at the boundaries of traditional cultural practice."}	TEDxSydney	I'd like to start by asking you all to go to your happy place, please. Yes, your happy place, I know you've got one even if it's fake. (Laughter) OK, so, comfortable? Good. Now I'd like to you to mentally answer the following questions. Is there any strip lighting in your happy place? Any plastic tables? Polyester flooring? Mobile phones? No? I think we all know that our happy place is meant to be somewhere natural, outdoors — on a beach, fireside. We'll be reading or eating or knitting. And we're surrounded by natural light and organic elements. Natural things make us happy. And happiness is a great motivator; we strive for happiness. Perhaps that's why we're always redesigning everything, in the hopes that our solutions might feel more natural. So let's start there — with the idea that good design should feel natural. Your phone is not very natural. And you probably think you're addicted to your phone, but you're really not. We're not addicted to devices, we're addicted to the information that flows through them. I wonder how long you would be happy in your happy place without any information from the outside world. I'm interested in how we access that information, how we experience it. We're moving from a time of static information, held in books and libraries and bus stops, through a period of digital information, towards a period of fluid information, where your children will expect to be able to access anything, anywhere at any time, from quantum physics to medieval viticulture, from gender theory to tomorrow's weather, just like switching on a lightbulb — Imagine that. Humans also like simple tools. Your phone is not a very simple tool. A fork is a simple tool. (Laughter) And we don't like them made of plastic, in the same way I don't really like my phone very much — it's not how I want to experience information. I think there are better solutions than a world mediated by screens. I don't hate screens, but I don't feel — and I don't think any of us feel that good about how much time we spend slouched over them. Fortunately, the big tech companies seem to agree. They're actually heavily invested in touch and speech and gesture, and also in senses — things that can turn dumb objects, like cups, and imbue them with the magic of the Internet, potentially turning this digital cloud into something we might touch and move. The parents in crisis over screen time need physical digital toys teaching their kids to read, as well as family-safe app stores. And I think, actually, that's already really happening. Reality is richer than screens. For example, I love books. For me they are time machines — atoms and molecules bound in space, from the moment of their creation to the moment of my experience. But frankly, the content's identical on my phone. So what makes this a richer experience than a screen? I mean, scientifically. We need screens, of course. I'm going to show film, I need the enormous screen. But there's more than you can do with these magic boxes. Your phone is not the Internet's door bitch. (Laughter) We can build things — physical things, using physics and pixels, that can integrate the Internet into the world around us. And I'm going to show you a few examples of those. A while ago, I got to work with a design agency, Berg, on an exploration of what the Internet without screens might actually look like. And they showed us a range ways that light can work with simple senses and physical objects to really bring the Internet to life, to make it tangible. Like this wonderfully mechanical YouTube player. And this was an inspiration to me. Next I worked with the Japanese agency, AQ, on a research project into mental health. We wanted to create an object that could capture the subjective data around mood swings that's so essential to diagnosis. This object captures your touch, so you might press it very hard if you're angry, or stroke it if you're calm. It's like a digital emoji stick. And then you might revisit those moments later, and add context to them online. Most of all, we wanted to create an intimate, beautiful thing that could live in your pocket and be loved. The binoculars are actually a birthday present for the Sydney Opera House's 40th anniversary. Our friends at Tellart in Boston brought over a pair of street binoculars, the kind you might find on the Empire State Building, and they fitted them with 360-degree views of other iconic world heritage sights — (Laughter) using Street View. And then we stuck them under the steps. So, they became this very physical, simple reappropriation, or like a portal to these other icons. So you might see Versailles or Shackleton's Hut. Basically, it's virtual reality circa 1955. (Laughter) In our office we use hacky sacks to exchange URLs. This is incredibly simple, it's like your Opal card. You basically put a website on the little chip in here, and then you do this and ... bosh! — the website appears on your phone. It's about 10 cents. Treehugger is a project that we're working on with Grumpy Sailor and Finch, here in Sydney. And I'm very excited about what might happen when you pull the phones apart and you put the bits into trees, and that my children might have an opportunity to visit an enchanted forest guided by a magic wand, where they could talk to digital fairies and ask them questions, and be asked questions in return. As you can see, we're at the cardboard stage with this one. (Laughter) But I'm very excited by the possibility of getting kids back outside without screens, but with all the powerful magic of the Internet at their fingertips. And we hope to have something like this working by the end of the year. So let's recap. Humans like natural solutions. Humans love information. Humans need simple tools. These principles should underpin how we design for the future, not just for the Internet. You may feel uncomfortable about the age of information that we're moving into. You may feel challenged, rather than simply excited. Guess what? Me too. It's a really extraordinary period of human history. We are the people that actually build our world, there are no artificial intelligences... yet. (Laughter) It's us — designers, architects, artists, engineers. And if we challenge ourselves, I think that actually we can have a happy place filled with the information we love that feels as natural and as simple as switching on lightbulb. And although it may seem inevitable, that what the public wants is watches and websites and widgets, maybe we could give a bit of thought to cork and light and hacky sacks. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Deep under the Earth's surface, discovering beauty and science	{0: 'Francesco Sauro studies caves and other karst features, and his research takes him places no one has ever been before.'}	TEDGlobal>London	I would like to invite you to come along on a visit to a dark continent. It is the continent hidden under the surface of the earth. It is largely unexplored, poorly understood, and the stuff of legends. But it is made also of dramatic landscapes like this huge underground chamber, and it is rich with surprising biological and mineralogical worlds. Thanks to the efforts of intrepid voyagers in the last three centuries — actually, we know also thanks to satellite technology, of course — we know almost every single square meter of our planet's surface. However, we know still very little about what is hidden inside the earth. Because a cave landscape, like this deep shaft in Italy, is hidden, the potential of cave exploration — the geographical dimension — is poorly understood and unappreciated. Because we are creatures living on the surface, our perception of the inner side of the planet is in some ways skewed, as is that of the depth of the oceans or of the upper atmosphere. However, since systematic cave exploration started about one century ago, we know actually that caves exist in every continent of the world. A single cave system, like Mammoth Cave, which is in Kentucky, can be as long as more than 600 kilometers. And an abyss like Krubera Voronya, which is in the Caucasus region, actually the deepest cave explored in the world, can go as far as more than 2,000 meters below the surface. That means a journey of weeks for a cave explorer. Caves form in karstic regions. So karstic regions are areas of the world where the infiltrating water along cracks, fractures, can easily dissolve soluble lithologies, forming a drainage system of tunnels, conduits — a three-dimensional network, actually. Karstic regions cover almost 20 percent of the continents' surface, and we know actually that speleologists in the last 50 years have explored roughly 30,000 kilometers of cave passages around the world, which is a big number. But geologists have estimated that what is still missing, to be discovered and mapped, is something around 10 million kilometers. That means that for each meter of a cave that we already know, that we have explored, there are still some tens of kilometers of undiscovered passages. That means that this is really an endless continent, and we will never be able to explore it completely. And this estimation is made without considering other types of caves, like, for example, inside glaciers or even volcanic caves, which are not karstic, but are formed by lava flows. And if we have a look at other planets like, for example, Mars, you will see that this characteristic is not so specific of our home planet. However, I will show to you now that we do not need to go to Mars to explore alien worlds. I'm a speleologist, that means a cave explorer. And I started with this passion when I was really young in the mountains not far from my hometown in North Italy, in the karstic regions of the Alps and the Dolomites. But soon, the quest for exploration brought me to the farthest corner of the planet, searching for new potential entrances of this undiscovered continent. And in 2009, I had the opportunity to visit the tepui table mountains, which are in the Orinoco and Amazon basins. These massifs enchanted me from the first time I saw them. They are surrounded by vertical, vertiginous rock walls with silvery waterfalls that are lost in the forest. They really inspired in me a sense of wilderness, with a soul older than millions and millions of years. And this dramatic landscape inspired among other things also Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" novel in 1912. And they are, really, a lost world. Scientists consider those mountains as islands in time, being separated from the surrounding lowlands since tens of millions of years ago. They are surrounded by up to 1,000-meter-high walls, resembling a fortress, impregnable by humans. And, in fact, only a few of these mountains have been climbed and explored on their top. These mountains contain also a scientific paradox: They are made by quartz, which is a very common mineral on the earth's crust, and the rock made up by quartz is called quartzite, and quartzite is one of the hardest and least soluble minerals on earth. So we do not expect at all to find a cave there. Despite this, in the last 10 years, speleologists from Italy, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and, of course, Venezuela and Brazil, have explored several caves in this area. So how can it be possible? To understand this contradiction, we have to consider the time factor, because the history of the tepuis is extremely long, starting about 1.6 billion years ago with the formation of the rock, and then evolving with the uplift of the region 150 million years ago, after the disruption of the Pangaea supercontinent and the opening of the Atlantic Ocean. So you can imagine that the water had tens or even hundreds of millions of years to sculpt the strangest forms on the tepuis' surfaces, but also to open the fractures and form stone cities, rock cities, fields of towers which are characterized in the famous landscape of the tepuis. But nobody could have imagined what was happening inside a mountain in so long a time frame. And so I was focusing in 2010 on one of those massifs, the Auyán-tepui, which is very famous because it hosts Angel Falls, which is the highest waterfall in the world — about 979 meters of vertical drop. And I was searching for hints of the existence of cave systems through satellite images, and finally we identified an area of collapses of the surface — so, big boulders, rock piles — and that means that there was a void below. It was a clear indication that there was something inside the mountain. So we did several attempts to reach this area, by land and with a helicopter, but it was really difficult because — you have to imagine that these mountains are covered by clouds most of the year, by fog. There are strong winds, and there are almost 4,000 millimeters of rainfall per year, so it's really, really difficult to find good conditions. And only in 2013 we finally landed on the spot and we started the exploration of the cave. The cave is huge. It's a huge network under the surface of the tepui plateau, and in only ten days of expedition, we explored more than 20 kilometers of cave passages. And it's a huge network of underground rivers, channels, big rooms, extremely deep shafts. So it's really an incredible place. And we named it Imawarì Yeuta. That means, in the Pemón indigenous language, "The House of the Gods." You have to imagine that indigenous people have never been there. It was impossible for them to reach this area. However, there were legends about the existence of a cave in the mountain. So when we started the exploration, we had to explore with a great respect, both because of the religious beliefs of the indigenous people, but also because it was really a sacred place, because no human had entered there before. So we had to use special protocols to not contaminate the environment with our presence, and we tried also to share with the community, with the indigenous community, our discoveries. And the caves represent, really, a snapshot of the past. The time needed for their formation could be as long as 50 or even 100 million years, which makes them possibly the oldest caves that we can explore on earth. What you can find there is really evidence of a lost world. When you enter a quartzite cave, you have to completely forget what you know about caves — classic limestone caves or the touristic caves that you can visit in several places in the world. Because what seems a simple stalactite here is not made by calcium carbonate, but is made by opal, and one of those stalactites can require tens of millions of years to be formed. But you can find even stranger forms, like these mushrooms of silica growing on a boulder. And you can imagine our talks when we were exploring the cave. We were the first entering and discovering those unknown things, things like those monster eggs. And we were a bit scared because it was all a discovery, and we didn't want to find a dinosaur. We didn't find a dinosaur. (Laughter) Anyway, actually, we know that this kind of formation, after several studies, we know that these kinds of formations are living organisms. They are bacterial colonies using silica to build mineral structures resembling stromatolites. Stromatolites are some of the oldest forms of life that we can find on earth. And here in the tepuis, the interesting thing is that these bacteria colonies have evolved in complete isolation from the external surface, and without being in contact with humans. They have never been in contact with humans. So the implications for science are enormous, because here you could find, for example, microbes that could be useful to resolve diseases in medicine, or you could find even a new kind of material with unknown properties. And, in fact, we discovered in the cave a new mineral structure for science, which is rossiantonite, a phosphate-sulfate. So whatever you find in the cave, even a small cricket, has evolved in the dark in complete isolation. And, really, everything that you can feel in the cave are real connections between the biological and the mineralogical world. So as we explore this dark continent and discover its mineralogical and biological diversity and uniqueness, we will find probably clues about the origin of life on our planet and on the relationship and evolution of life in relationship with the mineral world. What seems only a dark, empty environment could be in reality a chest of wonders full of useful information. With a team of Italian, Venezuelan and Brazilian speleologists, which is called La Venta Teraphosa, we will be back soon to Latin America, because we want to explore other tepuis in the farthest areas of the Amazon. There are still very unknown mountains, like Marahuaca, which is almost 3,000 meters high above sea level, or Aracà, which is in the upper region of Rio Negro in Brazil. And we suppose that we could find there even bigger cave systems, and each one with its own undiscovered world. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Francesco. Give me that to start so we don't forget. Francesco, you said we don't need to go to Mars to find alien life, and indeed, last time we spoke, you were in Sardinia and you were training European astronauts. So what do you, a speleologist, tell and teach to the astronauts? Francesco Sauro: Yeah, we are — it's a program of training for not only European, but also NASA, Roskosmos, JAXA astronauts, in a cave. So they stay in a cave for about one week in isolation. They have to work together in a real, real dangerous environment, and it's a real alien environment for them because it's unusual. It's always dark. They have to do science. They have a lot of tasks. And it's very similar to a journey to Mars or the International Space Station. BG: In principle. FS: Yes. BG: I want to go back to one of the pictures that was in your slide show, and it's just representative of the other photos — Weren't those photos amazing? Yeah? Audience: Yeah! (Applause) FS: I have to thank the photographers from the team La Venta, because all of those photos are from the photographers. BG: You bring, actually, photographers with you in the expedition. They're professionals, they're speleologists and photographers. But when I look at these pictures, I wonder: there is zero light down there, and yet they look incredibly well-exposed. How do you take these pictures? How do your colleagues, the photographers, take these pictures? FS: Yeah. They are working in a darkroom, basically, so you can open the shutter of the camera and use the lights to paint the environment. BG: So you're basically — FS: Yes. You can even keep the shutter open for one minute and then paint the environment. The final result is what you want to achieve. BG: You spray the environment with light and that's what you get. Maybe we can try this at home someday, I don't know. (Laughter) BG: Francesco, grazie. FS: Grazie. (Applause)
Social services are broken. How we can fix them	{0: 'Hilary Cottam wants to redesign the welfare state using the power of relationships.'}	TEDGlobal>London	I want to tell you three stories about the power of relationships to solve the deep and complex social problems of this century. You know, sometimes it seems like all these problems of poverty, inequality, ill health, unemployment, violence, addiction — they're right there in one person's life. So I want to tell you about someone like this that I know. I'm going to call her Ella. Ella lives in a British city on a run down estate. The shops are closed, the pub's gone, the playground's pretty desolate and never used, and inside Ella's house, the tension is palpable and the noise levels are deafening. The TV's on at full volume. One of her sons is fighting with one of her daughters. Another son, Ryan, is keeping up this constant stream of abuse from the kitchen, and the dogs are locked behind the bedroom door and straining. Ella is stuck. She has lived with crisis for 40 years. She knows nothing else, and she knows no way out. She's had a whole series of abusive partners, and, tragically, one of her children has been taken into care by social services. The three children that still live with her suffer from a whole range of problems, and none of them are in education. And Ella says to me that she is repeating the cycle of her own mother's life before her. But when I met Ella, there were 73 different services on offer for her and her family in the city where she lives, 73 different services run out of 24 departments in one city, and Ella and her partners and her children were known to most of them. They think nothing of calling social services to try and mediate one of the many arguments that broke out. And the family home was visited on a regular basis by social workers, youth workers, a health officer, a housing officer, a home tutor and the local policemen. And the governments say that there are 100,000 families in Britain today like Ella's, struggling to break the cycle of economic, social and environmental deprivation. And they also say that managing this problem costs a quarter of a million pounds per family per year and yet nothing changes. None of these well-meaning visitors are making a difference. This is a chart we made in the same city with another family like Ella's. This shows 30 years of intervention in that family's life. And just as with Ella, not one of these interventions is part of an overall plan. There's no end goal in sight. None of the interventions are dealing with the underlying issues. These are just containment measures, ways of managing a problem. One of the policemen says to me, "Look, I just deliver the message and then I leave." So, I've spent time living with families like Ella's in different parts of the world, because I want to know: what can we learn from places where our social institutions just aren't working? I want to know what it feels like to live in Ella's family. I want to know what's going on and what we can do differently. Well, the first thing I learned is that cost is a really slippery concept. Because when the government says that a family like Ella's costs a quarter of a million pounds a year to manage, what it really means is that this system costs a quarter of a million pounds a year. Because not one penny of this money actually touches Ella's family in a way that makes a difference. Instead, the system is just like this costly gyroscope that spins around the families, keeping them stuck at its heart, exactly where they are. And I also spent time with the frontline workers, and I learned that it is an impossible situation. So Tom, who is the social worker for Ella's 14-year-old son Ryan, has to spend 86 percent of his time servicing the system: meetings with colleagues, filling out forms, more meetings with colleagues to discuss the forms, and maybe most shockingly, the 14 percent of the time he has to be with Ryan is spent getting data and information for the system. So he says to Ryan, "How often have you been smoking? Have you been drinking? When did you go to school?" And this kind of interaction rules out the possibility of a normal conversation. It rules out the possibility of what's needed to build a relationship between Tom and Ryan. When we made this chart, the frontline workers, the professionals — they stared at it absolutely amazed. It snaked around the walls of their offices. So many hours, so well meant, but ultimately so futile. And there was this moment of absolute breakdown, and then of clarity: we had to work in a different way. So in a really brave step, the leaders of the city where Ella lives agreed that we could start by reversing Ryan's ratio. So everyone who came into contact with Ella or a family like Ella's would spend 80 percent of their time working with the families and only 20 percent servicing the system. And even more radically, the families would lead and they would decide who was in a best position to help them. So Ella and another mother were asked to be part of an interview panel, to choose from amongst the existing professionals who would work with them. And many, many people wanted to join us, because you don't go into this kind of work to manage a system, you go in because you can and you want to make a difference. So Ella and the mother asked everybody who came through the door, "What will you do when my son starts kicking me?" And so the first person who comes in says, "Well, I'll look around for the nearest exit and I will back out very slowly, and if the noise is still going on, I'll call my supervisor." And the mothers go, "You're the system. Get out of here!" And then the next person who comes is a policeman, and he says, "Well, I'll tackle your son to the ground and then I'm not sure what I'll do." And the mothers say, "Thank you." So, they chose professionals who confessed they didn't necessarily have the answers, who said — well, they weren't going to talk in jargon. They showed their human qualities and convinced the mothers that they would stick with them through thick and thin, even though they wouldn't be soft with them. So these new teams and the families were then given a sliver of the former budget, but they could spend the money in any way they chose. And so one of the families went out for supper. They went to McDonald's and they sat down and they talked and they listened for the first time in a long time. Another family asked the team if they would help them do up their home. And one mother took the money and she used it as a float to start a social enterprise. And in a really short space of time, something new started to grow: a relationship between the team and the workers. And then some remarkable changes took place. Maybe it's not surprising that the journey for Ella has had some big steps backwards as well as forwards. But today, she's completed an IT training course, she has her first paid job, her children are back in school, and the neighbors, who previously just hoped this family would be moved anywhere except next door to them, are fine. They've made some new friendships. And all the same people have been involved in this transformation — same families, same workers. But the relationship between them has been supported to change. So I'm telling you about Ella because I think that relationships are the critical resource we have in solving some of these intractable problems. But today, our relationships are all but written off by our politics, our social policies, our welfare institutions. And I've learned that this really has to change. So what do I mean by relationships? I'm talking about the simple human bonds between us, a kind of authentic sense of connection, of belonging, the bonds that make us happy, that support us to change, to be brave like Ella and try something new. And, you know, it's no accident that those who run and work in the institutions that are supposed to support Ella and her family don't talk about relationships, because relationships are expressly designed out of a welfare model that was drawn up in Britain and exported around the world. The contemporaries of William Beveridge, who was the architect of the first welfare state and the author of the Beveridge Report, had little faith in what they called the average sensual or emotional man. Instead, they trusted this idea of the impersonal system and the bureaucrat who would be detached and work in this system. And the impact of Beveridge on the way the modern state sees social issues just can't be underestimated. The Beveridge Report sold over 100,000 copies in the first weeks of publication alone. People queued in the rain on a November night to get hold of a copy, and it was read across the country, across the colonies, across Europe, across the United States of America, and it had this huge impact on the way that welfare states were designed around the globe. The cultures, the bureaucracies, the institutions — they are global, and they've come to seem like common sense. They've become so ingrained in us, that actually we don't even see them anymore. And I think it's really important to say that in the 20th century, they were remarkably successful, these institutions. They led to longer lifespans, the eradication of mass disease, mass housing, almost universal education. But at the same time, Beveridge sowed the seeds of today's challenges. So let me tell you a second story. What do you think today is a bigger killer than a lifetime of smoking? It's loneliness. According to government statistics, one person over 60 — one in three — doesn't speak to or see another person in a week. One person in 10, that's 850,000 people, doesn't speak to anyone else in a month. And we're not the only people with this problem; this problem touches the whole of the Western world. And it's even more acute in countries like China, where a process of rapid urbanization, mass migration, has left older people alone in the villages. And so the services that Beveridge designed and exported — they can't address this kind of problem. Loneliness is like a collective relational challenge, and it can't be addressed by a traditional bureaucratic response. So some years ago, wanting to understand this problem, I started to work with a group of about 60 older people in South London, where I live. I went shopping, I played bingo, but mainly I was just observing and listening. I wanted to know what we could do differently. And if you ask them, people tell you they want two things. They want somebody to go up a ladder and change a light bulb, or to be there when they come out of hospital. They want on-demand, practical support. And they want to have fun. They want to go out, do interesting things with like-minded people, and make friends like we've all made friends at every stage of our lives. So we rented a phone line, hired a couple of handymen, and started a service we called "Circle." And Circle offers its local membership a toll-free 0 800 number that they can call on demand for any support. And people have called us for so many reasons. They've called because their pets are unwell, their DVD is broken, they've forgotten how to use their mobile phone, or maybe they are coming out of hospital and they want someone to be there. And Circle also offers a rich social calendar — knitting, darts, museum tours, hot air ballooning — you name it. But here's the interesting thing, the really deep change: over time, the friendships that have formed have begun to replace the practical offer. So let me tell you about Belinda. Belinda's a Circle member, and she was going into hospital for a hip operation, so she called her local Circle to say they wouldn't see her for a bit. And Damon, who runs the local Circle, calls her back and says, "How can I help?" And Belinda says, "Oh no, I'm fine — Jocelyn is doing the shopping, Tony's doing the gardening, Melissa and Joe are going to come in and cook and chat." So five Circle members had organized themselves to take care of Belinda. And Belinda's 80, although she says that she feels 25 inside, but she also says that she felt stuck and pretty down when she joined Circle. But the simple act of encouraging her to come along to that first event led to a process where natural friendships formed, friendships that today are replacing the need for expensive services. It's relationships that are making the difference. So I think that three factors have converged that enable us to put relationships at the heart and center of how we solve social problems today. Firstly, the nature of the problems — they've changed, and they require different solutions. Secondly, the cost, human as much as financial, of doing business as usual. And thirdly, technology. I've talked about the first two factors. It's technology that enables these approaches to scale and potentially now support thousands of people. So the technology we've used is really simple, it's made up of available things like databases, mobile phones. Circle has got this very simple system that underpins it, enables a small local team to support a membership of up to a thousand. And you can contrast this with a neighborhood organization of the 1970s, when this kind of scale just wasn't possible, neither was the quality or the longevity that the spine of technology can provide. So it's relationships underpinned by technology that can turn the Beveridge models on their heads. The Beveridge models are all about institutions with finite resources, anonymously managing access. In my work at the front line, I've seen again and again how up to 80 percent of resource is spent keeping people out. So professionals have to administer these increasingly complex forms of administration that are basically about stopping people accessing the service or managing the queue. And Circle, like the relational services that we and others have designed, inverts this logic. What it says is, the more people, the more relationships, the stronger the solution. So I want to tell you my third and final story, which is about unemployment. In Britain, as in most places in the world, our welfare states were primarily designed to get people into work, to educate them for this, and to keep them healthy. But here, too, the systems are failing. And so the response has been to try and make these old systems even more efficient and transactional — to speed up processing times, divide people into ever-smaller categories, try and target services at them more efficiently — in other words, the very opposite of relational. But guess how most people find work today? Through word of mouth. It turns out that in Britain today, most new jobs are not advertised. So it's friends that tell you about a job, it's friends that recommend you for a job, and it's a rich and diverse social network that helps you find work. Maybe some of you here this evening are thinking, "But I found my job through an advert," but if you think back, it was probably a friend that showed you the ad and then encouraged you to apply. But not surprisingly, people who perhaps most need this rich and diverse network are those who are most isolated from it. So knowing this, and also knowing about the costs and failure of current systems, we designed something new with relationships at its heart. We designed a service that encourages people to meet up, people in and out of work, to work together in structured ways and try new opportunities. And, well, it's very hard to compare the results of these new systems with the old transactional models, but it looks like, with our first 1,000 members, we outperformed existing services by a factor of three, at a fraction of the cost. And here, too, we've used technology, but not to network people in the way that a social platform would do. We've used it to bring people face to face and connect them with each other, building real relationships and supporting people to find work. At the end of his life, in 1948, Beveridge wrote a third report. And in it he said he had made a dreadful mistake. He had left people and their communities out. And this omission, he said, led to seeing people, and people starting to see themselves, within the categories of the bureaucracies and the institutions. And human relationships were already withering. But unfortunately, this third report was much less read than Beveridge's earlier work. But today, we need to bring people and their communities back into the heart of the way we design new systems and new services, in an approach that I call "Relational Welfare." We need to leave behind these old, transactional, unsuitable, outdated models, and we need to adopt instead the shared collective relational responses that can support a family like Ella's, that can address an issue like loneliness, that can support people into work and up the skills curve in a modern labor market, that can also address challenges of education, of health care systems, and so many more of those problems that are pressing on our societies. It is all about relationships. Relationships are the critical resource we have. Thank you. (Applause)
How I teach kids to love science	{0: 'TED Senior Fellow Cesar Harada aims to harness the forces of nature as he invents innovative remedies for man-made problems like oil spills and radioactive leaks.'}	TED Fellows Retreat 2015	When I was a kid, my parents would tell me, "You can make a mess, but you have to clean up after yourself." So freedom came with responsibility. But my imagination would take me to all these wonderful places, where everything was possible. So I grew up in a bubble of innocence — or a bubble of ignorance, I should say, because adults would lie to us to protect us from the ugly truth. And growing up, I found out that adults make a mess, and they're not very good at cleaning up after themselves. Fast forward, I am an adult now, and I teach citizen science and invention at the Hong Kong Harbour School. And it doesn't take too long before my students walk on a beach and stumble upon piles of trash. So as good citizens, we clean up the beaches — and no, he is not drinking alcohol, and if he is, I did not give it to him. (Laughter) And so it's sad to say, but today more than 80 percent of the oceans have plastic in them. It's a horrifying fact. And in past decades, we've been taking those big ships out and those big nets, and we collect those plastic bits that we look at under a microscope, and we sort them, and then we put this data onto a map. But that takes forever, it's very expensive, and so it's quite risky to take those big boats out. So with my students, ages six to 15, we've been dreaming of inventing a better way. So we've transformed our tiny Hong Kong classroom into a workshop. And so we started building this small workbench, with different heights, so even really short kids can participate. And let me tell you, kids with power tools are awesome and safe. (Laughter) Not really. And so, back to plastic. We collect this plastic and we grind it to the size we find it in the ocean, which is very small because it breaks down. And so this is how we work. I let the imaginations of my students run wild. And my job is to try to collect the best of each kid's idea and try to combine it into something that hopefully would work. And so we have agreed that instead of collecting plastic bits, we are going to collect only the data. So we're going to get an image of the plastic with a robot — so robots, kids get very excited. And the next thing we do — we do what we call "rapid prototyping." We are so rapid at prototyping that the lunch is still in the lunchbox when we're hacking it. (Laughter) And we hack table lamps and webcams, into plumbing fixtures and we assemble that into a floating robot that will be slowly moving through water and through the plastic that we have there — and this is the image that we get in the robot. So we see the plastic pieces floating slowly through the sensor, and the computer on board will process this image, and measure the size of each particle, so we have a rough estimate of how much plastic there is in the water. So we documented this invention step by step on a website for inventors called Instructables, in the hope that somebody would make it even better. What was really cool about this project was that the students saw a local problem, and boom — they are trying to immediately address it. [I can investigate my local problem] But my students in Hong Kong are hyperconnected kids. And they watch the news, they watch the Internet, and they came across this image. This was a child, probably under 10, cleaning up an oil spill bare-handed, in the Sundarbans, which is the world's largest mangrove forest in Bangladesh. So they were very shocked, because this is the water they drink, this is the water they bathe in, this is the water they fish in — this is the place where they live. And also you can see the water is brown, the mud is brown and oil is brown, so when everything is mixed up, it's really hard to see what's in the water. But, there's a technology that's rather simple, that's called spectrometry, that allows you see what's in the water. So we built a rough prototype of a spectrometer, and you can shine light through different substances that produce different spectrums, so that can help you identify what's in the water. So we packed this prototype of a sensor, and we shipped it to Bangladesh. So what was cool about this project was that beyond addressing a local problem, or looking at a local problem, my students used their empathy and their sense of being creative to help, remotely, other kids. [I can investigate a remote problem] So I was very compelled by doing the second experiments, and I wanted to take it even further — maybe addressing an even harder problem, and it's also closer to my heart. So I'm half Japanese and half French, and maybe you remember in 2011 there was a massive earthquake in Japan. It was so violent that it triggered several giant waves — they are called tsunami — and those tsunami destroyed many cities on the eastern coast of Japan. More than 14,000 people died in an instant. Also, it damaged the nuclear power plant of Fukushima, the nuclear power plant just by the water. And today, I read the reports and an average of 300 tons are leaking from the nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. And today the whole Pacific Ocean has traces of contamination of cesium-137. If you go outside on the West Coast, you can measure Fukushima everywhere. But if you look at the map, it can look like most of the radioactivity has been washed away from the Japanese coast, and most of it is now — it looks like it's safe, it's blue. Well, reality is a bit more complicated than this. So I've been going to Fukushima every year since the accident, and I measure independently and with other scientists, on land, in the river — and this time we wanted to take the kids. So of course we didn't take the kids, the parents wouldn't allow that to happen. (Laughter) But every night we would report to "Mission Control" — different masks they're wearing. It could look like they didn't take the work seriously, but they really did because they're going to have to live with radioactivity their whole life. And so what we did with them is that we'd discuss the data we collected that day, and talk about where we should be going next — strategy, itinerary, etc... And to do this, we built a very rough topographical map of the region around the nuclear power plant. And so we built the elevation map, we sprinkled pigments to represent real-time data for radioactivity, and we sprayed water to simulate the rainfall. And with this we could see that the radioactive dust was washing from the top of the mountain into the river system, and leaking into the ocean. So it was a rough estimate. But with this in mind, we organized this expedition, which was the closest civilians have been to the nuclear power plant. We are sailing 1.5 kilometers away from the nuclear power plant, and with the help of the local fisherman, we are collecting sediment from the seabed with a custom sediment sampler we've invented and built. We pack the sediment into small bags, we then dispatch them to hundreds of small bags that we send to different universities, and we produce the map of the seabed radioactivity, especially in estuaries where the fish will reproduce, and I will hope that we will have improved the safety of the local fishermen and of your favorite sushi. (Laughter) You can see a progression here — we've gone from a local problem to a remote problem to a global problem. And it's been super exciting to work at these different scales, with also very simple, open-source technologies. But at the same time, it's been increasingly frustrating because we have only started to measure the damage that we have done. We haven't even started to try to solve the problems. And so I wonder if we should just take a leap and try to invent better ways to do all these things. And so the classroom started to feel a little bit small, so we found an industrial site in Hong Kong, and we turned it into the largest mega-space focused on social and environmental impact. It's in central Hong Kong, and it's a place we can work with wood, metal, chemistry, a bit of biology, a bit of optics, basically you can build pretty much everything there. And its a place where adults and kids can play together. It's a place where kids' dreams can come true, with the help of adults, and where adults can be kids again. Student: Acceleration! Acceleration! Cesar Harada: We're asking questions such as, can we invent the future of mobility with renewable energy? For example. Or, can we help the mobility of the aging population by transforming very standard wheelchairs into cool, electric vehicles? So plastic, oil and radioactivity are horrible, horrible legacies, but the very worst legacy that we can leave our children is lies. We can no longer afford to shield the kids from the ugly truth because we need their imagination to invent the solutions. So citizen scientists, makers, dreamers — we must prepare the next generation that cares about the environment and people, and that can actually do something about it. Thank you. (Applause)
The enchanting music of sign language	{0: 'Through visual art, composition and performance, Christine Sun Kim explores ways of transmuting sound and silence.'}	TED Fellows Retreat 2015	Interpreter: Piano, "p," is my favorite musical symbol. It means to play softly. If you're playing a musical instrument and you notice a "p" in the score, you need to play softer. Two p's — even softer. Four p's — extremely soft. This is my drawing of a p-tree, which demonstrates no matter how many thousands upon thousands of p's there may be, you'll never reach complete silence. That's my current definition of silence: a very obscure sound. I'd like to share a little bit about the history of American Sign Language, ASL, plus a bit of my own background. French sign language was brought to America during the early 1800s, and as time went by, mixed with local signs, it evolved into the language we know today as ASL. So it has a history of about 200 years. I was born deaf, and I was taught to believe that sound wasn't a part of my life. And I believed it to be true. Yet, I realize now that that wasn't the case at all. Sound was very much a part of my life, really, on my mind every day. As a Deaf person living in a world of sound, it's as if I was living in a foreign country, blindly following its rules, customs, behaviors and norms without ever questioning them. So how is it that I understand sound? Well, I watch how people behave and respond to sound. You people are like my loudspeakers, and amplify sound. I learn and mirror that behavior. At the same time, I've learned that I create sound, and I've seen how people respond to me. Thus I've learned, for example ... "Don't slam the door!" "Don't make too much noise when you're eating from the potato-chip bag!" (Laughter) "Don't burp, and when you're eating, make sure you don't scrape your utensils on the plate." All of these things I term "sound etiquette." Maybe I think about sound etiquette more than the average hearing person does. I'm hyper-vigilant around sound. And I'm always waiting in eager nervous anticipation around sound, about what's to come next. Hence, this drawing. TBD, to be decided. TBC, to be continued. TBA, to be announced. And you notice the staff — there are no notes contained in the lines. That's because the lines already contain sound through the subtle smudges and smears. In Deaf culture, movement is equivalent to sound. This is a sign for "staff" in ASL. A typical staff contains five lines. Yet for me, signing it with my thumb sticking up like that doesn't feel natural. That's why you'll notice in my drawings, I stick to four lines on paper. In the year 2008, I had the opportunity to travel to Berlin, Germany, for an artist residency there. Prior to this time, I had been working as a painter. During this summer, I visited different museums and gallery spaces, and as I went from one place to the next, I noticed there was no visual art there. At that time, sound was trending, and this struck me ... there was no visual art, everything was auditory. Now sound has come into my art territory. Is it going to further distance me from art? I realized that doesn't have to be the case at all. I actually know sound. I know it so well that it doesn't have to be something just experienced through the ears. It could be felt tactually, or experienced as a visual, or even as an idea. So I decided to reclaim ownership of sound and to put it into my art practice. And everything that I had been taught regarding sound, I decided to do away with and unlearn. I started creating a new body of work. And when I presented this to the art community, I was blown away with the amount of support and attention I received. I realized: sound is like money, power, control — social currency. In the back of my mind, I've always felt that sound was your thing, a hearing person's thing. And sound is so powerful that it could either disempower me and my artwork, or it could empower me. I chose to be empowered. There's a massive culture around spoken language. And just because I don't use my literal voice to communicate, in society's eyes it's as if I don't have a voice at all. So I need to work with individuals who can support me as an equal and become my voice. And that way, I'm able to maintain relevancy in society today. So at school, at work and institutions, I work with many different ASL interpreters. And their voice becomes my voice and identity. They help me to be heard. And their voices hold value and currency. Ironically, by borrowing out their voices, I'm able to maintain a temporary form of currency, kind of like taking out a loan with a very high interest rate. If I didn't continue this practice, I feel that I could just fade off into oblivion and not maintain any form of social currency. So with sound as my new art medium, I delved into the world of music. And I was surprised to see the similarities between music and ASL. For example, a musical note cannot be fully captured and expressed on paper. And the same holds true for a concept in ASL. They're both highly spatial and highly inflected — meaning that subtle changes can affect the entire meaning of both signs and sounds. I'd like to share with you a piano metaphor, to have you have a better understanding of how ASL works. So, envision a piano. ASL is broken down into many different grammatical parameters. If you assign a different parameter to each finger as you play the piano — such as facial expression, body movement, speed, hand shape and so on, as you play the piano — English is a linear language, as if one key is being pressed at a time. However, ASL is more like a chord — all 10 fingers need to come down simultaneously to express a clear concept or idea in ASL. If just one of those keys were to change the chord, it would create a completely different meaning. The same applies to music in regards to pitch, tone and volume. In ASL, by playing around with these different grammatical parameters, you can express different ideas. For example, take the sign TO-LOOK-AT. This is the sign TO-LOOK-AT. I'm looking at you. Staring at you. (Laughter) (Laughter) Oh — busted. (Laughter) Uh-oh. What are you looking at? Aw, stop. (Laughter) I then started thinking, "What if I was to look at ASL through a musical lens?" If I was to create a sign and repeat it over and over, it could become like a piece of visual music. For example, this is the sign for "day," as the sun rises and sets. This is "all day." If I was to repeat it and slow it down, visually it looks like a piece of music. All ... day. I feel the same holds true for "all night." "All night." This is ALL-NIGHT, represented in this drawing. And this led me to thinking about three different kinds of nights: "last night," "overnight," (Sings) "all night long." (Laughter) I feel like the third one has a lot more musicality than the other two. (Laughter) This represents how time is expressed in ASL and how the distance from your body can express the changes in time. For example, 1H is one hand, 2H is two hand, present tense happens closest and in front of the body, future is in front of the body and the past is to your back. So, the first example is "a long time ago." Then "past," "used to" and the last one, which is my favorite, with the very romantic and dramatic notion to it, "once upon a time." (Laughter) "Common time" is a musical term with a specific time signature of four beats per measure. Yet when I see the word "common time," what automatically comes to mind for me is "at the same time." So notice RH: right hand, LH: left hand. We have the staff across the head and the chest. [Head: RH, Flash claw] [Common time] [Chest: LH, Flash claw] I'm now going to demonstrate a hand shape called the "flash claw." Can you please follow along with me? Everybody, hands up. Now we're going to do it in both the head and the chest, kind of like "common time" or at the same time. Yes, got it. That means "to fall in love" in International [Sign]. (Laughter) International [Sign], as a note, is a visual tool to help communicate across cultures and sign languages around the world. The second one I'd like to demonstrate is this — please follow along with me again. And now this. This is "colonization" in ASL. (Laughter) Now the third — please follow along again. And again. This is "enlightenment" in ASL. So let's do all three together. "Fall in love," "colonization" and "enlightenment." Good job, everyone. (Laughter) Notice how all three signs are very similar, they all happen at the head and the chest, but they convey quite different meanings. So it's amazing to see how ASL is alive and thriving, just like music is. However, in this day and age, we live in a very audio-centric world. And just because ASL has no sound to it, it automatically holds no social currency. We need to start thinking harder about what defines social currency and allow ASL to develop its own form of currency — without sound. And this could possibly be a step to lead to a more inclusive society. And maybe people will understand that you don't need to be deaf to learn ASL, nor do you have to be hearing to learn music. ASL is such a rich treasure that I'd like you to have the same experience. And I'd like to invite you to open your ears, to open your eyes, take part in our culture and experience our visual language. And you never know, you might just fall in love with us. (Applause) Thank you. Denise Kahler-Braaten: Hey, that's me. (Applause)
Art that lets you talk back to NSA spies	{0: 'The work of artists Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter questions the limits of our communication possibilities and, therefore, of our identity.'}	TEDGlobal>London	A year ago, we were invited by the Swiss Embassy in Berlin to present our art projects. We are used to invitations, but this invitation really thrilled us. The Swiss Embassy in Berlin is special. It is the only old building in the government district that was not destroyed during the Second World War, and it sits right next to the Federal Chancellery. No one is closer to Chancellor Merkel than the Swiss diplomats. (Laughter) The government district in Berlin also contains the Reichstag — Germany's parliament — and the Brandenburg Gate, and right next to the gate there are other embassies, in particular the US and the British Embassy. Although Germany is an advanced democracy, citizens are limited in their constitutional rights in its government district. The right of assembly and the right to demonstrate are restricted there. And this is interesting from an artistic point of view. The opportunities to exercise participation and to express oneself are always bound to a certain order and always subject to a specific regulation. With an awareness of the dependencies of these regulations, we can gain a new perspective. The given terms and conditions shape our perception, our actions and our lives. And this is crucial in another context. Over the last couple of years, we learned that from the roofs of the US and the British Embassy, the secret services have been listening to the entire district, including the mobile phone of Angela Merkel. The antennas of the British GCHQ are hidden in a white cylindrical radome, while the listening post of the American NSA is covered by radio transparent screens. But how to address these hidden and disguised forces? With my colleague, Christoph Wachter, we accepted the invitation of the Swiss Embassy. And we used this opportunity to exploit the specific situation. If people are spying on us, it stands to reason that they have to listen to what we are saying. (Laughter) On the roof of the Swiss Embassy, we installed a series of antennas. They weren't as sophisticated as those used by the Americans and the British. (Laughter) They were makeshift can antennas, not camouflaged but totally obvious and visible. The Academy of Arts joined the project, and so we built another large antenna on their rooftop, exactly between the listening posts of the NSA and the GCHQ. (Laughter) Never have we been observed in such detail while building an art installation. A helicopter circled over our heads with a camera registering each and every move we made, and on the roof of the US Embassy, security officers patrolled. Although the government district is governed by a strict police order, there are no specific laws relating to digital communication. Our installation was therefore perfectly legal, and the Swiss Ambassador informed Chancellor Merkel about it. We named the project "Can You Hear Me?" (Laughter) The antennas created an open and free Wi-Fi communication network in which anyone who wanted to would be able to participate using any Wi-Fi-enabled device without any hindrance, and be able to send messages to those listening on the frequencies that were being intercepted. Text messages, voice chat, file sharing — anything could be sent anonymously. And people did communicate. Over 15,000 messages were sent. Here are some examples. "Hello world, hello Berlin, hello NSA, hello GCHQ." "NSA Agents, Do the Right Thing! Blow the whistle!" "This is the NSA. In God we trust. All others we track!!!!!" (Laughter) "#@nonymous is watching #NSA #GCHQ - we are part of your organizations. # expect us. We will #shutdown" "This is the NSA's Achilles heel. Open Networks." "Agents, what twisted story of yourself will you tell your grandchildren?" "@NSA My neighbors are noisy. Please send a drone strike." (Laughter) "Make Love, Not cyberwar." We invited the embassies and the government departments to participate in the open network, too, and to our surprise, they did. Files appeared on the network, including classified documents leaked from the parliamentary investigation commission, which highlights that the free exchange and discussion of vital information is starting to become difficult, even for members of a parliament. We also organized guided tours to experience and sound out the power constellations on-site. The tours visited the restricted zones around the embassies, and we discussed the potential and the highlights of communication. If we become aware of the constellation, the terms and conditions of communication, it not only broadens our horizon, it allows us to look behind the regulations that limit our worldview, our specific social, political or aesthetic conventions. Let's look at an actual example. The fate of people living in the makeshift settlements on the outskirts of Paris is hidden and faded from view. It's a vicious circle. It's not poverty, not racism, not exclusion that are new. What is new is how these realities are hidden and how people are made invisible in an age of global and overwhelming communication and exchange. Such makeshift settlements are considered illegal, and therefore those living in them don't have a chance of making their voices heard. On the contrary, every time they appear, every time they risk becoming visible, merely gives grounds for further persecution, expulsion and suppression. What interested us was how we could come to know this hidden side. We were searching for an interface and we found one. It's not a digital interface, but a physical one: it's a hotel. We named the project "Hotel Gelem." Together with Roma families, we created several Hotel Gelems in Europe, for example, in Freiburg in Germany, in Montreuil near Paris, and also in the Balkans. These are real hotels. People can stay there. But they aren't a commercial enterprise. They are a symbol. You can go online and ask for a personal invitation to come and live for a few days in the Hotel Gelem, in their homes, eating, working and living with the Roma families. Here, the Roma families are not the travelers; the visitors are. Here, the Roma families are not a minority; the visitors are. The point is not to make judgments, but rather to find out about the context that determines these disparate and seemingly insurmountable contradictions. In the world of globalization, the continents are drifting closer to each other. Cultures, goods and people are in permanent exchange, but at the same time, the gap between the world of the privileged and the world of the excluded is growing. We were recently in Australia. For us, it was no problem to enter the country. We have European passports, visas and air tickets. But asylum seekers who arrive by boat in Australia are deported or taken to prison. The interception of the boats and the disappearance of the people into the detention system are veiled by the Australian authorities. These procedures are declared to be secret military operations. After dramatic escapes from crisis zones and war zones, men, women and children are detained by Australia without trial, sometimes for years. During our stay, however, we managed to reach out and work with asylum seekers who were imprisoned, despite strict screening and isolation. From these contexts was born an installation in the art space of the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. On the face of it, it was a very simple installation. On the floor, a stylized compass gave the direction to each immigration detention center, accompanied by the distance and the name of the immigration facility. But the exhibition step came in the form of connectivity. Above every floor marking, there was a headset. Visitors were offered the opportunity to talk directly to a refugee who was or had been imprisoned in a specific detention facility and engage in a personal conversation. In the protected context of the art exhibition, asylum seekers felt free to talk about themselves, their story and their situation, without fear of consequences. Visitors immersed themselves in long conversations about families torn apart, about dramatic escapes from war zones, about suicide attempts, about the fate of children in detention. Emotions ran deep. Many wept. Several revisited the exhibition. It was a powerful experience. Europe is now facing a stream of migrants. The situation for the asylum seekers is made worse by contradictory policies and the temptation of militarized responses. We have also established communication systems in remote refugee centers in Switzerland and Greece. They are all about providing basic information — weather forecasts, legal information, guidance. But they are significant. Information on the Internet that could ensure survival along dangerous routes is being censored, and the provision of such information is becoming increasingly criminalized. This brings us back to our network and to the antennas on the roof of the Swiss Embassy in Berlin and the "Can You Hear Me?" project. We should not take it for granted to be boundlessly connected. We should start making our own connections, fighting for this idea of an equal and globally interconnected world. This is essential to overcome our speechlessness and the separation provoked by rival political forces. It is only in truly exposing ourselves to the transformative power of this experience that we can overcome prejudice and exclusion. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Mathias. The other half of your artistic duo is also here. Christoph Wachter, come onstage. (Applause) First, tell me just a detail: the name of the hotel is not a random name. Gelem means something specific in the Roma language. Mathias Jud: Yes, "Gelem, Gelem" is the title of the Romani hymn, the official, and it means "I went a long way." BG: That's just to add the detail to your talk. But you two traveled to the island of Lesbos very recently, you're just back a couple of days ago, in Greece, where thousands of refugees are arriving and have been arriving over the last few months. What did you see there and what did you do there? Christoph Wachter: Well, Lesbos is one of the Greek islands close to Turkey, and during our stay, many asylum seekers arrived by boat on overcrowded dinghies, and after landing, they were left completely on their own. They are denied many services. For example, they are not allowed to buy a bus ticket or to rent a hotel room, so many families literally sleep in the streets. And we installed networks there to allow basic communication, because I think, I believe, it's not only that we have to speak about the refugees, I think we need to start talking to them. And by doing so, we can realize that it is about human beings, about their lives and their struggle to survive. BG: And allow them to talk as well. Christoph, thank you for coming to TED. Mathias, thank you for coming to TED and sharing your story. (Applause)
How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed	{0: 'Daniel Levitin incorporates findings from neuroscience into everyday life.'}	TEDGlobal>London	A few years ago, I broke into my own house. I had just driven home, it was around midnight in the dead of Montreal winter, I had been visiting my friend, Jeff, across town, and the thermometer on the front porch read minus 40 degrees — and don't bother asking if that's Celsius or Fahrenheit, minus 40 is where the two scales meet — it was very cold. And as I stood on the front porch fumbling in my pockets, I found I didn't have my keys. In fact, I could see them through the window, lying on the dining room table where I had left them. So I quickly ran around and tried all the other doors and windows, and they were locked tight. I thought about calling a locksmith — at least I had my cellphone, but at midnight, it could take a while for a locksmith to show up, and it was cold. I couldn't go back to my friend Jeff's house for the night because I had an early flight to Europe the next morning, and I needed to get my passport and my suitcase. So, desperate and freezing cold, I found a large rock and I broke through the basement window, cleared out the shards of glass, I crawled through, I found a piece of cardboard and taped it up over the opening, figuring that in the morning, on the way to the airport, I could call my contractor and ask him to fix it. This was going to be expensive, but probably no more expensive than a middle-of-the-night locksmith, so I figured, under the circumstances, I was coming out even. Now, I'm a neuroscientist by training and I know a little bit about how the brain performs under stress. It releases cortisol that raises your heart rate, it modulates adrenaline levels and it clouds your thinking. So the next morning, when I woke up on too little sleep, worrying about the hole in the window, and a mental note that I had to call my contractor, and the freezing temperatures, and the meetings I had upcoming in Europe, and, you know, with all the cortisol in my brain, my thinking was cloudy, but I didn't know it was cloudy because my thinking was cloudy. (Laughter) And it wasn't until I got to the airport check-in counter, that I realized I didn't have my passport. (Laughter) So I raced home in the snow and ice, 40 minutes, got my passport, raced back to the airport, I made it just in time, but they had given away my seat to someone else, so I got stuck in the back of the plane, next to the bathrooms, in a seat that wouldn't recline, on an eight-hour flight. Well, I had a lot of time to think during those eight hours and no sleep. (Laughter) And I started wondering, are there things that I can do, systems that I can put into place, that will prevent bad things from happening? Or at least if bad things happen, will minimize the likelihood of it being a total catastrophe. So I started thinking about that, but my thoughts didn't crystallize until about a month later. I was having dinner with my colleague, Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner, and I somewhat embarrassedly told him about having broken my window, and, you know, forgotten my passport, and Danny shared with me that he'd been practicing something called prospective hindsight. (Laughter) It's something that he had gotten from the psychologist Gary Klein, who had written about it a few years before, also called the pre-mortem. Now, you all know what the postmortem is. Whenever there's a disaster, a team of experts come in and they try to figure out what went wrong, right? Well, in the pre-mortem, Danny explained, you look ahead and you try to figure out all the things that could go wrong, and then you try to figure out what you can do to prevent those things from happening, or to minimize the damage. So what I want to talk to you about today are some of the things we can do in the form of a pre-mortem. Some of them are obvious, some of them are not so obvious. I'll start with the obvious ones. Around the home, designate a place for things that are easily lost. Now, this sounds like common sense, and it is, but there's a lot of science to back this up, based on the way our spatial memory works. There's a structure in the brain called the hippocampus, that evolved over tens of thousands of years, to keep track of the locations of important things — where the well is, where fish can be found, that stand of fruit trees, where the friendly and enemy tribes live. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that in London taxicab drivers becomes enlarged. It's the part of the brain that allows squirrels to find their nuts. And if you're wondering, somebody actually did the experiment where they cut off the olfactory sense of the squirrels, and they could still find their nuts. They weren't using smell, they were using the hippocampus, this exquisitely evolved mechanism in the brain for finding things. But it's really good for things that don't move around much, not so good for things that move around. So this is why we lose car keys and reading glasses and passports. So in the home, designate a spot for your keys — a hook by the door, maybe a decorative bowl. For your passport, a particular drawer. For your reading glasses, a particular table. If you designate a spot and you're scrupulous about it, your things will always be there when you look for them. What about travel? Take a cell phone picture of your credit cards, your driver's license, your passport, mail it to yourself so it's in the cloud. If these things are lost or stolen, you can facilitate replacement. Now these are some rather obvious things. Remember, when you're under stress, the brain releases cortisol. Cortisol is toxic, and it causes cloudy thinking. So part of the practice of the pre-mortem is to recognize that under stress you're not going to be at your best, and you should put systems in place. And there's perhaps no more stressful a situation than when you're confronted with a medical decision to make. And at some point, all of us are going to be in that position, where we have to make a very important decision about the future of our medical care or that of a loved one, to help them with a decision. And so I want to talk about that. And I'm going to talk about a very particular medical condition. But this stands as a proxy for all kinds of medical decision-making, and indeed for financial decision-making, and social decision-making — any kind of decision you have to make that would benefit from a rational assessment of the facts. So suppose you go to your doctor and the doctor says, "I just got your lab work back, your cholesterol's a little high." Now, you all know that high cholesterol is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke. And so you're thinking having high cholesterol isn't the best thing, and so the doctor says, "You know, I'd like to give you a drug that will help you lower your cholesterol, a statin." And you've probably heard of statins, you know that they're among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world today, you probably even know people who take them. And so you're thinking, "Yeah! Give me the statin." But there's a question you should ask at this point, a statistic you should ask for that most doctors don't like talking about, and pharmaceutical companies like talking about even less. It's for the number needed to treat. Now, what is this, the NNT? It's the number of people that need to take a drug or undergo a surgery or any medical procedure before one person is helped. And you're thinking, what kind of crazy statistic is that? The number should be one. My doctor wouldn't prescribe something to me if it's not going to help. But actually, medical practice doesn't work that way. And it's not the doctor's fault, if it's anybody's fault, it's the fault of scientists like me. We haven't figured out the underlying mechanisms well enough. But GlaxoSmithKline estimates that 90 percent of the drugs work in only 30 to 50 percent of the people. So the number needed to treat for the most widely prescribed statin, what do you suppose it is? How many people have to take it before one person is helped? 300. This is according to research by research practitioners Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, independently confirmed by Bloomberg.com. I ran through the numbers myself. 300 people have to take the drug for a year before one heart attack, stroke or other adverse event is prevented. Now you're probably thinking, "Well, OK, one in 300 chance of lowering my cholesterol. Why not, doc? Give me the prescription anyway." But you should ask at this point for another statistic, and that is, "Tell me about the side effects." Right? So for this particular drug, the side effects occur in five percent of the patients. And they include terrible things — debilitating muscle and joint pain, gastrointestinal distress — but now you're thinking, "Five percent, not very likely it's going to happen to me, I'll still take the drug." But wait a minute. Remember under stress you're not thinking clearly. So think about how you're going to work through this ahead of time, so you don't have to manufacture the chain of reasoning on the spot. 300 people take the drug, right? One person's helped, five percent of those 300 have side effects, that's 15 people. You're 15 times more likely to be harmed by the drug than you are to be helped by the drug. Now, I'm not saying whether you should take the statin or not. I'm just saying you should have this conversation with your doctor. Medical ethics requires it, it's part of the principle of informed consent. You have the right to have access to this kind of information to begin the conversation about whether you want to take the risks or not. Now you might be thinking I've pulled this number out of the air for shock value, but in fact it's rather typical, this number needed to treat. For the most widely performed surgery on men over the age of 50, removal of the prostate for cancer, the number needed to treat is 49. That's right, 49 surgeries are done for every one person who's helped. And the side effects in that case occur in 50 percent of the patients. They include impotence, erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence, rectal tearing, fecal incontinence. And if you're lucky, and you're one of the 50 percent who has these, they'll only last for a year or two. So the idea of the pre-mortem is to think ahead of time to the questions that you might be able to ask that will push the conversation forward. You don't want to have to manufacture all of this on the spot. And you also want to think about things like quality of life. Because you have a choice oftentimes, do you I want a shorter life that's pain-free, or a longer life that might have a great deal of pain towards the end? These are things to talk about and think about now, with your family and your loved ones. You might change your mind in the heat of the moment, but at least you're practiced with this kind of thinking. Remember, our brain under stress releases cortisol, and one of the things that happens at that moment is a whole bunch on systems shut down. There's an evolutionary reason for this. Face-to-face with a predator, you don't need your digestive system, or your libido, or your immune system, because if you're body is expending metabolism on those things and you don't react quickly, you might become the lion's lunch, and then none of those things matter. Unfortunately, one of the things that goes out the window during those times of stress is rational, logical thinking, as Danny Kahneman and his colleagues have shown. So we need to train ourselves to think ahead to these kinds of situations. I think the important point here is recognizing that all of us are flawed. We all are going to fail now and then. The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be, to put systems in place that will help minimize the damage, or to prevent the bad things from happening in the first place. Getting back to that snowy night in Montreal, when I got back from my trip, I had my contractor install a combination lock next to the door, with a key to the front door in it, an easy to remember combination. And I have to admit, I still have piles of mail that haven't been sorted, and piles of emails that I haven't gone through. So I'm not completely organized, but I see organization as a gradual process, and I'm getting there. Thank you very much. (Applause)
How data from a crisis text line is saving lives	{0: 'Nancy Lublin, cofounder and CEO of Crisis Text Line, is using technology and data to save lives.'}	TEDWomen 2015	A girl I've never met before changed my life and the life of thousands of other people. I'm the CEO of DoSomething.org. It's one of the largest organizations in the world for young people. In fact it's bigger than the Boy Scouts in the United States. And we're not homophobic. (Laughter) And it's true — the way we communicate with young people is by text, because that's how young people communicate. So we'll run over 200 campaigns this year, things like collecting peanut butter for food pantries, or making Valentine's Day cards for senior citizens who are homebound. And we'll text them. And we'll have a 97 percent open rate. It'll over-index Hispanic and urban. We collected 200,000 jars of peanut butter and over 365,000 Valentine's Day cards. This is big scale. OK — (Applause) But there's one weird side effect. Every time we send out a text message, we get back a few dozen text messages having nothing to do with peanut butter or hunger or senior citizens — but text messages about being bullied, text messages about being addicted to pot. And the worst message we ever got said exactly this: "He won't stop raping me. It's my dad. He told me not to tell anyone. Are you there?" We couldn't believe this was happening. We couldn't believe that something so horrific could happen to a human being, and that she would share it with us — something so intimate, so personal. And we realized we had to stop triaging this and we had to build a crisis text line for these people in pain. So we launched Crisis Text Line, very quietly, in Chicago and El Paso — just a few thousand people in each market. And in four months, we were in all 295 area codes in America. Just to put that into perspective, that's zero marketing and faster growth than when Facebook first launched. (Applause) Text is unbelievably private. No one hears you talking. So we spike everyday at lunch time — kids are sitting at the lunch table and you think that she's texting the cute boy across the hall, but she's actually texting us about her bulimia. And we don't get the word "like" or "um" or hyperventilating or crying. We just get facts. We get things like, "I want to die. I have a bottle of pills on the desk in front of me." And so the crisis counselor says, "How about you put those pills in the drawer while we text?" And they go back and forth for a while. And the crisis counselor gets the girl to give her her address, because if you're texting a text line, you want help. So she gets the address and the counselor triggers an active rescue while they're texting back and forth. And then it goes quiet — 23 minutes with no response from this girl. And the next message that comes in says — it's the mom — "I had no idea, and I was in the house, we're in an ambulance on our way to the hospital." As a mom that one just — The next message comes a month later. "I just got out of the hospital. I was diagnosed as bipolar, and I think I'm going to be OK." (Applause) I would love to tell you that that's an unusual exchange, but we're doing on average 2.41 active rescues a day. Thirty percent of our text messages are about suicide and depression — huge. The beautiful thing about Crisis Text Line is that these are strangers counseling other strangers on the most intimate issues, and getting them from hot moments to cold moments. It's exciting, and I will tell you that we have done a total of more than 6.5 million text messages in less than two years. (Applause) But the thing that really gets me hot and sweaty about this, the thing that really gets me psyched is the data: 6.5 million messages — that's the volume, velocity and variety to provide a really juicy corpus. We can do things like predictive work. We can do all kinds of conclusions and learnings from that data set. So we can be better, and the world can be better. So how do we use the data to make us better? Alright, chances are someone here, someone watching this has seen a therapist or a shrink at some point in time in your life — you do not have to raise your hand. (Laughter) How do you know that person's any good? Oh, they have a degree from Harvard on the wall? Are you sure he didn't graduate in the bottom 10 percent? (Laughter) When my husband and I saw a marriage counselor, I thought she was a genius when she said, "I'll see you guys in two weeks — but I need to see you next week, sir." (Laughter) We have the data to know what makes a great counselor. We know that if you text the words "numbs" and "sleeve," there's a 99 percent match for cutting. We know that if you text in the words "mg" and "rubber band," there's a 99 percent match for substance abuse. And we know that if you text in "sex," "oral" and "Mormon," you're questioning if you're gay. Now that's interesting information that a counselor could figure out but that algorithm in our hands means that an automatic pop-up says, "99 percent match for cutting — try asking one of these questions" to prompt the counselor. Or "99 percent match for substance abuse, here are three drug clinics near the texter." It makes us more accurate. On the day that Robin Williams committed suicide, people flooded hotlines all over this country. It was sad to see an icon, a funnyman, commit suicide, and there were three hour wait times on every phone hotline in the country. We had a spike in volume also. The difference was if you text us, "I want to die," or "I want to kill myself," the algorithm reads that, you're code orange, and you become number one in the queue. So we can handle severity, not chronological. (Applause) This data is also making the world better because I'm sitting on the world's first map of real-time crises. Think about it: those 6.5 million messages, auto-tagging through natural language processes, all of these data points — I can tell you that the worst day of the week for eating disorders: Monday. The worst time of day for substance abuse: 5am. And that Montana is a beautiful place to visit but you do not want to live there, because it is the number one state for suicidal ideation. And we've made this data public and free and open. We've pulled all the personally identifiable information. And it's in a place called CrisisTrends.org. Because I want schools to be able to see that Monday is the worst day for eating disorders, so that they can plan meals and guidance counselors to be there on Mondays. And I want families to see that substance abuse questions spike at 5am. I want somebody to take care of those Native American reservations in Montana. (Applause) Data, evidence makes policy, research, journalism, policing, school boards — everything better. I don't think of myself as a mental health activist. I think of myself as a national health activist. I get really excited about this data, I'm a little nerdy. Yeah, that sounded too girly. I'm nerdy. (Laughter) I love data. And the only difference really between me and those people in hoodies down the road with their fat-funded companies, is that I'm not inspired by helping you find Chinese food at 2am in Dallas, or helping you touch your wrist and get a car immediately, or swipe right and get laid. I'm inspired — (Laughter, applause) I want to use tech and data to make the world a better place. I want to use it to help that girl, who texted in about being raped by her father. Because the truth is we never heard from her again. And I hope that she is somewhere safe and healthy, and I hope that she sees this talk and she knows that her desperation and her courage inspired the creation of Crisis Text Line and inspires me every freaking day. (Applause)
A boat carrying 500 refugees sunk at sea. The story of two survivors	{0: 'Melissa Fleming sheds light on their devastating plight and remarkable resilience of refugees.'}	TEDxThessaloniki	Every day, I listen to harrowing stories of people fleeing for their lives, across dangerous borders and unfriendly seas. But there's one story that keeps me awake at night, and it's about Doaa. A Syrian refugee, 19 years old, she was living a grinding existence in Egypt working day wages. Her dad was constantly thinking of his thriving business back in Syria that had been blown to pieces by a bomb. And the war that drove them there was still raging in its fourth year. And the community that once welcomed them there had become weary of them. And one day, men on motorcycles tried to kidnap her. Once an aspiring student thinking only of her future, now she was scared all the time. But she was also full of hope, because she was in love with a fellow Syrian refugee named Bassem. Bassem was also struggling in Egypt, and he said to Doaa, "Let's go to Europe; seek asylum, safety. I will work, you can study — the promise of a new life." And he asked her father for her hand in marriage. But they knew to get to Europe they had to risk their lives, traveling across the Mediterranean Sea, putting their hands in smugglers', notorious for their cruelty. And Doaa was terrified of the water. She always had been. She never learned to swim. It was August that year, and already 2,000 people had died trying to cross the Mediterranean, but Doaa knew of a friend who had made it all the way to Northern Europe, and she thought, "Maybe we can, too." So she asked her parents if they could go, and after a painful discussion, they consented, and Bassem paid his entire life savings — 2,500 dollars each — to the smugglers. It was a Saturday morning when the call came, and they were taken by bus to a beach, hundreds of people on the beach. They were taken then by small boats onto an old fishing boat, 500 of them crammed onto that boat, 300 below, [200] above. There were Syrians, Palestinians, Africans, Muslims and Christians, 100 children, including Sandra — little Sandra, six years old — and Masa, 18 months. There were families on that boat, crammed together shoulder to shoulder, feet to feet. Doaa was sitting with her legs crammed up to her chest, Bassem holding her hand. Day two on the water, they were sick with worry and sick to their stomachs from the rough sea. Day three, Doaa had a premonition. And she said to Bassem, "I fear we're not going to make it. I fear the boat is going to sink." And Bassem said to her, "Please be patient. We will make it to Sweden, we will get married and we will have a future." Day four, the passengers were getting agitated. They asked the captain, "When will we get there?" He told them to shut up, and he insulted them. He said, "In 16 hours we will reach the shores of Italy." They were weak and weary. Soon they saw a boat approach — a smaller boat, 10 men on board, who started shouting at them, hurling insults, throwing sticks, asking them to all disembark and get on this smaller, more unseaworthy boat. The parents were terrified for their children, and they collectively refused to disembark. So the boat sped away in anger, and a half an hour later, came back and started deliberately ramming a hole in the side of Doaa's boat, just below where she and Bassem were sitting. And she heard how they yelled, "Let the fish eat your flesh!" And they started laughing as the boat capsized and sank. The 300 people below deck were doomed. Doaa was holding on to the side of the boat as it sank, and watched in horror as a small child was cut to pieces by the propeller. Bassem said to her, "Please let go, or you'll be swept in and the propeller will kill you, too." And remember — she can't swim. But she let go and she started moving her arms and her legs, thinking, "This is swimming." And miraculously, Bassem found a life ring. It was one of those child's rings that they use to play in swimming pools and on calm seas. And Doaa climbed onto the ring, her arms and her legs dangling by the side. Bassem was a good swimmer, so he held her hand and tread water. Around them there were corpses. Around 100 people survived initially, and they started coming together in groups, praying for rescue. But when a day went by and no one came, some people gave up hope, and Doaa and Bassem watched as men in the distance took their life vests off and sank into the water. One man approached them with a small baby perched on his shoulder, nine months old — Malek. He was holding onto a gas canister to stay afloat, and he said to them, "I fear I am not going to survive. I'm too weak. I don't have the courage anymore." And he handed little Malek over to Bassem and to Doaa, and they perched her onto the life ring. So now they were three, Doaa, Bassem and little Malek. And let me take a pause in this story right here and ask the question: why do refugees like Doaa take these kinds of risks? Millions of refugees are living in exile, in limbo. They're living in countries [fleeing] from a war that has been raging for four years. Even if they wanted to return, they can't. Their homes, their businesses, their towns and their cities have been completely destroyed. This is a UNESCO World Heritage City, Homs, in Syria. So people continue to flee into neighboring countries, and we build refugee camps for them in the desert. Hundreds of thousands of people live in camps like these, and thousands and thousands more, millions, live in towns and cities. And the communities, the neighboring countries that once welcomed them with open arms and hearts are overwhelmed. There are simply not enough schools, water systems, sanitation. Even rich European countries could never handle such an influx without massive investment. The Syria war has driven almost four million people over the borders, but over seven million people are on the run inside the country. That means that over half the Syrian population has been forced to flee. Back to those neighboring countries hosting so many. They feel that the richer world has done too little to support them. And days have turned into months, months into years. A refugee's stay is supposed to be temporary. Back to Doaa and Bassem in the water. It was their second day, and Bassem was getting very weak. And now it was Doaa's turn to say to Bassem, "My love, please hold on to hope, to our future. We will make it." And he said to her, "I'm sorry, my love, that I put you in this situation. I have never loved anyone as much as I love you." And he released himself into the water, and Doaa watched as the love of her life drowned before her eyes. Later that day, a mother came up to Doaa with her small 18-month-old daughter, Masa. This was the little girl I showed you in the picture earlier, with the life vests. Her older sister Sandra had just drowned, and her mother knew she had to do everything in her power to save her daughter. And she said to Doaa, "Please take this child. Let her be part of you. I will not survive." And then she went away and drowned. So Doaa, the 19-year-old refugee who was terrified of the water, who couldn't swim, found herself in charge of two little baby kids. And they were thirsty and they were hungry and they were agitated, and she tried her best to amuse them, to sing to them, to say words to them from the Quran. Around them, the bodies were bloating and turning black. The sun was blazing during the day. At night, there was a cold moon and fog. It was very frightening. On the fourth day in the water, this is how Doaa probably looked on the ring with her two children. A woman came on the fourth day and approached her and asked her to take another child — a little boy, just four years old. When Doaa took the little boy and the mother drowned, she said to the sobbing child, "She just went away to find you water and food." But his heart soon stopped, and Doaa had to release the little boy into the water. Later that day, she looked up into the sky with hope, because she saw two planes crossing in the sky. And she waved her arms, hoping they would see her, but the planes were soon gone. But that afternoon, as the sun was going down, she saw a boat, a merchant vessel. And she said, "Please, God, let them rescue me." She waved her arms and she felt like she shouted for about two hours. And it had become dark, but finally the searchlights found her and they extended a rope, astonished to see a woman clutching onto two babies. They pulled them onto the boat, they got oxygen and blankets, and a Greek helicopter came to pick them up and take them to the island of Crete. But Doaa looked down and asked, "What of Malek?" And they told her the little baby did not survive — she drew her last breath in the boat's clinic. But Doaa was sure that as they had been pulled up onto the rescue boat, that little baby girl had been smiling. Only 11 people survived that wreck, of the 500. There was never an international investigation into what happened. There were some media reports about mass murder at sea, a terrible tragedy, but that was only for one day. And then the news cycle moved on. Meanwhile, in a pediatric hospital on Crete, little Masa was on the edge of death. She was really dehydrated. Her kidneys were failing. Her glucose levels were dangerously low. The doctors did everything in their medical power to save them, and the Greek nurses never left her side, holding her, hugging her, singing her words. My colleagues also visited and said pretty words to her in Arabic. Amazingly, little Masa survived. And soon the Greek press started reporting about the miracle baby, who had survived four days in the water without food or anything to drink, and offers to adopt her came from all over the country. And meanwhile, Doaa was in another hospital on Crete, thin, dehydrated. An Egyptian family took her into their home as soon as she was released. And soon word went around about Doaa's survival, and a phone number was published on Facebook. Messages started coming in. "Doaa, do you know what happened to my brother? My sister? My parents? My friends? Do you know if they survived?" One of those messages said, "I believe you saved my little niece, Masa." And it had this photo. This was from Masa's uncle, a Syrian refugee who had made it to Sweden with his family and also Masa's older sister. Soon, we hope, Masa will be reunited with him in Sweden, and until then, she's being cared for in a beautiful orphanage in Athens. And Doaa? Well, word went around about her survival, too. And the media wrote about this slight woman, and couldn't imagine how she could survive all this time under such conditions in that sea, and still save another life. The Academy of Athens, one of Greece's most prestigious institutions, gave her an award of bravery, and she deserves all that praise, and she deserves a second chance. But she wants to still go to Sweden. She wants to reunite with her family there. She wants to bring her mother and her father and her younger siblings away from Egypt there as well, and I believe she will succeed. She wants to become a lawyer or a politician or something that can help fight injustice. She is an extraordinary survivor. But I have to ask: what if she didn't have to take that risk? Why did she have to go through all that? Why wasn't there a legal way for her to study in Europe? Why couldn't Masa have taken an airplane to Sweden? Why couldn't Bassem have found work? Why is there no massive resettlement program for Syrian refugees, the victims of the worst war of our times? The world did this for the Vietnamese in the 1970s. Why not now? Why is there so little investment in the neighboring countries hosting so many refugees? And why, the root question, is so little being done to stop the wars, the persecution and the poverty that is driving so many people to the shores of Europe? Until these issues are resolved, people will continue to take to the seas and to seek safety and asylum. And what happens next? Well, that is largely Europe's choice. And I understand the public fears. People are worried about their security, their economies, the changes of culture. But is that more important than saving human lives? Because there is something fundamental here that I think overrides the rest, and it is about our common humanity. No person fleeing war or persecution should have to die crossing a sea to reach safety. (Applause) One thing is for sure, that no refugee would be on those dangerous boats if they could thrive where they are. And no migrant would take that dangerous journey if they had enough food for themselves and their children. And no one would put their life savings in the hands of those notorious smugglers if there was a legal way to migrate. So on behalf of little Masa and on behalf of Doaa and of Bassem and of those 500 people who drowned with them, can we make sure that they did not die in vain? Could we be inspired by what happened, and take a stand for a world in which every life matters? Thank you. (Applause)
The coolest animal you know nothing about ... and how we can save it	{0: 'Patrícia Medici leads the longest running conservation project to protect the threatened lowland tapir.'}	TED Fellows 2015	This is one of the most amazing animals on the face of the Earth. This is a tapir. Now this, this is a baby tapir, the cutest animal offspring in the animal kingdom. (Laughter) By far. There is no competition here. I have dedicated the past 20 years of my life to the research and conservation of tapirs in Brazil, and it has been absolutely amazing. But at the moment, I've been thinking really, really hard about the impact of my work. I've been questioning myself about the real contributions I have made for the conservation of these animals I love so much. Am I being effective in safeguarding their survival? Am I doing enough? I guess the big question here is, am I studying tapirs and contributing to their conservation, or am I just documenting their extinction? The world is facing so many different conservation crises. We all know that. It's all over the news every day. Tropical forests and other ecosystems are being destroyed, climate change, so many species on the brink of extinction: tigers, lions, elephants, rhinos, tapirs. This is the lowland tapir, the tapir species I work with, the largest terrestrial mammal of South America. They're massive. They're powerful. Adults can weigh up to 300 kilos. That's half the size of a horse. They're gorgeous. Tapirs are mostly found in tropical forests such as the Amazon, and they absolutely need large patches of habitat in order to find all the resources they need to reproduce and survive. But their habitat is being destroyed, and they have been hunted out of several parts of their geographic distribution. And you see, this is very, very unfortunate because tapirs are extremely important for the habitats where they are found. They're herbivores. Fifty percent of their diet consists of fruit, and when they eat the fruit, they swallow the seeds, which they disperse throughout the habitat through their feces. They play this major role in shaping and maintaining the structure and diversity of the forest, and for that reason, tapirs are known as gardeners of the forest. Isn't that amazing? If you think about it, the extinction of tapirs would seriously affect biodiversity as a whole. I started my tapir work in 1996, still very young, fresh out of college, and it was a pioneer research and conservation program. At that point, we had nearly zero information about tapirs, mostly because they're so difficult to study. They're nocturnal, solitary, very elusive animals, and we got started getting very basic data about these animals. But what is it that a conservationist does? Well, first, we need data. We need field research. We need those long-term datasets to support conservation action, and I told you tapirs are very hard to study, so we have to rely on indirect methods to study them. We have to capture and anesthetize them so that we can install GPS collars around their necks and follow their movements, which is a technique used by many other conservationists around the world. And then we can gather information about how they use space, how they move through the landscape, what are their priority habitats, and so much more. Next, we must disseminate what we learn. We have to educate people about tapirs and how important these animals are. And it's amazing how many people around the world do not know what a tapir is. In fact, many people think this is a tapir. Let me tell you, this is not a tapir. (Laughter) This is a giant anteater. Tapirs do not eat ants. Never. Ever. And then next we have to provide training, capacity building. It is our responsibility to prepare the conservationists of the future. We are losing several conservation battles, and we need more people doing what we do, and they need the skills, and they need the passion to do that. Ultimately, we conservationists, we must be able to apply our data, to apply our accumulated knowledge to support actual conservation action. Our first tapir program took place in the Atlantic Forest in the eastern part of Brazil, one of the most threatened biomes in the world. The destruction of the Atlantic Forest began in the early 1500s, when the Portuguese first arrived in Brazil, beginning European colonization in the eastern part of South America. This forest was almost completely cleared for timber, agriculture, cattle ranching and the construction of cities, and today only seven percent of the Atlantic forest is still left standing. And tapirs are found in very, very small, isolated, disconnected populations. In the Atlantic Forest, we found out that tapirs move through open areas of pastureland and agriculture going from one patch of forest to patch of forest. So our main approach in this region was to use our tapir data to identify the potential places for the establishment of wildlife corridors in between those patches of forest, reconnecting the habitat so that tapirs and many other animals could cross the landscape safely. After 12 years in the Atlantic Forest, in 2008, we expanded our tapir conservation efforts to the Pantanal in the western part of Brazil near the border with Bolivia and Paraguay. This is the largest continuous freshwater floodplain in the world, an incredible place and one of the most important strongholds for lowland tapirs in South America. And working in the Pantanal has been extremely refreshing because we found large, healthy tapir populations in the area, and we have been able to study tapirs in the most natural conditions we'll ever find, very much free of threats. In the Pantanal, besides the GPS collars, we are using another technique: camera traps. This camera is equipped with a movement sensor and it photographs animals when they walk in front of it. So thanks to these amazing devices, we have been able to gather precious information about tapir reproduction and social organization which are very important pieces of the puzzle when you're trying to develop those conservation strategies. And right now, 2015, we are expanding our work once again to the Brazilian Cerrado, the open grasslands and shrub forests in the central part of Brazil. Today this region is the very epicenter of economic development in my country, where natural habitat and wildlife populations are rapidly being eradicated by several different threats, including once again cattle ranching, large sugarcane and soybean plantations, poaching, roadkill, just to name a few. And somehow, tapirs are still there, which gives me a lot of hope. But I have to say that starting this new program in the Cerrado was a bit of a slap in the face. When you drive around and you find dead tapirs along the highways and signs of tapirs wandering around in the middle of sugarcane plantations where they shouldn't be, and you talk to kids and they tell you that they know how tapir meat tastes because their families poach and eat them, it really breaks your heart. The situation in the Cerrado made me realize — it gave me the sense of urgency. I am swimming against the tide. It made me realize that despite two decades of hard work trying to save these animals, we still have so much work to do if we are to prevent them from disappearing. We have to find ways to solve all these problems. We really do, and you know what? We really came to a point in the conservation world where we have to think out of the box. We'll have to be a lot more creative than we are right now. And I told you, roadkill is a big problem for tapirs in the Cerrado, so we just came up with the idea of putting reflective stickers on the GPS collars we put on the tapirs. These are the same stickers used on big trucks to avoid collision. Tapirs cross the highways after dark, so the stickers will hopefully help drivers see this shining thing crossing the highway, and maybe they will slow down a little bit. For now, this is just a crazy idea. We don't know. We'll see if it will reduce the amount of tapir roadkill. But the point is, maybe this is the kind of stuff that needs to be done. And although I'm struggling with all these questions in my mind right now, I have a pact with tapirs. I know in my heart that tapir conservation is my cause. This is my passion. I am not alone. I have this huge network of supporters behind me, and there is no way I'm ever going to stop. I will continue doing this, most probably for the rest of my life. And I'll keep doing this for Patrícia, my namesake, one of the first tapirs we captured and monitored in the Atlantic Forest many, many years ago; for Rita and her baby Vincent in the Pantanal. And I'll keep doing this for Ted, a baby tapir we captured in December last year also in the Pantanal. And I will keep doing this for the hundreds of tapirs that I've had the pleasure to meet over the years and the many others I know I will encounter in the future. These animals deserve to be cared for. They need me. They need us. And you know? We human beings deserve to live in a world where we can get out there and see and benefit from not only tapirs but all the other beautiful species, now and in the future. Thank you so much. (Applause)
Forget Wi-Fi. Meet the new Li-Fi Internet	{0: 'Harald Haas is the pioneer behind a new technology that can communicate as well as illuminate.'}	TEDGlobal>London	I would like to demonstrate for the first time in public that it is possible to transmit a video from a standard off-the-shelf LED lamp to a solar cell with a laptop acting as a receiver. There is no Wi-Fi involved, it's just light. And you may wonder, what's the point? And the point is this: There will be a massive extension of the Internet to close the digital divide, and also to allow for what we call "The Internet of Things" — tens of billions of devices connected to the Internet. In my view, such an extension of the Internet can only work if it's almost energy-neutral. This means we need to use existing infrastructure as much as possible. And this is where the solar cell and the LED come in. I demonstrated for the first time, at TED in 2011, Li-Fi, or Light Fidelity. Li-Fi uses off-the-shelf LEDs to transmit data incredibly fast, and also in a safe and secure manner. Data is transported by the light, encoded in subtle changes of the brightness. If we look around, we have many LEDs around us, so there's a rich infrastructure of Li-Fi transmitters around us. But so far, we have been using special devices — small photo detectors, to receive the information encoded in the data. I wanted to find a way to also use existing infrastructure to receive data from our Li-Fi lights. And this is why I have been looking into solar cells and solar panels. A solar cell absorbs light and converts it into electrical energy. This is why we can use a solar cell to charge our mobile phone. But now we need to remember that the data is encoded in subtle changes of the brightness of the LED, so if the incoming light fluctuates, so does the energy harvested from the solar cell. This means we have a principal mechanism in place to receive information from the light and by the solar cell, because the fluctuations of the energy harvested correspond to the data transmitted. Of course the question is: can we receive very fast and subtle changes of the brightness, such as the ones transmitted by our LED lights? And the answer to that is yes, we can. We have shown in the lab that we can receive up to 50 megabytes per second from a standard, off-the-shelf solar cell. And this is faster than most broadband connections these days. Now let me show you in practice. In this box is a standard, off-the-shelf LED lamp. This is a standard, off-the-shelf solar cell; it is connected to the laptop. And also we have an instrument here to visualize the energy we harvest from the solar cell. And this instrument shows something at the moment. This is because the solar cell already harvests light from the ambient light. Now what I would like to do first is switch on the light, and I'll simply, only switch on the light, for a moment, and what you'll notice is that the instrument jumps to the right. So the solar cell, for a moment, is harvesting energy from this artificial light source. If I turn it off, we see it drops. I turn it on ... So we harvest energy with the solar cell. But next I would like to activate the streaming of the video. And I've done this by pressing this button. So now this LED lamp here is streaming a video by changing the brightness of the LED in a very subtle way, and in a way that you can't recognize with your eye, because the changes are too fast to recognize. But in order to prove the point, I can block the light of the solar cell. So first you notice the energy harvesting drops and the video stops as well. If I remove the blockage, the video will restart. (Applause) And I can repeat that. So we stop the transmission of the video and energy harvesting stops as well. So that is to show that the solar cell acts as a receiver. But now imagine that this LED lamp is a street light, and there's fog. And so I want to simulate fog, and that's why I brought a handkerchief with me. (Laughter) And let me put the handkerchief over the solar cell. First you notice the energy harvested drops, as expected, but now the video still continues. This means, despite the blockage, there's sufficient light coming through the handkerchief to the solar cell, so that the solar cell is able to decode and stream that information, in this case, a high-definition video. What's really important here is that a solar cell has become a receiver for high-speed wireless signals encoded in light, while it maintains its primary function as an energy-harvesting device. That's why it is possible to use existing solar cells on the roof of a hut to act as a broadband receiver from a laser station on a close by hill, or indeed, lamp post. And It really doesn't matter where the beam hits the solar cell. And the same is true for translucent solar cells integrated into windows, solar cells integrated into street furniture, or indeed, solar cells integrated into these billions of devices that will form the Internet of Things. Because simply, we don't want to charge these devices regularly, or worse, replace the batteries every few months. As I said to you, this is the first time I've shown this in public. It's very much a lab demonstration, a prototype. But my team and I are confident that we can take this to market within the next two to three years. And we hope we will be able to contribute to closing the digital divide, and also contribute to connecting all these billions of devices to the Internet. And all of this without causing a massive explosion of energy consumption — because of the solar cells, quite the opposite. Thank you. (Applause)
A musical escape into a world of light and color	{0: 'Kaki King combines jaw-dropping guitar work with dreamy, searching songwriting.'}	TEDWomen 2015	(Guitar music starts) (Music ends) (Applause) (Distorted guitar music starts) (Music ends) (Applause) (Ambient/guitar music starts) (Music ends) (Applause)
This is what LGBT life is like around the world	{0: 'Jenni Chang and Lisa Dazols made "Out & Around" to show the momentous changes in the status of LGBTQ equality -- all around the world.'}	TEDWomen 2015	Jenni Chang: When I told my parents I was gay, the first thing they said to me was, "We're bringing you back to Taiwan." (Laughter) In their minds, my sexual orientation was America's fault. The West had corrupted me with divergent ideas, and if only my parents had never left Taiwan, this would not have happened to their only daughter. In truth, I wondered if they were right. Of course, there are gay people in Asia, just as there are gay people in every part of the world. But is the idea of living an "out" life, in the "I'm gay, this is my spouse, and we're proud of our lives together" kind of way just a Western idea? If I had grown up in Taiwan, or any place outside of the West, would I have found models of happy, thriving LGBT people? Lisa Dazols: I had similar notions. As an HIV social worker in San Francisco, I had met many gay immigrants. They told me their stories of persecution in their home countries, just for being gay, and the reasons why they escaped to the US. I saw how this had beaten them down. After 10 years of doing this kind of work, I needed better stories for myself. I knew the world was far from perfect, but surely not every gay story was tragic. JC: So as a couple, we both had a need to find stories of hope. So we set off on a mission to travel the world and look for the people we finally termed as the "Supergays." (Laughter) These would be the LGBT individuals who were doing something extraordinary in the world. They would be courageous, resilient, and most of all, proud of who they were. They would be the kind of person that I aspire to be. Our plan was to share their stories to the world through film. LD: There was just one problem. We had zero reporting and zero filmmaking experience. (Laughter) We didn't even know where to find the Supergays, so we just had to trust that we'd figure it all out along the way. So we picked 15 countries in Asia, Africa and South America, countries outside the West that varied in terms of LGBT rights. We bought a camcorder, ordered a book on how to make a documentary — (Laughter) you can learn a lot these days — and set off on an around-the-world trip. JC: One of the first countries that we traveled to was Nepal. Despite widespread poverty, a decade-long civil war, and now recently, a devastating earthquake, Nepal has made significant strides in the fight for equality. One of the key figures in the movement is Bhumika Shrestha. A beautiful, vibrant transgendered woman, Bhumika has had to overcome being expelled from school and getting incarcerated because of her gender presentation. But, in 2007, Bhumika and Nepal's LGBT rights organization successfully petitioned the Nepali Supreme Court to protect against LGBT discrimination. Here's Bhumika: (Video) BS: What I'm most proud of? I'm a transgendered person. I'm so proud of my life. On December 21, 2007, the supreme court gave the decision for the Nepal government to give transgender identity cards and same-sex marriage. LD: I can appreciate Bhumika's confidence on a daily basis. Something as simple as using a public restroom can be a huge challenge when you don't fit in to people's strict gender expectations. Traveling throughout Asia, I tended to freak out women in public restrooms. They weren't used to seeing someone like me. I had to come up with a strategy, so that I could just pee in peace. (Laughter) So anytime I would enter a restroom, I would thrust out my chest to show my womanly parts, and try to be as non-threatening as possible. Putting out my hands and saying, "Hello", just so that people could hear my feminine voice. This all gets pretty exhausting, but it's just who I am. I can't be anything else. JC: After Nepal, we traveled to India. On one hand, India is a Hindu society, without a tradition of homophobia. On the other hand, it is also a society with a deeply patriarchal system, which rejects anything that threatens the male-female order. When we spoke to activists, they told us that empowerment begins with ensuring proper gender equality, where the women's status is established in society. And in that way, the status of LGBT people can be affirmed as well. LD: There we met Prince Manvendra. He's the world's first openly gay prince. Prince Manvendra came out on the "Oprah Winfrey Show," very internationally. His parents disowned him and accused him of bringing great shame to the royal family. We sat down with Prince Manvendra and talked to him about why he decided to come out so very publicly. Here he is: (Video) Prince Manvendra: I felt there was a lot of need to break this stigma and discrimination which is existing in our society. And that instigated me to come out openly and talk about myself. Whether we are gay, we are lesbian, we are transgender, bisexual or whatever sexual minority we come from, we have to all unite and fight for our rights. Gay rights cannot be won in the court rooms, but in the hearts and the minds of the people. JC: While getting my hair cut, the woman cutting my hair asked me, "Do you have a husband?" Now, this was a dreaded question that I got asked a lot by locals while traveling. When I explained to her that I was with a woman instead of a man, she was incredulous, and she asked me a lot of questions about my parents' reactions and whether I was sad that I'd never be able to have children. I told her that there are no limitations to my life and that Lisa and I do plan to have a family some day. Now, this woman was ready to write me off as yet another crazy Westerner. She couldn't imagine that such a phenomenon could happen in her own country. That is, until I showed her the photos of the Supergays that we interviewed in India. She recognized Prince Manvendra from television and soon I had an audience of other hairdressers interested in meeting me. (Laughter) And in that ordinary afternoon, I had the chance to introduce an entire beauty salon to the social changes that were happening in their own country. LD: From India, we traveled to East Africa, a region known for intolerance towards LGBT people. In Kenya, 89 percent of people who come out to their families are disowned. Homosexual acts are a crime and can lead to incarceration. In Kenya, we met the soft-spoken David Kuria. David had a huge mission of wanting to work for the poor and improve his own government. So he decided to run for senate. He became Kenya's first openly gay political candidate. David wanted to run his campaign without denying the reality of who he was. But we were worried for his safety because he started to receive death threats. (Video) David Kuria: At that point, I was really scared because they were actually asking for me to be killed. And, yeah, there are some people out there who do it and they feel that they are doing a religious obligation. JC: David wasn't ashamed of who he was. Even in the face of threats, he stayed authentic. LD: At the opposite end of the spectrum is Argentina. Argentina's a country where 92 percent of the population identifies as Catholic. Yet, Argentina has LGBT laws that are even more progressive than here in the US. In 2010, Argentina became the first country in Latin America and the 10th in the world to adopt marriage equality. There, we met María Rachid. María was a driving force behind that movement. María Rachid (Spanish): I always say that, in reality, the effects of marriage equality are not only for those couples that get married. They are for a lot of people that, even though they may never get married, will be perceived differently by their coworkers, their families and neighbors, from the national state's message of equality. I feel very proud of Argentina because Argentina today is a model of equality. And hopefully soon, the whole world will have the same rights. JC: When we made the visit to my ancestral lands, I wish I could have shown my parents what we found there. Because here is who we met: (Video) One, two, three. Welcome gays to Shanghai! (Laughter) A whole community of young, beautiful Chinese LGBT people. Sure, they had their struggles. But they were fighting it out. In Shanghai, I had the chance to speak to a local lesbian group and tell them our story in my broken Mandarin Chinese. In Taipei, each time we got onto the metro, we saw yet another lesbian couple holding hands. And we learned that Asia's largest LGBT pride event happens just blocks away from where my grandparents live. If only my parents knew. LD: By the time we finished our not-so-straight journey around the world, (Laughter) we had traveled 50,000 miles and logged 120 hours of video footage. We traveled to 15 countries and interviewed 50 Supergays. Turns out, it wasn't hard to find them at all. JC: Yes, there are still tragedies that happen on the bumpy road to equality. And let's not forget that 75 countries still criminalize homosexuality today. But there are also stories of hope and courage in every corner of the world. What we ultimately took away from our journey is, equality is not a Western invention. LD: One of the key factors in this equality movement is momentum, momentum as more and more people embrace their full selves and use whatever opportunities they have to change their part of the world, and momentum as more and more countries find models of equality in one another. When Nepal protected against LGBT discrimination, India pushed harder. When Argentina embraced marriage equality, Uruguay and Brazil followed. When Ireland said yes to equality, (Applause) the world stopped to notice. When the US Supreme Court makes a statement to the world that we can all be proud of. (Applause) JC: As we reviewed our footage, what we realized is that we were watching a love story. It wasn't a love story that was expected of me, but it is one filled with more freedom, adventure and love than I could have ever possibly imagined. One year after returning home from our trip, marriage equality came to California. And in the end, we believe, love will win out. (Video) By the power vested in me, by the state of California and by God Almighty, I now pronounce you spouses for life. You may kiss. (Applause)
The moral bias behind your search results	{0: 'Andreas Ekström describes the power structures of the digital revolution.'}	TEDxOslo	So whenever I visit a school and talk to students, I always ask them the same thing: Why do you Google? Why is Google the search engine of choice for you? Strangely enough, I always get the same three answers. One, "Because it works," which is a great answer; that's why I Google, too. Two, somebody will say, "I really don't know of any alternatives." It's not an equally great answer and my reply to that is usually, "Try to Google the word 'search engine,' you may find a couple of interesting alternatives." And last but not least, thirdly, inevitably, one student will raise her or his hand and say, "With Google, I'm certain to always get the best, unbiased search result." Certain to always get the best, unbiased search result. Now, as a man of the humanities, albeit a digital humanities man, that just makes my skin curl, even if I, too, realize that that trust, that idea of the unbiased search result is a cornerstone in our collective love for and appreciation of Google. I will show you why that, philosophically, is almost an impossibility. But let me first elaborate, just a little bit, on a basic principle behind each search query that we sometimes seem to forget. So whenever you set out to Google something, start by asking yourself this: "Am I looking for an isolated fact?" What is the capital of France? What are the building blocks of a water molecule? Great — Google away. There's not a group of scientists who are this close to proving that it's actually London and H30. You don't see a big conspiracy among those things. We agree, on a global scale, what the answers are to these isolated facts. But if you complicate your question just a little bit and ask something like, "Why is there an Israeli-Palestine conflict?" You're not exactly looking for a singular fact anymore, you're looking for knowledge, which is something way more complicated and delicate. And to get to knowledge, you have to bring 10 or 20 or 100 facts to the table and acknowledge them and say, "Yes, these are all true." But because of who I am, young or old, black or white, gay or straight, I will value them differently. And I will say, "Yes, this is true, but this is more important to me than that." And this is where it becomes interesting, because this is where we become human. This is when we start to argue, to form society. And to really get somewhere, we need to filter all our facts here, through friends and neighbors and parents and children and coworkers and newspapers and magazines, to finally be grounded in real knowledge, which is something that a search engine is a poor help to achieve. So, I promised you an example just to show you why it's so hard to get to the point of true, clean, objective knowledge — as food for thought. I will conduct a couple of simple queries, search queries. We'll start with "Michelle Obama," the First Lady of the United States. And we'll click for pictures. It works really well, as you can see. It's a perfect search result, more or less. It's just her in the picture, not even the President. How does this work? Quite simple. Google uses a lot of smartness to achieve this, but quite simply, they look at two things more than anything. First, what does it say in the caption under the picture on each website? Does it say "Michelle Obama" under the picture? Pretty good indication it's actually her on there. Second, Google looks at the picture file, the name of the file as such uploaded to the website. Again, is it called "MichelleObama.jpeg"? Pretty good indication it's not Clint Eastwood in the picture. So, you've got those two and you get a search result like this — almost. Now, in 2009, Michelle Obama was the victim of a racist campaign, where people set out to insult her through her search results. There was a picture distributed widely over the Internet where her face was distorted to look like a monkey. And that picture was published all over. And people published it very, very purposefully, to get it up there in the search results. They made sure to write "Michelle Obama" in the caption and they made sure to upload the picture as "MichelleObama.jpeg," or the like. You get why — to manipulate the search result. And it worked, too. So when you picture-Googled for "Michelle Obama" in 2009, that distorted monkey picture showed up among the first results. Now, the results are self-cleansing, and that's sort of the beauty of it, because Google measures relevance every hour, every day. However, Google didn't settle for that this time, they just thought, "That's racist and it's a bad search result and we're going to go back and clean that up manually. We are going to write some code and fix it," which they did. And I don't think anyone in this room thinks that was a bad idea. Me neither. But then, a couple of years go by, and the world's most-Googled Anders, Anders Behring Breivik, did what he did. This is July 22 in 2011, and a terrible day in Norwegian history. This man, a terrorist, blew up a couple of government buildings walking distance from where we are right now in Oslo, Norway and then he traveled to the island of Utøya and shot and killed a group of kids. Almost 80 people died that day. And a lot of people would describe this act of terror as two steps, that he did two things: he blew up the buildings and he shot those kids. It's not true. It was three steps. He blew up those buildings, he shot those kids, and he sat down and waited for the world to Google him. And he prepared all three steps equally well. And if there was somebody who immediately understood this, it was a Swedish web developer, a search engine optimization expert in Stockholm, named Nikke Lindqvist. He's also a very political guy and he was right out there in social media, on his blog and Facebook. And he told everybody, "If there's something that this guy wants right now, it's to control the image of himself. Let's see if we can distort that. Let's see if we, in the civilized world, can protest against what he did through insulting him in his search results." And how? He told all of his readers the following, "Go out there on the Internet, find pictures of dog poop on sidewalks — find pictures of dog poop on sidewalks — publish them in your feeds, on your websites, on your blogs. Make sure to write the terrorist's name in the caption, make sure to name the picture file "Breivik.jpeg." Let's teach Google that that's the face of the terrorist." And it worked. Two years after that campaign against Michelle Obama, this manipulation campaign against Anders Behring Breivik worked. If you picture-Googled for him weeks after the July 22 events from Sweden, you'd see that picture of dog poop high up in the search results, as a little protest. Strangely enough, Google didn't intervene this time. They did not step in and manually clean those search results up. So the million-dollar question, is there anything different between these two happenings here? Is there anything different between what happened to Michelle Obama and what happened to Anders Behring Breivik? Of course not. It's the exact same thing, yet Google intervened in one case and not in the other. Why? Because Michelle Obama is an honorable person, that's why, and Anders Behring Breivik is a despicable person. See what happens there? An evaluation of a person takes place and there's only one power-player in the world with the authority to say who's who. "We like you, we dislike you. We believe in you, we don't believe in you. You're right, you're wrong. You're true, you're false. You're Obama, and you're Breivik." That's power if I ever saw it. So I'm asking you to remember that behind every algorithm is always a person, a person with a set of personal beliefs that no code can ever completely eradicate. And my message goes out not only to Google, but to all believers in the faith of code around the world. You need to identify your own personal bias. You need to understand that you are human and take responsibility accordingly. And I say this because I believe we've reached a point in time when it's absolutely imperative that we tie those bonds together again, tighter: the humanities and the technology. Tighter than ever. And, if nothing else, to remind us that that wonderfully seductive idea of the unbiased, clean search result is, and is likely to remain, a myth. Thank you for your time. (Applause)
How I'm working for change inside my church	{0: "Chelsea Shields is a biocultural anthropologist, a research and strategy consultant, and an outspoken activist for women's rights."}	TED Fellows Retreat 2015	Religion is more than belief. It's power, and it's influence. And that influence affects all of us, every day, regardless of your own belief. Despite the enormous influence of religion on the world today, we hold them to a different standard of scrutiny and accountability than any other sector of our society. For example, if there were a multinational organization, government or corporation today that said no female could be on a leadership board, not one woman could have a decision-making authority, not one woman could handle any financial matter, we would have outrage. There would be sanctions. And yet this is a common practice in almost every world religion today. We accept things in our religious lives that we do not accept in our secular lives, and I know this because I've been doing it for three decades. I was the type of girl that fought every form of gender discrimination growing up. I played pickup basketball games with the boys and inserted myself. I said I was going to be the first female President of the United States. I have been fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, which has been dead for 40 years. I'm the first woman in both sides of my family to ever work outside the home and ever receive a higher education. I never accepted being excluded because I was a woman, except in my religion. Throughout all of that time, I was a part of a very patriarchal orthodox Mormon religion. I grew up in an enormously traditional family. I have eight siblings, a stay-at-home mother. My father's actually a religious leader in the community. And I grew up in a world believing that my worth and my standing was in keeping these rules that I'd known my whole life. You get married a virgin, you never drink alcohol, you don't smoke, you always do service, you're a good kid. Some of the rules we had were strict, but you followed the rules because you loved the people and you loved the religion and you believed. Everything about Mormonism determined what you wore, who you dated, who you married. It determined what underwear we wore. I was the kind of religious where everyone I know donated 10 percent of everything they earned to the church, including myself. From paper routes and babysitting, I donated 10 percent. I was the kind of religious where I heard parents tell children when they're leaving on a two-year proselytizing mission that they would rather have them die than return home without honor, having sinned. I was the type and the kind of religious where kids kill themselves every single year because they're terrified of coming out to our community as gay. But I was also the kind of religious where it didn't matter where in the world I lived, I had friendship, instantaneous mutual aid. This was where I felt safe. This is certainty and clarity about life. I had help raising my little daughter. So that's why I accepted without question that only men can lead, and I accepted without question that women can't have the spiritual authority of God on the Earth, which we call the priesthood. And I allowed discrepancies between men and women in operating budgets, disciplinary councils, in decision-making capacities, and I gave my religion a free pass because I loved it. Until I stopped, and I realized that I had been allowing myself to be treated as the support staff to the real work of men. And I faced this contradiction in myself, and I joined with other activists in my community. We've been working very, very, very hard for the last decade and more. The first thing we did was raise consciousness. You can't change what you can't see. We started podcasting, blogging, writing articles. I created lists of hundreds of ways that men and women are unequal in our community. The next thing we did was build advocacy organizations. We tried to do things that were unignorable, like wearing pants to church and trying to attend all-male meetings. These seem like simple things, but to us, the organizers, they were enormously costly. We lost relationships. We lost jobs. We got hate mail on a daily basis. We were attacked in social media and national press. We received death threats. We lost standing in our community. Some of us got excommunicated. Most of us got put in front of a disciplinary council, and were rejected from the communities that we loved because we wanted to make them better, because we believed that they could be. And I began to expect this reaction from my own people. I know what it feels like when you feel like someone's trying to change you or criticize you. But what utterly shocked me was throughout all of this work I received equal measures of vitriol from the secular left, the same vehemence as the religious right. And what my secular friends didn't realize was that this religious hostility, these phrases of, "Oh, all religious people are crazy or stupid." "Don't pay attention to religion." "They're going to be homophobic and sexist." What they didn't understand was that that type of hostility did not fight religious extremism, it bred religious extremism. Those arguments don't work, and I know because I remember someone telling me that I was stupid for being Mormon. And what it caused me to do was defend myself and my people and everything we believe in, because we're not stupid. So criticism and hostility doesn't work, and I didn't listen to these arguments. When I hear these arguments, I still continue to bristle, because I have family and friends. These are my people, and I'm the first to defend them, but the struggle is real. How do we respect someone's religious beliefs while still holding them accountable for the harm or damage that those beliefs may cause others? It's a tough question. I still don't have a perfect answer. My parents and I have been walking on this tightrope for the last decade. They're intelligent people. They're lovely people. And let me try to help you understand their perspective. In Mormonism, we believe that after you die, if you keep all the rules and you follow all the rituals, you can be together as a family again. And to my parents, me doing something as simple as having a sleeveless top right now, showing my shoulders, that makes me unworthy. I won't be with my family in the eternities. But even more, I had a brother die in a tragic accident at 15, and something as simple as this means we won't be together as a family. And to my parents, they cannot understand why something as simple as fashion or women's rights would prevent me from seeing my brother again. And that's the mindset that we're dealing with, and criticism does not change that. And so my parents and I have been walking this tightrope, explaining our sides, respecting one another, but actually invalidating each other's very basic beliefs by the way we live our lives, and it's been difficult. The way that we've been able to do that is to get past those defensive shells and really see the soft inside of unbelief and belief and try to respect each other while still holding boundaries clear. The other thing that the secular left and the atheists and the orthodox and the religious right, what they all don't understand was why even care about religious activism? I cannot tell you the hundreds of people who have said, "If you don't like religion, just leave." Why would you try to change it? Because what is taught on the Sabbath leaks into our politics, our health policy, violence around the world. It leaks into education, military, fiscal decision-making. These laws get legally and culturally codified. In fact, my own religion has had an enormous effect on this nation. For example, during Prop 8, my church raised over 22 million dollars to fight same-sex marriage in California. Forty years ago, political historians will say, that if it wasn't for the Mormon opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, we'd have an Equal Rights Amendment in our Constitution today. How many lives did that affect? And we can spend time fighting every single one of these little tiny laws and rules, or we can ask ourselves, why is gender inequality the default around the world? Why is that the assumption? Because religion doesn't just create the roots of morality, it creates the seeds of normality. Religions can liberate or subjugate, they can empower or exploit, they can comfort or destroy, and the people that tip the scales over to the ethical and the moral are often not those in charge. Religions can't be dismissed or ignored. We need to take them seriously. But it's not easy to influence a religion, like we just talked about. But I'll tell you what my people have done. My groups are small, there's hundreds of us, but we've had huge impact. Right now, women's pictures are hanging in the halls next to men for the first time. Women are now allowed to pray in our church-wide meetings, and they never were before in the general conferences. As of last week, in a historic move, three women were invited down to three leadership boards that oversee the entire church. We've seen perceptual shifts in the Mormon community that allow for talk of gender inequality. We've opened up space, regardless of being despised, for more conservative women to step in and make real changes, and the words "women" and "the priesthood" can now be uttered in the same sentence. I never had that. My daughter and my nieces are inheriting a religion that I never had, that's more equal — we've had an effect. It wasn't easy standing in those lines trying to get into those male meetings. There were hundreds of us, and one by one, when we got to the door, we were told, "I'm sorry, this meeting is just for men," and we had to step back and watch men get into the meeting as young as 12 years old, escorted and walked past us as we all stood in line. But not one woman in that line will forget that day, and not one little boy that walked past us will forget that day. If we were a multinational corporation or a government, and that had happened, there would be outrage, but we're just a religion. We're all just part of religions. We can't keep looking at religion that way, because it doesn't only affect me, it affects my daughter and all of your daughters and what opportunities they have, what they can wear, who they can love and marry, if they have access to reproductive healthcare. We need to reclaim morality in a secular context that creates ethical scrutiny and accountability for religions all around the world, but we need to do it in a respectful way that breeds cooperation and not extremism. And we can do it through unignorable acts of bravery, standing up for gender equality. It's time that half of the world's population had voice and equality within our world's religions, churches, synagogues, mosques and shrines around the world. I'm working on my people. What are you doing for yours? (Applause)
The chilling aftershock of a brush with death	{0: 'Jean-Paul Mari has reported on conflicts in more than three dozen countries.'}	TEDxCannes	It was April 8, 2003. I was in Baghdad, covering the war in Iraq. That day, Americans tanks started arriving in Baghdad. We were just a few journalists in the Palestine Hotel, and, as happens in war, the fighting began to approach outside our windows. Baghdad was covered in black smoke and oil. It smelled awful. We couldn't see a thing, but we knew what was happening. Of course, I was supposed to be writing an article, but that's how it always goes — you're supposed to be writing and something big happens. So I was in my room on the 16th floor, writing and looking out the window every now and then to see what was happening. Suddenly, there was a huge explosion. During the previous three weeks, there had been shelling with half-ton missiles, but this time, the shock — I felt it inside of me, and I thought, "It's very close. It's very, very close." So I went down to see what was happening. I went down to the 15th floor to take a look. And I saw people, journalists, screaming in the hallways. I walked into a room and realized that it had been hit by a missile. Someone had been wounded. There was a man near the window, a cameraman named Taras Protsyuk, lying face-down. Having worked in a hospital before, I wanted to help out. So I turned him over. And when I turned him over, I noticed that he was open from sternum to pubis, but I couldn't see anything, nothing at all. All I saw was a white, pearly, shiny spot that blinded me, and I didn't understand what was going on. Once the spot disappeared and I could see his wound, which was very serious, my buddies and I put a sheet underneath him, and we carried him onto an elevator that stopped at each of the 15 floors. We put him in a car that took him to the hospital. He died on the way to the hospital. The Spanish cameraman José Couso, who was on the 14th floor and also hit — because the shell had exploded between the two floors — died on the operating table. As soon as the car left, I went back. There was that article I was supposed to write — which I had to write. And so — I returned to the hotel lobby with my arms covered in blood, when one of the hotel gofers stopped me and asked me to pay the tax I hadn't paid for 10 days. I told him to get lost. And I said to myself: "Clear your head, put it all aside. If you want to write, you need to put it all aside." And that's what I did. I went upstairs, wrote my article and sent it off. Later, aside from the feeling of having lost my colleagues, something else was bothering me. I kept seeing that shiny, pearly spot, and I couldn't understand what it meant. And then, the war was over. Later, I thought: "That's not possible. I can't just not know what happened." Because it wasn't the first time, and it didn't only happen to me. I have seen things like that happen to others in my 20 to 35 years of reporting. I have seen things that had an effect on me too. For example, there was this man I knew in Lebanon, a 25-year-old veteran who had been fighting for five years — a real veteran — who we would follow everywhere. He would crawl in the dark with confidence — he was a great soldier, a true soldier — so we would follow him, knowing that we would be safe with him. And one day, as I was told — and I've seen him again since — he was back in the camp, playing cards, when someone came in next door, and discharged their weapon. As the gun went off, that blast, that one shot, made him duck quickly under the table, like a child. He was shaking, panicking. And since then, he has never been able to get up and fight. He ended up working as a croupier in a Beirut casino where I later found him, because he couldn't sleep, so it was quite a suitable job. So I thought to myself, "What is this thing that can kill you without leaving any visible scars? How does that happen? What is this unknown thing?" It was too common to be coincidental. So I started to investigate — that's all I know how to do. I started to investigate by looking through books, reaching out to psychiatrists, going to museums, libraries, etc. Finally, I discovered that some people knew about this — often military psychiatrists — and that what we were dealing with was called trauma. Americans call it PTSD or traumatic neurosis. It was something that existed, but that we never spoke about. So, this trauma — what is it? Well, it's an encounter with death. I don't know if you've ever had an experience with death — I'm not talking about dead bodies, or someone's grandfather lying in a hospital bed, or someone who got hit by a car. I'm talking about facing the void of death. And that is something no one is supposed to see. People used to say, "Neither the sun, nor death can be looked at with a steady eye." A human being should not have to face the void of death. But when that happens, it can remain invisible for a while — days, weeks, months, sometimes years. And then, at some point, it explodes, because it's something that has entered your brain — a sort of window between an image and your mind — that has penetrated your brain, staying there and taking up all the space inside. And there are people — men, women, who suddenly no longer sleep. And they experience horrible anxiety attacks — panic attacks, not just minor fears. They suddenly don't want to sleep, because when they do, they have the same nightmare every night. They see the same image every night. What type of image? For example, a soldier who enters a building and comes face to face with another soldier aiming at him. He looks at the gun, straight down the barrel. And this barrel suddenly becomes enormous, deformed. It becomes fluffy, swallowing everything. And he says — later he will say, "I saw death. I saw myself dead, therefore I'm dead." And from then on, he knows he is dead. It is not a perception — he is convinced that he is dead. In reality, someone came in, the guy left or didn't shoot, whatever, and he didn't actually get shot — but to him, he died in that moment. Or it can be the smell of a mass grave — I saw a lot of that in Rwanda. It can be the voice of a friend calling, and they're being slaughtered and there's nothing you can do. You hear that voice, and you wake up every night — for weeks, months — in a trance-like state, anxious and terrified, like a child. I have seen men cry — just like children — from seeing the same image. So having that image of horror in your brain, seeing the void of death — that analogue of horror which is hiding something — will completely take over. You cannot do anything, anything at all. You cannot work anymore, you cannot love anymore. You go home and don't recognize anyone. You don't even recognize yourself. You hide and don't leave the house, you lock yourself in, you become ill. I know people who placed small cans outside their house with coins inside, in case someone tried to get in. All of a sudden, you feel like you want to die or kill or hide or run away. You want to be loved, but you hate everyone. It's a feeling that seizes you entirely day in and day out, and you suffer tremendously. And no one understands. They say, "There's nothing wrong with you. You seem fine, you have no injuries. You went to war, came back; you're fine." These people suffer tremendously. Some commit suicide. After all, suicide is like updating your daily planner — I'm already dead, I might as well commit suicide. Plus, there is no more pain. Some commit suicide, others end up under the bridge, drinking. Everyone remembers that grandfather or uncle or neighbor who used to drink, never said a word, always in a bad mood, beat his wife and who would end up either sinking into alcoholism or dying. And why do we not talk about this? We don't talk about it because it's taboo. It's not like we don't have the words to express the void of death. But others don't want hear it. The first time I returned from an assignment, They said, "Oh! He's back." There was a fancy dinner — white tablecloth, candles, guests. "Tell us everything!" Which I did. After 20 minutes, people were giving me dirty looks, the hostess had her nose in the ashtray. It was horrible and I realized I ruined the whole evening. So I don't talk about it anymore. We're just not ready to listen. People say outright: "Please, stop." Is that a rare occurrence? No, it's extremely common. One third of the soldiers who died in Iraq — well, not "died," let me re-phrase that — one third of the US soldiers who went to Iraq suffer from PTSD. In 1939, there were still 200,000 soldiers from the First World War that were being treated in British psychiatric hospitals. In Vietnam, 54,000 people died — Americans. In 1987, the US government identified 102,000 — twice as many — 102,000 veterans who died from committing suicide. Twice as many deaths by suicide than by combat in Vietnam. So you see, this relates to everything, not just modern warfare, but also ancient wars — you can read about it, the evidence is there. So why do we not talk about it? Why have we not talked about it? The problem is that if you don't talk about it, you're heading for disaster. The only way to heal — and the good news here is that this is treatable — think Munch's The Scream, Goya, etc. — it's indeed treatable. The only way to heal from this trauma, from this encounter with death that overwhelms, petrifies and kills you is to find a way to express it. People used to say, "Language is the only thing that holds all of us together." Without language, we're nothing. It's the thing that makes us human. In the face of such a horrible image — a wordless image of oblivion that obsesses us — the only way to cope with it is to put human words to it. Because these people feel excluded from humanity. No one wants to see them anymore and they don't want to see anyone. They feel dirty, defiled, ashamed. Someone said, "Doctor, I don't use the subway anymore because I'm afraid people will see the horror in my eyes." Another guy thought he had a terrible skin disease and spent six months with dermatologists, going from doctor to doctor. And then one day, they sent him to a psychiatrist. During his second session, he told the psychiatrist he had a terrible skin disease from head to toe. The psychiatrist asked, "Why are you in this state?" And the man said, "Well, because I'm dead, so I must be rotting away." So you see this is something that has a profound effect on people. In order to heal, we need to talk about it. The horror needs to be put into words — human words, so we can organize it and talk about it again. We have to look death in the face. And if we can do that, if we can talk about these things, then step by step, by working it out verbally, we can reclaim our place in humanity. And it is important. Silence kills us. So what does this mean? It means that after a trauma, without question, we lose our "unbearable lightness of being," that sense of immortality that keeps us here — meaning, if we're here, we almost feel like we're immortal, which we're not, but if we didn't believe that, we'd say, "What's the point of it all?" But trauma survivors have lost that feeling of immortality. They've lost their lightness. But they have found something else. So this means that if we manage to look death in the face, and actually confront it, rather than keep quiet and hide, like some of the men or women I know did, such as Michael from Rwanda, Carole from Iraq, Philippe from the Congo and other people I know, like Sorj Chalandon, now a great writer, who gave up field assignments after a trauma. Five friends of mine committed suicide, they're the ones who did not survive the trauma. So if we can look death in the face, if we, mortal humans, human mortals, understand that we are human and mortal, mortal and human, if we can confront death and identify it once again as the most mysterious place of all mysterious places, since no one has ever seen it — if we can give it back this meaning, yes, we may die, survive and come back to life, but we'll come back stronger than before. Much stronger. Thank you. (Applause)
Why sneakers are a great investment	{0: 'Josh Luber is the founder of Campless, a company that collects, analyzes and publishes data and derived insight related to collectible sneakers and the industry.'}	TED@IBM	This is the Air Jordan 3 Black Cement. This might be the most important sneaker in history. First released in 1988, this is the shoe that started Nike marketing as we know it. This is the shoe that propelled the entire Air Jordan lineage, and perhaps saved Nike. The Air Jordan 3 Black Cement did for sneakers what the iPhone did for phones. It's been re-released four times. Every celebrity's been seen wearing it. There's a site about what to wear with the Black Cement. It's been right under your nose for decades and you never looked down. And right about now, most of you are probably thinking, "Sneakers?" (Laughter) Yes. Yes, sneakers. Some extraordinary things about sneakers and data and Nike and how they're all related, possibly, to the future of all online commerce. In 2011, the last time the Jordan 3 Black Cement was released, at a retail of 160 dollars, it sold out globally in minutes. And that's because people were camped outside of sneaker stores for days before it went on sale. And just minutes after that, thousands of those pairs were on eBay for two and three times retail. In fact, there's over 1,000 pairs on eBay right now, four years later. But here's the thing: this happens every single Saturday. Every week there's another release or two or three, and every shoe has a story as rich and compelling as the Jordan 3 Black Cement. This is Nike building the marketplace for sneakerheads — people who collect sneakers — and my daughter. (Laughter) That's an "I love Dad" T-shirt. For the brands, sneakerheads are a very important demographic. These are the tastemakers; these are the Apple fanboys. Because who else is going to buy a pair of $8,000 Back to the Future sneakers? (Laughter) Yeah, 8,000 dollars. And while that's obviously the anomaly, the resell sneaker market is definitely not. Thirty years in the making, what started as an underground culture of a few people who like sneakers just a bit too much — (Laughter) Now we have sneaker addictions. In a market where in the past 12 months, there have been over nine million pairs of shoes resold in the United States alone, at a value of 1.2 billion dollars. And that's a conservative estimate — I should know, I am a sneakerhead. This is my collection. In the pantheon of great collections, mine doesn't even register. I have about 250 pairs, but trust me, I am small-time. People have thousands. I'm a very typical 37-year-old sneakerhead. I grew up playing basketball when Michael Jordan played, I always wanted Air Jordans, my mother would never buy me Air Jordans, as soon as I got some money I bought Air Jordans — literally, we all have the exact same story. But here's where mine diverged. After starting three companies, I took a job as a strategy consultant, when I very quickly realized that I didn't know the first thing about data. But I learned, because I had to, and I liked it. So I thought, I wonder if I could get ahold of some sneaker data, just to play with for my own amusement. The goal was to develop a price guide, a real data-driven view of the market. And four years later, we're analyzing over 25 million transactions, providing real-time analytics on thousands of sneakers. Now sneakerheads check prices while camping out for releases. Others have used the data to validate insurance claims. And the top investment banks in the world now use resell data to analyze the retail footwear industry. And here's the best part: sneakerheads have sneaker portfolios. (Laughter) Sneakerheads can track the value of their collection over time, compare it to others, and have access to the same analytics you might for your online brokerage account. So sneakerhead Dan builds his collection and identifies which 352 are his. He can see it's worth 103,000 dollars — frankly, a modest collection. At the asset level, he can see gain-loss by shoe. Here he's made over 600 dollars on one pair. I have one of those. (Laughter) So an unregulated 1.2 billion dollar industry that thrives as much on the street as it does online, and has spawned fundamental financial services for sneakers? At some point I asked myself what's really going on in the market, and two comparisons started to emerge. Are sneakers more like stocks or drugs? (Laughter) In fact, one guy emailed to say he thought his 15-year-old son was selling drugs and later found out he was selling sneakers. (Laughter) And now they use the data to do it together. And that's because sneakers are an investment opportunity where none other exists. And I don't just mean the kid selling sneakers instead of drugs. How about all kids? You have to be 18 to play the stock market. I sold chewing gum in sixth grade, Blow Pops in ninth grade and collected baseball cards through high school. The cards are long dead, and the candy market's usually quite local. For a lot of people, sneakers are a legal and accessible investment opportunity — a democratized stock market, but also unregulated. Which is why the story you're probably most familiar with is people killing each other for sneakers. And while that definitely happens and is tragic, it's not nearly the epidemic some media would have you believe. In fact, it's a very small piece of a much bigger and better story. So sneakers have clear similarities to both the stock exchange and the illegal drug trade, but perhaps the most fundamental is the existence of a central actor. Someone is making the rules. In the case of sneakers, that someone is Nike. Let me walk you through some numbers. The resell market, we know, is $1.2 billion. Nike, including Jordan brand, accounts for 96 percent of all shoes sold on the secondary market. Just complete domination. Sneakerheads love Jordans. And profit on the secondary market is about a third. That means that sneakerheads made 380 million dollars selling Nikes last year. Let's jump to retail for a second. Skechers, earlier this year, became the number two footwear brand in the country, surpassing Adidas — this was a big deal. And in the 12 months ending in June, Skechers's net income was 209 million dollars. That means that Nike's customers make almost twice as much profit as their closest competitor. That — (Laughter) How is that even possible? The sneaker market is just supply and demand, but Nike's gotten very good at using supply — limited sneakers — and the distribution of those sneakers to their own benefit. So it's really just supply. Sneakerheads joke that as long as it's limited and Nike, they'll buy it. Shoes that sell for 8,000 dollars do so because they're very rare. It's no different than any other collectible market, only this isn't a market at all. It's a false construct created by Nike — ingeniously created by Nike, in the most positive sense — to sell more shoes. And in the process, it provided tens of thousands of people with life-long passions, myself included. If Nike wanted to kill the resell market, they could do so tomorrow, all they have to do is release more shoes. But we certainly don't want them to, nor is it in their best interest. That's because unlike Apple, who will sell an iPhone to anyone who wants one, Nike doesn't make their money by just selling $200 sneakers. They sell millions of shoes to millions of people for 60 dollars. And sneakerheads are the ones who drive the marketing and the hype and the PR and the brand cachet, and enable Nike to sell millions of $60 sneakers. It's marketing. It's marketing the likes of which has never been seen before — this isn't in any textbook. For 15 years Nike has propped up an artificial commodities market, with a Facebook-level hyped IPO every single weekend. Drive by any Footlocker at 8am on a Saturday morning, and there will be a line down the street and around the block, and sometimes those kids have been waiting there all week. You know those crazy iPhone lines you see on the news every other year? Nike lines happen 104 times more often. So Nike sets the rules. And they do so by controlling supply and distribution. But once a pair leaves the retail channel, it's the Wild West. There are very few — if any — legal, unregulated markets of this size. So Nike is definitely not the stock exchange. In fact, there is no central exchange. By last count, there were 48 different online markets that I know of. Some are eBay clones, some are mobile markets, and then you have consignment shops and brick-and-mortar stores, and sneaker conventions, and reseller sites, and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter — literally, anywhere sneakerheads come into contact with each other, shoes will be bought and sold. But that means no efficiencies, no transparency, sometimes not even authenticity. Can you imagine if that's how stocks were bought? What if the way to buy a share of Apple stock was to search over 100 places online and off, including every time you walk down the street just hoping to pass someone wearing some Apple stock? Never knowing who had the best price, or even if the stock you were looking at was real. That would surely make you say: [WTF?] Of course that's not how we buy stock. But what if that's not how we need to buy sneakers either? What if the inverse is true, and what if we could buy sneakers exactly the same way as we buy stock? And what if it wasn't just sneakers, but any similar product, like watches and handbags and women's shoes, and any collectible, any seasonal item and any markdown item? What if there was a stock market for commerce? A stock market of things. And not only could you buy in a much more educated and efficient manner, but you could engage in all the sophisticated financial transactions you can with the stock market. Shorts and options and futures and well, maybe you see where this is going. Maybe you want to invest in a stock market of things. Because if you had invested in a pair of Air Jordan 3 Black Cement in 2011, you could either be wearing them onstage, (Laughter) or have earned 162 percent on your money — double the S&P and 20 percent more than Apple. (Laughter) And that's why we're talking about sneakers. Thank you. (Applause)
The future of news? Virtual reality	{0: 'Nonny de la Peña uses new, immersive media to tell stories that create empathy in readers and viewers.'}	TEDWomen 2015	What if I could present you a story that you would remember with your entire body and not just with your mind? My whole life as a journalist, I've really been compelled to try to make stories that can make a difference and maybe inspire people to care. I've worked in print. I've worked in documentary. I've worked in broadcast. But it really wasn't until I got involved with virtual reality that I started seeing these really intense, authentic reactions from people that really blew my mind. So the deal is that with VR, virtual reality, I can put you on scene in the middle of the story. By putting on these goggles that track wherever you look, you get this whole-body sensation, like you're actually, like, there. So five years ago was about when I really began to push the envelope with using virtual reality and journalism together. And I wanted to do a piece about hunger. Families in America are going hungry, food banks are overwhelmed, and they're often running out of food. Now, I knew I couldn't make people feel hungry, but maybe I could figure out a way to get them to feel something physical. So — again, this is five years ago — so doing journalism and virtual reality together was considered a worse-than-half-baked idea, and I had no funding. Believe me, I had a lot of colleagues laughing at me. And I did, though, have a really great intern, a woman named Michaela Kobsa-Mark. And together we went out to food banks and started recording audio and photographs. Until one day she came back to my office and she was bawling, she was just crying. She had been on scene at a long line, where the woman running the line was feeling extremely overwhelmed, and she was screaming, "There's too many people! There's too many people!" And this man with diabetes doesn't get food in time, his blood sugar drops too low, and he collapses into a coma. As soon as I heard that audio, I knew that this would be the kind of evocative piece that could really describe what was going on at food banks. So here's the real line. You can see how long it was, right? And again, as I said, we didn't have very much funding, so I had to reproduce it with virtual humans that were donated, and people begged and borrowed favors to help me create the models and make things as accurate as we could. And then we tried to convey what happened that day with as much as accuracy as is possible. (Video) Voice: There's too many people! There's too many people! Voice: OK, he's having a seizure. Voice: We need an ambulance. Nonny de la Peña: So the man on the right, for him, he's walking around the body. For him, he's in the room with that body. Like, that guy is at his feet. And even though, through his peripheral vision, he can see that he's in this lab space, he should be able to see that he's not actually on the street, but he feels like he's there with those people. He's very cautious not to step on this guy who isn't really there, right? So that piece ended up going to Sundance in 2012, a kind of amazing thing, and it was the first virtual reality film ever, basically. And when we went, I was really terrified. I didn't really know how people were going to react and what was going to happen. And we showed up with this duct-taped pair of goggles. (Video) Oh, you're crying. You're crying. Gina, you're crying. So you can hear the surprise in my voice, right? And this kind of reaction ended up being the kind of reaction we saw over and over and over: people down on the ground trying to comfort the seizure victim, trying to whisper something into his ear or in some way help, even though they couldn't. And I had a lot of people come out of that piece saying, "Oh my God, I was so frustrated. I couldn't help the guy," and take that back into their lives. So after this piece was made, the dean of the cinema school at USC, the University of Southern California, brought in the head of the World Economic Forum to try "Hunger," and he took off the goggles, and he commissioned a piece about Syria on the spot. And I really wanted to do something about Syrian refugee kids, because children have been the worst affected by the Syrian civil war. I sent a team to the border of Iraq to record material at refugee camps, basically an area I wouldn't send a team now, as that's where ISIS is really operating. And then we also recreated a street scene in which a young girl is singing and a bomb goes off. Now, when you're in the middle of that scene and you hear those sounds, and you see the injured around you, it's an incredibly scary and real feeling. I've had individuals who have been involved in real bombings tell me that it evokes the same kind of fear. [The civil war in Syria may seem far away] [until you experience it yourself.] (Girl singing) (Explosion) [Project Syria] [A virtual reality experience] NP: We were then invited to take the piece to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. And it wasn't advertised. And we were put in this tapestry room. There was no press about it, so anybody who happened to walk into the museum to visit it that day would see us with these crazy lights. You know, maybe they would want to see the old storytelling of the tapestries. They were confronted by our virtual reality cameras. But a lot of people tried it, and over a five-day run we ended up with 54 pages of guest book comments, and we were told by the curators there that they'd never seen such an outpouring. Things like, "It's so real," "Absolutely believable," or, of course, the one that I was excited about, "A real feeling as if you were in the middle of something that you normally see on the TV news." So, it works, right? This stuff works. And it doesn't really matter where you're from or what age you are — it's really evocative. Now, don't get me wrong — I'm not saying that when you're in a piece you forget that you're here. But it turns out we can feel like we're in two places at once. We can have what I call this duality of presence, and I think that's what allows me to tap into these feelings of empathy. Right? So that means, of course, that I have to be very cautious about creating these pieces. I have to really follow best journalistic practices and make sure that these powerful stories are built with integrity. If we don't capture the material ourselves, we have to be extremely exacting about figuring out the provenance and where did this stuff come from and is it authentic? Let me give you an example. With this Trayvon Martin case, this is a guy, a kid, who was 17 years old and he bought soda and a candy at a store, and on his way home he was tracked by a neighborhood watchman named George Zimmerman who ended up shooting and killing him. To make that piece, we got the architectural drawings of the entire complex, and we rebuilt the entire scene inside and out, based on those drawings. All of the action is informed by the real 911 recorded calls to the police. And interestingly, we broke some news with this story. The forensic house that did the audio reconstruction, Primeau Productions, they say that they would testify that George Zimmerman, when he got out of the car, he cocked his gun before he went to give chase to Martin. So you can see that the basic tenets of journalism, they don't really change here, right? We're still following the same principles that we would always. What is different is the sense of being on scene, whether you're watching a guy collapse from hunger or feeling like you're in the middle of a bomb scene. And this is kind of what has driven me forward with these pieces, and thinking about how to make them. We're trying to make this, obviously, beyond the headset, more available. We're creating mobile pieces like the Trayvon Martin piece. And these things have had impact. I've had Americans tell me that they've donated, direct deductions from their bank account, money to go to Syrian children refugees. And "Hunger in LA," well, it's helped start a new form of doing journalism that I think is going to join all the other normal platforms in the future. Thank you. (Applause)
My country will be underwater soon -- unless we work together	{0: 'Anote Tong has built worldwide awareness of the potentially devastating impacts of climate change.'}	Mission Blue II	Chris Anderson: Perhaps we could start by just telling us about your country. It's three dots there on the globe. Those dots are pretty huge. I think each one is about the size of California. Tell us about Kiribati. Anote Tong: Well, let me first begin by saying how deeply grateful I am for this opportunity to share my story with people who do care. I think I've been sharing my story with a lot of people who don't care too much. But Kiribati is comprised of three groups of islands: the Gilbert Group on the west, we have the Phoenix Islands in the middle, and the Line Islands in the east. And quite frankly, Kiribati is perhaps the only country that is actually in the four corners of the world, because we are in the Northern Hemisphere, in the Southern Hemisphere, and also in the east and the west of the International Date Line. These islands are entirely made up of coral atolls, and on average about two meters above sea level. And so this is what we have. Usually not more than two kilometers in width. And so, on many occasions, I've been asked by people, "You know, you're suffering, why don't you move back?" They don't understand. They have no concept of what it is that's involved. With the rising sea, they say, "Well, you can move back." And so this is what I tell them. If we move back, we will fall off on the other side of the ocean. OK? But these are the kinds of issues that people don't understand. CA: So certainly this is just a picture of fragility there. When was it that you yourself realized that there might be impending peril for your country? AT: Well, the story of climate change has been one that has been going on for quite a number of decades. And when I came into office in 2003, I began talking about climate change at the United Nations General Assembly, but not with so much passion, because then there was still this controversy among the scientists whether it was human-induced, whether it was real or it wasn't. But I think that that debate was fairly much concluded in 2007 with the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, which made a categorical statement that it is real, it's human-induced, and it's predicting some very serious scenarios for countries like mine. And so that's when I got very serious. In the past, I talked about it. We were worried. But when the scenarios, the predictions came in 2007, it became a real issue for us. CA: Now, those predictions are, I think, that by 2100, sea levels are forecast to rise perhaps three feet. There's scenarios where it's higher than that, for sure, but what would you say to a skeptic who said, "What's three feet? You're on average six feet above sea level. What's the problem?" AT: Well, I think it's got to be understood that a marginal rise in sea level would mean a loss of a lot of land, because much of the land is low. And quite apart from that, we are getting the swells at the moment. So it's not about getting two feet. I think what many people do not understand is they think climate change is something that is happening in the future. Well, we're at the very bottom end of the spectrum. It's already with us. We have communities who already have been dislocated. They have had to move, and every parliament session, I'm getting complaints from different communities asking for assistance to build seawalls, to see what we can do about the freshwater lens because it's being destroyed, and so in my trips to the different islands, I'm seeing evidence of communities which are now having to cope with the loss of food crops, the contamination of the water lenses, and I see these communities perhaps leaving, having to relocate, within five to 10 years. CA: And then, I think the country suffered its first cyclone, and this is connected, yes? What happened here? AT: Well, we're on the equator, and I'm sure many of you understand that when you're on the equator, it's supposed to be in the doldrums. We're not supposed to get the cyclones. We create them, and then we send them either north or south. (Laughter) But they aren't supposed to come back. But for the first time, at the beginning of this year, the Cyclone Pam, which destroyed Vanuatu, and in the process, the very edges of it actually touched our two southernmost islands, and all of Tuvalu was underwater when Hurricane Pam struck. But for our two southernmost islands, we had waves come over half the island, and so this has never happened before. It's a new experience. And I've just come back from my own constituency, and I've seen these beautiful trees which had been there for decades, they've been totally destroyed. So this is what's happening, but when we talk about the rising sea level, we think it's something that happens gradually. It comes with the winds, it comes with the swells, and so they can be magnified, but what we are beginning to witness is the change in the weather pattern, which is perhaps the more urgent challenge that we will face sooner than perhaps the rising sea level. CA: So the country is already seeing effects now. As you look forward, what are your options as a country, as a nation? AT: Well, I've been telling this story every year. I think I visit a number of — I've been traveling the world to try and get people to understand. We have a plan, we think we have a plan. And on one occasion, I think I spoke in Geneva and there was a gentleman who was interviewing me on something like this, and I said, "We are looking at floating islands," and he thought it was funny, but somebody said, "No, this is not funny. These people are looking for solutions." And so I have been looking at floating islands. The Japanese are interested in building floating islands. But, as a country, we have made a commitment that no matter what happens, we will try as much as possible to stay and continue to exist as a nation. What that will take, it's going to be something quite significant, very, very substantial. Either we live on floating islands, or we have to build up the islands to continue to stay out of the water as the sea level rises and as the storms get more severe. But even that, it's going to be very, very difficult to get the kind of resourcing that we would need. CA: And then the only recourse is some form of forced migration. AT: Well, we are also looking at that because in the event that nothing comes forward from the international community, we are preparing, we don't want to be caught like what's happening in Europe. OK? We don't want to mass migrate at some point in time. We want to be able to give the people the choice today, those who choose and want to do that, to migrate. We don't want something to happen that they are forced to migrate without having been prepared to do so. Of course, our culture is very different, our society is very different, and once we migrate into a different environment, a different culture, there's a whole lot of adjustments that are required. CA: Well, there's forced migration in your country's past, and I think just this week, just yesterday or the day before yesterday, you visited these people. What happened here? What's the story here? AT: Yes, and I'm sorry, I think somebody was asking why we were sneaking off to visit that place. I had a very good reason, because we have a community of Kiribati people living in that part of the Solomon Islands, but these were people who were relocated from the Phoenix Islands, in fact, in the 1960s. There was serious drought, and the people could not continue to live on the island, and so they were moved to live here in the Solomon Islands. And so yesterday it was very interesting to meet with these people. They didn't know who I was. They hadn't heard of me. Some of them later recognized me, but I think they were very happy. Later they really wanted to have the opportunity to welcome me formally. But I think what I saw yesterday was very interesting because here I see our people. I spoke in our language, and of course they spoke back, they replied, but their accent, they are beginning not to be able to speak Kiribati properly. I saw them, there was this lady with red teeth. She was chewing betel nuts, and it's not something we do in Kiribati. We don't chew betel nuts. I met also a family who have married the local people here, and so this is what is happening. As you go into another community, there are bound to be changes. There is bound to be a certain loss of identity, and this is what we will be looking for in the future if and when we do migrate. CA: It must have been just an extraordinarily emotional day because of these questions about identity, the joy of seeing you and perhaps an emphasized sense of what they had lost. And it's very inspiring to hear you say you're going to fight to the end to try to preserve the nation in a location. AT: This is our wish. Nobody wants ever to leave their home, and so it's been a very difficult decision for me. As a leader, you don't make plans to leave your island, your home, and so I've been asked on a number of occasions, "So how do you feel?" And it doesn't feel good at all. It's an emotional thing, and I've tried to live with it, and I know that on occasions, I'm accused of not trying to solve the problem because I can't solve the problem. It's something that's got to be done collectively. Climate change is a global phenomenon, and as I've often argued, unfortunately, the countries, when we come to the United Nations — I was in a meeting with the Pacific Island Forum countries where Australia and New Zealand are also members, and we had an argument. There was a bit of a story in the news because they were arguing that to cut emissions, it would be something that they're unable to do because it would affect the industries. And so here I was saying, OK, I hear you, I understand what you're saying, but try also to understand what I'm saying because if you do not cut your emissions, then our survival is on the line. And so it's a matter for you to weigh this, these moral issues. It's about industry as opposed to the survival of a people. CA: You know, I ask you yesterday what made you angry, and you said, "I don't get angry." But then you paused. I think this made you angry. AT: I'd refer you to my earlier statement at the United Nations. I was very angry, very frustrated and then depressed. There was a sense of futility that we are fighting a fight that we have no hope of winning. I had to change my approach. I had to become more reasonable because I thought people would listen to somebody who was rational, but I remain radically rational, whatever that is. (Laughter) CA: Now, a core part of your nation's identity is fishing. I think you said pretty much everyone is involved in fishing in some way. AT: Well, we eat fish every day, every day, and I think there is no doubt that our rate of consumption of fish is perhaps the highest in the world. We don't have a lot of livestock, so it's fish that we depend on. CA: So you're dependent on fish, both at the local level and for the revenues that the country receives from the global fishing business for tuna, and yet despite that, a few years ago you took a very radical step. Can you tell us about that? I think something happened right here in the Phoenix Islands. AT: Let me give some of the background of what fish means for us. We have one of the largest tuna fisheries remaining in the world. In the Pacific, I think we own something like 60 percent of the remaining tuna fisheries, and it remains relatively healthy for some species, but not all. And Kiribati is one of the three major resource owners, tuna resource owners. And at the moment, we have been getting something like 80 to 90 percent of our revenue from access fees, license fees. CA: Of your national revenue. AT: National revenue, which drives everything that we do in governments, hospitals, schools and what have you. But we decided to close this, and it was a very difficult decision. I can assure you, politically, locally, it was not easy, but I was convinced that we had to do this in order to ensure that the fishery remains sustainable. There had been some indications that some of the species, in particular the bigeye, was under serious threat. The yellowfin was also heavily fished. Skipjack remains healthy. And so we had to do something like that, and so that was the reason I did that. Another reason why I did that was because I had been asking the international community that in order to deal with climate change, in order to fight climate change, there has got to be sacrifice, there has got to be commitment. So in asking the international community to make a sacrifice, I thought we ourselves need to make that sacrifice. And so we made the sacrifice. And forgoing commercial fishing in the Phoenix Islands protected area would mean a loss of revenue. We are still trying to assess what that loss would be because we actually closed it off at the beginning of this year, and so we will see by the end of this year what it means in terms of the lost revenue. CA: So there's so many things playing into this. On the one hand, it may prompt healthier fisheries. I mean, how much are you able to move the price up that you charge for the remaining areas? AT: The negotiations have been very difficult, but we have managed to raise the cost of a vessel day. For any vessel to come in to fish for a day, we have raised the fee from — it was $6,000 and $8,000, now to $10,000, $12,000 per vessel day. And so there's been that significant increase. But at the same time, what's important to note is, whereas in the past these fishing boats might be fishing in a day and maybe catch 10 tons, now they're catching maybe 100 tons because they've become so efficient. And so we've got to respond likewise. We've got to be very, very careful because the technology has so improved. There was a time when the Brazilian fleet moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They couldn't. They started experimenting if they could, per se. But now they've got ways of doing it, and they've become so efficient. CA: Can you give us a sense of what it's like in those negotiations? Because you're up against companies that have hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, essentially. How do you hold the line? Is there any advice you can give to other leaders who are dealing with the same companies about how to get the most for your country, get the most for the fish? What advice would you give? AT: Well, I think we focus too often on licensing in order to get the rate of return, because what we are getting from license fees is about 10 percent of the landed value of the catch on the side of the wharf, not in the retail shops. And we only get about 10 percent. What we have been trying to do over the years is actually to increase our participation in the industry, in the harvesting, in the processing, and eventually, hopefully, the marketing. They're not easy to penetrate, but we are working towards that, and yes, the answer would be to enhance. In order to increase our rate of return, we have to become more involved. And so we've started doing that, and we have to restructure the industry. We've got to tell these people that the world has changed. Now we want to produce the fish ourselves. CA: And meanwhile, for your local fishermen, they are still able to fish, but what is business like for them? Is it getting harder? Are the waters depleted? Or is that being run on a sustainable basis? AT: For the artisanal fishery, we do not participate in the commercial fishing activity except only to supply the domestic market. The tuna fishery is really entirely for the foreign market, mostly here in the US, Europe, Japan. So I am a fisherman, very much, and I used to be able to catch yellowfin. Now it's very, very rare to be able to catch yellowfin because they are being lifted out of the water by the hundreds of tons by these purse seiners. CA: So here's a couple of beautiful girls from your country. I mean, as you think about their future, what message would you have for them and what message would you have for the world? AT: Well, I've been telling the world that we really have to do something about what is happening to the climate because for us, it's about the future of these children. I have 12 grandchildren, at least. I think I have 12, my wife knows. (Laughter) And I think I have eight children. It's about their future. Every day I see my grandchildren, about the same age as these young girls, and I do wonder, and I get angry sometimes, yes I do. I wonder what is to become of them. And so it's about them that we should be telling everybody, that it's not about their own national interest, because climate change, regrettably, unfortunately, is viewed by many countries as a national problem. It's not. And this is the argument we got into recently with our partners, the Australians and New Zealanders, because they said, "We can't cut any more." This is what one of the leaders, the Australian leader, said, that we've done our part, we are cutting back. I said, What about the rest? Why don't you keep it? If you could keep the rest of your emissions within your boundaries, within your borders, we'd have no question. You can go ahead as much as you like. But unfortunately, you're sending it our way, and it's affecting the future of our children. And so surely I think that is the heart of the problem of climate change today. We will be meeting in Paris at the end of this year, but until we can think of this as a global phenomenon, because we create it, individually, as nations, but it affects everybody else, and yet, we refuse to do anything about it, and we deal with it as a national problem, which it is not — it is a global issue, and it's got to be dealt with collectively. CA: People are incredibly bad at responding to graphs and numbers, and we shut our minds to it. Somehow, to people, we're slightly better at responding to that sometimes. And it seems like it's very possible that your nation, despite, actually because of the intense problems you face, you may yet be the warning light to the world that shines most visibly, most powerfully. I just want to thank you, I'm sure, on behalf of all of us, for your extraordinary leadership and for being here. Mr. President, thank you so much. AT: Thank you. (Applause)
What are animals thinking and feeling?	{0: "Carl Safina's writing explores the scientific, moral and social dimensions of our relationship with nature."}	Mission Blue II	Have you ever wondered what animals think and feel? Let's start with a question: Does my dog really love me, or does she just want a treat? Well, it's easy to see that our dog really loves us, easy to see, right, what's going on in that fuzzy little head. What is going on? Something's going on. But why is the question always do they love us? Why is it always about us? Why are we such narcissists? I found a different question to ask animals. Who are you? There are capacities of the human mind that we tend to think are capacities only of the human mind. But is that true? What are other beings doing with those brains? What are they thinking and feeling? Is there a way to know? I think there is a way in. I think there are several ways in. We can look at evolution, we can look at their brains and we can watch what they do. The first thing to remember is: our brain is inherited. The first neurons came from jellyfish. Jellyfish gave rise to the first chordates. The first chordates gave rise to the first vertebrates. The vertebrates came out of the sea, and here we are. But it's still true that a neuron, a nerve cell, looks the same in a crayfish, a bird or you. What does that say about the minds of crayfish? Can we tell anything about that? Well, it turns out that if you give a crayfish a lot of little tiny electric shocks every time it tries to come out of its burrow, it will develop anxiety. If you give the crayfish the same drug used to treat anxiety disorder in humans, it relaxes and comes out and explores. How do we show how much we care about crayfish anxiety? Mostly, we boil them. (Laughter) Octopuses use tools, as well as do most apes and they recognize human faces. How do we celebrate the ape-like intelligence of this invertebrate? Mostly boiled. If a grouper chases a fish into a crevice in the coral, it will sometimes go to where it knows a moray eel is sleeping and it will signal to the moray, "Follow me," and the moray will understand that signal. The moray may go into the crevice and get the fish, but the fish may bolt and the grouper may get it. This is an ancient partnership that we have just recently found out about. How do we celebrate that ancient partnership? Mostly fried. A pattern is emerging and it says a lot more about us than it does about them. Sea otters use tools and they take time away from what they're doing to show their babies what to do, which is called teaching. Chimpanzees don't teach. Killer whales teach and killer whales share food. When evolution makes something new, it uses the parts it has in stock, off the shelf, before it fabricates a new twist. And our brain has come to us through the enormity of the deep sweep of time. If you look at the human brain compared to a chimpanzee brain, what you see is we have basically a very big chimpanzee brain. It's a good thing ours is bigger, because we're also really insecure. (Laughter) But, uh oh, there's a dolphin, a bigger brain with more convolutions. OK, maybe you're saying, all right, well, we see brains, but what does that have to say about minds? Well, we can see the working of the mind in the logic of behaviors. So these elephants, you can see, obviously, they are resting. They have found a patch of shade under the palm trees under which to let their babies sleep, while they doze but remain vigilant. We make perfect sense of that image just as they make perfect sense of what they're doing because under the arc of the same sun on the same plains, listening to the howls of the same dangers, they became who they are and we became who we are. We've been neighbors for a very long time. No one would mistake these elephants as being relaxed. They're obviously very concerned about something. What are they concerned about? It turns out that if you record the voices of tourists and you play that recording from a speaker hidden in bushes, elephants will ignore it, because tourists never bother elephants. But if you record the voices of herders who carry spears and often hurt elephants in confrontations at water holes, the elephants will bunch up and run away from the hidden speaker. Not only do elephants know that there are humans, they know that there are different kinds of humans, and that some are OK and some are dangerous. They have been watching us for much longer than we have been watching them. They know us better than we know them. We have the same imperatives: take care of our babies, find food, try to stay alive. Whether we're outfitted for hiking in the hills of Africa or outfitted for diving under the sea, we are basically the same. We are kin under the skin. The elephant has the same skeleton, the killer whale has the same skeleton, as do we. We see helping where help is needed. We see curiosity in the young. We see the bonds of family connections. We recognize affection. Courtship is courtship. And then we ask, "Are they conscious?" When you get general anesthesia, it makes you unconscious, which means you have no sensation of anything. Consciousness is simply the thing that feels like something. If you see, if you hear, if you feel, if you're aware of anything, you are conscious, and they are conscious. Some people say well, there are certain things that make humans humans, and one of those things is empathy. Empathy is the mind's ability to match moods with your companions. It's a very useful thing. If your companions start to move quickly, you have to feel like you need to hurry up. We're all in a hurry now. The oldest form of empathy is contagious fear. If your companions suddenly startle and fly away, it does not work very well for you to say, "Jeez, I wonder why everybody just left." (Laughter) Empathy is old, but empathy, like everything else in life, comes on a sliding scale and has its elaboration. So there's basic empathy: you feel sad, it makes me sad. I see you happy, it makes me happy. Then there's something that I call sympathy, a little more removed: "I'm sorry to hear that your grandmother has just passed away. I don't feel that same grief, but I get it; I know what you feel and it concerns me." And then if we're motivated to act on sympathy, I call that compassion. Far from being the thing that makes us human, human empathy is far from perfect. We round up empathic creatures, we kill them and we eat them. Now, maybe you say OK, well, those are different species. That's just predation, and humans are predators. But we don't treat our own kind too well either. People who seem to know only one thing about animal behavior know that you must never attribute human thoughts and emotions to other species. Well, I think that's silly, because attributing human thoughts and emotions to other species is the best first guess about what they're doing and how they're feeling, because their brains are basically the same as ours. They have the same structures. The same hormones that create mood and motivation in us are in those brains as well. It is not scientific to say that they are hungry when they're hunting and they're tired when their tongues are hanging out, and then say when they're playing with their children and acting joyful and happy, we have no idea if they can possibly be experiencing anything. That is not scientific. So OK, so a reporter said to me, "Maybe, but how do you really know that other animals can think and feel?" And I started to rifle through all the hundreds of scientific references that I put in my book and I realized that the answer was right in the room with me. When my dog gets off the rug and comes over to me — not to the couch, to me — and she rolls over on her back and exposes her belly, she has had the thought, "I would like my belly rubbed. I know that I can go over to Carl, he will understand what I'm asking. I know I can trust him because we're family. He'll get the job done, and it will feel good." (Laughter) She has thought and she has felt, and it's really not more complicated than that. But we see other animals and we say, "Oh look, killer whales, wolves, elephants: that's not how they see it." That tall-finned male is L41. He's 38 years old. The female right on his left side is L22. She's 44. They've known each other for decades. They know exactly who they are. They know who their friends are. They know who their rivals are. Their life follows the arc of a career. They know where they are all the time. This is an elephant named Philo. He was a young male. This is him four days later. Humans not only can feel grief, we create an awful lot of it. We want to carve their teeth. Why can't we wait for them to die? Elephants once ranged from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope. In 1980, there were vast strongholds of elephant range in Central and Eastern Africa. And now their range is shattered into little shards. This is the geography of an animal that we are driving to extinction, a fellow being, the most magnificent creature on land. Of course, we take much better care of our wildlife in the United States. In Yellowstone National Park, we killed every single wolf. We killed every single wolf south of the Canadian border, actually. But in the park, park rangers did that in the 1920s, and then 60 years later they had to bring them back, because the elk numbers had gotten out of control. And then people came. People came by the thousands to see the wolves, the most accessibly visible wolves in the world. And I went there and I watched this incredible family of wolves. A pack is a family. It has some breeding adults and the young of several generations. And I watched the most famous, most stable pack in Yellowstone National Park. And then, when they wandered just outside the border, two of their adults were killed, including the mother, which we sometimes call the alpha female. The rest of the family immediately descended into sibling rivalry. Sisters kicked out other sisters. That one on the left tried for days to rejoin her family. They wouldn't let her because they were jealous of her. She was getting too much attention from two new males, and she was the precocious one. That was too much for them. She wound up wandering outside the park and getting shot. The alpha male wound up being ejected from his own family. As winter was coming in, he lost his territory, his hunting support, the members of his family and his mate. We cause so much pain to them. The mystery is, why don't they hurt us more than they do? This whale had just finished eating part of a grey whale with his companions who had killed that whale. Those people in the boat had nothing at all to fear. This whale is T20. He had just finished tearing a seal into three pieces with two companions. The seal weighed about as much as the people in the boat. They had nothing to fear. They eat seals. Why don't they eat us? Why can we trust them around our toddlers? Why is it that killer whales have returned to researchers lost in thick fog and led them miles until the fog parted and the researchers' home was right there on the shoreline? And that's happened more than one time. In the Bahamas, there's a woman named Denise Herzing, and she studies spotted dolphins and they know her. She knows them very well. She knows who they all are. They know her. They recognize the research boat. When she shows up, it's a big happy reunion. Except, one time showed up and they didn't want to come near the boat, and that was really strange. And they couldn't figure out what was going on until somebody came out on deck and announced that one of the people onboard had died during a nap in his bunk. How could dolphins know that one of the human hearts had just stopped? Why would they care? And why would it spook them? These mysterious things just hint at all of the things that are going on in the minds that are with us on Earth that we almost never think about at all. At an aquarium in South Africa was a little baby bottle-nosed dolphin named Dolly. She was nursing, and one day a keeper took a cigarette break and he was looking into the window into their pool, smoking. Dolly came over and looked at him, went back to her mother, nursed for a minute or two, came back to the window and released a cloud of milk that enveloped her head like smoke. Somehow, this baby bottle-nosed dolphin got the idea of using milk to represent smoke. When human beings use one thing to represent another, we call that art. (Laughter) The things that make us human are not the things that we think make us human. What makes us human is that, of all these things that our minds and their minds have, we are the most extreme. We are the most compassionate, most violent, most creative and most destructive animal that has ever been on this planet, and we are all of those things all jumbled up together. But love is not the thing that makes us human. It's not special to us. We are not the only ones who care about our mates. We are not the only ones who care about our children. Albatrosses frequently fly six, sometimes ten thousand miles over several weeks to deliver one meal, one big meal, to their chick who is waiting for them. They nest on the most remote islands in the oceans of the world, and this is what it looks like. Passing life from one generation to the next is the chain of being. If that stops, it all goes away. If anything is sacred, that is, and into that sacred relationship comes our plastic trash. All of these birds have plastic in them now. This is an albatross six months old, ready to fledge — died, packed with red cigarette lighters. This is not the relationship we are supposed to have with the rest of the world. But we, who have named ourselves after our brains, never think about the consequences. When we welcome new human life into the world, we welcome our babies into the company of other creatures. We paint animals on the walls. We don't paint cell phones. We don't paint work cubicles. We paint animals to show them that we are not alone. We have company. And every one of those animals in every painting of Noah's ark, deemed worthy of salvation is in mortal danger now, and their flood is us. So we started with a question: Do they love us? We're going to ask another question. Are we capable of using what we have to care enough to simply let them continue? Thank you very much. (Applause)
Why are these 32 symbols found in ancient caves all over Europe?	{0: 'Genevieve von Petzinger studies the geometric signs found in early European Ice Age rock art sites.'}	TED Fellows Retreat 2015	There's something about caves — a shadowy opening in a limestone cliff that draws you in. As you pass through the portal between light and dark, you enter a subterranean world — a place of perpetual gloom, of earthy smells, of hushed silence. Long ago in Europe, ancient people also entered these underground worlds. As witness to their passage, they left behind mysterious engravings and paintings, like this panel of humans, triangles and zigzags from Ojo Guareña in Spain. You now walk the same path as these early artists. And in this surreal, otherworldly place, it's almost possible to imagine that you hear the muffled footfall of skin boots on soft earth, or that you see the flickering of a torch around the next bend. When I'm in a cave, I often find myself wondering what drove these people to go so deep to brave dangerous and narrow passageways to leave their mark? In this video clip, that was shot half a kilometer, or about a third of a mile, underground, in the cave of Cudon in Spain, we found a series of red paintings on a ceiling in a previously unexplored section of the cave. As we crawled forward, military-style, with the ceiling getting ever lower, we finally got to a point where the ceiling was so low that my husband and project photographer, Dylan, could no longer achieve focus on the ceiling with his DSLR camera. So while he filmed me, I kept following the trail of red paint with a single light and a point-and-shoot camera that we kept for that type of occasion. Half a kilometer underground. Seriously. What was somebody doing down there with a torch or a stone lamp? (Laughter) I mean — me, it makes sense, right? But you know, this is the kind of question that I'm trying to answer with my research. I study some of the oldest art in the world. It was created by these early artists in Europe, between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago. And the thing is that I'm not just studying it because it's beautiful, though some of it certainly is. But what I'm interested in is the development of the modern mind, of the evolution of creativity, of imagination, of abstract thought, about what it means to be human. While all species communicate in one way or another, only we humans have really taken it to another level. Our desire and ability to share and collaborate has been a huge part of our success story. Our modern world is based on a global network of information exchange made possible, in large part, by our ability to communicate — in particular, using graphic or written forms of communication. The thing is, though, that we've been building on the mental achievements of those that came before us for so long that it's easy to forget that certain abilities haven't already existed. It's one of the things I find most fascinating about studying our deep history. Those people didn't have the shoulders of any giants to stand on. They were the original shoulders. And while a surprising number of important inventions come out of that distant time, what I want to talk to you about today is the invention of graphic communication. There are three main types of communication, spoken, gestural — so things like sign language — and graphic communication. Spoken and gestural are by their very nature ephemeral. It requires close contact for a message to be sent and received. And after the moment of transmission, it's gone forever. Graphic communication, on the other hand, decouples that relationship. And with its invention, it became possible for the first time for a message to be transmitted and preserved beyond a single moment in place and time. Europe is one of the first places that we start to see graphic marks regularly appearing in caves, rock shelters and even a few surviving open-air sites. But this is not the Europe we know today. This was a world dominated by towering ice sheets, three to four kilometers high, with sweeping grass plains and frozen tundra. This was the Ice Age. Over the last century, more than 350 Ice Age rock art sites have been found across the continent, decorated with animals, abstract shapes and even the occasional human like these engraved figures from Grotta dell'Addaura in Sicily. They provide us with a rare glimpse into the creative world and imagination of these early artists. Since their discovery, it's been the animals that have received the majority of the study like this black horse from Cullalvera in Spain, or this unusual purple bison from La Pasiega. But for me, it was the abstract shapes, what we call geometric signs, that drew me to study the art. The funny this is that at most sites the geometric signs far outnumber the animal and human images. But when I started on this back in 2007, there wasn't even a definitive list of how many shapes there were, nor was there a strong sense of whether the same ones appeared across space or time. Before I could even get started on my questions, my first step was to compile a database of all known geometric signs from all of the rock art sites. The problem was that while they were well documented at some sites, usually the ones with the very nice animals, there was also a large number of them where it was very vague — there wasn't a lot of description or detail. Some of them hadn't been visited in half a century or more. These were the ones that I targeted for my field work. Over the course of two years, my faithful husband Dylan and I each spent over 300 hours underground, hiking, crawling and wriggling around 52 sites in France, Spain, Portugal and Sicily. And it was totally worth it. We found new, undocumented geometric signs at 75 percent of the sites we visited. This is the level of accuracy I knew I was going to need if I wanted to start answering those larger questions. So let's get to those answers. Barring a handful of outliers, there are only 32 geometric signs. Only 32 signs across a 30,000-year time span and the entire continent of Europe. That is a very small number. Now, if these were random doodles or decorations, we would expect to see a lot more variation, but instead what we find are the same signs repeating across both space and time. Some signs start out strong, before losing popularity and vanishing, while other signs are later inventions. But 65 percent of those signs stayed in use during that entire time period — things like lines, rectangles triangles, ovals and circles like we see here from the end of the Ice Age, at a 10,000-year-old site high in the Pyrenees Mountains. And while certain signs span thousands of kilometers, other signs had much more restricted distribution patterns, with some being limited to a single territory, like we see here with these divided rectangles that are only found in northern Spain, and which some researchers have speculated could be some sort of family or clan signs. On a side note, there is surprising degree of similarity in the earliest rock art found all the way from France and Spain to Indonesia and Australia. With many of the same signs appearing in such far-flung places, especially in that 30,000 to 40,000-year range, it's starting to seem increasingly likely that this invention actually traces back to a common point of origin in Africa. But that I'm afraid, is a subject for a future talk. So back to the matter at hand. There could be no doubt that these signs were meaningful to their creators, like these 25,000-year-old bas-relief sculptures from La Roque de Venasque in France. We might not know what they meant, but the people of the time certainly did. The repetition of the same signs, for so long, and at so many sites tells us that the artists were making intentional choices. If we're talking about geometric shapes, with specific, culturally recognized, agreed-upon meanings, than we could very well be looking at one of the oldest systems of graphic communication in the world. I'm not talking about writing yet. There's just not enough characters at this point to have represented all of the words in the spoken language, something which is a requirement for a full writing system. Nor do we see the signs repeating regularly enough to suggest that they were some sort of alphabet. But what we do have are some intriguing one-offs, like this panel from La Pasiega in Spain, known as "The Inscription," with its symmetrical markings on the left, possible stylized representations of hands in the middle, and what looks a bit like a bracket on the right. The oldest systems of graphic communication in the world — Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the earliest Chinese script, all emerged between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, with each coming into existence from an earlier protosystem made up of counting marks and pictographic representations, where the meaning and the image were the same. So a picture of a bird would really have represented that animal. It's only later that we start to see these pictographs become more stylized, until they almost become unrecognizable and that we also start to see more symbols being invented to represent all those other missing words in language — things like pronouns, adverbs, adjectives. So knowing all this, it seems highly unlikely that the geometric signs from Ice Age Europe were truly abstract written characters. Instead, what's much more likely is that these early artists were also making counting marks, maybe like this row of lines from Riparo di Za Minic in Sicily, as well as creating stylized representations of things from the world around them. Could some of the signs be weaponry or housing? Or what about celestial objects like star constellations? Or maybe even rivers, mountains, trees — landscape features, possibly like this black penniform surrounded by strange bell-shaped signs from the site of El Castillo in Spain. The term penniform means "feather-shaped" in Latin, but could this actually be a depiction of a plant or a tree? Some researchers have begun to ask these questions about certain signs at specific sites, but I believe the time has come to revisit this category as a whole. The irony in all of this, of course, is that having just carefully classified all of the signs into a single category, I have a feeling that my next step will involve breaking it back apart as different types of imagery are identified and separated off. Now don't get me wrong, the later creation of fully developed writing was an impressive feat in its own right. But it's important to remember that those early writing systems didn't come out of a vacuum. And that even 5,000 years ago, people were already building on something much older, with its origins stretching back tens of thousands of years — to the geometric signs of Ice Age Europe and far beyond, to that point, deep in our collective history, when someone first came up with the idea of making a graphic mark, and forever changed the nature of how we communicate. Thank you. (Applause)
My year reading a book from every country in the world	{0: 'Ann Morgan challenged herself to read a book from every country in the world.'}	TEDGlobal>London	It's often said that you can tell a lot about a person by looking at what's on their bookshelves. What do my bookshelves say about me? Well, when I asked myself this question a few years ago, I made an alarming discovery. I'd always thought of myself as a fairly cultured, cosmopolitan sort of person. But my bookshelves told a rather different story. Pretty much all the titles on them were by British or North American authors, and there was almost nothing in translation. Discovering this massive, cultural blind spot in my reading came as quite a shock. And when I thought about it, it seemed like a real shame. I knew there had to be lots of amazing stories out there by writers working in languages other than English. And it seemed really sad to think that my reading habits meant I would probably never encounter them. So, I decided to prescribe myself an intensive course of global reading. 2012 was set to be a very international year for the UK; it was the year of the London Olympics. And so I decided to use it as my time frame to try to read a novel, short story collection or memoir from every country in the world. And so I did. And it was very exciting and I learned some remarkable things and made some wonderful connections that I want to share with you today. But it started with some practical problems. After I'd worked out which of the many different lists of countries in the world to use for my project, I ended up going with the list of UN-recognized nations, to which I added Taiwan, which gave me a total of 196 countries. And after I'd worked out how to fit reading and blogging about, roughly, four books a week around working five days a week, I then had to face up to the fact that I might even not be able to get books in English from every country. Only around 4.5 percent of the literary works published each year in the UK are translations, and the figures are similar for much of the English-speaking world. Although, the proportion of translated books published in many other countries is a lot higher. 4.5 percent is tiny enough to start with, but what that figure doesn't tell you is that many of those books will come from countries with strong publishing networks and lots of industry professionals primed to go out and sell those titles to English-language publishers. So, for example, although well over 100 books are translated from French and published in the UK each year, most of them will come from countries like France or Switzerland. French-speaking Africa, on the other hand, will rarely ever get a look-in. The upshot is that there are actually quite a lot of nations that may have little or even no commercially available literature in English. Their books remain invisible to readers of the world's most published language. But when it came to reading the world, the biggest challenge of all for me was that fact that I didn't know where to start. Having spent my life reading almost exclusively British and North American books, I had no idea how to go about sourcing and finding stories and choosing them from much of the rest of the world. I couldn't tell you how to source a story from Swaziland. I wouldn't know a good novel from Namibia. There was no hiding it — I was a clueless literary xenophobe. So how on earth was I going to read the world? I was going to have to ask for help. So in October 2011, I registered my blog, ayearofreadingtheworld.com, and I posted a short appeal online. I explained who I was, how narrow my reading had been, and I asked anyone who cared to to leave a message suggesting what I might read from other parts of the planet. Now, I had no idea whether anyone would be interested, but within a few hours of me posting that appeal online, people started to get in touch. At first, it was friends and colleagues. Then it was friends of friends. And pretty soon, it was strangers. Four days after I put that appeal online, I got a message from a woman called Rafidah in Kuala Lumpur. She said she loved the sound of my project, could she go to her local English-language bookshop and choose my Malaysian book and post it to me? I accepted enthusiastically, and a few weeks later, a package arrived containing not one, but two books — Rafidah's choice from Malaysia, and a book from Singapore that she had also picked out for me. Now, at the time, I was amazed that a stranger more than 6,000 miles away would go to such lengths to help someone she would probably never meet. But Rafidah's kindness proved to be the pattern for that year. Time and again, people went out of their way to help me. Some took on research on my behalf, and others made detours on holidays and business trips to go to bookshops for me. It turns out, if you want to read the world, if you want to encounter it with an open mind, the world will help you. When it came to countries with little or no commercially available literature in English, people went further still. Books often came from surprising sources. My Panamanian read, for example, came through a conversation I had with the Panama Canal on Twitter. Yes, the Panama Canal has a Twitter account. And when I tweeted at it about my project, it suggested that I might like to try and get hold of the work of the Panamanian author Juan David Morgan. I found Morgan's website and I sent him a message, asking if any of his Spanish-language novels had been translated into English. And he said that nothing had been published, but he did have an unpublished translation of his novel "The Golden Horse." He emailed this to me, allowing me to become one of the first people ever to read that book in English. Morgan was by no means the only wordsmith to share his work with me in this way. From Sweden to Palau, writers and translators sent me self-published books and unpublished manuscripts of books that hadn't been picked up by Anglophone publishers or that were no longer available, giving me privileged glimpses of some remarkable imaginary worlds. I read, for example, about the Southern African king Ngungunhane, who led the resistance against the Portuguese in the 19th century; and about marriage rituals in a remote village on the shores of the Caspian sea in Turkmenistan. I met Kuwait's answer to Bridget Jones. (Laughter) And I read about an orgy in a tree in Angola. But perhaps the most amazing example of the lengths that people were prepared to go to to help me read the world, came towards the end of my quest, when I tried to get hold of a book from the tiny, Portuguese-speaking African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe. Now, having spent several months trying everything I could think of to find a book that had been translated into English from the nation, it seemed as though the only option left to me was to see if I could get something translated for me from scratch. Now, I was really dubious whether anyone was going to want to help with this, and give up their time for something like that. But, within a week of me putting a call out on Twitter and Facebook for Portuguese speakers, I had more people than I could involve in the project, including Margaret Jull Costa, a leader in her field, who has translated the work of Nobel Prize winner José Saramago. With my nine volunteers in place, I managed to find a book by a São Toméan author that I could buy enough copies of online. Here's one of them. And I sent a copy out to each of my volunteers. They all took on a couple of short stories from this collection, stuck to their word, sent their translations back to me, and within six weeks, I had the entire book to read. In that case, as I found so often during my year of reading the world, my not knowing and being open about my limitations had become a big opportunity. When it came to São Tomé and Príncipe, it was a chance not only to learn something new and discover a new collection of stories, but also to bring together a group of people and facilitate a joint creative endeavor. My weakness had become the project's strength. The books I read that year opened my eyes to many things. As those who enjoy reading will know, books have an extraordinary power to take you out of yourself and into someone else's mindset, so that, for a while at least, you look at the world through different eyes. That can be an uncomfortable experience, particularly if you're reading a book from a culture that may have quite different values to your own. But it can also be really enlightening. Wrestling with unfamiliar ideas can help clarify your own thinking. And it can also show up blind spots in the way you might have been looking at the world. When I looked back at much of the English-language literature I'd grown up with, for example, I began to see how narrow a lot of it was, compared to the richness that the world has to offer. And as the pages turned, something else started to happen, too. Little by little, that long list of countries that I'd started the year with, changed from a rather dry, academic register of place names into living, breathing entities. Now, I don't want to suggest that it's at all possible to get a rounded picture of a country simply by reading one book. But cumulatively, the stories I read that year made me more alive than ever before to the richness, diversity and complexity of our remarkable planet. It was as though the world's stories and the people who'd gone to such lengths to help me read them had made it real to me. These days, when I look at my bookshelves or consider the works on my e-reader, they tell a rather different story. It's the story of the power books have to connect us across political, geographical, cultural, social, religious divides. It's the tale of the potential human beings have to work together. And, it's testament to the extraordinary times we live in, where, thanks to the Internet, it's easier than ever before for a stranger to share a story, a worldview, a book with someone she may never meet, on the other side of the planet. I hope it's a story I'm reading for many years to come. And I hope many more people will join me. If we all read more widely, there'd be more incentive for publishers to translate more books, and we would all be richer for that. Thank you. (Applause)
Why the best hire might not have the perfect resume	{0: "Regina Hartley thinks that those who don't always look good on paper may be just the person you need to hire."}	TED@UPS	Your company launches a search for an open position. The applications start rolling in, and the qualified candidates are identified. Now the choosing begins. Person A: Ivy League, 4.0, flawless resume, great recommendations. All the right stuff. Person B: state school, fair amount of job hopping, and odd jobs like cashier and singing waitress. But remember — both are qualified. So I ask you: who are you going to pick? My colleagues and I created very official terms to describe two distinct categories of candidates. We call A "the Silver Spoon," the one who clearly had advantages and was destined for success. And we call B "the Scrapper," the one who had to fight against tremendous odds to get to the same point. You just heard a human resources director refer to people as Silver Spoons and Scrappers — (Laughter) which is not exactly politically correct and sounds a bit judgmental. But before my human resources certification gets revoked — (Laughter) let me explain. A resume tells a story. And over the years, I've learned something about people whose experiences read like a patchwork quilt, that makes me stop and fully consider them before tossing their resumes away. A series of odd jobs may indicate inconsistency, lack of focus, unpredictability. Or it may signal a committed struggle against obstacles. At the very least, the Scrapper deserves an interview. To be clear, I don't hold anything against the Silver Spoon; getting into and graduating from an elite university takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice. But if your whole life has been engineered toward success, how will you handle the tough times? One person I hired felt that because he attended an elite university, there were certain assignments that were beneath him, like temporarily doing manual labor to better understand an operation. Eventually, he quit. But on the flip side, what happens when your whole life is destined for failure and you actually succeed? I want to urge you to interview the Scrapper. I know a lot about this because I am a Scrapper. Before I was born, my father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he couldn't hold a job in spite of his brilliance. Our lives were one part "Cuckoo's Nest," one part "Awakenings" and one part "A Beautiful Mind." (Laughter) I'm the fourth of five children raised by a single mother in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. We never owned a home, a car, a washing machine, and for most of my childhood, we didn't even have a telephone. So I was highly motivated to understand the relationship between business success and Scrappers, because my life could easily have turned out very differently. As I met successful business people and read profiles of high-powered leaders, I noticed some commonality. Many of them had experienced early hardships, anywhere from poverty, abandonment, death of a parent while young, to learning disabilities, alcoholism and violence. The conventional thinking has been that trauma leads to distress, and there's been a lot of focus on the resulting dysfunction. But during studies of dysfunction, data revealed an unexpected insight: that even the worst circumstances can result in growth and transformation. A remarkable and counterintuitive phenomenon has been discovered, which scientists call Post Traumatic Growth. In one study designed to measure the effects of adversity on children at risk, among a subset of 698 children who experienced the most severe and extreme conditions, fully one-third grew up to lead healthy, successful and productive lives. In spite of everything and against tremendous odds, they succeeded. One-third. Take this resume. This guy's parents give him up for adoption. He never finishes college. He job-hops quite a bit, goes on a sojourn to India for a year, and to top it off, he has dyslexia. Would you hire this guy? His name is Steve Jobs. In a study of the world's most highly successful entrepreneurs, it turns out a disproportionate number have dyslexia. In the US, 35 percent of the entrepreneurs studied had dyslexia. What's remarkable — among those entrepreneurs who experience post traumatic growth, they now view their learning disability as a desirable difficulty which provided them an advantage because they became better listeners and paid greater attention to detail. They don't think they are who they are in spite of adversity, they know they are who they are because of adversity. They embrace their trauma and hardships as key elements of who they've become, and know that without those experiences, they might not have developed the muscle and grit required to become successful. One of my colleagues had his life completely upended as a result of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966. At age 13, his parents were relocated to the countryside, the schools were closed and he was left alone in Beijing to fend for himself until 16, when he got a job in a clothing factory. But instead of accepting his fate, he made a resolution that he would continue his formal education. Eleven years later, when the political landscape changed, he heard about a highly selective university admissions test. He had three months to learn the entire curriculum of middle and high school. So, every day he came home from the factory, took a nap, studied until 4am, went back to work and repeated this cycle every day for three months. He did it, he succeeded. His commitment to his education was unwavering, and he never lost hope. Today, he holds a master's degree, and his daughters each have degrees from Cornell and Harvard. Scrappers are propelled by the belief that the only person you have full control over is yourself. When things don't turn out well, Scrappers ask, "What can I do differently to create a better result?" Scrappers have a sense of purpose that prevents them from giving up on themselves, kind of like if you've survived poverty, a crazy father and several muggings, you figure, "Business challenges? — (Laughter) Really? Piece of cake. I got this." (Laughter) And that reminds me — humor. Scrappers know that humor gets you through the tough times, and laughter helps you change your perspective. And finally, there are relationships. People who overcome adversity don't do it alone. Somewhere along the way, they find people who bring out the best in them and who are invested in their success. Having someone you can count on no matter what is essential to overcoming adversity. I was lucky. In my first job after college, I didn't have a car, so I carpooled across two bridges with a woman who was the president's assistant. She watched me work and encouraged me to focus on my future and not dwell on my past. Along the way I've met many people who've provided me brutally honest feedback, advice and mentorship. These people don't mind that I once worked as a singing waitress to help pay for college. (Laughter) I'll leave you with one final, valuable insight. Companies that are committed to diversity and inclusive practices tend to support Scrappers and outperform their peers. According to DiversityInc, a study of their top 50 companies for diversity outperformed the S&P 500 by 25 percent. So back to my original question. Who are you going to bet on: Silver Spoon or Scrapper? I say choose the underestimated contender, whose secret weapons are passion and purpose. Hire the Scrapper. (Applause)
An art made of trust, vulnerability and connection	{0: "In her performances she’s been cut, burned, and nearly shot -- but Marina Abramović's boldest work yet is a gargantuan institute dedicated to transformation through art."}	TED2015	Now... let's go back in time. It's 1974. There is the gallery somewhere in the world, and there is a young girl, age 23, standing in the middle of the space. In the front of her is a table. On the table there are 76 objects for pleasure and for pain. Some of the objects are a glass of water, a coat, a shoe, a rose. But also the knife, the razor blade, the hammer and the pistol with one bullet. There are instructions which say, "I'm an object. You can use everything on the table on me. I'm taking all responsibility — even killing me. And the time is six hours." The beginning of this performance was easy. People would give me the glass of water to drink, they'd give me the rose. But very soon after, there was a man who took the scissors and cut my clothes, and then they took the thorns of the rose and stuck them in my stomach. Somebody took the razor blade and cut my neck and drank the blood, and I still have the scar. The women would tell the men what to do. And the men didn't rape me because it was just a normal opening, and it was all public, and they were with their wives. They carried me around and put me on the table, and put the knife between my legs. And somebody took the pistol and bullet and put it against my temple. And another person took the pistol and they started a fight. And after six hours were finished, I... started walking towards the public. I was a mess. I was half-naked, I was full of blood and tears were running down my face. And everybody escaped, they just ran away. They could not confront myself, with myself as a normal human being. And then — what happened is I went to the hotel, it was at two in the morning. And I looked at myself in the mirror, and I had a piece of gray hair. Alright — please take off your blindfolds. Welcome to the performance world. First of all, let's explain what the performance is. So many artists, so many different explanations, but my explanation for performance is very simple. Performance is a mental and physical construction that the performer makes in a specific time in a space in front of an audience and then energy dialogue happens. The audience and the performer make the piece together. And the difference between performance and theater is huge. In the theater, the knife is not a knife and the blood is just ketchup. In the performance, the blood is the material, and the razor blade or knife is the tool. It's all about being there in the real time, and you can't rehearse performance, because you can't do many of these types of things twice — ever. Which is very important, the performance is — you know, all human beings are always afraid of very simple things. We're afraid of suffering, we're afraid of pain, we're afraid of mortality. So what I'm doing — I'm staging these kinds of fears in front of the audience. I'm using your energy, and with this energy I can go and push my body as far as I can. And then I liberate myself from these fears. And I'm your mirror. If I can do this for myself, you can do it for you. After Belgrade, where I was born, I went to Amsterdam. And you know, I've been doing performances since the last 40 years. And here I met Ulay, and he was the person I actually fell in love with. And we made, for 12 years, performances together. You know the knife and the pistols and the bullets, I exchange into love and trust. So to do this kind work you have to trust the person completely because this arrow is pointing to my heart. So, heart beating and adrenaline is rushing and so on, is about trust, is about total trust to another human being. Our relationship was 12 years, and we worked on so many subjects, both male and female energy. And as every relationship comes to an end, ours went too. We didn't make phone calls like normal human beings do and say, you know, "This is over." We walked the Great Wall of China to say goodbye. I started at the Yellow Sea, and he started from the Gobi Desert. We walked, each of us, three months, two and a half thousand kilometers. It was the mountains, it was difficult. It was climbing, it was ruins. It was, you know, going through the 12 Chinese provinces, this was before China was open in '87. And we succeeded to meet in the middle to say goodbye. And then our relationship stopped. And now, it completely changed how I see the public. And one very important piece I made in those days was "Balkan Baroque." And this was the time of the Balkan Wars, and I wanted to create some very strong, charismatic image, something that could serve for any war at any time, because the Balkan Wars are now finished, but there's always some war, somewhere. So here I am washing two and a half thousand dead, big, bloody cow bones. You can't wash the blood, you never can wash shame off the wars. So I'm washing this six hours, six days, and wars are coming off these bones, and becoming possible — an unbearable smell. But then something stays in the memory. I want to show you the one who really changed my life, and this was the performance in MoMa, which I just recently made. This performance — when I said to the curator, "I'm just going to sit at the chair, and there will be an empty chair at the front, and anybody from the public can come and sit as long as they want." The curator said to me, "That's ridiculous, you know, this is New York, this chair will be empty, nobody has time to sit in front of you." (Laughter) But I sit for three months. And I sit everyday, eight hours — the opening of the museum — and 10 hours on Friday when the museum is open 10 hours, and I never move. And I removed the table and I'm still sitting, and this changed everything. This performance, maybe 10 or 15 years ago — nothing would have happened. But the need of people to actually experience something different, the public was not anymore the group — relation was one to one. I was watching these people, they would come and sit in front of me, but they would have to wait for hours and hours and hours to get to this position, and finally, they sit. And what happened? They are observed by the other people, they're photographed, they're filmed by the camera, they're observed by me and they have nowhere to escape except in themselves. And that makes a difference. There was so much pain and loneliness, there's so much incredible things when you look in somebody else's eyes, because in the gaze with that total stranger, that you never even say one word — everything happened. And I understood when I stood up from that chair after three months, I am not the same anymore. And I understood that I have a very strong mission, that I have to communicate this experience to everybody. And this is how, for me, was born the idea to have an institute of immaterial performing arts. Because thinking about immateriality, performance is time-based art. It's not like a painting. You have the painting on the wall, the next day it's there. Performance, if you are missing it, you only have the memory, or the story of somebody else telling you, but you actually missed the whole thing. So you have to be there. And in my point, if you talk about immaterial art, music is the highest — absolutely highest art of all, because it's the most immaterial. And then after this is performance, and then everything else. That's my subjective way. This institute is going to happen in Hudson, upstate New York, and we are trying to build with Rem Koolhaas, an idea. And it's very simple. If you want to get experience, you have to give me your time. You have to sign the contract before you enter the building, that you will spend there a full six hours, you have to give me your word of honor. It's something so old-fashioned, but if you don't respect your own word of honor and you leave before — that's not my problem. But it's six hours, the experience. And then after you finish, you get a certificate of accomplishment, so get home and frame it if you want. (Laughter) This is orientation hall. The public comes in, and the first thing you have to do is dress in lab coats. It's this importance of stepping from being just a viewer into experimenter. And then you go to the lockers and you put your watch, your iPhone, your iPod, your computer and everything digital, electronic. And you are getting free time for yourself for the first time. Because there is nothing wrong with technology, our approach to technology is wrong. We are losing the time we have for ourselves. This is an institute to actually give you back this time. So what you do here, first you start slow walking, you start slowing down. You're going back to simplicity. After slow walking, you're going to learn how to drink water — very simple, drinking water for maybe half an hour. After this, you're going to the magnet chamber, where you're going to create some magnet streams on your body. Then after this, you go to crystal chamber. After crystal chamber, you go to eye-gazing chamber, after eye-gazing chamber, you go to a chamber where you are lying down. So it's the three basic positions of the human body, sitting, standing and lying. And slow walking. And there is a sound chamber. And then after you've seen all of this, and prepared yourself mentally and physically, then you are ready to see something with a long duration, like in immaterial art. It can be music, it can be opera, it can be a theater piece, it can be film, it can be video dance. You go to the long duration chairs because now you are comfortable. In the long duration chairs, you're transported to the big place where you're going to see the work. And if you fall asleep, which is very possible because it's been a long day, you're going to be transported to the parking lot. (Laughter) And you know, sleeping is very important. In sleeping, you're still receiving art. So in the parking lot you stay for a certain amount of time, and then after this you just, you know, go back, you see more of the things you like to see or go home with your certificate. So this institute right now is virtual. Right now, I am just making my institute in Brazil, then it's going to be in Australia, then it's coming here, to Canada and everywhere. And this is to experience a kind of simple method, how you go back to simplicity in your own life. Counting rice will be another thing. (Laughter) You know, if you count rice you can make life, too. How to count rice for six hours? It's incredibly important. You know, you go through this whole range of being bored, being angry, being completely frustrated, not finishing the amount of rice you're counting. And then this unbelievable amount of peace you get when satisfying work is finished — or counting sand in the desert. Or having the sound-isolated situation — that you have headphones, that you don't hear anything, and you're just there together without sound, with the people experiencing silence, just the simple silence. We are always doing things we like in our life. And this is why you're not changing. You do things in life — it's just nothing happens if you always do things the same way. But my method is to do things I'm afraid of, the things I fear, the things I don't know, to go to territory that nobody's ever been. And then also to include the failure. I think failure is important because if you go, if you experiment, you can fail. If you don't go into that area and you don't fail, you are actually repeating yourself over and over again. And I think that human beings right now need a change, and the only change to be made is a personal level change. You have to make the change on yourself. Because the only way to change consciousness and to change the world around us, is to start with yourself. It's so easy to criticize how it's different, the things in the world and they're not right, and the governments are corrupted and there's hunger in the world and there's wars — the killing. But what we do on the personal level — what is our contribution to this whole thing? Can you turn to your neighbor, the one you don't know, and look at them for two full minutes in their eyes, right now? (Chatter) I'm asking two minutes of your time, that's so little. Breathe slowly, don't try to blink, don't be self-conscious. Be relaxed. And just look a complete stranger in your eyes, in his eyes. (Silence) Thank you for trusting me. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. Thank you so much.
How we're growing baby corals to rebuild reefs	{0: 'TED Senior Fellow Kristen Marhaver is a marine biologist studying the ecology, behavior and reproduction of reef corals. '}	Mission Blue II	What was the most difficult job you ever did? Was it working in the sun? Was it working to provide food for a family or a community? Was it working days and nights trying to protect lives and property? Was it working alone or working on a project that wasn't guaranteed to succeed, but that might improve human health or save a life? Was it working to build something, create something, make a work of art? Was it work for which you were never sure you were fully understood or appreciated? The people in our communities who do these jobs deserve our attention, our love and our deepest support. But people aren't the only ones in our communities who do these difficult jobs. These jobs are also done by the plants, the animals and the ecosystems on our planet, including the ecosystems I study: the tropical coral reefs. Coral reefs are farmers. They provide food, income and food security for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Coral reefs are security guards. The structures that they build protect our shorelines from storm surge and waves, and the biological systems that they house filter the water and make it safer for us to work and play. Coral reefs are chemists. The molecules that we're discovering on coral reefs are increasingly important in the search for new antibiotics and new cancer drugs. And coral reefs are artists. The structures that they build are some of the most beautiful things on planet Earth. And this beauty is the foundation of the tourism industry in many countries with few or little other natural resources. So for all of these reasons, all of these ecosystem services, economists estimate the value of the world's coral reefs in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. And yet despite all that hard work being done for us and all that wealth that we gain, we have done almost everything we possibly could to destroy that. We have taken the fish out of the oceans and we have added in fertilizer, sewage, diseases, oil, pollution, sediments. We have trampled the reefs physically with our boats, our fins, our bulldozers, and we have changed the chemistry of the entire sea, warmed the waters and made storms worse. And these would all be bad on their own, but these threats magnify each other and compound one another and make each other worse. I'll give you an example. Where I live and work, in Curaçao, a tropical storm went by a few years ago. And on the eastern end of the island, where the reefs are intact and thriving, you could barely tell a tropical storm had passed. But in town, where corals had died from overfishing, from pollution, the tropical storm picked up the dead corals and used them as bludgeons to kill the corals that were left. This is a coral that I studied during my PhD — I got to know it quite well. And after this storm took off half of its tissue, it became infested with algae, the algae overgrew the tissue and that coral died. This magnification of threats, this compounding of factors is what Jeremy Jackson describes as the "slippery slope to slime." It's hardly even a metaphor because many of our reefs now are literally bacteria and algae and slime. Now, this is the part of the talk where you may expect me to launch into my plea for us to all save the coral reefs. But I have a confession to make: that phrase drives me nuts. Whether I see it in a tweet, in a news headline or the glossy pages of a conservation brochure, that phrase bothers me, because we as conservationists have been sounding the alarms about the death of coral reefs for decades. And yet, almost everyone I meet, no matter how educated, is not sure what a coral is or where they come from. How would we get someone to care about the world's coral reefs when it's an abstract thing they can barely understand? If they don't understand what a coral is or where it comes from, or how funny or interesting or beautiful it is, why would we expect them to care about saving them? So let's change that. What is a coral and where does it come from? Corals are born in a number of different ways, but most often by mass spawning: all of the individuals of a single species on one night a year, releasing all the eggs they've made that year into the water column, packaged into bundles with sperm cells. And those bundles go to the surface of the ocean and break apart. And hopefully — hopefully — at the surface of the ocean, they meet the eggs and sperm from other corals. And that is why you need lots of corals on a coral reef — so that all of their eggs can meet their match at the surface. When they're fertilized, they do what any other animal egg does: divides in half again and again and again. Taking these photos under the microscope every year is one of my favorite and most magical moments of the year. At the end of all this cell division, they turn into a swimming larva — a little tiny blob of fat the size of a poppy seed, but with all of the sensory systems that we have. They can sense color and light, textures, chemicals, pH. They can even feel pressure waves; they can hear sound. And they use those talents to search the bottom of the reef for a place to attach and live the rest of their lives. So imagine finding a place where you would live the rest of your life when you were just two days old. They attach in the place they find most suitable, they build a skeleton underneath themselves, they build a mouth and tentacles, and then they begin the difficult work of building the world's coral reefs. One coral polyp will divide itself again and again and again, leaving a limestone skeleton underneath itself and growing up toward the sun. Given hundreds of years and many species, what you get is a massive limestone structure that can be seen from space in many cases, covered by a thin skin of these hardworking animals. Now, there are only a few hundred species of corals on the planet, maybe 1,000. But these systems house millions and millions of other species, and that diversity is what stabilizes the systems, and it's where we're finding our new medicines. It's how we find new sources of food. I'm lucky enough to work on the island of Curaçao, where we still have reefs that look like this. But, indeed, much of the Caribbean and much of our world is much more like this. Scientists have studied in increasing detail the loss of the world's coral reefs, and they have documented with increasing certainty the causes. But in my research, I'm not interested in looking backward. My colleagues and I in Curaçao are interested in looking forward at what might be. And we have the tiniest reason to be optimistic. Because even in some of these reefs that we probably could have written off long ago, we sometimes see baby corals arrive and survive anyway. And we're starting to think that baby corals may have the ability to adjust to some of the conditions that the adults couldn't. They may be able to adjust ever so slightly more readily to this human planet. So in the research I do with my colleagues in Curaçao, we try to figure out what a baby coral needs in that critical early stage, what it's looking for and how we can try to help it through that process. I'm going to show you three examples of the work we've done to try to answer those questions. A few years ago we took a 3D printer and we made coral choice surveys — different colors and different textures, and we simply asked the coral where they preferred to settle. And we found that corals, even without the biology involved, still prefer white and pink, the colors of a healthy reef. And they prefer crevices and grooves and holes, where they will be safe from being trampled or eaten by a predator. So we can use this knowledge, we can go back and say we need to restore those factors — that pink, that white, those crevices, those hard surfaces — in our conservation projects. We can also use that knowledge if we're going to put something underwater, like a sea wall or a pier. We can choose to use the materials and colors and textures that might bias the system back toward those corals. Now in addition to the surfaces, we also study the chemical and microbial signals that attract corals to reefs. Starting about six years ago, I began culturing bacteria from surfaces where corals had settled. And I tried those one by one by one, looking for the bacteria that would convince corals to settle and attach. And we now have many bacterial strains in our freezer that will reliably cause corals to go through that settlement and attachment process. So as we speak, my colleagues in Curaçao are testing those bacteria to see if they'll help us raise more coral settlers in the lab, and to see if those coral settlers will survive better when we put them back underwater. Now in addition to these tools, we also try to uncover the mysteries of species that are under-studied. This is one of my favorite corals, and always has been: dendrogyra cylindrus, the pillar coral. I love it because it makes this ridiculous shape, because its tentacles are fat and look fuzzy and because it's rare. Finding one of these on a reef is a treat. In fact, it's so rare, that last year it was listed as a threatened species on the endangered species list. And this was in part because in over 30 years of research surveys, scientists had never found a baby pillar coral. We weren't even sure if they could still reproduce, or if they were still reproducing. So four years ago, we started following these at night and watching to see if we could figure out when they spawn in Curaçao. We got some good tips from our colleagues in Florida, who had seen one in 2007, one in 2008, and eventually we figured out when they spawn in Curaçao and we caught it. Here's a female on the left with some eggs in her tissue, about to release them into the seawater. And here's a male on the right, releasing sperm. We collected this, we got it back to the lab, we got it to fertilize and we got baby pillar corals swimming in our lab. Thanks to the work of our scientific aunts and uncles, and thanks to the 10 years of practice we've had in Curaçao at raising other coral species, we got some of those larvae to go through the rest of the process and settle and attach, and turn into metamorphosed corals. So this is the first pillar coral baby that anyone ever saw. (Applause) And I have to say — if you think baby pandas are cute, this is cuter. (Laughter) So we're starting to figure out the secrets to this process, the secrets of coral reproduction and how we might help them. And this is true all around the world; scientists are figuring out new ways to handle their embryos, to get them to settle, maybe even figuring out the methods to preserve them at low temperatures, so that we can preserve their genetic diversity and work with them more often. But this is still so low-tech. We are limited by the space on our bench, the number of hands in the lab and the number of coffees we can drink in any given hour. Now, compare that to our other crises and our other areas of concern as a society. We have advanced medical technology, we have defense technology, we have scientific technology, we even have advanced technology for art. But our technology for conservation is behind. Think back to the most difficult job you ever did. Many of you would say it was being a parent. My mother described being a parent as something that makes your life far more amazing and far more difficult than you could've ever possibly imagined. I've been trying to help corals become parents for over 10 years now. And watching the wonder of life has certainly filled me with amazement to the core of my soul. But I've also seen how difficult it is for them to become parents. The pillar corals spawned again two weeks ago, and we collected their eggs and brought them back to the lab. And here you see one embryo dividing, alongside 14 eggs that didn't fertilize and will blow up. They'll be infected with bacteria, they will explode and those bacteria will threaten the life of this one embryo that has a chance. We don't know if it was our handling methods that went wrong and we don't know if it was just this coral on this reef, always suffering from low fertility. Whatever the cause, we have much more work to do before we can use baby corals to grow or fix or, yes, maybe save coral reefs. So never mind that they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Coral reefs are hardworking animals and plants and microbes and fungi. They're providing us with art and food and medicine. And we almost took out an entire generation of corals. But a few made it anyway, despite our best efforts, and now it's time for us to thank them for the work they did and give them every chance they have to raise the coral reefs of the future, their coral babies. Thank you so much. (Applause)
The US needs paid family leave -- for the sake of its future	{0: "Jessica Shortall is a working mom of two and author of Work. Pump. Repeat: The New Mom's Survival Guide to Breastfeeding and Going Back to Work."}	TEDxSMU	What does a working mother look like? If you ask the Internet, this is what you'll be told. Never mind that this is what you'll actually produce if you attempt to work at a computer with a baby on your lap. (Laughter) But no, this isn't a working mother. You'll notice a theme in these photos. We'll look at a lot of them. That theme is amazing natural lighting, which, as we all know, is the hallmark of every American workplace. There are thousands of images like these. Just put the term "working mother" into any Google image search engine, stock photo site. They're all over the Internet, they're topping blog posts and news pieces, and I've become kind of obsessed with them and the lie that they tell us and the comfort that they give us, that when it comes to new working motherhood in America, everything's fine. But it's not fine. As a country, we are sending millions of women back to work every year, incredibly and kind of horrifically soon after they give birth. That's a moral problem but today I'm also going to tell you why it's an economic problem. I got so annoyed and obsessed with the unreality of these images, which look nothing like my life, that I recently decided to shoot and star in a parody series of stock photos that I hoped the world would start to use just showing the really awkward reality of going back to work when your baby's food source is attached to your body. I'm just going to show you two of them. (Laughter) Nothing says "Give that girl a promotion" like leaking breast milk through your dress during a presentation. You'll notice that there's no baby in this photo, because that's not how this works, not for most working mothers. Did you know, and this will ruin your day, that every time a toilet is flushed, its contents are aerosolized and they'll stay airborne for hours? And yet, for many new working mothers, this is the only place during the day that they can find to make food for their newborn babies. I put these things, a whole dozen of them, into the world. I wanted to make a point. I didn't know what I was also doing was opening a door, because now, total strangers from all walks of life write to me all the time just to tell me what it's like for them to go back to work within days or weeks of having a baby. I'm going to share 10 of their stories with you today. They are totally real, some of them are very raw, and not one of them looks anything like this. Here's the first. "I was an active duty service member at a federal prison. I returned to work after the maximum allowed eight weeks for my C-section. A male coworker was annoyed that I had been out on 'vacation,' so he intentionally opened the door on me while I was pumping breast milk and stood in the doorway with inmates in the hallway." Most of the stories that these women, total strangers, send to me now, are not actually even about breastfeeding. A woman wrote to me to say, "I gave birth to twins and went back to work after seven unpaid weeks. Emotionally, I was a wreck. Physically, I had a severe hemorrhage during labor, and major tearing, so I could barely get up, sit or walk. My employer told me I wasn't allowed to use my available vacation days because it was budget season." I've come to believe that we can't look situations like these in the eye because then we'd be horrified, and if we get horrified then we have to do something about it. So we choose to look at, and believe, this image. I don't really know what's going on in this picture, because I find it weird and slightly creepy. (Laughter) Like, what is she doing? But I know what it tells us. It tells us that everything's fine. This working mother, all working mothers and all of their babies, are fine. There's nothing to see here. And anyway, women have made a choice, so none of it's even our problem. I want to break this choice thing down into two parts. The first choice says that women have chosen to work. So, that's not true. Today in America, women make up 47 percent of the workforce, and in 40 percent of American households a woman is the sole or primary breadwinner. Our paid work is a part, a huge part, of the engine of this economy, and it is essential for the engines of our families. On a national level, our paid work is not optional. Choice number two says that women are choosing to have babies, so women alone should bear the consequences of those choices. You know, that's one of those things that when you hear it in passing, can sound correct. I didn't make you have a baby. I certainly wasn't there when that happened. But that stance ignores a fundamental truth, which is that our procreation on a national scale is not optional. The babies that women, many of them working women, are having today, will one day fill our workforce, protect our shores, make up our tax base. Our procreation on a national scale is not optional. These aren't choices. We need women to work. We need working women to have babies. So we should make doing those things at the same time at least palatable, right? OK, this is pop quiz time: what percentage of working women in America do you think have no access to paid maternity leave? 88 percent. 88 percent of working mothers will not get one minute of paid leave after they have a baby. So now you're thinking about unpaid leave. It exists in America. It's called FMLA. It does not work. Because of the way it's structured, all kinds of exceptions, half of new mothers are ineligible for it. Here's what that looks like. "We adopted our son. When I got the call, the day he was born, I had to take off work. I had not been there long enough to qualify for FMLA, so I wasn't eligible for unpaid leave. When I took time off to meet my newborn son, I lost my job." These corporate stock photos hide another reality, another layer. Of those who do have access to just that unpaid leave, most women can't afford to take much of it at all. A nurse told me, "I didn't qualify for short-term disability because my pregnancy was considered a preexisting condition. We used up all of our tax returns and half of our savings during my six unpaid weeks. We just couldn't manage any longer. Physically it was hard, but emotionally it was worse. I struggled for months being away from my son." So this decision to go back to work so early, it's a rational economic decision driven by family finances, but it's often physically horrific because putting a human into the world is messy. A waitress told me, "With my first baby, I was back at work five weeks postpartum. With my second, I had to have major surgery after giving birth, so I waited until six weeks to go back. I had third degree tears." 23 percent of new working mothers in America will be back on the job within two weeks of giving birth. "I worked as a bartender and cook, average of 75 hours a week while pregnant. I had to return to work before my baby was a month old, working 60 hours a week. One of my coworkers was only able to afford 10 days off with her baby." Of course, this isn't just a scenario with economic and physical implications. Childbirth is, and always will be, an enormous psychological event. A teacher told me, "I returned to work eight weeks after my son was born. I already suffer from anxiety, but the panic attacks I had prior to returning to work were unbearable." Statistically speaking, the shorter a woman's leave after having a baby, the more likely she will be to suffer from postpartum mood disorders like depression and anxiety, and among many potential consequences of those disorders, suicide is the second most common cause of death in a woman's first year postpartum. Heads up that this next story — I've never met this woman, but I find it hard to get through. "I feel tremendous grief and rage that I lost an essential, irreplaceable and formative time with my son. Labor and delivery left me feeling absolutely broken. For months, all I remember is the screaming: colic, they said. On the inside, I was drowning. Every morning, I asked myself how much longer I could do it. I was allowed to bring my baby to work. I closed my office door while I rocked and shushed and begged him to stop screaming so I wouldn't get in trouble. I hid behind that office door every damn day and cried while he screamed. I cried in the bathroom while I washed out the pump equipment. Every day, I cried all the way to work and all the way home again. I promised my boss that the work I didn't get done during the day, I'd make up at night from home. I thought, there's just something wrong with me that I can't swing this." So those are the mothers. What of the babies? As a country, do we care about the millions of babies born every year to working mothers? I say we don't, not until they're of working and tax-paying and military-serving age. We tell them we'll see them in 18 years, and getting there is kind of on them. One of the reasons I know this is that babies whose mothers have 12 or more weeks at home with them are more likely to get their vaccinations and their well checks in their first year, so those babies are more protected from deadly and disabling diseases. But those things are hidden behind images like this. America has a message for new mothers who work and for their babies. Whatever time you get together, you should be grateful for it, and you're an inconvenience to the economy and to your employers. That narrative of gratitude runs through a lot of the stories I hear. A woman told me, "I went back at eight weeks after my C-section because my husband was out of work. Without me, my daughter had failure to thrive. She wouldn't take a bottle. She started losing weight. Thankfully, my manager was very understanding. He let my mom bring my baby, who was on oxygen and a monitor, four times a shift so I could nurse her." There's a little club of countries in the world that offer no national paid leave to new mothers. Care to guess who they are? The first eight make up eight million in total population. They are Papua New Guinea, Suriname and the tiny island nations of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau and Tonga. Number nine is the United States of America, with 320 million people. Oh, that's it. That's the end of the list. Every other economy on the planet has found a way to make some level of national paid leave work for the people doing the work of the future of those countries, but we say, "We couldn't possibly do that." We say that the market will solve this problem, and then we cheer when corporations offer even more paid leave to the women who are already the highest-educated and highest-paid among us. Remember that 88 percent? Those middle- and low-income women are not going to participate in that. We know that there are staggering economic, financial, physical and emotional costs to this approach. We have decided — decided, not an accident, to pass these costs directly on to working mothers and their babies. We know the price tag is higher for low-income women, therefore disproportionately for women of color. We pass them on anyway. All of this is to America's shame. But it's also to America's risk. Because what would happen if all of these individual so-called choices to have babies started to turn into individual choices not to have babies. One woman told me, "New motherhood is hard. It shouldn't be traumatic. When we talk about expanding our family now, we focus on how much time I would have to care for myself and a new baby. If we were to have to do it again the same way as with our first, we might stick with one kid." The birthrate needed in America to keep the population stable is 2.1 live births per woman. In America today, we are at 1.86. We need women to have babies, and we are actively disincentivizing working women from doing that. What would happen to work force, to innovation, to GDP, if one by one, the working mothers of this country were to decide that they can't bear to do this thing more than once? I'm here today with only one idea worth spreading, and you've guessed what it is. It is long since time for the most powerful country on Earth to offer national paid leave to the people doing the work of the future of this country and to the babies who represent that future. Childbirth is a public good. This leave should be state-subsidized. It should have no exceptions for small businesses, length of employment or entrepreneurs. It should be able to be shared between partners. I've talked today a lot about mothers, but co-parents matter on so many levels. Not one more woman should have to go back to work while she is hobbling and bleeding. Not one more family should have to drain their savings account to buy a few days of rest and recovery and bonding. Not one more fragile infant should have to go directly from the incubator to day care because his parents have used up all of their meager time sitting in the NICU. Not one more working family should be told that the collision of their work, their needed work and their needed parenthood, is their problem alone. The catch is that when this is happening to a new family, it is consuming, and a family with a new baby is more financially vulnerable than they've ever been before, so that new mother cannot afford to speak up on her own behalf. But all of us have voices. I am done, done having babies, and you might be pre-baby, you might be post-baby, you might be no baby. It should not matter. We have to stop framing this as a mother's issue, or even a women's issue. This is an American issue. We need to stop buying the lie that these images tell us. We need to stop being comforted by them. We need to question why we're told that this can't work when we see it work everywhere all over the world. We need to recognize that this American reality is to our dishonor and to our peril. Because this is not, this is not, and this is not what a working mother looks like. (Applause)
How new technology helps blind people explore the world	{0: 'Dr. Chieko Asakawa invents technology to make the visually impaired more independent.'}	TED@IBM	You might think there are many things that I can't do because I cannot see. That's largely true. Actually, I just needed to have a bit of help to come up to the stage. But there is also a lot that I can do. This is me rock climbing for the first time. Actually, I love sports and I can play many sports, like swimming, skiing, skating, scuba diving, running and so on. But there is one limitation: somebody needs to help me. I want to be independent. I lost my sight at the age of 14 in a swimming pool accident. I was an active, independent teenager, and suddenly I became blind. The hardest thing for me was losing my independence. Things that until then seemed simple became almost impossible to do alone. For example, one of my challenges was textbooks. Back then, there were no personal computers, no Internet, no smartphones. So I had to ask one of my two brothers to read me textbooks, and I had to create my own books in Braille. Can you imagine? Of course, my brothers were not happy about it, and later, I noticed they were not there whenever I needed them. (Laughter) I think they tried to stay away from me. I don't blame them. I really wanted to be freed from relying on someone. That became my strong desire to ignite innovation. Jump ahead to the mid-1980s. I got to know cutting-edge technologies and I thought to myself, how come there is no computer technology to create books in Braille? These amazing technologies must be able to also help people with limitations like myself. That's the moment my innovation journey began. I started developing digital book technologies, such as a digital Braille editor, digital Braille dictionary and a digital Braille library network. Today, every student who is visually impaired can read textbooks, by using personal computers and mobile devices, in Braille or in voice. This may not surprise you, since everyone now has digital books in their tablets in 2015. But Braille went digital many years before digital books, already in the late 1980s, almost 30 years ago. Strong and specific needs of the blind people made this opportunity to create digital books way back then. And this is actually not the first time this happened, because history shows us accessibility ignites innovation. The telephone was invented while developing a communication tool for hearing impaired people. Some keyboards were also invented to help people with disabilities. Now I'm going to give you another example from my own life. In the '90s, people around me started talking about the Internet and web browsing. I remember the first time I went on the web. I was astonished. I could access newspapers at any time and every day. I could even search for any information by myself. I desperately wanted to help the blind people have access to the Internet, and I found ways to render the web into synthesized voice, which dramatically simplified the user interface. This led me to develop the Home Page Reader in 1997, first in Japanese and later, translated into 11 languages. When I developed the Home Page Reader, I got many comments from users. One that I strongly remember said, "For me, the Internet is a small window to the world." It was a revolutionary moment for the blind. The cyber world became accessible, and this technology that we created for the blind has many uses, way beyond what I imagined. It can help drivers listen to their emails or it can help you listen to a recipe while cooking. Today, I am more independent, but it is still not enough. For example, when I approached the stage just now, I needed assistance. My goal is to come up here independently. And not just here. My goal is to be able to travel and do things that are simple to you. OK, now let me show you the latest technologies. This is a smartphone app that we are working on. (Video) Electronic voice: 51 feet to the door, and keep straight. EV: Take the two doors to go out. The door is on your right. EV: Nick is approaching. Looks so happy. Chieko Asakawa: Hi, Nick! (Laughter) CA: Where are you going? You look so happy. Nick: Oh — well, my paper just got accepted. CA: That's great! Congratulations. Nick: Thanks. Wait — how'd you know it was me, and that I look happy? (Chieko and Nick laugh) Man: Hi. (Laughter) CA: Oh ... hi. EV: He is not talking to you, but on his phone. EV: Potato chips. EV: Dark chocolate with almonds. EV: You gained 5 pounds since yesterday; take apple instead of chocolate. (Laughter) EV: Approaching. EV: You arrived. CA: Now ... (Applause) Thank you. So now the app navigates me by analyzing beacon signals and smartphone sensors and permits me to move around indoor and outdoor environments all by myself. But the computer vision part that showed who is approaching, in which mood — we are still working on that part. And recognizing facial expressions is very important for me to be social. So now the fusions of technologies are ready to help me see the real world. We call this cognitive assistance. It understands our surrounding world and whispers to me in voice or sends a vibration to my fingers. Cognitive assistance will augment missing or weakened abilities — in other words, our five senses. This technology is only in an early stage, but eventually, I'll be able to find a classroom on campus, enjoy window shopping or find a nice restaurant while walking along a street. It will be amazing if I can find you on the street before you notice me. It will become my best buddy, and yours. So, this really is a great challenge. It is a challenge that needs collaboration, which is why we are creating an open community to accelerate research activities. Just this morning, we announced the open-source fundamental technologies you just saw in the video. The frontier is the real world. The blind community is exploring this technical frontier and the pathfinder. I hope to work with you to explore the new era, and the next time that I'm on this stage, through technology and innovation, I will be able to walk up here all by myself. Thank you so much. (Applause)
The exhilarating peace of freediving	{0: "With just one breath, Guillaume Néry can dive to -125m below the water's surface."}	TEDxToulouse	(Video) Announcer: 10 seconds. Five, four, three, two, one. Official top. Plus one, two, three, four, five six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Guillaume Néry, France. Constant weight, 123 meters, three minutes and 25 seconds. National record attempt. 70 meters. [123 meters] (Applause) (Video) Judge: White card. Guillaume Néry! National record! Guillaume Néry: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much, thanks for the warm welcome. That dive you just watched is a journey — a journey between two breaths. A journey that takes place between two breaths — the last one before diving into the water, and the first one, coming back to the surface. That dive is a journey to the very limits of human possibility, a journey into the unknown. But it's also, and above all, an inner journey, where a number of things happen, physiologically as well as mentally. And that's why I'm here today, to share my journey with you and to take you along with me. So, we start with the last breath. (Breathing in) (Breathing out) As you noticed, that last breath in is slow, deep and intense. It ends with a special technique called the carp, which allows me to store one to two extra liters of air in my lungs by compressing it. When I leave the surface, I have about 10 liters of air in my lungs. As soon as I leave the surface the first mechanism kicks in: the diving reflex. The first thing the diving reflex does is make your heart rate drop. My heart beat will drop from about 60-70 per minute to about 30-40 beats per minute in a matter of seconds; almost immediately. Next, the diving reflex causes peripheral vasoconstriction, which means that the blood flow will leave the body's extremities to feed the most important organs: the lungs, the heart and the brain. This mechanism is innate. I cannot control it. If you go underwater, even if you've never done it before, you'll experience the exact same effects. All human beings share this characteristic. And what's extraordinary is that we share this instinct with marine mammals — all marine mammals: dolphins, whales, sea lions, etc. When they dive deep into the ocean, these mechanisms become activated, but to a greater extent. And, of course, it works much better for them. It's absolutely fascinating. Right as I leave the surface, nature gives me a push in the right direction, allowing me to descend with confidence. So as I dive deeper into the blue, the pressure slowly starts to squeeze my lungs. And since it's the amount of air in my lungs that makes me float, the farther down I go, the more pressure there is on my lungs, the less air they contain and the easier it is for my body to fall. And at one point, around 35 or 40 meters down, I don't even need to swim. My body is dense and heavy enough to fall into the depths by itself, and I enter what's called the free fall phase. The free fall phase is the best part of the dive. It's the reason I still dive. Because it feels like you're being pulled down and you don't need to do anything. I can go from 35 meters to 123 meters without making a single movement. I let myself be pulled by the depths, and it feels like I'm flying underwater. It's truly an amazing feeling — an extraordinary feeling of freedom. And so I slowly continue sliding to the bottom. 40 meters down, 50 meters down, and between 50 and 60 meters, a second physiological response kicks in. My lungs reach residual volume, below which they're not supposed to be compressed, in theory. And this second response is called blood shift, or "pulmonary erection" in French. I prefer "blood shift." (Laughter) So blood shift — how does it work? The capillaries in the lungs become engorged with blood — which is caused by the suction — so the lungs can harden and protect the whole chest cavity from being crushed. It prevents the two walls of the lungs from collapsing, from sticking together and caving in. Thanks to this phenomenon, which we also share with marine mammals, I'm able to continue with my dive. 60, 70 meters down, I keep falling, faster and faster, because the pressure is crushing my body more and more. Below 80 meters, the pressure becomes a lot stronger, and I start to feel it physically. I really start to feel the suffocation. You can see what it looks like — not pretty at all. The diaphragm is completely collapsed, the rib cage is squeezed in, and mentally, there is something going on as well. You may be thinking, "This doesn't look enjoyable. How do you do it?" If I relied on my earthly reflexes — what do we do above water when there's a problem? We resist, we go against it. We fight. Underwater, that doesn't work. If you try that underwater, you might tear your lungs, spit up blood, develop an edema and you'll have to stop diving for a good amount of time. So what you need to do, mentally, is to tell yourself that nature and the elements are stronger than you. And so I let the water crush me. I accept the pressure and go with it. At this point, my body receives this information, and my lungs start relaxing. I relinquish all control, and relax completely. The pressure starts crushing me, and it doesn't feel bad at all. I even feel like I'm in a cocoon, protected. And the dive continues. 80, 85 meters down, 90, 100. 100 meters — the magic number. In every sport, it's a magic number. For swimmers and athletes and also for us, free divers, it's a number everyone dreams of. Everyone wishes one day to be able to get to 100 meters. And it's a symbolic number for us, because in the 1970s, doctors and physiologists did their math, and predicted that the human body would not be able to go below 100 meters. Below that, they said, the human body would implode. And then the Frenchman, Jacques Mayol — you all know him as the hero in "The Big Blue" — came along and dived down to 100 meters. He even reached 105 meters. At that time, he was doing "no limits." He'd use weights to descend faster and come back up with a balloon, just like in the movie. Today, we go down 200 meters in no limit free diving. I can do 123 meters by simply using muscle strength. And in a way, it's all thanks to him, because he challenged known facts, and with a sweep of his hand, got rid of the theoretical beliefs and all the mental limits that we like to impose on ourselves. He showed us that the human body has an infinite ability to adapt. So I carry on with my dive. 105, 110, 115. The bottom is getting closer. 120, 123 meters. I'm at the bottom. And now, I'd like to ask you to join me and put yourself in my place. Close your eyes. Imagine you get to 123 meters. The surface is far, far away. You're alone. There's hardly any light. It's cold — freezing cold. The pressure is crushing you completely — 13 times stronger than on the surface. And I know what you're thinking: "This is horrible. What the hell am I doing here? He's insane." But no. That's not what I think when I'm down there. When I'm at the bottom, I feel good. I get this extraordinary feeling of well-being. Maybe it's because I've completely released all tensions and let myself go. I feel great, without the need to breathe. Although, you'd agree, I should be worried. I feel like a tiny dot, a little drop of water, floating in the middle of the ocean. And each time, I picture the same image. [The Pale Blue Dot] It's that small dot the arrow is pointing to. Do you know what it is? It's planet Earth. Planet Earth, photographed by the Voyager probe, from 4 billion kilometers away. And it shows that our home is that small dot over there, floating in the middle of nothing. That's how I feel when I'm at the bottom, at 123 meters. I feel like a small dot, a speck of dust, stardust, floating in the middle of the cosmos, in the middle of nothing, in the immensity of space. It's a fascinating sensation, because when I look up, down, left, right, in front, behind, I see the same thing: the infinite deep blue. Nowhere else on Earth you can experience this — looking all around you, and seeing the same thing. It's extraordinary. And at that moment, I still get that feeling each time, building up inside of me — the feeling of humility. Looking at this picture, I feel very humble — just like when I'm all the way down at the bottom — because I'm nothing, I'm a little speck of nothingness lost in all of time and space. And it still is absolutely fascinating. I decide to go back to the surface, because this is not where I belong. I belong up there, on the surface. So I start heading back up. I get something of a shock at the very moment when I decide to go up. First, because it takes a huge effort to tear yourself away from the bottom. It pulled you down on the way in, and will do the same on the way up. You have to swim twice as hard. Then, I'm hit with another phenomenon known as narcosis. I don't know if you've heard of that. It's called nitrogen narcosis. It's something that happens to scuba divers, but it can happen to free divers. It's caused by nitrogen dissolving in the blood, which causes confusion between the conscious and unconscious mind. A flurry of thoughts goes spinning through your head. You can't control them, and you shouldn't try to — you have to let it happen. The more you try to control it, the harder it is to manage. Then, a third thing happens: the desire to breathe. I'm not a fish, I'm a human being, and the desire to breathe reminds me of that fact. Around 60, 70 meters, you start to feel the need to breathe. And with everything else that's going on, you can very easily lose your ground and start to panic. When that happens, you think, "Where's the surface? I want to go up. I want to breathe now." You should not do that. Never look up to the surface — not with your eyes, or your mind. You should never picture yourself up there. You have to stay in the present. I look at the rope right in front of me, leading me back to the surface. And I focus on that, on the present moment. Because if I think about the surface, I panic. And if I panic, it's over. Time goes faster this way. And at 30 meters: deliverance. I'm not alone any more. The safety divers, my guardian angels, join me. They leave the surface, we meet at 30 meters, and they escort me for the final few meters, where potential problems could arise. Every time I see them, I think to myself, "It's thanks to you." It's thanks to them, my team, that I'm here. It brings back the sense of humility. Without my team, without all the people around me, the adventure into the deep would be impossible. A journey into the deep is above all a group effort. So I'm happy to finish my journey with them, because I wouldn't be here if it weren't for them. 20 meters, 10 meters, my lungs slowly return to their normal volume. Buoyancy pushes me up to the surface. Five meters below the surface, I start to breathe out, so that as soon as I get to the surface all I do is breathe in. And so I arrive at the surface. (Breathing in) Air floods into my lungs. It's like being born again, a relief. It feels good. Though the journey was extraordinary, I do need to feel those small oxygen molecules fueling my body. It's an extraordinary sensation, but at the same time it's traumatizing. It's a shock to the system, as you can you imagine. I go from complete darkness to the light of day, from the near-silence of the depths to the commotion up top. In terms of touch, I go from the soft, velvety feeling of the water, to air rubbing across my face. In terms of smell, there is air rushing into my lungs. And in return, my lungs open up. They were completely squashed just 90 seconds ago, and now, they've opened up again. So all of this affects quite a lot of things. I need a few seconds to come back, and to feel "all there" again. But that needs to happen quickly, because the judges are there to verify my performance; I need to show them I'm in perfect physical condition. You saw in the video, I was doing a so-called exit protocol. Once at the surface, I have 15 seconds to take off my nose clip, give this signal and say (English) "I am OK." Plus, you need to be bilingual. (Laughter) On top of everything — that's not very nice. Once the protocol is completed, the judges show me a white card, and that's when the joy starts. I can finally celebrate what has just happened. So, the journey I've just described to you is a more extreme version of free diving. Luckily, it's far from just that. For the past few years, I've been trying to show another side of free diving, because the media mainly talks about competitions and records. But free diving is more than just that. It's about being at ease in the water. It's extremely beautiful, very poetic and artistic. So my wife and I decided to film it and try to show another side of it, mostly to make people want to go into the water. Let me show you some images to finish my story. It's a mix of beautiful underwater photos. (Music) I'd like you to know that if one day you try to stop breathing, you'll realize that when you stop breathing, you stop thinking, too. It calms your mind. Today, in the 21st century, we're under so much pressure. Our minds are overworked, we think at a million miles an hour, we're always stressed. Being able to free dive lets you, just for a moment, relax your mind. Holding your breath underwater means giving yourself the chance to experience weightlessness. It means being underwater, floating, with your body completely relaxed, letting go of all your tensions. This is our plight in the 21st century: our backs hurt, our necks hurt, everything hurts, because we're stressed and tense all the time. But when you're in the water, you let yourself float, as if you were in space. You let yourself go completely. It's an extraordinary feeling. You can finally get in touch with your body, mind and spirit. Everything feels better, all at once. Learning how to free dive is also about learning to breathe correctly. We breathe with our first breath at birth, up until our last one. Breathing gives rhythm to our lives. Learning how to breathe better is learning how to live better. Holding your breath in the sea, not necessarily at 100 meters, but maybe at two or three, putting on your goggles, a pair of flippers, means you can go see another world, another universe, completely magical. You can see little fish, seaweed, the flora and fauna, you can watch it all discreetly, sliding underwater, looking around, and coming back to the surface, leaving no trace. It's an amazing feeling to become one with nature like that. And if I may say one more thing, holding your breath, being in the water, finding this underwater world — it's all about connecting with yourself. You heard me talk a lot about the body's memory that dates back millions of years, to our marine origins. The day you get back into the water, when you hold your breath for a few seconds, you will reconnect with those origins. And I guarantee it's absolute magic. I encourage you to try it out. Thank you. (Applause)
The untapped genius that could change science for the better	{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.'}	TED Fellows Retreat 2015	Great things happen at intersections. In fact, I would argue that some of the most interesting things of the human experience occur at the intersections, in the liminal space, where by liminal I mean the space in-between. There's freedom in that in-between, freedom to create from the indefiniteness of not-quite-here, not-quite-there, a new self-definition. Some of the great intersections of the world come to mind, like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, or Times Square in New York City, both bustling with the excitement of a seemingly endless stream of people. Other intersections, like the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, or Canfield Drive and Copper Creek Court in Ferguson, Missouri, also come to mind because of the tremendous energy at the intersection of human beings, ideologies and the ongoing struggle for justice. Beyond the physical landscape of our planet, some of the most famous celestial images are of intersections. Stars are born at the messy intersection of gas and dust, instigated by gravity's irrevocable pull. Stars die by this same intersection, this time flung outward in a violent collision of smaller atoms, intersecting and efficiently fusing into altogether new and heavier things. We can all think of intersections that have special meaning to us. To be intersectional, then, is to occupy a position at an intersection. I've lived the entirety of my life in the in-between, in the liminal space between dreams and reality, race and gender, poverty and plenty, science and society. I am both black and a woman. Like the birth of stars in the heavenlies, this robust combination of knowing results in a shining example of the explosive fusion of identities. I am also an astrophysicist. I study blazars, supermassive, hyperactive black holes that sit at the centers of massive galaxies and shoot out jets nearby those black holes at speeds approaching the speed of light in a process we are still trying to completely understand. I have dreamed of becoming an astrophysicist since I was 12 years old. I had no idea that at that time, according to Dr. Jamie Alexander's archive of African-American women in physics, only 18 black women in the United States had ever earned a PhD in a physics-related discipline, and that the first black woman to graduate with a PhD in an astronomy-related field did so just one year before my birth. As I journeyed along my path, I encountered the best and worst of life at an intersection: the tremendous opportunity to self-define, the collision of expectation and experience, the exhilaration of victorious breakthroughs and, sometimes, the explosive pain of regeneration. I began my college experience just after my family had fallen apart. Our financial situation disintegrated just after my father's departure from our lives. This thrust my mother, my sister and I out of the relative comfort of middle-class life and into the almost constant struggle to make ends meet. Thus, I was one of roughly 60 percent of women of color who find finances to be a major barrier to their educational goals. Thankfully, Norfolk State University provided me with full funding, and I was able to achieve my bachelor's in physics. After graduation, and despite knowing that I wanted a PhD in astrophysics, I fell through the cracks. It was a poster that saved my dream, and some really incredible people and programs. The American Physical Society had this beautiful poster encouraging students of color to become physicists. It was striking to me because it featured a young black girl, probably around 12 years old, looking studiously at some physics equations. I remember thinking I was looking directly back at the little girl who first dared to dream this dream. I immediately wrote to the Society and requested my personal copy of the poster, which to this day still hangs in my office. I described to them in the email my educational path, and my desire to find myself again in pursuit of the PhD. They directed me to the Fisk-Vanderbilt University Bridge Program, itself an intersection of the master's and PhD degrees at two institutions. After two years out of school, they accepted me into the program, and I found myself again on the path to the PhD. After receiving my master's at Fisk, I went on to Yale to complete my PhD. Once I was physically occupying the space that would ultimately give way to my childhood aspirations, I anticipated a smooth glide to the PhD. (Laughter) It became immediately apparent that not everyone was thrilled to have that degree of liminality in their space. I was ostracized by many of my classmates, one of whom went so far as to invite me to "do what I really came here to do" as he pushed all the dirty dishes from our meal in front of me to clean up. I wish that were an isolated occurrence, but for many women of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, this is something they have long endured. One hundred percent of the 60 women of color interviewed in a recent study by Joan C. Williams at UC Hastings reported facing racialized gender bias, including being mistaken for the janitorial staff. This mistaken identity was not reported by any of the white women interviewed for this study, which comprised 557 women in total. While there is nothing inherently wrong with a janitorial position, and in fact my forefathers and foremothers were able to attend college because many of their parents worked these jobs, it was a clear attempt to put me in my place. While there was certainly the acute pain of the encounter, the real issue is that my appearance can tell anyone anything about my ability. Beyond that, though, it underscores that the women of color in STEM do not experience the same set of barriers that just women or just people of color face. That's why today I want to highlight women of color in STEM, who are inexorably, unapologetically living as the inseparable sum of identities. STEM itself is an intersectional term, such that its true richness cannot be appreciated without considering the liminal space between disciplines. Science, the pursuit of understanding the physical world by way of chemistry, physics, biology, cannot be accomplished in the absence of mathematics. Engineering requires the application of basic science and math to the lived experience. Technology sits firmly on the foundation of math, engineering and science. Math itself serves the critical role of Rosetta Stone, decoding and encoding the physical principles of the world. STEM is utterly incomplete without each individual piece. This is to say nothing of the enrichment that is realized when STEM is combined with other disciplines. The purpose for this talk is twofold: first, to say directly to every black, Latina, indigenous, First Nation or any other woman or girl who finds herself resting at the blessed intersection of race and gender, that you can be anything you want to be. My personal hope is that you'll become an astrophysicist, but beyond that, anything you want. Do not think for one minute that because you are who you are, you cannot be who you imagine yourself to be. Hold fast to those dreams and let them carry you into a world you can't even imagine. Secondly, among the most pressing issues of our time, most now find their intersection with STEM. We have as a global society solved most of the single-faceted issues of our time. Those that remain require a thorough investigation of the liminal space between disciplines to create the multifaceted solutions of tomorrow. Who better to solve these liminal problems than those who have faced their whole lives at the intersections. We as thought leaders and decision makers must push past the first steps of diversity and into the richer and more robust territory of full inclusion and equal opportunity. One of my favorite examples of liminal excellence comes from the late Dr. Claudia Alexander, a black woman plasma physicist, who passed away this past July after a 10-year bout with breast cancer. She was a NASA project scientist who spearheaded the NASA side of the Rosetta mission, which became famous this year for landing a rover on a comet, and the 1.5 billion dollar Galileo mission to Jupiter, two high-profile scientific victories for NASA, the United States and the world. Dr. Alexander said it this way: "I'm used to walking between two cultures. For me, it's among the purposes of my life to take us from states of ignorance to states of understanding with bold exploration that you can't do every day." This shows exactly the power of a liminal person. She had the technical ability to spearhead some of the most ambitious space missions of our time, and she perfectly understood her place of being exactly who she was in any place she was. Jessica Matthews, inventor of the SOCCKET line of sports products, like soccer balls, that generate renewable energy as you play with them, said it this way: "A major part of invention isn't just creating things, it's understanding people and understanding the systems that make this world." The reason I tell my story and the story of Dr. Alexander and Jessica Matthews is because they are fundamentally intersectional stories, the stories of lives lived at the nexus of race, gender and innovation. Despite implicit and explicit questions of my right to be in an elite space, I'm proud to report that when I graduated, I was the first black woman to earn a PhD in astrophysics in Yale's then 312-year history. (Applause) I am now part of a small but growing cadre of women of color in STEM who are poised to bring new perspectives and new ideas to life on the most pressing issues of our time: things like educational inequities, police brutality, HIV/AIDS, climate change, genetic editing, artificial intelligence and Mars exploration. This is to say nothing of the things we haven't even thought of yet. Women of color in STEM occupy some of the toughest and most exciting sociotechnological issues of our time. Thus, we are uniquely positioned to contribute to and drive these conversations in ways that are more inclusive of a wider variety of lived experience. This outlook can be expanded to the many intersectional people whose experiences, positive and negative, enrich the conversations in ways that outmatch even the best-resourced homogenous groups. This is not a request born out of a desire to fit in. It's a reminder that we cannot get to the best possible outcomes for the totality of humanity without precisely this collaboration, this bringing together of the liminal, the differently lived, distinctly experienced and disparately impacted. Simply put, we cannot be the most excellent expression of our collective genius without the full measure of humanity brought to bear. Thank you. (Applause)
Forget shopping. Soon you'll download your new clothes	{0: 'Danit Peleg created the first 3D-printed fashion collection printed entirely using home printers.'}	TEDYouth 2015	In the past few months, I've been traveling for weeks at a time with only one suitcase of clothes. One day, I was invited to an important event, and I wanted to wear something special and new for it. So I looked through my suitcase and I couldn't find anything to wear. I was lucky to be at the technology conference on that day, and I had access to 3D printers. So I quickly designed a skirt on my computer, and I loaded the file on the printer. It just printed the pieces overnight. The next morning, I just took all the pieces, assembled them together in my hotel room, and this is actually the skirt that I'm wearing right now. (Applause) So it wasn't the first time that I printed clothes. For my senior collection at fashion design school, I decided to try and 3D print an entire fashion collection from my home. The problem was that I barely knew anything about 3D printing, and I had only nine months to figure out how to print five fashionable looks. I always felt most creative when I worked from home. I loved experimenting with new materials, and I always tried to develop new techniques to make the most unique textiles for my fashion projects. I loved going to old factories and weird stores in search of leftovers of strange powders and weird materials, and then bring them home to experiment on. As you can probably imagine, my roommates didn't like that at all. (Laughter) So I decided to move on to working with big machines, ones that didn't fit in my living room. I love the exact and the custom work I can do with all kinds of fashion technologies, like knitting machines and laser cutting and silk printing. One summer break, I came here to New York for an internship at a fashion house in Chinatown. We worked on two incredible dresses that were 3D printed. They were amazing — like you can see here. But I had a few issues with them. They were made from hard plastics and that's why they were very breakable. The models couldn't sit in them, and they even got scratched from the plastics under their arms. With 3D printing, the designers had so much freedom to make the dresses look exactly like they wanted, but still, they were very dependent on big and expensive industrial printers that were located in a lab far from their studio. Later that year, a friend gave me a 3D printed necklace, printed using a home printer. I knew that these printers were much cheaper and much more accessible than the ones we used at my internship. So I looked at the necklace, and then I thought, "If I can print a necklace from home, why not print my clothes from home, too?" I really liked the idea that I wouldn't have to go to the market and pick fabrics that someone else chose to sell — I could just design them and print them directly from home. I found a small makerspace, where I learned everything I know about 3D printing. Right away, they literally gave me the key to the lab, so I could experiment into the night, every night. The main challenge was to find the right filament for printing clothes with. So what is a filament? Filament is the material you feed the printer with. And I spent a month or so experimenting with PLA, which is a hard and scratchy, breakable material. The breakthrough came when I was introduced to Filaflex, which is a new kind of filament. It's strong, yet very flexible. And with it, I was able to print the first garment, the red jacket that had the word "Liberté" — "freedom" in French — embedded into it. I chose this word because I felt so empowered and free when I could just design a garment from my home and then print it by myself. And actually, you can easily download this jacket, and easily change the word to something else. For example, your name or your sweetheart's name. (Laughter) So the printer plates are small, so I had to piece the garment together, just like a puzzle. And I wanted to solve another challenge. I wanted to print textiles that I would use just like regular fabrics. That's when I found an open-source file from an architect who designed a pattern that I love. And with it, I was able to print a beautiful textile that I would use just like a regular fabric. And it actually even looks a little bit like lace. So I took his file and I modified it, and changed it, played with it — many kinds of versions out of it. And I needed to print another 1,500 more hours to complete printing my collection. So I brought six printers to my home and just printed 24-7. And this is actually a really slow process, but let's remember the Internet was significantly slower 20 years ago, so 3D printing will also accelerate and in no time you'll be able to print a T-Shirt in your home in just a couple of hours, or even minutes. So you guys, you want to see what it looks like? Audience: Yeah! (Applause) Danit Peleg: Rebecca is wearing one of my five outfits. Almost everything here she's wearing, I printed from my home. Even her shoes are printed. Audience: Wow! Audience: Cool! (Applause) Danit Peleg: Thank you, Rebecca. (To audience) Thank you, guys. So I think in the future, materials will evolve, and they will look and feel like fabrics we know today, like cotton or silk. Imagine personalized clothes that fit exactly to your measurements. Music was once a very physical thing. You would have to go to the record shop and buy CDs, but now you can just download the music — digital music — directly to your phone. Fashion is also a very physical thing. And I wonder what our world will look like when our clothes will be digital, just like this skirt is. Thank you so much. (Applause) [Thank You] (Applause)
How germs travel on planes -- and how we can stop them	{0: 'Raymond Wang won the top prize in the 2015 Intel Science and Engineering Fair for his invention that circulates fresh air on planes and reduces transmission of germs between passengers.'}	TEDYouth 2015	Can I get a show of hands — how many of you in this room have been on a plane in this past year? That's pretty good. Well, it turns out that you share that experience with more than three billion people every year. And when we put so many people in all these metal tubes that fly all over the world, sometimes, things like this can happen and you get a disease epidemic. I first actually got into this topic when I heard about the Ebola outbreak last year. And it turns out that, although Ebola spreads through these more range-limited, large-droplet routes, there's all these other sorts of diseases that can be spread in the airplane cabin. The worst part is, when we take a look at some of the numbers, it's pretty scary. So with H1N1, there was this guy that decided to go on the plane and in the matter of a single flight actually spread the disease to 17 other people. And then there was this other guy with SARS, who managed to go on a three-hour flight and spread the disease to 22 other people. That's not exactly my idea of a great superpower. When we take a look at this, what we also find is that it's very difficult to pre-screen for these diseases. So when someone actually goes on a plane, they could be sick and they could actually be in this latency period in which they could actually have the disease but not exhibit any symptoms, and they could, in turn, spread the disease to many other people in the cabin. How that actually works is that right now we've got air coming in from the top of the cabin and from the side of the cabin, as you see in blue. And then also, that air goes out through these very efficient filters that eliminate 99.97 percent of pathogens near the outlets. What happens right now, though, is that we have this mixing airflow pattern. So if someone were to actually sneeze, that air would get swirled around multiple times before it even has a chance to go out through the filter. So I thought: clearly, this is a pretty serious problem. I didn't have the money to go out and buy a plane, so I decided to build a computer instead. It actually turns out that with computational fluid dynamics, what we're able to do is create these simulations that give us higher resolutions than actually physically going in and taking readings in the plane. And so how, essentially, this works is you would start out with these 2D drawings — these are floating around in technical papers around the Internet. I take that and then I put it into this 3D-modeling software, really building that 3D model. And then I divide that model that I just built into these tiny pieces, essentially meshing it so that the computer can better understand it. And then I tell the computer where the air goes in and out of the cabin, throw in a bunch of physics and basically sit there and wait until the computer calculates the simulation. So what we get, actually, with the conventional cabin is this: you'll notice the middle person sneezing, and we go "Splat!" — it goes right into people's faces. It's pretty disgusting. From the front, you'll notice those two passengers sitting next to the central passenger not exactly having a great time. And when we take a look at that from the side, you'll also notice those pathogens spreading across the length of the cabin. The first thing I thought was, "This is no good." So I actually conducted more than 32 different simulations and ultimately, I came up with this solution right here. This is what I call a — patent pending — Global Inlet Director. With this, we're able to reduce pathogen transmission by about 55 times, and increase fresh-air inhalation by about 190 percent. So how this actually works is we would install this piece of composite material into these existing spots that are already in the plane. So it's very cost-effective to install and we can do this directly overnight. All we have to do is put a couple of screws in there and you're good to go. And the results that we get are absolutely amazing. Instead of having those problematic swirling airflow patterns, we can create these walls of air that come down in-between the passengers to create personalized breathing zones. So you'll notice the middle passenger here is sneezing again, but this time, we're able to effectively push that down to the filters for elimination. And same thing from the side, you'll notice we're able to directly push those pathogens down. So if you take a look again now at the same scenario but with this innovation installed, you'll notice the middle passenger sneezes, and this time, we're pushing that straight down into the outlet before it gets a chance to infect any other people. So you'll notice the two passengers sitting next to the middle guy are breathing virtually no pathogens at all. Take a look at that from the side as well, you see a very efficient system. And in short, with this system, we win. When we take a look at what this means, what we see is that this not only works if the middle passenger sneezes, but also if the window-seat passenger sneezes or if the aisle-seat passenger sneezes. And so with this solution, what does this mean for the world? Well, when we take a look at this from the computer simulation into real life, we can see with this 3D model that I built over here, essentially using 3D printing, we can see those same airflow patterns coming down, right to the passengers. In the past, the SARS epidemic actually cost the world about 40 billion dollars. And in the future, a big disease outbreak could actually cost the world in excess of three trillion dollars. So before, it used to be that you had to take an airplane out of service for one to two months, spend tens of thousands of man hours and several million dollars to try to change something. But now, we're able to install something essentially overnight and see results right away. So it's really now a matter of taking this through to certification, flight testing, and going through all of these regulatory approvals processes. But it just really goes to show that sometimes the best solutions are the simplest solutions. And two years ago, even, this project would not have happened, just because the technology then wouldn't have supported it. But now with advanced computing and how developed our Internet is, it's really the golden era for innovation. And so the question I ask all of you today is: why wait? Together, we can build the future today. Thanks. (Applause)
A beatboxing lesson from a father-daughter duo	{0: 'Father-daughter beatboxing duo Nicole Paris and Ed Cage mix beats across generations.'}	TEDYouth 2015	Nicole Paris: TEDYouth, make some noise! (Beatboxing) TEDYouth, make some — (Beatboxing) (Beatboxing ends) Are you ready? (Cheers and applause) Are you ready? Ed Cage: Yeah, yeah, yeah! (Beatboxing) (Laughter) EC: Y'all like that? Let me show you how we used to do it — NP: Get it pops, go ahead. EC: ... when I was growing up in the '90s. (Beatboxing) (Beatboxing ends) (Laughter) (Beatboxing) NP: Pops, pops, pops, pops, pops, pops, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up! Oh my God. OK, he's trying to battle me. Hold on, right now, hold on. Do you remember when you used to beatbox me to sleep? EC: Yeah, yeah, I remember. That's when she was a little baby. We would do something like this. (Beatboxing) NP: I remember that. (Beatboxing) NP: All right, pops, pops, pops, chill out, chill out. Hold up, hold up, hold up. EC: Y'all remember the video. This is like a little payback or something for 50 million people calling me the loser. NP: Hold up, hold up. But a lot of people out there don't really know what beatboxing is, where it started from. EC: Right, right. NP: Where it came from. So why don't you give them a little history — just a tickle — a bit of history of where it comes from. EC: Beatbox started here in New York. (Cheers) That's right, that's right. New York, New York! Everybody like, "Yeah!" Well, we from St. Louis. (Laughter) NP: Now you can put y'all hands down. (Laughter) EC: But beatbox started here in New York. What you would have is that, when we would go to parties, you would have the DJ and you would have the rapper. But because I don't have electricity coming out of me, we had to emulate what the beats was doing. So when you would see the beatboxer, you would see us over to the side. Then you would see a rapper, and when the rapper began to rap, we would do a simple beat, because back then the beats were simple — (Beatboxing) or — (Beatboxing) Those were simple beats. But now, you got folks that want to do all type of stuff with their beats now, and they want to humiliate their father, which is not right when you want to humiliate the person that take care of you, pay all your tuition, (Nicole laughs) especially when you have 50 million people that just go around and call you "the loser." Well, I'm taking that to heart. But now we do something different in our house, so we have these jam sessions, and our jam sessions consist of us jamming in church. You know, in church, we'll look at each other like, (Beatboxing) (Laughter) and we'll text the beat to each other. Or we'll be in the kitchen cooking, road trips, airports. NP: Standing right there in the corner, "Aw, Dad — listen to that." (Beatboxing) Naw, I'm kidding. But you know what? We're talking all about this jam session and everything. EC: Yeah. NP: Why don't we give them a little peek, just a tiny bit of our jam session? NP: Y'all want to hear some jam session? EC: Y'all ready for a jam session? (Cheers) NP: Sorry? I can't hear you. (Cheers) Yeah! Kick it, pops! (Beatboxing) (Applause) (Beatboxing) (Beatboxing ends) (Applause) NP: I'm getting ready to go! EC: Y'all ready? Everybody stand up! Come on, everybody stand up! Get on up! Come on, stretch! (Beatboxing) (Beatboxing ends) NP: That's it. (Cheers and applause) Thank you! Make some noise! EG: Thank you, everybody! NP: Make some noise! Make some noise! Thank you!
The four fish we're overeating -- and what to eat instead	{0: 'Paul Greenberg researches and writes about fish, aquaculture and the future of the ocean.'}	Mission Blue II	So when I was a kid ... this was my team. (Laughter) I stunk at sports. I didn't like to play them, I didn't like to watch them. So this is what I did. I went fishing. And for all of my growing up I fished on the shores of Connecticut, and these are the creatures that I saw on a regular basis. But after I grew up and went to college, and I came home in the early 90's, this is what I found. My team had shrunk. It was like literally having your roster devastated. And as I sort of looked into that, from a very personal point of view as a fisherman, I started to kind of figure out, well, what was the rest of the world thinking about it? First place I started to look was fish markets. And when I went to fish markets, in spite of where I was — whether I was in North Carolina, or Paris, or London, or wherever — I kept seeing this weirdly repeating trope of four creatures, again and again — on the menus, on ice — shrimp, tuna, salmon and cod. And I thought this was pretty strange, and as I looked at it, I was wondering, did anyone else notice this sort of shrinking of the market? Well, when I looked into it, I realized that people didn't look at it as their team. Ordinary people, the way they looked at seafood was like this. It's not an unusual human characteristic to reduce the natural world down to very few elements. We did it before, 10,000 years ago, when we came out of our caves. If you look at fire pits from 10,000 years ago, you'll see raccoons, you'll see, you know, wolves, you'll see all kinds of different creatures. But if you telescope to the age of — you know, 2,000 years ago, you'll see these four mammals: pigs, cows, sheep and goats. It's true of birds, too. You look at the menus in New York City restaurants 150 years ago, 200 years ago, you'll see snipe, woodcock, grouse, dozens of ducks, dozens of geese. But telescope ahead to the age of modern animal husbandry, and you'll see four: turkeys, ducks, chicken and geese. So it makes sense that we've headed in this direction. But how have we headed in this direction? Well ... first it's a very, very new problem. This is the way we've been fishing the oceans over the last 50 years. World War II was a tremendous incentive to arm ourselves in a war against fish. All of the technology that we perfected during World War II — sonar, lightweight polymers — all these things were redirected towards fish. And so you see this tremendous buildup in fishing capacity, quadrupling in the course of time, from the end of World War II to the present time. And right now that means we're taking between 80 and 90 million metric tons out of the sea every year. That's the equivalent of the human weight of China taken out of the sea every year. And it's no coincidence that I use China as the example because China is now the largest fishing nation in the world. Well, that's only half the story. The other half of the story is this incredible boom in fish farming and aquaculture, which is now, only in the last year or two, starting to exceed the amount of wild fish that we produce. So that if you add wild fish and farmed fish together, you get the equivalent of two Chinas created from the ocean each and every year. And again, it's not a coincidence that I use China as the example, because China, in addition to being the biggest catcher of fish, is also the biggest farmer of fish. So let's look though at the four choices we are making right now. The first one — by far the most consumed seafood in America and in much of the West, is shrimp. Shrimp in the wild — as a wild product — is a terrible product. 5, 10, 15 pounds of wild fish are regularly killed to bring one pound of shrimp to the market. They're also incredibly fuel inefficient to bring to the market. In a recent study that was produced out of Dalhousie University, it was found that dragging for shrimp is one of the most carbon-intensive ways of fishing that you can find. So you can farm them, and people do farm them, and they farm them a lot in this very area. Problem is ... the place where you farm shrimp is in these wild habitats — in mangrove forests. Now look at those lovely roots coming down. Those are the things that hold soil together, protect coasts, create habitats for all sorts of young fish, young shrimp, all sorts of things that are important to this environment. Well, this is what happens to a lot of coastal mangrove forests. We've lost millions of acres of coastal mangroves over the last 30 or 40 years. That rate of destruction has slowed, but we're still in a major mangrove deficit. The other thing that's going on here is a phenomenon that the filmmaker Mark Benjamin called "Grinding Nemo." This phenomenon is very, very relevant to anything that you've ever seen on a tropical reef. Because what's going on right now, we have shrimp draggers dragging for shrimp, catching a huge amount of bycatch, that bycatch in turn gets ground up and turned into shrimp food. And sometimes, many of these vessels — manned by slaves — are catching these so-called "trash fish," fish that we would love to see on a reef, grinding them up and turning them into shrimp feed — an ecosystem literally eating itself and spitting out shrimp. The next most consumed seafood in America, and also throughout the West, is tuna. So tuna is this ultimate global fish. These huge management areas have to be observed in order for tuna to be well managed. Our own management area, called a Regional Fisheries Management Organization, is called ICCAT, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. The great naturalist Carl Safina once called it, "The International Conspiracy to Catch all the Tunas." Of course we've seen incredible improvement in ICCAT in the last few years, there is total room for improvement, but it remains to be said that tuna is a global fish, and to manage it, we have to manage the globe. Well, we could also try to grow tuna but tuna is a spectacularly bad animal for aquaculture. Many people don't know this but tuna are warm-blooded. They can heat their bodies 20 degrees above ambient temperature, they can swim at over 40 miles an hour. So that pretty much eliminates all the advantages of farming a fish, right? A farmed fish is — or a fish is cold-blooded, it doesn't move too much. That's a great thing for growing protein. But if you've got this crazy, wild creature that swims at 40 miles an hour and heats its blood — not a great candidate for aquaculture. The next creature — most consumed seafood in America and throughout the West — is salmon. Now salmon got its plundering, too, but it didn't really necessarily happen through fishing. This is my home state of Connecticut. Connecticut used to be home to a lot of wild salmon. But if you look at this map of Connecticut, every dot on that map is a dam. There are over 3,000 dams in the state of Connecticut. I often say this is why people in Connecticut are so uptight — (Laughter) If somebody could just unblock Connecticut's chi, I feel that we could have an infinitely better world. But I made this particular comment at a convention once of national parks officers, and this guy from North Carolina sidled up to me, he says, "You know, you oughtn't be so hard on your Connecticut, cause we here in North Carolina, we got 35,000 dams." So it's a national epidemic, it's an international epidemic. And there are dams everywhere, and these are precisely the things that stop wild salmon from reaching their spawning grounds. So as a result, we've turned to aquaculture, and salmon is one the most successful, at least from a numbers point of view. When they first started farming salmon, it could take as many as six pounds of wild fish to make a single pound of salmon. The industry has, to its credit, greatly improved. They've gotten it below two to one, although it's a little bit of a cheat because if you look at the way aquaculture feed is produced, they're measuring pellets — pounds of pellets per pound of salmon. Those pellets are in turn reduced fish. So the actual — what's called the FIFO, the fish in and the fish out — kind of hard to say. But in any case, credit to the industry, it has lowered the amount of fish per pound of salmon. Problem is we've also gone crazy with the amount of salmon that we're producing. Aquaculture is the fastest growing food system on the planet. It's growing at something like seven percent per year. And so even though we're doing less per fish to bring it to the market, we're still killing a lot of these little fish. And it's not just fish that we're feeding fish to, we're also feeding fish to chickens and pigs. So we've got chickens and they're eating fish, but weirdly, we also have fish that are eating chickens. Because the byproducts of chickens — feathers, blood, bone — get ground up and fed to fish. So I often wonder, is there a fish that ate a chicken that ate a fish? It's sort of a reworking of the chicken and egg thing. Anyway — (Laughter) All together, though, it results in a terrible mess. What you're talking about is something between 20 and 30 million metric tons of wild creatures that are taken from the ocean and used and ground up. That's the equivalent of a third of a China, or of an entire United States of humans that's taken out of the sea each and every year. The last of the four is a kind of amorphous thing. It's what the industry calls "whitefish." There are many fish that get cycled into this whitefish thing but the way to kind of tell the story, I think, is through that classic piece of American culinary innovation, the Filet-O-Fish sandwich. So the Filet-O-Fish sandwich actually started as halibut. And it started because a local franchise owner found that when he served his McDonald's on Friday, nobody came. Because it was a Catholic community, they needed fish. So he went to Ray Kroc and he said, "I'm going to bring you a fish sandwich, going to be made out of halibut." Ray Kroc said, "I don't think it's going to work. I want to do a Hula Burger, and there's going to be a slice of pineapple on a bun. But let's do this, let's have a bet. Whosever sandwich sells more, that will be the winning sandwich." Well, it's kind of sad for the ocean that the Hula Burger didn't win. So he made his halibut sandwich. Unfortunately though, the sandwich came in at 30 cents. Ray wanted the sandwich to come in at 25 cents, so he turned to Atlantic cod. We all know what happened to Atlantic cod in New England. So now the Filet-O-Fish sandwich is made out of Alaska pollock, it's the largest fin fish fishery in the United States, 2 to 3 billion pounds of fish taken out of the sea every single year. If we go through the pollock, the next choice is probably going to be tilapia. Tilapia is one of those fish nobody ever heard of 20 years ago. It's actually a very efficient converter of plant protein into animal protein, and it's been a godsend to the third world. It's actually a tremendously sustainable solution, it goes from an egg to an adult in nine months. The problem is that when you look about the West, it doesn't do what the West wants it to do. It really doesn't have what's called an oily fish profile. It doesn't have the EPA and DHA omega-3s that we all think are going to make us live forever. So what do we do? I mean, first of all, what about this poor fish, the clupeids? The fish that represent a huge part of that 20 to 30 million metric tons. Well, one possibility that a lot of conservationists have raised is could we eat them? Could we eat them directly instead of feeding them to salmon? There are arguments for it. They are tremendously fuel efficient to bring to market, a fraction of the fuel cost of say, shrimp, and at the very top of the carbon efficiency scale. They also are omega-3 rich, a great source for EPA and DHA. So that is a potential. And if we were to go down that route what I would say is, instead of paying a few bucks a pound — or a few bucks a ton, really — and making it into aquafeed, could we halve the catch and double the price for the fishermen and make that our way of treating these particular fish? Other possibility though, which is much more interesting, is looking at bivalves, particularly mussels. Now, mussels are very high in EPA and DHA, they're similar to canned tuna. They're also extremely fuel efficient. To bring a pound of mussels to market is about a thirtieth of the carbon as required to bring beef to market. They require no forage fish, they actually get their omega-3s by filtering the water of microalgae. In fact, that's where omega-3s come from, they don't come from fish. Microalgae make the omega-3s, they're only bioconcentrated in fish. Mussels and other bivalves do tremendous amounts of water filtration. A single mussel can filter dozens of gallons every single day. And this is incredibly important when we look at the world. Right now, nitrification, overuse of phosphates in our waterways are causing tremendous algal blooms. Over 400 new dead zones have been created in the last 20 years, tremendous sources of marine life death. We also could look at not a fish at all. We could look at a vegetable. We could look at seaweed, the kelps, all these different varieties of things that can be high in omega-3s, can be high in proteins, tremendously good things. They filter the water just like mussels do. And weirdly enough, it turns out that you can actually feed this to cows. Now, I'm not a big fan of cattle. But if you wanted to keep growing cattle in a time and place where water resources are limited, you're growing seaweed in the water, you don't have to water it — major consideration. And the last fish is a question mark. We have the ability to create aquacultured fish that creates a net gain of marine protein for us. This creature would have to be vegetarian, it would have to be fast growing, it would have to be adaptable to a changing climate and it would have to have that oily fish profile, that EPA, DHA, omega-3 fatty acid profile that we're looking for. This exists kind of on paper. I have been reporting on these subjects for 15 years. Every time I do a new story, somebody tells me, "We can do all that. We can do it. We've figured it all out. We can produce a fish that's a net gain of marine protein and has omega-3s." Great. It doesn't seem to be getting scaled up. It is time to scale this up. If we do, 30 million metric tons of seafood, a third of the world catch, stays in the water. So I guess what I'm saying is this is what we've been going with. We tend to go with our appetites rather than our minds. But if we went with this, or some configuration of it, we might have a little more of this. Thank you. (Applause)
Let's not use Mars as a backup planet	{0: 'Lucianne Walkowicz works on NASA\'s Kepler mission, studying starspots and "the tempestuous tantrums of stellar flares."'}	TED2015	We're at a tipping point in human history, a species poised between gaining the stars and losing the planet we call home. Even in just the past few years, we've greatly expanded our knowledge of how Earth fits within the context of our universe. NASA's Kepler mission has discovered thousands of potential planets around other stars, indicating that Earth is but one of billions of planets in our galaxy. Kepler is a space telescope that measures the subtle dimming of stars as planets pass in front of them, blocking just a little bit of that light from reaching us. Kepler's data reveals planets' sizes as well as their distance from their parent star. Together, this helps us understand whether these planets are small and rocky, like the terrestrial planets in our own Solar System, and also how much light they receive from their parent sun. In turn, this provides clues as to whether these planets that we discover might be habitable or not. Unfortunately, at the same time as we're discovering this treasure trove of potentially habitable worlds, our own planet is sagging under the weight of humanity. 2014 was the hottest year on record. Glaciers and sea ice that have been with us for millennia are now disappearing in a matter of decades. These planetary-scale environmental changes that we have set in motion are rapidly outpacing our ability to alter their course. But I'm not a climate scientist, I'm an astronomer. I study planetary habitability as influenced by stars with the hopes of finding the places in the universe where we might discover life beyond our own planet. You could say that I look for choice alien real estate. Now, as somebody who is deeply embedded in the search for life in the universe, I can tell you that the more you look for planets like Earth, the more you appreciate our own planet itself. Each one of these new worlds invites a comparison between the newly discovered planet and the planets we know best: those of our own Solar System. Consider our neighbor, Mars. Mars is small and rocky, and though it's a bit far from the Sun, it might be considered a potentially habitable world if found by a mission like Kepler. Indeed, it's possible that Mars was habitable in the past, and in part, this is why we study Mars so much. Our rovers, like Curiosity, crawl across its surface, scratching for clues as to the origins of life as we know it. Orbiters like the MAVEN mission sample the Martian atmosphere, trying to understand how Mars might have lost its past habitability. Private spaceflight companies now offer not just a short trip to near space but the tantalizing possibility of living our lives on Mars. But though these Martian vistas resemble the deserts of our own home world, places that are tied in our imagination to ideas about pioneering and frontiers, compared to Earth Mars is a pretty terrible place to live. Consider the extent to which we have not colonized the deserts of our own planet, places that are lush by comparison with Mars. Even in the driest, highest places on Earth, the air is sweet and thick with oxygen exhaled from thousands of miles away by our rainforests. I worry — I worry that this excitement about colonizing Mars and other planets carries with it a long, dark shadow: the implication and belief by some that Mars will be there to save us from the self-inflicted destruction of the only truly habitable planet we know of, the Earth. As much as I love interplanetary exploration, I deeply disagree with this idea. There are many excellent reasons to go to Mars, but for anyone to tell you that Mars will be there to back up humanity is like the captain of the Titanic telling you that the real party is happening later on the lifeboats. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. But the goals of interplanetary exploration and planetary preservation are not opposed to one another. No, they're in fact two sides of the same goal: to understand, preserve and improve life into the future. The extreme environments of our own world are alien vistas. They're just closer to home. If we can understand how to create and maintain habitable spaces out of hostile, inhospitable spaces here on Earth, perhaps we can meet the needs of both preserving our own environment and moving beyond it. I leave you with a final thought experiment: Fermi's paradox. Many years ago, the physicist Enrico Fermi asked that, given the fact that our universe has been around for a very long time and we expect that there are many planets within it, we should have found evidence for alien life by now. So where are they? Well, one possible solution to Fermi's paradox is that, as civilizations become technologically advanced enough to consider living amongst the stars, they lose sight of how important it is to safeguard the home worlds that fostered that advancement to begin with. It is hubris to believe that interplanetary colonization alone will save us from ourselves, but planetary preservation and interplanetary exploration can work together. If we truly believe in our ability to bend the hostile environments of Mars for human habitation, then we should be able to surmount the far easier task of preserving the habitability of the Earth. Thank you. (Applause)
What happens when a city runs out of room for its dead	{0: 'An architect and urban designer, Alison Killing uses journalism, filmmaking and exhibitions to help people better understand the built environment.'}	TEDxGroningen	So, I have an overlooked but potentially lucrative investment opportunity for you. Over the past 10 years in the UK, the return on burial plots has outperformed the UK property market by a ratio of around three to one. There are private cemeteries being set up with plots for sale to investors, and they start at around 3,900 pounds. And they're projected to achieve about 40 percent growth. The biggest advantage is that this is a market with continuous demand. Now, this is a real proposition, and there are companies out there that really are offering this investment, but my interest in it is quite different. I'm an architect and urban designer, and for the past year and a half, I've been looking at approaches to death and dying and at how they've shaped our cities and the buildings within them. So in the summer, I did my first exhibition on death and architecture in Venice, and it was called "Death in Venice." And because death is a subject that many of us find quite uncomfortable to talk about, the exhibition was designed to be quite playful, so that people would literally engage with it. So one of our exhibits was an interactive map of London which showed just how much of the real estate in the city is given over to death. As you wave your hand across the map, the name of the piece of real estate — the building or the cemetery — is revealed. And those white shapes that you can see, they're all of the hospitals and hospices and mortuaries and cemeteries in the city. In fact, the majority are cemeteries. We wanted to show that, even though death and burial are things that we might not think about, they're all around us, and they're important parts of our cities. So about half a million people die in the UK each year, and of those, around a quarter will want to be buried. But the UK, like many Western European countries, is running out of burial space, especially in the major cities. And the Greater London Authority has been aware of this for a while, and the main causes are population growth, the fact that existing cemeteries are almost full. There's a custom in the UK that graves are considered to be occupied forever, and there's also development pressure — people want to use that same land to build houses or offices or shops. So they came up with a few solutions. They were like, well, maybe we can reuse those graves after 50 years. Or maybe we can bury people, like, four deep, so that four people can be buried in the same plot, and we can make more efficient use of the land that way, and in that way, hopefully London will still have space to bury people in the near future. But, traditionally, cemeteries haven't been taken care of by the local authority. In fact, the surprising thing is that there's no legal obligation on anyone in the UK to provide burial space. Traditionally, it's been done by private and religious organizations, like churches and mosques and synagogues. But there's also occasionally been a for-profit group who has wanted to get in on the act. And, you know, they look at the small size of a burial plot and that high cost, and it looks like there's serious money to be made. So, actually, if you want to go out and start your own cemetery, you kind of can. There was this couple in South Wales, and they had a farmhouse and a load of fields next to it, and they wanted to develop the land. They had a load of ideas. They first thought about making a caravan park, but the council said no. And then they wanted to make a fish farm and again the council said no. Then they hit on the idea of making a cemetery and they calculated that by doing this, they could increase the value of their land from about 95,000 pounds to over one million pounds. But just to come back to this idea of making profit from cemeteries, like, it's kind of ludicrous, right? The thing is that the high cost of those burial plots is actually very misleading. They look like they're expensive, but that cost reflects the fact that you need to maintain the burial plot — like, someone has to cut the grass for the next 50 years. That means it's very difficult to make money from cemeteries. And it's the reason that normally they're run by the council or by a not-for-profit group. But anyway, the council granted these people permission, and they're now trying to build their cemetery. So just to explain to you kind of how this works: If I want to build something in the UK, like a cemetery for example, then I have to apply for planning permission first. So if I want to build a new office building for a client or if I want to extend my home or, you know, if I have a shop and I want to convert it into an office, I have to do a load of drawings, and I submit them to the council for permission. And they'll look at things like how it fits in the surroundings. So they'll look at what it looks like. But they'll also think about things like what impact is it going to have on the local environment? And they'll be thinking about things like, is this thing going to cause pollution or is there going to be a lot of traffic that wants to go to this thing that I've built? But also good things. Is it going to add local services like shops to the neighborhood that local people would like to use? And they'll weigh up the advantages and the disadvantages and they'll make a decision. So that's how it works if I want to build a large cemetery. But what if I've got a piece of land and I just want to bury a few people, like five or six? Well, then — actually, I don't need permission from anyone! There's actually almost no regulation in the UK around burial, and the little bit that there is, is about not polluting water courses, like not polluting rivers or groundwater. So actually, if you want to go and make your own mini-cemetery, then you can. But I mean, like — really, who does this? Right? Well, if you're an aristocratic family and you have a large estate, then there's a chance that you'll have a mausoleum on it, and you'll bury your family there. But the really weird thing is that you don't need to have a piece of land of a certain size before you're allowed to start burying people on it. And so that means that, technically, this applies to, like, the back garden of your house in the suburbs. (Laughter) So what if you wanted to try this yourself at home? Well, there's a few councils that have guidance on their website which can help you. So, the first thing that they tell you is that you need to have a certificate of burial before you can go ahead — you're not allowed to just murder people and put them under the patio. (Laughter) They also tell you that you need to keep a record of where the grave is. But that's pretty much it for formal requirements. Now, they do warn you that your neighbors might not like this, but, legally speaking, there's almost nothing that they can do about it. And just in case any of you still had that profit idea in your mind about how much those burial plots cost and how much money you might be able to make, they also warn that it might cause the value of your house to drop by 20 percent. Although, actually, it's more likely that no one will want to buy your house at all after that. So what I find fascinating about this is the fact that it kind of sums up many of our attitudes towards death. In the UK, and I think that the figures across Europe are probably similar, only about 30 percent of people have ever talked to anyone about their wishes around death, and even for people over 75, only 45 percent of people have ever talked about this. And the reasons that people give ... you know, they think that their death is far off or they think that they're going to make people uncomfortable by talking about it. And you know, to a certain extent, there are other people out there who are taking care of things for us. The government has all this regulation and bureaucracy around things like burying a death, for example, and there's people like funeral directors who devote their entire working lives to this issue. But when it comes to our cities and thinking about how death fits in our cities, there's much less regulation and design and thought than we might imagine. So we're not thinking about this, but all of the people we imagine are thinking about it — they're not taking care of it either. Thank you. (Applause)
A hilarious celebration of lifelong female friendship	{0: 'Jane Fonda has had four extraordinary careers (so far): Oscar-winning actor, author, fitness guru and impassioned activist.', 1: "Lily Tomlin has been honored by the Kennedy Center and awarded the Mark Twain Prize -- and she's still making vital, hilarious comedy.\r\n\r\n"}	TEDWomen 2015	Pat Mitchell: So I was thinking about female friendship a lot, and by the way, these two women, I'm very honored to say, have been my friends for a very long time, too. Jane Fonda: Yes we have. PM: And one of the things that I read about female friendship is something that Cervantes said. He said, "You can tell a lot about someone," in this case a woman, "by the company that she keeps." So let's start with — (Laughter) JF: We're in big trouble. Lily Tomlin: Hand me one of those waters, I'm extremely dry. (Laughter) JF: You're taking up our time. We have a very limited — LT: Just being with her sucks the life out of me. (Laughter) JF: You ain't seen nothing yet. Anyway — sorry. PM: So tell me, what do you look for in a friend? LT: I look for someone who has a sense of fun, who's audacious, who's forthcoming, who has politics, who has even a small scrap of passion for the planet, someone who's decent, has a sense of justice and who thinks I'm worthwhile. (Laughter) (Applause) JF: You know, I was thinking this morning, I don't even know what I would do without my women friends. I mean it's, "I have my friends, therefore I am." LT: (Laughter) JF: No, it's true. I exist because I have my women friends. They — You're one of them. I don't know about you. But anyway — (Laughter) You know, they make me stronger, they make me smarter, they make me braver. They tap me on the shoulder when I might be in need of course-correcting. And most of them are a good deal younger than me, too. You know? I mean, it's nice — LT: Thank you. (Laughter) JF: No, I do, I include you in that, because listen, you know — it's nice to have somebody still around to play with and learn from when you're getting toward the end. I'm approaching — I'll be there sooner than you. LT: No, I'm glad to have you parallel aging alongside me. (Laughter) JF: I'm showing you the way. (Laughter) LT: Well, you are and you have. PM: Well, as we grow older, and as we go through different kinds of life's journeys, what do you do to keep your friendships vital and alive? LT: Well you have to use a lot of — JF: She doesn't invite me over much, I'll tell you that. LT: I have to use a lot of social media — You be quiet now. And so — (Laughter) LT: And I look through my emails, I look through my texts to find my friends, so I can answer them as quickly as possible, because I know they need my counsel. (Laughter) They need my support, because most of my friends are writers, or activists, or actors, and you're all three ... and a long string of other descriptive phrases, and I want to get to you as soon as possible, I want you to know that I'm there for you. JF: Do you do emojis? LT: Oh ... JF: No? LT: That's embarrassing. JF: I'm really into emojis. LT: No, I spell out my — I spell out my words of happiness and congratulations, and sadness. JF: You spell it right out — LT: I spell it, every letter. (Laughter) JF: Such a purist. You know, as I've gotten older, I've understood more the importance of friendships, and so, I really make an effort to reach out and make play dates — not let too much time go by. I read a lot so, as Lily knows all too well, my books that I like, I send to my friends. LT: When we knew we would be here today you sent me a lot of books about women, female friendships, and I was so surprised to see how many books, how much research has been done recently — JF: And were you grateful? LT: I was grateful. (Laughter) PM: And — LT: Wait, no, it's really important because this is another example of how women are overlooked, put aside, marginalized. There's been very little research done on us, even though we volunteered lots of times. JF: That's for sure. (Laughter) LT: This is really exciting, and you all will be interested in this. The Harvard Medical School study has shown that women who have close female friendships are less likely to develop impairments — physical impairments as they age, and they are likely to be seen to be living much more vital, exciting — JF: And longer — LT: Joyful lives. JF: We live five years longer than men. LT: I think I'd trade the years for joy. (Laughter) LT: But the most important part is they found — the results were so exciting and so conclusive — the researchers found that not having close female friends is detrimental to your health, as much as smoking or being overweight. JF: And there's something else, too — LT: I've said my part, so ... (Laughter) JF: OK, well, listen to my part, because there's an additional thing. Because they only — for years, decades — they only researched men when they were trying to understand stress, only very recently have they researched what happens to women when we're stressed, and it turns out that when we're stressed — women, our bodies get flooded by oxytocin. Which is a feel-good, calming, stress-reducing hormone. Which is also increased when we're with our women friends. And I do think that's one reason why we live longer. And I feel so bad for men because they don't have that. Testosterone in men diminishes the effects of oxytocin. LT: Well, when you and I and Dolly made "9 to 5" ... JF: Oh — LT: We laughed, we did, we laughed so much, we found we had so much in common and we're so different. Here she is, like Hollywood royalty, I'm like a tough kid from Detroit, [Dolly's] a Southern kid from a poor town in Tennessee, and we found we were so in sync as women, and we must have — we laughed — we must have added at least a decade onto our lifespans. JF: I think — we sure crossed our legs a lot. (Laughter) If you know what I mean. LT: I think we all know what you mean. (Laughter) PM: You're adding decades to our lives right now. So among the books that Jane sent us both to read on female friendship was one by a woman we admire greatly, Sister Joan Chittister, who said about female friendship that women friends are not just a social act, they're a spiritual act. Do you think of your friends as spiritual? Do they add something spiritual to your lives? LT: Spiritual — I absolutely think that. Because — especially people you've known a long time, people you've spent time with — I can see the spiritual essence inside them, the tenderness, the vulnerability. There's actually kind of a love, an element of love in the relationship. I just see deeply into your soul. PM: Do you think that, Jane — LT: But I have special powers. JF: Well, there's all kinds of friends. There's business friends, and party friends, I've got a lot of those. (Laughter) But the oxytocin-producing friendships have ... They feel spiritual because it's a heart opening, right? You know, we go deep. And — I find that I shed tears a lot with my intimate friends. Not because I'm sad but because I'm so touched and inspired by them. LT: And you know one of you is going to go soon. (Laughter) PM: Well, two of us are sitting here, Lily, which one are you talking about? (Laughter) And I always think, when women talk about their friendships, that men always look a little mystified. What are the differences, in your opinion, between men friendships and women friendships? JF: There's a lot of difference, and I think we have to have a lot of empathy for men — (Laughter) that they don't have what we have. Which I think may be why they die sooner. (Laughter) I have a lot of compassion for men, because women, no kidding, we — women's relationships, our friendships are full disclosure, we go deep. They're revelatory. We risk vulnerability — this is something men don't do. I mean how many times have I asked you, "Am I doing OK?" "Did I really screw up there?" PM: You're doing great. (Laughter) JF: But I mean, we ask questions like that of our women friends, and men don't. You know, people describe women's relationships as face-to-face, whereas men's friendships are more side-by-side. LT: I mean most of the time men don't want to reveal their emotions, they want to bury deeper feelings. I mean, that's the general, conventional thought. They would rather go off in their man cave and watch a game or hit golf balls, or talk about sports, or hunting, or cars or have sex. I mean, it's just the kind of — it's a more manly behavior. JF: You meant — LT: They talk about sex. I meant they might have sex if they could get somebody in their man cave to — (Laughter) JF: You know something, though, that I find very interesting — and again, psychologists didn't know this until relatively recently — is that men are born every bit as relational as women are. If you look at films of newborn baby boys and girls, you'll see the baby boys just like the girls, gazing into their mother's eyes, you know, needing that relational exchange of energy. When the mother looks away, they could see the dismay on the child, even the boy would cry. They need relationship. So the question is why, as they grow older, does that change? And the answer is patriarchal culture, which says to boys and young men that to be needing of relationship, to be emotional with someone is girly. That a real man doesn't ask directions or express a need, they don't go to doctors if they feel bad. They don't ask for help. There's a quote that I really like, "Men fear that becoming 'we' will erase his 'I'." You know, his sense of self. Whereas women's sense of self has always been kind of porous. But our "we" is our saving grace, it's what makes us strong. It's not that we're better than men, we just don't have our masculinity to prove. LT: And, well — JF: That's a Gloria Steinem quote. So we can express our humanity — LT: I know who Gloria Steinem is. JF: I know you know who she is, but I think it's a — (Laughter) No, but it's a great quote, I think. We're not better than men, we just don't have our masculinity to prove. And that's really important. LT: But men are so inculcated in the culture to be comfortable in the patriarchy. And we've got to make something different happen. JF: Women's friendships are like a renewable source of power. LT: Well, that's what's exciting about this subject. It's because our friendships — female friendships are just a hop to our sisterhood, and sisterhood can be a very powerful force, to give the world — to make it what it should be — the things that humans desperately need. PM: It is why we're talking about it, because women's friendships are, as you said, Jane, a renewable source of power. So how do we use that power? JF: Well, women are the fastest growing demographic in the world, especially older women. And if we harness our power, we can change the world. And guess what? We need to. (Applause) And we need to do it soon. And one of the things that we need to do — and we can do it as women — for one thing, we kind of set the consumer standards. We need to consume less. We in the Western world need to consume less and when we buy things, we need to buy things that are made locally, when we buy food, we need to buy food that's grown locally. We are the ones that need to get off the grid. We need to make ourselves independent from fossil fuels. And the fossil fuel companies — the Exxons and the Shell Oils and those bad guys — cause they are — are going to tell us that we can't do it without going back to the Stone Age. You know, that the alternatives just aren't quite there yet, and that's not true. There are countries in the world right now that are living mostly on renewable energy and doing just fine. And they tell us that if we do wean ourselves from fossil fuel that we're going to be back in the Stone Age, and in fact, if we begin to use renewable energy, and not drill in the Arctic, and not drill — LT: Oh, boy. JF: And not drill in the Alberta tar sands — Right. That we will be — there will be more democracy and more jobs and more well-being, and it's women that are going to lead the way. LT: Maybe we have the momentum to start a third-wave feminist movement with our sisterhood around the world, with women we don't see, women we may never meet, but we join together that way, because — Aristotle said — most people — people would die without male friendships. And the operative word here was "male." Because they thought that friendships should be between equals and women were not considered equal — JF: They didn't think we had souls even, the Greeks. LT: No, exactly. That shows you just how limited Aristotle was. (Laughter) And wait, no, here's the best part. It's like, you know, men do need women now. The planet needs women. The US Constitution needs women. We are not even in the Constitution. JF: You're talking about the Equal Rights Amendment. LT: Right. Justice Ginsberg said something like — every constitution that's been written since the end of World War II included a provision that made women citizens of equal stature, but ours does not. So that would be a good place to start. Very, very mild — JF: Right. (Applause) And gender equality, it's like a tide, it would lift all boats, not just women. PM: Needing new role models on how to do that. How to be friends, how to think about our power in different ways, as consumers, as citizens of the world, and this is what makes Jane and Lily a role model of how women can be friends — for a very long time, and even if they occasionally disagree. Thank you. Thank you both. (Applause) JF: Thanks. LT: Thank you. JF: Thank you. (Applause)
Refugees have the right to be protected	{0: 'António Guterres is at the forefront of advocating for refugee rights around the world.'}	TEDGlobal>Geneva	Bruno Giussani: Commissioner, thank you for coming to TED. António Guterres: Pleasure. BG: Let's start with a figure. During 2015, almost one million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe from many different countries, of course, from Syria and Iraq, but also from Afghanistan and Bangladesh and Eritrea and elsewhere. And there have been reactions of two different kinds: welcoming parties and border fences. But I want to look at it a little bit from the short-term and the long-term perspective. And the first question is very simple: Why has the movement of refugees spiked so fast in the last six months? AG: Well, I think, basically, what triggered this huge increase was the Syrian refugee group. There has been an increased movement into Europe from Africa, from Asia, but slowly growing, and all of a sudden we had this massive increase in the first months of this year. Why? I think there are three reasons, two long-term ones and the trigger. The long-term ones, in relation to Syrians, is that hope is less and less clear for people. I mean, they look at their own country and they don't see much hope to go back home, because there is no political solution, so there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Second, the living conditions of the Syrians in the neighboring countries have been deteriorating. We just had research with the World Bank, and 87 percent of the Syrians in Jordan and 93 percent of the Syrians in Lebanon live below the national poverty lines. Only half of the children go to school, which means that people are living very badly. Not only are they refugees, out of home, not only have they suffered what they have suffered, but they are living in very, very dramatic conditions. And then the trigger was when all of a sudden, international aid decreased. The World Food Programme was forced, for lack of resources, to cut by 30 percent food support to the Syrian refugees. They're not allowed to work, so they are totally dependent on international support, and they felt, "The world is abandoning us." And that, in my opinion, was the trigger. All of a sudden, there was a rush, and people started to move in large numbers and, to be absolutely honest, if I had been in the same situation and I would have been brave enough to do it, I think I would have done the same. BG: But I think what surprised many people is it's not only sudden, but it wasn't supposed to be sudden. The war in Syria has been happening for five years. Millions of refugees are in camps and villages and towns around Syria. You have yourself warned about the situation and about the consequences of a breakdown of Libya, for example, and yet Europe looked totally unprepared. AG: Well, unprepared because divided, and when you are divided, you don't want to recognize the reality. You prefer to postpone decisions, because you do not have the capacity to make them. And the proof is that even when the spike occurred, Europe remained divided and was unable to put in place a mechanism to manage the situation. You talk about one million people. It looks enormous, but the population of the European Union is 550 million people, which means we are talking about one per every [550] Europeans. Now, in Lebanon, we have one refugee per three Lebanese. And Lebanon? Struggling, of course, but it's managing. So, the question is: is this something that could have been managed if — not mentioning the most important thing, which would have been addressing the root causes, but forgetting about root causes for now, looking at the phenomenon as it is — if Europe were able to come together in solidarity to create an adequate reception capacity of entry points? But for that, the countries at entry points need to be massively supported, and then screening the people with security checks and all the other mechanisms, distributing those that are coming into all European countries, according to the possibilities of each country. I mean, if you look at the relocation program that was approved by the Commission, always too little too late, or by the Council, too little too late — BG: It's already breaking down. AG: My country is supposed to receive four thousand. Four thousand in Portugal means nothing. So this is perfectly manageable if it is managed, but in the present circumstances, the pressure is at the point of entry, and then, as people move in this chaotic way through the Balkans, then they come to Germany, Sweden, basically, and Austria. They are the three countries that are, in the end, receiving the refugees. The rest of Europe is looking without doing much. BG: Let me try to bring up three questions, playing a bit devil's advocate. I'll try to ask them, make them blunt. But I think the questions are very present in the minds of many people in Europe right now, The first, of course, is about numbers. You say 550 million versus one million is not much, but realistically, how many people can Europe take? AG: Well, that is a question that has no answer, because refugees have the right to be protected. And there is such a thing as international law, so there is no way you can say, "I take 10,000 and that's finished." I remind you of one thing: in Turkey, at the beginning of the crisis, I remember one minister saying, "Turkey will be able to receive up to 100,000 people." Turkey has now two million three-hundred thousand or something of the sort, if you count all refugees. So I don't think it's fair to say how many we can take. What it is fair to say is: how we can we organize ourselves to assume our international responsibilities? And Europe has not been able to do so, because basically, Europe is divided because there is no solidarity in the European project. And it's not only about refugees; there are many other areas. And let's be honest, this is the moment in which we need more Europe instead of less Europe. But as the public less and less believes in European institutions, it is also each time more difficult to convince the public that we need more Europe to solve these problems. BG: We seem to be at the point where the numbers turn into political shifts, particularly domestically. We saw it again this weekend in France, but we have seen it over and over in many countries: in Poland and in Denmark and in Switzerland and elsewhere, where the mood changes radically because of the numbers, although they are not very significant in absolute numbers. The Prime Minister of — AG: But, if I may, on these: I mean, what does a European see at home in a village where there are no migrants? What a European sees is, on television, every single day, a few months ago, opening the news every single day, a crowd coming, uncontrolled, moving from border to border, and the images on television were of hundreds or thousands of people moving. And the idea is that nobody is taking care of it — this is happening without any kind of management. And so their idea was, "They are coming to my village." So there was this completely false idea that Europe was being invaded and our way of life is going to change, and everything will — And the problem is that if this had been properly managed, if people had been properly received, welcomed, sheltered at point of entry, screened at point of entry, and the moved by plane to different European countries, this would not have scared people. But, unfortunately, we have a lot of people scared, just because Europe was not able to do the job properly. BG: But there are villages in Germany with 300 inhabitants and 1,000 refugees. So, what's your position? How do you imagine these people reacting? AG: If there would be a proper management of the situation and the proper distribution of people all over Europe, you would always have the percentage that I mentioned: one per each 2,000. It is because things are not properly managed that in the end we have situations that are totally impossible to live with, and of course if you have a village — in Lebanon, there are many villages that have more Syrians than Lebanese; Lebanon has been living with that. I'm not asking for the same to happen in Europe, for all European villages to have more refugees than inhabitants. What I am asking is for Europe to do the job properly, and to be able to organize itself to receive people as other countries in the world were forced to do in the past. BG: So, if you look at the global situation not only at Europe — (Applause) BG: Yes! (Applause) BG: If you look at the global situation, so, not only at Europe, I know you can make a long list of countries that are not really stepping up, but I'm more interested in the other part — is there somebody who's doing the right thing? AG: Well, 86 percent of the refugees in the world are in the developing world. And if you look at countries like Ethiopia — Ethiopia has received more than 600,000 refugees. All the borders in Ethiopia are open. And they have, as a policy, they call the "people to people" policy that every refugee should be received. And they have South Sudanese, they have Sudanese, they have Somalis. They have all the neighbors. They have Eritreans. And, in general, African countries are extremely welcoming of refugees coming, and I would say that in the Middle East and in Asia, we have seen a tendency for borders to be open. Now we see some problems with the Syrian situation, as the Syrian situation evolved into also a major security crisis, but the truth is that for a large period, all borders in the Middle East were open. The truth is that for Afghans, the borders of Pakistan and Iran were open for, at the time, six million Afghans that came. So I would say that even today, the trend in the developing world has been for borders to be open. The trend in the developed world is for these questions to become more and more complex, especially when there is, in the public opinion, a mixture of discussions between refugee protections on one side and security questions — in my opinion, misinterpreted — on the other side. BG: We'll come back to that too, but you mentioned the cutting of funding and the vouchers from the World Food Programme. That reflects the general underfunding of the organizations working on these issues. Now that the world seems to have woken up, are you getting more funding and more support, or it's still the same? AG: We are getting more support. I would say that we are coming close to the levels of last year. We were much worse during the summer. But that is clearly insufficient to address the needs of the people and address the needs of the countries that are supporting the people. And here we have a basic review of the criteria, the objectives, the priorities of development cooperation that is required. For instance, Lebanon and Jordan are middle-income countries. Because they are middle-income countries, they cannot receive soft loans or grants from the World Bank. Now, today this doesn't make any sense, because they are providing a global public good. They have millions of refugees there, and to be honest, they are pillars of stability in the region, with all the difficulties they face, and the first line of defense of our collective security. So it doesn't make sense that these countries are not a first priority in development cooperation policies. And they are not. And not only do the refugees live in very dramatic circumstances inside those countries, but the local communities themselves are suffering, because salaries went down, because there are more unemployed, because prices and rents went up. And, of course, if you look at today's situation of the indicators in these countries, it is clear that, especially their poor groups of the population, are living worse and worse because of the crisis they are facing. BG: Who should be providing this support? Country by country, international organizations, the European Union? Who should be coming up with this support? AG: We need to join all efforts. It's clear that bilateral cooperation is essential. It's clear that multilateral cooperation is essential. It's clear that international financial institutions should have flexibility in order to be able to invest more massively in support to these countries. We need to combine all the instruments and to understand that today, in protracted situations, at a certain moment, that it doesn't make sense anymore to make a distinction between humanitarian aid and development aid or development processes. Because you are talking about children in school, you are talking about health, you are talking about infrastructure that is overcrowded. You are talking about things that require a long-term perspective, a development perspective and not only an emergency humanitarian aid perspective. BG: I would like your comment on something that was in newspapers this morning. It is a statement made by the current front-runner for the Republican nomination for US President, Donald Trump. Yesterday, he said this. (Laughter) No, listen to this. It's interesting. I quote: "I am calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the US, until our country's representatives can figure out what's going on." How do you react to that? AG: Well, it's not only Donald Trump. We have seen several people around the world with political responsibility saying, for instance, that Muslims refugees should not be received. And the reason why they say this is because they think that by doing or saying this, they are protecting the security of their countries. Now, I've been in government. I am very keen on the need for governments to protect the security of their countries and their people. But if you say, like that, in the US or in any European country, "We are going to close our doors to Muslim refugees," what you are saying is the best possible help for the propaganda of terrorist organizations. Because what you are saying — (Applause) What you are saying will be heard by all the Muslims in your own country, and it will pave the way for the recruitment and the mechanisms that, through technology, Daesh and al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, and all those other groups are today penetrating in our societies. And it's just telling them, "You are right, we are against you." So obviously, this is creating in societies that are all multiethnic, multi-religious, multicultural, this is creating a situation in which, really, it is much easier for the propaganda of these terrorist organizations to be effective in recruiting people for terror acts within the countries where these kinds of sentences are expressed. BG: Have the recent attacks in Paris and the reactions to them made your job more difficult? AG: Undoubtedly. BG: In what sense? AG: In the sense that, I mean, for many people the first reaction in relation to these kinds of terrorist attacks is: close all borders — not understanding that the terrorist problem in Europe is largely homegrown. We have thousands and thousands of European fighters in Syria and in Iraq, so this is not something that you solve by just not allowing Syrians to come in. And I must say, I am convinced that the passport that appeared, I believe, was put by the person who has blown — BG: — himself up, yeah. AG: [I believe] it was on purpose, because part of the strategies of Daesh is against refugees, because they see refugees as people that should be with the caliphate and are fleeing to the crusaders. And I think that is part of Daesh's strategy to make Europe react, closing its doors to Muslim refugees and having an hostility towards Muslims inside Europe, exactly to facilitate Daesh's work. And my deep belief is that it was not the refugee movement that triggered terrorism. I think, as I said, essentially terrorism in Europe is today a homegrown movement in relation to the global situation that we are facing, and what we need is exactly to prove these groups wrong, by welcoming and integrating effectively those that are coming from that part of the world. And another thing that I believe is that to a large extent, what we are today paying for in Europe is the failures of integration models that didn't work in the '60s, in the '70s, in the '80s, in relation to big migration flows that took place at that time and generated what is today in many of the people, for instance, of the second generation of communities, a situation of feeling marginalized, having no jobs, having improper education, living in some of the neighborhoods that are not adequately provided by public infrastructure. And this kind of uneasiness, sometimes even anger, that exists in this second generation is largely due to the failure of integration policies, to the failure of what should have been a much stronger investment in creating the conditions for people to live together and respect each other. For me it is clear. (Applause) For me it is clear that all societies will be multiethnic, multicultural, multi-religious in the future. To try to avoid it is, in my opinion, impossible. And for me it's a good thing that they will be like that, but I also recognize that, for that to work properly, you need a huge investment in the social cohesion of your own societies. And Europe, to a large extent, failed in that investment in the past few decades. BG: Question: You are stepping down from your job at the end of the year, after 10 years. If you look back at 2005, when you entered that office for the first time, what do you see? AG: Well, look: In 2005, we were helping one million people go back home in safety and dignity, because conflicts had ended. Last year, we helped 124,000. In 2005, we had about 38 million people displaced by conflict in the world. Today, we have more than 60 million. At that time, we had had, recently, some conflicts that were solved. Now, we see a multiplication of new conflicts and the old conflicts never died: Afghanistan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo. It is clear that the world today is much more dangerous than it was. It is clear that the capacity of the international community to prevent conflicts and to timely solve them, is, unfortunately, much worse than what it was 10 years ago. There are no clear power relations in the world, no global governance mechanisms that work, which means that we live in a situation where impunity and unpredictability tend to prevail, and that means that more and more people suffer, namely those that are displaced by conflicts. BG: It's a tradition in American politics that when a President leaves the Oval Office for the last time, he leaves a handwritten note on the desk for his successor that walks in a couple of hours later. If you had to write such a note to your successor, Filippo Grandi, what would you write? AG: Well, I don't think I would write any message. You know, one of the terrible things when one leaves an office is to try to become the backseat driver, always telling the new one what to do. So that, I will not do. If I had to say something to him, it would be, "Be yourself, and do your best." BG: Commissioner, thank you for the job you do. Thank you for coming to TED. (Applause)
Governments don't understand cyber warfare. We need hackers	{0: "Rodrigo Bijou's work focuses on the cross section of intelligence, data science and information security."}	TEDGlobal>London	In 2008, Burhan Hassan, age 17, boarded a flight from Minneapolis to the Horn of Africa. And while Burhan was the youngest recruit, he was not alone. Al-Shabaab managed to recruit over two dozen young men in their late teens and early 20s with a heavy presence on social media platforms like Facebook. With the Internet and other technologies, they've changed our everyday lives, but they've also changed recruitment, radicalization and the front lines of conflict today. What about the links connecting Twitter, Google and protesters fighting for democracy? These numbers represent Google's public DNS servers, effectively the only digital border crossing protesters had and could use to communicate with each other, to reach the outside world and to spread viral awareness of what was happening in their own country. Today, conflict is essentially borderless. If there are bounds to conflict today, they're bound by digital, not physical geography. And under all this is a vacuum of power where non-state actors, individuals and private organizations have the advantage over slow, outdated military and intelligence agencies. And this is because, in the digital age of conflict, there exists a feedback loop where new technologies, platforms like the ones I mentioned, and more disruptive ones, can be adapted, learned, and deployed by individuals and organizations faster than governments can react. To understand the pace of our own government thinking on this, I like to turn to something aptly named the Worldwide Threat Assessment, where every year the Director of National Intelligence in the US looks at the global threat landscape, and he says, "These are the threats, these are the details, and this is how we rank them." In 2007, there was absolutely no mention of cyber security. It took until 2011, when it came at the end, where other things, like West African drug trafficking, took precedence. In 2012, it crept up, still behind things like terrorism and proliferation. In 2013, it became the top threat, in 2014 and for the foreseeable future. What things like that show us is that there is a fundamental inability today on the part of governments to adapt and learn in digital conflict, where conflict can be immaterial, borderless, often wholly untraceable. And conflict isn't just online to offline, as we see with terrorist radicalization, but it goes the other way as well. We all know the horrible events that unfolded in Paris this year with the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks. What an individual hacker or a small group of anonymous individuals did was enter those social media conversations that so many of us took part in. #JeSuisCharlie. On Facebook, on Twitter, on Google, all sorts of places where millions of people, myself included, were talking about the events and saw images like this, the emotional, poignant image of a baby with "Je suis Charlie" on its wrist. And this turned into a weapon. What the hackers did was weaponize this image, where unsuspecting victims, like all of us in those conversations, saw this image, downloaded it but it was embedded with malware. And so when you downloaded this image, it hacked your system. It took six days to deploy a global malware campaign. The divide between physical and digital domains today ceases to exist, where we have offline attacks like those in Paris appropriated for online hacks. And it goes the other way as well, with recruitment. We see online radicalization of teens, who can then be deployed globally for offline terrorist attacks. With all of this, we see that there's a new 21st century battle brewing, and governments don't necessarily take a part. So in another case, Anonymous vs. Los Zetas. In early September 2011 in Mexico, Los Zetas, one of the most powerful drug cartels, hung two bloggers with a sign that said, "This is what will happen to all Internet busybodies." A week later, they beheaded a young girl. They severed her head, put it on top of her computer with a similar note. And taking the digital counteroffensive because governments couldn't even understand what was going on or act, Anonymous, a group we might not associate as the most positive force in the world, took action, not in cyber attacks, but threatening information to be free. On social media, they said, "We will release information that ties prosecutors and governors to corrupt drug deals with the cartel." And escalating that conflict, Los Zetas said, "We will kill 10 people for every bit of information you release." And so it ended there because it would become too gruesome to continue. But what was powerful about this was that anonymous individuals, not federal policia, not military, not politicians, could strike fear deep into the heart of one of the most powerful, violent organizations in the world. And so we live in an era that lacks the clarity of the past in conflict, in who we're fighting, in the motivations behind attacks, in the tools and techniques used, and how quickly they evolve. And the question still remains: what can individuals, organizations and governments do? For answers to these questions, it starts with individuals, and I think peer-to-peer security is the answer. Those people in relationships that bought over teens online, we can do that with peer-to-peer security. Individuals have more power than ever before to affect national and international security. And we can create those positive peer-to-peer relationships on and offline, we can support and educate the next generation of hackers, like myself, instead of saying, "You can either be a criminal or join the NSA." That matters today. And it's not just individuals — it's organizations, corporations even. They have an advantage to act across more borders, more effectively and more rapidly than governments can, and there's a set of real incentives there. It's profitable and valuable to be seen as trustworthy in the digital age, and will only be more so in future generations to come. But we still can't ignore government, because that's who we turn to for collective action to keep us safe and secure. But we see where that's gotten us so far, where there's an inability to adapt and learn in digital conflict, where at the highest levels of leadership, the Director of the CIA, Secretary of Defense, they say, "Cyber Pearl Harbor will happen." "Cyber 9/11 is imminent." But this only makes us more fearful, not more secure. By banning encryption in favor of mass surveillance and mass hacking, sure, GCHQ and the NSA can spy on you. But that doesn't mean that they're the only ones that can. Capabilities are cheap, even free. Technical ability is rising around the world, and individuals and small groups have the advantage. So today it might just be the NSA and GCHQ, but who's to say that the Chinese can't find that backdoor? Or in another generation, some kid in his basement in Estonia? And so I would say that it's not what governments can do, it's that they can't. Governments today need to give up power and control in order to help make us more secure. Giving up mass surveillance and hacking and instead fixing those backdoors means that, yeah, they can't spy on us, but neither can the Chinese or that hacker in Estonia a generation from now. And government support for technologies like Tor and Bitcoin mean giving up control, but it means that developers, translators, anybody with an Internet connection, in countries like Cuba, Iran and China, can sell their skills, their products, in the global marketplace, but more importantly sell their ideas, show us what's happening in their own countries. And so it should be not fearful, it should be inspiring to the same governments that fought for civil rights, free speech and democracy in the great wars of the last century, that today, for the first time in human history, we have a technical opportunity to make billions of people safer around the world that we've never had before in human history. It should be inspiring. (Applause)
An underwater art museum, teeming with life	{0: "Jason deCaires Taylor's underwater installations offer views of another world, where the artistic efforts of man meet the vivifying power of nature."}	Mission Blue II	Ten years ago, I had my first exhibition here. I had no idea if it would work or was at all possible, but with a few small steps and a very steep learning curve, I made my first sculpture, called "The Lost Correspondent." Teaming up with a marine biologist and a local dive center, I submerged the work off the coast of Grenada, in an area decimated by Hurricane Ivan. And then this incredible thing happened. It transformed. One sculpture became two. Two quickly became 26. And before I knew it, we had the world's first underwater sculpture park. In 2009, I moved to Mexico and started by casting local fisherman. This grew to a small community, to almost an entire movement of people in defense of the sea. And then finally, to an underwater museum, with over 500 living sculptures. Gardening, it seems, is not just for greenhouses. We've since scaled up the designs: "Ocean Atlas," in the Bahamas, rising 16 feet up to the surface and weighing over 40 tons, to now currently in Lanzarote, where I'm making an underwater botanical garden, the first of its kind in the Atlantic Ocean. Each project, we use materials and designs that help encourage life; a long-lasting pH-neutral cement provides a stable and permanent platform. It is textured to allow coral polyps to attach. We position them down current from natural reefs so that after spawning, there's areas for them to settle. The formations are all configured so that they aggregate fish on a really large scale. Even this VW Beetle has an internal living habitat to encourage crustaceans such as lobsters and sea urchins. So why exhibit my work in the ocean? Because honestly, it's really not easy. When you're in the middle of the sea under a hundred-foot crane, trying to lower eight tons down to the sea floor, you start to wonder whether I shouldn't have taken up watercolor painting instead. (Laughter) But in the end, the results always blow my mind. (Music) The ocean is the most incredible exhibition space an artist could ever wish for. You have amazing lighting effects changing by the hour, explosions of sand covering the sculptures in a cloud of mystery, a unique timeless quality and the procession of inquisitive visitors, each lending their own special touch to the site. (Music) But over the years, I've realized that the greatest thing about what we do, the really humbling thing about the work, is that as soon as we submerge the sculptures, they're not ours anymore, because as soon as we sink them, the sculptures, they belong to the sea. As new reefs form, a new world literally starts to evolve, a world that continuously amazes me. It's a bit of a cliché, but nothing man-made can ever match the imagination of nature. Sponges look like veins across the faces. Staghorn coral morphs the form. Fireworms scrawl white lines as they feed. Tunicates explode from the faces. Sea urchins crawl across the bodies feeding at night. Coralline algae applies a kind of purple paint. The deepest red I've ever seen in my life lives underwater. Gorgonian fans oscillate with the waves. Purple sponges breathe water like air. And grey angelfish glide silently overhead. And the amazing response we've had to these works tells me that we've managed to plug into something really primal, because it seems that these images translate across the world, and that's made me focus on my responsibility as an artist and about what I'm trying to achieve. I'm standing here today on this boat in the middle of the ocean, and this couldn't be a better place to talk about the really, really important effect of my work. Because as we all know, our reefs are dying, and our oceans are in trouble. So here's the thing: the most used, searched and shared image of all my work thus far is this. And I think this is for a reason, or at least I hope it is. What I really hope is that people are beginning to understand that when we think of the environment and the destruction of nature, that we need to start thinking about our oceans, too. Since building these sites, we've seen some phenomenal and unexpected results. Besides creating over 800 square meters of new habitats and living reef, visitors to the marine park in Cancun now divide half their time between the museum and the natural reefs, providing significant rest for natural, overstressed areas. Visitors to "Ocean Atlas" in the Bahamas highlighted a leak from a nearby oil refinery. The subsequent international media forced the local government to pledge 10 million dollars in coastal cleanups. The sculpture park in Grenada was instrumental in the government designating a spot — a marine-protected area. Entrance fees to the park now help fund park rangers to manage tourism and fishing quotas. The site was actually listed as a "Wonder of the World" by National Geographic. So why are we all here today in this room? What do we all have in common? I think we all share a fear that we don't protect our oceans enough. And one way of thinking about this is that we don't regard our oceans as sacred, and we should. When we see incredible places — like the Himalayas or the La Sagrada Família, or the Mona Lisa, even — when we see these incredible places and things, we understand their importance. We call them sacred, and we do our best to cherish them, to protect them and to keep them safe. But in order to do that, we are the ones that have to assign that value; otherwise, it will be desecrated by someone who doesn't understand that value. So I want to finish up tonight by talking about sacred things. When we were naming the site in Cancun, we named it a museum for a very important and simple reason: museums are places of preservation, of conservation and of education. They're places where we keep objects of great value to us, where we simply treasure them for them being themselves. If someone was to throw an egg at the Sistine Chapel, we'd all go crazy. If someone wanted to build a seven-star hotel at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, then we would laugh them out of Arizona. Yet every day we dredge, pollute and overfish our oceans. And I think it's easier for us to do that, because when we see the ocean, we don't see the havoc we're wreaking. Because for most people, the ocean is like this. And it's really hard to think of something that's just so plain and so enormous, as fragile. It's simply too massive, too vast, too endless. And what do you see here? I think most people actually look past to the horizon. So I think there's a real danger that we never really see the sea, and if we don't really see it, if it doesn't have its own iconography, if we miss its majesty, then there's a big danger that we take it for granted. Cancun is famous for spring break, tequila and foam parties. And its waters are where frat boys can ride around on Jet Skis and banana boats. But because of our work there, there's now a little corner of Cancun that is simply precious for being itself. And we don't want to stop in Grenada, in Cancun or the Bahamas. Just last month, I installed these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Thames River, in central London, right in front of the Houses of Parliament, putting a stark message about climate change in front of the people that have the power to help change things. Because for me, this is just the beginning of the mission. We want to team up with other inventors, creators, philanthropists, educators, biologists, to see better futures for our oceans. And we want to see beyond sculpture, beyond art, even. Say you're a 14-year-old kid from the city, and you've never seen the ocean. And instead of getting taken to the natural history museum or an aquarium, you get taken out to the ocean, to an underwater Noah's Ark, which you can access through a dry-glass viewing tunnel, where you can see all the wildlife of the land be colonized by the wildlife of the ocean. Clearly, it would blow your mind. So let's think big and let's think deep. Who knows where our imagination and willpower can lead us? I hope that by bringing our art into the ocean, that not only do we take advantage of amazing creativity and visual impact of the setting, but that we are also giving something back, and by encouraging new environments to thrive, and in some way opening up a new — or maybe it's a really old way of seeing the seas: as delicate, precious places, worthy of our protection. Our oceans are sacred. Thank you. (Applause)
What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness	{0: 'Robert Waldinger is the Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history.'}	TEDxBeaconStreet	What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life? If you were going to invest now in your future best self, where would you put your time and your energy? There was a recent survey of millennials asking them what their most important life goals were, and over 80 percent said that a major life goal for them was to get rich. And another 50 percent of those same young adults said that another major life goal was to become famous. (Laughter) And we're constantly told to lean in to work, to push harder and achieve more. We're given the impression that these are the things that we need to go after in order to have a good life. Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to get. Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative. But what if we could watch entire lives as they unfold through time? What if we could study people from the time that they were teenagers all the way into old age to see what really keeps people happy and healthy? We did that. The Harvard Study of Adult Development may be the longest study of adult life that's ever been done. For 75 years, we've tracked the lives of 724 men, year after year, asking about their work, their home lives, their health, and of course asking all along the way without knowing how their life stories were going to turn out. Studies like this are exceedingly rare. Almost all projects of this kind fall apart within a decade because too many people drop out of the study, or funding for the research dries up, or the researchers get distracted, or they die, and nobody moves the ball further down the field. But through a combination of luck and the persistence of several generations of researchers, this study has survived. About 60 of our original 724 men are still alive, still participating in the study, most of them in their 90s. And we are now beginning to study the more than 2,000 children of these men. And I'm the fourth director of the study. Since 1938, we've tracked the lives of two groups of men. The first group started in the study when they were sophomores at Harvard College. They all finished college during World War II, and then most went off to serve in the war. And the second group that we've followed was a group of boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods, boys who were chosen for the study specifically because they were from some of the most troubled and disadvantaged families in the Boston of the 1930s. Most lived in tenements, many without hot and cold running water. When they entered the study, all of these teenagers were interviewed. They were given medical exams. We went to their homes and we interviewed their parents. And then these teenagers grew up into adults who entered all walks of life. They became factory workers and lawyers and bricklayers and doctors, one President of the United States. Some developed alcoholism. A few developed schizophrenia. Some climbed the social ladder from the bottom all the way to the very top, and some made that journey in the opposite direction. The founders of this study would never in their wildest dreams have imagined that I would be standing here today, 75 years later, telling you that the study still continues. Every two years, our patient and dedicated research staff calls up our men and asks them if we can send them yet one more set of questions about their lives. Many of the inner city Boston men ask us, "Why do you keep wanting to study me? My life just isn't that interesting." The Harvard men never ask that question. (Laughter) To get the clearest picture of these lives, we don't just send them questionnaires. We interview them in their living rooms. We get their medical records from their doctors. We draw their blood, we scan their brains, we talk to their children. We videotape them talking with their wives about their deepest concerns. And when, about a decade ago, we finally asked the wives if they would join us as members of the study, many of the women said, "You know, it's about time." (Laughter) So what have we learned? What are the lessons that come from the tens of thousands of pages of information that we've generated on these lives? Well, the lessons aren't about wealth or fame or working harder and harder. The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period. We've learned three big lessons about relationships. The first is that social connections are really good for us, and that loneliness kills. It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected. And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic. People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely. And the sad fact is that at any given time, more than one in five Americans will report that they're lonely. And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd and you can be lonely in a marriage, so the second big lesson that we learned is that it's not just the number of friends you have, and it's not whether or not you're in a committed relationship, but it's the quality of your close relationships that matters. It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health. High-conflict marriages, for example, without much affection, turn out to be very bad for our health, perhaps worse than getting divorced. And living in the midst of good, warm relationships is protective. Once we had followed our men all the way into their 80s, we wanted to look back at them at midlife and to see if we could predict who was going to grow into a happy, healthy octogenarian and who wasn't. And when we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50, it wasn't their middle age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. And good, close relationships seem to buffer us from some of the slings and arrows of getting old. Our most happily partnered men and women reported, in their 80s, that on the days when they had more physical pain, their mood stayed just as happy. But the people who were in unhappy relationships, on the days when they reported more physical pain, it was magnified by more emotional pain. And the third big lesson that we learned about relationships and our health is that good relationships don't just protect our bodies, they protect our brains. It turns out that being in a securely attached relationship to another person in your 80s is protective, that the people who are in relationships where they really feel they can count on the other person in times of need, those people's memories stay sharper longer. And the people in relationships where they feel they really can't count on the other one, those are the people who experience earlier memory decline. And those good relationships, they don't have to be smooth all the time. Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker with each other day in and day out, but as long as they felt that they could really count on the other when the going got tough, those arguments didn't take a toll on their memories. So this message, that good, close relationships are good for our health and well-being, this is wisdom that's as old as the hills. Why is this so hard to get and so easy to ignore? Well, we're human. What we'd really like is a quick fix, something we can get that'll make our lives good and keep them that way. Relationships are messy and they're complicated and the hard work of tending to family and friends, it's not sexy or glamorous. It's also lifelong. It never ends. The people in our 75-year study who were the happiest in retirement were the people who had actively worked to replace workmates with new playmates. Just like the millennials in that recent survey, many of our men when they were starting out as young adults really believed that fame and wealth and high achievement were what they needed to go after to have a good life. But over and over, over these 75 years, our study has shown that the people who fared the best were the people who leaned in to relationships, with family, with friends, with community. So what about you? Let's say you're 25, or you're 40, or you're 60. What might leaning in to relationships even look like? Well, the possibilities are practically endless. It might be something as simple as replacing screen time with people time or livening up a stale relationship by doing something new together, long walks or date nights, or reaching out to that family member who you haven't spoken to in years, because those all-too-common family feuds take a terrible toll on the people who hold the grudges. I'd like to close with a quote from Mark Twain. More than a century ago, he was looking back on his life, and he wrote this: "There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that." The good life is built with good relationships. Thank you. (Applause)
Have we reached the end of physics?	{0: 'Harry Cliff looks for answers to questions about the origins of the universe and the laws of nature. '}	TEDGlobal>Geneva	A hundred years ago this month, a 36-year-old Albert Einstein stood up in front of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin to present a radical new theory of space, time and gravity: the general theory of relativity. General relativity is unquestionably Einstein's masterpiece, a theory which reveals the workings of the universe at the grandest scales, capturing in one beautiful line of algebra everything from why apples fall from trees to the beginning of time and space. 1915 must have been an exciting year to be a physicist. Two new ideas were turning the subject on its head. One was Einstein's theory of relativity, the other was arguably even more revolutionary: quantum mechanics, a mind-meltingly strange yet stunningly successful new way of understanding the microworld, the world of atoms and particles. Over the last century, these two ideas have utterly transformed our understanding of the universe. It's thanks to relativity and quantum mechanics that we've learned what the universe is made from, how it began and how it continues to evolve. A hundred years on, we now find ourselves at another turning point in physics, but what's at stake now is rather different. The next few years may tell us whether we'll be able to continue to increase our understanding of nature, or whether maybe for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer, not because we don't have the brains or technology, but because the laws of physics themselves forbid it. This is the essential problem: the universe is far, far too interesting. Relativity and quantum mechanics appear to suggest that the universe should be a boring place. It should be dark, lethal and lifeless. But when we look around us, we see we live in a universe full of interesting stuff, full of stars, planets, trees, squirrels. The question is, ultimately, why does all this interesting stuff exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? This contradiction is the most pressing problem in fundamental physics, and in the next few years, we may find out whether we'll ever be able to solve it. At the heart of this problem are two numbers, two extremely dangerous numbers. These are properties of the universe that we can measure, and they're extremely dangerous because if they were different, even by a tiny bit, then the universe as we know it would not exist. The first of these numbers is associated with the discovery that was made a few kilometers from this hall, at CERN, home of this machine, the largest scientific device ever built by the human race, the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC whizzes subatomic particles around a 27-kilometer ring, getting them closer and closer to the speed of light before smashing them into each other inside gigantic particle detectors. On July 4, 2012, physicists at CERN announced to the world that they'd spotted a new fundamental particle being created at the violent collisions at the LHC: the Higgs boson. Now, if you followed the news at the time, you'll have seen a lot of physicists getting very excited indeed, and you'd be forgiven for thinking we get that way every time we discover a new particle. Well, that is kind of true, but the Higgs boson is particularly special. We all got so excited because finding the Higgs proves the existence of a cosmic energy field. Now, you may have trouble imagining an energy field, but we've all experienced one. If you've ever held a magnet close to a piece of metal and felt a force pulling across that gap, then you've felt the effect of a field. And the Higgs field is a little bit like a magnetic field, except it has a constant value everywhere. It's all around us right now. We can't see it or touch it, but if it wasn't there, we would not exist. The Higgs field gives mass to the fundamental particles that we're made from. If it wasn't there, those particles would have no mass, and no atoms could form and there would be no us. But there is something deeply mysterious about the Higgs field. Relativity and quantum mechanics tell us that it has two natural settings, a bit like a light switch. It should either be off, so that it has a zero value everywhere in space, or it should be on so it has an absolutely enormous value. In both of these scenarios, atoms could not exist, and therefore all the other interesting stuff that we see around us in the universe would not exist. In reality, the Higgs field is just slightly on, not zero but 10,000 trillion times weaker than its fully on value, a bit like a light switch that's got stuck just before the off position. And this value is crucial. If it were a tiny bit different, then there would be no physical structure in the universe. So this is the first of our dangerous numbers, the strength of the Higgs field. Theorists have spent decades trying to understand why it has this very peculiarly fine-tuned number, and they've come up with a number of possible explanations. They have sexy-sounding names like "supersymmetry" or "large extra dimensions." I'm not going to go into the details of these ideas now, but the key point is this: if any of them explained this weirdly fine-tuned value of the Higgs field, then we should see new particles being created at the LHC along with the Higgs boson. So far, though, we've not seen any sign of them. But there's actually an even worse example of this kind of fine-tuning of a dangerous number, and this time it comes from the other end of the scale, from studying the universe at vast distances. One of the most important consequences of Einstein's general theory of relativity was the discovery that the universe began as a rapid expansion of space and time 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang. Now, according to early versions of the Big Bang theory, the universe has been expanding ever since with gravity gradually putting the brakes on that expansion. But in 1998, astronomers made the stunning discovery that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up. The universe is getting bigger and bigger faster and faster driven by a mysterious repulsive force called dark energy. Now, whenever you hear the word "dark" in physics, you should get very suspicious because it probably means we don't know what we're talking about. (Laughter) We don't know what dark energy is, but the best idea is that it's the energy of empty space itself, the energy of the vacuum. Now, if you use good old quantum mechanics to work out how strong dark energy should be, you get an absolutely astonishing result. You find that dark energy should be 10 to the power of 120 times stronger than the value we observe from astronomy. That's one with 120 zeroes after it. This is a number so mind-bogglingly huge that it's impossible to get your head around. We often use the word "astronomical" when we're talking about big numbers. Well, even that one won't do here. This number is bigger than any number in astronomy. It's a thousand trillion trillion trillion times bigger than the number of atoms in the entire universe. So that's a pretty bad prediction. In fact, it's been called the worst prediction in physics, and this is more than just a theoretical curiosity. If dark energy were anywhere near this strong, then the universe would have been torn apart, stars and galaxies could not form, and we would not be here. So this is the second of those dangerous numbers, the strength of dark energy, and explaining it requires an even more fantastic level of fine-tuning than we saw for the Higgs field. But unlike the Higgs field, this number has no known explanation. The hope was that a complete combination of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is the theory of the universe at grand scales, with quantum mechanics, the theory of the universe at small scales, might provide a solution. Einstein himself spent most of his later years on a futile search for a unified theory of physics, and physicists have kept at it ever since. One of the most promising candidates for a unified theory is string theory, and the essential idea is, if you could zoom in on the fundamental particles that make up our world, you'd see actually that they're not particles at all, but tiny vibrating strings of energy, with each frequency of vibration corresponding to a different particle, a bit like musical notes on a guitar string. So it's a rather elegant, almost poetic way of looking at the world, but it has one catastrophic problem. It turns out that string theory isn't one theory at all, but a whole collection of theories. It's been estimated, in fact, that there are 10 to the 500 different versions of string theory. Each one would describe a different universe with different laws of physics. Now, critics say this makes string theory unscientific. You can't disprove the theory. But others actually turned this on its head and said, well, maybe this apparent failure is string theory's greatest triumph. What if all of these 10 to the 500 different possible universes actually exist out there somewhere in some grand multiverse? Suddenly we can understand the weirdly fine-tuned values of these two dangerous numbers. In most of the multiverse, dark energy is so strong that the universe gets torn apart, or the Higgs field is so weak that no atoms can form. We live in one of the places in the multiverse where the two numbers are just right. We live in a Goldilocks universe. Now, this idea is extremely controversial, and it's easy to see why. If we follow this line of thinking, then we will never be able to answer the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" In most of the multiverse, there is nothing, and we live in one of the few places where the laws of physics allow there to be something. Even worse, we can't test the idea of the multiverse. We can't access these other universes, so there's no way of knowing whether they're there or not. So we're in an extremely frustrating position. That doesn't mean the multiverse doesn't exist. There are other planets, other stars, other galaxies, so why not other universes? The problem is, it's unlikely we'll ever know for sure. Now, the idea of the multiverse has been around for a while, but in the last few years, we've started to get the first solid hints that this line of reasoning may get born out. Despite high hopes for the first run of the LHC, what we were looking for there — we were looking for new theories of physics: supersymmetry or large extra dimensions that could explain this weirdly fine-tuned value of the Higgs field. But despite high hopes, the LHC revealed a barren subatomic wilderness populated only by a lonely Higgs boson. My experiment published paper after paper where we glumly had to conclude that we saw no signs of new physics. The stakes now could not be higher. This summer, the LHC began its second phase of operation with an energy almost double what we achieved in the first run. What particle physicists are all desperately hoping for are signs of new particles, micro black holes, or maybe something totally unexpected emerging from the violent collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. If so, then we can continue this long journey that began 100 years ago with Albert Einstein towards an ever deeper understanding of the laws of nature. But if, in two or three years' time, when the LHC switches off again for a second long shutdown, we've found nothing but the Higgs boson, then we may be entering a new era in physics: an era where there are weird features of the universe that we cannot explain; an era where we have hints that we live in a multiverse that lies frustratingly forever beyond our reach; an era where we will never be able to answer the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Harry, even if you just said the science may not have some answers, I would like to ask you a couple of questions, and the first is: building something like the LHC is a generational project. I just mentioned, introducing you, that we live in a short-term world. How do you think so long term, projecting yourself out a generation when building something like this? Harry Cliff: I was very lucky that I joined the experiment I work on at the LHC in 2008, just as we were switching on, and there are people in my research group who have been working on it for three decades, their entire careers on one machine. So I think the first conversations about the LHC were in 1976, and you start planning the machine without the technology that you know you're going to need to be able to build it. So the computing power did not exist in the early '90s when design work began in earnest. One of the big detectors which record these collisions, they didn't think there was technology that could withstand the radiation that would be created in the LHC, so there was basically a lump of lead in the middle of this object with some detectors around the outside, but subsequently we have developed technology. So you have to rely on people's ingenuity, that they will solve the problems, but it may be a decade or more down the line. BG: China just announced two or three weeks ago that they intend to build a supercollider twice the size of the LHC. I was wondering how you and your colleagues welcome the news. HC: Size isn't everything, Bruno. BG: I'm sure. I'm sure. (Laughter) It sounds funny for a particle physicist to say that. But I mean, seriously, it's great news. So building a machine like the LHC requires countries from all over the world to pool their resources. No one nation can afford to build a machine this large, apart from maybe China, because they can mobilize huge amounts of resources, manpower and money to build machines like this. So it's only a good thing. What they're really planning to do is to build a machine that will study the Higgs boson in detail and could give us some clues as to whether these new ideas, like supersymmetry, are really out there, so it's great news for physics, I think. BG: Harry, thank you. HC: Thank you very much. (Applause)
How to use data to make a hit TV show	{0: 'After making a splash in the field of bioinformatics, Sebastian Wernicke moved on to the corporate sphere, where he motivates and manages multidimensional projects.'}	TEDxCambridge	Roy Price is a man that most of you have probably never heard about, even though he may have been responsible for 22 somewhat mediocre minutes of your life on April 19, 2013. He may have also been responsible for 22 very entertaining minutes, but not very many of you. And all of that goes back to a decision that Roy had to make about three years ago. So you see, Roy Price is a senior executive with Amazon Studios. That's the TV production company of Amazon. He's 47 years old, slim, spiky hair, describes himself on Twitter as "movies, TV, technology, tacos." And Roy Price has a very responsible job, because it's his responsibility to pick the shows, the original content that Amazon is going to make. And of course that's a highly competitive space. I mean, there are so many TV shows already out there, that Roy can't just choose any show. He has to find shows that are really, really great. So in other words, he has to find shows that are on the very right end of this curve here. So this curve here is the rating distribution of about 2,500 TV shows on the website IMDB, and the rating goes from one to 10, and the height here shows you how many shows get that rating. So if your show gets a rating of nine points or higher, that's a winner. Then you have a top two percent show. That's shows like "Breaking Bad," "Game of Thrones," "The Wire," so all of these shows that are addictive, whereafter you've watched a season, your brain is basically like, "Where can I get more of these episodes?" That kind of show. On the left side, just for clarity, here on that end, you have a show called "Toddlers and Tiaras" — (Laughter) — which should tell you enough about what's going on on that end of the curve. Now, Roy Price is not worried about getting on the left end of the curve, because I think you would have to have some serious brainpower to undercut "Toddlers and Tiaras." So what he's worried about is this middle bulge here, the bulge of average TV, you know, those shows that aren't really good or really bad, they don't really get you excited. So he needs to make sure that he's really on the right end of this. So the pressure is on, and of course it's also the first time that Amazon is even doing something like this, so Roy Price does not want to take any chances. He wants to engineer success. He needs a guaranteed success, and so what he does is, he holds a competition. So he takes a bunch of ideas for TV shows, and from those ideas, through an evaluation, they select eight candidates for TV shows, and then he just makes the first episode of each one of these shows and puts them online for free for everyone to watch. And so when Amazon is giving out free stuff, you're going to take it, right? So millions of viewers are watching those episodes. What they don't realize is that, while they're watching their shows, actually, they are being watched. They are being watched by Roy Price and his team, who record everything. They record when somebody presses play, when somebody presses pause, what parts they skip, what parts they watch again. So they collect millions of data points, because they want to have those data points to then decide which show they should make. And sure enough, so they collect all the data, they do all the data crunching, and an answer emerges, and the answer is, "Amazon should do a sitcom about four Republican US Senators." They did that show. So does anyone know the name of the show? (Audience: "Alpha House.") Yes, "Alpha House," but it seems like not too many of you here remember that show, actually, because it didn't turn out that great. It's actually just an average show, actually — literally, in fact, because the average of this curve here is at 7.4, and "Alpha House" lands at 7.5, so a slightly above average show, but certainly not what Roy Price and his team were aiming for. Meanwhile, however, at about the same time, at another company, another executive did manage to land a top show using data analysis, and his name is Ted, Ted Sarandos, who is the Chief Content Officer of Netflix, and just like Roy, he's on a constant mission to find that great TV show, and he uses data as well to do that, except he does it a little bit differently. So instead of holding a competition, what he did — and his team of course — was they looked at all the data they already had about Netflix viewers, you know, the ratings they give their shows, the viewing histories, what shows people like, and so on. And then they use that data to discover all of these little bits and pieces about the audience: what kinds of shows they like, what kind of producers, what kind of actors. And once they had all of these pieces together, they took a leap of faith, and they decided to license not a sitcom about four Senators but a drama series about a single Senator. You guys know the show? (Laughter) Yes, "House of Cards," and Netflix of course, nailed it with that show, at least for the first two seasons. (Laughter) (Applause) "House of Cards" gets a 9.1 rating on this curve, so it's exactly where they wanted it to be. Now, the question of course is, what happened here? So you have two very competitive, data-savvy companies. They connect all of these millions of data points, and then it works beautifully for one of them, and it doesn't work for the other one. So why? Because logic kind of tells you that this should be working all the time. I mean, if you're collecting millions of data points on a decision you're going to make, then you should be able to make a pretty good decision. You have 200 years of statistics to rely on. You're amplifying it with very powerful computers. The least you could expect is good TV, right? And if data analysis does not work that way, then it actually gets a little scary, because we live in a time where we're turning to data more and more to make very serious decisions that go far beyond TV. Does anyone here know the company Multi-Health Systems? No one. OK, that's good actually. OK, so Multi-Health Systems is a software company, and I hope that nobody here in this room ever comes into contact with that software, because if you do, it means you're in prison. (Laughter) If someone here in the US is in prison, and they apply for parole, then it's very likely that data analysis software from that company will be used in determining whether to grant that parole. So it's the same principle as Amazon and Netflix, but now instead of deciding whether a TV show is going to be good or bad, you're deciding whether a person is going to be good or bad. And mediocre TV, 22 minutes, that can be pretty bad, but more years in prison, I guess, even worse. And unfortunately, there is actually some evidence that this data analysis, despite having lots of data, does not always produce optimum results. And that's not because a company like Multi-Health Systems doesn't know what to do with data. Even the most data-savvy companies get it wrong. Yes, even Google gets it wrong sometimes. In 2009, Google announced that they were able, with data analysis, to predict outbreaks of influenza, the nasty kind of flu, by doing data analysis on their Google searches. And it worked beautifully, and it made a big splash in the news, including the pinnacle of scientific success: a publication in the journal "Nature." It worked beautifully for year after year after year, until one year it failed. And nobody could even tell exactly why. It just didn't work that year, and of course that again made big news, including now a retraction of a publication from the journal "Nature." So even the most data-savvy companies, Amazon and Google, they sometimes get it wrong. And despite all those failures, data is moving rapidly into real-life decision-making — into the workplace, law enforcement, medicine. So we should better make sure that data is helping. Now, personally I've seen a lot of this struggle with data myself, because I work in computational genetics, which is also a field where lots of very smart people are using unimaginable amounts of data to make pretty serious decisions like deciding on a cancer therapy or developing a drug. And over the years, I've noticed a sort of pattern or kind of rule, if you will, about the difference between successful decision-making with data and unsuccessful decision-making, and I find this a pattern worth sharing, and it goes something like this. So whenever you're solving a complex problem, you're doing essentially two things. The first one is, you take that problem apart into its bits and pieces so that you can deeply analyze those bits and pieces, and then of course you do the second part. You put all of these bits and pieces back together again to come to your conclusion. And sometimes you have to do it over again, but it's always those two things: taking apart and putting back together again. And now the crucial thing is that data and data analysis is only good for the first part. Data and data analysis, no matter how powerful, can only help you taking a problem apart and understanding its pieces. It's not suited to put those pieces back together again and then to come to a conclusion. There's another tool that can do that, and we all have it, and that tool is the brain. If there's one thing a brain is good at, it's taking bits and pieces back together again, even when you have incomplete information, and coming to a good conclusion, especially if it's the brain of an expert. And that's why I believe that Netflix was so successful, because they used data and brains where they belong in the process. They use data to first understand lots of pieces about their audience that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to understand at that depth, but then the decision to take all these bits and pieces and put them back together again and make a show like "House of Cards," that was nowhere in the data. Ted Sarandos and his team made that decision to license that show, which also meant, by the way, that they were taking a pretty big personal risk with that decision. And Amazon, on the other hand, they did it the wrong way around. They used data all the way to drive their decision-making, first when they held their competition of TV ideas, then when they selected "Alpha House" to make as a show. Which of course was a very safe decision for them, because they could always point at the data, saying, "This is what the data tells us." But it didn't lead to the exceptional results that they were hoping for. So data is of course a massively useful tool to make better decisions, but I believe that things go wrong when data is starting to drive those decisions. No matter how powerful, data is just a tool, and to keep that in mind, I find this device here quite useful. Many of you will ... (Laughter) Before there was data, this was the decision-making device to use. (Laughter) Many of you will know this. This toy here is called the Magic 8 Ball, and it's really amazing, because if you have a decision to make, a yes or no question, all you have to do is you shake the ball, and then you get an answer — "Most Likely" — right here in this window in real time. I'll have it out later for tech demos. (Laughter) Now, the thing is, of course — so I've made some decisions in my life where, in hindsight, I should have just listened to the ball. But, you know, of course, if you have the data available, you want to replace this with something much more sophisticated, like data analysis to come to a better decision. But that does not change the basic setup. So the ball may get smarter and smarter and smarter, but I believe it's still on us to make the decisions if we want to achieve something extraordinary, on the right end of the curve. And I find that a very encouraging message, in fact, that even in the face of huge amounts of data, it still pays off to make decisions, to be an expert in what you're doing and take risks. Because in the end, it's not data, it's risks that will land you on the right end of the curve. Thank you. (Applause)
How we'll find life on other planets	{0: 'Aomawa Shields studies the climate and habitability of planets outside of the Solar System.'}	TED2015	I am in search of another planet in the universe where life exists. I can't see this planet with my naked eyes or even with the most powerful telescopes we currently possess. But I know that it's there. And understanding contradictions that occur in nature will help us find it. On our planet, where there's water, there's life. So we look for planets that orbit at just the right distance from their stars. At this distance, shown in blue on this diagram for stars of different temperatures, planets could be warm enough for water to flow on their surfaces as lakes and oceans where life might reside. Some astronomers focus their time and energy on finding planets at these distances from their stars. What I do picks up where their job ends. I model the possible climates of exoplanets. And here's why that's important: there are many factors besides distance from its star that control whether a planet can support life. Take the planet Venus. It's named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, because of its benign, ethereal appearance in the sky. But spacecraft measurements revealed a different story. The surface temperature is close to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, 500 Celsius. That's hot enough to melt lead. Its thick atmosphere, not its distance from the sun, is the reason. It causes a greenhouse effect on steroids, trapping heat from the sun and scorching the planet's surface. The reality totally contradicted initial perceptions of this planet. From these lessons from our own solar system, we've learned that a planet's atmosphere is crucial to its climate and potential to host life. We don't know what the atmospheres of these planets are like because the planets are so small and dim compared to their stars and so far away from us. For example, one of the closest planets that could support surface water — it's called Gliese 667 Cc — such a glamorous name, right, nice phone number for a name — it's 23 light years away. So that's more than 100 trillion miles. Trying to measure the atmospheric composition of an exoplanet passing in front of its host star is hard. It's like trying to see a fruit fly passing in front of a car's headlight. OK, now imagine that car is 100 trillion miles away, and you want to know the precise color of that fly. So I use computer models to calculate the kind of atmosphere a planet would need to have a suitable climate for water and life. Here's an artist's concept of the planet Kepler-62f, with the Earth for reference. It's 1,200 light years away, and just 40 percent larger than Earth. Our NSF-funded work found that it could be warm enough for open water from many types of atmospheres and orientations of its orbit. So I'd like future telescopes to follow up on this planet to look for signs of life. Ice on a planet's surface is also important for climate. Ice absorbs longer, redder wavelengths of light, and reflects shorter, bluer light. That's why the iceberg in this photo looks so blue. The redder light from the sun is absorbed on its way through the ice. Only the blue light makes it all the way to the bottom. Then it gets reflected back to up to our eyes and we see blue ice. My models show that planets orbiting cooler stars could actually be warmer than planets orbiting hotter stars. There's another contradiction — that ice absorbs the longer wavelength light from cooler stars, and that light, that energy, heats the ice. Using climate models to explore how these contradictions can affect planetary climate is vital to the search for life elsewhere. And it's no surprise that this is my specialty. I'm an African-American female astronomer and a classically trained actor who loves to wear makeup and read fashion magazines, so I am uniquely positioned to appreciate contradictions in nature — (Laughter) (Applause) ... and how they can inform our search for the next planet where life exists. My organization, Rising Stargirls, teaches astronomy to middle-school girls of color, using theater, writing and visual art. That's another contradiction — science and art don't often go together, but interweaving them can help these girls bring their whole selves to what they learn, and maybe one day join the ranks of astronomers who are full of contradictions, and use their backgrounds to discover, once and for all, that we are truly not alone in the universe. Thank you. (Applause)
4 ways we can avoid a catastrophic drought	{0: 'David Sedlak’s research focuses the long-term goal of developing cost-effective, safe and sustainable systems to manage water resources.'}	TEDxMarin	Our grandparents' generation created an amazing system of canals and reservoirs that made it possible for people to live in places where there wasn't a lot of water. For example, during the Great Depression, they created the Hoover Dam, which in turn, created Lake Mead and made it possible for the cities of Las Vegas and Phoenix and Los Angeles to provide water for people who lived in a really dry place. In the 20th century, we literally spent trillions of dollars building infrastructure to get water to our cities. In terms of economic development, it was a great investment. But in the last decade, we've seen the combined effects of climate change, population growth and competition for water resources threaten these vital lifelines and water resources. This figure shows you the change in the lake level of Lake Mead that happened in the last 15 years. You can see starting around the year 2000, the lake level started to drop. And it was dropping at such a rate that it would have left the drinking water intakes for Las Vegas high and dry. The city became so concerned about this that they recently constructed a new drinking water intake structure that they referred to as the "Third Straw" to pull water out of the greater depths of the lake. The challenges associated with providing water to a modern city are not restricted to the American Southwest. In the year 2007, the third largest city in Australia, Brisbane, came within 6 months of running out of water. A similar drama is playing out today in São Paulo, Brazil, where the main reservoir for the city has gone from being completely full in 2010, to being nearly empty today as the city approaches the 2016 Summer Olympics. For those of us who are fortunate enough to live in one of the world's great cities, we've never truly experienced the effects of a catastrophic drought. We like to complain about the navy showers we have to take. We like our neighbors to see our dirty cars and our brown lawns. But we've never really faced the prospect of turning on the tap and having nothing come out. And that's because when things have gotten bad in the past, it's always been possible to expand a reservoir or dig a few more groundwater wells. Well, in a time when all of the water resources are spoken for, it's not going to be possible to rely on this tried and true way of providing ourselves with water. Some people think that we're going to solve the urban water problem by taking water from our rural neighbors. But that's an approach that's fraught with political, legal and social dangers. And even if we succeed in grabbing the water from our rural neighbors, we're just transferring the problem to someone else and there's a good chance it will come back and bite us in the form of higher food prices and damage to the aquatic ecosystems that already rely upon that water. I think that there's a better way to solve our urban water crisis and I think that's to open up four new local sources of water that I liken to faucets. If we can make smart investments in these new sources of water in the coming years, we can solve our urban water problem and decrease the likelihood that we'll ever run across the effects of a catastrophic drought. Now, if you told me 20 years ago that a modern city could exist without a supply of imported water, I probably would have dismissed you as an unrealistic and uninformed dreamer. But my own experiences working with some of the world's most water-starved cities in the last decades have shown me that we have the technologies and the management skills to actually transition away from imported water, and that's what I want to tell you about tonight. The first source of local water supply that we need to develop to solve our urban water problem will flow with the rainwater that falls in our cities. One of the great tragedies of urban development is that as our cities grew, we started covering all the surfaces with concrete and asphalt. And when we did that, we had to build storm sewers to get the water that fell on the cities out before it could cause flooding, and that's a waste of a vital water resource. Let me give you an example. This figure here shows you the volume of water that could be collected in the city of San Jose if they could harvest the stormwater that fell within the city limits. You can see from the intersection of the blue line and the black dotted line that if San Jose could just capture half of the water that fell within the city, they'd have enough water to get them through an entire year. Now, I know what some of you are probably thinking. "The answer to our problem is to start building great big tanks and attaching them to the downspouts of our roof gutters, rainwater harvesting." Now, that's an idea that might work in some places. But if you live in a place where it mainly rains in the winter time and most of the water demand is in the summertime, it's not a very cost-effective way to solve a water problem. And if you experience the effects of a multiyear drought, like California's currently experiencing, you just can't build a rainwater tank that's big enough to solve your problem. I think there's a lot more practical way to harvest the stormwater and the rainwater that falls in our cities, and that's to capture it and let it percolate into the ground. After all, many of our cities are sitting on top of a natural water storage system that can accommodate huge volumes of water. For example, historically, Los Angeles has obtained about a third of its water supply from a massive aquifer that underlies the San Fernando Valley. Now, when you look at the water that comes off of your roof and runs off of your lawn and flows down the gutter, you might say to yourself, "Do I really want to drink that stuff?" Well, the answer is you don't want to drink it until it's been treated a little bit. And so the challenge that we face in urban water harvesting is to capture the water, clean the water and get it underground. And that's exactly what the city of Los Angeles is doing with a new project that they're building in Burbank, California. This figure here shows the stormwater park that they're building by hooking a series of stormwater collection systems, or storm sewers, and routing that water into an abandoned gravel quarry. The water that's captured in the quarry is slowly passed through a man-made wetland, and then it goes into that ball field there and percolates into the ground, recharging the drinking water aquifer of the city. And in the process of passing through the wetland and percolating through the ground, the water encounters microbes that live on the surfaces of the plants and the surfaces of the soil, and that purifies the water. And if the water's still not clean enough to drink after it's been through this natural treatment process, the city can treat it again when they pump if back out of the groundwater aquifers before they deliver it to people to drink. The second tap that we need to open up to solve our urban water problem will flow with the wastewater that comes out of our sewage treatment plants. Now, many of you are probably familiar with the concept of recycled water. You've probably seen signs like this that tell you that the shrubbery and the highway median and the local golf course is being watered with water that used to be in a sewage treatment plant. We've been doing this for a couple of decades now. But what we're learning from our experience is that this approach is much more expensive that we expected it to be. Because once we build the first few water recycling systems close to the sewage treatment plant, we have to build longer and longer pipe networks to get that water to where it needs to go. And that becomes prohibitive in terms of cost. What we're finding is that a much more cost-effective and practical way of recycling wastewater is to turn treated wastewater into drinking water through a two-step process. In the first step in this process we pressurize the water and pass it through a reverse osmosis membrane: a thin, permeable plastic membrane that allows water molecules to pass through but traps and retains the salts, the viruses and the organic chemicals that might be present in the wastewater. In the second step in the process, we add a small amount of hydrogen peroxide and shine ultraviolet light on the water. The ultraviolet light cleaves the hydrogen peroxide into two parts that are called hydroxyl radicals, and these hydroxyl radicals are very potent forms of oxygen that break down most organic chemicals. After the water's been through this two-stage process, it's safe to drink. I know, I've been studying recycled water using every measurement technique known to modern science for the past 15 years. We've detected some chemicals that can make it through the first step in the process, but by the time we get to the second step, the advanced oxidation process, we rarely see any chemicals present. And that's in stark contrast to the taken-for-granted water supplies that we regularly drink all the time. There's another way we can recycle water. This is an engineered treatment wetland that we recently built on the Santa Ana River in Southern California. The treatment wetland receives water from a part of the Santa Ana River that in the summertime consists almost entirely of wastewater effluent from cities like Riverside and San Bernardino. The water comes into our treatment wetland, it's exposed to sunlight and algae and those break down the organic chemicals, remove the nutrients and inactivate the waterborne pathogens. The water gets put back in the Santa Ana River, it flows down to Anaheim, gets taken out at Anaheim and percolated into the ground, and becomes the drinking water of the city of Anaheim, completing the trip from the sewers of Riverside County to the drinking water supply of Orange County. Now, you might think that this idea of drinking wastewater is some sort of futuristic fantasy or not commonly done. Well, in California, we already recycle about 40 billion gallons a year of wastewater through the two-stage advanced treatment process I was telling you about. That's enough water to be the supply of about a million people if it were their sole water supply. The third tap that we need to open up will not be a tap at all, it will be a kind of virtual tap, it will be the water conservation that we manage to do. And the place where we need to think about water conservation is outdoors because in California and other modern American cities, about half of our water use happens outdoors. In the current drought, we've seen that it's possible to have our lawns survive and our plants survive with about half as much water. So there's no need to start painting concrete green and putting in Astroturf and buying cactuses. We can have California-friendly landscaping with soil moisture detectors and smart irrigation controllers and have beautiful green landscapes in our cities. The fourth and final water tap that we need to open up to solve our urban water problem will flow with desalinated seawater. Now, I know what you probably heard people say about seawater desalination. "It's a great thing to do if you have lots of oil, not a lot of water and you don't care about climate change." Seawater desalination is energy-intensive no matter how you slice it. But that characterization of seawater desalination as being a nonstarter is hopelessly out of date. We've made tremendous progress in seawater desalination in the past two decades. This picture shows you the largest seawater desalination plant in the Western hemisphere that's currently being built north of San Diego. Compared to the seawater desalination plant that was built in Santa Barbara 25 years ago, this treatment plant will use about half the energy to produce a gallon of water. But just because seawater desalination has become less energy-intensive, doesn't mean we should start building desalination plants everywhere. Among the different choices we have, it's probably the most energy-intensive and potentially environmentally damaging of the options to create a local water supply. So there it is. With these four sources of water, we can move away from our reliance on imported water. Through reform in the way we landscape our surfaces and our properties, we can reduce outdoor water use by about 50 percent, thereby increasing the water supply by 25 percent. We can recycle the water that makes it into the sewer, thereby increasing our water supply by 40 percent. And we can make up the difference through a combination of stormwater harvesting and seawater desalination. So, let's create a water supply that will be able to withstand any of the challenges that climate change throws at us in the coming years. Let's create a water supply that uses local sources and leaves more water in the environment for fish and for food. Let's create a water system that's consistent with out environmental values. And let's do it for our children and our grandchildren and let's tell them this is the system that they have to take care of in the future because it's our last chance to create a new kind of water system. Thank you very much for your attention. (Applause)
This is what happens when you reply to spam email	{0: 'For James Veitch, a British writer and comedian with a mischievous side, spam emails proved the perfect opening to have some fun, playing the scammers at their own game.'}	TEDGlobal>Geneva	A few years ago, I got one of those spam emails. And it managed to get through my spam filter. I'm not quite sure how, but it turned up in my inbox, and it was from a guy called Solomon Odonkoh. (Laughter) I know. (Laughter) It went like this: it said, "Hello James Veitch, I have an interesting business proposal I want to share with you, Solomon." Now, my hand was kind of hovering on the delete button, right? I was looking at my phone. I thought, I could just delete this. Or I could do what I think we've all always wanted to do. (Laughter) And I said, "Solomon, Your email intrigues me." (Laughter) (Applause) And the game was afoot. He said, "Dear James Veitch, We shall be shipping Gold to you." (Laughter) "You will earn 10% of any gold you distributes." (Laughter) So I knew I was dealing with a professional. (Laughter) I said, "How much is it worth?" He said, "We will start with smaller quantity," — I was like, aww — and then he said, "of 25 kgs. (Laughter) The worth should be about $2.5 million." I said, "Solomon, if we're going to do it, let's go big. (Applause) I can handle it. How much gold do you have?" (Laughter) He said, "It is not a matter of how much gold I have, what matters is your capability of handling. We can start with 50 kgs as trial shipment." I said, "50 kgs? There's no point doing this at all unless you're shipping at least a metric ton." (Laughter) (Applause) He said, "What do you do for a living?" (Laughter) I said, "I'm a hedge fund executive bank manager." (Laughter) This isn't the first time I've shipped bullion, my friend, no no no. Then I started to panic. I was like, "Where are you based?" I don't know about you, but I think if we're going via the postal service, it ought to be signed for. That's a lot of gold." He said, "It will not be easy to convince my company to do larger quantity shipment." I said, "Solomon, I'm completely with you on this one. I'm putting together a visual for you to take into the board meeting. Hold tight." (Laughter) This is what I sent Solomon. (Laughter) (Applause) I don't know if we have any statisticians in the house, but there's definitely something going on. (Laughter) I said, "Solomon, attached to this email you'll find a helpful chart. I've had one of my assistants run the numbers. (Laughter) We're ready for shipping as much gold as possible." There's always a moment where they try to tug your heartstrings, and this was it for Solomon. He said, "I will be so much happy if the deal goes well, because I'm going to get a very good commission as well." And I said, "That's amazing, What are you going to spend your cut on?" And he said, "On RealEstate, what about you?" I thought about it for a long time. And I said, "One word; Hummus." (Laughter) "It's going places. (Laughter) I was in Sainsbury's the other day and there were like 30 different varieties. Also you can cut up carrots, and you can dip them. Have you ever done that, Solomon?" (Laughter) He said, "I have to go bed now." (Laughter) (Applause) "Till morrow. Have sweet dream." I didn't know what to say! I said, "Bonsoir my golden nugget, bonsoir." (Laughter) Guys, you have to understand, this had been going for, like, weeks, albeit hitherto the greatest weeks of my life, but I had to knock it on the head. It was getting a bit out of hand. Friends were saying, "James, do you want to come for a drink?" I was like, "I can't, I'm expecting an email about some gold." So I figured I had to knock it on the head. I had to take it to a ridiculous conclusion. So I concocted a plan. I said, "Solomon, I'm concerned about security. When we email each other, we need to use a code." And he agreed. (Laughter) I said, "Solomon, I spent all night coming up with this code we need to use in all further correspondence: Lawyer: Gummy Bear. Bank: Cream Egg. Legal: Fizzy Cola Bottle. Claim: Peanut M&Ms. Documents: Jelly Beans. Western Union: A Giant Gummy Lizard." (Laughter) I knew these were all words they use, right? I said, "Please call me Kitkat in all further correspondence." (Laughter) I didn't hear back. I thought, I've gone too far. I've gone too far. So I had to backpedal a little. I said, "Solomon, Is the deal still on? KitKat." (Laughter) Because you have to be consistent. Then I did get an email back from him. He said, "The Business is on and I am trying to blah blah blah ..." I said, "Dude, you have to use the code!" What followed is the greatest email I've ever received. (Laughter) I'm not joking, this is what turned up in my inbox. This was a good day. "The business is on. I am trying to raise the balance for the Gummy Bear — (Laughter) so he can submit all the needed Fizzy Cola Bottle Jelly Beans to the Creme Egg, for the Peanut M&Ms process to start. (Laughter) Send 1,500 pounds via a Giant Gummy Lizard." (Applause) And that was so much fun, right, that it got me thinking: like, what would happen if I just spent as much time as could replying to as many scam emails as I could? And that's what I've been doing for three years on your behalf. (Laughter) (Applause) Crazy stuff happens when you start replying to scam emails. It's really difficult, and I highly recommend we do it. I don't think what I'm doing is mean. There are a lot of people who do mean things to scammers. All I'm doing is wasting their time. And I think any time they're spending with me is time they're not spending scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings, right? And if you're going to do this — and I highly recommend you do — get yourself a pseudonymous email address. Don't use your own email address. That's what I was doing at the start and it was a nightmare. I'd wake up in the morning and have a thousand emails about penis enlargements, only one of which was a legitimate response — (Laughter) to a medical question I had. But I'll tell you what, though, guys, I'll tell you what: any day is a good day, any day is a good day if you receive an email that begins like this: (Laughter) "I AM WINNIE MANDELA, THE SECOND WIFE OF NELSON MANDELA THE FORMER SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENT." I was like, oh! — that Winnie Mandela. (Laughter) I know so many. "I NEED TO TRANSFER 45 MILLION DOLLARS OUT OF THE COUNTRY BECAUSE OF MY HUSBAND NELSON MANDELA'S HEALTH CONDITION." Let that sink in. She sent me this, which is hysterical. (Laughter) And this. And this looks fairly legitimate, this is a letter of authorization. But to be honest, if there's nothing written on it, it's just a shape! (Laughter) I said, "Winnie, I'm really sorry to hear of this. Given that Nelson died three months ago, I'd describe his health condition as fairly serious." (Laughter) That's the worst health condition you can have, not being alive. She said, "KINDLY COMPLY WITH MY BANKERS INSTRUCTIONS. ONE LOVE." (Laughter) I said, "Of course. NO WOMAN, NO CRY." (Laughter) (Applause) She said, "MY BANKER WILL NEED TRANSFER OF 3000 DOLLARS. ONE LOVE." (Laughter) I said, "no problemo. I SHOT THE SHERIFF." [ (BUT I DID NOT SHOOT THE DEPUTY) ] (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)
How frustration can make us more creative	{0: "Tim Harford's writings reveal the economic ideas behind everyday experiences."}	TEDGlobal>London	Late in January 1975, a 17-year-old German girl called Vera Brandes walked out onto the stage of the Cologne Opera House. The auditorium was empty. It was lit only by the dim, green glow of the emergency exit sign. This was the most exciting day of Vera's life. She was the youngest concert promoter in Germany, and she had persuaded the Cologne Opera House to host a late-night concert of jazz from the American musician, Keith Jarrett. 1,400 people were coming. And in just a few hours, Jarrett would walk out on the same stage, he'd sit down at the piano and without rehearsal or sheet music, he would begin to play. But right now, Vera was introducing Keith to the piano in question, and it wasn't going well. Jarrett looked to the instrument a little warily, played a few notes, walked around it, played a few more notes, muttered something to his producer. Then the producer came over to Vera and said ... "If you don't get a new piano, Keith can't play." There'd been a mistake. The opera house had provided the wrong instrument. This one had this harsh, tinny upper register, because all the felt had worn away. The black notes were sticking, the white notes were out of tune, the pedals didn't work and the piano itself was just too small. It wouldn't create the volume that would fill a large space such as the Cologne Opera House. So Keith Jarrett left. He went and sat outside in his car, leaving Vera Brandes to get on the phone to try to find a replacement piano. Now she got a piano tuner, but she couldn't get a new piano. And so she went outside and she stood there in the rain, talking to Keith Jarrett, begging him not to cancel the concert. And he looked out of his car at this bedraggled, rain-drenched German teenager, took pity on her, and said, "Never forget ... only for you." And so a few hours later, Jarrett did indeed step out onto the stage of the opera house, he sat down at the unplayable piano and began. (Music) Within moments it became clear that something magical was happening. Jarrett was avoiding those upper registers, he was sticking to the middle tones of the keyboard, which gave the piece a soothing, ambient quality. But also, because the piano was so quiet, he had to set up these rumbling, repetitive riffs in the bass. And he stood up twisting, pounding down on the keys, desperately trying to create enough volume to reach the people in the back row. It's an electrifying performance. It somehow has this peaceful quality, and at the same time it's full of energy, it's dynamic. And the audience loved it. Audiences continue to love it because the recording of the Köln Concert is the best-selling piano album in history and the best-selling solo jazz album in history. Keith Jarrett had been handed a mess. He had embraced that mess, and it soared. But let's think for a moment about Jarrett's initial instinct. He didn't want to play. Of course, I think any of us, in any remotely similar situation, would feel the same way, we'd have the same instinct. We don't want to be asked to do good work with bad tools. We don't want to have to overcome unnecessary hurdles. But Jarrett's instinct was wrong, and thank goodness he changed his mind. And I think our instinct is also wrong. I think we need to gain a bit more appreciation for the unexpected advantages of having to cope with a little mess. So let me give you some examples from cognitive psychology, from complexity science, from social psychology, and of course, rock 'n' roll. So cognitive psychology first. We've actually known for a while that certain kinds of difficulty, certain kinds of obstacle, can actually improve our performance. For example, the psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer, a few years ago, teamed up with high school teachers. And he asked them to reformat the handouts that they were giving to some of their classes. So the regular handout would be formatted in something straightforward, such as Helvetica or Times New Roman. But half these classes were getting handouts that were formatted in something sort of intense, like Haettenschweiler, or something with a zesty bounce, like Comic Sans italicized. Now, these are really ugly fonts, and they're difficult fonts to read. But at the end of the semester, students were given exams, and the students who'd been asked to read the more difficult fonts, had actually done better on their exams, in a variety of subjects. And the reason is, the difficult font had slowed them down, forced them to work a bit harder, to think a bit more about what they were reading, to interpret it ... and so they learned more. Another example. The psychologist Shelley Carson has been testing Harvard undergraduates for the quality of their attentional filters. What do I mean by that? What I mean is, imagine you're in a restaurant, you're having a conversation, there are all kinds of other conversations going on in the restaurant, you want to filter them out, you want to focus on what's important to you. Can you do that? If you can, you have good, strong attentional filters. But some people really struggle with that. Some of Carson's undergraduate subjects struggled with that. They had weak filters, they had porous filters — let a lot of external information in. And so what that meant is they were constantly being interrupted by the sights and the sounds of the world around them. If there was a television on while they were doing their essays, they couldn't screen it out. Now, you would think that that was a disadvantage ... but no. When Carson looked at what these students had achieved, the ones with the weak filters were vastly more likely to have some real creative milestone in their lives, to have published their first novel, to have released their first album. These distractions were actually grists to their creative mill. They were able to think outside the box because their box was full of holes. Let's talk about complexity science. So how do you solve a really complex — the world's full of complicated problems — how do you solve a really complicated problem? For example, you try to make a jet engine. There are lots and lots of different variables, the operating temperature, the materials, all the different dimensions, the shape. You can't solve that kind of problem all in one go, it's too hard. So what do you do? Well, one thing you can do is try to solve it step-by-step. So you have some kind of prototype and you tweak it, you test it, you improve it. You tweak it, you test it, you improve it. Now, this idea of marginal gains will eventually get you a good jet engine. And it's been quite widely implemented in the world. So you'll hear about it, for example, in high performance cycling, web designers will talk about trying to optimize their web pages, they're looking for these step-by-step gains. That's a good way to solve a complicated problem. But you know what would make it a better way? A dash of mess. You add randomness, early on in the process, you make crazy moves, you try stupid things that shouldn't work, and that will tend to make the problem-solving work better. And the reason for that is the trouble with the step-by-step process, the marginal gains, is they can walk you gradually down a dead end. And if you start with the randomness, that becomes less likely, and your problem-solving becomes more robust. Let's talk about social psychology. So the psychologist Katherine Phillips, with some colleagues, recently gave murder mystery problems to some students, and these students were collected in groups of four and they were given dossiers with information about a crime — alibis and evidence, witness statements and three suspects. And the groups of four students were asked to figure out who did it, who committed the crime. And there were two treatments in this experiment. In some cases these were four friends, they all knew each other well. In other cases, three friends and a stranger. And you can see where I'm going with this. Obviously I'm going to say that the groups with the stranger solved the problem more effectively, which is true, they did. Actually, they solved the problem quite a lot more effectively. So the groups of four friends, they only had a 50-50 chance of getting the answer right. Which is actually not that great — in multiple choice, for three answers? 50-50's not good. (Laughter) The three friends and the stranger, even though the stranger didn't have any extra information, even though it was just a case of how that changed the conversation to accommodate that awkwardness, the three friends and the stranger, they had a 75 percent chance of finding the right answer. That's quite a big leap in performance. But I think what's really interesting is not just that the three friends and the stranger did a better job, but how they felt about it. So when Katherine Phillips interviewed the groups of four friends, they had a nice time, they also thought they'd done a good job. They were complacent. When she spoke to the three friends and the stranger, they had not had a nice time — it's actually rather difficult, it's rather awkward ... and they were full of doubt. They didn't think they'd done a good job even though they had. And I think that really exemplifies the challenge that we're dealing with here. Because, yeah — the ugly font, the awkward stranger, the random move ... these disruptions help us solve problems, they help us become more creative. But we don't feel that they're helping us. We feel that they're getting in the way ... and so we resist. And that's why the last example is really important. So I want to talk about somebody from the background of the world of rock 'n' roll. And you may know him, he's actually a TED-ster. His name is Brian Eno. He is an ambient composer — rather brilliant. He's also a kind of catalyst behind some of the great rock 'n' roll albums of the last 40 years. He's worked with David Bowie on "Heroes," he worked with U2 on "Achtung Baby" and "The Joshua Tree," he's worked with DEVO, he's worked with Coldplay, he's worked with everybody. And what does he do to make these great rock bands better? Well, he makes a mess. He disrupts their creative processes. It's his role to be the awkward stranger. It's his role to tell them that they have to play the unplayable piano. And one of the ways in which he creates this disruption is through this remarkable deck of cards — I have my signed copy here — thank you, Brian. They're called The Oblique Strategies, he developed them with a friend of his. And when they're stuck in the studio, Brian Eno will reach for one of the cards. He'll draw one at random, and he'll make the band follow the instructions on the card. So this one ... "Change instrument roles." Yeah, everyone swap instruments — Drummer on the piano — Brilliant, brilliant idea. "Look closely at the most embarrassing details. Amplify them." "Make a sudden, destructive, unpredictable action. Incorporate." These cards are disruptive. Now, they've proved their worth in album after album. The musicians hate them. (Laughter) So Phil Collins was playing drums on an early Brian Eno album. He got so frustrated he started throwing beer cans across the studio. Carlos Alomar, great rock guitarist, working with Eno on David Bowie's "Lodger" album, and at one point he turns to Brian and says, "Brian, this experiment is stupid." But the thing is it was a pretty good album, but also, Carlos Alomar, 35 years later, now uses The Oblique Strategies. And he tells his students to use The Oblique Strategies because he's realized something. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't helping you. The strategies actually weren't a deck of cards originally, they were just a list — list on the recording studio wall. A checklist of things you might try if you got stuck. The list didn't work. Know why? Not messy enough. Your eye would go down the list and it would settle on whatever was the least disruptive, the least troublesome, which of course misses the point entirely. And what Brian Eno came to realize was, yes, we need to run the stupid experiments, we need to deal with the awkward strangers, we need to try to read the ugly fonts. These things help us. They help us solve problems, they help us be more creative. But also ... we really need some persuasion if we're going to accept this. So however we do it ... whether it's sheer willpower, whether it's the flip of a card or whether it's a guilt trip from a German teenager, all of us, from time to time, need to sit down and try and play the unplayable piano. Thank you. (Applause)
I love being a police officer, but we need reform	{0: 'Melvin Russell is bringing stakeholders together to work toward the common goal of peace and prosperity for Baltimore City.'}	TEDxMidAtlantic	I have been a police officer for a very, very long time. And you see these notes in my hand because I'm also a black preacher. (Laughter) And if you know anything about black preachers, we'll close, and then we'll keep going for another 20 minutes. (Laughter) So I need this to keep pushing this thing forward. I've been a police officer for a very long time, and I mean I predated technology. I'm talking about before pagers. (Laughter) Laugh if you want to, but I'm telling the truth. I predate War on Our Fellow Man — I mean, War on Drugs. I predate all of that. I predate so much and I've been through ebbs and flows and I've been through good and bad times, and still I absolutely love being a police officer. I love being a police officer because it's always been a calling for me and never a job. And even with that, my personal truth is that law enforcement is in a crisis. It's an invisible crisis, and it has been for many, many years. Even though we in law enforcement say, "You know what? We can't arrest our way out of this." We say in law enforcement things like, "Yeah, it's illegal to profile." You know what? In law enforcement, we even agree that we have to adopt this thinking and become more oriented to community policing. And yet all the while, still, we continue in the same vein, the same vein that contradicts everything that we just admitted. And so that's the reason for me, several years ago. Because I was tired of the racism, I was tired of discrimination, I was tired of the "-isms" and the schisms. I was just so tired. I was tired of the vicious cycle, and I was tired of it even in the beloved agency in the department that I still love today. And so my wife and I, we sat down and we decided and we targeted a date that we would retire. We would retire and I would go off into the sunset, maybe do ministry full time, love my wife a long time. Y'all know what I'm talking about. (Laughter) But we decided that I would retire. But then there was a higher power than I. There was a love for the city that I loved, that I grew up in, that I was educated in — a city that pulled my heart back into the system. So we didn't retire. We didn't retire and so what happened was, over the next — I would say, 18 months, 19 months, I had this passion to implement some radical policing. And so now, over the next 19 months, I shifted, and I transcended from being a drug sergeant — ready to retire as a drug sergeant — and went from level to level to level, until I find myself as a district commander, commander of the worst district in Baltimore city. We call it the Eastern District, the most violent district, the most impoverished district — 46 percent unemployment in that district. National rating at that time, national rating, the AIDS and the tuberculosis [rating], was always on the top 10 list for zip codes for cities across the nation, or just zip codes across the nation. The top 10 — I didn't say state, I didn't say city — that little neighborhood. And I said, you know what? We gotta do something different. We gotta do something different. We gotta think radical. We gotta think outside the box. And so in order to bring change that I desperately wanted and I desperately felt in my heart, I had to start listening to that inner spirit. I had to start listening to that man on the inside that went against everything that I had been trained to do. But we still did it. We still did it because we listened to that inner spirit, because I realized this: if I was to see real police reform in the communities that I had authority over for public safety, we had to change our stinkin' thinkin'. We had to change it. And so what we did is we started to think holistically and not paramilitarily. So we thought differently. And we started to realize that it could never be and never should have been us versus them. And so I decided to come to that intersection where I could meet all classes, all races, all creeds, all colors; where I would meet the businesses and the faith-based, and the eds, the meds, and I would meet all the people that made up the communities that I had authority over. So I met them and I began to listen. See, police have a problem. Off the top, we want to bring things into the community and come up with these extravagant strategies and deployments, but we never talk to the community about them. And we shove them into the community and say, "Take that." But we said we'd get rid of that stinkin' thinkin', so we talked to our communities. We said, "This is your community table. We'll pull up a chair. We want to hear from you. What's going to work in your community?" And then some great things started to happen. See, here's the thing: I had to figure out a way to shift 130 cops that were under my tutelage from being occupiers of communities to being partners. I had to figure out how to do that. Because here's the crazy thing: in law enforcement, we have evolved into something incredible. Listen, we have become great protectors. We know how to protect you. But we have exercised that arm so much, so very much. If I was a natural police department and I represented a police department, you would see this incredible, beautiful, 23-inch arm. (Laughter) It's pretty, ain't it? It's cut up. No fat on it. Mmm it look good. It just look good! (Laughter) That's a great arm — protection! That's who we are, but we've exercised it so much sometimes that it has led to abuse. It's led to coldness and callousness and dehumanized us. And we've forgotten the mantra across this nation is to protect and serve. Y'all don't know that? Protect and serve. (Laughter) So you look at the other arm, and then you look at it and ... there it is. (Laughter) You know, it's kinda weak. It looks sickly. It's withering and it's dying because we've invested so much in our protective arm. But we forgot to treat our communities like they're our customers; like they're our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers. And so somehow, along the way, we've gotten out of balance. And because we are a proud profession, it is very hard for us to look in the mirror and see our mistakes. It's even harder to make a change. And so, as I try to hurry and get through this, I need to say this: it's not just law enforcement, though. Because every one of us makes up a community. Everybody makes up a community. And as communities — can I say this? — we have put too much responsibility on law enforcement. Too much. (Applause) And then we have the audacity and the nerve to get upset with law enforcement when we take action. There is no way in the world that we, as a community, should be calling the police for kids playing ball in the street. No way in the world that we should be calling the police because my neighbor's music is up too loud, because his dog came over to my yard and did a number two; there's no way we should be calling the police. But we have surrendered so much of our responsibility. Listen, when I was a little boy coming up in Baltimore — and listen, we played rough in the street — I ain't never see the police come and break us up. You know who came? It was the elders. It was the parental figures in the community. It was those guardians, it was that village mentality. They came and said, "Stop that!" and "Do this." and "Stop that." We had mentors throughout all of the community. So it takes all of us, all of us. And when I say community, I'm talking about everything that makes up a community, even — listen, because I'm a preacher, I'm very hard on the churches, because I believe the churches too often have become MIA, missing in action. I believe they have shifted over the last 10, 20 years from being community churches, where you walk outside your door, round the corner and you're in church. They shifted from that and became commuter churches. So you now have churches who have become disconnected by default from the very community where they're planted. And they don't take care of that community. I could go on and on, but I really need to wrap this up. Community and policing: we've all lost that precious gift, and I call it relational equity. We've lost it with one another. It's not somebody else's fault — it's all of our fault. We all take responsibility in this. But I say this: it's not too late for all of us to build our cities and nation to make it great again. It is never too late. It is never too late. You see, after three years of my four-and-a-half-year commandship in that district, three years in, after putting pastors in the car with my police because I knew this — it's a little secret — I knew this: it was hard to stay a nasty police officer while you're riding around with a clergy. (Laughter) (Applause) You'd be getting in and out of the car, looking to your right, talking about: "Father, forgive me, for I have sinned," all day long — you can't do it! So we came up with some incredible initiatives, engagements for our community and police to build that trust back. We began to deal with our youth and with those who we consider are on the wrong side of the fence. We knew we had an economic problem, so we began to create jobs. We knew there was sickness in our community and they didn't have access to proper medical care, so we'd partner up. We got to that intersection and partnered up with anybody that wanted to partner with us and talked about what we needed holistically, never thinking about the crime. Because at the end of the day, if we took care of the needs of the people, if we got to the root cause, the crime would take care of itself. It would take care of itself. (Applause) And so, after three years of a four-and-a-half-year stint, we looked back and we looked over and found out that we were at a 40-year historical low: our crime numbers, our homicides — everything had dropped down, back to the 1970s. And it might go back further, but the problem is, we only started keeping data since 1970. Forty-year crime low, so much so, I had other commanders call me, "Hey Mel, whatcha doin', man? Whatcha doin'? We gotta get some of that!" (Laughter) And so we gave them some of that. And in a short period of time, the city went to a 30-year crime low. For the first time in 30 years, we fell, Baltimore city, to under 200 homicides — 197 to be exact. And we celebrated, because we had learned to become great servers, become great servers first. But I gotta tell you this: these last few years, as much as we had learned to become great proactive police officers and great relational police officers rather than reactive, these last years have disappointed me. They have broken my heart. The uprising still hurts. It still hurts my heart, because truly I believe that it should've never happened. I believe it should've never happened if we were allowed to continue along the vein that we were in, servicing our community, treating them like human beings, treating them with respect, loving on them first. If we continued in that vein, it would've never happened. But somehow, we went back to business as usual. But I'm excited again! I'm excited again, because now we have a police commissioner who not only talks about community policing, but he absolutely understands it, and more importantly, he embraces it. So I'm very excited now. Listen, I'm excited about Baltimore today, because we, as many cities, I believe shall rise from the ashes. I believe — I truly believe — (Applause) that we will be great again. I believe, as we continue to wrap arms and continue to say, "We're in this together," because it's not just an intersection: once we meet, we now gotta get on the same path for the same goals, and this city will become great again. This nation will become great again. Because we have the same goal: we all want peace. We all want respect for one another. We all want love. And I believe we are back on that road, and I'm so excited about it. So listen, I thank you for giving me a few minutes of your time. God bless you all. (Applause) God bless you. (Applause)
Let's design social media that drives real change	{0: 'Wael Ghonim believes that the Internet can be the most powerful platform for connecting humanity, if we can bring civility and thoughtful conversations back to it.'}	TEDGlobal>Geneva	I once said, "If you want to liberate a society, all you need is the Internet." I was wrong. I said those words back in 2011, when a Facebook page I anonymously created helped spark the Egyptian revolution. The Arab Spring revealed social media's greatest potential, but it also exposed its greatest shortcomings. The same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart. I would like to share my own experience in using social media for activism, and talk about some of the challenges I have personally faced and what we could do about them. In the early 2000s, Arabs were flooding the web. Thirsty for knowledge, for opportunities, for connecting with the rest of the people around the globe, we escaped our frustrating political realities and lived a virtual, alternative life. Just like many of them, I was completely apolitical until 2009. At the time, when I logged into social media, I started seeing more and more Egyptians aspiring for political change in the country. It felt like I was not alone. In June 2010, Internet changed my life forever. While browsing Facebook, I saw a photo, a terrifying photo, of a tortured, dead body of a young Egyptian guy. His name was Khaled Said. Khaled was a 29-year-old Alexandrian who was killed by police. I saw myself in his picture. I thought, "I could be Khaled." I could not sleep that night, and I decided to do something. I anonymously created a Facebook page and called it "We are all Khaled Said." In just three days, the page had over 100,000 people, fellow Egyptians who shared the same concern. Whatever was happening had to stop. I recruited my co-admin, AbdelRahman Mansour. We worked together for hours and hours. We were crowdsourcing ideas from the people. We were engaging them. We were calling collectively for actions, and sharing news that the regime did not want Egyptians to know. The page became the most followed page in the Arab world. It had more fans than established media organizations and even top celebrities. On January 14, 2011, Ben Ali fled out of Tunisia after mounting protests against his regime. I saw a spark of hope. Egyptians on social media were wondering, "If Tunisia did it, why can't we?" I posted an event on Facebook and called it "A Revolution against Corruption, Injustice and Dictatorship." I posed a question to the 300,000 users of the page at the time: "Today is the 14th of January. The 25th of January is Police Day. It's a national holiday. If 100,000 of us take to the streets of Cairo, no one is going to stop us. I wonder if we could do it." In just a few days, the invitation reached over a million people, and over 100,000 people confirmed attendance. Social media was crucial for this campaign. It helped a decentralized movement arise. It made people realize that they were not alone. And it made it impossible for the regime to stop it. At the time, they didn't even understand it. And on January 25th, Egyptians flooded the streets of Cairo and other cities, calling for change, breaking the barrier of fear and announcing a new era. Then came the consequences. A few hours before the regime cut off the Internet and telecommunications, I was walking in a dark street in Cairo, around midnight. I had just tweeted, "Pray for Egypt. The government must be planning a massacre tomorrow." I was hit hard on my head. I lost my balance and fell down, to find four armed men surrounding me. One covered my mouth and the others paralyzed me. I knew I was being kidnapped by state security. I found myself in a cell, handcuffed, blindfolded. I was terrified. So was my family, who started looking for me in hospitals, police stations and even morgues. After my disappearance, a few of my fellow colleagues who knew I was the admin of the page told the media about my connection with that page, and that I was likely arrested by state security. My colleagues at Google started a search campaign trying to find me, and the fellow protesters in the square demanded my release. After 11 days of complete darkness, I was set free. And three days later, Mubarak was forced to step down. It was the most inspiring and empowering moment of my life. It was a time of great hope. Egyptians lived a utopia for 18 days during the revolution. They all shared the belief that we could actually live together despite our differences, that Egypt after Mubarak would be for all. But unfortunately, the post-revolution events were like a punch in the gut. The euphoria faded, we failed to build consensus, and the political struggle led to intense polarization. Social media only amplified that state, by facilitating the spread of misinformation, rumors, echo chambers and hate speech. The environment was purely toxic. My online world became a battleground filled with trolls, lies, hate speech. I started to worry about the safety of my family. But of course, this wasn't just about me. The polarization reached its peak between the two main powers — the army supporters and the Islamists. People in the center, like me, started feeling helpless. Both groups wanted you to side with them; you were either with them or against them. And on the 3rd of July 2013, the army ousted Egypt's first democratically elected president, after three days of popular protest that demanded his resignation. That day I made a very hard decision. I decided to go silent, completely silent. It was a moment of defeat. I stayed silent for more than two years, and I used the time to reflect on everything that happened, trying to understand why did it happen. It became clear to me that while it's true that polarization is primarily driven by our human behavior, social media shapes this behavior and magnifies its impact. Say you want to say something that is not based on a fact, pick a fight or ignore someone that you don't like. These are all natural human impulses, but because of technology, acting on these impulses is only one click away. In my view, there are five critical challenges facing today's social media. First, we don't know how to deal with rumors. Rumors that confirm people's biases are now believed and spread among millions of people. Second, we create our own echo chambers. We tend to only communicate with people that we agree with, and thanks to social media, we can mute, un-follow and block everybody else. Third, online discussions quickly descend into angry mobs. All of us probably know that. It's as if we forget that the people behind screens are actually real people and not just avatars. And fourth, it became really hard to change our opinions. Because of the speed and brevity of social media, we are forced to jump to conclusions and write sharp opinions in 140 characters about complex world affairs. And once we do that, it lives forever on the Internet, and we are less motivated to change these views, even when new evidence arises. Fifth — and in my point of view, this is the most critical — today, our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations. It's as if we agreed that we are here to talk at each other instead of talking with each other. I witnessed how these critical challenges contributed to an already polarized Egyptian society, but this is not just about Egypt. Polarization is on the rise in the whole world. We need to work hard on figuring out how technology could be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. There's a lot of debate today on how to combat online harassment and fight trolls. This is so important. No one could argue against that. But we need to also think about how to design social media experiences that promote civility and reward thoughtfulness. I know for a fact if I write a post that is more sensational, more one-sided, sometimes angry and aggressive, I get to have more people see that post. I will get more attention. But what if we put more focus on quality? What is more important: the total number of readers of a post you write, or who are the people who have impact that read what you write? Couldn't we just give people more incentives to engage in conversations, rather than just broadcasting opinions all the time? Or reward people for reading and responding to views that they disagree with? And also, make it socially acceptable that we change our minds, or probably even reward that? What if we have a matrix that says how many people changed their minds, and that becomes part of our social media experience? If I could track how many people are changing their minds, I'd probably write more thoughtfully, trying to do that, rather than appealing to the people who already agree with me and "liking" because I just confirmed their biases. We also need to think about effective crowdsourcing mechanisms, to fact-check widely spread online information, and reward people who take part in that. In essence, we need to rethink today's social media ecosystem and redesign its experiences to reward thoughtfulness, civility and mutual understanding. As a believer in the Internet, I teamed up with a few friends, started a new project, trying to find answers and explore possibilities. Our first product is a new media platform for conversations. We're hosting conversations that promote mutual understanding and hopefully change minds. We don't claim to have the answers, but we started experimenting with different discussions about very divisive issues, such as race, gun control, the refugee debate, relationship between Islam and terrorism. These are conversations that matter. Today, at least one out of three people on the planet have access to the Internet. But part of this Internet is being held captive by the less noble aspects of our human behavior. Five years ago, I said, "If you want to liberate society, all you need is the Internet." Today, I believe if we want to liberate society, we first need to liberate the Internet. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Why great architecture should tell a story	{0: 'Ole Scheeren designs buildings that generate both functional and social spaces.'}	TEDGlobal>London	For much of the past century, architecture was under the spell of a famous doctrine. "Form follows function" had become modernity's ambitious manifesto and detrimental straitjacket, as it liberated architecture from the decorative, but condemned it to utilitarian rigor and restrained purpose. Of course, architecture is about function, but I want to remember a rewriting of this phrase by Bernard Tschumi, and I want to propose a completely different quality. If form follows fiction, we could think of architecture and buildings as a space of stories — stories of the people that live there, of the people that work in these buildings. And we could start to imagine the experiences our buildings create. In this sense, I'm interested in fiction not as the implausible but as the real, as the reality of what architecture means for the people that live in it and with it. Our buildings are prototypes, ideas for how the space of living or how the space of working could be different, and what a space of culture or a space of media could look like today. Our buildings are real; they're being built. They're an explicit engagement in physical reality and conceptual possibility. I think of our architecture as organizational structures. At their core is indeed structural thinking, like a system: How can we arrange things in both a functional and experiential way? How can we create structures that generate a series of relationships and narratives? And how can fictive stories of the inhabitants and users of our buildings script the architecture, while the architecture scripts those stories at the same time? And here comes the second term into play, what I call "narrative hybrids" — structures of multiple simultaneous stories that unfold throughout the buildings we create. So we could think of architecture as complex systems of relationships, both in a programmatic and functional way and in an experiential and emotive or social way. This is the headquarters for China's national broadcaster, which I designed together with Rem Koolhaas at OMA. When I first arrived in Beijing in 2002, the city planners showed us this image: a forest of several hundred skyscrapers to emerge in the central business district, except at that time, only a handful of them existed. So we had to design in a context that we knew almost nothing about, except one thing: it would all be about verticality. Of course, the skyscraper is vertical — it's a profoundly hierarchical structure, the top always the best, the bottom the worst, and the taller you are, the better, so it seems. And we wanted to ask ourselves, could a building be about a completely different quality? Could it undo this hierarchy, and could it be about a system that is more about collaboration, rather than isolation? So we took this needle and bent it back into itself, into a loop of interconnected activities. Our idea was to bring all aspects of television-making into one single structure: news, program production, broadcasting, research and training, administration — all into a circuit of interconnected activities where people would meet in a process of exchange and collaboration. I still very much like this image. It reminds one of biology classes, if you remember the human body with all its organs and circulatory systems, like at school. And suddenly you think of architecture no longer as built substance, but as an organism, as a life form. And as you start to dissect this organism, you can identify a series of primary technical clusters — program production, broadcasting center and news. Those are tightly intertwined with social clusters: meeting rooms, canteens, chat areas — informal spaces for people to meet and exchange. So the organizational structure of this building was a hybrid between the technical and the social, the human and the performative. And of course, we used the loop of the building as a circulatory system, to thread everything together and to allow both visitors and staff to experience all these different functions in a great unity. With 473,000 square meters, it is one of the largest buildings ever built in the world. It has a population of over 10,000 people, and of course, this is a scale that exceeds the comprehension of many things and the scale of typical architecture. So we stopped work for a while and sat down and cut 10,000 little sticks and glued them onto a model, just simply to confront ourselves with what that quantity actually meant. But of course, it's not a number, it is the people, it is a community that inhabits the building, and in order to both comprehend this, but also script this architecture, we identified five characters, hypothetical characters, and we followed them throughout their day in a life in this building, thought of where they would meet, what they would experience. So it was a way to script and design the building, but of course, also to communicate its experiences. This was part of an exhibition with the Museum of Modern Art in both New York and Beijing. This is the main broadcast control room, a technical installation so large, it can broadcast over 200 channels simultaneously. And this is how the building stands in Beijing today. Its first broadcast live was the London Olympics 2012, after it had been completed from the outside for the Beijing Olympics. And you can see at the very tip of this 75-meter cantilever, those three little circles. And they're indeed part of a public loop that goes through the building. They're a piece of glass that you can stand on and watch the city pass by below you in slow motion. The building has become part of everyday life in Beijing. It is there. It has also become a very popular backdrop for wedding photography. (Laughter) But its most important moment is maybe sill this one. "That's Beijing" is similar to "Time Out," a magazine that broadcasts what is happening in town during the week, and suddenly you see the building portrayed no longer as physical matter, but actually as an urban actor, as part of a series of personas that define the life of the city. So architecture suddenly assumes the quality of a player, of something that writes stories and performs stories. And I think that could be one of its primary meanings that we believe in. But of course, there's another story to this building. It is the story of the people that made it — 400 engineers and architects that I was guiding over almost a decade of collaborative work that we spent together in scripting this building, in imagining its reality and ultimately getting it built in China. This is a residential development in Singapore, large scale. If we look at Singapore like most of Asia and more and more of the world, of course, it is dominated by the tower, a typology that indeed creates more isolation than connectedness, and I wanted to ask, how could we think about living, not only in terms of the privacy and individuality of ourselves and our apartment, but in an idea of a collective? How could we think about creating a communal environment in which sharing things was as great as having your own? The typical answer to the question — we had to design 1,040 apartments — would have looked like this: 24-story height limit given by the planning authorities, 12 towers with nothing but residual in between — a very tight system that, although the tower isolates you, it doesn't even give you privacy, because you're so close to the next one, that it is very questionable what the qualities of this would be. So I proposed to topple the towers, throw the vertical into the horizontal and stack them up, and what looks a bit random from the side, if you look from the viewpoint of the helicopter, you can see its organizational structure is actually a hexagonal grid, in which these horizontal building blocks are stacked up to create huge outdoor courtyards — central spaces for the community, programmed with a variety of amenities and functions. And you see that these courtyards are not hermetically sealed spaces. They're open, permeable; they're interconnected. We called the project "The Interlace," thinking that we interlace and interconnect the human beings and the spaces alike. And the detailed quality of everything we designed was about animating the space and giving the space to the inhabitants. And, in fact, it was a system where we would layer primarily communal spaces, stacked to more and more individual and private spaces. So we would open up a spectrum between the collective and the individual. A little piece of math: if we count all the green that we left on the ground, minus the footprint of the buildings, and we would add back the green of all the terraces, we have 112 percent green space, so more nature than not having built a building. And of course this little piece of math shows you that we are multiplying the space available to those who live there. This is, in fact, the 13th floor of one of these terraces. So you see new datum planes, new grounds planes for social activity. We paid a lot of attention to sustainability. In the tropics, the sun is the most important thing to pay attention to, and, in fact, it is seeking protection from the sun. We first proved that all apartments would have sufficient daylight through the year. We then went on to optimize the glazing of the facades to minimize the energy consumption of the building. But most importantly, we could prove that through the geometry of the building design, the building itself would provide sufficient shading to the courtyards so that those would be usable throughout the entire year. We further placed water bodies along the prevailing wind corridors, so that evaporative cooling would create microclimates that, again, would enhance the quality of those spaces available for the inhabitants. And it was the idea of creating this variety of choices, of freedom to think where you would want to be, where you would want to escape, maybe, within the own complexity of the complex in which you live. But coming from Asia to Europe: a building for a German media company based in Berlin, transitioning from the traditional print media to the digital media. And its CEO asked a few very pertinent questions: Why would anyone today still want to go to the office, because you can actually work anywhere? And how could a digital identity of a company be embodied in a building? We created not only an object, but at the center of this object we created a giant space, and this space was about the experience of a collective, the experience of collaboration and of togetherness. Communication, interaction as the center of a space that in itself would float, like what we call the collaborative cloud, in the middle of the building, surrounded by an envelope of standard modular offices. So with only a few steps from your quiet work desk, you could participate in the giant collective experience of the central space. Finally, we come to London, a project commissioned by the London Legacy Development Corporation of the Mayor of London. We were asked to undertake a study and investigate the potential of a site out in Stratford in the Olympic Park. In the 19th century, Prince Albert had created Albertopolis. And Boris Johnson thought of creating Olympicopolis. The idea was to bring together some of Britain's greatest institutions, some international ones, and to create a new system of synergies. Prince Albert, as yet, created Albertopolis in the 19th century, thought of showcasing all achievements of mankind, bringing arts and science closer together. And he built Exhibition Road, a linear sequence of those institutions. But of course, today's society has moved on from there. We no longer live in a world in which everything is as clearly delineated or separated from each other. We live in a world in which boundaries start to blur between the different domains, and in which collaboration and interaction becomes far more important than keeping separations. So we wanted to think of a giant culture machine, a building that would orchestrate and animate the various domains, but allow them to interact and collaborate. At the base of it is a very simple module, a ring module. It can function as a double-loaded corridor, has daylight, has ventilation. It can be glazed over and turned into a giant exhibitional performance space. These modules were stacked together with the idea that almost any function could, over time, occupy any of these modules. So institutions could shrink or contract, as, of course, the future of culture is, in a way, the most uncertain of all. This is how the building sits, adjacent to the Aquatics Centre, opposite the Olympic Stadium. And you can see how its cantilevering volumes project out and engage the public space and how its courtyards animate the public inside. The idea was to create a complex system in which institutional entities could maintain their own identity, in which they would not be subsumed in a singular volume. Here's a scale comparison to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It both shows the enormous scale and potential of the project, but also the difference: here, it is a multiplicity of a heterogeneous structure, in which different entities can interact without losing their own identity. And it was this thought: to create an organizational structure that would allow for multiple narratives to be scripted — for those in the educational parts that create and think culture; for those that present the visual arts, the dance; and for the public to be admitted into all of this with a series of possible trajectories, to script their own reading of these narratives and their own experience. And I want to end on a project that is very small, in a way, very different: a floating cinema in the ocean of Thailand. Friends of mine had founded a film festival, and I thought, if we think of the stories and narratives of movies, we should also think of the narratives of the people that watch them. So I designed a small modular floating platform, based on the techniques of local fishermen, how they built their lobster and fish farms. We collaborated with the local community and built, out of recycled materials of their own, this fantastical floating platform that gently moved in the ocean as we watched films from the British film archive, [1903] "Alice in Wonderland," for example. The most primordial experiences of the audience merged with the stories of the movies. So I believe that architecture exceeds the domain of physical matter, of the built environment, but is really about how we want to live our lives, how we script our own stories and those of others. Thank you. (Applause)
The mysterious world of underwater caves	{0: 'Jill Heinerth explores underwater caves deep inside the earth.'}	TEDYouth 2015	I'm an underwater explorer, more specifically a cave diver. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a little kid, but growing up in Canada as a young girl, that wasn't really available to me. But as it turns out, we know a lot more about space than we do about the underground waterways coursing through our planet, the very lifeblood of Mother Earth. So I decided to do something that was even more remarkable. Instead of exploring outer space, I wanted to explore the wonders of inner space. Now, a lot of people will tell you that cave diving is perhaps one of the most dangerous endeavors. I mean, imagine yourself here in this room, if you were suddenly plunged into blackness, with your only job to find the exit, sometimes swimming through these large spaces, and at other times crawling beneath the seats, following a thin guideline, just waiting for the life support to provide your very next breath. Well, that's my workplace. But what I want to teach you today is that our world is not one big solid rock. It's a whole lot more like a sponge. I can swim through a lot of the pores in our earth's sponge, but where I can't, other life-forms and other materials can make that journey without me. And my voice is the one that's going to teach you about the inside of Mother Earth. There was no guidebook available to me when I decided to be the first person to cave dive inside Antarctic icebergs. In 2000, this was the largest moving object on the planet. It calved off the Ross Ice Shelf, and we went down there to explore ice edge ecology and search for life-forms beneath the ice. We use a technology called rebreathers. It's an awful lot like the same technology that is used for space walks. This technology enables us to go deeper than we could've imagined even 10 years ago. We use exotic gases, and we can make missions even up to 20 hours long underwater. I work with biologists. It turns out that caves are repositories of amazing life-forms, species that we never knew existed before. Many of these life-forms live in unusual ways. They have no pigment and no eyes in many cases, and these animals are also extremely long-lived. In fact, animals swimming in these caves today are identical in the fossil record that predates the extinction of the dinosaurs. So imagine that: these are like little swimming dinosaurs. What can they teach us about evolution and survival? When we look at an animal like this remipede swimming in the jar, he has giant fangs with venom. He can actually attack something 40 times his size and kill it. If he were the size of a cat, he'd be the most dangerous thing on our planet. And these animals live in remarkably beautiful places, and in some cases, caves like this, that are very young, yet the animals are ancient. How did they get there? I also work with physicists, and they're interested oftentimes in global climate change. They can take rocks within the caves, and they can slice them and look at the layers within with rocks, much like the rings of a tree, and they can count back in history and learn about the climate on our planet at very different times. The red that you see in this photograph is actually dust from the Sahara Desert. So it's been picked up by wind, blown across the Atlantic Ocean. It's rained down in this case on the island of Abaco in the Bahamas. It soaks in through the ground and deposits itself in the rocks within these caves. And when we look back in the layers of these rocks, we can find times when the climate was very, very dry on earth, and we can go back many hundreds of thousands of years. Paleoclimatologists are also interested in where the sea level stands were at other times on earth. Here in Bermuda, my team and I embarked on the deepest manned dives ever conducted in the region, and we were looking for places where the sea level used to lap up against the shoreline, many hundreds of feet below current levels. I also get to work with paleontologists and archaeologists. In places like Mexico, in the Bahamas, and even in Cuba, we're looking at cultural remains and also human remains in caves, and they tell us a lot about some of the earliest inhabitants of these regions. But my very favorite project of all was over 15 years ago, when I was a part of the team that made the very first accurate, three-dimensional map of a subterranean surface. This device that I'm driving through the cave was actually creating a three-dimensional model as we drove it. We also used ultra low frequency radio to broadcast back to the surface our exact position within the cave. So I swam under houses and businesses and bowling alleys and golf courses, and even under a Sonny's BBQ Restaurant, Pretty remarkable, and what that taught me was that everything we do on the surface of our earth will be returned to us to drink. Our water planet is not just rivers, lakes and oceans, but it's this vast network of groundwater that knits us all together. It's a shared resource from which we all drink. And when we can understand our human connections with our groundwater and all of our water resources on this planet, then we'll be working on the problem that's probably the most important issue of this century. So I never got to be that astronaut that I always wanted to be, but this mapping device, designed by Dr. Bill Stone, will be. It's actually morphed. It's now a self-swimming autonomous robot, artificially intelligent, and its ultimate goal is to go to Jupiter's moon Europa and explore oceans beneath the frozen surface of that body. And that's pretty amazing. (Applause)
How we can make crops survive without water	{0: 'Jill Farrant is leading the development of drought-tolerant crops to nourish populations in arid climates.'}	TEDGlobal>Geneva	I believe that the secret to producing extremely drought-tolerant crops, which should go some way to providing food security in the world, lies in resurrection plants, pictured here, in an extremely droughted state. You might think that these plants look dead, but they're not. Give them water, and they will resurrect, green up, start growing, in 12 to 48 hours. Now, why would I suggest that producing drought-tolerant crops will go towards providing food security? Well, the current world population is around 7 billion. And it's estimated that by 2050, we'll be between 9 and 10 billion people, with the bulk of this growth happening in Africa. The food and agricultural organizations of the world have suggested that we need a 70 percent increase in current agricultural practice to meet that demand. Given that plants are at the base of the food chain, most of that's going to have to come from plants. That percentage of 70 percent does not take into consideration the potential effects of climate change. This is taken from a study by Dai published in 2011, where he took into consideration all the potential effects of climate change and expressed them — amongst other things — increased aridity due to lack of rain or infrequent rain. The areas in red shown here, are areas that until recently have been very successfully used for agriculture, but cannot anymore because of lack of rainfall. This is the situation that's predicted to happen in 2050. Much of Africa, in fact, much of the world, is going to be in trouble. We're going to have to think of some very smart ways of producing food. And preferably among them, some drought-tolerant crops. The other thing to remember about Africa is that most of their agriculture is rainfed. Now, making drought-tolerant crops is not the easiest thing in the world. And the reason for this is water. Water is essential to life on this planet. All living, actively metabolizing organisms, from microbes to you and I, are comprised predominately of water. All life reactions happen in water. And loss of a small amount of water results in death. You and I are 65 percent water — we lose one percent of that, we die. But we can make behavioral changes to avoid that. Plants can't. They're stuck in the ground. And so in the first instance they have a little bit more water than us, about 95 percent water, and they can lose a little bit more than us, like 10 to about 70 percent, depending on the species, but for short periods only. Most of them will either try to resist or avoid water loss. So extreme examples of resistors can be found in succulents. They tend to be small, very attractive, but they hold onto their water at such great cost that they grow extremely slowly. Examples of avoidance of water loss are found in trees and shrubs. They send down very deep roots, mine subterranean water supplies and just keep flushing it through them at all times, keeping themselves hydrated. The one on the right is called a baobab. It's also called the upside-down tree, simply because the proportion of roots to shoots is so great that it looks like the tree has been planted upside down. And of course the roots are required for hydration of that plant. And probably the most common strategy of avoidance is found in annuals. Annuals make up the bulk of our plant food supplies. Up the west coast of my country, for much of the year you don't see much vegetation growth. But come the spring rains, you get this: flowering of the desert. The strategy in annuals, is to grow only in the rainy season. At the end of that season they produce a seed, which is dry, eight to 10 percent water, but very much alive. And anything that is that dry and still alive, we call desiccation-tolerant. In the desiccated state, what seeds can do is lie in extremes of environment for prolonged periods of time. The next time the rainy season comes, they germinate and grow, and the whole cycle just starts again. It's widely believed that the evolution of desiccation-tolerant seeds allowed the colonization and the radiation of flowering plants, or angiosperms, onto land. But back to annuals as our major form of food supplies. Wheat, rice and maize form 95 percent of our plant food supplies. And it's been a great strategy because in a short space of time you can produce a lot of seed. Seeds are energy-rich so there's a lot of food calories, you can store it in times of plenty for times of famine, but there's a downside. The vegetative tissues, the roots and leaves of annuals, do not have much by way of inherent resistance, avoidance or tolerance characteristics. They just don't need them. They grow in the rainy season and they've got a seed to help them survive the rest of the year. And so despite concerted efforts in agriculture to make crops with improved properties of resistance, avoidance and tolerance — particularly resistance and avoidance because we've had good models to understand how those work — we still get images like this. Maize crop in Africa, two weeks without rain and it's dead. There is a solution: resurrection plants. These plants can lose 95 percent of their cellular water, remain in a dry, dead-like state for months to years, and give them water, they green up and start growing again. Like seeds, these are desiccation-tolerant. Like seeds, these can withstand extremes of environmental conditions. And this is a really rare phenomenon. There are only 135 flowering plant species that can do this. I'm going to show you a video of the resurrection process of these three species in that order. And at the bottom, there's a time axis so you can see how quickly it happens. (Applause) Pretty amazing, huh? So I've spent the last 21 years trying to understand how they do this. How do these plants dry without dying? And I work on a variety of different resurrection plants, shown here in the hydrated and dry states, for a number of reasons. One of them is that each of these plants serves as a model for a crop that I'd like to make drought-tolerant. So on the extreme top left, for example, is a grass, it's called Eragrostis nindensis, it's got a close relative called Eragrostis tef — a lot of you might know it as "teff" — it's a staple food in Ethiopia, it's gluten-free, and it's something we would like to make drought-tolerant. The other reason for looking at a number of plants, is that, at least initially, I wanted to find out: do they do the same thing? Do they all use the same mechanisms to be able to lose all that water and not die? So I undertook what we call a systems biology approach in order to get a comprehensive understanding of desiccation tolerance, in which we look at everything from the molecular to the whole plant, ecophysiological level. For example we look at things like changes in the plant anatomy as they dried out and their ultrastructure. We look at the transcriptome, which is just a term for a technology in which we look at the genes that are switched on or off, in response to drying. Most genes will code for proteins, so we look at the proteome. What are the proteins made in response to drying? Some proteins would code for enzymes which make metabolites, so we look at the metabolome. Now, this is important because plants are stuck in the ground. They use what I call a highly tuned chemical arsenal to protect themselves from all the stresses of their environment. So it's important that we look at the chemical changes involved in drying. And at the last study that we do at the molecular level, we look at the lipidome — the lipid changes in response to drying. And that's also important because all biological membranes are made of lipids. They're held as membranes because they're in water. Take away the water, those membranes fall apart. Lipids also act as signals to turn on genes. Then we use physiological and biochemical studies to try and understand the function of the putative protectants that we've actually discovered in our other studies. And then use all of that to try and understand how the plant copes with its natural environment. I've always had the philosophy that I needed a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms of desiccation tolerance in order to make a meaningful suggestion for a biotic application. I'm sure some of you are thinking, "By biotic application, does she mean she's going to make genetically modified crops?" And the answer to that question is: depends on your definition of genetic modification. All of the crops that we eat today, wheat, rice and maize, are highly genetically modified from their ancestors, but we don't consider them GM because they're being produced by conventional breeding. If you mean, am I going to put resurrection plant genes into crops, your answer is yes. In the essence of time, we have tried that approach. More appropriately, some of my collaborators at UCT, Jennifer Thomson, Suhail Rafudeen, have spearheaded that approach and I'm going to show you some data soon. But we're about to embark upon an extremely ambitious approach, in which we aim to turn on whole suites of genes that are already present in every crop. They're just never turned on under extreme drought conditions. I leave it up to you to decide whether those should be called GM or not. I'm going to now just give you some of the data from that first approach. And in order to do that I have to explain a little bit about how genes work. So you probably all know that genes are made of double-stranded DNA. It's wound very tightly into chromosomes that are present in every cell of your body or in a plant's body. If you unwind that DNA, you get genes. And each gene has a promoter, which is just an on-off switch, the gene coding region, and then a terminator, which indicates that this is the end of this gene, the next gene will start. Now, promoters are not simple on-off switches. They normally require a lot of fine-tuning, lots of things to be present and correct before that gene is switched on. So what's typically done in biotech studies is that we use an inducible promoter, we know how to switch it on. We couple that to genes of interest and put that into a plant and see how the plant responds. In the study that I'm going to talk to you about, my collaborators used a drought-induced promoter, which we discovered in a resurrection plant. The nice thing about this promoter is that we do nothing. The plant itself senses drought. And we've used it to drive antioxidant genes from resurrection plants. Why antioxidant genes? Well, all stresses, particularly drought stress, results in the formation of free radicals, or reactive oxygen species, which are highly damaging and can cause crop death. What antioxidants do is stop that damage. So here's some data from a maize strain that's very popularly used in Africa. To the left of the arrow are plants without the genes, to the right — plants with the antioxidant genes. After three weeks without watering, the ones with the genes do a hell of a lot better. Now to the final approach. My research has shown that there's considerable similarity in the mechanisms of desiccation tolerance in seeds and resurrection plants. So I ask the question, are they using the same genes? Or slightly differently phrased, are resurrection plants using genes evolved in seed desiccation tolerance in their roots and leaves? Have they retasked these seed genes in roots and leaves of resurrection plants? And I answer that question, as a consequence of a lot of research from my group and recent collaborations from a group of Henk Hilhorst in the Netherlands, Mel Oliver in the United States and Julia Buitink in France. The answer is yes, that there is a core set of genes that are involved in both. And I'm going to illustrate this very crudely for maize, where the chromosomes below the off switch represent all the genes that are required for desiccation tolerance. So as maize seeds dried out at the end of their period of development, they switch these genes on. Resurrection plants switch on the same genes when they dry out. All modern crops, therefore, have these genes in their roots and leaves, they just never switch them on. They only switch them on in seed tissues. So what we're trying to do right now is to understand the environmental and cellular signals that switch on these genes in resurrection plants, to mimic the process in crops. And just a final thought. What we're trying to do very rapidly is to repeat what nature did in the evolution of resurrection plants some 10 to 40 million years ago. My plants and I thank you for your attention. (Applause)
Can a computer write poetry?	{0: "Oscar Schwartz's research and writing concerns the influence of digital technology on culture and human interaction."}	TEDxYouth@Sydney	I have a question. Can a computer write poetry? This is a provocative question. You think about it for a minute, and you suddenly have a bunch of other questions like: What is a computer? What is poetry? What is creativity? But these are questions that people spend their entire lifetime trying to answer, not in a single TED Talk. So we're going to have to try a different approach. So up here, we have two poems. One of them is written by a human, and the other one's written by a computer. I'm going to ask you to tell me which one's which. Have a go: Poem 1: Little Fly / Thy summer's play, / My thoughtless hand / Has brush'd away. Am I not / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me? Poem 2: We can feel / Activist through your life's / morning / Pauses to see, pope I hate the / Non all the night to start a / great otherwise (...) Alright, time's up. Hands up if you think Poem 1 was written by a human. OK, most of you. Hands up if you think Poem 2 was written by a human. Very brave of you, because the first one was written by the human poet William Blake. The second one was written by an algorithm that took all the language from my Facebook feed on one day and then regenerated it algorithmically, according to methods that I'll describe a little bit later on. So let's try another test. Again, you haven't got ages to read this, so just trust your gut. Poem 1: A lion roars and a dog barks. It is interesting / and fascinating that a bird will fly and not / roar or bark. Enthralling stories about animals are in my dreams and I will sing them all if I / am not exhausted or weary. Poem 2: Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You are really beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! All / the stuff they've always talked about (...) Alright, time's up. So if you think the first poem was written by a human, put your hand up. OK. And if you think the second poem was written by a human, put your hand up. We have, more or less, a 50/50 split here. It was much harder. The answer is, the first poem was generated by an algorithm called Racter, that was created back in the 1970s, and the second poem was written by a guy called Frank O'Hara, who happens to be one of my favorite human poets. (Laughter) So what we've just done now is a Turing test for poetry. The Turing test was first proposed by this guy, Alan Turing, in 1950, in order to answer the question, can computers think? Alan Turing believed that if a computer was able to have a to have a text-based conversation with a human, with such proficiency such that the human couldn't tell whether they are talking to a computer or a human, then the computer can be said to have intelligence. So in 2013, my friend Benjamin Laird and I, we created a Turing test for poetry online. It's called bot or not, and you can go and play it for yourselves. But basically, it's the game we just played. You're presented with a poem, you don't know whether it was written by a human or a computer and you have to guess. So thousands and thousands of people have taken this test online, so we have results. And what are the results? Well, Turing said that if a computer could fool a human 30 percent of the time that it was a human, then it passes the Turing test for intelligence. We have poems on the bot or not database that have fooled 65 percent of human readers into thinking it was written by a human. So, I think we have an answer to our question. According to the logic of the Turing test, can a computer write poetry? Well, yes, absolutely it can. But if you're feeling a little bit uncomfortable with this answer, that's OK. If you're having a bunch of gut reactions to it, that's also OK because this isn't the end of the story. Let's play our third and final test. Again, you're going to have to read and tell me which you think is human. Poem 1: Red flags the reason for pretty flags. / And ribbons. Ribbons of flags / And wearing material / Reasons for wearing material. (...) Poem 2: A wounded deer leaps highest, / I've heard the daffodil I've heard the flag to-day / I've heard the hunter tell; / 'Tis but the ecstasy of death, / And then the brake is almost done (...) OK, time is up. So hands up if you think Poem 1 was written by a human. Hands up if you think Poem 2 was written by a human. Whoa, that's a lot more people. So you'd be surprised to find that Poem 1 was written by the very human poet Gertrude Stein. And Poem 2 was generated by an algorithm called RKCP. Now before we go on, let me describe very quickly and simply, how RKCP works. So RKCP is an algorithm designed by Ray Kurzweil, who's a director of engineering at Google and a firm believer in artificial intelligence. So, you give RKCP a source text, it analyzes the source text in order to find out how it uses language, and then it regenerates language that emulates that first text. So in the poem we just saw before, Poem 2, the one that you all thought was human, it was fed a bunch of poems by a poet called Emily Dickinson it looked at the way she used language, learned the model, and then it regenerated a model according to that same structure. But the important thing to know about RKCP is that it doesn't know the meaning of the words it's using. The language is just raw material, it could be Chinese, it could be in Swedish, it could be the collected language from your Facebook feed for one day. It's just raw material. And nevertheless, it's able to create a poem that seems more human than Gertrude Stein's poem, and Gertrude Stein is a human. So what we've done here is, more or less, a reverse Turing test. So Gertrude Stein, who's a human, is able to write a poem that fools a majority of human judges into thinking that it was written by a computer. Therefore, according to the logic of the reverse Turing test, Gertrude Stein is a computer. (Laughter) Feeling confused? I think that's fair enough. So far we've had humans that write like humans, we have computers that write like computers, we have computers that write like humans, but we also have, perhaps most confusingly, humans that write like computers. So what do we take from all of this? Do we take that William Blake is somehow more of a human than Gertrude Stein? Or that Gertrude Stein is more of a computer than William Blake? (Laughter) These are questions I've been asking myself for around two years now, and I don't have any answers. But what I do have are a bunch of insights about our relationship with technology. So my first insight is that, for some reason, we associate poetry with being human. So that when we ask, "Can a computer write poetry?" we're also asking, "What does it mean to be human and how do we put boundaries around this category? How do we say who or what can be part of this category?" This is an essentially philosophical question, I believe, and it can't be answered with a yes or no test, like the Turing test. I also believe that Alan Turing understood this, and that when he devised his test back in 1950, he was doing it as a philosophical provocation. So my second insight is that, when we take the Turing test for poetry, we're not really testing the capacity of the computers because poetry-generating algorithms, they're pretty simple and have existed, more or less, since the 1950s. What we are doing with the Turing test for poetry, rather, is collecting opinions about what constitutes humanness. So, what I've figured out, we've seen this when earlier today, we say that William Blake is more of a human than Gertrude Stein. Of course, this doesn't mean that William Blake was actually more human or that Gertrude Stein was more of a computer. It simply means that the category of the human is unstable. This has led me to understand that the human is not a cold, hard fact. Rather, it is something that's constructed with our opinions and something that changes over time. So my final insight is that the computer, more or less, works like a mirror that reflects any idea of a human that we show it. We show it Emily Dickinson, it gives Emily Dickinson back to us. We show it William Blake, that's what it reflects back to us. We show it Gertrude Stein, what we get back is Gertrude Stein. More than any other bit of technology, the computer is a mirror that reflects any idea of the human we teach it. So I'm sure a lot of you have been hearing a lot about artificial intelligence recently. And much of the conversation is, can we build it? Can we build an intelligent computer? Can we build a creative computer? What we seem to be asking over and over is can we build a human-like computer? But what we've seen just now is that the human is not a scientific fact, that it's an ever-shifting, concatenating idea and one that changes over time. So that when we begin to grapple with the ideas of artificial intelligence in the future, we shouldn't only be asking ourselves, "Can we build it?" But we should also be asking ourselves, "What idea of the human do we want to have reflected back to us?" This is an essentially philosophical idea, and it's one that can't be answered with software alone, but I think requires a moment of species-wide, existential reflection. Thank you. (Applause)
How I turned a deadly plant into a thriving business	{0: 'Achenyo Idachaba is the head of MitiMeth, a Nigeria-based company that makes handicrafts from aquatic weeds and other agro-waste.\r\n\r\n'}	TEDWomen 2015	Welcome to Bayeku, a riverine community in Ikorodu, Lagos — a vivid representation of several riverine communities across Nigeria, communities whose waterways have been infested by an invasive aquatic weed; communities where economic livelihoods have been hampered: fishing, marine transportation and trading; communities where fish yields have diminished; communities where schoolchildren are unable to go to school for days, sometimes weeks, on end. Who would have thought that this plant with round leaves, inflated stems, and showy, lavender flowers would cause such havoc in these communities. The plant is known as water hyacinth and its botanical name, Eichhornia crassipes. Interestingly, in Nigeria, the plant is also known by other names, names associated with historical events, as well as myths. In some places, the plant is called Babangida. When you hear Babangida, you remember the military and military coups. And you think: fear, restraint. In parts of Nigeria in the Niger Delta, the plant is also known as Abiola. When you hear Abiola, you remember annulled elections and you think: dashed hopes. In the southwestern part of Nigeria, the plant is known as Gbe'borun. Gbe'borun is a Yoruba phrase which translates to "gossip," or "talebearer." When you think of gossip, you think: rapid reproduction, destruction. And in the Igala-speaking part of Nigeria, the plant is known as A Kp'iye Kp'oma, And when you hear that, you think of death. It literally translates to "death to mother and child." I personally had my encounter with this plant in the year 2009. It was shortly after I had relocated from the US to Nigeria. I'd quit my job in corporate America and decided to take this big leap of faith, a leap of faith that came out of a deep sense of conviction that there was a lot of work to do in Nigeria in the area of sustainable development. And so here I was in the year 2009, actually, at the end of 2009, in Lagos on the Third Mainland Bridge. And I looked to my left and saw this very arresting image. It was an image of fishing boats that had been hemmed in by dense mats of water hyacinth. And I was really pained by what I saw because I thought to myself, "These poor fisherfolk, how are they going to go about their daily activities with these restrictions." And then I thought, "There's got to be a better way." A win-win solution whereby the environment is taken care of by the weeds being cleared out of the way and then this being turned into an economic benefit for the communities whose lives are impacted the most by the infestation of the weed. That, I would say, was my spark moment. And so I did further research to find out more about the beneficial uses of this weed. Out of the several, one struck me the most. It was the use of the plant for handicrafts. And I thought, "What a great idea." Personally, I love handicrafts, especially handicrafts that are woven around a story. And so I thought, "This could be easily deployed within the communities without the requirement of technical skills." And I thought to myself, "Three simple steps to a mega solution." First step: Get out into the waterways and harvest the water hyacinth. That way, you create access. Secondly, you dry the water hyacinth stems. And thirdly, you weave the water hyacinth into products. The third step was a challenge. See, I'm a computer scientist by background and not someone in the creative arts. And so I began my quest to find out how I can learn how to weave. And this quest took me to a community in Ibadan, where I lived, called Sabo. Sabo translates to "strangers' quarters." And the community is predominantly made up of people from the northern part of the country. So I literally took my dried weeds in hand, there were several more of them, and went knocking from door to door to find out who could teach me how to weave these water hyacinth stems into ropes. And I was directed to the shed of Malam Yahaya. The problem, though, is that Malam Yahaya doesn't speak English and neither did I speak Hausa. But some little kids came to the rescue and helped translate. And that began my journey of learning how to weave and transform these dried water hyacinth stems into long ropes. With my long ropes in hand, I was now equipped to make products. And that was the beginning of partnerships. Working with rattan basket makers to come up with products. So with this in hand, I felt confident that I would be able to take this knowledge back into the riverine communities and help them to transform their adversity into prosperity. So taking these weeds and actually weaving them into products that can be sold. So we have pens, we have tableware, we have purses, we have tissue boxes. Thereby, helping the communities to see water hyacinth in a different light. Seeing water hyacinth as being valuable, being aesthetic, being durable, tough, resilient. Changing names, changing livelihoods. From Gbe'borun, gossip, to Olusotan, storyteller. And from A Kp'iye Kp'oma, which is "killer of mother and child," to Ya du j'ewn w'Iye kp'Oma, "provider of food for mother and child." And I'd like to end with a quote by Michael Margolis. He said, "If you want to learn about a culture, listen to the stories. And if you want to change a culture, change the stories." And so, from Makoko community, to Abobiri, to Ewoi, to Kolo, to Owahwa, Esaba, we have changed the story. Thank you for listening. (Applause)
The unheard story of the Sistine Chapel	{0: "Elizabeth Lev's experience studying and teaching art has led her to believe that when we encounter something beautiful, we are made vulnerable and opened to the truth."}	TEDGlobal>Geneva	Imagine you're in Rome, and you've made your way to the Vatican Museums. And you've been shuffling down long corridors, past statues, frescoes, lots and lots of stuff. You're heading towards the Sistine Chapel. At last — a long corridor, a stair and a door. You're at the threshold of the Sistine Chapel. So what are you expecting? Soaring domes? Choirs of angels? We don't really have any of that there. Instead, you may ask yourself, what do we have? Well, curtains up on the Sistine Chapel. And I mean literally, you're surrounded by painted curtains, the original decoration of this chapel. Churches used tapestries not just to keep out cold during long masses, but as a way to represent the great theater of life. The human drama in which each one of us plays a part is a great story, a story that encompasses the whole world and that came to unfold in the three stages of the painting in the Sistine Chapel. Now, this building started out as a space for a small group of wealthy, educated Christian priests. They prayed there. They elected their pope there. Five hundred years ago, it was the ultimate ecclesiastical man cave. So, you may ask, how can it be that today it attracts and delights five million people a year, from all different backgrounds? Because in that compressed space, there was a creative explosion, ignited by the electric excitement of new geopolitical frontiers, which set on fire the ancient missionary tradition of the Church and produced one of the greatest works of art in history. Now, this development took place as a great evolution, moving from the beginning of a few elite, and eventually able to speak to audiences of people that come from all over the world. This evolution took place in three stages, each one linked to a historical circumstance. The first one was rather limited in scope. It reflected the rather parochial perspective. The second one took place after worldviews were dramatically altered after Columbus's historical voyage; and the third, when the Age of Discovery was well under way and the Church rose to the challenge of going global. The original decoration of this church reflected a smaller world. There were busy scenes that told the stories of the lives of Jesus and Moses, reflecting the development of the Jewish and Christian people. The man who commissioned this, Pope Sixtus IV, assembled a dream team of Florentine art, including men like Sandro Botticelli and the man who would become Michelangelo's future painting teacher, Ghirlandaio. These men, they blanketed the walls with a frieze of pure color, and in these stories you'll notice familiar landscapes, the artists using Roman monuments or a Tuscan landscape to render a faraway story, something much more familiar. With the addition of images of the Pope's friends and family, this was a perfect decoration for a small court limited to the European continent. But in 1492, the New World was discovered, horizons were expanding, and this little 133 by 46-foot microcosm had to expand as well. And it did, thanks to a creative genius, a visionary and an awesome story. Now, the creative genius was Michelangelo Buonarroti, 33 years old when he was tapped to decorate 12,000 square feet of ceiling, and the deck was stacked against him — he had trained in painting but had left to pursue sculpture. There were angry patrons in Florence because he had left a stack of incomplete commissions, lured to Rome by the prospect of a great sculptural project, and that project had fallen through. And he had been left with a commission to paint 12 apostles against a decorative background in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which would look like every other ceiling in Italy. But genius rose to the challenge. In an age when a man dared to sail across the Atlantic Ocean, Michelangelo dared to chart new artistic waters. He, too, would tell a story — no Apostles — but a story of great beginnings, the story of Genesis. Not really an easy sell, stories on a ceiling. How would you be able to read a busy scene from 62 feet below? The painting technique that had been handed on for 200 years in Florentine studios was not equipped for this kind of a narrative. But Michelangelo wasn't really a painter, and so he played to his strengths. Instead of being accustomed to filling space with busyness, he took a hammer and chisel and hacked away at a piece of marble to reveal the figure within. Michelangelo was an essentialist; he would tell his story in massive, dynamic bodies. This plan was embraced by the larger-than-life Pope Julius II, a man who was unafraid of Michelangelo's brazen genius. He was nephew to Pope Sixtus IV, and he had been steeped in art for 30 years and he knew its power. And history has handed down the moniker of the Warrior Pope, but this man's legacy to the Vatican — it wasn't fortresses and artillery, it was art. He left us the Raphael Rooms, the Sistine Chapel. He left St. Peter's Basilica as well as an extraordinary collection of Greco-Roman sculptures — decidedly un-Christian works that would become the seedbed of the world's first modern museum, the Vatican Museums. Julius was a man who envisioned a Vatican that would be eternally relevant through grandeur and through beauty, and he was right. The encounter between these two giants, Michelangelo and Julius II, that's what gave us the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo was so committed to this project, that he succeeded in getting the job done in three and a half years, using a skeleton crew and spending most of the time, hours on end, reaching up above his head to paint the stories on the ceiling. So let's look at this ceiling and see storytelling gone global. No more familiar artistic references to the world around you. There's just space and structure and energy; a monumental painted framework which opens onto nine panels, more driven by sculptural form than painterly color. And we stand in the far end by the entrance, far from the altar and from the gated enclosure intended for the clergy and we peer into the distance, looking for a beginning. And whether in scientific inquiry or in biblical tradition, we think in terms of a primal spark. Michelangelo gave us an initial energy when he gave us the separation of light and dark, a churning figure blurry in the distance, compressed into a tight space. The next figure looms larger, and you see a figure hurtling from one side to the next. He leaves in his wake the sun, the moon, vegetation. Michelangelo didn't focus on the stuff that was being created, unlike all the other artists. He focused on the act of creation. And then the movement stops, like a caesura in poetry and the creator hovers. So what's he doing? Is he creating land? Is he creating sea? Or is he looking back over his handiwork, the universe and his treasures, just like Michelangelo must have, looking back over his work in the ceiling and proclaiming, "It is good." So now the scene is set, and you get to the culmination of creation, which is man. Adam leaps to the eye, a light figure against a dark background. But looking closer, that leg is pretty languid on the ground, the arm is heavy on the knee. Adam lacks that interior spark that will impel him to greatness. That spark is about to be conferred by the creator in that finger, which is one millimeter from the hand of Adam. It puts us at the edge of our seats, because we're one moment from that contact, through which that man will discover his purpose, leap up and take his place at the pinnacle of creation. And then Michelangelo threw a curveball. Who is in that other arm? Eve, first woman. No, she's not an afterthought. She's part of the plan. She's always been in his mind. Look at her, so intimate with God that her hand curls around his arm. And for me, an American art historian from the 21st century, this was the moment that the painting spoke to me. Because I realized that this representation of the human drama was always about men and women — so much so, that the dead center, the heart of the ceiling, is the creation of woman, not Adam. And the fact is, that when you see them together in the Garden of Eden, they fall together and together their proud posture turns into folded shame. You are at critical juncture now in the ceiling. You are exactly at the point where you and I can go no further into the church. The gated enclosure keeps us out of the inner sanctum, and we are cast out much like Adam and Eve. The remaining scenes in the ceiling, they mirror the crowded chaos of the world around us. You have Noah and his Ark and the flood. You have Noah. He's making a sacrifice and a covenant with God. Maybe he's the savior. Oh, but no, Noah is the one who grew grapes, invented wine, got drunk and passed out naked in his barn. It is a curious way to design the ceiling, now starting out with God creating life, ending up with some guy blind drunk in a barn. And so, compared with Adam, you might think Michelangelo is making fun of us. But he's about to dispel the gloom by using those bright colors right underneath Noah: emerald, topaz, scarlet on the prophet Zechariah. Zechariah foresees a light coming from the east, and we are turned at this juncture to a new destination, with sibyls and prophets who will lead us on a parade. You have the heroes and heroines who make safe the way, and we follow the mothers and fathers. They are the motors of this great human engine, driving it forward. And now we're at the keystone of the ceiling, the culmination of the whole thing, with a figure that looks like he's about to fall out of his space into our space, encroaching our space. This is the most important juncture. Past meets present. This figure, Jonah, who spent three days in the belly of the whale, for the Christians, is the symbol of the renewal of humanity through Jesus' sacrifice, but for the multitudes of visitors to that museum from all faiths who visit there every day, he is the moment the distant past encounters and meets immediate reality. All of this brings us to the yawning archway of the altar wall, where we see Michelangelo's Last Judgment, painted in 1534 after the world had changed again. The Reformation had splintered the Church, the Ottoman Empire had made Islam a household word and Magellan had found a route into the Pacific Ocean. How is a 59-year-old artist who has never been any further than Venice going to speak to this new world? Michelangelo chose to paint destiny, that universal desire, common to all of us, to leave a legacy of excellence. Told in terms of the Christian vision of the Last Judgment, the end of the world, Michelangelo gave you a series of figures who are wearing these strikingly beautiful bodies. They have no more covers, no more portraits except for a couple. It's a composition only out of bodies, 391, no two alike, unique like each and every one of us. They start in the lower corner, breaking away from the ground, struggling and trying to rise. Those who have risen reach back to help others, and in one amazing vignette, you have a black man and a white man pulled up together in an incredible vision of human unity in this new world. The lion's share of the space goes to the winner's circle. There you find men and women completely nude like athletes. They are the ones who have overcome adversity, and Michelangelo's vision of people who combat adversity, overcome obstacles — they're just like athletes. So you have men and women flexing and posing in this extraordinary spotlight. Presiding over this assembly is Jesus, first a suffering man on the cross, now a glorious ruler in Heaven. And as Michelangelo proved in his painting, hardship, setbacks and obstacles, they don't limit excellence, they forge it. Now, this does lead us to one odd thing. This is the Pope's private chapel, and the best way you can describe that is indeed a stew of nudes. But Michelangelo was trying to use only the best artistic language, the most universal artistic language he could think of: that of the human body. And so instead of the way of showing virtue such as fortitude or self-mastery, he borrowed from Julius II's wonderful collection of sculptures in order to show inner strength as external power. Now, one contemporary did write that the chapel was too beautiful to not cause controversy. And so it did. Michelangelo soon found that thanks to the printing press, complaints about the nudity spread all over the place, and soon his masterpiece of human drama was labeled pornography, at which point he added two more portraits, one of the man who criticized him, a papal courtier, and the other one of himself as a dried up husk, no athlete, in the hands of a long-suffering martyr. The year he died he saw several of these figures covered over, a triumph for trivial distractions over his great exhortation to glory. And so now we stand in the here and now. We are caught in that space between beginnings and endings, in the great, huge totality of the human experience. The Sistine Chapel forces us to look around as if it were a mirror. Who am I in this picture? Am I one of the crowd? Am I the drunk guy? Am I the athlete? And as we leave this haven of uplifting beauty, we are inspired to ask ourselves life's biggest questions: Who am I, and what role do I play in this great theater of life? Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Elizabeth Lev, thank you. Elizabeth, you mentioned this whole issue of pornography, too many nudes and too many daily life scenes and improper things in the eyes of the time. But actually the story is bigger. It's not just touching up and covering up some of the figures. This work of art was almost destroyed because of that. Elizabeth Lev: The effect of the Last Judgment was enormous. The printing press made sure that everybody saw it. And so, this wasn't something that happened within a couple of weeks. It was something that happened over the space of 20 years of editorials and complaints, saying to the Church, "You can't possibly tell us how to live our lives. Did you notice you have pornography in the Pope's chapel?" And so after complaints and insistence of trying to get this work destroyed, it was finally the year that Michelangelo died that the Church finally found a compromise, a way to save the painting, and that was in putting up these extra 30 covers, and that happens to be the origin of fig-leafing. That's where it all came about, and it came about from a church that was trying to save a work of art, not indeed deface or destroyed it. BG: This, what you just gave us, is not the classic tour that people get today when they go to the Sistine Chapel. (Laughter) EL: I don't know, is that an ad? (Laughter) BG: No, no, no, not necessarily, it is a statement. The experience of art today is encountering problems. Too many people want to see this there, and the result is five million people going through that tiny door and experiencing it in a completely different way than we just did. EL: Right. I agree. I think it's really nice to be able to pause and look. But also realize, even when you're in those days, with 28,000 people a day, even those days when you're in there with all those other people, look around you and think how amazing it is that some painted plaster from 500 years ago can still draw all those people standing side by side with you, looking upwards with their jaws dropped. It's a great statement about how beauty truly can speak to us all through time and through geographic space. BG: Liz, grazie. EL: Grazie a te. BG: Thank you. (Applause)
Capitalism will eat democracy -- unless we speak up	{0: 'Yanis Varoufakis thinks we need a radically new way of thinking about the economy, finance and capitalism.'}	TEDGlobal>Geneva	Democracy. In the West, we make a colossal mistake taking it for granted. We see democracy not as the most fragile of flowers that it really is, but we see it as part of our society's furniture. We tend to think of it as an intransigent given. We mistakenly believe that capitalism begets inevitably democracy. It doesn't. Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and his great imitators in Beijing have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that it is perfectly possible to have a flourishing capitalism, spectacular growth, while politics remains democracy-free. Indeed, democracy is receding in our neck of the woods, here in Europe. Earlier this year, while I was representing Greece — the newly elected Greek government — in the Eurogroup as its Finance Minister, I was told in no uncertain terms that our nation's democratic process — our elections — could not be allowed to interfere with economic policies that were being implemented in Greece. At that moment, I felt that there could be no greater vindication of Lee Kuan Yew, or the Chinese Communist Party, indeed of some recalcitrant friends of mine who kept telling me that democracy would be banned if it ever threatened to change anything. Tonight, here, I want to present to you an economic case for an authentic democracy. I want to ask you to join me in believing again that Lee Kuan Yew, the Chinese Communist Party and indeed the Eurogroup are wrong in believing that we can dispense with democracy — that we need an authentic, boisterous democracy. And without democracy, our societies will be nastier, our future bleak and our great, new technologies wasted. Speaking of waste, allow me to point out an interesting paradox that is threatening our economies as we speak. I call it the twin peaks paradox. One peak you understand — you know it, you recognize it — is the mountain of debts that has been casting a long shadow over the United States, Europe, the whole world. We all recognize the mountain of debts. But few people discern its twin. A mountain of idle cash belonging to rich savers and to corporations, too terrified to invest it into the productive activities that can generate the incomes from which you can extinguish the mountain of debts and which can produce all those things that humanity desperately needs, like green energy. Now let me give you two numbers. Over the last three months, in the United States, in Britain and in the Eurozone, we have invested, collectively, 3.4 trillion dollars on all the wealth-producing goods — things like industrial plants, machinery, office blocks, schools, roads, railways, machinery, and so on and so forth. $3.4 trillion sounds like a lot of money until you compare it to the $5.1 trillion that has been slushing around in the same countries, in our financial institutions, doing absolutely nothing during the same period except inflating stock exchanges and bidding up house prices. So a mountain of debt and a mountain of idle cash form twin peaks, failing to cancel each other out through the normal operation of the markets. The result is stagnant wages, more than a quarter of 25- to 54-year-olds in America, in Japan and in Europe out of work. And consequently, low aggregate demand, which in a never-ending cycle, reinforces the pessimism of the investors, who, fearing low demand, reproduce it by not investing — exactly like Oedipus' father, who, terrified by the prophecy of the oracle that his son would grow up to kill him, unwittingly engineered the conditions that ensured that Oedipus, his son, would kill him. This is my quarrel with capitalism. Its gross wastefulness, all this idle cash, should be energized to improve lives, to develop human talents, and indeed to finance all these technologies, green technologies, which are absolutely essential for saving planet Earth. Am I right in believing that democracy might be the answer? I believe so, but before we move on, what do we mean by democracy? Aristotle defined democracy as the constitution in which the free and the poor, being in the majority, control government. Now, of course Athenian democracy excluded too many. Women, migrants and, of course, the slaves. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the significance of ancient Athenian democracy on the basis of whom it excluded. What was more pertinent, and continues to be so about ancient Athenian democracy, was the inclusion of the working poor, who not only acquired the right to free speech, but more importantly, crucially, they acquired the rights to political judgments that were afforded equal weight in the decision-making concerning matters of state. Now, of course, Athenian democracy didn't last long. Like a candle that burns brightly, it burned out quickly. And indeed, our liberal democracies today do not have their roots in ancient Athens. They have their roots in the Magna Carta, in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, indeed in the American constitution. Whereas Athenian democracy was focusing on the masterless citizen and empowering the working poor, our liberal democracies are founded on the Magna Carta tradition, which was, after all, a charter for masters. And indeed, liberal democracy only surfaced when it was possible to separate fully the political sphere from the economic sphere, so as to confine the democratic process fully in the political sphere, leaving the economic sphere — the corporate world, if you want — as a democracy-free zone. Now, in our democracies today, this separation of the economic from the political sphere, the moment it started happening, it gave rise to an inexorable, epic struggle between the two, with the economic sphere colonizing the political sphere, eating into its power. Have you wondered why politicians are not what they used to be? It's not because their DNA has degenerated. (Laughter) It is rather because one can be in government today and not in power, because power has migrated from the political to the economic sphere, which is separate. Indeed, I spoke about my quarrel with capitalism. If you think about it, it is a little bit like a population of predators, that are so successful in decimating the prey that they must feed on, that in the end they starve. Similarly, the economic sphere has been colonizing and cannibalizing the political sphere to such an extent that it is undermining itself, causing economic crisis. Corporate power is increasing, political goods are devaluing, inequality is rising, aggregate demand is falling and CEOs of corporations are too scared to invest the cash of their corporations. So the more capitalism succeeds in taking the demos out of democracy, the taller the twin peaks and the greater the waste of human resources and humanity's wealth. Clearly, if this is right, we must reunite the political and economic spheres and better do it with a demos being in control, like in ancient Athens except without the slaves or the exclusion of women and migrants. Now, this is not an original idea. The Marxist left had that idea 100 years ago and it didn't go very well, did it? The lesson that we learned from the Soviet debacle is that only by a miracle will the working poor be reempowered, as they were in ancient Athens, without creating new forms of brutality and waste. But there is a solution: eliminate the working poor. Capitalism's doing it by replacing low-wage workers with automata, androids, robots. The problem is that as long as the economic and the political spheres are separate, automation makes the twin peaks taller, the waste loftier and the social conflicts deeper, including — soon, I believe — in places like China. So we need to reconfigure, we need to reunite the economic and the political spheres, but we'd better do it by democratizing the reunified sphere, lest we end up with a surveillance-mad hyperautocracy that makes The Matrix, the movie, look like a documentary. (Laughter) So the question is not whether capitalism will survive the technological innovations it is spawning. The more interesting question is whether capitalism will be succeeded by something resembling a Matrix dystopia or something much closer to a Star Trek-like society, where machines serve the humans and the humans expend their energies exploring the universe and indulging in long debates about the meaning of life in some ancient, Athenian-like, high tech agora. I think we can afford to be optimistic. But what would it take, what would it look like to have this Star Trek-like utopia, instead of the Matrix-like dystopia? In practical terms, allow me to share just briefly, a couple of examples. At the level of the enterprise, imagine a capital market, where you earn capital as you work, and where your capital follows you from one job to another, from one company to another, and the company — whichever one you happen to work at at that time — is solely owned by those who happen to work in it at that moment. Then all income stems from capital, from profits, and the very concept of wage labor becomes obsolete. No more separation between those who own but do not work in the company and those who work but do not own the company; no more tug-of-war between capital and labor; no great gap between investment and saving; indeed, no towering twin peaks. At the level of the global political economy, imagine for a moment that our national currencies have a free-floating exchange rate, with a universal, global, digital currency, one that is issued by the International Monetary Fund, the G-20, on behalf of all humanity. And imagine further that all international trade is denominated in this currency — let's call it "the cosmos," in units of cosmos — with every government agreeing to be paying into a common fund a sum of cosmos units proportional to the country's trade deficit, or indeed to a country's trade surplus. And imagine that that fund is utilized to invest in green technologies, especially in parts of the world where investment funding is scarce. This is not a new idea. It's what, effectively, John Maynard Keynes proposed in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference. The problem is that back then, they didn't have the technology to implement it. Now we do, especially in the context of a reunified political-economic sphere. The world that I am describing to you is simultaneously libertarian, in that it prioritizes empowered individuals, Marxist, since it will have confined to the dustbin of history the division between capital and labor, and Keynesian, global Keynesian. But above all else, it is a world in which we will be able to imagine an authentic democracy. Will such a world dawn? Or shall we descend into a Matrix-like dystopia? The answer lies in the political choice that we shall be making collectively. It is our choice, and we'd better make it democratically. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Yanis ... It was you who described yourself in your bios as a libertarian Marxist. What is the relevance of Marx's analysis today? Yanis Varoufakis: Well, if there was any relevance in what I just said, then Marx is relevant. Because the whole point of reunifying the political and economic is — if we don't do it, then technological innovation is going to create such a massive fall in aggregate demand, what Larry Summers refers to as secular stagnation. With this crisis migrating from one part of the world, as it is now, it will destabilize not only our democracies, but even the emerging world that is not that keen on liberal democracy. So if this analysis holds water, then Marx is absolutely relevant. But so is Hayek, that's why I'm a libertarian Marxist, and so is Keynes, so that's why I'm totally confused. (Laughter) BG: Indeed, and possibly we are too, now. (Laughter) (Applause) YV: If you are not confused, you are not thinking, OK? BG: That's a very, very Greek philosopher kind of thing to say — YV: That was Einstein, actually — BG: During your talk you mentioned Singapore and China, and last night at the speaker dinner, you expressed a pretty strong opinion about how the West looks at China. Would you like to share that? YV: Well, there's a great degree of hypocrisy. In our liberal democracies, we have a semblance of democracy. It's because we have confined, as I was saying in my talk, democracy to the political sphere, while leaving the one sphere where all the action is — the economic sphere — a completely democracy-free zone. In a sense, if I am allowed to be provocative, China today is closer to Britain in the 19th century. Because remember, we tend to associate liberalism with democracy — that's a mistake, historically. Liberalism, liberal, it's like John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill was particularly skeptical about the democratic process. So what you are seeing now in China is a very similar process to the one that we had in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, especially the transition from the first to the second. And to be castigating China for doing that which the West did in the 19th century, smacks of hypocrisy. BG: I am sure that many people here are wondering about your experience as the Finance Minister of Greece earlier this year. YV: I knew this was coming. BG: Yes. BG: Six months after, how do you look back at the first half of the year? YV: Extremely exciting, from a personal point of view, and very disappointing, because we had an opportunity to reboot the Eurozone. Not just Greece, the Eurozone. To move away from the complacency and the constant denial that there was a massive — and there is a massive architectural fault line going through the Eurozone, which is threatening, massively, the whole of the European Union process. We had an opportunity on the basis of the Greek program — which by the way, was the first program to manifest that denial — to put it right. And, unfortunately, the powers in the Eurozone, in the Eurogroup, chose to maintain denial. But you know what happens. This is the experience of the Soviet Union. When you try to keep alive an economic system that architecturally cannot survive, through political will and through authoritarianism, you may succeed in prolonging it, but when change happens it happens very abruptly and catastrophically. BG: What kind of change are you foreseeing? YV: Well, there's no doubt that if we don't change the architecture of the Eurozone, the Eurozone has no future. BG: Did you make any mistakes when you were Finance Minister? YV: Every day. BG: For example? YV: Anybody who looks back — (Applause) No, but seriously. If there's any Minister of Finance, or of anything else for that matter, who tells you after six months in a job, especially in such a stressful situation, that they have made no mistake, they're dangerous people. Of course I made mistakes. The greatest mistake was to sign the application for the extension of a loan agreement in the end of February. I was imagining that there was a genuine interest on the side of the creditors to find common ground. And there wasn't. They were simply interested in crushing our government, just because they did not want to have to deal with the architectural fault lines that were running through the Eurozone. And because they didn't want to admit that for five years they were implementing a catastrophic program in Greece. We lost one-third of our nominal GDP. This is worse than the Great Depression. And no one has come clean from the troika of lenders that have been imposing this policy to say, "This was a colossal mistake." BG: Despite all this, and despite the aggressiveness of the discussion, you seem to be remaining quite pro-European. YV: Absolutely. Look, my criticism of the European Union and the Eurozone comes from a person who lives and breathes Europe. My greatest fear is that the Eurozone will not survive. Because if it doesn't, the centrifugal forces that will be unleashed will be demonic, and they will destroy the European Union. And that will be catastrophic not just for Europe but for the whole global economy. We are probably the largest economy in the world. And if we allow ourselves to fall into a route of the postmodern 1930's, which seems to me to be what we are doing, then that will be detrimental to the future of Europeans and non-Europeans alike. BG: We definitely hope you are wrong on that point. Yanis, thank you for coming to TED. YV: Thank you. (Applause)
Glow-in-the-dark sharks and other stunning sea creatures	{0: 'David Gruber searches the undersea world for bioluminescent and biofluorescent marine animals.'}	Mission Blue II	I'm a marine biologist and an explorer-photographer with National Geographic, but I want to share a secret. This image is totally incorrect, totally incorrect. I see a couple of people crying in the back that I've blown their idea of mermaids. All right, the mermaid is indeed real, but anyone who's gone on a dive will know that the ocean looks more like this. It's because the ocean is this massive filter, and as soon as you start going underwater, you're going to lose your colors, and it's going to get dark and blue very quickly. But we're humans — we're terrestrial mammals. And we've got trichromatic vision, so we see in red, green and blue, and we're just complete color addicts. We love eye-popping color, and we try to bring this eye-popping color underwater with us. So there's been a long and sordid history of bringing color underwater, and it starts 88 years ago with Bill Longley and Charles Martin, who were trying to take the first underwater color photograph. And they're in there with old-school scuba suits, where you're pumping air down to them, and they've got a pontoon of high-explosive magnesium powder, and the poor people at the surface are not sure when they're going to pull the string when they've got their frame in focus, and — boom! — a pound of high explosives would go off so they could put a little bit of light underwater and get an image like this beautiful hogfish. I mean, it's a gorgeous image, but this is not real. They're creating an artificial environment so we can satisfy our own addiction to color. And looking at it the other way, what we've been finding is that instead of bringing color underwater with us, that we've been looking at the blue ocean, and it's a crucible of blue, and these animals living there for millions of years have been evolving all sorts of ways to take in that blue light and give off other colors. And here's just a little sample of what this secret world looks like. It's like an underwater light show. (Music) Again, what we're seeing here is blue light hitting this image. These animals are absorbing the blue light and immediately transforming this light. So if you think about it, the ocean is 71 percent of the planet, and blue light can extend down to almost a 1,000 meters. As we go down underwater, after about 10 meters, all the red is gone. So if you see anything under 10 meters that's red, it's an animal transforming and creating its own red. This is the largest single monochromatic blue environment on our planet. And my gateway into this world of biofluorescence begins with corals. And I want to give a full TED Talk on corals and just how cool these things are. One of the things that they do, one of their miraculous feats, is they produce lots of these fluorescent proteins, fluorescent molecules. And in this coral, it could be making up to 14 percent of its body mass — could be this fluorescent protein. So you wouldn't be making, like, 14 percent muscle and not using it, so it's likely doing something that has a functional role. And for the last 10, 15 years, this was so special to me, because this molecule has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary tools in biomedical science, and it's allowing us to better see inside ourselves. So, how do I study this? In order to study biofluorescence, we swim at night. And when I started out, I was just using these blue duct-tape filters over my strobe, so I could make sure I'm actually seeing the light that's being transformed by the animals. We're making an exhibit for the Museum of Natural History, and we're trying to show off how great the fluorescent corals are on the reef, and something happened that just blew me away: this. In the middle of our corals, is this green fluorescent fish. It's the first time we've ever seen a green fluorescent fish or any vertebrate for that matter. And we're rubbing our eyes, checking the filters, thinking that somebody's maybe playing a joke on us with the camera, but the eel was real. It was the first green fluorescent eel that we found, and this just changed my trajectory completely. So I had to put down my corals and team up with a fish scientist, John Sparks, and begin a search around the world to see how prevalent this phenomenon is. And fish are much more interesting than corals, because they have really advanced vision, and some of the fish even have, the way that I was photographing it, they have lenses in their eyes that would magnify the fluorescence. So I wanted to seek this out further. So we designed a new set of gear and we're scouring the reefs around the world, looking for fluorescent life. And it's a bit like "E.T. phone home." We're out there swimming with this blue light, and we're looking for a response, for animals to be absorbing the light and transferring this back to us. And eventually, we found our photobombing Kaupichphys eel. It's a really shy, reclusive eel that we know almost nothing about. They're only about the size of my finger, and they spend about 99.9 percent of their time hidden under a rock. But these eels do come out to mate under full-moon nights, and that full-moon night translates underwater to blue. Perhaps they're using this as a way to see each other, quickly find each other, mate, go back into their hole for the next long stint of time. But then we started to find other fluorescent marine life, like this green fluorescent bream, with its, like, racing stripes along its head and its nape, and it's almost camouflaged and fluorescing at the same intensity as the fluorescent coral there. After this fish, we were introduced to this red fluorescent scorpionfish cloaked and hidden on this rock. The only time we've ever seen this, it's either on red fluorescent algae or red fluorescent coral. Later, we found this stealthy green fluorescent lizardfish. These lizardfish come in many varieties, and they look almost exactly alike under white light. But if you look at them under fluorescent light, you see lots of patterns, you can really see the differences among them. And in total — we just reported this last year — we found over 200 species of biofluorescent fish. One of my inspirations is French artist and biologist Jean Painlevé. He really captures this entrepreneuring, creative spirit in biology. He would design his own gear, make his own cameras, and he was fascinated with the seahorse, Hippocampus erectus, and he filmed for the first time the seahorse giving birth. So this is the male seahorse. They were one of the first fish to start swimming upright with their brain above their head. The males give birth, just phenomenal creatures. So he stayed awake for days. He even put this electrical visor on his head that would shock him, so he could capture this moment. Now, I wish I could have shown Painlevé the moment where we found biofluorescent seahorses in the exact same species that he was studying. And here's our footage. (Music) They're the most cryptic fish. You could be swimming right on top of them and not see the seahorse. They would blend right into the algae, which would also fluoresce red, but they've got great vision, and they go through this long mating ritual, and perhaps they're using it in that effect. But things got pretty edgy when we found green fluorescence in the stingray, because stingrays are in the Elasmobranch class, which includes ... sharks. So I'm, like, a coral biologist. Somebody's got to go down and check to see if the sharks are fluorescent. And there I am. (Laughter) And I was like, "Maybe I should go back to corals." (Laughter) It turns out that these sharks are not fluorescent. And then we found it. In a deep, dark canyon off the coast of California, we found the first biofluorescent swellshark, right underneath all the surfers. Here it is. They're just about a meter long. It's called a swellshark. And they call them a swellshark because if they're threatened, they can gulp down water and blow up like an inner tube, about twice their size, and wedge themselves under a rock, so they don't get eaten by a predator. And here is our first footage of these biofluorescent swellsharks. Just magnificent — I mean, they're showing these distinct patterns, and there are areas that are fluorescent and areas that are not fluorescent, but they've also got these twinkling spots on them that are much brighter than other parts of the shark. But this is all beautiful to see. I was like, this is gorgeous. But what does it mean to the shark? Can they see this? And we looked in the literature, and nothing was known about this shark's vision. So I took this shark to eye specialist Ellis Loew at Cornell University, and we found out that this shark sees discretely and acutely in the blue-green interface, probably about 100 times better than we can see in the dark, but they only see blue-green. So what it's doing is taking this blue world and it's absorbing the blue, creating green. It's creating contrast that they can indeed see. So we have a model, showing that it creates an ability for them to see all these patterns. And males and females also have, we're finding, distinct patterns among them. But our last find came really just a few miles from where we are now, in the Solomon Islands. Swimming at night, I encountered the first biofluorescent sea turtle. So now it's going from fish and sharks into reptiles, which, again, this is only one month old, but it shows us that we know almost nothing about this hawksbill turtle's vision. And it makes me think about how much more there is to learn. And here in the Solomon Islands, there's only a few thousand breeding females of this species left, and this is one of the hotspots for them. So it shows us how much we need to really protect these animals while they're still here, and understand them. In thinking about biofluorescence, I wanted to know, how deep does it go? Does this go all the way to the bottom of the ocean? So we started using submarines, and we equipped them with special blue lights on the front here. And we dropped down, and we noticed one important thing — that as we get down to 1,000 meters, it drops off. There's no biofluorescent marine life down there, below 1,000 meters — almost nothing, it's just darkness. So it's mainly a shallow phenomenon. And below 1,000 meters, we encountered the bioluminescent zone, where nine out of 10 animals are actually making their own lights and flashing and blinking. As I try to get deeper, this is slapping on a one-person submarine suit — some people call this my "Jacques Cousteau meets Woody Allen" moment. (Laughter) But as we explore down here, I was thinking about: How do we interact with life delicately? Because we're entering a new age of exploration, where we have to take great care, and we have to set examples how we explore. So I've teamed up with roboticist Rob Wood at Harvard University, and we've been designing squishy underwater robot fingers, so we can delicately interact with the marine life down there. The idea is that most of our technologies to explore the deep ocean come from oil and gas and military, who, you know, they're not really caring to be gentle. Some corals could be 1,000 years old. You don't want to just go and crush them with a big claw. So my dream is something like this. At night, I'm in a submarine, I have force-feedback gloves, and I could delicately set up a lab in the front of my submarine, where the squishy robot fingers are delicately collecting and putting things in jars, and we can conduct our research. Back to the powerful applied applications. Here, you're looking at a living brain that's using the DNA of fluorescent marine creatures, this one from jellyfish and corals, to illuminate the living brain and see its connections. It's funny that we're using RGB just to kind of satisfy our own human intuition, so we can see our brains better. And even more mind-blowing, is my close colleague Vincent Pieribone at Yale, who has actually designed and engineered a fluorescent protein that responds to voltage. So he could see when a single neuron fires. You're essentially looking at a portal into consciousness that was designed by marine creatures. So this brings me all back to perspective and relationship. From deep space, our universe looks like a human brain cell, and then here we are in the deep ocean, and we're finding marine creatures and cells that can illuminate the human mind. And it's my hope that with illuminated minds, we could ponder the overarching interconnectedness of all life, and fathom how much more lies in store if we keep our oceans healthy. Thank you. (Applause)
Should you be able to patent a human gene?	{0: 'Tania Simoncelli advises the White House on science and technology policy.'}	TEDxAmoskeagMillyard	It was an afternoon in the fall of 2005. I was working at the ACLU as the organization's science advisor. I really, really loved my job, but I was having one of those days where I was feeling just a little bit discouraged. So I wandered down the hallway to my colleague Chris Hansen's office. Chris had been at the ACLU for more than 30 years, so he had deep institutional knowledge and insights. I explained to Chris that I was feeling a little bit stuck. I had been investigating a number of issues at the intersection of science and civil liberties — super interesting. But I wanted the ACLU to engage these issues in a much bigger way, in a way that could really make a difference. So Chris cut right to the chase, and he says, "Well, of all the issues you've been looking at, what are the top five?" "Well, there's genetic discrimination, and reproductive technologies, and biobanking, and ... oh, there's this really cool issue, functional MRI and using it for lie detection, and ... oh, and of course, there's gene patents." "Gene patents?" "Yes, you know, patents on human genes." "No! You're telling me that the US government has been issuing patents on part of the human body? That can't be right." I went back to my office and sent Chris three articles. And 20 minutes later, he came bursting in my office. "Oh my god! You're right! Who can we sue?" (Laughter) Now Chris is a really brilliant lawyer, but he knew almost nothing about patent law and certainly nothing about genetics. I knew something about genetics, but I wasn't even a lawyer, let alone a patent lawyer. So clearly we had a lot to learn before we could file a lawsuit. First, we needed to understand exactly what was patented when someone patented a gene. Gene patents typically contain dozens of claims, but the most controversial of these are to so-called "isolated DNA" — namely, a piece of DNA that has been removed from a cell. Gene patent proponents say, "See? We didn't patent the gene in your body, we patented an isolated gene." And that's true, but the problem is that any use of the gene requires that it be isolated. And the patents weren't just to a particular gene that they isolated, but on every possible version of that gene. So what does that mean? That means that you can't give your gene to your doctor and ask him or her to look at it, say, to see if it has any mutations, without permission of the patent holder. It also means that the patent holder has the right to stop anyone from using that gene in research or clinical testing. Allowing patent holders, often private companies, to lock up stretches of the human genome was harming patients. Consider Abigail, a 10-year-old with long QT syndrome, a serious heart condition that, if left untreated, can result in sudden death. The company that obtained a patent on two genes associated with this condition developed a test to diagnose the syndrome. But then they went bankrupt and they never offered it. So another lab tried to offer the test, but the company that held the patents threatened to sue the lab for patent infringement. So as a result, for 2 years, no test was available. During that time, Abigail died of undiagnosed long QT. Gene patents clearly were a problem and were harming patients. But was there a way we could challenge them? Turns out that the Supreme Court has made clear through a long line of cases, that certain things are not patent eligible. You can't patent products of nature — the air, the water, minerals, elements of the periodic table. And you can't patent laws of nature — the law of gravity, E = mc2. These things are just too fundamental and must remain free to all and reserved exclusively to none. It seemed to us that DNA, the most fundamental structure of life, that codes for the production of all of our proteins, is both a product of nature and a law of nature, regardless of whether it's in our bodies or sitting in the bottom of a test tube. As we delved into this issue, we traveled all over the country to speak with many different experts — scientists, medical professionals, lawyers, patent lawyers. Most of them agreed that we were right as a matter of policy, and, at least in theory, as a matter of law. All of them thought our chances of winning a gene-patent challenge were about zero. Why is that? Well, the patent office had been issuing these patents for more than 20 years. There were literally thousands of patents on human genes. The patent bar was deeply entrenched in the status quo, the biotech industry had grown up around this practice, and legislation to ban gene patents had been introduced year after year in Congress, and had gone absolutely nowhere. So the bottom line: courts just weren't going to be willing to overturn these patents. Now, neither Chris nor I were the type to shy away from a challenge, and hearing, "Being right just isn't enough," seemed all the more reason to take on this fight. So we set out to build our case. Now, patent cases tend to be: Company A sues Company B over some really narrow, obscure technical issue. We weren't really interested in that kind of case, and we thought this case was much bigger than that. This was about scientific freedom, medical progress, the rights of patients. So we decided we were going to develop a case that was not like your typical patent case — more like a civil rights case. We set out to identify a gene-patent holder that was vigorously enforcing its patents and then to organize a broad coalition of plaintiffs and experts that could tell the court about all the ways that these patents were harming patients and innovation. We found the prime candidate to sue in Myriad Genetics, a company that's based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Myriad held patents on two genes, the BRCA1 and the BRCA2 genes. Women with certain mutations along these genes are considered to be at a significantly increased risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. Myriad had used its patents to maintain a complete monopoly on BRCA testing in the United States. It had forced multiple labs that were offering BRCA testing to stop. It charged a lot of money for its test — over 3,000 dollars. It had stopped sharing its clinical data with the international scientific community. And perhaps worst of all, for a period of several years, Myriad refused to update its test to include additional mutations that had been identified by a team of researchers in France. It has been estimated that during that period, for several years, as many as 12 percent of women undergoing testing received the wrong answer — a negative test result that should have been positive. This is Kathleen Maxian. Kathleen's sister Eileen developed breast cancer at age 40 and she was tested by Myriad. The test was negative. The family was relieved. That meant that Eileen's cancer most likely didn't run in the family, and that other members of her family didn't need to be tested. But two years later, Kathleen was diagnosed with advanced-stage ovarian cancer. It turned out that Kathleen's sister was among the 12 percent who received a false-negative test result. Had Eileen received the proper result, Kathleen would have then been tested, and her ovarian cancer could have been prevented. Once we settled on Myriad, we then had to form a coalition of plaintiffs and experts that could illuminate these problems. We ended up with 20 highly committed plaintiffs: genetic counselors, geneticists who had received cease and desist letters, advocacy organizations, four major scientific organizations that collectively represented more than 150,000 scientists and medical professionals, and individual women who either couldn't afford Myriad's test, or who wanted to obtain a second opinion but could not, as a result of the patents. One of the major challenges we had in preparing the case was figuring out how best to communicate the science. So in order to argue that what Myriad did was not an invention, and that isolated BRCA genes were products of nature, we had to explain a couple of basic concepts, like: What's a gene? What's DNA? How is DNA isolated, and why isn't that an invention? We spent hours and hours with our plaintiffs and experts, trying to come up with ways of explaining these concepts simply yet accurately. And we ended up relying heavily on the use of metaphors, like gold. So isolating DNA — it's like extracting gold from a mountain or taking it out of a stream bed. You might be able to patent the process for mining the gold, but you can't patent the gold itself. It might've taken a lot of hard work and effort to dig the gold out of the mountain; you still can't patent it, it's still gold. And the gold, once it's extracted, can clearly be used for all sorts of things that it couldn't be used for when it was in the mountain; you can make jewelry out of it for example — still can't patent the gold, it's still gold. So now it's 2009, and we're ready to file our case. We filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York, and the case was randomly assigned to Judge Robert Sweet. In March 2010, Judge Sweet issued his opinion — 152 pages — and a complete victory for our side. In reading the opinion, we could not get over how eloquently he described the science in the case. I mean, our brief — it was pretty good, but not this good. How did he develop such a deep understanding of this issue in such a short time? We just could not comprehend how this had happened. So it turned out, Judge Sweet's clerk working for him at the time, was not just a lawyer — he was a scientist. He was not just a scientist — he had a PhD in molecular biology. (Laughter) What an incredible stroke of luck! Myriad then appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. And here things got really interesting. First, in a pivotal moment of this case, the US government switched sides. So in the district court the government submitted a brief on Myriad's side. But now in direct opposition to its own patent office, the US government files a brief that states that is has reconsidered this issue in light of the district court's opinion, and has concluded that isolated DNA is not patent eligible. This was a really big deal, totally unexpected. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit hears all patent cases, and it has a reputation for being very, very pro-patent. So even with this remarkable development, we expected to lose. And we did. Sort of. Ends up split decision, 2 to 1. But the two judges who ruled against us, did so for completely different reasons. The first one, Judge Lourie, made up his own novel, biological theory — totally wrong. (Laughter) He decided Myriad had created a new chemical — made absolutely no sense. Myriad didn't even argue this, so it came out of the blue. The other, Judge Moore, said she basically agreed with us that isolated DNA is a product of nature. But she's like, "I don't want to shake up the biotech industry." The third, Judge Bryson, agreed with us. So now we sought review by the Supreme Court. And when you petition the Supreme Court, you have to present a question that you want the Court to answer. Usually these questions take the form of a super-long paragraph, like a whole page long with lots and lots of clauses, "wherein this" and "therefore that." We submitted perhaps the shortest question presented ever. Four words: Are human genes patentable? Now when Chris first asked me what I thought of these words, I said, "Well, I don't know. I think you have to say, 'Is isolated DNA patentable?'" "Nope. I want the justices to have the very same reaction that I had when you brought this issue to me seven years ago." Well, I certainly couldn't argue with that. The Supreme Court only hears about one percent of the cases that it receives, and it agreed to hear ours. The day of the oral argument arrives, and it was really, really exciting — long line of people outside, people had been standing in line since 2:30 in the morning to try to get into the courthouse. Two breast cancer organizations, Breast Cancer Action and FORCE, had organized a demonstration on the courthouse steps. Chris and I sat quietly in the hallway, moments before he was to walk in and argue the most important case of his career. I was clearly more nervous than he was. But any remaining panic subsided as I walked into the courtroom and looked around at a sea of friendly faces: our individual women clients who had shared their deeply personal stories, the geneticists who had taken huge chunks of time out of their busy careers to dedicate themselves to this fight and representatives from a diverse array of medical, patient advocacy, environmental and religious organizations, who had submitted friend of the court briefs in the case. Also in the room were three leaders of the Human Genome Project, including the co-discoverer of DNA himself, James Watson, who had submitted a brief to the court, where he referred to gene patenting as "lunacy." (Laughter) The diversity of the communities represented in this room and the contributions each had made to make this day a reality spoke volumes to what was at stake. The argument itself was riveting. Chris argued brilliantly. But for me, the most thrilling aspect was watching the Supreme Court justices grapple with isolated DNA, through a series of colorful analogies and feisty exchanges, very much the same way as our legal team had done for the past seven years. Justice Kagan likened isolating DNA to extracting a medicinal plant from the Amazon. Justice Roberts distinguished it from carving a baseball bat from a tree. And in one of my absolutely favorite moments, Justice Sotomayor proclaimed isolated DNA to be "just nature sitting there." (Laughter) We felt pretty confident leaving the courtroom that day, but I could never have anticipated the outcome: nine to zero. "A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature, and not patent-eligible merely because it has been isolated. And furthermore, Myriad did not create anything." Within 24 hours of the decision, five labs had announced that they would begin to offer testing for the BRCA genes. Some of them promised to offer the tests at a lower price than Myriad's. Some promised to provide a more comprehensive test than the one Myriad was offering. But of course the decision goes far beyond Myriad. It ends a 25-year practice of allowing patents on human genes in the United States. It clears a significant barrier to biomedical discovery and innovation. And it helps to ensure that patients like Abigail, Kathleen and Eileen have access to the tests that they need. A few weeks after the court issued its decision, I received a small package in the mail. It was from Bob Cook-Deegan, a professor at Duke University and one the very first people Chris and I went to visit when we started to consider whether to bring this case. I opened it up to find a small stuffed animal. (Laughter) We took a big risk in taking this case. Part of what gave us the courage to take that risk was knowing that we were doing the right thing. The process took nearly eight years from the start to finish, with many twists and turns along the way. A little luck certainly helped, but it was the communities that we bridged, the alliances that we created, that made pigs fly. Thank you. (Applause)
A robot that runs and swims like a salamander	{0: 'Auke Ijspeert works at the intersection of robotics, biology and computational neuroscience.'}	TEDGlobal>Geneva	This is Pleurobot. Pleurobot is a robot that we designed to closely mimic a salamander species called Pleurodeles waltl. Pleurobot can walk, as you can see here, and as you'll see later, it can also swim. So you might ask, why did we design this robot? And in fact, this robot has been designed as a scientific tool for neuroscience. Indeed, we designed it together with neurobiologists to understand how animals move, and especially how the spinal cord controls locomotion. But the more I work in biorobotics, the more I'm really impressed by animal locomotion. If you think of a dolphin swimming or a cat running or jumping around, or even us as humans, when you go jogging or play tennis, we do amazing things. And in fact, our nervous system solves a very, very complex control problem. It has to coordinate more or less 200 muscles perfectly, because if the coordination is bad, we fall over or we do bad locomotion. And my goal is to understand how this works. There are four main components behind animal locomotion. The first component is just the body, and in fact we should never underestimate to what extent the biomechanics already simplify locomotion in animals. Then you have the spinal cord, and in the spinal cord you find reflexes, multiple reflexes that create a sensorimotor coordination loop between neural activity in the spinal cord and mechanical activity. A third component are central pattern generators. These are very interesting circuits in the spinal cord of vertebrate animals that can generate, by themselves, very coordinated rhythmic patterns of activity while receiving only very simple input signals. And these input signals coming from descending modulation from higher parts of the brain, like the motor cortex, the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, will all modulate activity of the spinal cord while we do locomotion. But what's interesting is to what extent just a low-level component, the spinal cord, together with the body, already solve a big part of the locomotion problem. You probably know it by the fact that you can cut the head off a chicken, it can still run for a while, showing that just the lower part, spinal cord and body, already solve a big part of locomotion. Now, understanding how this works is very complex, because first of all, recording activity in the spinal cord is very difficult. It's much easier to implant electrodes in the motor cortex than in the spinal cord, because it's protected by the vertebrae. Especially in humans, very hard to do. A second difficulty is that locomotion is really due to a very complex and very dynamic interaction between these four components. So it's very hard to find out what's the role of each over time. This is where biorobots like Pleurobot and mathematical models can really help. So what's biorobotics? Biorobotics is a very active field of research in robotics where people want to take inspiration from animals to make robots to go outdoors, like service robots or search and rescue robots or field robots. And the big goal here is to take inspiration from animals to make robots that can handle complex terrain — stairs, mountains, forests, places where robots still have difficulties and where animals can do a much better job. The robot can be a wonderful scientific tool as well. There are some very nice projects where robots are used, like a scientific tool for neuroscience, for biomechanics or for hydrodynamics. And this is exactly the purpose of Pleurobot. So what we do in my lab is to collaborate with neurobiologists like Jean-Marie Cabelguen, a neurobiologist in Bordeaux in France, and we want to make spinal cord models and validate them on robots. And here we want to start simple. So it's good to start with simple animals like lampreys, which are very primitive fish, and then gradually go toward more complex locomotion, like in salamanders, but also in cats and in humans, in mammals. And here, a robot becomes an interesting tool to validate our models. And in fact, for me, Pleurobot is a kind of dream becoming true. Like, more or less 20 years ago I was already working on a computer making simulations of lamprey and salamander locomotion during my PhD. But I always knew that my simulations were just approximations. Like, simulating the physics in water or with mud or with complex ground, it's very hard to simulate that properly on a computer. Why not have a real robot and real physics? So among all these animals, one of my favorites is the salamander. You might ask why, and it's because as an amphibian, it's a really key animal from an evolutionary point of view. It makes a wonderful link between swimming, as you find it in eels or fish, and quadruped locomotion, as you see in mammals, in cats and humans. And in fact, the modern salamander is very close to the first terrestrial vertebrate, so it's almost a living fossil, which gives us access to our ancestor, the ancestor to all terrestrial tetrapods. So the salamander swims by doing what's called an anguilliform swimming gait, so they propagate a nice traveling wave of muscle activity from head to tail. And if you place the salamander on the ground, it switches to what's called a walking trot gait. In this case, you have nice periodic activation of the limbs which are very nicely coordinated with this standing wave undulation of the body, and that's exactly the gait that you are seeing here on Pleurobot. Now, one thing which is very surprising and fascinating in fact is the fact that all this can be generated just by the spinal cord and the body. So if you take a decerebrated salamander — it's not so nice but you remove the head — and if you electrically stimulate the spinal cord, at low level of stimulation this will induce a walking-like gait. If you stimulate a bit more, the gait accelerates. And at some point, there's a threshold, and automatically, the animal switches to swimming. This is amazing. Just changing the global drive, as if you are pressing the gas pedal of descending modulation to your spinal cord, makes a complete switch between two very different gaits. And in fact, the same has been observed in cats. If you stimulate the spinal cord of a cat, you can switch between walk, trot and gallop. Or in birds, you can make a bird switch between walking, at a low level of stimulation, and flapping its wings at high-level stimulation. And this really shows that the spinal cord is a very sophisticated locomotion controller. So we studied salamander locomotion in more detail, and we had in fact access to a very nice X-ray video machine from Professor Martin Fischer in Jena University in Germany. And thanks to that, you really have an amazing machine to record all the bone motion in great detail. That's what we did. So we basically figured out which bones are important for us and collected their motion in 3D. And what we did is collect a whole database of motions, both on ground and in water, to really collect a whole database of motor behaviors that a real animal can do. And then our job as roboticists was to replicate that in our robot. So we did a whole optimization process to find out the right structure, where to place the motors, how to connect them together, to be able to replay these motions as well as possible. And this is how Pleurobot came to life. So let's look at how close it is to the real animal. So what you see here is almost a direct comparison between the walking of the real animal and the Pleurobot. You can see that we have almost a one-to-one exact replay of the walking gait. If you go backwards and slowly, you see it even better. But even better, we can do swimming. So for that we have a dry suit that we put all over the robot — (Laughter) and then we can go in water and start replaying the swimming gaits. And here, we were very happy, because this is difficult to do. The physics of interaction are complex. Our robot is much bigger than a small animal, so we had to do what's called dynamic scaling of the frequencies to make sure we had the same interaction physics. But you see at the end, we have a very close match, and we were very, very happy with this. So let's go to the spinal cord. So here what we did with Jean-Marie Cabelguen is model the spinal cord circuits. And what's interesting is that the salamander has kept a very primitive circuit, which is very similar to the one we find in the lamprey, this primitive eel-like fish, and it looks like during evolution, new neural oscillators have been added to control the limbs, to do the leg locomotion. And we know where these neural oscillators are but what we did was to make a mathematical model to see how they should be coupled to allow this transition between the two very different gaits. And we tested that on board of a robot. And this is how it looks. So what you see here is a previous version of Pleurobot that's completely controlled by our spinal cord model programmed on board of the robot. And the only thing we do is send to the robot through a remote control the two descending signals it normally should receive from the upper part of the brain. And what's interesting is, by playing with these signals, we can completely control speed, heading and type of gait. For instance, when we stimulate at a low level, we have the walking gait, and at some point, if we stimulate a lot, very rapidly it switches to the swimming gait. And finally, we can also do turning very nicely by just stimulating more one side of the spinal cord than the other. And I think it's really beautiful how nature has distributed control to really give a lot of responsibility to the spinal cord so that the upper part of the brain doesn't need to worry about every muscle. It just has to worry about this high-level modulation, and it's really the job of the spinal cord to coordinate all the muscles. So now let's go to cat locomotion and the importance of biomechanics. So this is another project where we studied cat biomechanics, and we wanted to see how much the morphology helps locomotion. And we found three important criteria in the properties, basically, of the limbs. The first one is that a cat limb more or less looks like a pantograph-like structure. So a pantograph is a mechanical structure which keeps the upper segment and the lower segments always parallel. So a simple geometrical system that kind of coordinates a bit the internal movement of the segments. A second property of cat limbs is that they are very lightweight. Most of the muscles are in the trunk, which is a good idea, because then the limbs have low inertia and can be moved very rapidly. The last final important property is this very elastic behavior of the cat limb, so to handle impacts and forces. And this is how we designed Cheetah-Cub. So let's invite Cheetah-Cub onstage. So this is Peter Eckert, who does his PhD on this robot, and as you see, it's a cute little robot. It looks a bit like a toy, but it was really used as a scientific tool to investigate these properties of the legs of the cat. So you see, it's very compliant, very lightweight, and also very elastic, so you can easily press it down and it will not break. It will just jump, in fact. And this very elastic property is also very important. And you also see a bit these properties of these three segments of the leg as pantograph. Now, what's interesting is that this quite dynamic gait is obtained purely in open loop, meaning no sensors, no complex feedback loops. And that's interesting, because it means that just the mechanics already stabilized this quite rapid gait, and that really good mechanics already basically simplify locomotion. To the extent that we can even disturb a bit locomotion, as you will see in the next video, where we can for instance do some exercise where we have the robot go down a step, and the robot will not fall over, which was a surprise for us. This is a small perturbation. I was expecting the robot to immediately fall over, because there are no sensors, no fast feedback loop. But no, just the mechanics stabilized the gait, and the robot doesn't fall over. Obviously, if you make the step bigger, and if you have obstacles, you need the full control loops and reflexes and everything. But what's important here is that just for small perturbation, the mechanics are right. And I think this is a very important message from biomechanics and robotics to neuroscience, saying don't underestimate to what extent the body already helps locomotion. Now, how does this relate to human locomotion? Clearly, human locomotion is more complex than cat and salamander locomotion, but at the same time, the nervous system of humans is very similar to that of other vertebrates. And especially the spinal cord is also the key controller for locomotion in humans. That's why, if there's a lesion of the spinal cord, this has dramatic effects. The person can become paraplegic or tetraplegic. This is because the brain loses this communication with the spinal cord. Especially, it loses this descending modulation to initiate and modulate locomotion. So a big goal of neuroprosthetics is to be able to reactivate that communication using electrical or chemical stimulations. And there are several teams in the world that do exactly that, especially at EPFL. My colleagues Grégoire Courtine and Silvestro Micera, with whom I collaborate. But to do this properly, it's very important to understand how the spinal cord works, how it interacts with the body, and how the brain communicates with the spinal cord. This is where the robots and models that I've presented today will hopefully play a key role towards these very important goals. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Auke, I've seen in your lab other robots that do things like swim in pollution and measure the pollution while they swim. But for this one, you mentioned in your talk, like a side project, search and rescue, and it does have a camera on its nose. Auke Ijspeert: Absolutely. So the robot — We have some spin-off projects where we would like to use the robots to do search and rescue inspection, so this robot is now seeing you. And the big dream is to, if you have a difficult situation like a collapsed building or a building that is flooded, and this is very dangerous for a rescue team or even rescue dogs, why not send in a robot that can crawl around, swim, walk, with a camera onboard to do inspection and identify survivors and possibly create a communication link with the survivor. BG: Of course, assuming the survivors don't get scared by the shape of this. AI: Yeah, we should probably change the appearance quite a bit, because here I guess a survivor might die of a heart attack just of being worried that this would feed on you. But by changing the appearance and it making it more robust, I'm sure we can make a good tool out of it. BG: Thank you very much. Thank you and your team.
Our campaign to ban plastic bags in Bali	{0: 'Sisters Melati and Isabel Wijsen are on a mission to ban plastic bags in Bali.'}	TEDGlobal>London	Melati Wijsen: Bali — island of gods. Isabel Wijsen: A green paradise. MW: Or ... a paradise lost. Bali: island of garbage. IW: In Bali, we generate 680 cubic meters of plastic garbage a day. That's about a 14-story building. And when it comes to plastic bags, less than five percent gets recycled. MW: We know that changes the image you may have of our island. It changed ours, too, when we learned about it, when we learned that almost all plastic bags in Bali end up in our drains and then in our rivers and then in our ocean. And those that don't even make it to the ocean, they're either burned or littered. IW: So we decided to do something about it. And we've been working for almost three years now to try to say no to plastic bags on our home island. And we have had some significant successes. MW: We are sisters, and we go to the best school on earth: Green School, Bali. Green School is not only different in the way that it is built out of bamboo, but also in the way that it teaches. We are taught to become leaders of today, something a normal textbook cannot match. IW: One day we had a lesson in class where we learned about significant people, like Nelson Mandela, Lady Diana and Mahatma Gandhi. Walking home that day, we agreed that we also wanted to be significant. Why should we wait until we were grown up to be significant? We wanted to do something now. MW: Sitting on the sofa that night, we brainstormed and thought of all the issues facing Bali. And one thing that stood out to us the most was the plastic garbage. But that is a huge problem. So we looked into what was a realistic target for us kids: plastic bags. And the idea was born. IW: We started researching, and let's just say, the more we learned, there was nothing good about plastic bags. And you know what? We don't even need them. MW: We were really inspired by the efforts to say no to plastic bags in many other places, from Hawaii to Rwanda and to severals cities like Oakland and Dublin. IW: And so the idea turned into the launch of "Bye Bye Plastic Bags." MW: In the years that we have been campaigning, we have learned a lot. Lesson number one: you cannot do it all by yourself. You need a big team of like-minded kids, and so we formed the Bye Bye Plastic Bags crew. The volunteer team includes children from all over the island, from both international and local schools. And together with them, we started a multi-layered approach, based on an on- and off-line signature petition, educational and inspirational presentations at schools and we raise general awareness at markets, festivals, beach clean-ups. And last but not least, we distribute alternative bags, bags like net bags, recycled newspaper bags or 100 percent organic material bags, all made by local initiatives on the island. IW: We run a pilot village, home of 800 families. The village mayor was our first friend and he loved our T-shirts, so that helped. We focused on making the customers aware, because that's where the change needs to happen. The village is already two-thirds along the way of becoming plastic bag free. Our first attempts to get the government of Bali on board failed. So we thought, "Hmm ... a petition with one million signatures. They can't ignore us, right?" MW: Right! IW: But, who would have guessed one million signatures is, like, a thousand times a thousand? (Laughter) We got stuck — till we learned lesson number two: think outside the box. Someone mentioned that the Bali airport handles 16 million arrivals and departures a year. MW: But how do we get into the airport? And here comes lesson number three: persistence. Off we headed to the airport. We got past the janitor. And then it was his boss's boss, and then the assistant office manager, and then the office manager, and then ... we got shuffled down two levels and thought, well, here comes the janitor again. And after several days knocking on doors and just being kids on a mission, we finally got to the commercial manager of Bali airports. And we gave him the "Bali of plastic bags" speech, and being a very nice man, he said, [imitating the man's voice] "I cannot believe what I'm about say, but I'm going to give authorization to collect signatures behind customs and immigrations." (Laughter) (Applause) IW: In our first hour and a half there, we got almost 1,000 signatures. How cool is that? Lesson number four: you need champions at all levels of society, from students to commercial managers to famous people. And thanks to the attraction of Green School, we had access to a steady stream of celebrities. Ban Ki Moon taught us that Secretary-Generals of the United Nations don't sign petitions — (Laughter) even if kids ask nicely. But he promised to spread the word, and now we work closely with the United Nations. MW: Jane Goodall taught us the power of a people's network. She started with just one Roots & Shoots group and now she has 4,000 groups around the world. We are one of them. She's a real inspiration. If you're a fellow Rotarian, nice to meet you. We're Interactors, the youngest department of Rotary International. IW: But we have also learned much about patience, MW: how to deal with frustrations, IW: leadership, MW: teamwork, IW: friendship, MW: we learned more about the Balinese and their culture IW: and we learned about the importance of commitment. MW: It's not always easy. Sometimes it does get a little bit hard to walk your talk. IW: But last year, we did exactly that. We went to India to give a talk, and our parents took us to visit the former private house of Mahatma Gandhi. We learned about the power of hunger strikes he did to reach his goals. Yes, by the end of the tour, when we met our parents again, we both made a decision and said, "We're going on a hunger strike!" (Laughter) MW: And you can probably imagine their faces. It took a lot of convincing, and not only to our parents but to our friends and to our teachers as well. Isabel and I were serious about doing this. So we met with a nutritionist, and we came up with a compromise of not eating from sunrise to sunset every day until the governor of Bali would agree to meet with us to talk about how to stop plastic bags on Bali. IW: Our "mogak makan," as it is called in Bahasa Indonesia, started. We used social media to support our goal and already on day two, police started to come to our home and school. What were these two girls doing? We knew we weren't making the governor look his best by doing this food strike — we could have gone to jail. But, hey, it worked. Twenty-four hours later, we were picked up from school and escorted to the office of the governor. MW: And there he was — (Applause) waiting for us to meet and speak, being all supportive and thankful for our willingness to care for the beauty and the environment of Bali. He signed a promise to help the people of Bali say no to plastic bags. And we are now friends, and on a regular basis, we remind him and his team of the promises he has made. And indeed, recently he stated and committed that Bali will be plastic bag free by 2018. (Applause) IW: Also, at the International Airport of Bali, one of our supporters is planning to start a plastic bag-free policy by 2016. MW: Stop handing out free plastic bags and bring in your own reusable bag is our next message to change that mindset of the public. IW: Our short-term campaign, "One Island / One Voice," is all about this. We check and recognize the shops and restaurants that have declared themselves a plastic bag-free zone, and we put this sticker at their entrance and publish their names on social media and some important magazines on Bali. And conversely, that highlights those who do not have the sticker. (Laughter) MW: So, why are we actually telling you all of this? Well, partly, it is because we are proud of the results that, together with our team, we have been able to reach. But also because along the way, we have learned that kids can do things. We can make things happen. Isabel and I were only 10 and 12 years old when we started this. We never had a business plan, nor a fixed strategy, nor any hidden agendas — just the idea in front of us and a group of friends working with us. All we wanted to do was stop those plastic bags from wrapping and suffocating our beautiful home. Kids have a boundless energy and a motivation to be the change the world needs. IW: So to all the kids of this beautiful but challenging world: go for it! Make that difference. We're not telling you it's going to be easy. We're telling you it's going to be worth it. Us kids may only be 25 percent of the world's population, but we are 100 percent of the future. MW: We still have a lot of work to do, but know that we still not stop until the first question asked when arriving at the Bali airports will be Both: "Welcome to Bali, do you have nay plastic bags to declare?" (Laughter) Om shanti shanti shanti om. Thank you. (Applause)
A delightful way to teach kids about computers	{0: 'Linda Liukas wants to create a more diverse and colorful world of technology, starting with the poetry of code.'}	TEDxCERN	Code is the next universal language. In the seventies, it was punk music that drove the whole generation. In the eighties, it was probably money. But for my generation of people, software is the interface to our imagination and our world. And that means that we need a radically, radically more diverse set of people to build those products, to not see computers as mechanical and lonely and boring and magic, to see them as things that they can tinker and turn around and twist, and so forth. My personal journey into the world of programming and technology started at the tender age of 14. I had this mad teenage crush on an older man, and the older man in question just happened to be the then Vice President of the United States, Mr. Al Gore. And I did what every single teenage girl would want to do. I wanted to somehow express all of this love, so I built him a website, it's over here. And in 2001, there was no Tumblr, there was no Facebook, there was no Pinterest. So I needed to learn to code in order to express all of this longing and loving. And that is how programming started for me. It started as a means of self-expression. Just like when I was smaller, I would use crayons and legos. And when I was older, I would use guitar lessons and theater plays. But then, there were other things to get excited about, like poetry and knitting socks and conjugating French irregular verbs and coming up with make-believe worlds and Bertrand Russell and his philosophy. And I started to be one of those people who felt that computers are boring and technical and lonely. Here's what I think today. Little girls don't know that they are not supposed to like computers. Little girls are amazing. They are really, really good at concentrating on things and being exact and they ask amazing questions like, "What?" and "Why?" and "How?" and "What if?" And they don't know that they are not supposed to like computers. It's the parents who do. It's us parents who feel like computer science is this esoteric, weird science discipline that only belongs to the mystery makers. That it's almost as far removed from everyday life as, say, nuclear physics. And they are partly right about that. There's a lot of syntax and controls and data structures and algorithms and practices, protocols and paradigms in programming. And we as a community, we've made computers smaller and smaller. We've built layers and layers of abstraction on top of each other between the man and the machine to the point that we no longer have any idea how computers work or how to talk to them. And we do teach our kids how the human body works, we teach them how the combustion engine functions and we even tell them that if you want to really be an astronaut you can become one. But when the kid comes to us and asks, "So, what is a bubble sort algorithm?" Or, "How does the computer know what happens when I press 'play,' how does it know which video to show?" Or, "Linda, is Internet a place?" We adults, we grow oddly silent. "It's magic," some of us say. "It's too complicated," the others say. Well, it's neither. It's not magic and it's not complicated. It all just happened really, really, really fast. Computer scientists built these amazing, beautiful machines, but they made them very, very foreign to us, and also the language we speak to the computers so that we don't know how to speak to the computers anymore without our fancy user interfaces. And that's why no one recognized that when I was conjugating French irregular verbs, I was actually practicing my pattern recognition skills. And when I was excited about knitting, I actually was following a sequence of symbolic commands that included loops inside of them. And that Bertrand Russell's lifelong quest to find an exact language between English and mathematics found its home inside of a computer. I was a programmer, but no one knew it. The kids of today, they tap, swipe and pinch their way through the world. But unless we give them tools to build with computers, we are raising only consumers instead of creators. This whole quest led me to this little girl. Her name is Ruby, she is six years old. She is completely fearless, imaginative and a little bit bossy. And every time I would run into a problem in trying to teach myself programming like, "What is object-oriented design or what is garbage collection?", I would try to imagine how a six-year-old little girl would explain the problem. And I wrote a book about her and I illustrated it and the things Ruby taught me go like this. Ruby taught me that you're not supposed to be afraid of the bugs under your bed. And even the biggest of the problems are a group of tiny problems stuck together. And Ruby also introduced me to her friends, the colorful side of the Internet culture. She has friends like the Snow Leopard, who is beautiful but doesn't want to play with the other kids. And she has friends like the green robots that are really friendly but super messy. And she has friends like Linux the penguin who's really ruthlessly efficient, but somewhat hard to understand. And idealistic foxes, and so on. In Ruby's world, you learn technology through play. And, for instance, computers are really good at repeating stuff, so the way Ruby would teach loops goes like this. This is Ruby's favorite dance move, it goes, "Clap, clap, stomp, stomp clap, clap and jump." And you learn counter loops by repeating that four times. And you learn while loops by repeating that sequence while I'm standing on one leg. And you learn until loops by repeating that sequence until mom gets really mad. (Laughter) And most of all, you learn that there are no ready answers. When coming up with the curriculum for Ruby's world, I needed to really ask the kids how they see the world and what kind of questions they have and I would organize play testing sessions. I would start by showing the kids these four pictures. I would show them a picture of a car, a grocery store, a dog and a toilet. And I would ask, "Which one of these do you think is a computer?" And the kids would be very conservative and go, "None of these is a computer. I know what a computer is: it's that glowing box in front of which mom or dad spends way too much time." But then we would talk and we would discover that actually, a car is a computer, it has a navigation system inside of it. And a dog — a dog might not be a computer, but it has a collar and the collar might have a computer inside of it. And grocery stores, they have so many different kinds of computers, like the cashier system and the burglar alarms. And kids, you know what? In Japan, toilets are computers and there's even hackers who hack them. (Laughter) And we go further and I give them these little stickers with an on/off button on them. And I tell the kids, "Today you have this magic ability to make anything in this room into a computer." And again, the kids go, "Sounds really hard, I don't know the right answer for this." But I tell them, "Don't worry, your parents don't know the right answer, either. They've just started to hear about this thing called The Internet of Things. But you kids, you are going to be the ones who are really going to live up in a world where everything is a computer." And then I had this little girl who came to me and took a bicycle lamp and she said, "This bicycle lamp, if it were a computer, it would change colors." And I said, "That's a really good idea, what else could it do?" And she thinks and she thinks, and she goes, "If this bicycle lamp were a computer, we could go on a biking trip with my father and we would sleep in a tent and this biking lamp could also be a movie projector." And that's the moment I'm looking for, the moment when the kid realizes that the world is definitely not ready yet, that a really awesome way of making the world more ready is by building technology and that each one of us can be a part of that change. Final story, we also built a computer. And we got to know the bossy CPU and the helpful RAM and ROM that help it remember things. And after we've assembled our computer together, we also design an application for it. And my favorite story is this little boy, he's six years old and his favorite thing in the world is to be an astronaut. And the boy, he has these huge headphones on and he's completely immersed in his tiny paper computer because you see, he's built his own intergalactic planetary navigation application. And his father, the lone astronaut in the Martian orbit, is on the other side of the room and the boy's important mission is to bring the father safely back to earth. And these kids are going to have a profoundly different view of the world and the way we build it with technology. Finally, the more approachable, the more inclusive, and the more diverse we make the world of technology, the more colorful and better the world will look like. So, imagine with me, for a moment, a world where the stories we tell about how things get made don't only include the twentysomething-year-old Silicon Valley boys, but also Kenyan schoolgirls and Norwegian librarians. Imagine a world where the little Ada Lovelaces of tomorrow, who live in a permanent reality of 1s and 0s, they grow up to be very optimistic and brave about technology. They embrace the powers and the opportunities and the limitations of the world. A world of technology that is wonderful, whimsical and a tiny bit weird. When I was a girl, I wanted to be a storyteller. I loved make-believe worlds and my favorite thing to do was to wake up in the mornings in Moominvalley. In the afternoons, I would roam around the Tatooines. And in the evenings, I would go to sleep in Narnia. And programming turned out to be the perfect profession for me. I still create worlds. Instead of stories, I do them with code. Programming gives me this amazing power to build my whole little universe with its own rules and paradigms and practices. Create something out of nothing with the pure power of logic. Thank you. (Applause)
The boiling river of the Amazon	{0: "Andrés Ruzo investigates the Earth's heat and the mystery of a boiling river in the Peruvian rainforest."}	TEDGlobal 2014	As a boy in Lima, my grandfather told me a legend of the Spanish conquest of Peru. Atahualpa, emperor of the Inca, had been captured and killed. Pizarro and his conquistadors had grown rich, and tales of their conquest and glory had reached Spain and was bringing new waves of Spaniards, hungry for gold and glory. They would go into towns and ask the Inca, "Where's another civilization we can conquer? Where's more gold?" And the Inca, out of vengeance, told them, "Go to the Amazon. You'll find all the gold you want there. In fact, there is a city called Paititi — El Dorado in Spanish — made entirely of gold." The Spanish set off into the jungle, but the few that return come back with stories, stories of powerful shamans, of warriors with poisoned arrows, of trees so tall they blotted out the sun, spiders that ate birds, snakes that swallowed men whole and a river that boiled. All this became a childhood memory. And years passed. I'm working on my PhD at SMU, trying to understand Peru's geothermal energy potential, when I remember this legend, and I began asking that question. Could the boiling river exist? I asked colleagues from universities, the government, oil, gas and mining companies, and the answer was a unanimous no. And this makes sense. You see, boiling rivers do exist in the world, but they're generally associated with volcanoes. You need a powerful heat source to produce such a large geothermal manifestation. And as you can see from the red dots here, which are volcanoes, we don't have volcanoes in the Amazon, nor in most of Peru. So it follows: We should not expect to see a boiling river. Telling this same story at a family dinner, my aunt tells me, "But no, Andrés, I've been there. I've swum in that river." (Laughter) Then my uncle jumps in. "No, Andrés, she's not kidding. You see, you can only swim in it after a very heavy rain, and it's protected by a powerful shaman. Your aunt, she's friends with his wife." (Laughter) "¿Cómo?" ["Huh?"] You know, despite all my scientific skepticism, I found myself hiking into the jungle, guided by my aunt, over 700 kilometers away from the nearest volcanic center, and well, honestly, mentally preparing myself to behold the legendary "warm stream of the Amazon." But then ... I heard something, a low surge that got louder and louder as we came closer. It sounded like ocean waves constantly crashing, and as we got closer, I saw smoke, vapor, coming up through the trees. And then, I saw this. I immediately grabbed for my thermometer, and the average temperatures in the river were 86 degrees C. This is not quite the 100-degree C boiling but definitely close enough. The river flowed hot and fast. I followed it upriver and was led by, actually, the shaman's apprentice to the most sacred site on the river. And this is what's bizarre — It starts off as a cold stream. And here, at this site, is the home of the Yacumama, mother of the waters, a giant serpent spirit who births hot and cold water. And here we find a hot spring, mixing with cold stream water underneath her protective motherly jaws and thus bringing their legends to life. The next morning, I woke up and — (Laughter) I asked for tea. I was handed a mug, a tea bag and, well, pointed towards the river. To my surprise, the water was clean and had a pleasant taste, which is a little weird for geothermal systems. What was amazing is that the locals had always known about this place, and that I was by no means the first outsider to see it. It was just part of their everyday life. They drink its water. They take in its vapor. They cook with it, clean with it, even make their medicines with it. I met the shaman, and he seemed like an extension of the river and his jungle. He asked for my intentions and listened carefully. Then, to my tremendous relief — I was freaking out, to be honest with you — a smile began to snake across his face, and he just laughed. (Laughter) I had received the shaman's blessing to study the river, on the condition that after I take the water samples and analyze them in my lab, wherever I was in the world, that I pour the waters back into the ground so that, as the shaman said, the waters could find their way back home. I've been back every year since that first visit in 2011, and the fieldwork has been exhilarating, demanding and at times dangerous. One story was even featured in National Geographic Magazine. I was trapped on a small rock about the size of a sheet of paper in sandals and board shorts, in between an 80 degree C river and a hot spring that, well, looked like this, close to boiling. And on top of that, it was Amazon rain forest. Pshh, pouring rain, couldn't see a thing. The temperature differential made it all white. It was a whiteout. Intense. Now, after years of work, I'll soon be submitting my geophysical and geochemical studies for publication. And I'd like to share, today, with all of you here, on the TED stage, for the first time, some of these discoveries. Well, first off, it's not a legend. Surprise! (Laughter) When I first started the research, the satellite imagery was too low-resolution to be meaningful. There were just no good maps. Thanks to the support of the Google Earth team, I now have this. Not only that, the indigenous name of the river, Shanay-timpishka, "boiled with the heat of the sun," indicating that I'm not the first to wonder why the river boils, and showing that humanity has always sought to explain the world around us. So why does the river boil? (Bubbling sounds) It actually took me three years to get that footage. Fault-fed hot springs. As we have hot blood running through our veins and arteries, so, too, the earth has hot water running through its cracks and faults. Where these arteries come to the surface, these earth arteries, we'll get geothermal manifestations: fumaroles, hot springs and in our case, the boiling river. What's truly incredible, though, is the scale of this place. Next time you cross the road, think about this. The river flows wider than a two-lane road along most of its path. It flows hot for 6.24 kilometers. Truly impressive. There are thermal pools larger than this TED stage, and that waterfall that you see there is six meters tall — and all with near-boiling water. We mapped the temperatures along the river, and this was by far the most demanding part of the fieldwork. And the results were just awesome. Sorry — the geoscientist in me coming out. And it showed this amazing trend. You see, the river starts off cold. It then heats up, cools back down, heats up, cools back down, heats up again, and then has this beautiful decay curve until it smashes into this cold river. Now, I understand not all of you are geothermal scientists, so to put it in more everyday terms: Everyone loves coffee. Yes? Good. Your regular cup of coffee, 54 degrees C, an extra-hot one, well, 60. So, put in coffee shop terms, the boiling river plots like this. There you have your hot coffee. Here you have your extra-hot coffee, and you can see that there's a bit point there where the river is still hotter than even the extra-hot coffee. And these are average water temperatures. We took these in the dry season to ensure the purest geothermal temperatures. But there's a magic number here that's not being shown, and that number is 47 degrees C, because that's where things start to hurt, and I know this from very personal experience. Above that temperature, you don't want to get in that water. You need to be careful. It can be deadly. I've seen all sorts of animals fall in, and what's shocking to me, is the process is pretty much the same. So they fall in and the first thing to go are the eyes. Eyes, apparently, cook very quickly. They turn this milky-white color. The stream is carrying them. They're trying to swim out, but their meat is cooking on the bone because it's so hot. So they're losing power, losing power, until finally they get to a point where hot water goes into their mouths and they cook from the inside out. (Laughter) A bit sadistic, aren't we? Jeez. Leave them marinating for a little longer. What's, again, amazing are these temperatures. They're similar to things that I've seen on volcanoes all over the world and even super-volcanoes like Yellowstone. But here's the thing: the data is showing that the boiling river exists independent of volcanism. It's neither magmatic or volcanic in origin, and again, over 700 kilometers away from the nearest volcanic center. How can a boiling river exist like this? I've asked geothermal experts and volcanologists for years, and I'm still unable to find another non-volcanic geothermal system of this magnitude. It's unique. It's special on a global scale. So, still — how does it work? Where do we get this heat? There's still more research to be done to better constrain the problem and better understand the system, but from what the data is telling us now, it looks to be the result of a large hydrothermal system. Basically, it works like this: So, the deeper you go into the earth, the hotter it gets. We refer to this as the geothermal gradient. The waters could be coming from as far away as glaciers in the Andes, then seeping down deep into the earth and coming out to form the boiling river after getting heated up from the geothermal gradient, all due to this unique geologic setting. Now, we found that in and around the river — this is working with colleagues from National Geographic, Dr. Spencer Wells, and Dr. Jon Eisen from UC Davis — we genetically sequenced the extremophile lifeforms living in and around the river, and have found new lifeforms, unique species living in the boiling river. But again, despite all of these studies, all of these discoveries and the legends, a question remains: What is the significance of the boiling river? What is the significance of this stationary cloud that always hovers over this patch of jungle? And what is the significance of a detail in a childhood legend? To the shaman and his community, it's a sacred site. To me, as a geoscientist, it's a unique geothermal phenomenon. But to the illegal loggers and cattle farmers, it's just another resource to exploit. And to the Peruvian government, it's just another stretch of unprotected land ready for development. My goal is to ensure that whoever controls this land understands the boiling river's uniqueness and significance. Because that's the question, one of significance. And the thing there is, we define significance. It's us. We have that power. We are the ones who draw that line between the sacred and the trivial. And in this age, where everything seems mapped, measured and studied, in this age of information, I remind you all that discoveries are not just made in the black void of the unknown but in the white noise of overwhelming data. There remains so much to explore. We live in an incredible world. So go out. Be curious. Because we do live in a world where shamans still sing to the spirits of the jungle, where rivers do boil and where legends do come to life. Thank you very much. (Applause)
A simple way to break a bad habit	{0: 'Psychiatrist and addiction expert Judson Brewer researches mindfulness techniques that effectively help quell cravings of all kinds.'}	TEDMED 2015	When I was first learning to meditate, the instruction was to simply pay attention to my breath, and when my mind wandered, to bring it back. Sounded simple enough. Yet I'd sit on these silent retreats, sweating through T-shirts in the middle of winter. I'd take naps every chance I got because it was really hard work. Actually, it was exhausting. The instruction was simple enough but I was missing something really important. So why is it so hard to pay attention? Well, studies show that even when we're really trying to pay attention to something — like maybe this talk — at some point, about half of us will drift off into a daydream, or have this urge to check our Twitter feed. So what's going on here? It turns out that we're fighting one of the most evolutionarily-conserved learning processes currently known in science, one that's conserved back to the most basic nervous systems known to man. This reward-based learning process is called positive and negative reinforcement, and basically goes like this. We see some food that looks good, our brain says, "Calories! ... Survival!" We eat the food, we taste it — it tastes good. And especially with sugar, our bodies send a signal to our brain that says, "Remember what you're eating and where you found it." We lay down this context-dependent memory and learn to repeat the process next time. See food, eat food, feel good, repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward. Simple, right? Well, after a while, our creative brains say, "You know what? You can use this for more than just remembering where food is. You know, next time you feel bad, why don't you try eating something good so you'll feel better?" We thank our brains for the great idea, try this and quickly learn that if we eat chocolate or ice cream when we're mad or sad, we feel better. Same process, just a different trigger. Instead of this hunger signal coming from our stomach, this emotional signal — feeling sad — triggers that urge to eat. Maybe in our teenage years, we were a nerd at school, and we see those rebel kids outside smoking and we think, "Hey, I want to be cool." So we start smoking. The Marlboro Man wasn't a dork, and that was no accident. See cool, smoke to be cool, feel good. Repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward. And each time we do this, we learn to repeat the process and it becomes a habit. So later, feeling stressed out triggers that urge to smoke a cigarette or to eat something sweet. Now, with these same brain processes, we've gone from learning to survive to literally killing ourselves with these habits. Obesity and smoking are among the leading preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in the world. So back to my breath. What if instead of fighting our brains, or trying to force ourselves to pay attention, we instead tapped into this natural, reward-based learning process ... but added a twist? What if instead we just got really curious about what was happening in our momentary experience? I'll give you an example. In my lab, we studied whether mindfulness training could help people quit smoking. Now, just like trying to force myself to pay attention to my breath, they could try to force themselves to quit smoking. And the majority of them had tried this before and failed — on average, six times. Now, with mindfulness training, we dropped the bit about forcing and instead focused on being curious. In fact, we even told them to smoke. What? Yeah, we said, "Go ahead and smoke, just be really curious about what it's like when you do." And what did they notice? Well here's an example from one of our smokers. She said, "Mindful smoking: smells like stinky cheese and tastes like chemicals, YUCK!" Now, she knew, cognitively that smoking was bad for her, that's why she joined our program. What she discovered just by being curiously aware when she smoked was that smoking tastes like shit. (Laughter) Now, she moved from knowledge to wisdom. She moved from knowing in her head that smoking was bad for her to knowing it in her bones, and the spell of smoking was broken. She started to become disenchanted with her behavior. Now, the prefrontal cortex, that youngest part of our brain from an evolutionary perspective, it understands on an intellectual level that we shouldn't smoke. And it tries its hardest to help us change our behavior, to help us stop smoking, to help us stop eating that second, that third, that fourth cookie. We call this cognitive control. We're using cognition to control our behavior. Unfortunately, this is also the first part of our brain that goes offline when we get stressed out, which isn't that helpful. Now, we can all relate to this in our own experience. We're much more likely to do things like yell at our spouse or kids when we're stressed out or tired, even though we know it's not going to be helpful. We just can't help ourselves. When the prefrontal cortex goes offline, we fall back into our old habits, which is why this disenchantment is so important. Seeing what we get from our habits helps us understand them at a deeper level — to know it in our bones so we don't have to force ourselves to hold back or restrain ourselves from behavior. We're just less interested in doing it in the first place. And this is what mindfulness is all about: Seeing really clearly what we get when we get caught up in our behaviors, becoming disenchanted on a visceral level and from this disenchanted stance, naturally letting go. This isn't to say that, poof, magically we quit smoking. But over time, as we learn to see more and more clearly the results of our actions, we let go of old habits and form new ones. The paradox here is that mindfulness is just about being really interested in getting close and personal with what's actually happening in our bodies and minds from moment to moment. This willingness to turn toward our experience rather than trying to make unpleasant cravings go away as quickly as possible. And this willingness to turn toward our experience is supported by curiosity, which is naturally rewarding. What does curiosity feel like? It feels good. And what happens when we get curious? We start to notice that cravings are simply made up of body sensations — oh, there's tightness, there's tension, there's restlessness — and that these body sensations come and go. These are bite-size pieces of experiences that we can manage from moment to moment rather than getting clobbered by this huge, scary craving that we choke on. In other words, when we get curious, we step out of our old, fear-based, reactive habit patterns, and we step into being. We become this inner scientist where we're eagerly awaiting that next data point. Now, this might sound too simplistic to affect behavior. But in one study, we found that mindfulness training was twice as good as gold standard therapy at helping people quit smoking. So it actually works. And when we studied the brains of experienced meditators, we found that parts of a neural network of self-referential processing called the default mode network were at play. Now, one current hypothesis is that a region of this network, called the posterior cingulate cortex, is activated not necessarily by craving itself but when we get caught up in it, when we get sucked in, and it takes us for a ride. In contrast, when we let go — step out of the process just by being curiously aware of what's happening — this same brain region quiets down. Now we're testing app and online-based mindfulness training programs that target these core mechanisms and, ironically, use the same technology that's driving us to distraction to help us step out of our unhealthy habit patterns of smoking, of stress eating and other addictive behaviors. Now, remember that bit about context-dependent memory? We can deliver these tools to peoples' fingertips in the contexts that matter most. So we can help them tap into their inherent capacity to be curiously aware right when that urge to smoke or stress eat or whatever arises. So if you don't smoke or stress eat, maybe the next time you feel this urge to check your email when you're bored, or you're trying to distract yourself from work, or maybe to compulsively respond to that text message when you're driving, see if you can tap into this natural capacity, just be curiously aware of what's happening in your body and mind in that moment. It will just be another chance to perpetuate one of our endless and exhaustive habit loops ... or step out of it. Instead of see text message, compulsively text back, feel a little bit better — notice the urge, get curious, feel the joy of letting go and repeat. Thank you. (Applause)
How we'll fight the next deadly virus	{0: 'Pardis Sabeti investigates the genomes of microbes, like Ebola and coronavirus, to understand how to slow them.'}	TEDWomen 2015	You may never have heard of Kenema, Sierra Leone or Arua, Nigeria. But I know them as two of the most extraordinary places on earth. In hospitals there, there's a community of nurses, physicians and scientists that have been quietly battling one of the deadliest threats to humanity for years: Lassa virus. Lassa virus is a lot like Ebola. It can cause a severe fever and can often be fatal. But these individuals, they risk their lives every day to protect the individuals in their communities, and by doing so, protect us all. But one of the most extraordinary things I learned about them on one of my first visits out there many years ago was that they start each morning — these challenging, extraordinary days on the front lines — by singing. They gather together, and they show their joy. They show their spirit. And over the years, from year after year as I've visited them and they've visited me, I get to gather with them and I sing and we write and we love it, because it reminds us that we're not just there to pursue science together; we're bonded through a shared humanity. And that of course, as you can imagine, becomes extremely important, even essential, as things begin to change. And that changed a great deal in March of 2014, when the Ebola outbreak was declared in Guinea. This is the first outbreak in West Africa, near the border of Sierra Leone and Liberia. And it was frightening, frightening for us all. We had actually suspected for some time that Lassa and Ebola were more widespread than thought, and we thought it could one day come to Kenema. And so members of my team immediately went out and joined Dr. Humarr Khan and his team there, and we set up diagnostics to be able to have sensitive molecular tests to pick up Ebola if it came across the border and into Sierra Leone. We'd already set up this kind of capacity for Lassa virus, we knew how to do it, the team is outstanding. We just had to give them the tools and place to survey for Ebola. And unfortunately, that day came. On May 23, 2014, a woman checked into the maternity ward at the hospital, and the team ran those important molecular tests and they identified the first confirmed case of Ebola in Sierra Leone. This was an exceptional work that was done. They were able to diagnose the case immediately, to safely treat the patient and to begin to do contact tracing to follow what was going on. It could've stopped something. But by the time that day came, the outbreak had already been breeding for months. With hundreds of cases, it had already eclipsed all previous outbreaks. And it came into Sierra Leone not as that singular case, but as a tidal wave. We had to work with the international community, with the Ministry of Health, with Kenema, to begin to deal with the cases, as the next week brought 31, then 92, then 147 cases — all coming to Kenema, one of the only places in Sierra Leone that could deal with this. And we worked around the clock trying to do everything we could, trying to help the individuals, trying to get attention, but we also did one other simple thing. From that specimen that we take from a patient's blood to detect Ebola, we can discard it, obviously. The other thing we can do is, actually, put in a chemical and deactivate it, so just place it into a box and ship it across the ocean, and that's what we did. We sent it to Boston, where my team works. And we also worked around the clock doing shift work, day after day, and we quickly generated 99 genomes of the Ebola virus. This is the blueprint — the genome of a virus is the blueprint. We all have one. It says everything that makes up us, and it tells us so much information. The results of this kind of work are simple and they're powerful. We could actually take these 99 different viruses, look at them and compare them, and we could see, actually, compared to three genomes that had been previously published from Guinea, we could show that the outbreak emerged in Guinea months before, once into the human population, and from there had been transmitting from human to human. Now, that's incredibly important when you're trying to figure out how to intervene, but the important thing is contact tracing. We also could see that as the virus was moving between humans, it was mutating. And each of those mutations are so important, because the diagnostics, the vaccines, the therapies that we're using, are all based on that genome sequence, fundamentally — that's what drives it. And so global health experts would need to respond, would have to develop, to recalibrate everything that they were doing. But the way that science works, the position I was in at that point is, I had the data, and I could have worked in a silo for many, many months, analyzed the data carefully, slowly, submitted the paper for publication, gone through a few back-and-forths, and then finally when the paper came out, might release that data. That's the way the status quo works. Well, that was not going to work at this point, right? We had friends on the front lines and to us it was just obvious that what we needed is help, lots of help. So the first thing we did is, as soon as the sequences came off the machines, we published it to the web. We just released it to the whole world and said, "Help us." And help came. Before we knew it, we were being contacted from people all over, surprised to see the data out there and released. Some of the greatest viral trackers in the world were suddenly part of our community. We were working together in this virtual way, sharing, regular calls, communications, trying to follow the virus minute by minute, to see ways that we could stop it. And there are so many ways that we can form communities like that. Everybody, particularly when the outbreak started to expand globally, was reaching out to learn, to participate, to engage. Everybody wants to play a part. The amount of human capacity out there is just amazing, and the Internet connects us all. And could you imagine that instead of being frightened of each other, that we all just said, "Let's do this. Let's work together, and let's make this happen." But the problem is that the data that all of us are using, Googling on the web, is just too limited to do what we need to do. And so many opportunities get missed when that happens. So in the early part of the epidemic from Kenema, we'd had 106 clinical records from patients, and we once again made that publicly available to the world. And in our own lab, we could show that you could take those 106 records, we could train computers to predict the prognosis for Ebola patients to near 100 percent accuracy. And we made an app that could release that, to make that available to health-care workers in the field. But 106 is just not enough to make it powerful, to validate it. So we were waiting for more data to release that. and the data has still not come. We are still waiting, tweaking away, in silos rather than working together. And this just — we can't accept that. Right? You, all of you, cannot accept that. It's our lives on the line. And in fact, actually, many lives were lost, many health-care workers, including beloved colleagues of mine, five colleagues: Mbalu Fonnie, Alex Moigboi, Dr. Humarr Khan, Alice Kovoma and Mohamed Fullah. These are just five of many health-care workers at Kenema and beyond that died while the world waited and while we all worked, quietly and separately. See, Ebola, like all threats to humanity, it's fueled by mistrust and distraction and division. When we build barriers amongst ourselves and we fight amongst ourselves, the virus thrives. But unlike all threats to humanity, Ebola is one where we're actually all the same. We're all in this fight together. Ebola on one person's doorstep could soon be on ours. And so in this place with the same vulnerabilities, the same strengths, the same fears, the same hopes, I hope that we work together with joy. A graduate student of mine was reading a book about Sierra Leone, and she discovered that the word "Kenema," the hospital that we work at and the city where we work in Sierra Leone, is named after the Mende word for "clear like a river, translucent and open to the public gaze." That was really profound for us, because without knowing it, we'd always felt that in order to honor the individuals in Kenema where we worked, we had to work openly, we had to share and we had to work together. And we have to do that. We all have to demand that of ourselves and others — to be open to each other when an outbreak happens, to fight in this fight together. Because this is not the first outbreak of Ebola, it will not be the last, and there are many other microbes out there that are lying in wait, like Lassa virus and others. And the next time this happens, it could happen in a city of millions, it could start there. It could be something that's transmitted through the air. It could even be disseminated intentionally. And I know that that is frightening, I understand that, but I know also, and this experience shows us, that we have the technology and we have the capacity to win this thing, to win this and have the upper hand over viruses. But we can only do it if we do it together and we do it with joy. So for Dr. Khan and for all of those who sacrificed their lives on the front lines in this fight with us always, let us be in this fight with them always. And let us not let the world be defined by the destruction wrought by one virus, but illuminated by billions of hearts and minds working in unity. Thank you. (Applause)
Special Olympics let me be myself -- a champion	{0: 'Matthew Williams believes that sport has the power to change lives.'}	TEDxVancouver	Hello. My name is Matthew Williams, and I am a champion. I have won medals in three different sports and national games in Canada, competed at the international level in basketball and was proud to represent Canada on the world stage. (Applause) I train five days a week for basketball and speed skating, work with top quality coaches and mental performance consultants to be at my best in my sport. By the way, all that is through Special Olympics. Does that change the way you think of me and my accomplishments? The world does not see all people like me as champions. Not long ago, people like me were shunned and hidden away. There has been lots of change since Special Olympics began in 1968, but in too many cases, people with intellectual disabilities are invisible to the wider population. People use the r-word in front of me, and they think it doesn't matter. That's the word "retard" or "retarded" used in a derogatory manner. They're not thinking about how much it hurts me and my friends. I don't want you to think I'm here because I'm a charity case. I am here because there is still a big problem with the way many people see individuals with intellectual disabilities, or, too often, how they don't see them at all. Did you know the World Games happened this year? I was one of over 6,500 athletes with intellectual disabilities from 165 countries who competed in LA. There was over 62,000 spectators watching opening ceremonies, and there was live coverage on TSN and ESPN. Did you even know that happened? What do you think of when you see someone like me? I am here today to challenge you to look at us as equals. Special Olympics transforms the self-identity of athletes with intellectual disabilities and the perceptions of everyone watching. For those of you who aren't familiar, Special Olympics is for athletes with intellectual disabilities. Special Olympics is separate from the Paralympics and Olympics. We offer high-quality, year round sports programs for people with intellectual disabilities that changes lives and perceptions. This movement has changed my life and those of so many others. And it has changed the way the world sees people with intellectual disabilities. I was born with epilepsy and an intellectual disability. Growing up, I played hockey until I was 12 years old. The older I got, the more I felt it was harder to keep up with everyone else, and I was angry and frustrated. For a while, I did not play any sports, didn't have many friends and felt left out and sad. There was a time when people with intellectual disabilities were hidden away from society. No one thought they could participate in sports, let alone be a valued member of society. In the 1960s, Dr. Frank Hayden, a scientist at the University of Toronto, was studying the effects of regular exercise on the fitness levels of children with intellectual disabilities. Using rigorous scientific research, Dr. Hayden and other researchers came to the conclusion that it was simply the lack of opportunity to participate that caused their fitness levels to suffer. Lots of people doubted that people with intellectual disabilities could benefit from fitness programs and sports competition opportunities. But pioneers like Dr. Hayden and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of Special Olympics, persevered, and Special Olympics athletes have proved them right four and a half million times over. (Applause) Before I joined Special Olympics, I was nervous because I was young, shy, not confident and didn't have many friends. When I got there, though, everyone was very encouraging, supportive, and let me be myself without being judged. Now, I am a basketball player and speed skater who has competed at provincial, national games, and this year made it all the way to the World Summer Games in LA, where I was part of the first ever Canadian basketball team to compete at World Games. (Applause) I am one of more than four and a half million athletes around the globe, and I've heard so many similar stories. Being Special Olympics athletes restores our pride and dignity. Special Olympics also addresses critical health needs. Studies have shown that, on average, men with intellectual disabilities die 13 years younger than men without, and women with intellectual disabilities die 20 years younger than women without. Special Olympics keeps us healthy by getting us active and participating in sport. Also, our coaches teach us about nutrition and health. Special Olympics also provides free health screening for athletes who have difficulty communicating with their doctor or accessing health care. At the 2015 World Summer Games, my Team Canada teammates and I played the Nigerian basketball team. The day before our game, the Nigerian basketball team went to the World Games Healthy Athlete screening, where seven of 10 members were given hearing aids for free and got to hear clearly for the first time. (Applause) The change in them was amazing. They were more excited, happy and confident, because their coach could vocally communicate with them. And they were emotional because they could hear the sounds of the basketball, the sounds of the whistle and the cheering fans in the stands — sounds that we take for granted. Special Olympics is transforming more than just the athlete in their sport. Special Olympics is transforming their lives off the field. This year, research findings showed that nearly half of the adults in the US don't know a single person with an intellectual disability, and the 44 percent of Americans who don't have personal contact with intellectual disabilities are significantly less accepting and positive. Then there's the r-word, proving that people with intellectual disabilities are still invisible to far too many people. People use it as a casual term or an insult. It was tweeted more than nine million times last year, and it is deeply hurtful to me and my four and a half million fellow athletes around the planet. People don't think it's insulting, but it is. As my fellow athlete and global messenger John Franklin Stephens wrote in an open letter to a political pundit who used the r-word as an insult, "Come join us someday at Special Olympics. See if you walk away with your heart unchanged." (Applause) This year, at the 2015 World Summer Games, people lined up for hours to get into the final night of powerlifting competition. So it was standing room only when my teammate Jackie Barrett, the Newfoundland Moose, deadlifted 655 pounds and lifted 611 pounds in the squat — (Applause) setting huge new records for Special Olympics. Jackie is a record holder among all powerlifters in Newfoundland — not just Special Olympics, all powerlifters. Jackie was a huge star in LA, and ESPN live-tweeted his record-breaking lifts and were wowed by his performance. Fifty years ago, few imagined individuals with intellectual disabilities could do anything like that. This year, 60,000 spectators filled the famous LA Memorial Coliseum to watch the opening ceremonies of World Games and cheer athletes from 165 countries around the world. Far from being hidden away, we were cheered and celebrated. Special Olympics teaches athletes to be confident and proud of themselves. Special Olympics teaches the world that people with intellectual disabilities deserve respect and inclusion. (Applause) Now, I have dreams and achievements in my sport, great coaches, respect and dignity, better health, and I am pursuing a career as a personal trainer. (Applause) I am no longer hidden, bullied and I am here doing a TED Talk. (Applause) The world is a different place because of Special Olympics, but there is still farther to go. So the next time you see someone with an intellectual disability, I hope you will see their ability. The next time someone uses the r-word near you, I hope you will tell them how much it hurts. I hope you will think about getting involved with Special Olympics. (Applause) I would like to leave you with one final thought. Nelson Mandela said, "Sports has the power to change the world." Special Olympics is changing the world by transforming four and a half million athletes and giving us a place to be confident, meet friends, not be judged and get to feel like and be champions. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Economic growth has stalled. Let's fix it	{0: 'Dambisa Moyo is an international economist who analyzes the macroeconomy and global affairs.'}	TEDGlobal>Geneva	Our ability to create and sustain economic growth is the defining challenge of our time. Of course there are other challenges — health care, disease burdens and pandemics, environmental challenges and, of course, radicalized terrorism. However, to the extent that we can actually solve the economic growth challenge, it will take us a long way to solving the challenges that I've just elucidated. More importantly, unless and until we solve economic growth and create sustainable, long-term economic growth, we'll be unable to address the seemingly intractable challenges that continue to pervade the globe today, whether it's health care, education or economic development. The fundamental question is this: How are we going to create economic growth in advanced and developed economies like the United States and across Europe at a time when they continue to struggle to create economic growth after the financial crisis? They continue to underperform and to see an erosion in the three key drivers of economic growth: capital, labor and productivity. In particular, these developed economies continue to see debts and deficits, the decline and erosion of both the quality and quantity of labor and they also see productivity stalling. In a similar vein, how are we going to create economic growth in the emerging markets, where 90 percent of the world's population lives and where, on average, 70 percent of the population is under the age of 25? In these countries, it is essential that they grow at a minimum of seven percent a year in order to put a dent in poverty and to double per capita incomes in one generation. And yet today, the largest emerging economies — countries with at least 50 million people — continue to struggle to reach that seven percent magic mark. Worse than that, countries like India, Russia, South Africa, Brazil and even China are falling below that seven percent number and, in many cases, actually regressing. Economic growth matters. With economic growth, countries and societies enter into a virtuous cycle of upward mobility, opportunity and improved living standards. Without growth, countries contract and atrophy, not just in the annals of economic statistics but also in the meaning of life and how lives are lived. Economic growth matters powerfully for the individual. If growth wanes, the risk to human progress and the risk of political and social instability rises, and societies become dimmer, coarser and smaller. The context matters. And countries in emerging markets do not need to grow at the same rates as developed countries. Now, I know some of you in this room find this to be a risky proposition. There are some people here who will turn around and be quite disillusioned by what's happened around the world and basically ascribe that to economic growth. You worry about the overpopulation of the planet. And looking at the UN's recent statistics and projections that the world will have 11 billion people on the planet before it plateaus in 2100, you're concerned about what that does to natural resources — arable land, potable water, energy and minerals. You are also concerned about the degradation of the environment. And you worry about how man, embodied in the corporate globalist, has become greedy and corrupt. But I'm here to tell you today that economic growth has been the backbone of changes in living standards of millions of people around the world. And more importantly, it's not just economic growth that has been driven by capitalism. The definition of capitalism, very simply put, is that the factors of production, such as trade and industry, capital and labor, are left in the hands of the private sector and not the state. It's really essential here that we understand that fundamentally the critique is not for economic growth per se but what has happened to capitalism. And to the extent that we need to create economic growth over the long term, we're going to have to pursue it with a better form of economic stance. Economic growth needs capitalism, but it needs it to work properly. And as I mentioned a moment ago, the core of the capitalist system has been defined by private actors. And even this, however, is a very simplistic dichotomy. Capitalism: good; non-capitalism: bad. When in practical experience, capitalism is much more of a spectrum. And we have countries such as China, which have practiced more state capitalism, and we have countries like the Unites States which are more market capitalist. Our efforts to critique the capitalist system, however, have tended to focus on countries like China that are in fact not blatantly market capitalism. However, there is a real reason and real concern for us to now focus our attentions on purer forms of capitalism, particularly those embodied by the United States. This is really important because this type of capitalism has increasingly been afforded the critique that it is now fostering corruption and, worse still, it's increasing income inequality — the idea that the few are benefiting at the expense of the many. The two really critical questions that we need to address is how can we fix capitalism so that it can help create economic growth but at the same time can help to address social ills. In order to think about that framing, we have to ask ourselves, how does capitalism work today? Very simplistically, capitalism is set on the basis of an individual utility maximizer — a selfish individual who goes after what he or she wants. And only after they've maximized their utility do they then decide it's important to provide support to other social contracts. Of course, in this system governments do tax, and they use part of their revenues to fund social programs, recognizing that government's role is not just regulation but also to be arbiter of social goods. But nevertheless, this framework — this two-stage framework — is the basis from which we must now start to think about how we can improve the capitalist model. I would argue that there are two sides to this challenge. First of all, we can draw on the right-wing policies to see what could be beneficial for us to think about how we can improve capitalism. In particular, right-leaning policies have tended to focus on things like conditional transfers, where we pay and reward people for doing the things that we actually think can help enhance economic growth. For example, sending children to school, parents could earn money for that, or getting their children inoculated or immunized, parents could get paid for doing that. Now, quite apart from the debate on whether or not we should be paying people to do what we think they should do anyway, the fact of the matter is that pay for performance has actually yielded some positive results in places like Mexico, in Brazil and also in pilot programs in New York. But there are also benefits and significant changes underway on left-leaning policies. Arguments that government should expand its role and responsibility so that it's not so narrowly defined and that government should be much more of an arbiter of the factors of production have become commonplace with the success of China. But also we've started to have debates about how the role of the private sector should move away from just being a profit motive and really be more engaged in the delivery of social programs. Things like the corporate social responsibility programs, albeit small in scale, are moving in that right direction. Of course, left-leaning policies have also tended to blur the lines between government, NGOs and private sector. Two very good examples of this are the 19th-century United States, when the infrastructure rollout was really about public-private partnerships. More recently, of course, the advent of the Internet has also proven to the world that public and private can work together for the betterment of society. My fundamental message to you is this: We cannot continue to try and solve the world economic growth challenges by being dogmatic and being unnecessarily ideological. In order to create sustainable, long-term economic growth and solve the challenges and social ills that continue to plague the world today, we're going to have to be more broad-minded about what might work. Ultimately, we have to recognize that ideology is the enemy of growth. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: I want to ask a couple of questions, Dambisa, because one could react to your last sentence by saying growth is also an ideology, it's possibly the dominant ideology of our times. What do you say to those who react that way? DM: Well, I think that that's completely legitimate, and I think that we're already having that discussion. There's a lot of work going on around happiness and other metrics being used for measuring people's success and improvements in living standards. And so I think that we should be open to what could deliver improvements in people's living standards and continue to reduce poverty around the world. BG: So you're basically pleading for rehabilitating growth, but the only way for that happen without compromising the capacity of the earth, to take us on a long journey, is for economic growth somehow to decouple from the underlying use of resources. Do you see that happening? DM: Well, I think that I'm more optimistic about human ability and ingenuity. I think if we start to constrain ourselves using the finite, scarce and depleting resources that we know today, we could get quite negative and quite concerned about the way the world is. However, we've seen the Club of Rome, we've seen previous claims that the world would be running out of resources, and it's not to argue that those things are not valid. But I think, with ingenuity we could see desalination, I think we could reinvest in energy, so that we can actually get better outcomes. And so in that sense, I'm much more optimistic about what humans can do. BG: The thing that strikes me about your proposals for rehabilitating growth and taking a different direction is that you're kind of suggesting to fix capitalism with more capitalism — with putting a price tag on good behavior as incentive or developing a bigger role for business in social issues. Is that what you're suggesting? DM: I'm suggesting we have to be open-minded. I think it is absolutely the case that traditional models of economic growth are not working the way we would like them to. And I think it's no accident that today the largest economy in the world, the United States, has democracy, liberal democracy, as it's core political stance and it has free market capitalism — to the extent that it is free — free market capitalism as its economic stance. The second largest economy is China. It has deprioritized democracy and it has state capitalism, which is a completely different model. These two countries, completely different political models and completely different economic models, and yet they have the same income inequality number measured as a Gini coefficient. I think those are the debates we should have, because it's not clear at all what model we should be adopting, and I think there needs to be much more discourse and much more humility about what we know and what we don't know. BG: One last question. The COP21 is going on in Paris. If you could send a tweet to all the heads of state and heads of delegations there, what would you say? DM: Again, I would be very much about being open-minded. As you're aware, the issues around the environmental concerns have been on the agenda many times now — in Copenhagen, '72 in Stockholm — and we keep revisiting these issues partly because there is not a fundamental agreement, in fact there's a schism between what the developed countries believe and want and what emerging market countries want. Emerging market countries need to continue to create economic growth so that we don't have political uncertainty in the those countries. Developed countries recognize that they have a real, important responsibility not only just to manage their CO2 emissions and some of the degradation that they're contributing to the world, but also as trendsetters in R&D. And so they have to come to the table as well. But in essence, it cannot be a situation where we start ascribing policies to the emerging markets without developed countries themselves also taking quite a swipe at what they're doing both in demand and supply in developed markets. BG: Dambisa, thank you for coming to TED. DM: Thank you very much. (Applause)
Shape-shifting tech will change work as we know it	{0: 'Sean Follmer designs shape-changing and deformable interfaces that take advantage of our natural dexterity and spatial abilities.'}	TEDxCERN	We've evolved with tools, and tools have evolved with us. Our ancestors created these hand axes 1.5 million years ago, shaping them to not only fit the task at hand but also their hand. However, over the years, tools have become more and more specialized. These sculpting tools have evolved through their use, and each one has a different form which matches its function. And they leverage the dexterity of our hands in order to manipulate things with much more precision. But as tools have become more and more complex, we need more complex controls to control them. And so designers have become very adept at creating interfaces that allow you to manipulate parameters while you're attending to other things, such as taking a photograph and changing the focus or the aperture. But the computer has fundamentally changed the way we think about tools because computation is dynamic. So it can do a million different things and run a million different applications. However, computers have the same static physical form for all of these different applications and the same static interface elements as well. And I believe that this is fundamentally a problem, because it doesn't really allow us to interact with our hands and capture the rich dexterity that we have in our bodies. And my belief is that, then, we must need new types of interfaces that can capture these rich abilities that we have and that can physically adapt to us and allow us to interact in new ways. And so that's what I've been doing at the MIT Media Lab and now at Stanford. So with my colleagues, Daniel Leithinger and Hiroshi Ishii, we created inFORM, where the interface can actually come off the screen and you can physically manipulate it. Or you can visualize 3D information physically and touch it and feel it to understand it in new ways. Or you can interact through gestures and direct deformations to sculpt digital clay. Or interface elements can arise out of the surface and change on demand. And the idea is that for each individual application, the physical form can be matched to the application. And I believe this represents a new way that we can interact with information, by making it physical. So the question is, how can we use this? Traditionally, urban planners and architects build physical models of cities and buildings to better understand them. So with Tony Tang at the Media Lab, we created an interface built on inFORM to allow urban planners to design and view entire cities. And now you can walk around it, but it's dynamic, it's physical, and you can also interact directly. Or you can look at different views, such as population or traffic information, but it's made physical. We also believe that these dynamic shape displays can really change the ways that we remotely collaborate with people. So when we're working together in person, I'm not only looking at your face but I'm also gesturing and manipulating objects, and that's really hard to do when you're using tools like Skype. And so using inFORM, you can reach out from the screen and manipulate things at a distance. So we used the pins of the display to represent people's hands, allowing them to actually touch and manipulate objects at a distance. And you can also manipulate and collaborate on 3D data sets as well, so you can gesture around them as well as manipulate them. And that allows people to collaborate on these new types of 3D information in a richer way than might be possible with traditional tools. And so you can also bring in existing objects, and those will be captured on one side and transmitted to the other. Or you can have an object that's linked between two places, so as I move a ball on one side, the ball moves on the other as well. And so we do this by capturing the remote user using a depth-sensing camera like a Microsoft Kinect. Now, you might be wondering how does this all work, and essentially, what it is, is 900 linear actuators that are connected to these mechanical linkages that allow motion down here to be propagated in these pins above. So it's not that complex compared to what's going on at CERN, but it did take a long time for us to build it. And so we started with a single motor, a single linear actuator, and then we had to design a custom circuit board to control them. And then we had to make a lot of them. And so the problem with having 900 of something is that you have to do every step 900 times. And so that meant that we had a lot of work to do. So we sort of set up a mini-sweatshop in the Media Lab and brought undergrads in and convinced them to do "research" — (Laughter) and had late nights watching movies, eating pizza and screwing in thousands of screws. You know — research. (Laughter) But anyway, I think that we were really excited by the things that inFORM allowed us to do. Increasingly, we're using mobile devices, and we interact on the go. But mobile devices, just like computers, are used for so many different applications. So you use them to talk on the phone, to surf the web, to play games, to take pictures or even a million different things. But again, they have the same static physical form for each of these applications. And so we wanted to know how can we take some of the same interactions that we developed for inFORM and bring them to mobile devices. So at Stanford, we created this haptic edge display, which is a mobile device with an array of linear actuators that can change shape, so you can feel in your hand where you are as you're reading a book. Or you can feel in your pocket new types of tactile sensations that are richer than the vibration. Or buttons can emerge from the side that allow you to interact where you want them to be. Or you can play games and have actual buttons. And so we were able to do this by embedding 40 small, tiny linear actuators inside the device, and that allow you not only to touch them but also back-drive them as well. But we've also looked at other ways to create more complex shape change. So we've used pneumatic actuation to create a morphing device where you can go from something that looks a lot like a phone ... to a wristband on the go. And so together with Ken Nakagaki at the Media Lab, we created this new high-resolution version that uses an array of servomotors to change from interactive wristband to a touch-input device to a phone. (Laughter) And we're also interested in looking at ways that users can actually deform the interfaces to shape them into the devices that they want to use. So you can make something like a game controller, and then the system will understand what shape it's in and change to that mode. So, where does this point? How do we move forward from here? I think, really, where we are today is in this new age of the Internet of Things, where we have computers everywhere — they're in our pockets, they're in our walls, they're in almost every device that you'll buy in the next five years. But what if we stopped thinking about devices and think instead about environments? And so how can we have smart furniture or smart rooms or smart environments or cities that can adapt to us physically, and allow us to do new ways of collaborating with people and doing new types of tasks? So for the Milan Design Week, we created TRANSFORM, which is an interactive table-scale version of these shape displays, which can move physical objects on the surface; for example, reminding you to take your keys. But it can also transform to fit different ways of interacting. So if you want to work, then it can change to sort of set up your work system. And so as you bring a device over, it creates all the affordances you need and brings other objects to help you accomplish those goals. So, in conclusion, I really think that we need to think about a new, fundamentally different way of interacting with computers. We need computers that can physically adapt to us and adapt to the ways that we want to use them and really harness the rich dexterity that we have of our hands, and our ability to think spatially about information by making it physical. But looking forward, I think we need to go beyond this, beyond devices, to really think about new ways that we can bring people together, and bring our information into the world, and think about smart environments that can adapt to us physically. So with that, I will leave you. Thank you very much. (Applause)
How I'm discovering the secrets of ancient texts	{0: 'Gregory Heyworth uses spectral imaging technology to uncover lost classics that could rewrite history.'}	TEDxUM	On January 26, 2013, a band of al-Qaeda militants entered the ancient city of Timbuktu on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. There, they set fire to a medieval library of 30,000 manuscripts written in Arabic and several African languages and ranging in subject from astronomy to geography, history to medicine, including one book which records perhaps the first treatment for male erectile dysfunction. Unknown in the West, this was the collected wisdom of an entire continent, the voice of Africa at a time when Africa was thought not to have a voice at all. The mayor of Bamako, who witnessed the event, called the burning of the manuscripts "a crime against world cultural heritage." And he was right — or he would have been, if it weren't for the fact that he was also lying. In fact, just before, African scholars had collected a random assortment of old books and left them out for the terrorists to burn. Today, the collection lies hidden in Bamako, the capital of Mali, moldering in the high humidity. What was rescued by ruse is now once again in jeopardy, this time by climate. But Africa, and the far-flung corners of the world, are not the only places, or even the main places in which manuscripts that could change the history of world culture are in jeopardy. Several years ago, I conducted a survey of European research libraries and discovered that, at the barest minimum, there are 60,000 manuscripts pre-1500 that are illegible because of water damage, fading, mold and chemical reagents. The real number is likely double that, and that doesn't even count Renaissance manuscripts and modern manuscripts and cultural heritage objects such as maps. What if there were a technology that could recover these lost and unknown works? Imagine worldwide how a trove of hundreds of thousands of previously unknown texts could radically transform our knowledge of the past. Imagine what unknown classics we would discover which would rewrite the canons of literature, history, philosophy, music — or, more provocatively, that could rewrite our cultural identities, building new bridges between people and culture. These are the questions that transformed me from a medieval scholar, a reader of texts, into a textual scientist. What an unsatisfying word "reader" is. For me, it conjures up images of passivity, of someone sitting idly in an armchair waiting for knowledge to come to him in a neat little parcel. How much better to be a participant in the past, an adventurer in an undiscovered country, searching for the hidden text. As an academic, I was a mere reader. I read and taught the same classics that people had been reading and teaching for hundreds of years — Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, Petrarch — and with every scholarly article that I published I added to human knowledge in ever-diminishing slivers of insight. What I wanted to be was an archaeologist of the past, a discoverer of literature, an Indiana Jones without the whip — or, actually, with the whip. (Laughter) And I wanted it not just for myself but I wanted it for my students as well. And so six years ago, I changed the direction of my career. At the time, I was working on "The Chess of Love," the last important long poem of the European Middle Ages never to have been edited. And it wasn't edited because it existed in only one manuscript which was so badly damaged during the firebombing of Dresden in World War II that generations of scholars had pronounced it lost. For five years, I had been working with an ultraviolet lamp trying to recover traces of the writing and I'd gone about as far as technology at the time could actually take me. And so I did what many people do. I went online, and there I learned about how multispectral imaging had been used to recover two lost treatises of the famed Greek mathematician Archimedes from a 13th-century palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript which has been erased and overwritten. And so, out of the blue, I decided to write to the lead imaging scientist on the Archimedes palimpsest project, Professor Roger Easton, with a plan and a plea. And to my surprise, he actually wrote back. With his help, I was able to win a grant from the US government to build a transportable, multispectral imaging lab, And with this lab, I transformed what was a charred and faded mess into a new medieval classic. So how does multispectral imaging actually work? Well, the idea behind multispectral imaging is something that anyone who is familiar with infrared night vision goggles will immediately appreciate: that what we can see in the visible spectrum of light is only a tiny fraction of what's actually there. The same is true with invisible writing. Our system uses 12 wavelengths of light between the ultraviolet and the infrared, and these are shown down onto the manuscript from above from banks of LEDs, and another multispectral light source which comes up through the individual leaves of the manuscript. Up to 35 images per sequence per leaf are imaged this way using a high-powered digital camera equipped with a lens which is made out of quartz. There are about five of these in the world. And once we capture these images, we feed them through statistical algorithms to further enhance and clarify them, using software which was originally designed for satellite images and used by people like geospatial scientists and the CIA. The results can be spectacular. You may already have heard of what's been done for the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are slowly gelatinizing. Using infrared, we've been able to read even the darkest corners of the Dead Sea Scrolls. You may not be aware, however, of other Biblical texts that are in jeopardy. Here, for example, is a leaf from a manuscript that we imaged, which is perhaps the most valuable Christian Bible in the world. The Codex Vercellensis is the oldest translation of the Gospels into Latin, and it dates from the first half of the fourth century. This is the closest we can come to the Bible at the time of the foundation of Christendom under Emperor Constantine, and at the time also of the Council of Nicaea, when the basic creed of Christianity was being agreed upon. This manuscript, unfortunately, has been very badly damaged, and it's damaged because for centuries it had been used and handled in swearing in ceremonies in the church. In fact, that purple splotch that you see in the upper left hand corner is Aspergillus, which is a fungus which originates in the unwashed hands of a person with tuberculosis. Our imaging has enabled me to make the first transcription of this manuscript in 250 years. Having a lab that can travel to collections where it's needed, however, is only part of the solution. The technology is expensive and very rare, and the imaging and image processing skills are esoteric. That means that mounting recoveries is beyond the reach of most researchers and all but the wealthiest institutions. That's why I founded the Lazarus Project, a not-for-profit initiative to bring multispectral imaging to individual researchers and smaller institutions at little or no cost whatsoever. Over the past five years, our team of imaging scientists, scholars and students has travelled to seven different countries and have recovered some of the world's most valuable damaged manuscripts, included the Vercelli Book, which is the oldest book of English, the Black Book of Carmarthen, the oldest book of Welsh, and some of the most valuable earliest Gospels located in what is now the former Soviet Georgia. So, spectral imaging can recover lost texts. More subtly, though, it can recover a second story behind every object, the story of how, when and by whom a text was created, and, sometimes, what the author was thinking at the time he wrote. Take, for example, a draft of the Declaration of Independence written in Thomas Jefferson's own hand, which some colleagues of mine imaged a few years ago at the Library of Congress. Curators had noticed that one word throughout had been scratched out and overwritten. The word overwritten was "citizens." Perhaps you can guess what the word underneath was. "Subjects." There, ladies and gentlemen, is American democracy evolving under the hand of Thomas Jefferson. Or consider the 1491 Martellus Map, which we imaged at Yale's Beinecke Library. This was the map that Columbus likely consulted before he traveled to the New World and which gave him his idea of what Asia looked like and where Japan was located. The problem with this map is that its inks and pigments had so degraded over time that this large, nearly seven-foot map, made the world look like a giant desert. Until now, we had very little idea, detailed idea, that is, of what Columbus knew of the world and how world cultures were represented. The main legend of the map was entirely illegible under normal light. Ultraviolet did very little for it. Multispectral gave us everything. In Asia, we learned of monsters with ears so long that they could cover the creature's entire body. In Africa, about a snake who could cause the ground to smoke. Like starlight, which can convey images of the way the Universe looked in the distant past, so multispectral light can take us back to the first stuttering moments of an object's creation. Through this lens, we witness the mistakes, the changes of mind, the naïvetés, the uncensored thoughts, the imperfections of the human imagination that allow these hallowed objects and their authors to become more real, that make history closer to us. What about the future? There's so much of the past, and so few people with the skills to rescue it before these objects disappear forever. That's why I have begun to teach this new hybrid discipline that I call "textual science." Textual science is a marriage of the traditional skills of a literary scholar — the ability to read old languages and old handwriting, the knowledge of how texts are made in order to be able to place and date them — with new techniques like imaging science, the chemistry of inks and pigments, computer-aided optical character recognition. Last year, a student in my class, a freshman, with a background in Latin and Greek, was image-processing a palimpsest that we had photographed at a famous library in Rome. As he worked, tiny Greek writing began to appear from behind the text. Everyone gathered around, and he read a line from a lost work of the Greek comic dramatist Menander. This was the first time in well over a thousand years that those words had been pronounced aloud. In that moment, he became a scholar. Ladies and gentlemen, that is the future of the past. Thank you very much. (Applause)
The case for fish farming	{0: 'Mike Velings understands the potential for business to create durable solutions to complex world problems.'}	Mission Blue II	So I come from the tallest people on the planet — the Dutch. It hasn't always been this way. In fact, all across the globe, people have been gaining height. In the last 150 years, in developed countries, on average, we have gotten 10 centimeters taller. And scientists have a lot of theories about why this is, but almost all of them involve nutrition, namely the increase of dairy and meat. In the last 50 years, global meat consumption has more than quadrupled, from 71 million tons to 310 million tons. Something similar has been going on with milk and eggs. In every society where incomes have risen, so has protein consumption. And we know that globally, we are getting richer. And as the middle class is on the rise, so is our global population, from 7 billion of us today to 9.7 billion by 2050, which means that by 2050, we are going to need at least 70 percent more protein than what is available to humankind today. And the latest prediction of the UN puts that population number, by the end of this century, at 11 billion, which means that we are going to need a lot more protein. This challenge is staggering — so much so, that recently, a team at Anglia Ruskin Global Sustainability Institute suggested that if we don't change our global policies and food production systems, our societies might actually collapse in the next 30 years. Currently, our ocean serves as the main source of animal protein. Over 2.6 billion people depend on it every single day. At the same time, our global fisheries are two-and-a-half times larger than what our oceans can sustainably support, meaning that humans take far more fish from the ocean than the oceans can naturally replace. WWF recently published a report showing that just in the last 40 years, our global marine life has been slashed in half. And another recent report suggests that of our largest predatory species, such as swordfish and bluefin tuna, over 90 percent has disappeared since the 1950s. And there are a lot of great, sustainable fishing initiatives across the planet working towards better practices and better-managed fisheries. But ultimately, all of these initiatives are working towards keeping current catch constant. It's unlikely, even with the best-managed fisheries, that we are going to be able to take much more from the ocean than we do today. We have to stop plundering our oceans the way we have. We need to alleviate the pressure on it. And we are at a point where if we push much harder for more produce, we might face total collapse. Our current systems are not going to feed a growing global population. So how do we fix this? What's the world going to look like in just 35 short years when there's 2.7 billion more of us sharing the same resources? We could all become vegan. Sounds like a great idea, but it's not realistic and it's impossibly hard to mandate globally. People are eating animal protein whether we like it or not. And suppose we fail to change our ways and continue on the current path, failing to meet demands. The World Health Organization recently reported that 800 million people are suffering from malnutrition and food shortage, which is due to that same growing, global population and the declining access to resources like water, energy and land. It takes very little imagination to picture a world of global unrest, riots and further malnutrition. People are hungry, and we are running dangerously low on natural resources. For so, so many reasons, we need to change our global food production systems. We must do better and there is a solution. And that solution lies in aquaculture — the farming of fish, plants like seaweed, shellfish and crustaceans. As the great ocean hero Jacques Cousteau once said, "We must start using the ocean as farmers instead of hunters. That's what civilization is all about — farming instead of hunting." Fish is the last food that we hunt. And why is it that we keep hearing phrases like, "Life's too short for farmed fish," or, "Wild-caught, of course!" over fish that we know virtually nothing about? We don't know what it ate during its lifetime, and we don't know what pollution it encounters. And if it was a large predatory species, it might have gone through the coast of Fukushima yesterday. We don't know. Very few people realize the traceability in fisheries never goes beyond the hunter that caught the wild animal. But let's back up for a second and talk about why fish is the best food choice. It's healthy, it prevents heart disease, it provides key amino acids and key fatty acids like Omega-3s, which is very different from almost any other type of meat. And aside from being healthy, it's also a lot more exciting and diverse. Think about it — most animal farming is pretty monotonous. Cow is cow, sheep is sheep, pig's pig, and poultry — turkey, duck, chicken — pretty much sums it up. And then there's 500 species of fish being farmed currently. not that Western supermarkets reflect that on their shelves, but that's beside that point. And you can farm fish in a very healthy manner that's good for us, good for the planet and good for the fish. I know I sound fish-obsessed — (Laughter) Let me explain: My brilliant partner and wife, Amy Novograntz, and I got involved in aquaculture a couple of years ago. We were inspired by Sylvia Earle, who won the TED Prize in 2009. We actually met on Mission Blue I in the Galapagos. Amy was there as the TED Prize Director; me, an entrepreneur from the Netherlands and concerned citizen, love to dive, passion for the oceans. Mission Blue truly changed our lives. We fell in love, got married and we came away really inspired, thinking we really want to do something about ocean conservation — something that was meant to last, that could make a real difference and something that we could do together. Little did we expect that that would lead us to fish farming. But a few months after we got off the boat, we got to a meeting at Conservation International, where the Director General of WorldFish was talking about aquaculture, asking a room full of environmentalists to stop turning from it, realize what was going on and to really get involved because aquaculture has the potential to be just what our oceans and populations need. We were stunned when we heard the stats that we didn't know more about this industry already and excited about the chance to help get it right. And to talk about stats — right now, the amount of fish consumed globally, wild catch and farmed combined, is twice the tonnage of the total amount of beef produced on planet earth last year. Every single fishing vessel combined, small and large, across the globe, together produce about 65 million tons of wild-caught seafood for human consumption. Aquaculture this year, for the first time in history, actually produces more than what we catch from the wild. But now this: Demand is going to go up. In the next 35 years, we are going to need an additional 85 million tons to meet demand, which is one-and-a-half times as much, almost, as what we catch globally out of our oceans. An enormous number. It's safe to assume that that's not going to come from the ocean. It needs to come from farming. And talk about farming — for farming you need resources. As a human needs to eat to grow and stay alive, so does an animal. A cow needs to eat eight to nine pounds of feed and drink almost 8,000 liters of water to create just one pound of meat. Experts agree that it's impossible to farm cows for every inhabitant on this planet. We just don't have enough feed or water. And we can't keep cutting down rain forests for it. And fresh water — planet earth has a very limited supply. We need something more efficient to keep humankind alive on this planet. And now let's compare that with fish farming. You can farm one pound of fish with just one pound of feed, and depending on species, even less. And why is that? Well, that's because fish, first of all, float. They don't need to stand around all day resisting gravity like we do. And most fish are cold-blooded — they don't need to heat themselves. Fish chills. (Laughter) And it needs very little water, which is counterintuitive, but as we say, it swims in it but it hardly drinks it. Fish are the most resource-efficient animal protein available to humankind, aside from insects. How much we've learned since. For example, on top of that 65 million tons that's annually caught for human consumption, there's an additional 30 million tons caught for animal feed, mostly sardines and anchovies for the aquaculture industry that's turned into fish meal and fish oil. This is madness. Sixty-five percent of these fisheries, globally, are badly managed. Some of the worst issues of our time are connected to it. It's destroying our oceans. The worst slavery issues imaginable are connected to it. Recently, an article came out of Stanford saying that if 50 percent of the world's aquaculture industry would stop using fish meal, our oceans would be saved. Now think about that for a minute. Now, we know that the oceans have far more problems — they have pollution, there's acidification, coral reef destruction and so on. But it underlines the impact of our fisheries, and it underlines how interconnected everything is. Fisheries, aquaculture, deforestation, climate change, food security and so on. In the search for alternatives, the industry, on a massive scale, has reverted to plant-based alternatives like soy, industrial chicken waste, blood meal from slaughterhouses and so on. And we understand where these choices come from, but this is not the right approach. It's not sustainable, it's not healthy. Have you ever seen a chicken at the bottom of the ocean? Of course not. If you feed salmon soy with nothing else, it literally explodes. Salmon is a carnivore, it has no way to digest soy. Now, fish farming is by far the best animal farming available to humankind. But it's had a really bad reputation. There's been excessive use of chemicals, there's been virus and disease transfered to wild populations, ecosystem destruction and pollution, escaped fish breeding with wild populations, altering the overall genetic pool, and then of course, as just mentioned, the unsustainable feed ingredients. How blessed were the days when we could just enjoy food that was on our plate, whatever it was. Once you know, you know. You can't go back. It's not fun. We really need a transparent food system that we can trust, that produces healthy food. But the good news is that decades of development and research have led to a lot of new technologies and knowledge that allow us to do a lot better. We can now farm fish without any of these issues. I think of agriculture before the green revolution — we are at aquaculture and the blue revolution. New technologies means that we can now produce a feed that's perfectly natural, with a minimal footprint that consists of microbes, insects, seaweeds and micro-algae. Healthy for the people, healthy for the fish, healthy for the planet. Microbes, for example, can be a perfect alternative for high-grade fish meal — at scale. Insects are the — well, first of all, the perfect recycling because they're grown on food waste; but second, think of fly-fishing, and you know how logical it actually is to use it as fish feed. You don't need large tracts of land for it and you don't need to cut down rain forests for it. And microbes and insects are actually net water producers. This revolution is starting as we speak, it just needs scale. We can now farm far more species than ever before in controlled, natural conditions, creating happy fish. I imagine, for example, a closed system that's performing more efficiently than insect farming, where you can produce healthy, happy, delicious fish with little or no effluent, almost no energy and almost no water and a natural feed with a minimal footprint. Or a system where you grow up to 10 species next to each other — off of each other, mimicking nature. You need very little feed, very little footprint. I think of seaweed growing off the effluent of fish, for example. There's great technologies popping up all over the globe. From alternatives to battle disease so we don't need antibiotics and chemicals anymore, to automated feeders that feel when the fish are hungry, so we can save on feed and create less pollution. Software systems that gather data across farms, so we can improve farm practices. There's really cool stuff happening all over the globe. And make no mistake — all of these things are possible at a cost that's competitive to what a farmer spends today. Tomorrow, there will be no excuse for anyone to not do the right thing. So somebody needs to connect the dots and give these developments a big kick in the butt. And that's what we've been working on the last couple of years, and that's what we need to be working on together — rethinking everything from the ground up, with a holistic view across the value chain, connecting all these things across the globe, alongside great entrepreneurs that are willing to share a collective vision. Now is the time to create change in this industry and to push it into a sustainable direction. This industry is still young, much of its growth is still ahead. It's a big task, but not as far-fetched as you might think. It's possible. So we need to take pressure off the ocean. We want to eat good and healthy. And if we eat an animal, it needs to be one that had a happy and healthy life. We need to have a meal that we can trust, live long lives. And this is not just for people in San Francisco or Northern Europe — this is for all of us. Even in the poorest countries, it's not just about money. People prefer something fresh and healthy that they can trust over something that comes from far away that they know nothing about. We're all the same. The day will come where people will realize — no, demand — farmed fish on their plate that's farmed well and that's farmed healthy — and refuse anything less. You can help speed this up. Ask questions when you order seafood. Where does my fish come from? Who raised it, and what did it eat? Information about where your fish comes from and how it was produced needs to be much more readily available. And consumers need to put pressure on the aquaculture industry to do the right thing. So every time you order, ask for detail and show that you really care about what you eat and what's been given to you. And eventually, they will listen. And all of us will benefit. Thank you. (Applause)
The problem with race-based medicine	{0: 'Global scholar, University of Pennsylvania civil rights sociologist and law professor Dorothy Roberts exposes the myths of race-\xadbased medicine.'}	TEDMED 2015	15 years ago, I volunteered to participate in a research study that involved a genetic test. When I arrived at the clinic to be tested, I was handed a questionnaire. One of the very first questions asked me to check a box for my race: White, black, Asian, or Native American. I wasn't quite sure how to answer the question. Was it aimed at measuring the diversity of research participants' social backgrounds? In that case, I would answer with my social identity, and check the box for "black." But what if the researchers were interested in investigating some association between ancestry and the risk for certain genetic traits? In that case, wouldn't they want to know something about my ancestry, which is just as much European as African? And how could they make scientific findings about my genes if I put down my social identity as a black woman? After all, I consider myself a black woman with a white father rather than a white woman with a black mother entirely for social reasons. Which racial identity I check has nothing to do with my genes. Well, despite the obvious importance of this question to the study's scientific validity, I was told, "Don't worry about it, just put down however you identify yourself." So I check "black," but I had no confidence in the results of a study that treated a critical variable so unscientifically. That personal experience with the use of race in genetic testing got me thinking: Where else in medicine is race used to make false biological predictions? Well, I found out that race runs deeply throughout all of medical practice. It shapes physicians' diagnoses, measurements, treatments, prescriptions, even the very definition of diseases. And the more I found out, the more disturbed I became. Sociologists like me have long explained that race is a social construction. When we identify people as black, white, Asian, Native American, Latina, we're referring to social groupings with made up demarcations that have changed over time and vary around the world. As a legal scholar, I've also studied how lawmakers, not biologists, have invented the legal definitions of races. And it's not just the view of social scientists. You remember when the map of the human genome was unveiled at a White House ceremony in June 2000? President Bill Clinton famously declared, "I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same." And he might have added that that less than one percent of genetic difference doesn't fall into racial boxes. Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and now heads NIH, echoed President Clinton. "I am happy that today, the only race we're talking about is the human race." Doctors are supposed to practice evidence-based medicine, and they're increasingly called to join the genomic revolution. But their habit of treating patients by race lags far behind. Take the estimate of glomerular filtration rate, or GFR. Doctors routinely interpret GFR, this important indicator of kidney function, by race. As you can see in this lab test, the exact same creatinine level, the concentration in the blood of the patient, automatically produces a different GFR estimate depending on whether or not the patient is African-American. Why? I've been told it's based on an assumption that African-Americans have more muscle mass than people of other races. But what sense does it make for a doctor to automatically assume I have more muscle mass than that female bodybuilder? Wouldn't it be far more accurate and evidence-based to determine the muscle mass of individual patients just by looking at them? Well, doctors tell me they're using race as a shortcut. It's a crude but convenient proxy for more important factors, like muscle mass, enzyme level, genetic traits they just don't have time to look for. But race is a bad proxy. In many cases, race adds no relevant information at all. It's just a distraction. But race also tends to overwhelm the clinical measures. It blinds doctors to patients' symptoms, family illnesses, their history, their own illnesses they might have — all more evidence-based than the patient's race. Race can't substitute for these important clinical measures without sacrificing patient well-being. Doctors also tell me race is just one of many factors they take into account, but there are numerous medical tests, like the GFR, that use race categorically to treat black, white, Asian patients differently just because of their race. Race medicine also leaves patients of color especially vulnerable to harmful biases and stereotypes. Black and Latino patients are twice as likely to receive no pain medication as whites for the same painful long bone fractures because of stereotypes that black and brown people feel less pain, exaggerate their pain, and are predisposed to drug addiction. The Food and Drug Administration has even approved a race-specific medicine. It's a pill called BiDil to treat heart failure in self-identified African-American patients. A cardiologist developed this drug without regard to race or genetics, but it became convenient for commercial reasons to market the drug to black patients. The FDA then allowed the company, the drug company, to test the efficacy in a clinical trial that only included African-American subjects. It speculated that race stood in as a proxy for some unknown genetic factor that affects heart disease or response to drugs. But think about the dangerous message it sent, that black people's bodies are so substandard, a drug tested in them is not guaranteed to work in other patients. In the end, the drug company's marketing scheme failed. For one thing, black patients were understandably wary of using a drug just for black people. One elderly black woman stood up in a community meeting and shouted, "Give me what the white people are taking!" (Laughter) And if you find race-specific medicine surprising, wait until you learn that many doctors in the United States still use an updated version of a diagnostic tool that was developed by a physician during the slavery era, a diagnostic tool that is tightly linked to justifications for slavery. Dr. Samuel Cartwright graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He practiced in the Deep South before the Civil War, and he was a well-known expert on what was then called "Negro medicine." He promoted the racial concept of disease, that people of different races suffer from different diseases and experience common diseases differently. Cartwright argued in the 1850s that slavery was beneficial for black people for medical reasons. He claimed that because black people have lower lung capacity than whites, forced labor was good for them. He wrote in a medical journal, "It is the red vital blood sent to the brain that liberates their minds when under the white man's control, and it is the want of sufficiency of red vital blood that chains their minds to ignorance and barbarism when in freedom." To support this theory, Cartwright helped to perfect a medical device for measuring breathing called the spirometer to show the presumed deficiency in black people's lungs. Today, doctors still uphold Cartwright's claim the black people as a race have lower lung capacity than white people. Some even use a modern day spirometer that actually has a button labeled "race" so the machine adjusts the measurement for each patient according to his or her race. It's a well-known function called "correcting for race." The problem with race medicine extends far beyond misdiagnosing patients. Its focus on innate racial differences in disease diverts attention and resources from the social determinants that cause appalling racial gaps in health: lack of access to high-quality medical care; food deserts in poor neighborhoods; exposure to environmental toxins; high rates of incarceration; and experiencing the stress of racial discrimination. You see, race is not a biological category that naturally produces these health disparities because of genetic difference. Race is a social category that has staggering biological consequences, but because of the impact of social inequality on people's health. Yet race medicine pretends the answer to these gaps in health can be found in a race-specific pill. It's much easier and more lucrative to market a technological fix for these gaps in health than to deal with the structural inequities that produce them. The reason I'm so passionate about ending race medicine isn't just because it's bad medicine. I'm also on this mission because the way doctors practice medicine continues to promote a false and toxic view of humanity. Despite the many visionary breakthroughs in medicine we've been learning about, there's a failure of imagination when it comes to race. Would you imagine with me, just a moment: What would happen if doctors stopped treating patients by race? Suppose they rejected an 18th-century classification system and incorporated instead the most advanced knowledge of human genetic diversity and unity, that human beings cannot be categorized into biological races? What if, instead of using race as a crude proxy for some more important factor, doctors actually investigated and addressed that more important factor? What if doctors joined the forefront of a movement to end the structural inequities caused by racism, not by genetic difference? Race medicine is bad medicine, it's poor science and it's a false interpretation of humanity. It is more urgent than ever to finally abandon this backward legacy and to affirm our common humanity by ending the social inequalities that truly divide us. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.
The brain may be able to repair itself -- with help	{0: 'Jocelyne Bloch is helping to unlock potential self-healing capacities of the human brain.'}	TEDGlobal>Geneva	So I'm a neurosurgeon. And like most of my colleagues, I have to deal, every day, with human tragedies. I realize how your life can change from one second to the other after a major stroke or after a car accident. And what is very frustrating for us neurosurgeons is to realize that unlike other organs of the body, the brain has very little ability for self-repair. And after a major injury of your central nervous system, the patients often remain with a severe handicap. And that's probably the reason why I've chosen to be a functional neurosurgeon. What is a functional neurosurgeon? It's a doctor who is trying to improve a neurological function through different surgical strategies. You've certainly heard of one of the famous ones called deep brain stimulation, where you implant an electrode in the depths of the brain in order to modulate a circuit of neurons to improve a neurological function. It's really an amazing technology in that it has improved the destiny of patients with Parkinson's disease, with severe tremor, with severe pain. However, neuromodulation does not mean neuro-repair. And the dream of functional neurosurgeons is to repair the brain. I think that we are approaching this dream. And I would like to show you that we are very close to this. And that with a little bit of help, the brain is able to help itself. So the story started 15 years ago. At that time, I was a chief resident working days and nights in the emergency room. I often had to take care of patients with head trauma. You have to imagine that when a patient comes in with a severe head trauma, his brain is swelling and he's increasing his intracranial pressure. And in order to save his life, you have to decrease this intracranial pressure. And to do that, you sometimes have to remove a piece of swollen brain. So instead of throwing away these pieces of swollen brain, we decided with Jean-François Brunet, who is a colleague of mine, a biologist, to study them. What do I mean by that? We wanted to grow cells from these pieces of tissue. It's not an easy task. Growing cells from a piece of tissue is a bit the same as growing very small children out from their family. So you need to find the right nutrients, the warmth, the humidity and all the nice environments to make them thrive. So that's exactly what we had to do with these cells. And after many attempts, Jean-François did it. And that's what he saw under his microscope. And that was, for us, a major surprise. Why? Because this looks exactly the same as a stem cell culture, with large green cells surrounding small, immature cells. And you may remember from biology class that stem cells are immature cells, able to turn into any type of cell of the body. The adult brain has stem cells, but they're very rare and they're located in deep and small niches in the depths of the brain. So it was surprising to get this kind of stem cell culture from the superficial part of swollen brain we had in the operating theater. And there was another intriguing observation: Regular stem cells are very active cells — cells that divide, divide, divide very quickly. And they never die, they're immortal cells. But these cells behave differently. They divide slowly, and after a few weeks of culture, they even died. So we were in front of a strange new cell population that looked like stem cells but behaved differently. And it took us a long time to understand where they came from. They come from these cells. These blue and red cells are called doublecortin-positive cells. All of you have them in your brain. They represent four percent of your cortical brain cells. They have a very important role during the development stage. When you were fetuses, they helped your brain to fold itself. But why do they stay in your head? This, we don't know. We think that they may participate in brain repair because we find them in higher concentration close to brain lesions. But it's not so sure. But there is one clear thing — that from these cells, we got our stem cell culture. And we were in front of a potential new source of cells to repair the brain. And we had to prove this. So to prove it, we decided to design an experimental paradigm. The idea was to biopsy a piece of brain in a non-eloquent area of the brain, and then to culture the cells exactly the way Jean-François did it in his lab. And then label them, to put color in them in order to be able to track them in the brain. And the last step was to re-implant them in the same individual. We call these autologous grafts — autografts. So the first question we had, "What will happen if we re-implant these cells in a normal brain, and what will happen if we re-implant the same cells in a lesioned brain?" Thanks to the help of professor Eric Rouiller, we worked with monkeys. So in the first-case scenario, we re-implanted the cells in the normal brain and what we saw is that they completely disappeared after a few weeks, as if they were taken from the brain, they go back home, the space is already busy, they are not needed there, so they disappear. In the second-case scenario, we performed the lesion, we re-implanted exactly the same cells, and in this case, the cells remained — and they became mature neurons. And that's the image of what we could observe under the microscope. Those are the cells that were re-implanted. And the proof they carry, these little spots, those are the cells that we've labeled in vitro, when they were in culture. But we could not stop here, of course. Do these cells also help a monkey to recover after a lesion? So for that, we trained monkeys to perform a manual dexterity task. They had to retrieve food pellets from a tray. They were very good at it. And when they had reached a plateau of performance, we did a lesion in the motor cortex corresponding to the hand motion. So the monkeys were plegic, they could not move their hand anymore. And exactly the same as humans would do, they spontaneously recovered to a certain extent, exactly the same as after a stroke. Patients are completely plegic, and then they try to recover due to a brain plasticity mechanism, they recover to a certain extent, exactly the same for the monkey. So when we were sure that the monkey had reached his plateau of spontaneous recovery, we implanted his own cells. So on the left side, you see the monkey that has spontaneously recovered. He's at about 40 to 50 percent of his previous performance before the lesion. He's not so accurate, not so quick. And look now when we re-implant the cells: Two months after re-implantation, the same individual. (Applause) It was also very exciting results for us, I tell you. Since that time, we've understood much more about these cells. We know that we can cryopreserve them, we can use them later on. We know that we can apply them in other neuropathological models, like Parkinson's disease, for example. But our dream is still to implant them in humans. And I really hope that I'll be able to show you soon that the human brain is giving us the tools to repair itself. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Jocelyne, this is amazing, and I'm sure that right now, there are several dozen people in the audience, possibly even a majority, who are thinking, "I know somebody who can use this." I do, in any case. And of course the question is, what are the biggest obstacles before you can go into human clinical trials? Jocelyne Bloch: The biggest obstacles are regulations. (Laughs) So, from these exciting results, you need to fill out about two kilograms of papers and forms to be able to go through these kind of trials. BG: Which is understandable, the brain is delicate, etc. JB: Yes, it is, but it takes a long time and a lot of patience and almost a professional team to do it, you know? BG: If you project yourself — having done the research and having tried to get permission to start the trials, if you project yourself out in time, how many years before somebody gets into a hospital and this therapy is available? JB: So, it's very difficult to say. It depends, first, on the approval of the trial. Will the regulation allow us to do it soon? And then, you have to perform this kind of study in a small group of patients. So it takes, already, a long time to select the patients, do the treatment and evaluate if it's useful to do this kind of treatment. And then you have to deploy this to a multicentric trial. You have to really prove first that it's useful before offering this treatment up for everybody. BG: And safe, of course. JB: Of course. BG: Jocelyne, thank you for coming to TED and sharing this. BG: Thank you. (Applause)
10 ways to have a better conversation	{0: "Celeste Headlee's years of interview experience give her a unique perspective on what makes for a good conversation."}	TEDxCreativeCoast	All right, I want to see a show of hands: how many of you have unfriended someone on Facebook because they said something offensive about politics or religion, childcare, food? (Laughter) And how many of you know at least one person that you avoid because you just don't want to talk to them? (Laughter) You know, it used to be that in order to have a polite conversation, we just had to follow the advice of Henry Higgins in "My Fair Lady": Stick to the weather and your health. But these days, with climate change and anti-vaxxing, those subjects — (Laughter) are not safe either. So this world that we live in, this world in which every conversation has the potential to devolve into an argument, where our politicians can't speak to one another and where even the most trivial of issues have someone fighting both passionately for it and against it, it's not normal. Pew Research did a study of 10,000 American adults, and they found that at this moment, we are more polarized, we are more divided, than we ever have been in history. We're less likely to compromise, which means we're not listening to each other. And we make decisions about where to live, who to marry and even who our friends are going to be, based on what we already believe. Again, that means we're not listening to each other. A conversation requires a balance between talking and listening, and somewhere along the way, we lost that balance. Now, part of that is due to technology. The smartphones that you all either have in your hands or close enough that you could grab them really quickly. According to Pew Research, about a third of American teenagers send more than a hundred texts a day. And many of them, almost most of them, are more likely to text their friends than they are to talk to them face to face. There's this great piece in The Atlantic. It was written by a high school teacher named Paul Barnwell. And he gave his kids a communication project. He wanted to teach them how to speak on a specific subject without using notes. And he said this: "I came to realize..." (Laughter) "I came to realize that conversational competence might be the single most overlooked skill we fail to teach. Kids spend hours each day engaging with ideas and each other through screens, but rarely do they have an opportunity to hone their interpersonal communications skills. It might sound like a funny question, but we have to ask ourselves: Is there any 21st-century skill more important than being able to sustain coherent, confident conversation?" Now, I make my living talking to people: Nobel Prize winners, truck drivers, billionaires, kindergarten teachers, heads of state, plumbers. I talk to people that I like. I talk to people that I don't like. I talk to some people that I disagree with deeply on a personal level. But I still have a great conversation with them. So I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes or so teaching you how to talk and how to listen. Many of you have already heard a lot of advice on this, things like look the person in the eye, think of interesting topics to discuss in advance, look, nod and smile to show that you're paying attention, repeat back what you just heard or summarize it. So I want you to forget all of that. It is crap. (Laughter) There is no reason to learn how to show you're paying attention if you are in fact paying attention. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, I actually use the exact same skills as a professional interviewer that I do in regular life. So, I'm going to teach you how to interview people, and that's actually going to help you learn how to be better conversationalists. Learn to have a conversation without wasting your time, without getting bored, and, please God, without offending anybody. We've all had really great conversations. We've had them before. We know what it's like. The kind of conversation where you walk away feeling engaged and inspired, or where you feel like you've made a real connection or you've been perfectly understood. There is no reason why most of your interactions can't be like that. So I have 10 basic rules. I'm going to walk you through all of them, but honestly, if you just choose one of them and master it, you'll already enjoy better conversations. Number one: Don't multitask. And I don't mean just set down your cell phone or your tablet or your car keys or whatever is in your hand. I mean, be present. Be in that moment. Don't think about your argument you had with your boss. Don't think about what you're going to have for dinner. If you want to get out of the conversation, get out of the conversation, but don't be half in it and half out of it. Number two: Don't pontificate. If you want to state your opinion without any opportunity for response or argument or pushback or growth, write a blog. (Laughter) Now, there's a really good reason why I don't allow pundits on my show: Because they're really boring. If they're conservative, they're going to hate Obama and food stamps and abortion. If they're liberal, they're going to hate big banks and oil corporations and Dick Cheney. Totally predictable. And you don't want to be like that. You need to enter every conversation assuming that you have something to learn. The famed therapist M. Scott Peck said that true listening requires a setting aside of oneself. And sometimes that means setting aside your personal opinion. He said that sensing this acceptance, the speaker will become less and less vulnerable and more and more likely to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. Again, assume that you have something to learn. Bill Nye: "Everyone you will ever meet knows something that you don't." I put it this way: Everybody is an expert in something. Number three: Use open-ended questions. In this case, take a cue from journalists. Start your questions with who, what, when, where, why or how. If you put in a complicated question, you're going to get a simple answer out. If I ask you, "Were you terrified?" you're going to respond to the most powerful word in that sentence, which is "terrified," and the answer is "Yes, I was" or "No, I wasn't." "Were you angry?" "Yes, I was very angry." Let them describe it. They're the ones that know. Try asking them things like, "What was that like?" "How did that feel?" Because then they might have to stop for a moment and think about it, and you're going to get a much more interesting response. Number four: Go with the flow. That means thoughts will come into your mind and you need to let them go out of your mind. We've heard interviews often in which a guest is talking for several minutes and then the host comes back in and asks a question which seems like it comes out of nowhere, or it's already been answered. That means the host probably stopped listening two minutes ago because he thought of this really clever question, and he was just bound and determined to say that. And we do the exact same thing. We're sitting there having a conversation with someone, and then we remember that time that we met Hugh Jackman in a coffee shop. (Laughter) And we stop listening. Stories and ideas are going to come to you. You need to let them come and let them go. Number five: If you don't know, say that you don't know. Now, people on the radio, especially on NPR, are much more aware that they're going on the record, and so they're more careful about what they claim to be an expert in and what they claim to know for sure. Do that. Err on the side of caution. Talk should not be cheap. Number six: Don't equate your experience with theirs. If they're talking about having lost a family member, don't start talking about the time you lost a family member. If they're talking about the trouble they're having at work, don't tell them about how much you hate your job. It's not the same. It is never the same. All experiences are individual. And, more importantly, it is not about you. You don't need to take that moment to prove how amazing you are or how much you've suffered. Somebody asked Stephen Hawking once what his IQ was, and he said, "I have no idea. People who brag about their IQs are losers." (Laughter) Conversations are not a promotional opportunity. Number seven: Try not to repeat yourself. It's condescending, and it's really boring, and we tend to do it a lot. Especially in work conversations or in conversations with our kids, we have a point to make, so we just keep rephrasing it over and over. Don't do that. Number eight: Stay out of the weeds. Frankly, people don't care about the years, the names, the dates, all those details that you're struggling to come up with in your mind. They don't care. What they care about is you. They care about what you're like, what you have in common. So forget the details. Leave them out. Number nine: This is not the last one, but it is the most important one. Listen. I cannot tell you how many really important people have said that listening is perhaps the most, the number one most important skill that you could develop. Buddha said, and I'm paraphrasing, "If your mouth is open, you're not learning." And Calvin Coolidge said, "No man ever listened his way out of a job." (Laughter) Why do we not listen to each other? Number one, we'd rather talk. When I'm talking, I'm in control. I don't have to hear anything I'm not interested in. I'm the center of attention. I can bolster my own identity. But there's another reason: We get distracted. The average person talks at about 225 word per minute, but we can listen at up to 500 words per minute. So our minds are filling in those other 275 words. And look, I know, it takes effort and energy to actually pay attention to someone, but if you can't do that, you're not in a conversation. You're just two people shouting out barely related sentences in the same place. (Laughter) You have to listen to one another. Stephen Covey said it very beautifully. He said, "Most of us don't listen with the intent to understand. We listen with the intent to reply." One more rule, number 10, and it's this one: Be brief. [A good conversation is like a miniskirt; short enough to retain interest, but long enough to cover the subject. — My Sister] (Laughter) (Applause) All of this boils down to the same basic concept, and it is this one: Be interested in other people. You know, I grew up with a very famous grandfather, and there was kind of a ritual in my home. People would come over to talk to my grandparents, and after they would leave, my mother would come over to us, and she'd say, "Do you know who that was? She was the runner-up to Miss America. He was the mayor of Sacramento. She won a Pulitzer Prize. He's a Russian ballet dancer." And I kind of grew up assuming everyone has some hidden, amazing thing about them. And honestly, I think it's what makes me a better host. I keep my mouth shut as often as I possibly can, I keep my mind open, and I'm always prepared to be amazed, and I'm never disappointed. You do the same thing. Go out, talk to people, listen to people, and, most importantly, be prepared to be amazed. Thanks. (Applause)
My year of saying yes to everything	{0: 'With the runaway success of shows like Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy, Shonda Rhimes has become one of Hollywood’s most powerful icons.'}	TED2016	So a while ago, I tried an experiment. For one year, I would say yes to all the things that scared me. Anything that made me nervous, took me out of my comfort zone, I forced myself to say yes to. Did I want to speak in public? No, but yes. Did I want to be on live TV? No, but yes. Did I want to try acting? No, no, no, but yes, yes, yes. And a crazy thing happened: the very act of doing the thing that scared me undid the fear, made it not scary. My fear of public speaking, my social anxiety, poof, gone. It's amazing, the power of one word. "Yes" changed my life. "Yes" changed me. But there was one particular yes that affected my life in the most profound way, in a way I never imagined, and it started with a question from my toddler. I have these three amazing daughters, Harper, Beckett and Emerson, and Emerson is a toddler who inexplicably refers to everyone as "honey." as though she's a Southern waitress. (Laughter) "Honey, I'm gonna need some milk for my sippy cup." (Laughter) The Southern waitress asked me to play with her one evening when I was on my way somewhere, and I said, "Yes." And that yes was the beginning of a new way of life for my family. I made a vow that from now on, every time one of my children asks me to play, no matter what I'm doing or where I'm going, I say yes, every single time. Almost. I'm not perfect at it, but I try hard to practice it. And it's had a magical effect on me, on my children, on our family. But it's also had a stunning side effect, and it wasn't until recently that I fully understood it, that I understood that saying yes to playing with my children likely saved my career. See, I have what most people would call a dream job. I'm a writer. I imagine. I make stuff up for a living. Dream job. No. I'm a titan. Dream job. I create television. I executive produce television. I make television, a great deal of television. In one way or another, this TV season, I'm responsible for bringing about 70 hours of programming to the world. Four television programs, 70 hours of TV — (Applause) Three shows in production at a time, sometimes four. Each show creates hundreds of jobs that didn't exist before. The budget for one episode of network television can be anywhere from three to six million dollars. Let's just say five. A new episode made every nine days times four shows, so every nine days that's 20 million dollars worth of television, four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time, sometimes four, 16 episodes going on at all times: 24 episodes of "Grey's," 21 episodes of "Scandal," 15 episodes of "How To Get Away With Murder," 10 episodes of "The Catch," that's 70 hours of TV, that's 350 million dollars for a season. In America, my television shows are back to back to back on Thursday night. Around the world, my shows air in 256 territories in 67 languages for an audience of 30 million people. My brain is global, and 45 hours of that 70 hours of TV are shows I personally created and not just produced, so on top of everything else, I need to find time, real quiet, creative time, to gather my fans around the campfire and tell my stories. Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time, sometimes four, 350 million dollars, campfires burning all over the world. You know who else is doing that? Nobody, so like I said, I'm a titan. Dream job. (Applause) Now, I don't tell you this to impress you. I tell you this because I know what you think of when you hear the word "writer." I tell you this so that all of you out there who work so hard, whether you run a company or a country or a classroom or a store or a home, take me seriously when I talk about working, so you'll get that I don't peck at a computer and imagine all day, so you'll hear me when I say that I understand that a dream job is not about dreaming. It's all job, all work, all reality, all blood, all sweat, no tears. I work a lot, very hard, and I love it. When I'm hard at work, when I'm deep in it, there is no other feeling. For me, my work is at all times building a nation out of thin air. It is manning the troops. It is painting a canvas. It is hitting every high note. It is running a marathon. It is being Beyoncé. And it is all of those things at the same time. I love working. It is creative and mechanical and exhausting and exhilarating and hilarious and disturbing and clinical and maternal and cruel and judicious, and what makes it all so good is the hum. There is some kind of shift inside me when the work gets good. A hum begins in my brain, and it grows and it grows and that hum sounds like the open road, and I could drive it forever. And a lot of people, when I try to explain the hum, they assume that I'm talking about the writing, that my writing brings me joy. And don't get me wrong, it does. But the hum — it wasn't until I started making television that I started working, working and making and building and creating and collaborating, that I discovered this thing, this buzz, this rush, this hum. The hum is more than writing. The hum is action and activity. The hum is a drug. The hum is music. The hum is light and air. The hum is God's whisper right in my ear. And when you have a hum like that, you can't help but strive for greatness. That feeling, you can't help but strive for greatness at any cost. That's called the hum. Or, maybe it's called being a workaholic. (Laughter) Maybe it's called genius. Maybe it's called ego. Maybe it's just fear of failure. I don't know. I just know that I'm not built for failure, and I just know that I love the hum. I just know that I want to tell you I'm a titan, and I know that I don't want to question it. But here's the thing: the more successful I become, the more shows, the more episodes, the more barriers broken, the more work there is to do, the more balls in the air, the more eyes on me, the more history stares, the more expectations there are. The more I work to be successful, the more I need to work. And what did I say about work? I love working, right? The nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running, the troops, the canvas, the high note, the hum, the hum, the hum. I like that hum. I love that hum. I need that hum. I am that hum. Am I nothing but that hum? And then the hum stopped. Overworked, overused, overdone, burned out. The hum stopped. Now, my three daughters are used to the truth that their mother is a single working titan. Harper tells people, "My mom won't be there, but you can text my nanny." And Emerson says, "Honey, I'm wanting to go to ShondaLand." They're children of a titan. They're baby titans. They were 12, 3, and 1 when the hum stopped. The hum of the engine died. I stopped loving work. I couldn't restart the engine. The hum would not come back. My hum was broken. I was doing the same things I always did, all the same titan work, 15-hour days, working straight through the weekends, no regrets, never surrender, a titan never sleeps, a titan never quits, full hearts, clear eyes, yada, whatever. But there was no hum. Inside me was silence. Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time, sometimes four. Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time ... I was the perfect titan. I was a titan you could take home to your mother. All the colors were the same, and I was no longer having any fun. And it was my life. It was all I did. I was the hum, and the hum was me. So what do you do when the thing you do, the work you love, starts to taste like dust? Now, I know somebody's out there thinking, "Cry me a river, stupid writer titan lady." (Laughter) But you know, you do, if you make, if you work, if you love what you do, being a teacher, being a banker, being a mother, being a painter, being Bill Gates, if you simply love another person and that gives you the hum, if you know the hum, if you know what the hum feels like, if you have been to the hum, when the hum stops, who are you? What are you? What am I? Am I still a titan? If the song of my heart ceases to play, can I survive in the silence? And then my Southern waitress toddler asks me a question. I'm on my way out the door, I'm late, and she says, "Momma, wanna play?" And I'm just about to say no, when I realize two things. One, I'm supposed to say yes to everything, and two, my Southern waitress didn't call me "honey." She's not calling everyone "honey" anymore. When did that happen? I'm missing it, being a titan and mourning my hum, and here she is changing right before my eyes. And so she says, "Momma, wanna play?" And I say, "Yes." There's nothing special about it. We play, and we're joined by her sisters, and there's a lot of laughing, and I give a dramatic reading from the book Everybody Poops. Nothing out of the ordinary. (Laughter) And yet, it is extraordinary, because in my pain and my panic, in the homelessness of my humlessness, I have nothing to do but pay attention. I focus. I am still. The nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running, the troops, the canvas, the high note does not exist. All that exists are sticky fingers and gooey kisses and tiny voices and crayons and that song about letting go of whatever it is that Frozen girl needs to let go of. (Laughter) It's all peace and simplicity. The air is so rare in this place for me that I can barely breathe. I can barely believe I'm breathing. Play is the opposite of work. And I am happy. Something in me loosens. A door in my brain swings open, and a rush of energy comes. And it's not instantaneous, but it happens, it does happen. I feel it. A hum creeps back. Not at full volume, barely there, it's quiet, and I have to stay very still to hear it, but it is there. Not the hum, but a hum. And now I feel like I know a very magical secret. Well, let's not get carried away. It's just love. That's all it is. No magic. No secret. It's just love. It's just something we forgot. The hum, the work hum, the hum of the titan, that's just a replacement. If I have to ask you who I am, if I have to tell you who I am, if I describe myself in terms of shows and hours of television and how globally badass my brain is, I have forgotten what the real hum is. The hum is not power and the hum is not work-specific. The hum is joy-specific. The real hum is love-specific. The hum is the electricity that comes from being excited by life. The real hum is confidence and peace. The real hum ignores the stare of history, and the balls in the air, and the expectation, and the pressure. The real hum is singular and original. The real hum is God's whisper in my ear, but maybe God was whispering the wrong words, because which one of the gods was telling me I was the titan? It's just love. We could all use a little more love, a lot more love. Any time my child asks me to play, I will say yes. I make it a firm rule for one reason, to give myself permission, to free me from all of my workaholic guilt. It's a law, so I don't have a choice, and I don't have a choice, not if I want to feel the hum. I wish it were that easy, but I'm not good at playing. I don't like it. I'm not interested in doing it the way I'm interested in doing work. The truth is incredibly humbling and humiliating to face. I don't like playing. I work all the time because I like working. I like working more than I like being at home. Facing that fact is incredibly difficult to handle, because what kind of person likes working more than being at home? Well, me. I mean, let's be honest, I call myself a titan. I've got issues. (Laughter) And one of those issues isn't that I am too relaxed. (Laughter) We run around the yard, up and back and up and back. We have 30-second dance parties. We sing show tunes. We play with balls. I blow bubbles and they pop them. And I feel stiff and delirious and confused most of the time. I itch for my cell phone always. But it is OK. My tiny humans show me how to live and the hum of the universe fills me up. I play and I play until I begin to wonder why we ever stop playing in the first place. You can do it too, say yes every time your child asks you to play. Are you thinking that maybe I'm an idiot in diamond shoes? You're right, but you can still do this. You have time. You know why? Because you're not Rihanna and you're not a Muppet. Your child does not think you're that interesting. (Laughter) You only need 15 minutes. My two- and four-year-old only ever want to play with me for about 15 minutes or so before they think to themselves they want to do something else. It's an amazing 15 minutes, but it's 15 minutes. If I'm not a ladybug or a piece of candy, I'm invisible after 15 minutes. (Laughter) And my 13-year-old, if I can get a 13-year-old to talk to me for 15 minutes I'm Parent of the Year. (Laughter) 15 minutes is all you need. I can totally pull off 15 minutes of uninterrupted time on my worst day. Uninterrupted is the key. No cell phone, no laundry, no anything. You have a busy life. You have to get dinner on the table. You have to force them to bathe. But you can do 15 minutes. My kids are my happy place, they're my world, but it doesn't have to be your kids, the fuel that feeds your hum, the place where life feels more good than not good. It's not about playing with your kids, it's about joy. It's about playing in general. Give yourself the 15 minutes. Find what makes you feel good. Just figure it out and play in that arena. I'm not perfect at it. In fact, I fail as often as I succeed, seeing friends, reading books, staring into space. "Wanna play?" starts to become shorthand for indulging myself in ways I'd given up on right around the time I got my first TV show, right around the time I became a titan-in-training, right around the time I started competing with myself for ways unknown. 15 minutes? What could be wrong with giving myself my full attention for 15 minutes? Turns out, nothing. The very act of not working has made it possible for the hum to return, as if the hum's engine could only refuel while I was away. Work doesn't work without play. It takes a little time, but after a few months, one day the floodgates open and there's a rush, and I find myself standing in my office filled with an unfamiliar melody, full on groove inside me, and around me, and it sends me spinning with ideas, and the humming road is open, and I can drive it and drive it, and I love working again. But now, I like that hum, but I don't love that hum. I don't need that hum. I am not that hum. That hum is not me, not anymore. I am bubbles and sticky fingers and dinners with friends. I am that hum. Life's hum. Love's hum. Work's hum is still a piece of me, it is just no longer all of me, and I am so grateful. And I don't give a crap about being a titan, because I have never once seen a titan play Red Rover, Red Rover. I said yes to less work and more play, and somehow I still run my world. My brain is still global. My campfires still burn. The more I play, the happier I am, and the happier my kids are. The more I play, the more I feel like a good mother. The more I play, the freer my mind becomes. The more I play, the better I work. The more I play, the more I feel the hum, the nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running, the troops, the canvas, the high note, the hum, the hum, the other hum, the real hum, life's hum. The more I feel that hum, the more this strange, quivering, uncocooned, awkward, brand new, alive non-titan feels like me. The more I feel that hum, the more I know who I am. I'm a writer, I make stuff up, I imagine. That part of the job, that's living the dream. That's the dream of the job. Because a dream job should be a little bit dreamy. I said yes to less work and more play. Titans need not apply. Wanna play? Thank you. (Applause)
What the discovery of gravitational waves means	{0: 'Allan Adams is a theoretical physicist working at the intersection of fluid dynamics, quantum field theory and string theory. '}	TED2016	1.3 billion years ago, in a distant, distant galaxy, two black holes locked into a spiral, falling inexorably towards each other and collided, converting three Suns' worth of stuff into pure energy in a tenth of a second. For that brief moment in time, the glow was brighter than all the stars in all the galaxies in all of the known Universe. It was a very big bang. But they didn't release their energy in light. I mean, you know, they're black holes. All that energy was pumped into the fabric of space and time itself, making the Universe explode in gravitational waves. Let me give you a sense of the timescale at work here. 1.3 billion years ago, Earth had just managed to evolve multicellular life. Since then, Earth has made and evolved corals, fish, plants, dinosaurs, people and even — God save us — the Internet. And about 25 years ago, a particularly audacious set of people — Rai Weiss at MIT, Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever at Caltech — decided that it would be really neat to build a giant laser detector with which to search for the gravitational waves from things like colliding black holes. Now, most people thought they were nuts. But enough people realized that they were brilliant nuts that the US National Science Foundation decided to fund their crazy idea. So after decades of development, construction and imagination and a breathtaking amount of hard work, they built their detector, called LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. For the last several years, LIGO's been undergoing a huge expansion in its accuracy, a tremendous improvement in its detection ability. It's now called Advanced LIGO as a result. In early September of 2015, LIGO turned on for a final test run while they sorted out a few lingering details. And on September 14 of 2015, just days after the detector had gone live, the gravitational waves from those colliding black holes passed through the Earth. And they passed through you and me. And they passed through the detector. (Audio) Scott Hughes: There's two moments in my life more emotionally intense than that. One is the birth of my daughter. The other is when I had to say goodbye to my father when he was terminally ill. You know, it was the payoff of my career, basically. Everything I'd been working on — it's no longer science fiction! (Laughs) Allan Adams: So that's my very good friend and collaborator, Scott Hughes, a theoretical physicist at MIT, who has been studying gravitational waves from black holes and the signals that they could impart on observatories like LIGO, for the past 23 years. So let me take a moment to tell you what I mean by a gravitational wave. A gravitational wave is a ripple in the shape of space and time. As the wave passes by, it stretches space and everything in it in one direction, and compresses it in the other. This has led to countless instructors of general relativity doing a really silly dance to demonstrate in their classes on general relativity. "It stretches and expands, it stretches and expands." So the trouble with gravitational waves is that they're very weak; they're preposterously weak. For example, the waves that hit us on September 14 — and yes, every single one of you stretched and compressed under the action of that wave — when the waves hit, they stretched the average person by one part in 10 to the 21. That's a decimal place, 20 zeroes, and a one. That's why everyone thought the LIGO people were nuts. Even with a laser detector five kilometers long — and that's already crazy — they would have to measure the length of those detectors to less than one thousandth of the radius of the nucleus of an atom. And that's preposterous. So towards the end of his classic text on gravity, LIGO co-founder Kip Thorne described the hunt for gravitational waves as follows: He said, "The technical difficulties to be surmounted in constructing such detectors are enormous. But physicists are ingenious, and with the support of a broad lay public, all obstacles will surely be overcome." Thorne published that in 1973, 42 years before he succeeded. Now, coming back to LIGO, Scott likes to say that LIGO acts like an ear more than it does like an eye. I want to explain what that means. Visible light has a wavelength, a size, that's much smaller than the things around you, the features on people's faces, the size of your cell phone. And that's really useful, because it lets you make an image or a map of the things around you, by looking at the light coming from different spots in the scene about you. Sound is different. Audible sound has a wavelength that can be up to 50 feet long. And that makes it really difficult — in fact, in practical purposes, impossible — to make an image of something you really care about. Your child's face. Instead, we use sound to listen for features like pitch and tone and rhythm and volume to infer a story behind the sounds. That's Alice talking. That's Bob interrupting. Silly Bob. So, the same is true of gravitational waves. We can't use them to make simple images of things out in the Universe. But by listening to changes in the amplitude and frequency of those waves, we can hear the story that those waves are telling. And at least for LIGO, the frequencies that it can hear are in the audio band. So if we convert the wave patterns into pressure waves and air, into sound, we can literally hear the Universe speaking to us. For example, listening to gravity, just in this way, can tell us a lot about the collision of two black holes, something my colleague Scott has spent an awful lot of time thinking about. (Audio) SH: If the two black holes are non-spinning, you get a very simple chirp: whoop! If the two bodies are spinning very rapidly, I have that same chirp, but with a modulation on top of it, so it kind of goes: whir, whir, whir! It's sort of the vocabulary of spin imprinted on this waveform. AA: So on September 14, 2015, a date that's definitely going to live in my memory, LIGO heard this: [Whirring sound] So if you know how to listen, that is the sound of — (Audio) SH: ... two black holes, each of about 30 solar masses, that were whirling around at a rate comparable to what goes on in your blender. AA: It's worth pausing here to think about what that means. Two black holes, the densest thing in the Universe, one with a mass of 29 Suns and one with a mass of 36 Suns, whirling around each other 100 times per second before they collide. Just imagine the power of that. It's fantastic. And we know it because we heard it. That's the lasting importance of LIGO. It's an entirely new way to observe the Universe that we've never had before. It's a way that lets us hear the Universe and hear the invisible. And there's a lot out there that we can't see — in practice or even in principle. So supernova, for example: I would love to know why very massive stars explode in supernovae. They're very useful; we've learned a lot about the Universe from them. The problem is, all the interesting physics happens in the core, and the core is hidden behind thousands of kilometers of iron and carbon and silicon. We'll never see through it, it's opaque to light. Gravitational waves go through iron as if it were glass — totally transparent. The Big Bang: I would love to be able to explore the first few moments of the Universe, but we'll never see them, because the Big Bang itself is obscured by its own afterglow. With gravitational waves, we should be able to see all the way back to the beginning. Perhaps most importantly, I'm positive that there are things out there that we've never seen that we may never be able to see and that we haven't even imagined — things that we'll only discover by listening. And in fact, even in that very first event, LIGO found things that we didn't expect. Here's my colleague and one of the key members of the LIGO collaboration, Matt Evans, my colleague at MIT, addressing exactly that: (Audio) Matt Evans: The kinds of stars which produce the black holes that we observed here are the dinosaurs of the Universe. They're these massive things that are old, from prehistoric times, and the black holes are kind of like the dinosaur bones with which we do this archeology. So it lets us really get a whole nother angle on what's out there in the Universe and how the stars came to be, and in the end, of course, how we came to be out of this whole mess. AA: Our challenge now is to be as audacious as possible. Thanks to LIGO, we know how to build exquisite detectors that can listen to the Universe, to the rustle and the chirp of the cosmos. Our job is to dream up and build new observatories — a whole new generation of observatories — on the ground, in space. I mean, what could be more glorious than listening to the Big Bang itself? Our job now is to dream big. Dream with us. Thank you. (Applause)
Meet the dazzling flying machines of the future	{0: "Raffaello D'Andrea explores the possibilities of autonomous technology by collaborating with artists, engineers and entrepreneurs."}	TED2016	What started as a platform for hobbyists is poised to become a multibillion-dollar industry. Inspection, environmental monitoring, photography and film and journalism: these are some of the potential applications for commercial drones, and their enablers are the capabilities being developed at research facilities around the world. For example, before aerial package delivery entered our social consciousness, an autonomous fleet of flying machines built a six-meter-tall tower composed of 1,500 bricks in front of a live audience at the FRAC Centre in France, and several years ago, they started to fly with ropes. By tethering flying machines, they can achieve high speeds and accelerations in very tight spaces. They can also autonomously build tensile structures. Skills learned include how to carry loads, how to cope with disturbances, and in general, how to interact with the physical world. Today we want to show you some new projects that we've been working on. Their aim is to push the boundary of what can be achieved with autonomous flight. Now, for a system to function autonomously, it must collectively know the location of its mobile objects in space. Back at our lab at ETH Zurich, we often use external cameras to locate objects, which then allows us to focus our efforts on the rapid development of highly dynamic tasks. For the demos you will see today, however, we will use new localization technology developed by Verity Studios, a spin-off from our lab. There are no external cameras. Each flying machine uses onboard sensors to determine its location in space and onboard computation to determine what its actions should be. The only external commands are high-level ones such as "take off" and "land." This is a so-called tail-sitter. It's an aircraft that tries to have its cake and eat it. Like other fixed-wing aircraft, it is efficient in forward flight, much more so than helicopters and variations thereof. Unlike most other fixed-wing aircraft, however, it is capable of hovering, which has huge advantages for takeoff, landing and general versatility. There is no free lunch, unfortunately. One of the limitations with tail-sitters is that they're susceptible to disturbances such as wind gusts. We're developing new control architectures and algorithms that address this limitation. The idea is for the aircraft to recover no matter what state it finds itself in, and through practice, improve its performance over time. (Applause) OK. When doing research, we often ask ourselves fundamental abstract questions that try to get at the heart of a matter. For example, one such question would be, what is the minimum number of moving parts needed for controlled flight? Now, there are practical reasons why you may want to know the answer to such a question. Helicopters, for example, are affectionately known as machines with a thousand moving parts all conspiring to do you bodily harm. It turns out that decades ago, skilled pilots were able to fly remote-controlled aircraft that had only two moving parts: a propeller and a tail rudder. We recently discovered that it could be done with just one. This is the monospinner, the world's mechanically simplest controllable flying machine, invented just a few months ago. It has only one moving part, a propeller. It has no flaps, no hinges, no ailerons, no other actuators, no other control surfaces, just a simple propeller. Even though it's mechanically simple, there's a lot going on in its little electronic brain to allow it to fly in a stable fashion and to move anywhere it wants in space. Even so, it doesn't yet have the sophisticated algorithms of the tail-sitter, which means that in order to get it to fly, I have to throw it just right. And because the probability of me throwing it just right is very low, given everybody watching me, what we're going to do instead is show you a video that we shot last night. (Laughter) (Applause) If the monospinner is an exercise in frugality, this machine here, the omnicopter, with its eight propellers, is an exercise in excess. What can you do with all this surplus? The thing to notice is that it is highly symmetric. As a result, it is ambivalent to orientation. This gives it an extraordinary capability. It can move anywhere it wants in space irrespective of where it is facing and even of how it is rotating. It has its own complexities, mainly having to do with the interacting flows from its eight propellers. Some of this can be modeled, while the rest can be learned on the fly. Let's take a look. (Applause) If flying machines are going to enter part of our daily lives, they will need to become extremely safe and reliable. This machine over here is actually two separate two-propeller flying machines. This one wants to spin clockwise. This other one wants to spin counterclockwise. When you put them together, they behave like one high-performance quadrocopter. If anything goes wrong, however — a motor fails, a propeller fails, electronics, even a battery pack — the machine can still fly, albeit in a degraded fashion. We're going to demonstrate this to you now by disabling one of its halves. (Applause) This last demonstration is an exploration of synthetic swarms. The large number of autonomous, coordinated entities offers a new palette for aesthetic expression. We've taken commercially available micro quadcopters, each weighing less than a slice of bread, by the way, and outfitted them with our localization technology and custom algorithms. Because each unit knows where it is in space and is self-controlled, there is really no limit to their number. (Applause) (Applause) (Applause) Hopefully, these demonstrations will motivate you to dream up new revolutionary roles for flying machines. That ultrasafe one over there for example has aspirations to become a flying lampshade on Broadway. (Laughter) The reality is that it is difficult to predict the impact of nascent technology. And for folks like us, the real reward is the journey and the act of creation. It's a continual reminder of how wonderful and magical the universe we live in is, that it allows creative, clever creatures to sculpt it in such spectacular ways. The fact that this technology has such huge commercial and economic potential is just icing on the cake. Thank you. (Applause)
The case for optimism on climate change	{0: 'Nobel Laureate Al Gore focused the world’s attention on the global climate crisis. Now he’s showing us how we’re moving towards real solutions.\r\n'}	TED2016	I was excited to be a part of the "Dream" theme, and then I found out I'm leading off the "Nightmare?" section of it. (Laughter) And certainly there are things about the climate crisis that qualify. And I have some bad news, but I have a lot more good news. I'm going to propose three questions and the answer to the first one necessarily involves a little bad news. But — hang on, because the answers to the second and third questions really are very positive. So the first question is, "Do we really have to change?" And of course, the Apollo Mission, among other things changed the environmental movement, really launched the modern environmental movement. 18 months after this Earthrise picture was first seen on earth, the first Earth Day was organized. And we learned a lot about ourselves looking back at our planet from space. And one of the things that we learned confirmed what the scientists have long told us. One of the most essential facts about the climate crisis has to do with the sky. As this picture illustrates, the sky is not the vast and limitless expanse that appears when we look up from the ground. It is a very thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet. That right now is the open sewer for our industrial civilization as it's currently organized. We are spewing 110 million tons of heat-trapping global warming pollution into it every 24 hours, free of charge, go ahead. And there are many sources of the greenhouse gases, I'm certainly not going to go through them all. I'm going to focus on the main one, but agriculture is involved, diet is involved, population is involved. Management of forests, transportation, the oceans, the melting of the permafrost. But I'm going to focus on the heart of the problem, which is the fact that we still rely on dirty, carbon-based fuels for 85 percent of all the energy that our world burns every year. And you can see from this image that after World War II, the emission rates started really accelerating. And the accumulated amount of man-made, global warming pollution that is up in the atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours, 365 days a year. Fact-checked over and over again, conservative, it's the truth. Now it's a big planet, but — (Explosion sound) that is a lot of energy, particularly when you multiply it 400,000 times per day. And all that extra heat energy is heating up the atmosphere, the whole earth system. Let's look at the atmosphere. This is a depiction of what we used to think of as the normal distribution of temperatures. The white represents normal temperature days; 1951-1980 are arbitrarily chosen. The blue are cooler than average days, the red are warmer than average days. But the entire curve has moved to the right in the 1980s. And you'll see in the lower right-hand corner the appearance of statistically significant numbers of extremely hot days. In the 90s, the curve shifted further. And in the last 10 years, you see the extremely hot days are now more numerous than the cooler than average days. In fact, they are 150 times more common on the surface of the earth than they were just 30 years ago. So we're having record-breaking temperatures. Fourteen of the 15 of the hottest years ever measured with instruments have been in this young century. The hottest of all was last year. Last month was the 371st month in a row warmer than the 20th-century average. And for the first time, not only the warmest January, but for the first time, it was more than two degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average. These higher temperatures are having an effect on animals, plants, people, ecosystems. But on a global basis, 93 percent of all the extra heat energy is trapped in the oceans. And the scientists can measure the heat buildup much more precisely now at all depths: deep, mid-ocean, the first few hundred meters. And this, too, is accelerating. It goes back more than a century. And more than half of the increase has been in the last 19 years. This has consequences. The first order of consequence: the ocean-based storms get stronger. Super Typhoon Haiyan went over areas of the Pacific five and a half degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal before it slammed into Tacloban, as the most destructive storm ever to make landfall. Pope Francis, who has made such a difference to this whole issue, visited Tacloban right after that. Superstorm Sandy went over areas of the Atlantic nine degrees warmer than normal before slamming into New York and New Jersey. The second order of consequences are affecting all of us right now. The warmer oceans are evaporating much more water vapor into the skies. Average humidity worldwide has gone up four percent. And it creates these atmospheric rivers. The Brazilian scientists call them "flying rivers." And they funnel all of that extra water vapor over the land where storm conditions trigger these massive record-breaking downpours. This is from Montana. Take a look at this storm last August. As it moves over Tucson, Arizona. It literally splashes off the city. These downpours are really unusual. Last July in Houston, Texas, it rained for two days, 162 billion gallons. That represents more than two days of the full flow of Niagara Falls in the middle of the city, which was, of course, paralyzed. These record downpours are creating historic floods and mudslides. This one is from Chile last year. And you'll see that warehouse going by. There are oil tankers cars going by. This is from Spain last September, you could call this the running of the cars and trucks, I guess. Every night on the TV news now is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. (Laughter) I mean, really. The insurance industry has certainly noticed, the losses have been mounting up. They're not under any illusions about what's happening. And the causality requires a moment of discussion. We're used to thinking of linear cause and linear effect — one cause, one effect. This is systemic causation. As the great Kevin Trenberth says, "All storms are different now. There's so much extra energy in the atmosphere, there's so much extra water vapor. Every storm is different now." So, the same extra heat pulls the soil moisture out of the ground and causes these deeper, longer, more pervasive droughts and many of them are underway right now. It dries out the vegetation and causes more fires in the western part of North America. There's certainly been evidence of that, a lot of them. More lightning, as the heat energy builds up, there's a considerable amount of additional lightning also. These climate-related disasters also have geopolitical consequences and create instability. The climate-related historic drought that started in Syria in 2006 destroyed 60 percent of the farms in Syria, killed 80 percent of the livestock, and drove 1.5 million climate refugees into the cities of Syria, where they collided with another 1.5 million refugees from the Iraq War. And along with other factors, that opened the gates of Hell that people are trying to close now. The US Defense Department has long warned of consequences from the climate crisis, including refugees, food and water shortages and pandemic disease. Right now we're seeing microbial diseases from the tropics spread to the higher latitudes; the transportation revolution has had a lot to do with this. But the changing conditions change the latitudes and the areas where these microbial diseases can become endemic and change the range of the vectors, like mosquitoes and ticks that carry them. The Zika epidemic now — we're better positioned in North America because it's still a little too cool and we have a better public health system. But when women in some regions of South and Central America are advised not to get pregnant for two years — that's something new, that ought to get our attention. The Lancet, one of the two greatest medical journals in the world, last summer labeled this a medical emergency now. And there are many factors because of it. This is also connected to the extinction crisis. We're in danger of losing 50 percent of all the living species on earth by the end of this century. And already, land-based plants and animals are now moving towards the poles at an average rate of 15 feet per day. Speaking of the North Pole, last December 29, the same storm that caused historic flooding in the American Midwest, raised temperatures at the North Pole 50 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, causing the thawing of the North Pole in the middle of the long, dark, winter, polar night. And when the land-based ice of the Arctic melts, it raises sea level. Paul Nicklen's beautiful photograph from Svalbard illustrates this. It's more dangerous coming off Greenland and particularly, Antarctica. The 10 largest risk cities for sea-level rise by population are mostly in South and Southeast Asia. When you measure it by assets at risk, number one is Miami: three and a half trillion dollars at risk. Number three: New York and Newark. I was in Miami last fall during the supermoon, one of the highest high-tide days. And there were fish from the ocean swimming in some of the streets of Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale and Del Rey. And this happens regularly during the highest-tide tides now. Not with rain — they call it "sunny-day flooding." It comes up through the storm sewers. And the Mayor of Miami speaks for many when he says it is long past time this can be viewed through a partisan lens. This is a crisis that's getting worse day by day. We have to move beyond partisanship. And I want to take a moment to honor these House Republicans — (Applause) who had the courage last fall to step out and take a political risk, by telling the truth about the climate crisis. So the cost of the climate crisis is mounting up, there are many of these aspects I haven't even mentioned. It's an enormous burden. I'll mention just one more, because the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, after their annual survey of 750 economists, said the climate crisis is now the number one risk to the global economy. So you get central bankers like Mark Carney, the head of the UK Central Bank, saying the vast majority of the carbon reserves are unburnable. Subprime carbon. I'm not going to remind you what happened with subprime mortgages, but it's the same thing. If you look at all of the carbon fuels that were burned since the beginning of the industrial revolution, this is the quantity burned in the last 16 years. Here are all the ones that are proven and left on the books, 28 trillion dollars. The International Energy Agency says only this amount can be burned. So the rest, 22 trillion dollars — unburnable. Risk to the global economy. That's why divestment movement makes practical sense and is not just a moral imperative. So the answer to the first question, "Must we change?" is yes, we have to change. Second question, "Can we change?" This is the exciting news! The best projections in the world 16 years ago were that by 2010, the world would be able to install 30 gigawatts of wind capacity. We beat that mark by 14 and a half times over. We see an exponential curve for wind installations now. We see the cost coming down dramatically. Some countries — take Germany, an industrial powerhouse with a climate not that different from Vancouver's, by the way — one day last December, got 81 percent of all its energy from renewable resources, mainly solar and wind. A lot of countries are getting more than half on an average basis. More good news: energy storage, from batteries particularly, is now beginning to take off because the cost has been coming down very dramatically to solve the intermittency problem. With solar, the news is even more exciting! The best projections 14 years ago were that we would install one gigawatt per year by 2010. When 2010 came around, we beat that mark by 17 times over. Last year, we beat it by 58 times over. This year, we're on track to beat it 68 times over. We're going to win this. We are going to prevail. The exponential curve on solar is even steeper and more dramatic. When I came to this stage 10 years ago, this is where it was. We have seen a revolutionary breakthrough in the emergence of these exponential curves. (Applause) And the cost has come down 10 percent per year for 30 years. And it's continuing to come down. Now, the business community has certainly noticed this, because it's crossing the grid parity point. Cheaper solar penetration rates are beginning to rise. Grid parity is understood as that line, that threshold, below which renewable electricity is cheaper than electricity from burning fossil fuels. That threshold is a little bit like the difference between 32 degrees Fahrenheit and 33 degrees Fahrenheit, or zero and one Celsius. It's a difference of more than one degree, it's the difference between ice and water. And it's the difference between markets that are frozen up, and liquid flows of capital into new opportunities for investment. This is the biggest new business opportunity in the history of the world, and two-thirds of it is in the private sector. We are seeing an explosion of new investment. Starting in 2010, investments globally in renewable electricity generation surpassed fossils. The gap has been growing ever since. The projections for the future are even more dramatic, even though fossil energy is now still subsidized at a rate 40 times larger than renewables. And by the way, if you add the projections for nuclear on here, particularly if you assume that the work many are doing to try to break through to safer and more acceptable, more affordable forms of nuclear, this could change even more dramatically. So is there any precedent for such a rapid adoption of a new technology? Well, there are many, but let's look at cell phones. In 1980, AT&T, then Ma Bell, commissioned McKinsey to do a global market survey of those clunky new mobile phones that appeared then. "How many can we sell by the year 2000?" they asked. McKinsey came back and said, "900,000." And sure enough, when the year 2000 arrived, they did sell 900,000 — in the first three days. And for the balance of the year, they sold 120 times more. And now there are more cell connections than there are people in the world. So, why were they not only wrong, but way wrong? I've asked that question myself, "Why?" (Laughter) And I think the answer is in three parts. First, the cost came down much faster than anybody expected, even as the quality went up. And low-income countries, places that did not have a landline grid — they leap-frogged to the new technology. The big expansion has been in the developing counties. So what about the electricity grids in the developing world? Well, not so hot. And in many areas, they don't exist. There are more people without any electricity at all in India than the entire population of the United States of America. So now we're getting this: solar panels on grass huts and new business models that make it affordable. Muhammad Yunus financed this one in Bangladesh with micro-credit. This is a village market. Bangladesh is now the fastest-deploying country in the world: two systems per minute on average, night and day. And we have all we need: enough energy from the Sun comes to the earth every hour to supply the full world's energy needs for an entire year. It's actually a little bit less than an hour. So the answer to the second question, "Can we change?" is clearly "Yes." And it's an ever-firmer "yes." Last question, "Will we change?" Paris really was a breakthrough, some of the provisions are binding and the regular reviews will matter a lot. But nations aren't waiting, they're going ahead. China has already announced that starting next year, they're adopting a nationwide cap and trade system. They will likely link up with the European Union. The United States has already been changing. All of these coal plants were proposed in the next 10 years and canceled. All of these existing coal plants were retired. All of these coal plants have had their retirement announced. All of them — canceled. We are moving forward. Last year — if you look at all of the investment in new electricity generation in the United States, almost three-quarters was from renewable energy, mostly wind and solar. We are solving this crisis. The only question is: how long will it take to get there? So, it matters that a lot of people are organizing to insist on this change. Almost 400,000 people marched in New York City before the UN special session on this. Many thousands, tens of thousands, marched in cities around the world. And so, I am extremely optimistic. As I said before, we are going to win this. I'll finish with this story. When I was 13 years old, I heard that proposal by President Kennedy to land a person on the Moon and bring him back safely in 10 years. And I heard adults of that day and time say, "That's reckless, expensive, may well fail." But eight years and two months later, in the moment that Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, there was great cheer that went up in NASA's mission control in Houston. Here's a little-known fact about that: the average age of the systems engineers, the controllers in the room that day, was 26, which means, among other things, their age, when they heard that challenge, was 18. We now have a moral challenge that is in the tradition of others that we have faced. One of the greatest poets of the last century in the US, Wallace Stevens, wrote a line that has stayed with me: "After the final 'no,' there comes a 'yes,' and on that 'yes', the future world depends." When the abolitionists started their movement, they met with no after no after no. And then came a yes. The Women's Suffrage and Women's Rights Movement met endless no's, until finally, there was a yes. The Civil Rights Movement, the movement against apartheid, and more recently, the movement for gay and lesbian rights here in the United States and elsewhere. After the final "no" comes a "yes." When any great moral challenge is ultimately resolved into a binary choice between what is right and what is wrong, the outcome is fore-ordained because of who we are as human beings. Ninety-nine percent of us, that is where we are now and it is why we're going to win this. We have everything we need. Some still doubt that we have the will to act, but I say the will to act is itself a renewable resource. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: You've got this incredible combination of skills. You've got this scientist mind that can understand the full range of issues, and the ability to turn it into the most vivid language. No one else can do that, that's why you led this thing. It was amazing to see it 10 years ago, it was amazing to see it now. Al Gore: Well, you're nice to say that, Chris. But honestly, I have a lot of really good friends in the scientific community who are incredibly patient and who will sit there and explain this stuff to me over and over and over again until I can get it into simple enough language that I can understand it. And that's the key to trying to communicate. CA: So, your talk. First part: terrifying, second part: incredibly hopeful. How do we know that all those graphs, all that progress, is enough to solve what you showed in the first part? AG: I think that the crossing — you know, I've only been in the business world for 15 years. But one of the things I've learned is that apparently it matters if a new product or service is more expensive than the incumbent, or cheaper than. Turns out, it makes a difference if it's cheaper than. (Laughter) And when it crosses that line, then a lot of things really change. We are regularly surprised by these developments. The late Rudi Dornbusch, the great economist said, "Things take longer to happen then you think they will, and then they happen much faster than you thought they could." I really think that's where we are. Some people are using the phrase "The Solar Singularity" now, meaning when it gets below the grid parity, unsubsidized in most places, then it's the default choice. Now, in one of the presentations yesterday, the jitney thing, there is an effort to use regulations to slow this down. And I just don't think it's going to work. There's a woman in Atlanta, Debbie Dooley, who's the Chairman of the Atlanta Tea Party. They enlisted her in this effort to put a tax on solar panels and regulations. And she had just put solar panels on her roof and she didn't understand the request. (Laughter) And so she went and formed an alliance with the Sierra Club and they formed a new organization called the Green Tea Party. (Laughter) (Applause) And they defeated the proposal. So, finally, the answer to your question is, this sounds a little corny and maybe it's a cliché, but 10 years ago — and Christiana referred to this — there are people in this audience who played an incredibly significant role in generating those exponential curves. And it didn't work out economically for some of them, but it kick-started this global revolution. And what people in this audience do now with the knowledge that we are going to win this. But it matters a lot how fast we win it. CA: Al Gore, that was incredibly powerful. If this turns out to be the year, that the partisan thing changes, as you said, it's no longer a partisan issue, but you bring along people from the other side together, backed by science, backed by these kinds of investment opportunities, backed by reason that you win the day — boy, that's really exciting. Thank you so much. AG: Thank you so much for bringing me back to TED. Thank you! (Applause)
What it's like to be Muslim in America	{0: 'Researcher and pollster Dalia Mogahed is an author, advisor and consultant who studies Muslim communities.'}	TED2016	What do you think when you look at me? A woman of faith? An expert? Maybe even a sister. Or oppressed, brainwashed, a terrorist. Or just an airport security line delay. That one's actually true. (Laughter) If some of your perceptions were negative, I don't really blame you. That's just how the media has been portraying people who look like me. One study found that 80 percent of news coverage about Islam and Muslims is negative. And studies show that Americans say that most don't know a Muslim. I guess people don't talk to their Uber drivers. (Laughter) Well, for those of you who have never met a Muslim, it's great to meet you. Let me tell you who I am. I'm a mom, a coffee lover — double espresso, cream on the side. I'm an introvert. I'm a wannabe fitness fanatic. And I'm a practicing, spiritual Muslim. But not like Lady Gaga says, because baby, I wasn't born this way. It was a choice. When I was 17, I decided to come out. No, not as a gay person like some of my friends, but as a Muslim, and decided to start wearing the hijab, my head covering. My feminist friends were aghast: "Why are you oppressing yourself?" The funny thing was, it was actually at that time a feminist declaration of independence from the pressure I felt as a 17-year-old, to conform to a perfect and unattainable standard of beauty. I didn't just passively accept the faith of my parents. I wrestled with the Quran. I read and reflected and questioned and doubted and, ultimately, believed. My relationship with God — it was not love at first sight. It was a trust and a slow surrender that deepened with every reading of the Quran. Its rhythmic beauty sometimes moves me to tears. I see myself in it. I feel that God knows me. Have you ever felt like someone sees you, completely understands you and yet loves you anyway? That's how it feels. And so later, I got married, and like all good Egyptians, started my career as an engineer. (Laughter) I later had a child, after getting married, and I was living essentially the Egyptian-American dream. And then that terrible morning of September, 2001. I think a lot of you probably remember exactly where you were that morning. I was sitting in my kitchen finishing breakfast, and I look up on the screen and see the words "Breaking News." There was smoke, airplanes flying into buildings, people jumping out of buildings. What was this? An accident? A malfunction? My shock quickly turned to outrage. Who would do this? And I switch the channel and I hear, "... Muslim terrorist ...," "... in the name of Islam ...," "... Middle-Eastern descent ...," "... jihad ...," "... we should bomb Mecca." Oh my God. Not only had my country been attacked, but in a flash, somebody else's actions had turned me from a citizen to a suspect. That same day, we had to drive across Middle America to move to a new city to start grad school. And I remember sitting in the passenger seat as we drove in silence, crouched as low as I could go in my seat, for the first time in my life, afraid for anyone to know I was a Muslim. We moved into our apartment that night in a new town in what felt like a completely different world. And then I was hearing and seeing and reading warnings from national Muslim organizations saying things like, "Be alert," "Be aware," "Stay in well-lit areas," "Don't congregate." I stayed inside all week. And then it was Friday that same week, the day that Muslims congregate for worship. And again the warnings were, "Don't go that first Friday, it could be a target." And I was watching the news, wall-to-wall coverage. Emotions were so raw, understandably, and I was also hearing about attacks on Muslims, or people who were perceived to be Muslim, being pulled out and beaten in the street. Mosques were actually firebombed. And I thought, we should just stay home. And yet, something didn't feel right. Because those people who attacked our country attacked our country. I get it that people were angry at the terrorists. Guess what? So was I. And so to have to explain yourself all the time isn't easy. I don't mind questions. I love questions. It's the accusations that are tough. Today we hear people actually saying things like, "There's a problem in this country, and it's called Muslims. When are we going to get rid of them?" So, some people want to ban Muslims and close down mosques. They talk about my community kind of like we're a tumor in the body of America. And the only question is, are we malignant or benign? You know, a malignant tumor you extract altogether, and a benign tumor you just keep under surveillance. The choices don't make sense, because it's the wrong question. Muslims, like all other Americans, aren't a tumor in the body of America, we're a vital organ. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Muslims are inventors and teachers, first responders and Olympic athletes. Now, is closing down mosques going to make America safer? It might free up some parking spots, but it will not end terrorism. Going to a mosque regularly is actually linked to having more tolerant views of people of other faiths and greater civic engagement. And as one police chief in the Washington, DC area recently told me, people don't actually get radicalized at mosques. They get radicalized in their basement or bedroom, in front of a computer. And what you find about the radicalization process is it starts online, but the first thing that happens is the person gets cut off from their community, from even their family, so that the extremist group can brainwash them into believing that they, the terrorists, are the true Muslims, and everyone else who abhors their behavior and ideology are sellouts or apostates. So if we want to prevent radicalization, we have to keep people going to the mosque. Now, some will still argue Islam is a violent religion. After all, a group like ISIS bases its brutality on the Quran. Now, as a Muslim, as a mother, as a human being, I think we need to do everything we can to stop a group like ISIS. But we would be giving in to their narrative if we cast them as representatives of a faith of 1.6 billion people. (Applause) Thank you. ISIS has as much to do with Islam as the Ku Klux Klan has to do with Christianity. (Applause) Both groups claim to base their ideology on their holy book. But when you look at them, they're not motivated by what they read in their holy book. It's their brutality that makes them read these things into the scripture. Recently, a prominent imam told me a story that really took me aback. He said that a girl came to him because she was thinking of going to join ISIS. And I was really surprised and asked him, had she been in contact with a radical religious leader? And he said the problem was quite the opposite, that every cleric that she had talked to had shut her down and said that her rage, her sense of injustice in the world, was just going to get her in trouble. And so with nowhere to channel and make sense of this anger, she was a prime target to be exploited by extremists promising her a solution. What this imam did was to connect her back to God and to her community. He didn't shame her for her rage — instead, he gave her constructive ways to make real change in the world. What she learned at that mosque prevented her from going to join ISIS. I've told you a little bit about how Islamophobia affects me and my family. But how does it impact ordinary Americans? How does it impact everyone else? How does consuming fear 24 hours a day affect the health of our democracy, the health of our free thought? Well, one study — actually, several studies in neuroscience — show that when we're afraid, at least three things happen. We become more accepting of authoritarianism, conformity and prejudice. One study showed that when subjects were exposed to news stories that were negative about Muslims, they became more accepting of military attacks on Muslim countries and policies that curtail the rights of American Muslims. Now, this isn't just academic. When you look at when anti-Muslim sentiment spiked between 2001 and 2013, it happened three times, but it wasn't around terrorist attacks. It was in the run up to the Iraq War and during two election cycles. So Islamophobia isn't just the natural response to Muslim terrorism as I would have expected. It can actually be a tool of public manipulation, eroding the very foundation of a free society, which is rational and well-informed citizens. Muslims are like canaries in the coal mine. We might be the first to feel it, but the toxic air of fear is harming us all. (Applause) And assigning collective guilt isn't just about having to explain yourself all the time. Deah and his wife Yusor were a young married couple living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where they both went to school. Deah was an athlete. He was in dental school, talented, promising ... And his sister would tell me that he was the sweetest, most generous human being she knew. She was visiting him there and he showed her his resume, and she was amazed. She said, "When did my baby brother become such an accomplished young man?" Just a few weeks after Suzanne's visit to her brother and his new wife, their neighbor, Craig Stephen Hicks, murdered them, as well as Yusor's sister, Razan, who was visiting for the afternoon, in their apartment, execution style, after posting anti-Muslim statements on his Facebook page. He shot Deah eight times. So bigotry isn't just immoral, it can even be lethal. So, back to my story. What happened after 9/11? Did we go to the mosque or did we play it safe and stay home? Well, we talked it over, and it might seem like a small decision, but to us, it was about what kind of America we wanted to leave for our kids: one that would control us by fear or one where we were practicing our religion freely. So we decided to go to the mosque. And we put my son in his car seat, buckled him in, and we drove silently, intensely, to the mosque. I took him out, I took off my shoes, I walked into the prayer hall and what I saw made me stop. The place was completely full. And then the imam made an announcement, thanking and welcoming our guests, because half the congregation were Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, people of faith and no faith, who had come not to attack us, but to stand in solidarity with us. (Applause) I just break down at this time. These people were there because they chose courage and compassion over panic and prejudice. What will you choose? What will you choose at this time of fear and bigotry? Will you play it safe? Or will you join those who say we are better than that? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you so much. Helen Walters: So Dalia, you seem to have struck a chord. But I wonder, what would you say to those who might argue that you're giving a TED Talk, you're clearly a deep thinker, you work at a fancy think tank, you're an exception, you're not the rule. What would you say to those people? Dalia Mogahed: I would say, don't let this stage distract you, I'm completely ordinary. I'm not an exception. My story is not unusual. I am as ordinary as they come. When you look at Muslims around the world — and I've done this, I've done the largest study ever done on Muslims around the world — people want ordinary things. They want prosperity for their family, they want jobs and they want to live in peace. So I am not in any way an exception. When you meet people who seem like an exception to the rule, oftentimes it's that the rule is broken, not that they're an exception to it. HW: Thank you so much. Dalia Mogahed. (Applause)
How to make a profit while making a difference	{0: 'Audrey Choi is a thought leader on how finance can be harnessed to address public policy challenges.'}	TED@State Street Boston	I believe big institutions have unique potential to create change, and I believe that we as individuals have unique power to influence the direction that those institutions take. Now, these beliefs did not come naturally to me, because trusting big institutions, not really part of my family legacy. My mother escaped North Korea when she was 10 years old. To do so, she had to elude every big institution in her life: repressive governments, occupying armies and even armed border patrols. Later, when she decided she wanted to emigrate to the United States, she had to defy an entire culture that said the girls would never be the best and brightest. Only because her name happens to sound like a boy's was she able to finagle her way into the government immigration exam to come to the United States. Because of her bravery and passion, I've had all the opportunities that she never did, and that has made my story so different. Instead of running away from big institutions, I've actually run toward them. I've had the chance over the course of my career to work for The Wall Street Journal, the White House and now one of the largest financial institutions in the world, where I lead sustainable investing. Now, these institutions are like tankers, and working inside of them, I've come to appreciate what large wakes they can leave, and I've become convinced that the institution of the global capital markets, the nearly 290 trillion dollars of stocks and bonds in the world, that that may be one of our most powerful forces for positive social change at our disposal, if we ask it to be. Now, I know some of you are thinking, global capital markets, positive social change, not usually in the same sentence or even the same paragraph. I think many people think of the capital markets kind of like an ocean. It's a vast, impersonal, uncaring force of nature that is not affected by our wishes or desires. So the best that our little savings accounts or retirement accounts can do is to try to catch some waves in the good cycles and hope that we don't get inundated in the turbulent ones, but certainly our decisions on how to steer our little retirement accounts don't affect the tides, don't change the shape or size or direction of the waves. But why is that? Because actually, one third of this ocean of capital actually belongs to individuals like us, and most of the rest of the capital markets is controlled by the institutions that get their power and authority and their capital from us, as members, participants, beneficiaries, shareholders or citizens. So if we are the ultimate owners of the capital markets, why aren't we able to make our voices heard? Why can't we make some waves? So let me ask you a different question: did any of you buy fair trade coffee the last time you were at a supermarket or at Starbucks? OK. Do any of you go to the restaurant and order the sustainably farmed trout instead of the miso-glazed Chilean sea bass that you really wish you could have? Do any of you drive hybrid cars or even electric cars? So why do we do these things? Right? One electric car doesn't amount to much in a fleet of 1.2 billion combustion engine vehicles. One fish is just one fish in the sea. And one cup of coffee doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. But we do these things because we believe they matter, that our actions add up, that our choices might influence others and collectively, what an impact we can have. So, in my bag I have a coffee mug that I bought a couple of years ago. It's a reusable mug. It has all these things printed on it. Look at some of the things that are on it, that it says. "This one cup can be used again and again." "This one cup may inspire others to use one too." "This one cup helps save the planet." I had no idea this plastic cup was so powerful. (Laughter) So why do we think that our choice of a four dollar shade-grown fair trade artisanal cup of coffee in a reusable mug matters, but what we do with 4,000 dollars in our investment account for our IRA doesn't? Why can't we tell the supermarket and the capital markets that we care, that we care about fair labor standards, that we care about sustainable production methods and about healthy communities? Why aren't we voting with our investment dollars, but we would vote with our lattes? So I think it has something to do with the myths, the fables that we all carry around in our collective consciousness. Do you remember the Grimm's fairy tale about the magic porridge pot? If you said to the pot, "Boil, little pot, boil," it would fill up with sweet porridge. And if you said, "Stop, little pot, stop," it would stop. But if you got the words wrong, it wouldn't listen, and things could go terribly awry. So I think when it comes to markets, we have a little bit of a similar fable in our heads. We believe that the markets is this magic pot that obeys only one command: make more money. Only those words said exactly that way will make the pot fill up with gold. Add in some extra words like "protect the environment," the spell might not work. Put in the wrong words like "promote social justice," and you might see your gold coins shrink or even vanish entirely, according to this fable. So we asked people, what do you really think? And we actually went out and polled a thousand individual investors, and we found something fascinating. Overwhelmingly, people wanted to add those extra words into the formula. 71 percent of people said yes, they were interested in sustainable investing, which we define as taking the best in class investment process that you already have traditionally and adding in the extra information you get when you think about the environment and society and good governance. 71 percent wanted that. 72 percent said that they believe that companies who did that would actually do better financially. So people really do believe that you can do well by doing good. But here was the weird thing: 54 percent of the people still said if they put their money in those kinds of stocks, they thought that they would make less money. So is it true? Do you get less sweet porridge if you invest in shade-grown coffee instead of drinking it? Well, you know, the investors in companies like Burt's Bees or Ben & Jerry's wouldn't say so. Right? Both of those started out as small, socially conscious companies that ended up becoming so popular with consumers that the giants Unilever and Clorox bought them for hundreds of millions of dollars each. But here's the important thing. Those corporations realized that if they wanted to protect the value of their investments, they had to preserve that socially conscious mission. If they didn't keep adding in those extra words of environmentally friendly and socially conscious, those brands wouldn't make more money. But maybe this is just the exception the proves the rule, right? The serious companies that fund our economy and that fund our retirements and that really make the world go round, they need to stick to making more money. So, Harvard Business School actually researched this, and they found something fascinating. If you had invested a dollar 20 years ago in a portfolio of companies that focused narrowly on making more money quarter by quarter, that one dollar would have grown to 14 dollars and 46 cents. That's not bad until you consider that if instead you'd invested that same dollar in a portfolio of companies that focused on growing their business and on the most important environmental and social issues, that one dollar would have grown to 28 dollars and 36 cents. almost twice as much sweet porridge. Now, let's be clear, they didn't make that outperformance by giving away money to seem like a nice corporate citizen. They did it by focusing on the things that matter to their business, like wasting less energy and water in their manufacturing processes; like making sure the CEO contracts had the CEOs incentivized for the long-term results of the company and the communities they served, not just quarterly results; or building a first class culture that would have higher employee loyalty, retention and productivity. Now, Harvard's not alone. Oxford also did a research study where they examined 120 different studies looking at the effect of sustainability and economic results, and they found time and time and time again that the companies that cared about these kinds of important things actually had better operational efficiency, lower cost of capital and better performance in their stock price. And then there's Al Gore. So 20 years ago, when I worked for Al Gore in the White House, he was one of the early pioneers pleading with businesses and governments to pay attention to the challenges of climate change. Post-White House, he opened an investment firm called Generation, where he baked environmental sustainability and other things right into the core investment process. And at the time there was a good bit of skepticism about his views. Ten years later, his track record is one more proof point that sustainable investing done right can be sound investing. Far from making less sweet porridge because he added sustainability into the mix, he actually significantly outperformed the benchmark. Now, sustainable investing, the good news is it doesn't require a magic spell and it doesn't require some investment secret, and it's not just for the elite. It is not just about private equity for billionaires. It's not just groovy-sounding investments like clean technology or microfinance in emerging markets or artisanal bakeries in Brooklyn. It's about stocks and bonds and Fortune 500 companies. It's about mutual funds. It's about all the things we already see in the market today. So here's why I'm convinced that we collectively have the power to make sustainable investing the new normal. First, the proof points are coming out all the time that sustainable investing done right, preserving all the same good principles of investing, the traditional sphere, can pay. It makes sense. Secondly, the biggest obstacle standing in our way may actually just be in our heads. We just need to let go of that myth that if you add your values into your investment thinking, that you get less sweet porridge. And once you get rid of the fable, you can actually start appreciating those facts we've been talking about. And third, the future is already here. Sustainable investment today is a 20 trillion dollar market and it's the fastest-growing segment of the investment industry. In the United States, it has grown enormously, as you can see. It now represents one out of every six dollars under professional management in the United States. So what are we waiting for? For me, it goes back to the inspiration that I received from my mother. She knew that she wanted a life where she would have the freedom to make her own choices and to have her voice heard and write her own story. She was passionate about that goal and she was clear that she would let no army, no obstacle, no big institution stand in her way. She made it to the States, and she became a teacher, an award-winning author and a mother, and ended up sending her daughters to Harvard. And these days, you can tell that she is amply comfortable holding court in the most powerful institutions in the world. It seems almost too prophetic that her name in Korean means "passionate clarity." Passionate clarity: that's what I think we need to drive change. Passion about the change we want to see in the world, and clarity that we are able to help chart the course. We have more opportunity today than ever before to make choices. We have more power than ever before to make our voices heard. So change your perspective. Vote with your small change. Invest in the change you want to see in the world. Change the fables and change the markets. Thank you. (Applause)
Why your doctor should care about social justice	{0: 'Mary Bassett is fighting what may be the greatest stumbling block to equitable health care in the US: institutional racism.'}	TEDMED 2015	When I moved to Harare in 1985, social justice was at the core of Zimbabwe's national health policy. The new government emerged from a long war of independence and immediately proclaimed a socialist agenda: health care services, primary education became essentially free. A massive expansion of rural health centers placed roughly 80 percent of the population less than a two-hour walk from these facilities, a truly remarkable accomplishment. In 1980, the year of independence, 25 percent of Zimbabwean children were fully immunized. By 1990, a mere decade later, this proportion stood at 80 percent. I felt tremendously privileged to be part of this transformation, a revolution. The excitement, the camaraderie, was palpable. Working side by side with brilliant Zimbabweans — scientists, doctors, activists — I felt connected not only to an African independence movement, but to a global progressive public health movement. But there were daunting challenges. Zimbabwe reported its first AIDS case in 1985, the year I arrived. I had taken care of a few patients with AIDS in the early 1980s, when I did my medical training at Harlem Hospital, but — we had no idea what lay in store for Africa. Infection rate stood at about two percent in my early days there. These would soar to one out of every four adults by the time I left Harare 17 years later. By the mid-1990s, I'd told hundreds of people in the prime of life that they were HIV-positive. I saw colleagues and friends die, my students, hospital patients, die. In response, my colleagues and I set up a clinic. We did condom demonstrations. We launched school education and workplace interventions. We did research. We counseled the partners of infected men about how to protect themselves. We worked hard, and at the time, I believed that I was doing my best. I was providing excellent treatment, such as it was. But I was not talking about structural change. Former UN Secretary Kofi Annan has spoken candidly about his personal failure leading to the Rwandan genocide. In 1994, he was head of the UN peacekeeping department. At a 10-year memorial for the genocide, he reflected, "I believed at the time I was doing my best, but I realized after the genocide that there was more I could and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support." The AIDS epidemic caught the health community unprepared, and today, when the World Health Organization estimates that 39 million people have lost their lives to this disease, I'm not alone in feeling remorse and regret at not having done more earlier. But while living in Zimbabwe, I didn't see my role as an advocacy or a political one. I was there for my technical skills, both my clinical and my research epidemiology skills. And in my mind, my job was to take care of patients and to do research to better understand the population patterns of transmission, and I hoped that we'd slow the spread of the virus. I was aware that socially marginalized populations were at disproportionate risk of getting and dying of AIDS. And on the sugar plantations, which really more closely resembled feudal fiefdoms than any modern enterprise, 60 percent of pregnant women tested HIV-positive. I worked to show how getting infected was not a moral failure but instead related to a culture of male superiority, to forced migrant labor and to colonialism. Whites were largely unscathed. As health professionals, our tools were pitifully weak: imploring people to change their individual behaviors, use condoms, reduce number of partners. Infection rates climbed, and when treatment became available in the West, treatment that remains our most potent weapon against this virus, it was unaffordable to the public sector across Africa. I didn't speak out about the unequal access to these life-saving drugs or about the underlying economic and political systems that were driving infection rates in such huge swaths of the population. I rationalized my silence by reminding myself that I was a guest in the country, that sounding the alarm could even get me kicked out, keep me from doing good work, taking care of my patients, doing much-needed research. So I didn't speak out about the government's early stance on AIDS. I didn't voice my concerns loudly enough. Many doctors, health professionals, may think I did nothing wrong. Our pact with our patients, the Hippocratic Oath and its variants, is about the sanctity of the patient-doctor relationship. And I did everything I could for each and every patient of mine. But I knew that epidemics emerge along the fissures of our society, reflecting not only biology, but more importantly patterns of marginalization, exclusion, discrimination related to race, gender, sexuality, class and more. It was true of AIDS. It was true just recently of Ebola. Medical anthropologists such as Paul Farmer, who worked on AIDS in Haiti, call this structural violence: structural because inequities are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world, often in ways that are invisible to those with privilege and power; and violence because its impact — premature deaths, suffering, illness — is violent. We do little for our patients if we fail to recognize these social injustices. Sounding the alarm is the first step towards doing public health right, and it's how we may rally support to break through and create real change together. So these days, I'm not staying quiet. I'm speaking up about a lot of things, even when it makes listeners uncomfortable, even when it makes me uncomfortable. And a lot of this is about racial disparities and institutionalized racism, things that we're not supposed to have in this country anymore, certainly not in the practice of medicine or public health. But we have them, and we pay for them in lives cut short. That's why sounding the alarm about the impact of racism on health in the United States, the ongoing institutional and interpersonal violence that people of color face, compounded by our tragic legacy of 250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow and 60 years of imperfect equality, sounding the alarm about this is central to doing my job right as New York City's Health Commissioner. In New York City, premature mortality — that's death before the age of 65 — is 50 percent higher for black men than white ones. A black woman in 2012 faced more than 10 times the risk of dying related to childbirth as a white woman. And though we've made enormous strides in reducing infant mortality rates, a black baby still faces nearly three times the risk of death in its first year of life as compared to a white baby. New York City's not exceptional. These statistics are paralleled by statistics found across the United States. A recent New York Times analysis reported that there are 1.5 million missing black men across the country. They noted that more than one out of every six black men who today should be between the ages of 25 and 54 years have disappeared from daily life, lost either to prison or premature death. There is great injustice in the daily and disproportionate violence faced by young black men, the focus of recent protests under the banner #BlackLivesMatter. But we have to remember that enduring and disparate rates and the occurrence and outcome of common medical conditions — heart disease, cancer, diabetes, HIV — diseases that may kill slowly and quietly and take even more black lives prematurely. As the #BlackLivesMatter movement unfolded, I felt frustrated and angry that the medical community has been reluctant to even use the word "racism" in our research and our work. You've probably felt something every time I've said it. Our medical students held die-ins in their white coats, but the medical community has largely stood by passively as ongoing discrimination continues to affect the disease profile and mortality. And I worry that the trend towards personalized and precision medicine, looking for biological or genetic targets to better tailor treatment, may inadvertently cause us to lose sight of the big picture, that it is the daily context, where a person lives, grows, works, loves, that most importantly determines population health, and for too many of us, poor health. As health professionals in our daily work, whether in the clinic or doing research, we are witness to great injustice: the homeless person who is unable to follow medical advice because he has more pressing priorities; the transgender youth who is contemplating suicide because our society is just so harsh; the single mother who has been made to feel that she is responsible for the poor health of her child. Our role as health professionals is not just to treat our patients but to sound the alarm and advocate for change. Rightfully or not, our societal position gives our voices great credibility, and we shouldn't waste that. I regret not speaking up in Zimbabwe, and I've promised myself that as New York City's Health Commissioner, I will use every opportunity I have to sound the alarm and rally support for health equity. I will speak out against racism, and I hope you will join me, and I will join you when you speak out against sexism or any other form of inequality. It's time for us to rise up and collectively speak up about structural inequality. We don't have to have all the answers to call for change. We just need courage. The health of our patients, the health of us all, depends on it. (Applause)
Why we need gender-neutral bathrooms	{0: 'Ivan Coyote believes that a good story can help inspire us to invent a better future.'}	TEDxVancouver	There are a few things that all of us need. We all need air to breathe. We need clean water to drink. We need food to eat. We need shelter and love. You know. Love is great, too. And we all need a safe place to pee. (Laughter) Yeah? As a trans person who doesn't fit neatly into the gender binary, if I could change the world tomorrow to make it easier for me to navigate, the very first thing I would do is blink and create single stall, gender-neutral bathrooms in all public places. (Applause) Trans people and trans issues, they've been getting a lot of mainstream media attention lately. And this is a great and necessary thing, but most of that attention has been focused on a very few individuals, most of whom are kinda rich and pretty famous, and probably don't have to worry that much anymore about where they're going to pee in between classes at their community college, or where they're going to get changed into their gym strip at their public high school. Fame and money insulates these television star trans people from most of the everyday challenges that the rest of us have to tackle on a daily basis. Public bathrooms. They've been a problem for me since as far back as I can remember, first when I was just a little baby tomboy and then later as a masculine-appearing, predominantly estrogen-based organism. (Laughter) Now, today as a trans person, public bathrooms and change rooms are where I am most likely to be questioned or harassed. I've often been verbally attacked behind their doors. I've been hauled out by security guards with my pants still halfway pulled up. I've been stared at, screamed at, whispered about, and one time I got smacked in the face by a little old lady's purse that from the looks of the shiner I took home that day I am pretty certain contained at least 70 dollars of rolled up small change and a large hard candy collection. (Laughter) And I know what some of you are thinking, and you're mostly right. I can and do just use the men's room most of the time these days. But that doesn't solve my change room dilemmas, does it? And I shouldn't have to use the men's room because I'm not a man. I'm a trans person. And now we've got these fearmongering politicians that keep trying to pass these bathroom bills. Have you heard about these? They try to legislate to try and force people like myself to use the bathroom that they deem most appropriate according to the gender I was assigned at birth. And if these politicians ever get their way, in Arizona or California or Florida or just last week in Houston, Texas, or Ottawa, well then, using the men's room will not be a legal option for me either. And every time one of these politicians brings one of these bills to the table, I can't help but wonder, you know, just who will and exactly how would we go about enforcing laws like these. Right? Panty checks? Really. Genital inspections outside of bath change rooms at public pools? There's no legal or ethical or plausible way to enforce laws like these anyway. They exist only to foster fear and promote transphobia. They don't make anyone safer. But they do for sure make the world more dangerous for some of us. And meanwhile, our trans children suffer. They drop out of school, or they opt out of life altogether. Trans people, especially trans and gender-nonconforming youth face additional challenges when accessing pools and gyms, but also universities, hospitals, libraries. Don't even get me started on how they treat us in airports. If we don't move now to make sure that these places are truly open and accessible to everyone, then we just need to get honest and quit calling them public places. We need to just admit that they are really only open for people who fit neatly into one of two gender boxes, which I do not. I never have. And this starts very early. I know a little girl. She's the daughter of a friend of mine. She's a self-identified tomboy. I'm talking about cowboy boots and Caterpillar yellow toy trucks and bug jars, the whole nine yards. One time I asked her what her favorite color was. She told me, "Camouflage." (Laughter) So that awesome little kid, she came home from school last October from her half day of preschool with soggy pants on because the other kids at school were harassing her when she tried to use the girls' bathroom. And the teacher had already instructed her to stay out of the boys' bathroom. And she had drank two glasses of that red juice at the Halloween party, and I mean, who can resist that red juice, right? It's so good. And she couldn't hold her pee any longer. Her and her classmates were four years old. They already felt empowered enough to police her use of the so-called public bathrooms. She was four years old. She had already been taught the brutal lesson that there was no bathroom door at preschool with a sign on it that welcomed people like her. She'd already learned that bathrooms were going to be a problem, and that problem started with her and was hers alone. So my friend asked me to talk to her little daughter, and I did. I wanted to tell her that me and her mom were going to march on down and talk to that school, and the problem was going to go away, but I knew that wasn't true. I wanted to tell her that it was all going to get better when she got older, but I couldn't. So I asked her to tell me the story of what had happened, asked her to tell me how it made her feel. "Mad and sad," she told me. So I told her that she wasn't alone and that it wasn't right what had happened to her, and then she asked me if I had ever peed in my pants before. I said yes, I had, but not for a really long time. (Laughter) Which of course was a lie, because you know how you hit, like, 42 or 43, and sometimes you just, I don't know, you pee a little bit when you cough or sneeze, when you're running upstairs, or you're stretching. Don't lie. It happens. Right? She doesn't need to know that, I figure. (Laughter) I told her, when you get older, your bladder is going to grow bigger, too. When you get old like me, you're going to be able to hold your pee for way longer, I promised her. "Until you can get home?" she asked me. I said, "Yes, until you can get home." She seemed to take some comfort in that. So let's just build some single stall, gender-neutral bathrooms with a little bench for getting changed into your gym clothes. We can't change the world overnight for our children, but we can give them a safe and private place to escape that world, if only for just a minute. This we can do. So let's just do it. And if you are one of those people who is sitting out there right now already coming up with a list of reasons in your head why this is not a priority, or it's too expensive, or telling yourself that giving a trans person a safe place to pee or get changed in supports a lifestyle choice that you feel offends your morality, or your masculinity, or your religious beliefs, then let me just appeal to the part of your heart that probably, hopefully, does care about the rest of the population. If you can't bring yourself to care enough about people like me, then what about women and girls with body image issues? What about anyone with body image stuff going on? What about that boy at school who is a foot shorter than his classmates, whose voice still hasn't dropped yet? Hey? Oh, grade eight, what a cruel master you can be. Right? What about people with anxiety issues? What about people with disabilities or who need assistance in there? What about folks with bodies who, for whatever reason, don't fit into the mainstream idea of what a body should look like? How many of us still feel shy or afraid to disrobe in front of our peers, and how many of us allow that fear to keep us from something as important as physical exercise? Would all those people not benefit from these single stall facilities? We can't change transphobic minds overnight, but we can give everybody a place to get changed in so that we can all get to work making the world safer for all of us. Thank you for listening. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
Dive into an ocean photographer's world	{0: 'Thomas Peschak strives to merge photojournalism and cutting edge science to create powerful media projects that tackle critical marine conservation issues.'}	Mission Blue II	As a kid, I used to dream about the ocean. It was this wild place full of color and life, home to these alien-looking, fantastical creatures. I pictured big sharks ruling the food chain and saw graceful sea turtles dancing across coral reefs. As a marine biologist turned photographer, I've spent most of my career looking for places as magical as those I used to dream about when I was little. As you can see, I began exploring bodies of water at a fairly young age. But the first time I truly went underwater, I was about 10 years old. And I can still vividly remember furiously finning to reach this old, encrusted cannon on a shallow coral reef. And when I finally managed to grab hold of it, I looked up, and I was instantly surrounded by fish in all colors of the rainbow. That was the day I fell in love with the ocean. Thomas Peschak Conservation Photographer In my 40 years on this planet, I've had the great privilege to explore some of its most incredible seascapes for National Geographic Magazine and the Save Our Seas Foundation. I've photographed everything from really, really big sharks to dainty ones that fit in the palm of your hand. I've smelled the fishy, fishy breath of humpback whales feeding just feet away from me in the cold seas off Canada's Great Bear Rainforest. And I've been privy to the mating rituals of green sea turtles in the Mozambique Channel. Everyone on this planet affects and is affected by the ocean. And the pristine seas I used to dream of as a child are becoming harder and harder to find. They are becoming more compressed and more threatened. As we humans continue to maintain our role as the leading predator on earth, I've witnessed and photographed many of these ripple effects firsthand. For a long time, I thought I had to shock my audience out of their indifference with disturbing images. And while this approach has merits, I have come full circle. I believe that the best way for me to effect change is to sell love. I guess I'm a matchmaker of sorts and as a photographer, I have the rare opportunity to reveal animals and entire ecosystems that lie hidden beneath the ocean's surface. You can't love something and become a champion for it if you don't know it exists. Uncovering this — that is the power of conservation photography. (Music) I've visited hundreds of marine locations, but there are a handful of seascapes that have touched me incredibly deeply. The first time I experienced that kind of high was about 10 years ago, off South Africa's rugged, wild coast. And every June and July, enormous shoals of sardines travel northwards in a mass migration we call the Sardine Run. And boy, do those fish have good reason to run. In hot pursuit are hoards of hungry and agile predators. Common dolphins hunt together and they can separate some of the sardines from the main shoal and they create bait balls. They drive and trap the fish upward against the ocean surface and then they rush in to dine on this pulsating and movable feast. Close behind are sharks. Now, most people believe that sharks and dolphins are these mortal enemies, but during the Sardine Run, they actually coexist. In fact, dolphins actually help sharks feed more effectively. Without dolphins, the bait balls are more dispersed and sharks often end up with what I call a sardine donut, or a mouth full of water. Now, while I've had a few spicy moments with sharks on the sardine run, I know they don't see me as prey. However, I get bumped and tail-slapped just like any other guest at this rowdy, rowdy banquet. From the shores of Africa we travel east, across the vastness that is the Indian Ocean to the Maldives, an archipelago of coral islands. And during the stormy southwest monsoon, manta rays from all across the archipelago travel to a tiny speck in Baa Atoll called Hanifaru. Armies of crustaceans, most no bigger than the size of your pupils, are the mainstay of the manta ray's diet. When plankton concentrations become patchy, manta rays feed alone and they somersault themselves backwards again and again, very much like a puppy chasing its own tail. (Music) However, when plankton densities increase, the mantas line up head-to-tail to form these long feeding chains, and any tasty morsel that escapes the first or second manta in line is surely to be gobbled up by the next or the one after. As plankton levels peak in the bay, the mantas swim closer and closer together in a unique behavior we call cyclone feeding. And as they swirl in tight formation, this multi-step column of mantas creates its own vortex, sucking in and delivering the plankton right into the mantas' cavernous mouths. The experience of diving amongst such masses of hundreds of rays is truly unforgettable. (Music) When I first photographed Hanifaru, the site enjoyed no protection and was threatened by development. And working with NGOs like the Manta Trust, my images eventually helped Hanifaru become a marine-protected area. Now, fisherman from neighboring islands, they once hunted these manta rays to make traditional drums from their skins. Today, they are the most ardent conservation champions and manta rays earn the Maldivian economy in excess of 8 million dollars every single year. I have always wanted to travel back in time to an era where maps were mostly blank or they read, "There be dragons." And today, the closest I've come is visiting remote atolls in the western Indian Ocean. Far, far away from shipping lanes and fishing fleets, diving into these waters is a poignant reminder of what our oceans once looked like. Very few people have heard of Bassas da India, a tiny speck of coral in the Mozambique Channel. Its reef forms a protective outer barrier and the inner lagoon is a nursery ground for Galapagos sharks. These sharks are anything but shy, even during the day. I had a bit of a hunch that they'd be even bolder and more abundant at night. (Music) Never before have I encountered so many sharks on a single coral outcrop. Capturing and sharing moments like this — that reminds me why I chose my path. Earlier this year, I was on assignment for National Geographic Magazine in Baja California. And about halfway down the peninsula on the Pacific side lies San Ignacio Lagoon, a critical calving ground for gray whales. For 100 years, this coast was the scene of a wholesale slaughter, where more than 20,000 gray whales were killed, leaving only a few hundred survivors. Today the descendents of these same whales nudge their youngsters to the surface to play and even interact with us. (Music) This species truly has made a remarkable comeback. Now, on the other side of the peninsula lies Cabo Pulmo, a sleepy fishing village. Decades of overfishing had brought them close to collapse. In 1995, local fisherman convinced the authorities to proclaim their waters a marine reserve. But what happened next was nothing short of miraculous. In 2005, after only a single decade of protection, scientists measured the largest recovery of fish ever recorded. But don't take my word for it — come with me. On a single breath, swim with me in deep, into one of the largest and densest schools of fish I have ever encountered. (Music) We all have the ability to be creators of hope. And through my photography, I want to pass on the message that it is not too late for our oceans. And particularly, I want to focus on nature's resilience in the face of 7.3 billion people. My hope is that in the future, I will have to search much, much harder to make photographs like this, while creating images that showcase our respectful coexistence with the ocean. Those will hopefully become an everyday occurrence for me. To thrive and survive in my profession, you really have to be a hopeless optimist. And I always operate on the assumption that the next great picture that will effect change is right around the corner, behind the next coral head, inside the next lagoon or possibly, in the one after it. (Music)
How yarn bombing grew into a worldwide movement	{0: "Magda Sayeg uses handmade, eye-catching yarn bombs to shake up the way we see the world and make us notice things we hadn't seen before."}	TEDYouth 2015	I'm a textile artist most widely known for starting the yarn bombing movement. Yarn bombing is when you take knitted or crocheted material out into the urban environment, graffiti-style — or, more specifically, without permission and unsanctioned. But when I started this over 10 years ago, I didn't have a word for it, I didn't have any ambitious notions about it, I had no visions of grandeur. All I wanted to see was something warm and fuzzy and human-like on the cold, steel, gray facade that I looked at everyday. So I wrapped the door handle. I call this the Alpha Piece. Little did I know that this tiny piece would change the course of my life. So clearly the reaction was interesting. It intrigued me and I thought, "What else could I do?" Could I do something in the public domain that would get the same reaction? So I wrapped the stop sign pole near my house. The reaction was wild. People would park their cars and get out of their cars and stare at it, and scratch their heads and stare at it, and take pictures of it and take pictures next to it, and all of that was really exciting to me and I wanted to do every stop sign pole in the neighborhood. And the more that I did, the stronger the reaction. So at this point I'm smitten. I'm hooked. This was all seductive. I found my new passion and the urban environment was my playground. So this is some of my early work. I was very curious about this idea of enhancing the ordinary, the mundane, even the ugly, and not taking away its identity or its functionality but just giving it a well-tailored suit out of knitting. And this was fun for me. It was really fun to take inanimate objects and have them come to life. So ... I think we all see the humor in this, but — (Laughter) I was at a point where I wanted to take it seriously. I wanted to analyze it. I wanted to know why I was letting this take over my life, why I was passionate about it, why were other people reacting so strongly to it. And I realized something. We all live in this fast-paced, digital world, but we still crave and desire something that's relatable. I think we've all become desensitized by our overdeveloped cities that we live in, and billboards and advertisements, and giant parking lots, and we don't even complain about that stuff anymore. So when you stumble upon a stop sign pole that's wrapped in knitting and it seems so out of place and then gradually — weirdly — you find a connection to it, that is the moment. That is the moment I love and that is the moment I love to share with others. So at this point, my curiosity grew. It went from the fire hydrants and the stop sign poles to what else can I do with this material. Can I do something big and large-scale and insurmountable? So that's when the bus happened. This was a real game changer for me. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for this one. At this point, people were recognizing my work but there wasn't much out there that was wrapped in knitting that was large-scale, and this definitely was the first city bus to be wrapped in knitting. So at this point, I'm experiencing, or I'm witnessing something interesting. I may have started yarn bombing but I certainly don't own it anymore. It had reached global status. People from all over the world were doing this. And I know this because I would travel to certain parts of the world that I'd never been to, and I'd stumble upon a stop sign pole and I knew I didn't wrap it. So as I pursued my own goals with my art — this is a lot of my recent work — so was yarn bombing. Yarn bombing was also growing. And that experience showed me the hidden power of this craft and showed me that there was this common language I had with the rest of the world. It was through this granny hobby — this unassuming hobby — that I found commonality with people that I never thought I'd have a connection with. So as I tell my story today, I'd also like to convey to you that hidden power can be found in the most unassuming places, and we all possess skills that are just waiting to be discovered. If you think about our hands, these tools that are connected to us, and what they're capable of doing — building houses and furniture, and painting giant murals — and most of the time we hold a controller or a cell phone. And I'm totally guilty of this as well. But if you think about it, what would happen if you put those things down? What would you make? What would you create with your own hands? A lot of people think that I am a master knitter but I actually couldn't knit a sweater to save my life. But I did something interesting with knitting that had never been done before. I also wasn't "supposed to be" an artist in the sense that I wasn't formally trained to do this — I'm a math major actually. So I didn't think this was in the cards for me, but I also know that I didn't stumble upon this. And when this happened to me, I held on tight, I fought for it and I'm proud to say that I am a working artist today. So as we ponder the future, know that your future might not be so seamless. And one day, you might be as bored as I was and knit a door handle to change your world forever. Thank you. (Applause)
What really happens when you mix medications?	{0: 'Russ Altman uses machine learning to better understand adverse effects of medication.'}	TEDMED 2015	So you go to the doctor and get some tests. The doctor determines that you have high cholesterol and you would benefit from medication to treat it. So you get a pillbox. You have some confidence, your physician has some confidence that this is going to work. The company that invented it did a lot of studies, submitted it to the FDA. They studied it very carefully, skeptically, they approved it. They have a rough idea of how it works, they have a rough idea of what the side effects are. It should be OK. You have a little more of a conversation with your physician and the physician is a little worried because you've been blue, haven't felt like yourself, you haven't been able to enjoy things in life quite as much as you usually do. Your physician says, "You know, I think you have some depression. I'm going to have to give you another pill." So now we're talking about two medications. This pill also — millions of people have taken it, the company did studies, the FDA looked at it — all good. Think things should go OK. Think things should go OK. Well, wait a minute. How much have we studied these two together? Well, it's very hard to do that. In fact, it's not traditionally done. We totally depend on what we call "post-marketing surveillance," after the drugs hit the market. How can we figure out if bad things are happening between two medications? Three? Five? Seven? Ask your favorite person who has several diagnoses how many medications they're on. Why do I care about this problem? I care about it deeply. I'm an informatics and data science guy and really, in my opinion, the only hope — only hope — to understand these interactions is to leverage lots of different sources of data in order to figure out when drugs can be used together safely and when it's not so safe. So let me tell you a data science story. And it begins with my student Nick. Let's call him "Nick," because that's his name. (Laughter) Nick was a young student. I said, "You know, Nick, we have to understand how drugs work and how they work together and how they work separately, and we don't have a great understanding. But the FDA has made available an amazing database. It's a database of adverse events. They literally put on the web — publicly available, you could all download it right now — hundreds of thousands of adverse event reports from patients, doctors, companies, pharmacists. And these reports are pretty simple: it has all the diseases that the patient has, all the drugs that they're on, and all the adverse events, or side effects, that they experience. It is not all of the adverse events that are occurring in America today, but it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of drugs. So I said to Nick, "Let's think about glucose. Glucose is very important, and we know it's involved with diabetes. Let's see if we can understand glucose response. I sent Nick off. Nick came back. "Russ," he said, "I've created a classifier that can look at the side effects of a drug based on looking at this database, and can tell you whether that drug is likely to change glucose or not." He did it. It was very simple, in a way. He took all the drugs that were known to change glucose and a bunch of drugs that don't change glucose, and said, "What's the difference in their side effects? Differences in fatigue? In appetite? In urination habits?" All those things conspired to give him a really good predictor. He said, "Russ, I can predict with 93 percent accuracy when a drug will change glucose." I said, "Nick, that's great." He's a young student, you have to build his confidence. "But Nick, there's a problem. It's that every physician in the world knows all the drugs that change glucose, because it's core to our practice. So it's great, good job, but not really that interesting, definitely not publishable." (Laughter) He said, "I know, Russ. I thought you might say that." Nick is smart. "I thought you might say that, so I did one other experiment. I looked at people in this database who were on two drugs, and I looked for signals similar, glucose-changing signals, for people taking two drugs, where each drug alone did not change glucose, but together I saw a strong signal." And I said, "Oh! You're clever. Good idea. Show me the list." And there's a bunch of drugs, not very exciting. But what caught my eye was, on the list there were two drugs: paroxetine, or Paxil, an antidepressant; and pravastatin, or Pravachol, a cholesterol medication. And I said, "Huh. There are millions of Americans on those two drugs." In fact, we learned later, 15 million Americans on paroxetine at the time, 15 million on pravastatin, and a million, we estimated, on both. So that's a million people who might be having some problems with their glucose if this machine-learning mumbo jumbo that he did in the FDA database actually holds up. But I said, "It's still not publishable, because I love what you did with the mumbo jumbo, with the machine learning, but it's not really standard-of-proof evidence that we have." So we have to do something else. Let's go into the Stanford electronic medical record. We have a copy of it that's OK for research, we removed identifying information. And I said, "Let's see if people on these two drugs have problems with their glucose." Now there are thousands and thousands of people in the Stanford medical records that take paroxetine and pravastatin. But we needed special patients. We needed patients who were on one of them and had a glucose measurement, then got the second one and had another glucose measurement, all within a reasonable period of time — something like two months. And when we did that, we found 10 patients. However, eight out of the 10 had a bump in their glucose when they got the second P — we call this P and P — when they got the second P. Either one could be first, the second one comes up, glucose went up 20 milligrams per deciliter. Just as a reminder, you walk around normally, if you're not diabetic, with a glucose of around 90. And if it gets up to 120, 125, your doctor begins to think about a potential diagnosis of diabetes. So a 20 bump — pretty significant. I said, "Nick, this is very cool. But, I'm sorry, we still don't have a paper, because this is 10 patients and — give me a break — it's not enough patients." So we said, what can we do? And we said, let's call our friends at Harvard and Vanderbilt, who also — Harvard in Boston, Vanderbilt in Nashville, who also have electronic medical records similar to ours. Let's see if they can find similar patients with the one P, the other P, the glucose measurements in that range that we need. God bless them, Vanderbilt in one week found 40 such patients, same trend. Harvard found 100 patients, same trend. So at the end, we had 150 patients from three diverse medical centers that were telling us that patients getting these two drugs were having their glucose bump somewhat significantly. More interestingly, we had left out diabetics, because diabetics already have messed up glucose. When we looked at the glucose of diabetics, it was going up 60 milligrams per deciliter, not just 20. This was a big deal, and we said, "We've got to publish this." We submitted the paper. It was all data evidence, data from the FDA, data from Stanford, data from Vanderbilt, data from Harvard. We had not done a single real experiment. But we were nervous. So Nick, while the paper was in review, went to the lab. We found somebody who knew about lab stuff. I don't do that. I take care of patients, but I don't do pipettes. They taught us how to feed mice drugs. We took mice and we gave them one P, paroxetine. We gave some other mice pravastatin. And we gave a third group of mice both of them. And lo and behold, glucose went up 20 to 60 milligrams per deciliter in the mice. So the paper was accepted based on the informatics evidence alone, but we added a little note at the end, saying, oh by the way, if you give these to mice, it goes up. That was great, and the story could have ended there. But I still have six and a half minutes. (Laughter) So we were sitting around thinking about all of this, and I don't remember who thought of it, but somebody said, "I wonder if patients who are taking these two drugs are noticing side effects of hyperglycemia. They could and they should. How would we ever determine that?" We said, well, what do you do? You're taking a medication, one new medication or two, and you get a funny feeling. What do you do? You go to Google and type in the two drugs you're taking or the one drug you're taking, and you type in "side effects." What are you experiencing? So we said OK, let's ask Google if they will share their search logs with us, so that we can look at the search logs and see if patients are doing these kinds of searches. Google, I am sorry to say, denied our request. So I was bummed. I was at a dinner with a colleague who works at Microsoft Research and I said, "We wanted to do this study, Google said no, it's kind of a bummer." He said, "Well, we have the Bing searches." (Laughter) Yeah. That's great. Now I felt like I was — (Laughter) I felt like I was talking to Nick again. He works for one of the largest companies in the world, and I'm already trying to make him feel better. But he said, "No, Russ — you might not understand. We not only have Bing searches, but if you use Internet Explorer to do searches at Google, Yahoo, Bing, any ... Then, for 18 months, we keep that data for research purposes only." I said, "Now you're talking!" This was Eric Horvitz, my friend at Microsoft. So we did a study where we defined 50 words that a regular person might type in if they're having hyperglycemia, like "fatigue," "loss of appetite," "urinating a lot," "peeing a lot" — forgive me, but that's one of the things you might type in. So we had 50 phrases that we called the "diabetes words." And we did first a baseline. And it turns out that about .5 to one percent of all searches on the Internet involve one of those words. So that's our baseline rate. If people type in "paroxetine" or "Paxil" — those are synonyms — and one of those words, the rate goes up to about two percent of diabetes-type words, if you already know that there's that "paroxetine" word. If it's "pravastatin," the rate goes up to about three percent from the baseline. If both "paroxetine" and "pravastatin" are present in the query, it goes up to 10 percent, a huge three- to four-fold increase in those searches with the two drugs that we were interested in, and diabetes-type words or hyperglycemia-type words. We published this, and it got some attention. The reason it deserves attention is that patients are telling us their side effects indirectly through their searches. We brought this to the attention of the FDA. They were interested. They have set up social media surveillance programs to collaborate with Microsoft, which had a nice infrastructure for doing this, and others, to look at Twitter feeds, to look at Facebook feeds, to look at search logs, to try to see early signs that drugs, either individually or together, are causing problems. What do I take from this? Why tell this story? Well, first of all, we have now the promise of big data and medium-sized data to help us understand drug interactions and really, fundamentally, drug actions. How do drugs work? This will create and has created a new ecosystem for understanding how drugs work and to optimize their use. Nick went on; he's a professor at Columbia now. He did this in his PhD for hundreds of pairs of drugs. He found several very important interactions, and so we replicated this and we showed that this is a way that really works for finding drug-drug interactions. However, there's a couple of things. We don't just use pairs of drugs at a time. As I said before, there are patients on three, five, seven, nine drugs. Have they been studied with respect to their nine-way interaction? Yes, we can do pair-wise, A and B, A and C, A and D, but what about A, B, C, D, E, F, G all together, being taken by the same patient, perhaps interacting with each other in ways that either makes them more effective or less effective or causes side effects that are unexpected? We really have no idea. It's a blue sky, open field for us to use data to try to understand the interaction of drugs. Two more lessons: I want you to think about the power that we were able to generate with the data from people who had volunteered their adverse reactions through their pharmacists, through themselves, through their doctors, the people who allowed the databases at Stanford, Harvard, Vanderbilt, to be used for research. People are worried about data. They're worried about their privacy and security — they should be. We need secure systems. But we can't have a system that closes that data off, because it is too rich of a source of inspiration, innovation and discovery for new things in medicine. And the final thing I want to say is, in this case we found two drugs and it was a little bit of a sad story. The two drugs actually caused problems. They increased glucose. They could throw somebody into diabetes who would otherwise not be in diabetes, and so you would want to use the two drugs very carefully together, perhaps not together, make different choices when you're prescribing. But there was another possibility. We could have found two drugs or three drugs that were interacting in a beneficial way. We could have found new effects of drugs that neither of them has alone, but together, instead of causing a side effect, they could be a new and novel treatment for diseases that don't have treatments or where the treatments are not effective. If we think about drug treatment today, all the major breakthroughs — for HIV, for tuberculosis, for depression, for diabetes — it's always a cocktail of drugs. And so the upside here, and the subject for a different TED Talk on a different day, is how can we use the same data sources to find good effects of drugs in combination that will provide us new treatments, new insights into how drugs work and enable us to take care of our patients even better? Thank you very much. (Applause)

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