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Our refugee system is failing. Here's how we can fix it | {0: 'Alexander Betts explores ways societies might empower refugees rather than pushing them to the margins.'} | TED2016 | There are times when I feel really quite ashamed to be a European. In the last year, more than a million people arrived in Europe in need of our help, and our response, frankly, has been pathetic. There are just so many contradictions. We mourn the tragic death of two-year-old Alan Kurdi, and yet, since then, more than 200 children have subsequently drowned in the Mediterranean. We have international treaties that recognize that refugees are a shared responsibility, and yet we accept that tiny Lebanon hosts more Syrians than the whole of Europe combined. We lament the existence of human smugglers, and yet we make that the only viable route to seek asylum in Europe. We have labor shortages, and yet we exclude people who fit our economic and demographic needs from coming to Europe. We proclaim our liberal values in opposition to fundamentalist Islam, and yet — we have repressive policies that detain child asylum seekers, that separate children from their families, and that seize property from refugees. What are we doing? How has the situation come to this, that we've adopted such an inhumane response to a humanitarian crisis? I don't believe it's because people don't care, or at least I don't want to believe it's because people don't care. I believe it's because our politicians lack a vision, a vision for how to adapt an international refugee system created over 50 years ago for a changing and globalized world. And so what I want to do is take a step back and ask two really fundamental questions, the two questions we all need to ask. First, why is the current system not working? And second, what can we do to fix it? So the modern refugee regime was created in the aftermath of the Second World War by these guys. Its basic aim is to ensure that when a state fails, or worse, turns against its own people, people have somewhere to go, to live in safety and dignity until they can go home. It was created precisely for situations like the situation we see in Syria today. Through an international convention signed by 147 governments, the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, and an international organization, UNHCR, states committed to reciprocally admit people onto their territory who flee conflict and persecution. But today, that system is failing. In theory, refugees have a right to seek asylum. In practice, our immigration policies block the path to safety. In theory, refugees have a right to a pathway to integration, or return to the country they've come from. But in practice, they get stuck in almost indefinite limbo. In theory, refugees are a shared global responsibility. In practice, geography means that countries proximate the conflict take the overwhelming majority of the world's refugees. The system isn't broken because the rules are wrong. It's that we're not applying them adequately to a changing world, and that's what we need to reconsider. So I want to explain to you a little bit about how the current system works. How does the refugee regime actually work? But not from a top-down institutional perspective, rather from the perspective of a refugee. So imagine a Syrian woman. Let's call her Amira. And Amira to me represents many of the people I've met in the region. Amira, like around 25 percent of the world's refugees, is a woman with children, and she can't go home because she comes from this city that you see before you, Homs, a once beautiful and historic city now under rubble. And so Amira can't go back there. But Amira also has no hope of resettlement to a third country, because that's a lottery ticket only available to less than one percent of the world's refugees. So Amira and her family face an almost impossible choice. They have three basic options. The first option is that Amira can take her family to a camp. In the camp, she might get assistance, but there are very few prospects for Amira and her family. Camps are in bleak, arid locations, often in the desert. In the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, you can hear the shells across the border in Syria at nighttime. There's restricted economic activity. Education is often of poor quality. And around the world, some 80 percent of refugees who are in camps have to stay for at least five years. It's a miserable existence, and that's probably why, in reality, only nine percent of Syrians choose that option. Alternatively, Amira can head to an urban area in a neighboring country, like Amman or Beirut. That's an option that about 75 percent of Syrian refugees have taken. But there, there's great difficulty as well. Refugees in such urban areas don't usually have the right to work. They don't usually get significant access to assistance. And so when Amira and her family have used up their basic savings, they're left with very little and likely to face urban destitution. So there's a third alternative, and it's one that increasing numbers of Syrians are taking. Amira can seek some hope for her family by risking their lives on a dangerous and perilous journey to another country, and it's that which we're seeing in Europe today. Around the world, we present refugees with an almost impossible choice between three options: encampment, urban destitution and dangerous journeys. For refugees, that choice is the global refugee regime today. But I think it's a false choice. I think we can reconsider that choice. The reason why we limit those options is because we think that those are the only options that are available to refugees, and they're not. Politicians frame the issue as a zero-sum issue, that if we benefit refugees, we're imposing costs on citizens. We tend to have a collective assumption that refugees are an inevitable cost or burden to society. But they don't have to. They can contribute. So what I want to argue is there are ways in which we can expand that choice set and still benefit everyone else: the host states and communities, our societies and refugees themselves. And I want to suggest four ways we can transform the paradigm of how we think about refugees. All four ways have one thing in common: they're all ways in which we take the opportunities of globalization, mobility and markets, and update the way we think about the refugee issue. The first one I want to think about is the idea of enabling environments, and it starts from a very basic recognition that refugees are human beings like everyone else, but they're just in extraordinary circumstances. Together with my colleagues in Oxford, we've embarked on a research project in Uganda looking at the economic lives of refugees. We chose Uganda not because it's representative of all host countries. It's not. It's exceptional. Unlike most host countries around the world, what Uganda has done is give refugees economic opportunity. It gives them the right to work. It gives them freedom of movement. And the results of that are extraordinary both for refugees and the host community. In the capital city, Kampala, we found that 21 percent of refugees own a business that employs other people, and 40 percent of those employees are nationals of the host country. In other words, refugees are making jobs for citizens of the host country. Even in the camps, we found extraordinary examples of vibrant, flourishing and entrepreneurial businesses. For example, in a settlement called Nakivale, we found examples of Congolese refugees running digital music exchange businesses. We found a Rwandan who runs a business that's available to allow the youth to play computer games on recycled games consoles and recycled televisions. Against the odds of extreme constraint, refugees are innovating, and the gentleman you see before you is a Congolese guy called Demou-Kay. Demou-Kay arrived in the settlement with very little, but he wanted to be a filmmaker. So with friends and colleagues, he started a community radio station, he rented a video camera, and he's now making films. He made two documentary films with and for our team, and he's making a successful business out of very little. It's those kinds of examples that should guide our response to refugees. Rather than seeing refugees as inevitably dependent upon humanitarian assistance, we need to provide them with opportunities for human flourishing. Yes, clothes, blankets, shelter, food are all important in the emergency phase, but we need to also look beyond that. We need to provide opportunities to connectivity, electricity, education, the right to work, access to capital and banking. All the ways in which we take for granted that we are plugged in to the global economy can and should apply to refugees. The second idea I want to discuss is economic zones. Unfortunately, not every host country in the world takes the approach Uganda has taken. Most host countries don't open up their economies to refugees in the same way. But there are still pragmatic alternative options that we can use. Last April, I traveled to Jordan with my colleague, the development economist Paul Collier, and we brainstormed an idea while we were there with the international community and the government, an idea to bring jobs to Syrians while supporting Jordan's national development strategy. The idea is for an economic zone, one in which we could potentially integrate the employment of refugees alongside the employment of Jordanian host nationals. And just 15 minutes away from the Zaatari refugee camp, home to 83,000 refugees, is an existing economic zone called the King Hussein Bin Talal Development Area. The government has spent over a hundred million dollars connecting it to the electricity grid, connecting it to the road network, but it lacked two things: access to labor and inward investment. So what if refugees were able to work there rather than being stuck in camps, able to support their families and develop skills through vocational training before they go back to Syria? We recognized that that could benefit Jordan, whose development strategy requires it to make the leap as a middle income country to manufacturing. It could benefit refugees, but it could also contribute to the postconflict reconstruction of Syria by recognizing that we need to incubate refugees as the best source of eventually rebuilding Syria. We published the idea in the journal Foreign Affairs. King Abdullah has picked up on the idea. It was announced at the London Syria Conference two weeks ago, and a pilot will begin in the summer. (Applause) The third idea that I want to put to you is preference matching between states and refugees to lead to the kinds of happy outcomes you see here in the selfie featuring Angela Merkel and a Syrian refugee. What we rarely do is ask refugees what they want, where they want to go, but I'd argue we can do that and still make everyone better off. The economist Alvin Roth has developed the idea of matching markets, ways in which the preference ranking of the parties shapes an eventual match. My colleagues Will Jones and Alex Teytelboym have explored ways in which that idea could be applied to refugees, to ask refugees to rank their preferred destinations, but also allow states to rank the types of refugees they want on skills criteria or language criteria and allow those to match. Now, of course you'd need to build in quotas on things like diversity and vulnerability, but it's a way of increasing the possibilities of matching. The matching idea has been successfully used to match, for instance, students with university places, to match kidney donors with patients, and it underlies the kind of algorithms that exist on dating websites. So why not apply that to give refugees greater choice? It could also be used at the national level, where one of the great challenges we face is to persuade local communities to accept refugees. And at the moment, in my country, for instance, we often send engineers to rural areas and farmers to the cities, which makes no sense at all. So matching markets offer a potential way to bring those preferences together and listen to the needs and demands of the populations that host and the refugees themselves. The fourth idea I want to put to you is of humanitarian visas. Much of the tragedy and chaos we've seen in Europe was entirely avoidable. It stems from a fundamental contradiction in Europe's asylum policy, which is the following: that in order to seek asylum in Europe, you have to arrive spontaneously by embarking on those dangerous journeys that I described. But why should those journeys be necessary in an era of the budget airline and modern consular capabilities? They're completely unnecessary journeys, and last year, they led to the deaths of over 3,000 people on Europe's borders and within European territory. If refugees were simply allowed to travel directly and seek asylum in Europe, we would avoid that, and there's a way of doing that through something called a humanitarian visa, that allows people to collect a visa at an embassy or a consulate in a neighboring country and then simply pay their own way through a ferry or a flight to Europe. It costs around a thousand euros to take a smuggler from Turkey to the Greek islands. It costs 200 euros to take a budget airline from Bodrum to Frankfurt. If we allowed refugees to do that, it would have major advantages. It would save lives, it would undercut the entire market for smugglers, and it would remove the chaos we see from Europe's front line in areas like the Greek islands. It's politics that prevents us doing that rather than a rational solution. And this is an idea that has been applied. Brazil has adopted a pioneering approach where over 2,000 Syrians have been able to get humanitarian visas, enter Brazil, and claim refugee status on arrival in Brazil. And in that scheme, every Syrian who has gone through it has received refugee status and been recognized as a genuine refugee. There is a historical precedent for it as well. Between 1922 and 1942, these Nansen passports were used as travel documents to allow 450,000 Assyrians, Turks and Chechens to travel across Europe and claim refugee status elsewhere in Europe. And the Nansen International Refugee Office received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of this being a viable strategy. So all four of these ideas that I've presented you are ways in which we can expand Amira's choice set. They're ways in which we can have greater choice for refugees beyond those basic, impossible three options I explained to you and still leave others better off. In conclusion, we really need a new vision, a vision that enlarges the choices of refugees but recognizes that they don't have to be a burden. There's nothing inevitable about refugees being a cost. Yes, they are a humanitarian responsibility, but they're human beings with skills, talents, aspirations, with the ability to make contributions — if we let them. In the new world, migration is not going to go away. What we've seen in Europe will be with us for many years. People will continue to travel, they'll continue to be displaced, and we need to find rational, realistic ways of managing this — not based on the old logics of humanitarian assistance, not based on logics of charity, but building on the opportunities offered by globalization, markets and mobility. I'd urge you all to wake up and urge our politicians to wake up to this challenge. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Uber's plan to get more people into fewer cars | {0: "As Uber's co-founder and former CEO, Travis Kalanick is disrupting an entrenched industry and reinventing urban transportation."} | TED2016 | Today I wanted to — well, this morning — I want to talk about the future of human-driven transportation; about how we can cut congestion, pollution and parking by getting more people into fewer cars; and how we can do it with the technology that's in our pockets. And yes, I'm talking about smartphones ... not self-driving cars. But to get started we've got to go back over 100 years. Because it turns out there was an Uber way before Uber. And if it had survived, the future of transportation would probably already be here. So let me introduce you to the jitney. In 1914 it was created or invented by a guy named LP Draper. He was a car salesman from LA, and he had an idea. Well, he was cruising around downtown Los Angeles, my hometown, and he saw trolleys with long lines of people trying to get to where they wanted to go. He said, well, why don't I just put a sign on my car that takes people wherever they want to go for a jitney — that was slang for a nickel. And so people jumped on board, and not just in Los Angeles but across the country. And within one year, by 1915, there were 50,000 rides per day in Seattle, 45,000 rides per day in Kansas and 150,000 rides per day in Los Angeles. To give you some perspective, Uber in Los Angeles is doing 157,000 rides per day, today ... 100 years later. And so these are the trolley guys, the existing transportation monopoly at the time. They were clearly not happy about the jitney juggernaut. And so they got to work and they went to cities across the country and got regulations put in place to slow down the growth of the jitney. And there were all kinds of regulations. There were licenses — often they were pricey. In some cities, if you were a jitney driver, you were required to be in the jitney for 16 hours a day. In other cities, they required two jitney drivers for one jitney. But there was a really interesting regulation which was they had to put a backseat light — install it in every Jitney — to stop a new pernicious innovation which they called spooning. (Laughter) All right. So what happened? Well, within a year this thing had taken off. But the jitney, by 1919, was regulated completely out of existence. That's unfortunate ... because, well, when you can't share a car, then you have to own one. And car ownership skyrocketed and it's no wonder that by 2007, there was a car for every man, woman and child in the United States. And that phenomenon had gone global. In China by 2011, there were more car sales happening in China than in the US. Now, all this private ownership of course had a public cost. In the US, we spend 7 billion hours a year, wasted, sitting in traffic. 160 billion dollars in lost productivity, of course also sitting in traffic, and one-fifth of all of our carbon footprint is spewed out in the air by those cars that we're sitting in. Now, that's only four percent of our problem though. Because if you have to own a car then that means 96 percent of the time your car is sitting idle. And so, up to 30 percent of our land and our space is used storing these hunks of steel. We even have skyscrapers built for cars. That's the world we live in today. Now, cities have been dealing with this problem for decades. It's called mass transit. And even in a city like New York City, one of the most densely populated in the world and one of the most sophisticated mass transit systems in the world, there are still 2.5 million cars that go over those bridges every day. Why is that? Well, it's because mass transit hasn't yet figured out how to get to everybody's doorstep. And so back in San Francisco, where I live, the situation's much worse, in fact, much worse around the world. And so the beginning of Uber in 2010 was — well, we just wanted to push a button and get a ride. We didn't have any grand ambitions. But it just turned out that lots of people wanted to push a button and get a ride, and ultimately what we started to see was a lot of duplicate rides. We saw a lot of people pushing the same button at the same time going essentially to the same place. And so we started thinking about, well, how do we make those two trips and turn them into one. Because if we did, that ride would be a lot cheaper — up to 50 percent cheaper — and of course for the city you've got a lot more people and a lot fewer cars. And so the big question for us was: would it work? Could you have a cheaper ride cheap enough that people would be willing to share it? And the answer, fortunately, is a resounding yes. In San Francisco, before uberPOOL, we had — well, everybody would take their car wherever the heck they wanted. And the bright colors is where we have the most cars. And once we introduced uberPOOL, well, you see there's not as many bright colors. More people getting around the city in fewer cars, taking cars off the road. It looks like uberPOOL is working. And so we rolled it out in Los Angeles eight months ago. And since then, we've taken 7.9 million miles off the roads and we've taken 1.4 thousand metric tons of CO2 out of the air. But the part that I'm really — (Applause) But my favorite statistic — remember, I'm from LA, I spent years of my life sitting behind the wheel, going, "How do we fix this?" — my favorite part is that eight months later, we have added 100,000 new people that are carpooling every week. Now, in China everything is supersized, and so we're doing 15 million uberPOOL trips per month, that's 500,000 per day. And of course we're seeing that exponential growth happen. In fact, we're seeing it in LA, too. And when I talk to my team, we don't talk about, "Hey, well, 100,000 people carpooling every week and we're done." How do we get that to a million? And in China, well, that could be several million. And so uberPOOL is a very great solution for urban carpooling. But what about the suburbs? This is the street where I grew up in Los Angeles, it's actually a suburb called Northridge, California, and, well — look, those mailboxes, they kind of just go on forever. And every morning at about the same time, cars roll of out their driveway, most of them, one person in the car, and they go to work, they go to their place of work. So the question for us is: well, how do we turn all of these commuter cars — and literally there's tens of millions of them — how do we turn all these commuter cars into shared cars? Well, we have something for this that we recently launched called uberCOMMUTE. You get up in the morning, get ready for work, get your coffee, go to your car and you light up the Uber app, and all of a sudden, you become an Uber driver. And we'll match you up with one of your neighbors on your way to work and it's a really great thing. There's just one hitch ... it's called regulation. So 54 cents a mile, what is that? Well, that is what the US government has determined that the cost of owning a car is per mile. You can pick up anybody in the United States and take them wherever they want to go at a moment's notice, for 54 cents a mile or less. But if you charge 60 cents a mile, you're a criminal. But what if for 60 cents a mile we could get half a million more people carpooling in Los Angeles? And what if at 60 cents a mile we could get 50 million people carpooling in the United States? If we could, it's obviously something we should do. And so it goes back to the lesson of the jitney. If by 1915 this thing was taking off, imagine without the regulations that happened, if that thing could just keep going. How would our cities be different today? Would we have parks in the place of parking lots? Well, we lost that chance. But technology has given us another opportunity. Now, I'm as excited as anybody else about self-driving cars but do we have to really wait five, 10 or even 20 years to make our new cities a reality? With the technology in our pockets today, and a little smart regulation, we can turn every car into a shared car, and we can reclaim our cities starting today. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Travis, thank you. Travis Kalanick: Thank you. CA: You know — I mean the company you've built is absolutely astounding. You only just talked about a small part of it here — a powerful part — the idea of turning cars into public transport like that, it's cool. But I've got a couple other questions because I know they're out there on people's minds. So first of all, last week I think it was, I switched on my phone and tried to book an Uber and I couldn't find the app. You had this very radical, very bold, brave redesign. TK: Sure. CA: How did it go? Did you notice other people not finding the app that day? Are you going to win people over for this redesign? TK: Well, first I should probably just say, well, what we were trying to accomplish. And I think if you know a little bit about our history, it makes a lot more sense. Which is, when we first got started, it was just black cars. It was literally you push a button and get an S-Class. And so what we did was almost what I would call an immature version of a luxury brand that looked like a badge on a luxury car. And as we've gone worldwide and gone from S-Classes to auto rickshaws in India, it became something that was important for us to be more accessible, to be more hyperlocal, to be about the cities we were in and that's what you see with the patterns and colors. And to be more iconic, because a U doesn't mean anything in Sanskrit, and a U doesn't mean anything in Mandarin. And so that was a little bit what it was about. Now, when you first roll out something like that, I mean, your hands are sweating, you've got — you know, you're a little worried. What we saw is a lot of people — actually, at the beginning, we saw a lot more people opening the app because they were curious what they would find when they opened it. And our numbers were slightly up from what we expected. CA: OK, that's cool. Now, so you, yourself, are something of an enigma, I would say. Your supporters and investors, who have been with you the whole way, believe that the only chance of sort of taking on the powerful, entrenched interests of taxi industry and so forth, is to have someone who is a fierce, relentless competitor, which you've certainly proved to be. Some people feel you've almost taken that culture too far, and you know — like a year or two ago there was a huge controversy where a lot of women got upset. How did it feel like inside the company during that period? Did you notice a loss of business? Did you learn anything from that? TK: Well, look, I think — I've been an entrepreneur since I've been in high school and you have — In various different ways an entrepreneur will see hard times and for us, it was about a year and a half ago, and for us it was hard times, too. Now, inside, we felt like — I guess at the end of the day we felt like we were good people doing good work, but on the outside that wasn't evident. And so there was a lot that we had to do to sort of — We'd gone from a very small company — I mean if you go literally two and a half years ago, our company was 400 people, and today it's 6,500. And so when you go through that growth, you have to sort of cement your cultural values and talk about them all of the time. And make sure that people are constantly checking to say, "Are we good people doing good work?" And if you check those boxes, the next part of that is making sure you're telling your story. And I think we learned a lot of lessons but I think at the end of it we came out stronger. But it was certainly a difficult period. CA: It seems to me, everywhere you turn, you're facing people who occasionally give you a hard time. Some Uber drivers in New York and elsewhere are mad as hell now because you changed the fees and they can barely — they claim — barely afford the deal anymore. How — You know, you said that you started this originally — just the coolness of pressing a button and summoning a ride. This thing's taken off, you're affecting the whole global economy, basically, at this point. You're being forced to be, whether you want it or not, a kind of global visionary who's changing the world. I mean — who are you? Do you want that? Are you ready to go with that and be what that takes? TK: Well, there's a few things packed in that question, so — (Laughter) First is on the pricing side — I mean, keep in mind, right? UberX, when we first started, was literally 10 or 15 percent cheaper than our black car product. It's now in many cities, half the price of a taxi. And we have all the data to show that the divers are making more per hour than they would as taxi drivers. What happens is when the price goes down, people are more likely to take Uber at different times of the day than they otherwise would have, and they're more likely to use it in places they wouldn't have before. And what that means for a driver is wherever he or she drops somebody off, they're much more likely to get a pickup and get back in. And so what that means is more trips per hour, more minutes of the hour where they're productive and actually, earnings come up. And we have cities where we've done literally five or six price cuts and have seen those price cuts go up over time. So even in New York — We have a blog post we call "4 Septembers" — compare the earnings September after September after September. Same month every year. And we see the earnings going up over time as the price comes down. And there's a perfect price point — you can't go down forever. And in those places where we bring the price down but we don't see those earnings pop, we bring the prices back up. So that addresses that first part. And then the enigma and all of this — I mean, the kind of entrepreneur I am is one that gets really excited about solving hard problems. And the way I like to describe it is it's kind of like a math professor. You know? If a math professor doesn't have hard problems to solve, that's a really sad math professor. And so at Uber we like the hard problems and we like getting excited about those and solving them. But we don't want just any math problem, we want the hardest ones that we can possibly find, and we want the one that if you solve it, there's a little bit of a wow factor. CA: In a couple years' time — say five years' time, I don't know when — you roll out your incredible self-driving cars, at probably a lower cost than you currently pay for an Uber ride. What do you say to your army of a million drivers plus at that time? TK: Explain that again — at which time? CA: At the time when self-driving cars are coming — TK: Sure, sure, sure. Sorry, I missed that. CA: What do you say to a driver? TK: Well, look, I think the first part is it's going to take — it's likely going to take a lot longer than I think some of the hype or media might expect. That's part one. Part two is it's going to also take — there's going to be a long transition. These cars will work in certain places and not in others. For us it's an interesting challenge, right? Because, well — Google's been investing in this since 2007, Tesla's going to be doing it, Apple's going to be doing it, the manufacturers are going to be doing it. This is a world that's going to exist, and for good reason. A million people die a year in cars. And we already looked at the billions or even trillions of hours worldwide that people are spending sitting in them, driving frustrated, anxious. And think about the quality of life that improves when you give people their time back and it's not so anxiety-ridden. So I think there's a lot of good. And so the way we think about it is that it's a challenge, but one for optimistic leadership, Where instead of resisting — resisting technology, maybe like the taxi industry, or the trolley industry — we have to embrace it or be a part of the future. But how do we optimistically lead through it? Are there ways to partner with cities? Are there ways to have education systems, vocational training, etc., for that transition period. It will take a lot longer than I think we all expect, especially that transition period. But it is a world that's going to exist, and it is going to be a better world. CA: Travis, what you're building is absolutely incredible and I'm hugely grateful to you for coming to TED and sharing so openly. Thank you so much. TK: Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Teach girls bravery, not perfection | {0: 'Reshma Saujani, author of "Brave, Not Perfect" and founder of Girls Who Code, initiates young women into the tech world. Her goal: one million women in computer science by 2020.'} | TED2016 | So a few years ago, I did something really brave, or some would say really stupid. I ran for Congress. For years, I had existed safely behind the scenes in politics as a fundraiser, as an organizer, but in my heart, I always wanted to run. The sitting congresswoman had been in my district since 1992. She had never lost a race, and no one had really even run against her in a Democratic primary. But in my mind, this was my way to make a difference, to disrupt the status quo. The polls, however, told a very different story. My pollsters told me that I was crazy to run, that there was no way that I could win. But I ran anyway, and in 2012, I became an upstart in a New York City congressional race. I swore I was going to win. I had the endorsement from the New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal snapped pictures of me on election day, and CNBC called it one of the hottest races in the country. I raised money from everyone I knew, including Indian aunties that were just so happy an Indian girl was running. But on election day, the polls were right, and I only got 19 percent of the vote, and the same papers that said I was a rising political star now said I wasted 1.3 million dollars on 6,321 votes. Don't do the math. It was humiliating. Now, before you get the wrong idea, this is not a talk about the importance of failure. Nor is it about leaning in. I tell you the story of how I ran for Congress because I was 33 years old and it was the first time in my entire life that I had done something that was truly brave, where I didn't worry about being perfect. And I'm not alone: so many women I talk to tell me that they gravitate towards careers and professions that they know they're going to be great in, that they know they're going to be perfect in, and it's no wonder why. Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. We're taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A's. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars and then just jump off headfirst. And by the time they're adults, whether they're negotiating a raise or even asking someone out on a date, they're habituated to take risk after risk. They're rewarded for it. It's often said in Silicon Valley, no one even takes you seriously unless you've had two failed start-ups. In other words, we're raising our girls to be perfect, and we're raising our boys to be brave. Some people worry about our federal deficit, but I, I worry about our bravery deficit. Our economy, our society, we're just losing out because we're not raising our girls to be brave. The bravery deficit is why women are underrepresented in STEM, in C-suites, in boardrooms, in Congress, and pretty much everywhere you look. In the 1980s, psychologist Carol Dweck looked at how bright fifth graders handled an assignment that was too difficult for them. She found that bright girls were quick to give up. The higher the IQ, the more likely they were to give up. Bright boys, on the other hand, found the difficult material to be a challenge. They found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts. What's going on? Well, at the fifth grade level, girls routinely outperform boys in every subject, including math and science, so it's not a question of ability. The difference is in how boys and girls approach a challenge. And it doesn't just end in fifth grade. An HP report found that men will apply for a job if they meet only 60 percent of the qualifications, but women, women will apply only if they meet 100 percent of the qualifications. 100 percent. This study is usually invoked as evidence that, well, women need a little more confidence. But I think it's evidence that women have been socialized to aspire to perfection, and they're overly cautious. (Applause) And even when we're ambitious, even when we're leaning in, that socialization of perfection has caused us to take less risks in our careers. And so those 600,000 jobs that are open right now in computing and tech, women are being left behind, and it means our economy is being left behind on all the innovation and problems women would solve if they were socialized to be brave instead of socialized to be perfect. (Applause) So in 2012, I started a company to teach girls to code, and what I found is that by teaching them to code I had socialized them to be brave. Coding, it's an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place, with sometimes just a semicolon making the difference between success and failure. Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries until that magical moment when what you're trying to build comes to life. It requires perseverance. It requires imperfection. We immediately see in our program our girls' fear of not getting it right, of not being perfect. Every Girls Who Code teacher tells me the same story. During the first week, when the girls are learning how to code, a student will call her over and she'll say, "I don't know what code to write." The teacher will look at her screen, and she'll see a blank text editor. If she didn't know any better, she'd think that her student spent the past 20 minutes just staring at the screen. But if she presses undo a few times, she'll see that her student wrote code and then deleted it. She tried, she came close, but she didn't get it exactly right. Instead of showing the progress that she made, she'd rather show nothing at all. Perfection or bust. It turns out that our girls are really good at coding, but it's not enough just to teach them to code. My friend Lev Brie, who is a professor at the University of Columbia and teaches intro to Java tells me about his office hours with computer science students. When the guys are struggling with an assignment, they'll come in and they'll say, "Professor, there's something wrong with my code." The girls will come in and say, "Professor, there's something wrong with me." We have to begin to undo the socialization of perfection, but we've got to combine it with building a sisterhood that lets girls know that they are not alone. Because trying harder is not going to fix a broken system. I can't tell you how many women tell me, "I'm afraid to raise my hand, I'm afraid to ask a question, because I don't want to be the only one who doesn't understand, the only one who is struggling. When we teach girls to be brave and we have a supportive network cheering them on, they will build incredible things, and I see this every day. Take, for instance, two of our high school students who built a game called Tampon Run — yes, Tampon Run — to fight against the menstruation taboo and sexism in gaming. Or the Syrian refugee who dared show her love for her new country by building an app to help Americans get to the polls. Or a 16-year-old girl who built an algorithm to help detect whether a cancer is benign or malignant in the off chance that she can save her daddy's life because he has cancer. These are just three examples of thousands, thousands of girls who have been socialized to be imperfect, who have learned to keep trying, who have learned perseverance. And whether they become coders or the next Hillary Clinton or Beyoncé, they will not defer their dreams. And those dreams have never been more important for our country. For the American economy, for any economy to grow, to truly innovate, we cannot leave behind half our population. We have to socialize our girls to be comfortable with imperfection, and we've got to do it now. We cannot wait for them to learn how to be brave like I did when I was 33 years old. We have to teach them to be brave in schools and early in their careers, when it has the most potential to impact their lives and the lives of others, and we have to show them that they will be loved and accepted not for being perfect but for being courageous. And so I need each of you to tell every young woman you know — your sister, your niece, your employee, your colleague — to be comfortable with imperfection, because when we teach girls to be imperfect, and we help them leverage it, we will build a movement of young women who are brave and who will build a better world for themselves and for each and every one of us. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Chris Anderson: Reshma, thank you. It's such a powerful vision you have. You have a vision. Tell me how it's going. How many girls are involved now in your program? Reshma Saujani: Yeah. So in 2012, we taught 20 girls. This year we'll teach 40,000 in all 50 states. (Applause) And that number is really powerful, because last year we only graduated 7,500 women in computer science. Like, the problem is so bad that we can make that type of change quickly. CA: And you're working with some of the companies in this room even, who are welcoming graduates from your program? RS: Yeah, we have about 80 partners, from Twitter to Facebook to Adobe to IBM to Microsoft to Pixar to Disney, I mean, every single company out there. And if you're not signed up, I'm going to find you, because we need every single tech company to embed a Girls Who Code classroom in their office. CA: And you have some stories back from some of those companies that when you mix in more gender balance in the engineering teams, good things happen. RS: Great things happen. I mean, I think that it's crazy to me to think about the fact that right now 85 percent of all consumer purchases are made by women. Women use social media at a rate of 600 percent more than men. We own the Internet, and we should be building the companies of tomorrow. And I think when companies have diverse teams, and they have incredible women that are part of their engineering teams, they build awesome things, and we see it every day. CA: Reshma, you saw the reaction there. You're doing incredibly important work. This whole community is cheering you on. More power to you. Thank you. RS: Thank you. (Applause) |
The secrets I find on the mysterious ocean floor | {0: "Dr. Laura Robinson's scientific mission is to document and understand the processes that govern climate."} | TEDxBrussels | Well, I'm an ocean chemist. I look at the chemistry of the ocean today. I look at the chemistry of the ocean in the past. The way I look back in the past is by using the fossilized remains of deepwater corals. You can see an image of one of these corals behind me. It was collected from close to Antarctica, thousands of meters below the sea, so, very different than the kinds of corals you may have been lucky enough to see if you've had a tropical holiday. So I'm hoping that this talk will give you a four-dimensional view of the ocean. Two dimensions, such as this beautiful two-dimensional image of the sea surface temperature. This was taken using satellite, so it's got tremendous spatial resolution. The overall features are extremely easy to understand. The equatorial regions are warm because there's more sunlight. The polar regions are cold because there's less sunlight. And that allows big icecaps to build up on Antarctica and up in the Northern Hemisphere. If you plunge deep into the sea, or even put your toes in the sea, you know it gets colder as you go down, and that's mostly because the deep waters that fill the abyss of the ocean come from the cold polar regions where the waters are dense. If we travel back in time 20,000 years ago, the earth looked very much different. And I've just given you a cartoon version of one of the major differences you would have seen if you went back that long. The icecaps were much bigger. They covered lots of the continent, and they extended out over the ocean. Sea level was 120 meters lower. Carbon dioxide [levels] were very much lower than they are today. So the earth was probably about three to five degrees colder overall, and much, much colder in the polar regions. What I'm trying to understand, and what other colleagues of mine are trying to understand, is how we moved from that cold climate condition to the warm climate condition that we enjoy today. We know from ice core research that the transition from these cold conditions to warm conditions wasn't smooth, as you might predict from the slow increase in solar radiation. And we know this from ice cores, because if you drill down into ice, you find annual bands of ice, and you can see this in the iceberg. You can see those blue-white layers. Gases are trapped in the ice cores, so we can measure CO2 — that's why we know CO2 was lower in the past — and the chemistry of the ice also tells us about temperature in the polar regions. And if you move in time from 20,000 years ago to the modern day, you see that temperature increased. It didn't increase smoothly. Sometimes it increased very rapidly, then there was a plateau, then it increased rapidly. It was different in the two polar regions, and CO2 also increased in jumps. So we're pretty sure the ocean has a lot to do with this. The ocean stores huge amounts of carbon, about 60 times more than is in the atmosphere. It also acts to transport heat across the equator, and the ocean is full of nutrients and it controls primary productivity. So if we want to find out what's going on down in the deep sea, we really need to get down there, see what's there and start to explore. This is some spectacular footage coming from a seamount about a kilometer deep in international waters in the equatorial Atlantic, far from land. You're amongst the first people to see this bit of the seafloor, along with my research team. You're probably seeing new species. We don't know. You'd have to collect the samples and do some very intense taxonomy. You can see beautiful bubblegum corals. There are brittle stars growing on these corals. Those are things that look like tentacles coming out of corals. There are corals made of different forms of calcium carbonate growing off the basalt of this massive undersea mountain, and the dark sort of stuff, those are fossilized corals, and we're going to talk a little more about those as we travel back in time. To do that, we need to charter a research boat. This is the James Cook, an ocean-class research vessel moored up in Tenerife. Looks beautiful, right? Great, if you're not a great mariner. Sometimes it looks a little more like this. This is us trying to make sure that we don't lose precious samples. Everyone's scurrying around, and I get terribly seasick, so it's not always a lot of fun, but overall it is. So we've got to become a really good mapper to do this. You don't see that kind of spectacular coral abundance everywhere. It is global and it is deep, but we need to really find the right places. We just saw a global map, and overlaid was our cruise passage from last year. This was a seven-week cruise, and this is us, having made our own maps of about 75,000 square kilometers of the seafloor in seven weeks, but that's only a tiny fraction of the seafloor. We're traveling from west to east, over part of the ocean that would look featureless on a big-scale map, but actually some of these mountains are as big as Everest. So with the maps that we make on board, we get about 100-meter resolution, enough to pick out areas to deploy our equipment, but not enough to see very much. To do that, we need to fly remotely-operated vehicles about five meters off the seafloor. And if we do that, we can get maps that are one-meter resolution down thousands of meters. Here is a remotely-operated vehicle, a research-grade vehicle. You can see an array of big lights on the top. There are high-definition cameras, manipulator arms, and lots of little boxes and things to put your samples. Here we are on our first dive of this particular cruise, plunging down into the ocean. We go pretty fast to make sure the remotely operated vehicles are not affected by any other ships. And we go down, and these are the kinds of things you see. These are deep sea sponges, meter scale. This is a swimming holothurian — it's a small sea slug, basically. This is slowed down. Most of the footage I'm showing you is speeded up, because all of this takes a lot of time. This is a beautiful holothurian as well. And this animal you're going to see coming up was a big surprise. I've never seen anything like this and it took us all a bit surprised. This was after about 15 hours of work and we were all a bit trigger-happy, and suddenly this giant sea monster started rolling past. It's called a pyrosome or colonial tunicate, if you like. This wasn't what we were looking for. We were looking for corals, deep sea corals. You're going to see a picture of one in a moment. It's small, about five centimeters high. It's made of calcium carbonate, so you can see its tentacles there, moving in the ocean currents. An organism like this probably lives for about a hundred years. And as it grows, it takes in chemicals from the ocean. And the chemicals, or the amount of chemicals, depends on the temperature; it depends on the pH, it depends on the nutrients. And if we can understand how these chemicals get into the skeleton, we can then go back, collect fossil specimens, and reconstruct what the ocean used to look like in the past. And here you can see us collecting that coral with a vacuum system, and we put it into a sampling container. We can do this very carefully, I should add. Some of these organisms live even longer. This is a black coral called Leiopathes, an image taken by my colleague, Brendan Roark, about 500 meters below Hawaii. Four thousand years is a long time. If you take a branch from one of these corals and polish it up, this is about 100 microns across. And Brendan took some analyses across this coral — you can see the marks — and he's been able to show that these are actual annual bands, so even at 500 meters deep in the ocean, corals can record seasonal changes, which is pretty spectacular. But 4,000 years is not enough to get us back to our last glacial maximum. So what do we do? We go in for these fossil specimens. This is what makes me really unpopular with my research team. So going along, there's giant sharks everywhere, there are pyrosomes, there are swimming holothurians, there's giant sponges, but I make everyone go down to these dead fossil areas and spend ages kind of shoveling around on the seafloor. And we pick up all these corals, bring them back, we sort them out. But each one of these is a different age, and if we can find out how old they are and then we can measure those chemical signals, this helps us to find out what's been going on in the ocean in the past. So on the left-hand image here, I've taken a slice through a coral, polished it very carefully and taken an optical image. On the right-hand side, we've taken that same piece of coral, put it in a nuclear reactor, induced fission, and every time there's some decay, you can see that marked out in the coral, so we can see the uranium distribution. Why are we doing this? Uranium is a very poorly regarded element, but I love it. The decay helps us find out about the rates and dates of what's going on in the ocean. And if you remember from the beginning, that's what we want to get at when we're thinking about climate. So we use a laser to analyze uranium and one of its daughter products, thorium, in these corals, and that tells us exactly how old the fossils are. This beautiful animation of the Southern Ocean I'm just going to use illustrate how we're using these corals to get at some of the ancient ocean feedbacks. You can see the density of the surface water in this animation by Ryan Abernathey. It's just one year of data, but you can see how dynamic the Southern Ocean is. The intense mixing, particularly the Drake Passage, which is shown by the box, is really one of the strongest currents in the world coming through here, flowing from west to east. It's very turbulently mixed, because it's moving over those great big undersea mountains, and this allows CO2 and heat to exchange with the atmosphere in and out. And essentially, the oceans are breathing through the Southern Ocean. We've collected corals from back and forth across this Antarctic passage, and we've found quite a surprising thing from my uranium dating: the corals migrated from south to north during this transition from the glacial to the interglacial. We don't really know why, but we think it's something to do with the food source and maybe the oxygen in the water. So here we are. I'm going to illustrate what I think we've found about climate from those corals in the Southern Ocean. We went up and down sea mountains. We collected little fossil corals. This is my illustration of that. We think back in the glacial, from the analysis we've made in the corals, that the deep part of the Southern Ocean was very rich in carbon, and there was a low-density layer sitting on top. That stops carbon dioxide coming out of the ocean. We then found corals that are of an intermediate age, and they show us that the ocean mixed partway through that climate transition. That allows carbon to come out of the deep ocean. And then if we analyze corals closer to the modern day, or indeed if we go down there today anyway and measure the chemistry of the corals, we see that we move to a position where carbon can exchange in and out. So this is the way we can use fossil corals to help us learn about the environment. So I want to leave you with this last slide. It's just a still taken out of that first piece of footage that I showed you. This is a spectacular coral garden. We didn't even expect to find things this beautiful. It's thousands of meters deep. There are new species. It's just a beautiful place. There are fossils in amongst, and now I've trained you to appreciate the fossil corals that are down there. So next time you're lucky enough to fly over the ocean or sail over the ocean, just think — there are massive sea mountains down there that nobody's ever seen before, and there are beautiful corals. Thank you. (Applause) |
Simple hacks for life with Parkinson's | {0: "Mileha Soneji believes that having empathy and being able to put yourself in another person's shoes is what makes for great design."} | TEDxDelft | In India, we have these huge families. I bet a lot of you all must have heard about it. Which means that there are a lot of family events. So as a child, my parents used to drag me to these family events. But the one thing that I always looked forward to was playing around with my cousins. And there was always this one uncle who used to be there, always ready, jumping around with us, having games for us, making us kids have the time of our lives. This man was extremely successful: he was confident and powerful. But then I saw this hale and hearty person deteriorate in health. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's. Parkinson's is a disease that causes degeneration of the nervous system, which means that this person who used to be independent suddenly finds tasks like drinking coffee, because of tremors, much more difficult. My uncle started using a walker to walk, and to take a turn, he literally had to take one step at a time, like this, and it took forever. So this person, who used to be the center of attention in every family gathering, was suddenly hiding behind people. He was hiding from the pitiful look in people's eyes. And he's not the only one in the world. Every year, 60,000 people are newly diagnosed with Parkinson's, and this number is only rising. As designers, we dream that our designs solve these multifaceted problems, one solution that solves it all, but it need not always be like that. You can also target simple problems and create small solutions for them and eventually make a big impact. So my aim here was to not cure Parkinson's, but to make their everyday tasks much more simple, and then make an impact. Well, the first thing I targeted was tremors, right? My uncle told me that he had stopped drinking coffee or tea in public just out of embarrassment, so, well, I designed the no-spill cup. It works just purely on its form. The curve on top deflects the liquid back inside every time they have tremors, and this keeps the liquid inside compared to a normal cup. But the key here is that it is not tagged as a Parkinson's patient product. It looks like a cup that could be used by you, me, any clumsy person, and that makes it much more comforting for them to use, to blend in. So, well, one problem solved, many more to go. All this while, I was interviewing him, questioning him, and then I realized that I was getting very superficial information, or just answers to my questions. But I really needed to dig deeper to get a new perspective. So I thought, well, let's observe him in his daily tasks, while he's eating, while he's watching TV. And then, when I was actually observing him walking to his dining table, it struck me, this man who finds it so difficult to walk on flat land, how does he climb a staircase? Because in India we do not have a fancy rail that takes you up a staircase like in the developed countries. One actually has to climb the stairs. So he told me, "Well, let me show you how I do it." Let's take a look at what I saw. So he took really long to reach this position, and then all this while, I'm thinking, "Oh my God, is he really going to do it? Is he really, really going to do it without his walker?" And then ... (Laughter) And the turns, he took them so easily. So — shocked? Well, I was too. So this person who could not walk on flat land was suddenly a pro at climbing stairs. On researching this, I realized that it's because it's a continuous motion. There's this other man who also suffers from the same symptoms and uses a walker, but the moment he's put on a cycle, all his symptoms vanish, because it is a continuous motion. So the key for me was to translate this feeling of walking on a staircase back to flat land. And a lot of ideas were tested and tried on him, but the one that finally worked was this one. Let's take a look. (Laughter) (Applause) He walked faster, right? (Applause) I call this the staircase illusion, and actually when the staircase illusion abruptly ended, he froze, and this is called freezing of gait. So it happens a lot, so why not have a staircase illusion flowing through all their rooms, making them feel much more confident? You know, technology is not always it. What we need are human-centered solutions. I could have easily made it into a projection, or a Google Glass, or something like that. But I stuck to simple print on the floor. This print could be taken into hospitals to make them feel much more welcome. What I wish to do is make every Parkinson's patient feel like my uncle felt that day. He told me that I made him feel like his old self again. "Smart" in today's world has become synonymous to high tech, and the world is only getting smarter and smarter day by day. But why can't smart be something that's simple and yet effective? All we need is a little bit of empathy and some curiosity, to go out there, observe. But let's not stop at that. Let's find these complex problems. Don't be scared of them. Break them, boil them down into much smaller problems, and then find simple solutions for them. Test these solutions, fail if needed, but with newer insights to make it better. Imagine what we all could do if we all came up with simple solutions. What would the world be like if we combined all our simple solutions? Let's make a smarter world, but with simplicity. Thank you. (Applause) |
This country isn't just carbon neutral -- it's carbon negative | {0: "Tshering Tobgay is the president of the People's Democratic Party in Bhutan."} | TED2016 | In case you are wondering, no, I'm not wearing a dress, and no, I'm not saying what I'm wearing underneath. (Laughter) This is a gho. This is my national dress. This is how all men dress in Bhutan. That is how our women dress. Like our women, we men get to wear pretty bright colors, but unlike our women, we get to show off our legs. (Laughter) Our national dress is unique, but this is not the only thing that's unique about my country. Our promise to remain carbon neutral is also unique, and this is what I'd like to speak about today, our promise to remain carbon neutral. But before I proceed, I should set you the context. I should tell you our story. Bhutan is a small country in the Himalayas. We've been called Shangri-La, even the last Shangri-La. But let me tell you right off the bat, we are not Shangri-La. My country is not one big monastery populated with happy monks. (Laughter) The reality is that there are barely 700,000 of us sandwiched between two of the most populated countries on earth, China and India. The reality is that we are a small, underdeveloped country doing our best to survive. But we are doing OK. We are surviving. In fact, we are thriving, and the reason we are thriving is because we've been blessed with extraordinary kings. Our enlightened monarchs have worked tirelessly to develop our country, balancing economic growth carefully with social development, environmental sustainability and cultural preservation, all within the framework of good governance. We call this holistic approach to development "Gross National Happiness," or GNH. Back in the 1970s, our fourth king famously pronounced that for Bhutan, Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product. (Applause) Ever since, all development in Bhutan is driven by GNH, a pioneering vision that aims to improve the happiness and well-being of our people. But that's easier said than done, especially when you are one of the smallest economies in the world. Our entire GDP is less than two billion dollars. I know that some of you here are worth more — (Laughter) individually than the entire economy of my country. So our economy is small, but here is where it gets interesting. Education is completely free. All citizens are guaranteed free school education, and those that work hard are given free college education. Healthcare is also completely free. Medical consultation, medical treatment, medicines: they are all provided by the state. We manage this because we use our limited resources very carefully, and because we stay faithful to the core mission of GNH, which is development with values. Our economy is small, and we must strengthen it. Economic growth is important, but that economic growth must not come from undermining our unique culture or our pristine environment. Today, our culture is flourishing. We continue to celebrate our art and architecture, food and festivals, monks and monasteries. And yes, we celebrate our national dress, too. This is why I can wear my gho with pride. Here's a fun fact: you're looking at the world's biggest pocket. (Laughter) It starts here, goes around the back, and comes out from inside here. In this pocket we store all manner of personal goods from phones and wallets to iPads, office files and books. (Laughter) (Applause) But sometimes — sometimes even precious cargo. So our culture is flourishing, but so is our environment. 72 percent of my country is under forest cover. Our constitution demands that a minimum of 60 percent of Bhutan's total land shall remain under forest cover for all time. (Applause) Our constitution, this constitution, imposes forest cover on us. Incidentally, our king used this constitution to impose democracy on us. You see, we the people didn't want democracy. We didn't ask for it, we didn't demand it, and we certainly didn't fight for it. Instead, our king imposed democracy on us by insisting that he include it in the constitution. But he went further. He included provisions in the constitution that empower the people to impeach their kings, and included provisions in here that require all our kings to retire at the age of 65. (Applause) Fact is, we already have a king in retirement: our previous king, the Great Fourth, retired 10 years ago at the peak of his popularity. He was all of 51 years at that time. So as I was saying, 72 percent of our country is under forest cover, and all that forest is pristine. That's why we are one of the few remaining global biodiversity hotspots in the world, and that's why we are a carbon neutral country. In a world that is threatened with climate change, we are a carbon neutral country. Turns out, it's a big deal. Of the 200-odd countries in the world today, it looks like we are the only one that's carbon neutral. Actually, that's not quite accurate. Bhutan is not carbon neutral. Bhutan is carbon negative. Our entire country generates 2.2 million tons of carbon dioxide, but our forests, they sequester more than three times that amount, so we are a net carbon sink for more than four million tons of carbon dioxide each year. But that's not all. (Applause) We export most of the renewable electricity we generate from our fast-flowing rivers. So today, the clean energy that we export offsets about six million tons of carbon dioxide in our neighborhood. By 2020, we'll be exporting enough electricity to offset 17 million tons of carbon dioxide. And if we were to harness even half our hydropower potential, and that's exactly what we are working at, the clean, green energy that we export would offset something like 50 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. That is more CO2 than what the entire city of New York generates in one year. So inside our country, we are a net carbon sink. Outside, we are offsetting carbon. And this is important stuff. You see, the world is getting warmer, and climate change is a reality. Climate change is affecting my country. Our glaciers are melting, causing flash floods and landslides, which in turn are causing disaster and widespread destruction in our country. I was at that lake recently. It's stunning. That's how it looked 10 years ago, and that's how it looked 20 years ago. Just 20 years ago, that lake didn't exist. It was a solid glacier. A few years ago, a similar lake breached its dams and wreaked havoc in the valleys below. That destruction was caused by one glacier lake. We have 2,700 of them to contend with. The point is this: my country and my people have done nothing to contribute to global warming, but we are already bearing the brunt of its consequences. And for a small, poor country, one that is landlocked and mountainous, it is very difficult. But we are not going to sit on our hands doing nothing. We will fight climate change. That's why we have promised to remain carbon neutral. We first made this promise in 2009 during COP 15 in Copenhagen, but nobody noticed. Governments were so busy arguing with one another and blaming each other for causing climate change, that when a small country raised our hands and announced, "We promise to remain carbon neutral for all time," nobody heard us. Nobody cared. Last December in Paris, at COP 21, we reiterated our promise to remain carbon neutral for all time to come. This time, we were heard. We were noticed, and everybody cared. What was different in Paris was that governments came round together to accept the realities of climate change, and were willing to come together and act together and work together. All countries, from the very small to the very large, committed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change says that if these so-called intended commitments are kept, we'd be closer to containing global warming by two degrees Celsius. By the way, I've requested the TED organizers here to turn up the heat in here by two degrees, so if some of you are feeling warmer than usual, you know who to blame. It's crucial that all of us keep our commitments. As far as Bhutan is concerned, we will keep our promise to remain carbon neutral. Here are some of the ways we are doing it. We are providing free electricity to our rural farmers. The idea is that, with free electricity, they will no longer have to use firewood to cook their food. We are investing in sustainable transport and subsidizing the purchase of electric vehicles. Similarly, we are subsidizing the cost of LED lights, and our entire government is trying to go paperless. We are cleaning up our entire country through Clean Bhutan, a national program, and we are planting trees throughout our country through Green Bhutan, another national program. But it is our protected areas that are at the core of our carbon neutral strategy. Our protected areas are our carbon sink. They are our lungs. Today, more than half our country is protected, as national parks, nature reserves and wildlife sanctuaries. But the beauty is that we've connected them all with one another through a network of biological corridors. Now, what this means is that our animals are free to roam throughout our country. Take this tiger, for example. It was spotted at 250 meters above sea level in the hot, subtropical jungles. Two years later, that same tiger was spotted near 4,000 meters in our cold alpine mountains. Isn't that awesome? (Applause) We must keep it that way. We must keep our parks awesome. So every year, we set aside resources to prevent poaching, hunting, mining and pollution in our parks, and resources to help communities who live in those parks manage their forests, adapt to climate change, and lead better lives while continuing to live in harmony with Mother Nature. But that is expensive. Over the next few years, our small economy won't have the resources to cover all the costs that are required to protect our environment. In fact, when we run the numbers, it looks like it'll take us at least 15 years before we can fully finance all our conservation efforts. But neither Bhutan, nor the world can afford to spend 15 years going backwards. This is why His Majesty the King started Bhutan For Life. Bhutan For Life gives us the time we need. It gives us breathing room. It is essentially a funding mechanism to look after our parks, to protect our parks, until our government can take over on our own fully. The idea is to raise a transition fund from individual donors, corporations and institutions, but the deal is closed only after predetermined conditions are met and all funds committed. So multiparty, single closing: an idea we borrowed from Wall Street. This means that individual donors can commit without having to worry that they'll be left supporting an underfunded plan. It's something like a Kickstarter project, only with a 15-year time horizon and millions of tons of carbon dioxide at stake. Once the deal is closed, we use the transition fund to protect our parks, giving our government time to increase our own funding gradually until the end of the 15-year period. After that, our government guarantees full funding forever. We are almost there. We expect to close later this year. Naturally, I'm pretty excited. (Applause) The World Wildlife Fund is our principle partner in this journey, and I want to give them a big shoutout for the excellent work they are doing in Bhutan and across the world. (Applause) Whew, it is getting warm in here. I thank you for listening to our story, a story of how we are keeping our promise to remain carbon neutral, a story of how we are keeping our country pristine, for ourselves, our children, for your children and for the world. But we are not here to tell stories, are we? We are here to dream together. So in closing, I'd like to share one more dream that I have. What if we could mobilize our leadership and our resources, our influence and our passion, to replicate the Bhutan For Life idea to other countries so that they too can conserve their protected areas for all time. After all, there are many other countries who face the same issues that we face. They too have natural resources that can help win the world's fight for sustainability, only they may not have the ability to invest in them now. So what if we set up Earth For Life, a global fund, to kickstart the Bhutan For Life throughout the world? I invite you to help me, to carry this dream beyond our borders to all those who care about our planet's future. After all, we're here to dream together, to work together, to fight climate change together, to protect our planet together. Because the reality is we are in it together. Some of us might dress differently, but we are in it together. Thank you very much, and kadrin chhe la. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, thank you, thank you. |
The gospel of doubt | {0: 'In his memoir, "There Will Be No Miracles Here," Casey Gerald reimagines what it means to truly live and succeed in our society.'} | TED2016 | There we were, souls and bodies packed into a Texas church on the last night of our lives. Packed into a room just like this, but with creaky wooden pews draped in worn-down red fabric, with an organ to my left and a choir at my back and a baptism pool built into the wall behind them. A room like this, nonetheless. With the same great feelings of suspense, the same deep hopes for salvation, the same sweat in the palms and the same people in the back not paying attention. (Laughter) This was December 31, 1999, the night of the Second Coming of Christ, and the end of the world as I knew it. I had turned 12 that year and had reached the age of accountability. And once I stopped complaining about how unfair it was that Jesus would return as soon as I had to be accountable for all that I had done, I figured I had better get my house in order very quickly. So I went to church as often as I could. I listened for silence as anxiously as one might listen for noise, trying to be sure that the Lord hadn't pulled a fast one on me and decided to come back early. And just in case he did, I built a backup plan, by reading the "Left Behind" books that were all the rage at the time. And I found in their pages that if I was not taken in the rapture at midnight, I had another shot. All I had to do was avoid taking the mark of the beast, fight off demons, plagues and the Antichrist himself. It would be hard — (Laughter) but I knew I could do it. (Laughter) But planning time was over now. It was 11:50pm. We had 10 minutes left, and my pastor called us out of the pews and down to the altar because he wanted to be praying when midnight struck. So every faction of the congregation took its place. The choir stayed in the choir stand, the deacons and their wives — or the Baptist Bourgeoisie as I like to call them — (Laughter) took first position in front of the altar. You see, in America, even the Second Coming of Christ has a VIP section. (Laughter) (Applause) And right behind the Baptist Bourgeoisie were the elderly — these men and women whose young backs had been bent under hot suns in the cotton fields of East Texas, and whose skin seemed to be burnt a creaseless noble brown, just like the clay of East Texas, and whose hopes and dreams for what life might become outside of East Texas had sometimes been bent and broken even further than their backs. Yes, these men and women were the stars of the show for me. They had waited their whole lives for this moment, just as their medieval predecessors had longed for the end of the world, and just as my grandmother waited for the Oprah Winfrey Show to come on Channel 8 every day at 4 o'clock. And as she made her way to the altar, I snuck right in behind her, because I knew for sure that my grandmother was going to heaven. And I thought that if I held on to her hand during this prayer, I might go right on with her. So I held on and I closed my eyes to listen, to wait. And the prayers got louder. And the shouts of response to the call of the prayer went up higher even still. And the organ rolled on in to add the dirge. And the heat came on to add to the sweat. And my hand gripped firmer, so I wouldn't be the one left in the field. My eyes clenched tighter so I wouldn't see the wheat being separated from the chaff. And then a voice rang out above us: "Amen." It was over. I looked at the clock. It was after midnight. I looked at the elder believers whose savior had not come, who were too proud to show any signs of disappointment, who had believed too much and for too long to start doubting now. But I was upset on their behalf. They had been duped, hoodwinked, bamboozled, and I had gone right along with them. I had prayed their prayers, I had yielded not to temptation as best I could. I had dipped my head not once, but twice in that snot-inducing baptism pool. I had believed. Now what? I got home just in time to turn on the television and watch Peter Jennings announce the new millennium as it rolled in around the world. It struck me that it would have been strange anyway, for Jesus to come back again and again based on the different time zones. (Laughter) And this made me feel even more ridiculous — hurt, really. But there on that night, I did not stop believing. I just believed a new thing: that it was possible not to believe. It was possible the answers I had were wrong, that the questions themselves were wrong. And now, where there was once a mountain of certitude, there was, running right down to its foundation, a spring of doubt, a spring that promised rivers. I can trace the whole drama of my life back to that night in that church when my savior did not come for me; when the thing I believed most certainly turned out to be, if not a lie, then not quite the truth. And even though most of you prepared for Y2K in a very different way, I'm convinced that you are here because some part of you has done the same thing that I have done since the dawn of this new century, since my mother left and my father stayed away and my Lord refused to come. And I held out my hand, reaching for something to believe in. I held on when I arrived at Yale at 18, with the faith that my journey from Oak Cliff, Texas was a chance to leave behind all the challenges I had known, the broken dreams and broken bodies I had seen. But when I found myself back home one winter break, with my face planted in the floor, my hands tied behind my back and a burglar's gun pressed to my head, I knew that even the best education couldn't save me. I held on when I showed up at Lehman Brothers as an intern in 2008. (Laughter) So hopeful — (Laughter) that I called home to inform my family that we'd never be poor again. (Laughter) But as I witnessed this temple of finance come crashing down before my eyes, I knew that even the best job couldn't save me. I held on when I showed up in Washington DC as a young staffer, who had heard a voice call out from Illinois, saying, "It's been a long time coming, but in this election, change has come to America." But as the Congress ground to a halt and the country ripped at the seams and hope and change began to feel like a cruel joke, I knew that even the political second coming could not save me. I had knelt faithfully at the altar of the American Dream, praying to the gods of my time of success, and money, and power. But over and over again, midnight struck, and I opened my eyes to see that all of these gods were dead. And from that graveyard, I began the search once more, not because I was brave, but because I knew that I would either believe or I would die. So I took a pilgrimage to yet another mecca, Harvard Business School — (Laughter) this time, knowing that I could not simply accept the salvation that it claimed to offer. No, I knew there'd be more work to do. The work began in the dark corner of a crowded party, in the late night of an early, miserable Cambridge winter, when three friends and I asked a question that young folks searching for something real have asked for a very long time: "What if we took a road trip?" (Laughter) We didn't know where'd we go or how we'd get there, but we knew we had to do it. Because all our lives we yearned, as Jack Kerouac wrote, to "sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere," and go find out what everybody was doing all over the country. So even though there were other voices who said that the risk was too great and the proof too thin, we went on anyhow. We went on 8,000 miles across America in the summer of 2013, through the cow pastures of Montana, through the desolation of Detroit, through the swamps of New Orleans, where we found and worked with men and women who were building small businesses that made purpose their bottom line. And having been trained at the West Point of capitalism, this struck us as a revolutionary idea. (Laughter) And this idea spread, growing into a nonprofit called MBAs Across America, a movement that landed me here on this stage today. It spread because we found a great hunger in our generation for purpose, for meaning. It spread because we found countless entrepreneurs in the nooks and crannies of America who were creating jobs and changing lives and who needed a little help. But if I'm being honest, it also spread because I fought to spread it. There was no length to which I would not go to preach this gospel, to get more people to believe that we could bind the wounds of a broken country, one social business at a time. But it was this journey of evangelism that led me to the rather different gospel that I've come to share with you today. It began one evening almost a year ago at the Museum of Natural History in New York City, at a gala for alumni of Harvard Business School. Under a full-size replica of a whale, I sat with the titans of our time as they celebrated their peers and their good deeds. There was pride in a room where net worth and assets under management surpassed half a trillion dollars. We looked over all that we had made, and it was good. (Laughter) But it just so happened, two days later, I had to travel up the road to Harlem, where I found myself sitting in an urban farm that had once been a vacant lot, listening to a man named Tony tell me of the kids that showed up there every day. All of them lived below the poverty line. Many of them carried all of their belongings in a backpack to avoid losing them in a homeless shelter. Some of them came to Tony's program, called Harlem Grown, to get the only meal they had each day. Tony told me that he started Harlem Grown with money from his pension, after 20 years as a cab driver. He told me that he didn't give himself a salary, because despite success, the program struggled for resources. He told me that he would take any help that he could get. And I was there as that help. But as I left Tony, I felt the sting and salt of tears welling up in my eyes. I felt the weight of revelation that I could sit in one room on one night, where a few hundred people had half a trillion dollars, and another room, two days later, just 50 blocks up the road, where a man was going without a salary to get a child her only meal of the day. And it wasn't the glaring inequality that made me want to cry, it wasn't the thought of hungry, homeless kids, it wasn't rage toward the one percent or pity toward the 99. No, I was disturbed because I had finally realized that I was the dialysis for a country that needed a kidney transplant. I realized that my story stood in for all those who were expected to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, even if they didn't have any boots; that my organization stood in for all the structural, systemic help that never went to Harlem or Appalachia or the Lower 9th Ward; that my voice stood in for all those voices that seemed too unlearned, too unwashed, too unaccommodated. And the shame of that, that shame washed over me like the shame of sitting in front of the television, watching Peter Jennings announce the new millennium again and again and again. I had been duped, hoodwinked, bamboozled. But this time, the false savior was me. You see, I've come a long way from that altar on the night I thought the world would end, from a world where people spoke in tongues and saw suffering as a necessary act of God and took a text to be infallible truth. Yes, I've come so far that I'm right back where I started. Because it simply is not true to say that we live in an age of disbelief — no, we believe today just as much as any time that came before. Some of us may believe in the prophecy of Brené Brown or Tony Robbins. We may believe in the bible of The New Yorker or the Harvard Business Review. We may believe most deeply when we worship right here at the church of TED, but we desperately want to believe, we need to believe. We speak in the tongues of charismatic leaders that promise to solve all our problems. We see suffering as a necessary act of the capitalism that is our god, we take the text of technological progress to be infallible truth. And we hardly realize the human price we pay when we fail to question one brick, because we fear it might shake our whole foundation. But if you are disturbed by the unconscionable things that we have come to accept, then it must be questioning time. So I have not a gospel of disruption or innovation or a triple bottom line. I do not have a gospel of faith to share with you today, in fact. I have and I offer a gospel of doubt. The gospel of doubt does not ask that you stop believing, it asks that you believe a new thing: that it is possible not to believe. It is possible the answers we have are wrong, it is possible the questions themselves are wrong. Yes, the gospel of doubt means that it is possible that we, on this stage, in this room, are wrong. Because it raises the question, "Why?" With all the power that we hold in our hands, why are people still suffering so bad? This doubt leads me to share that we are putting my organization, MBAs Across America, out of business. We have shed our staff and closed our doors and we will share our model freely with anyone who sees their power to do this work without waiting for our permission. This doubt compels me to renounce the role of savior that some have placed on me, because our time is too short and our odds are too long to wait for second comings, when the truth is that there will be no miracles here. And this doubt, it fuels me, it gives me hope that when our troubles overwhelm us, when the paths laid out for us seem to lead to our demise, when our healers bring no comfort to our wounds, it will not be our blind faith — no, it will be our humble doubt that shines a little light into the darkness of our lives and of our world and lets us raise our voice to whisper or to shout or to say simply, very simply, "There must be another way." Thank you. (Applause) |
How Airbnb designs for trust | {0: 'As a designer, entrepreneur and the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Airbnb, Joe Gebbia helped redesign the way the world travels and people connect.'} | TED2016 | I want to tell you the story about the time I almost got kidnapped in the trunk of a red Mazda Miata. It's the day after graduating from design school and I'm having a yard sale. And this guy pulls up in this red Mazda and he starts looking through my stuff. And he buys a piece of art that I made. And it turns out he's alone in town for the night, driving cross-country on a road trip before he goes into the Peace Corps. So I invite him out for a beer and he tells me all about his passion for making a difference in the world. Now it's starting to get late, and I'm getting pretty tired. As I motion for the tab, I make the mistake of asking him, "So where are you staying tonight?" And he makes it worse by saying, "Actually, I don't have a place." And I'm thinking, "Oh, man!" What do you do? We've all been there, right? Do I offer to host this guy? But, I just met him — I mean, he says he's going to the Peace Corps, but I don't really know if he's going to the Peace Corps and I don't want to end up kidnapped in the trunk of a Miata. That's a small trunk! So then I hear myself saying, "Hey, I have an airbed you can stay on in my living room." And the voice in my head goes, "Wait, what?" That night, I'm laying in bed, I'm staring at the ceiling and thinking, "Oh my god, what have I done? There's a complete stranger sleeping in my living room. What if he's psychotic?" My anxiety grows so much, I leap out of bed, I sneak on my tiptoes to the door, and I lock the bedroom door. It turns out he was not psychotic. We've kept in touch ever since. And the piece of art he bought at the yard sale is hanging in his classroom; he's a teacher now. This was my first hosting experience, and it completely changed my perspective. Maybe the people that my childhood taught me to label as strangers were actually friends waiting to be discovered. The idea of hosting people on airbeds gradually became natural to me and when I moved to San Francisco, I brought the airbed with me. So now it's two years later. I'm unemployed, I'm almost broke, my roommate moves out, and then the rent goes up. And then I learn there's a design conference coming to town, and all the hotels are sold out. And I've always believed that turning fear into fun is the gift of creativity. So here's what I pitch my best friend and my new roommate Brian Chesky: "Brian, thought of a way to make a few bucks — turning our place into 'designers bed and breakfast,' offering young designers who come to town a place to crash, complete with wireless Internet, a small desk space, sleeping mat, and breakfast each morning. Ha!" We built a basic website and Airbed and Breakfast was born. Three lucky guests got to stay on a 20-dollar airbed on the hardwood floor. But they loved it, and so did we. I swear, the ham and Swiss cheese omelets we made tasted totally different because we made them for our guests. We took them on adventures around the city, and when we said goodbye to the last guest, the door latch clicked, Brian and I just stared at each other. Did we just discover it was possible to make friends while also making rent? The wheels had started to turn. My old roommate, Nate Blecharczyk, joined as engineering co-founder. And we buckled down to see if we could turn this into a business. Here's what we pitched investors: "We want to build a website where people publicly post pictures of their most intimate spaces, their bedrooms, the bathrooms — the kinds of rooms you usually keep closed when people come over. And then, over the Internet, they're going to invite complete strangers to come sleep in their homes. It's going to be huge!" (Laughter) We sat back, and we waited for the rocket ship to blast off. It did not. No one in their right minds would invest in a service that allows strangers to sleep in people's homes. Why? Because we've all been taught as kids, strangers equal danger. Now, when you're faced with a problem, you fall back on what you know, and all we really knew was design. In art school, you learn that design is much more than the look and feel of something — it's the whole experience. We learned to do that for objects, but here, we were aiming to build Olympic trust between people who had never met. Could design make that happen? Is it possible to design for trust? I want to give you a sense of the flavor of trust that we were aiming to achieve. I've got a 30-second experiment that will push you past your comfort zone. If you're up for it, give me a thumbs-up. OK, I need you to take out your phones. Now that you have your phone out, I'd like you to unlock your phone. Now hand your unlocked phone to the person on your left. (Laughter) That tiny sense of panic you're feeling right now — (Laughter) is exactly how hosts feel the first time they open their home. Because the only thing more personal than your phone is your home. People don't just see your messages, they see your bedroom, your kitchen, your toilet. Now, how does it feel holding someone's unlocked phone? Most of us feel really responsible. That's how most guests feel when they stay in a home. And it's because of this that our company can even exist. By the way, who's holding Al Gore's phone? (Laughter) Would you tell Twitter he's running for President? (Laughter) (Applause) OK, you can hand your phones back now. So now that you've experienced the kind of trust challenge we were facing, I'd love to share a few discoveries we've made along the way. What if we changed one small thing about the design of that experiment? What if your neighbor had introduced themselves first, with their name, where they're from, the name of their kids or their dog? Imagine that they had 150 reviews of people saying, "They're great at holding unlocked phones!" (Laughter) Now how would you feel about handing your phone over? It turns out, a well-designed reputation system is key for building trust. And we didn't actually get it right the first time. It's hard for people to leave bad reviews. Eventually, we learned to wait until both guests and hosts left the review before we reveal them. Now, here's a discovery we made just last week. We did a joint study with Stanford, where we looked at people's willingness to trust someone based on how similar they are in age, location and geography. The research showed, not surprisingly, we prefer people who are like us. The more different somebody is, the less we trust them. Now, that's a natural social bias. But what's interesting is what happens when you add reputation into the mix, in this case, with reviews. Now, if you've got less than three reviews, nothing changes. But if you've got more than 10, everything changes. High reputation beats high similarity. The right design can actually help us overcome one of our most deeply rooted biases. Now we also learned that building the right amount of trust takes the right amount of disclosure. This is what happens when a guest first messages a host. If you share too little, like, "Yo," acceptance rates go down. And if you share too much, like, "I'm having issues with my mother," (Laughter) acceptance rates also go down. But there's a zone that's just right, like, "Love the artwork in your place. Coming for vacation with my family." So how do we design for just the right amount of disclosure? We use the size of the box to suggest the right length, and we guide them with prompts to encourage sharing. We bet our whole company on the hope that, with the right design, people would be willing to overcome the stranger-danger bias. What we didn't realize is just how many people were ready and waiting to put the bias aside. This is a graph that shows our rate of adoption. There's three things happening here. The first, an unbelievable amount of luck. The second is the efforts of our team. And third is the existence of a previously unsatisfied need. Now, things have been going pretty well. Obviously, there are times when things don't work out. Guests have thrown unauthorized parties and trashed homes. Hosts have left guests stranded in the rain. In the early days, I was customer service, and those calls came right to my cell phone. I was at the front lines of trust breaking. And there's nothing worse than those calls, it hurts to even think about them. And the disappointment in the sound of someone's voice was and, I would say, still is our single greatest motivator to keep improving. Thankfully, out of the 123 million nights we've ever hosted, less than a fraction of a percent have been problematic. Turns out, people are justified in their trust. And when trust works out right, it can be absolutely magical. We had a guest stay with a host in Uruguay, and he suffered a heart attack. The host rushed him to the hospital. They donated their own blood for his operation. Let me read you his review. (Laughter) "Excellent house for sedentary travelers prone to myocardial infarctions. (Laughter) The area is beautiful and has direct access to the best hospitals. (Laughter) Javier and Alejandra instantly become guardian angels who will save your life without even knowing you. They will rush you to the hospital in their own car while you're dying and stay in the waiting room while the doctors give you a bypass. They don't want you to feel lonely, they bring you books to read. And they let you stay at their house extra nights without charging you. Highly recommended!" (Applause) Of course, not every stay is like that. But this connection beyond the transaction is exactly what the sharing economy is aiming for. Now, when I heard that term, I have to admit, it tripped me up. How do sharing and transactions go together? So let's be clear; it is about commerce. But if you just called it the rental economy, it would be incomplete. The sharing economy is commerce with the promise of human connection. People share a part of themselves, and that changes everything. You know how most travel today is, like, I think of it like fast food — it's efficient and consistent, at the cost of local and authentic. What if travel were like a magnificent buffet of local experiences? What if anywhere you visited, there was a central marketplace of locals offering to get you thoroughly drunk on a pub crawl in neighborhoods you didn't even know existed. Or learning to cook from the chef of a five-star restaurant? Today, homes are designed around the idea of privacy and separation. What if homes were designed to be shared from the ground up? What would that look like? What if cities embraced a culture of sharing? I see a future of shared cities that bring us community and connection instead of isolation and separation. In South Korea, in the city of Seoul, they've actually even started this. They've repurposed hundreds of government parking spots to be shared by residents. They're connecting students who need a place to live with empty-nesters who have extra rooms. And they've started an incubator to help fund the next generation of sharing economy start-ups. Tonight, just on our service, 785,000 people in 191 countries will either stay in a stranger's home or welcome one into theirs. Clearly, it's not as crazy as we were taught. We didn't invent anything new. Hospitality has been around forever. There's been many other websites like ours. So, why did ours eventually take off? Luck and timing aside, I've learned that you can take the components of trust, and you can design for that. Design can overcome our most deeply rooted stranger-danger bias. And that's amazing to me. It blows my mind. I think about this every time I see a red Miata go by. Now, we know design won't solve all the world's problems. But if it can help out with this one, if it can make a dent in this, it makes me wonder, what else can we design for next? Thank you. (Applause) |
Inside the mind of a master procrastinator | {0: 'With Wait But Why, Tim Urban demonstrates that complex and long-form writing can stand out in an online wilderness choked with listicles and clickbait.'} | TED2016 | So in college, I was a government major, which means I had to write a lot of papers. Now, when a normal student writes a paper, they might spread the work out a little like this. So, you know — (Laughter) you get started maybe a little slowly, but you get enough done in the first week that, with some heavier days later on, everything gets done, things stay civil. (Laughter) And I would want to do that like that. That would be the plan. I would have it all ready to go, but then, actually, the paper would come along, and then I would kind of do this. (Laughter) And that would happen every single paper. But then came my 90-page senior thesis, a paper you're supposed to spend a year on. And I knew for a paper like that, my normal work flow was not an option. It was way too big a project. So I planned things out, and I decided I kind of had to go something like this. This is how the year would go. So I'd start off light, and I'd bump it up in the middle months, and then at the end, I would kick it up into high gear just like a little staircase. How hard could it be to walk up the stairs? No big deal, right? But then, the funniest thing happened. Those first few months? They came and went, and I couldn't quite do stuff. So we had an awesome new revised plan. (Laughter) And then — (Laughter) But then those middle months actually went by, and I didn't really write words, and so we were here. And then two months turned into one month, which turned into two weeks. And one day I woke up with three days until the deadline, still not having written a word, and so I did the only thing I could: I wrote 90 pages over 72 hours, pulling not one but two all-nighters — humans are not supposed to pull two all-nighters — sprinted across campus, dove in slow motion, and got it in just at the deadline. I thought that was the end of everything. But a week later I get a call, and it's the school. And they say, "Is this Tim Urban?" And I say, "Yeah." And they say, "We need to talk about your thesis." And I say, "OK." And they say, "It's the best one we've ever seen." (Laughter) (Applause) That did not happen. (Laughter) It was a very, very bad thesis. (Laughter) I just wanted to enjoy that one moment when all of you thought, "This guy is amazing!" (Laughter) No, no, it was very, very bad. Anyway, today I'm a writer-blogger guy. I write the blog Wait But Why. And a couple of years ago, I decided to write about procrastination. My behavior has always perplexed the non-procrastinators around me, and I wanted to explain to the non-procrastinators of the world what goes on in the heads of procrastinators, and why we are the way we are. Now, I had a hypothesis that the brains of procrastinators were actually different than the brains of other people. And to test this, I found an MRI lab that actually let me scan both my brain and the brain of a proven non-procrastinator, so I could compare them. I actually brought them here to show you today. I want you to take a look carefully to see if you can notice a difference. I know that if you're not a trained brain expert, it's not that obvious, but just take a look, OK? So here's the brain of a non-procrastinator. (Laughter) Now ... here's my brain. (Laughter) There is a difference. Both brains have a Rational Decision-Maker in them, but the procrastinator's brain also has an Instant Gratification Monkey. Now, what does this mean for the procrastinator? Well, it means everything's fine until this happens. [This is a perfect time to get some work done.] [Nope!] So the Rational Decision-Maker will make the rational decision to do something productive, but the Monkey doesn't like that plan, so he actually takes the wheel, and he says, "Actually, let's read the entire Wikipedia page of the Nancy Kerrigan/ Tonya Harding scandal, because I just remembered that that happened. (Laughter) Then — (Laughter) Then we're going to go over to the fridge, to see if there's anything new in there since 10 minutes ago. After that, we're going to go on a YouTube spiral that starts with videos of Richard Feynman talking about magnets and ends much, much later with us watching interviews with Justin Bieber's mom. (Laughter) "All of that's going to take a while, so we're not going to really have room on the schedule for any work today. Sorry!" (Sigh) Now, what is going on here? The Instant Gratification Monkey does not seem like a guy you want behind the wheel. He lives entirely in the present moment. He has no memory of the past, no knowledge of the future, and he only cares about two things: easy and fun. Now, in the animal world, that works fine. If you're a dog and you spend your whole life doing nothing other than easy and fun things, you're a huge success! (Laughter) And to the Monkey, humans are just another animal species. You have to keep well-slept, well-fed and propagating into the next generation, which in tribal times might have worked OK. But, if you haven't noticed, now we're not in tribal times. We're in an advanced civilization, and the Monkey does not know what that is. Which is why we have another guy in our brain, the Rational Decision-Maker, who gives us the ability to do things no other animal can do. We can visualize the future. We can see the big picture. We can make long-term plans. And he wants to take all of that into account. And he wants to just have us do whatever makes sense to be doing right now. Now, sometimes it makes sense to be doing things that are easy and fun, like when you're having dinner or going to bed or enjoying well-earned leisure time. That's why there's an overlap. Sometimes they agree. But other times, it makes much more sense to be doing things that are harder and less pleasant, for the sake of the big picture. And that's when we have a conflict. And for the procrastinator, that conflict tends to end a certain way every time, leaving him spending a lot of time in this orange zone, an easy and fun place that's entirely out of the Makes Sense circle. I call it the Dark Playground. (Laughter) Now, the Dark Playground is a place that all of you procrastinators out there know very well. It's where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn't actually fun, because it's completely unearned, and the air is filled with guilt, dread, anxiety, self-hatred — all of those good procrastinator feelings. And the question is, in this situation, with the Monkey behind the wheel, how does the procrastinator ever get himself over here to this blue zone, a less pleasant place, but where really important things happen? Well, turns out the procrastinator has a guardian angel, someone who's always looking down on him and watching over him in his darkest moments — someone called the Panic Monster. (Laughter) Now, the Panic Monster is dormant most of the time, but he suddenly wakes up anytime a deadline gets too close or there's danger of public embarrassment, a career disaster or some other scary consequence. And importantly, he's the only thing the Monkey is terrified of. Now, he became very relevant in my life pretty recently, because the people of TED reached out to me about six months ago and invited me to do a TED Talk. (Laughter) Now, of course, I said yes. It's always been a dream of mine to have done a TED Talk in the past. (Laughter) (Applause) But in the middle of all this excitement, the Rational Decision-Maker seemed to have something else on his mind. He was saying, "Are we clear on what we just accepted? Do we get what's going to be now happening one day in the future? We need to sit down and work on this right now." And the Monkey said, "Totally agree, but let's just open Google Earth and zoom in to the bottom of India, like 200 feet above the ground, and scroll up for two and a half hours til we get to the top of the country, so we can get a better feel for India." (Laughter) So that's what we did that day. (Laughter) As six months turned into four and then two and then one, the people of TED decided to release the speakers. And I opened up the website, and there was my face staring right back at me. And guess who woke up? (Laughter) So the Panic Monster starts losing his mind, and a few seconds later, the whole system's in mayhem. (Laughter) And the Monkey — remember, he's terrified of the Panic Monster — boom, he's up the tree! And finally, finally, the Rational Decision-Maker can take the wheel and I can start working on the talk. Now, the Panic Monster explains all kinds of pretty insane procrastinator behavior, like how someone like me could spend two weeks unable to start the opening sentence of a paper, and then miraculously find the unbelievable work ethic to stay up all night and write eight pages. And this entire situation, with the three characters — this is the procrastinator's system. It's not pretty, but in the end, it works. This is what I decided to write about on the blog a couple of years ago. When I did, I was amazed by the response. Literally thousands of emails came in, from all different kinds of people from all over the world, doing all different kinds of things. These are people who were nurses, bankers, painters, engineers and lots and lots of PhD students. (Laughter) And they were all writing, saying the same thing: "I have this problem too." But what struck me was the contrast between the light tone of the post and the heaviness of these emails. These people were writing with intense frustration about what procrastination had done to their lives, about what this Monkey had done to them. And I thought about this, and I said, well, if the procrastinator's system works, then what's going on? Why are all of these people in such a dark place? Well, it turns out that there's two kinds of procrastination. Everything I've talked about today, the examples I've given, they all have deadlines. And when there's deadlines, the effects of procrastination are contained to the short term because the Panic Monster gets involved. But there's a second kind of procrastination that happens in situations when there is no deadline. So if you wanted a career where you're a self-starter — something in the arts, something entrepreneurial — there's no deadlines on those things at first, because nothing's happening, not until you've gone out and done the hard work to get momentum, get things going. There's also all kinds of important things outside of your career that don't involve any deadlines, like seeing your family or exercising and taking care of your health, working on your relationship or getting out of a relationship that isn't working. Now if the procrastinator's only mechanism of doing these hard things is the Panic Monster, that's a problem, because in all of these non-deadline situations, the Panic Monster doesn't show up. He has nothing to wake up for, so the effects of procrastination, they're not contained; they just extend outward forever. And it's this long-term kind of procrastination that's much less visible and much less talked about than the funnier, short-term deadline-based kind. It's usually suffered quietly and privately. And it can be the source of a huge amount of long-term unhappiness, and regrets. And I thought, that's why those people are emailing, and that's why they're in such a bad place. It's not that they're cramming for some project. It's that long-term procrastination has made them feel like a spectator, at times, in their own lives. The frustration is not that they couldn't achieve their dreams; it's that they weren't even able to start chasing them. So I read these emails and I had a little bit of an epiphany — that I don't think non-procrastinators exist. That's right — I think all of you are procrastinators. Now, you might not all be a mess, like some of us, (Laughter) and some of you may have a healthy relationship with deadlines, but remember: the Monkey's sneakiest trick is when the deadlines aren't there. Now, I want to show you one last thing. I call this a Life Calendar. That's one box for every week of a 90-year life. That's not that many boxes, especially since we've already used a bunch of those. So I think we need to all take a long, hard look at that calendar. We need to think about what we're really procrastinating on, because everyone is procrastinating on something in life. We need to stay aware of the Instant Gratification Monkey. That's a job for all of us. And because there's not that many boxes on there, it's a job that should probably start today. Well, maybe not today, but ... (Laughter) You know. Sometime soon. Thank you. (Applause) |
The reporting system that sexual assault survivors want | {0: 'Jessica Ladd is using technology to combat sexual assault, empower survivors and advance justice. '} | TED2016 | Hannah is excited to be going to college. She couldn't wait to get out of her parents' house, to prove to them that she's an adult, and to prove to her new friends that she belongs. She heads to a campus party where she sees a guy that she has a crush on. Let's call him Mike. The next day, Hannah wakes up with a pounding headache. She can only remember the night in flashes. But what she does remember is throwing up in the hall outside Mike's room and staring at the wall silently while he was inside her, wanting it to stop, then shakily stumbling home. She doesn't feel good about what happened, but she thinks, "Maybe this is just what sex in college is?" One in five women and one in 13 men will be sexually assaulted at some point during their college career in the United States. Less than 10 percent will ever report their assault to their school or to the police. And those who do, on average, wait 11 months to make the report. Hannah initially just feels like dealing with what happened on her own. But when she sees Mike taking girls home from parties, she's worried about them. After graduation, Hannah learns that she was one of five women who Mike did the exact same thing to. And this is not an unlikely scenario because 90 percent of sexual assaults are committed by repeat offenders. But with such low reporting rates, it's fairly unlikely that even repeat perpetrators will be reported, much less anything happen if they are. In fact, only six percent of assaults reported to the police end with the assailant spending a single day in prison. Meaning, there's a 99 percent chance that they'll get away with it. This means there's practically no deterrent to assault in the United States. Now, I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist by training. I'm interested in systems and networks and where we can concentrate our resources to do the most good. So this, to me, is a tragic but a solvable problem. So when the issue of campus assault started hitting the news a few years ago, it felt like a unique opportunity to make a change. And so we did. We started by talking to college survivors. And what they wish they'd had in college is pretty simple; they wanted a website, one they could use at the time and place that felt safest to them with clearly written information about their reporting options, with the ability to electronically report their assault, rather than having the first step to go in and talk to someone who may or may not believe them. With the option to create a secure, timestamped document of what happened to them, preserving evidence even if they don't want to report yet. And lastly, and perhaps most critically, with the ability to report their assault only if someone else reported the same assailant. You see, knowing that you weren't the only one changes everything. It changes the way you frame your own experience, it changes the way you think about your perpetrator, it means that if you do come forward, you'll have someone else's back and they'll have yours. We created a website that actually does this and we launched it [...] in August, on two college campuses. And we included a unique matching system where if Mike's first victim had come forward, saved her record, entered into the matching system and named Mike, and Mike's second victim had done the same thing a few months later, they would have matched and the verified contact information of both survivors would have been sent to the authorities at the same time for investigation and follow up. If a system like this had existed for Hannah and her peers, it's more likely that they would have reported, that they would have been believed, and that Mike would have been kicked off campus, gone to jail, or at least gotten the help that he needed. And if we were able to stop repeat offenders like Mike after just their second assault following a match, survivors like Hannah would never even be assaulted in the first place. We could prevent 59 percent of sexual assaults just by stopping repeat perpetrators earlier on. And because we're creating a real deterrent to assault, for perhaps the first time, maybe the Mikes of the world would never even try to assault anyone. The type of system I'm describing, the type of system that survivors want is a type of information escrow, meaning an entity that holds on to information for you and only releases it to a third party when certain pre-agreed upon conditions are met, such as a match. The application that we built is for college campuses. But the same type of system could be used in the military or even the workplace. We don't have to live in a world where 99 percent of rapists get away with it. We can create one where those who do wrong are held accountable, where survivors get the support and justice they deserve, where the authorities get the information they need, and where there's a real deterrent to violating the rights of another human being. Thank you. (Applause) |
A conservative's plea: Let's work together | {0: 'As president of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks is changing the way conservatives think about poverty and opportunity.'} | TED2016 | I come from one of the most liberal, tolerant, progressive places in the United States, Seattle, Washington. And I grew up with a family of great Seattlites. My mother was an artist, my father was a college professor, and I am truly grateful for my upbringing, because I always felt completely comfortable designing my life exactly as I saw fit. And in point of fact, I took a route that was not exactly what my parents had in mind. When I was 19, I dropped out of college — dropped out, kicked out, splitting hairs. (Laughter) And I went on the road as a professional French horn player, which was my lifelong dream. I played chamber music all over the United States and Europe, and I toured for a couple of years with a great jazz guitar player named Charlie Bird. And by the end of my 20s, I wound up as a member of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra in Spain. What a great life. And you know, my parents never complained. They supported me all the way through it. It wasn't their dream. They used to tell their neighbors and friends, "Our son, he's taking a gap decade." (Laughter) And — There was, however, one awkward conversation about my lifestyle that I want to tell you about. I was 27, and I was home from Barcelona, and I was visiting my parents for Christmas, and I was cooking dinner with my mother, and we were alone in the kitchen. And she was quiet, too quiet. Something was wrong. And so I said, "Mom, what's on your mind?" And she said, "Your dad and I are really worried about you." And I said, "What?" I mean, what could it be, at this point? And she said, "I want you to be completely honest with me: have you been voting for Republicans?" (Laughter) Now, the truth is, I wasn't really political, I was just a French horn player. But I had a bit of an epiphany, and they had detected it, and it was causing some confusion. You see, I had become an enthusiast for capitalism, and I want to tell you why that is. It stems from a lifelong interest of mine in, believe it or not, poverty. See, when I was a kid growing up in Seattle, I remember the first time I saw real poverty. We were a lower middle class family, but that's of course not real poverty. That's not even close. The first time I saw poverty, and poverty's face, was when I was six or seven years old, early 1970s. And it was like a lot of you, kind of a prosaic example, kind of trite. It was a picture in the National Geographic Magazine of a kid who was my age in East Africa, and there were flies on his face and a distended belly. And he wasn't going to make it, and I knew that, and I was helpless. Some of you remember that picture, not exactly that picture, one just like it. It introduced the West to grinding poverty around the world. Well, that vision kind of haunted me as I grew up and I went to school and I dropped out and dropped in and started my family. And I wondered, what happened to that kid? Or to people just like him all over the world? And so I started to study, even though I wasn't in college, I was looking for the answer: what happened to the world's poorest people? Has it gotten worse? Has it gotten better? What? And I found the answer, and it changed my life, and I want to share it with you. See — most Americans believe that poverty has gotten worse since we were children, since they saw that vision. If you ask Americans, "Has poverty gotten worse or better around the world?", 70 percent will say that hunger has gotten worse since the early 1970s. But here's the truth. Here's the epiphany that I had that changed my thinking. From 1970 until today, the percentage of the world's population living in starvation levels, living on a dollar a day or less, obviously adjusted for inflation, that percentage has declined by 80 percent. There's been an 80 percent decline in the world's worst poverty since I was a kid. And I didn't even know about it. This, my friends, that's a miracle. That's something we ought to celebrate. It's the greatest antipoverty achievement in the history of mankind, and it happened in our lifetimes. (Applause) So when I learned this, I asked, what did that? What made it possible? Because if you don't know why, you can't do it again. If you want to replicate it and get the next two billion people out of poverty, because that's what we're talking about: since I was a kid, two billion of the least of these, our brothers and sisters, have been pulled out of poverty. I want the next two billion, so I've got to know why. And I went in search of an answer. And it wasn't a political answer, because I didn't care. You know what, I still don't care. I wanted the best answer from mainstream economists left, right and center. And here it is. Here are the reasons. There are five reasons that two billion of our brothers and sisters have been pulled out of poverty since I was a kid. Number one: globalization. Number two: free trade. Number three: property rights. Number four: rule of law. Number five: entrepreneurship. It was the free enterprise system spreading around the world after 1970 that did that. Now, I'm not naive. I know that free enterprise isn't perfect, and I know that free enterprise isn't everything we need to build a better world. But that is great. And that's beyond politics. Here's what I learned. This is the epiphany. Capitalism is not just about accumulation. At its best, it's about aspiration, which is what so many people on this stage talk about, is the aspiration that comes from dreams that are embedded in the free enterprise system. And we've got to share it with more people. Now, I want to tell you about a second epiphany that's related to that first one that I think can bring us progress, not just around the world, but right here at home. The best quote I've ever heard to summarize the thoughts that I've just given you about pulling people out of poverty is as follows: "Free markets have created more wealth than any system in history. They have lifted billions out of poverty." Who said it? It sounds like Milton Friedman or Ronald Reagan. Wrong. President Barack Obama said that. Why do I know it by heart? Because he said it to me. Crazy. And I said, "Hallelujah." But more than that, I said, "What an opportunity." You know what I was thinking? It was at an event that we were doing on the subject at Georgetown University in May of 2015. And I thought, this is the solution to the biggest problem facing America today. What? It's coming together around these ideas, liberals and conservatives, to help people who need us the most. Now, I don't have to tell anybody in this room that we're in a crisis, in America and many countries around the world with political polarization. It's risen to critical, crisis levels. It's unpleasant. It's not right. There was an article last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is one of the most prestigious scientific journals published in the West. And it was an article in 2014 on political motive asymmetry. What's that? That's what psychologists call the phenomenon of assuming that your ideology is based in love but your opponents' ideology is based in hate. It's common in world conflict. You expect to see this between Palestinians and Israelis, for example. What the authors of this article found was that in America today, a majority of Republicans and Democrats suffer from political motive asymmetry. A majority of people in our country today who are politically active believe that they are motivated by love but the other side is motivated by hate. Think about it. Think about it. Most people are walking around saying, "You know, my ideology is based on basic benevolence, I want to help people, but the other guys, they're evil and out to get me." You can't progress as a society when you have this kind of asymmetry. It's impossible. How do we solve it? Well, first, let's be honest: there are differences. Let's not minimize the differences. That would be really naïve. There's a lot of good research on this. A veteran of the TED stage is my friend Jonathan Haidt. He's a psychology professor at New York University. He does work on the ideology and values and morals of different people to see how they differ. And he's shown, for example, that conservatives and liberals have a very different emphasis on what they think is important. For example, Jon Haidt has shown that liberals care about poverty 59 percent more than they care about economic liberty. And conservatives care about economic liberty 28 percent more than they care about poverty. Irreconcilable differences, right? We'll never come together. Wrong. That is diversity in which lies our strength. Remember what pulled up the poor. It was the obsession with poverty, accompanied by the method of economic freedom spreading around the world. We need each other, in other words, if we want to help people and get the next two billion people out of poverty. There's no other way. Hmm. How are we going to get that? It's a tricky thing, isn't it. We need innovative thinking. A lot of it's on this stage. Social entrepreneurship. Yeah. Absolutely. Phenomenal. We need investment overseas in a sustainable, responsible, ethical and moral way. Yes. Yes. But you know what we really need? We need a new day in flexible ideology. We need to be less predictable. Don't we? Do you ever feel like your own ideology is starting to get predictable? Kinda conventional? Do you ever feel like you're always listening to people who agree with you? Why is that dangerous? Because when we talk in this country about economics, on the right, conservatives, you're always talking about taxes and regulations and big government. And on the left, liberals, you're talking about economics, it's always about income inequality. Right? Now those are important things, really important to me, really important to you. But when it comes to lifting people up who are starving and need us today, those are distractions. We need to come together around the best ways to mitigate poverty using the best tools at our disposal, and that comes only when conservatives recognize that they need liberals and their obsession with poverty, and liberals need conservatives and their obsession with free markets. That's the diversity in which lies the future strength of this country, if we choose to take it. So how are we going to do it? How are we going to do it together? I've got to have some action items, not just for you but for me. Number one. Action item number one: remember, it's not good enough just to tolerate people who disagree. It's not good enough. We have to remember that we need people who disagree with us, because there are people who need all of us who are still waiting for these tools. Now, what are you going to do? How are you going to express that? Where does this start? It starts here. You know, all of us in this room, we're blessed. We're blessed with people who listen to us. We're blessed with prosperity. We're blessed with leadership. When people hear us, with the kind of unpredictable ideology, then maybe people will listen. Maybe progress will start at that point. That's number one. Number two. Number two: I'm asking you and I'm asking me to be the person specifically who blurs the lines, who is ambiguous, who is hard to classify. If you're a conservative, be the conservative who is always going on about poverty and the moral obligation to be a warrior for the poor. And if you're a liberal, be a liberal who is always talking about the beauty of free markets to solve our problems when we use them responsibly. If we do that, we get two things. Number one: we get to start to work on the next two billion and be the solution that we've seen so much of in the past and we need to see more of in the future. That's what we get. And the second is that we might just be able to take the ghastly holy war of ideology that we're suffering under in this country and turn it into a competition of ideas based on solidarity and mutual respect. And then maybe, just maybe, we'll all realize that our big differences aren't really that big after all. Thank you. (Applause) |
A glimpse of the future through an augmented reality headset | {0: 'At Meta, Meron Gribetz is leading an effort to produce and sell augmented reality glasses with natural gestural hand recognition.'} | TED2016 | Today's computers are so amazing that we fail to notice how terrible they really are. I'd like to talk to you today about this problem, and how we can fix it with neuroscience. First, I'd like to take you back to a frosty night in Harlem in 2011 that had a profound impact on me. I was sitting in a dive bar outside of Columbia University, where I studied computer science and neuroscience, and I was having this great conversation with a fellow student about the power of holograms to one day replace computers. And just as we were getting to the best part of the conversation, of course, his phone lights up. And he pulls it towards himself, and he looks down and he starts typing. And then he forces his eyeballs back up to mine and he goes, "Keep going. I'm with you." But of course his eyes were glazed over, and the moment was dead. Meanwhile across the bar, I noticed another student holding his phone, this time towards a group. He was swiping through pictures on Instagram, and these kids were laughing hysterically. And that dichotomy between how crappy I was feeling and how happy they were feeling about the same technology, really got me thinking. And the more I thought of it, the more I realized it was clearly not the digital information that was the bad guy here, it was simply the display position that was separating me from my friend and that was binding those kids together. See, they were connected around something, just like our ancestors who evolved their social cognitions telling stories around the campfire. And that's exactly what tools should do, I think. They should extend our bodies. And I think computers today are doing quite the opposite. Whether you're sending an email to your wife or you're composing a symphony or just consoling a friend, you're doing it in pretty much the same way. You're hunched over these rectangles, fumbling with buttons and menus and more rectangles. And I think this is the wrong way, I think we can start using a much more natural machine. We should use machines that bring our work back into the world. We should use machines that use the principles of neuroscience to extend our senses versus going against them. Now it just so happens that I have such a machine here. It's called the Meta 2. Let's try it out. Now in front of me right now, I can see the audience, and I can see my very hands. And in three, two, one, we're going to see an immersive hologram appear, a very realistic hologram appear in front of me, of our very glasses I'm wearing on my head right now. And of course this could be anything that we're shopping for or learning from, and I can use my hands to very nicely kind of move it around with fine control. And I think Iron Man would be proud. We're going to come back to this in just a bit. (Applause) Now if you're anything like me, your mind is already reeling with the possibilities of what we can do with this kind of technology, so let's look at a few. My mom is an architect, so naturally the first thing I imagined was laying out a building in 3D space instead of having to use these 2D floor plans. She's actually touching graphics right now and selecting an interior decor. This was all shot through a GoPro through our very glasses. And this next use case is very personal to me, it's Professor Adam Gazzaley's glass brain project, courtesy of UCSF. As a neuroscience student, I would always fantasize about the ability to learn and memorize these complex brain structures with an actual machine, where I could touch and play with the various brain structures. Now what you're seeing is called augmented reality, but to me, it's part of a much more important story — a story of how we can begin to extend our bodies with digital devices, instead of the other way around. Now ... in the next few years, humanity's going to go through a shift, I think. We're going to start putting an entire layer of digital information on the real world. Just imagine for a moment what this could mean for storytellers, for painters, for brain surgeons, for interior decorators and maybe for all of us here today. And what I think we need to do as a community, is really try and make an effort to imagine how we can create this new reality in a way that extends the human experience, instead of gamifying our reality or cluttering it with digital information. And that's what I'm very passionate about. Now, I want to tell you a little secret. In about five years — this is not the smallest device — in about five years, these are all going to look like strips of glass on our eyes that project holograms. And just like we don't care so much about which phone we buy in terms of the hardware — we buy it for the operating system — as a neuroscientist, I always dreamt of building the iOS of the mind, if you will. And it's very, very important that we get this right, because we might be living inside of these things for at least as long as we've lived with the Windows graphical user interface. And I don't know about you, but living inside of Windows scares me. (Laughter) To isolate the single most intuitive interface out of infinity, we use neuroscience to drive our design guidelines, instead of letting a bunch of designers fight it out in the boardroom. And the principle we all revolve around is what's called the "Neural Path of Least Resistance." At every turn, we're connecting the iOS of the brain with our brain on, for the first time, our brain's terms. In other words, we're trying to create a zero learning-curve computer. We're building a system that you've always known how to use. Here are the first three design guidelines that we employ in this brand-new form of user experience. First and foremost, you are the operating system. Traditional file systems are complex and abstract, and they take your brain extra steps to decode them. We're going against the Neural Path of Least Resistance. Meanwhile, in augmented reality, you can of course place your holographic TED panel over here, and your holographic email on the other side of the desk, and your spatial memory evolved just fine to go ahead and retrieve them. You could put your holographic Tesla that you're shopping for — or whatever model my legal team told me to put in right before the show. (Laughter) Perfect. And your brain knows exactly how to get it back. The second interface guideline we call "touch to see." What do babies do when they see something that grabs their interest? They try and reach out and touch it. And that's exactly how the natural machine should work as well. Turns out the visual system gets a fundamental boost from a sense we call proprioception — that's the sense of our body parts in space. So by touching our work directly, we're not only going to control it better, we're also going to understand it much more deeply. Hence, touch to see. But it's not enough to experience things ourselves. We're inherently these social primates. And this leads me to our third guideline, the holographic campfire from our first story. Our mirror-neuron subsystem suggests that we can connect with each other and with our work much better if we can see each other's faces and hands in 3D. So if you look at the video behind me, you can see two Meta users playing around with the same hologram, making eye contact, connected around this thing, instead of being distracted by external devices. Let's go ahead and try this again with neuroscience in mind. So again, our favorite interface, the iOS of the mind. I'm going to now take a step further and go ahead and grab this pair of glasses and leave it right here by the desk. I'm now with you, I'm in the moment, we're connecting. My spatial memory kicks in, and I can go ahead and grab it and bring it right back here, reminding me that I am the operating system. And now my proprioception is working, and I can go ahead and explode these glasses into a thousand parts and touch the very sensor that is currently scanning my hand. But it's not enough to see things alone, so in a second, my co-founder Ray is going to make a 3D call — Ray? (Ringing) Hey Ray, how's it going? Guys, I can see this guy in front me in full 3D. And he is photo-realistic. (Applause) Thank you. My mirror-neuron subsystem suggests that this is going to replace phones in not too long. Ray, how's it going? Ray: Great. We're live today. (Applause) MG: Ray, give the crowd a gift of the holographic brain we saw from the video earlier. Guys, this is not only going to change phones, it's also going to change the way we collaborate. Thank you so much. Thanks, Ray. Ray: You're welcome. (Applause) MG: So folks, this is the message that I discovered in that bar in 2011: The future of computers is not locked inside one of these screens. It's right here, inside of us. (Applause) So if there's one idea that I could leave you with here today, it's that the natural machine is not some figment of the future, it's right here in 2016. Which is why all hundred of us at Meta, including the administrative staff, the executives, the designers, the engineers — before TED2017, we're all going to be throwing away our external monitors and replacing them with a truly and profoundly more natural machine. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you, appreciate it. Thanks, guys. Chris Anderson: So help me out on one thing, because there've been a few augmented reality demos shown over the last year or so out there. And there's sometimes a debate among technologists about, are we really seeing the real thing on-screen? There's this issue of field of view, that somehow the technology is showing a broader view than you would actually see wearing the glasses. Were we seeing the real deal there? MG: Absolutely the real deal. Not only that, we took extra measures to shoot it with a GoPro through the actual lens in the various videos that you've seen here. We want to try to simulate the experience for the world that we're actually seeing through the glasses, and not cut any corners. CA: Thank you so much for showing us that. MG: Thanks so much, I appreciate that. |
A prosecutor's vision for a better justice system | {0: 'By shifting his focus from incarceration to transforming lives, Adam Foss is reinventing the role of the criminal prosecutor. '} | TED2016 | The following are my opinions, and do not reflect the opinions or policies of any particular prosecutor's office. (Laughter) I am a prosecutor. I believe in law and order. I am the adopted son of a police officer, a Marine and a hairdresser. I believe in accountability and that we should all be safe in our communities. I love my job and the people that do it. I just think that it's our responsibility to do it better. By a show of hands, how many of you, by the age of 25, had either acted up in school, went somewhere you were specifically told to stay out of, or drank alcohol before your legal age? (Laughter) All right. How many of you shoplifted, tried an illegal drug or got into a physical fight — yes, even with a sibling? Now, how many of you ever spent one day in jail for any of those decisions? How many of you sitting here today think that you're a danger to society or should be defined by those actions of youthful indiscretion? (Laughter) Point taken. When we talk about criminal justice reform, we often focus on a few things, and that's what I want to talk to you about today. But first I'm going to — since you shared with me, I'm going to give you a confession on my part. I went to law school to make money. I had no interest in being a public servant, I had no interest in criminal law, and I definitely didn't think that I would ever be a prosecutor. Near the end of my first year of law school, I got an internship in the Roxbury Division of Boston Municipal Court. I knew of Roxbury as an impoverished neighborhood in Boston, plagued by gun violence and drug crime. My life and my legal career changed the first day of that internship. I walked into a courtroom, and I saw an auditorium of people who, one by one, would approach the front of that courtroom to say two words and two words only: "Not guilty." They were predominately black and brown. And then a judge, a defense attorney and a prosecutor would make life-altering decisions about that person without their input. They were predominately white. As each person, one by one, approached the front of that courtroom, I couldn't stop but think: How did they get here? I wanted to know their stories. And as the prosecutor read the facts of each case, I was thinking to myself, we could have predicted that. That seems so preventable... not because I was an expert in criminal law, but because it was common sense. Over the course of the internship, I began to recognize people in the auditorium, not because they were criminal masterminds but because they were coming to us for help and we were sending them out without any. My second year of law school I worked as a paralegal for a defense attorney, and in that experience I met many young men accused of murder. Even in our "worst," I saw human stories. And they all contained childhood trauma, victimization, poverty, loss, disengagement from school, early interaction with the police and the criminal justice system, all leading to a seat in a courtroom. Those convicted of murder were condemned to die in prison, and it was during those meetings with those men that I couldn't fathom why we would spend so much money to keep this one person in jail for the next 80 years when we could have reinvested it up front, and perhaps prevented the whole thing from happening in the first place. (Applause) My third year of law school, I defended people accused of small street crimes, mostly mentally ill, mostly homeless, mostly drug-addicted, all in need of help. They would come to us, and we would send them away without that help. They were in need of our assistance. But we weren't giving them any. Prosecuted, adjudged and defended by people who knew nothing about them. The staggering inefficiency is what drove me to criminal justice work. The unfairness of it all made me want to be a defender. The power dynamic that I came to understand made me become a prosecutor. I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about the problem. We know the criminal justice system needs reform, we know there are 2.3 million people in American jails and prisons, making us the most incarcerated nation on the planet. We know there's another seven million people on probation or parole, we know that the criminal justice system disproportionately affects people of color, particularly poor people of color. And we know there are system failures happening everywhere that bring people to our courtrooms. But what we do not discuss is how ill-equipped our prosecutors are to receive them. When we talk about criminal justice reform, we, as a society, focus on three things. We complain, we tweet, we protest about the police, about sentencing laws and about prison. We rarely, if ever, talk about the prosecutor. In the fall of 2009, a young man was arrested by the Boston Police Department. He was 18 years old, he was African American and he was a senior at a local public school. He had his sights set on college but his part-time, minimum-wage job wasn't providing the financial opportunity he needed to enroll in school. In a series of bad decisions, he stole 30 laptops from a store and sold them on the Internet. This led to his arrest and a criminal complaint of 30 felony charges. The potential jail time he faced is what stressed Christopher out the most. But what he had little understanding of was the impact a criminal record would have on his future. I was standing in arraignments that day when Christopher's case came across my desk. And at the risk of sounding dramatic, in that moment, I had Christopher's life in my hands. I was 29 years old, a brand-new prosecutor, and I had little appreciation for how the decisions I would make would impact Christopher's life. Christopher's case was a serious one and it needed to be dealt with as such, but I didn't think branding him a felon for the rest of his life was the right answer. For the most part, prosecutors step onto the job with little appreciation of the impact of our decisions, regardless of our intent. Despite our broad discretion, we learn to avoid risk at all cost, rendering our discretion basically useless. History has conditioned us to believe that somehow, the criminal justice system brings about accountability and improves public safety, despite evidence to the contrary. We're judged internally and externally by our convictions and our trial wins, so prosecutors aren't really incentivized to be creative at our case dispositions, or to take risks on people we might not otherwise. We stick to an outdated method, counterproductive to achieving the very goal that we all want, and that's safer communities. Yet most prosecutors standing in my space would have arraigned Christopher. They have little appreciation for what we can do. Arraigning Christopher would give him a criminal record, making it harder for him to get a job, setting in motion a cycle that defines the failing criminal justice system today. With a criminal record and without a job, Christopher would be unable to find employment, education or stable housing. Without those protective factors in his life, Christopher would be more likely to commit further, more serious crime. The more contact Christopher had with the criminal justice system, the more likely it would be that he would return again and again and again — all at tremendous social cost to his children, to his family and to his peers. And, ladies and gentlemen, it is a terrible public safety outcome for the rest of us. When I came out of law school, I did the same thing as everybody else. I came out as a prosecutor expected to do justice, but I never learned what justice was in my classes — none of us do. None of us do. And yet, prosecutors are the most powerful actors in the criminal justice system. Our power is virtually boundless. In most cases, not the judge, not the police, not the legislature, not the mayor, not the governor, not the President can tell us how to prosecute our cases. The decision to arraign Christopher and give him a criminal record was exclusively mine. I would choose whether to prosecute him for 30 felonies, for one felony, for a misdemeanor, or at all. I would choose whether to leverage Christopher into a plea deal or take the case to trial, and ultimately, I would be in a position to ask for Christopher to go to jail. These are decisions that prosecutors make every day unfettered, and we are unaware and untrained of the grave consequences of those decisions. One night this past summer, I was at a small gathering of professional men of color from around the city. As I stood there stuffing free finger sandwiches into my mouth, as you do as public servant — (Laughter) I noticed across the room, a young man waving and smiling at me and approaching me. And I recognized him, but I couldn't place from where, and before I knew it, this young man was hugging me. And thanking me. "You cared about me, and you changed my life." It was Christopher. See, I never arraigned Christopher. He never faced a judge or a jail, he never had a criminal record. Instead, I worked with Christopher; first on being accountable for his actions, and then, putting him in a position where he wouldn't re-offend. We recovered 75 percent of the computers that he sold and gave them back to Best Buy, and came up with a financial plan to repay for the computers we couldn't recover. Christopher did community service. He wrote an essay reflecting on how this case could impact his future and that of the community. He applied to college, he obtained financial aid, and he went on to graduate from a four-year school. (Applause) After we finished hugging, I looked at his name tag, to learn that Christopher was the manager of a large bank in Boston. Christopher had accomplished — and making a lot more money than me — (Laughter) He had accomplished all of this in the six years since I had first seen him in Roxbury Court. I can't take credit for Christopher's journey to success, but I certainly did my part to keep him on the path. There are thousands of Christophers out there, some locked in our jails and prisons. We need thousands of prosecutors to recognize that and to protect them. An employed Christopher is better for public safety than a condemned one. It's a bigger win for all of us. In retrospect, the decision not to throw the book at Christopher makes perfect sense. When I saw him that first day in Roxbury Court, I didn't see a criminal standing there. I saw myself — a young person in need of intervention. As an individual caught selling a large quantity of drugs in my late teens, I knew firsthand the power of opportunity as opposed to the wrath of the criminal justice system. Along the way, with the help and guidance of my district attorney, my supervisor and judges, I learned the power of the prosecutor to change lives instead of ruining them. And that's how we do it in Boston. We helped a woman who was arrested for stealing groceries to feed her kids get a job. Instead of putting an abused teenager in adult jail for punching another teenager, we secured mental health treatment and community supervision. A runaway girl who was arrested for prostituting, to survive on the streets, needed a safe place to live and grow — something we could help her with. I even helped a young man who was so afraid of the older gang kids showing up after school, that one morning instead of a lunchbox into his backpack, he put a loaded 9-millimeter. We would spend our time that we'd normally take prepping our cases for months and months for trial down the road by coming up with real solutions to the problems as they presented. Which is the better way to spend our time? How would you prefer your prosecutors to spend theirs? Why are we spending 80 billion dollars on a prison industry that we know is failing, when we could take that money and reallocate it into education, into mental health treatment, into substance abuse treatment and to community investment so we can develop our neighborhoods? (Applause) So why should this matter to you? Well, one, we're spending a lot of money. Our money. It costs 109,000 dollars in some states to lock up a teenager for a year, with a 60 percent chance that that person will return to the very same system. That is a terrible return on investment. Number two: it's the right thing to do. If prosecutors were a part of creating the problem, it's incumbent on us to create a solution and we can do that using other disciplines that have already done the data and research for us. And number three: your voice and your vote can make that happen. The next time there's a local district attorney's election in your jurisdiction, ask candidates these questions. One: What are you doing to make me and my neighbors safer? Two: What data are you collecting, and how are you training your prosecutors to make sure that it's working? And number three: If it's not working for everybody, what are you doing to fix it? If they can't answer the questions, they shouldn't be doing the job. Each one of you that raised your hand at the beginning of this talk is a living, breathing example of the power of opportunity, of intervention, of support and of love. While each of you may have faced your own brand of discipline for whatever malfeasances you committed, barely any of you needed a day in jail to make you the people that you are today — some of the greatest minds on the planet. Every day, thousands of times a day, prosecutors around the United States wield power so great that it can bring about catastrophe as quickly as it can bring about opportunity, intervention, support and yes, even love. Those qualities are the hallmarks of a strong community, and a strong community is a safe one. If our communities are broken, don't let the lawyers that you elect fix them with outdated, inefficient, expensive methods. Demand more; vote for the prosecutor who's helping people stay out of jail, not putting them in. Demand better. You deserve it, your children deserve it, the people who are tied up in the system deserve it, but most of all, the people that we are sworn to protect and do justice for demand it. We must, we must do better. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. |
How to get back to work after a career break | {0: 'Carol Fishman Cohen documents successful transitions back into the workforce after career breaks.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | People returning to work after a career break: I call them relaunchers. These are people who have taken career breaks for elder care, for childcare reasons, pursuing a personal interest or a personal health issue. Closely related are career transitioners of all kinds: veterans, military spouses, retirees coming out of retirement or repatriating expats. Returning to work after a career break is hard because of a disconnect between the employers and the relaunchers. Employers can view hiring people with a gap on their resume as a high-risk proposition, and individuals on career break can have doubts about their abilities to relaunch their careers, especially if they've been out for a long time. This disconnect is a problem that I'm trying to help solve. Now, successful relaunchers are everywhere and in every field. This is Sami Kafala. He's a nuclear physicist in the UK who took a five-year career break to be home with his five children. The Singapore press recently wrote about nurses returning to work after long career breaks. And speaking of long career breaks, this is Mimi Kahn. She's a social worker in Orange County, California, who returned to work in a social services organization after a 25-year career break. That's the longest career break that I'm aware of. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor took a five-year career break early in her career. And this is Tracy Shapiro, who took a 13-year career break. Tracy answered a call for essays by the Today Show from people who were trying to return to work but having a difficult time of it. Tracy wrote in that she was a mom of five who loved her time at home, but she had gone through a divorce and needed to return to work, plus she really wanted to bring work back into her life because she loved working. Tracy was doing what so many of us do when we feel like we've put in a good day in the job search. She was looking for a finance or accounting role, and she had just spent the last nine months very diligently researching companies online and applying for jobs with no results. I met Tracy in June of 2011, when the Today Show asked me if I could work with her to see if I could help her turn things around. The first thing I told Tracy was she had to get out of the house. I told her she had to go public with her job search and tell everyone she knew about her interest in returning to work. I also told her, "You are going to have a lot of conversations that don't go anywhere. Expect that, and don't be discouraged by it. There will be a handful that ultimately lead to a job opportunity." I'll tell you what happened with Tracy in a little bit, but I want to share with you a discovery that I made when I was returning to work after my own career break of 11 years out of the full-time workforce. And that is, that people's view of you is frozen in time. What I mean by this is, when you start to get in touch with people and you get back in touch with those people from the past, the people with whom you worked or went to school, they are going to remember you as you were before your career break. And that's even if your sense of self has diminished over time, as happens with so many of us the farther removed we are from our professional identities. So for example, you might think of yourself as someone who looks like this. This is me, crazy after a day of driving around in my minivan. Or here I am in the kitchen. But those people from the past, they don't know about any of this. They only remember you as you were, and it's a great confidence boost to be back in touch with these people and hear their enthusiasm about your interest in returning to work. There's one more thing I remember vividly from my own career break. And that was that I hardly kept up with the business news. My background is in finance, and I hardly kept up with any news when I was home caring for my four young children. So I was afraid I'd go into an interview and start talking about a company that didn't exist anymore. So I had to resubscribe to the Wall Street Journal and read it for a good six months cover to cover before I felt like I had a handle on what was going on in the business world again. I believe relaunchers are a gem of the workforce, and here's why. Think about our life stage: for those of us who took career breaks for childcare reasons, we have fewer or no maternity leaves. We did that already. We have fewer spousal or partner job relocations. We're in a more settled time of life. We have great work experience. We have a more mature perspective. We're not trying to find ourselves at an employer's expense. Plus we have an energy, an enthusiasm about returning to work precisely because we've been away from it for a while. On the flip side, I speak with employers, and here are two concerns that employers have about hiring relaunchers. The first one is, employers are worried that relaunchers are technologically obsolete. Now, I can tell you, having been technologically obsolete myself at one point, that it's a temporary condition. I had done my financial analysis so long ago that I used Lotus 1-2-3. I don't know if anyone can even remember back that far, but I had to relearn it on Excel. It actually wasn't that hard. A lot of the commands are the same. I found PowerPoint much more challenging, but now I use PowerPoint all the time. I tell relaunchers that employers expect them to come to the table with a working knowledge of basic office management software. And if they're not up to speed, then it's their responsibility to get there. And they do. The second area of concern that employers have about relaunchers is they're worried that relaunchers don't know what they want to do. I tell relaunchers that they need to do the hard work to figure out whether their interests and skills have changed or have not changed while they have been on career break. That's not the employer's job. It's the relauncher's responsibility to demonstrate to the employer where they can add the most value. Back in 2010 I started noticing something. I had been tracking return to work programs since 2008, and in 2010, I started noticing the use of a short-term paid work opportunity, whether it was called an internship or not, but an internship-like experience, as a way for professionals to return to work. I saw Goldman Sachs and Sara Lee start corporate reentry internship programs. I saw a returning engineer, a nontraditional reentry candidate, apply for an entry-level internship program in the military, and then get a permanent job afterward. I saw two universities integrate internships into mid-career executive education programs. So I wrote a report about what I was seeing, and it became this article for Harvard Business Review called "The 40-Year-Old Intern." I have to thank the editors there for that title, and also for this artwork where you can see the 40-year-old intern in the midst of all the college interns. And then, courtesy of Fox Business News, they called the concept "The 50-Year-Old Intern." (Laughter) So five of the biggest financial services companies have reentry internship programs for returning finance professionals. And at this point, hundreds of people have participated. These internships are paid, and the people who move on to permanent roles are commanding competitive salaries. And now, seven of the biggest engineering companies are piloting reentry internship programs for returning engineers as part of an initiative with the Society of Women Engineers. Now, why are companies embracing the reentry internship? Because the internship allows the employer to base their hiring decision on an actual work sample instead of a series of interviews, and the employer does not have to make that permanent hiring decision until the internship period is over. This testing out period removes the perceived risk that some managers attach to hiring relaunchers, and they are attracting excellent candidates who are turning into great hires. Think about how far we have come. Before this, most employers were not interested in engaging with relaunchers at all. But now, not only are programs being developed specifically with relaunchers in mind, but you can't even apply for these programs unless you have a gap on your résumé. This is the mark of real change, of true institutional shift, because if we can solve this problem for relaunchers, we can solve it for other career transitioners too. In fact, an employer just told me that their veterans return to work program is based on their reentry internship program. And there's no reason why there can't be a retiree internship program. Different pool, same concept. So let me tell you what happened with Tracy Shapiro. Remember that she had to tell everyone she knew about her interest in returning to work. Well, one critical conversation with another parent in her community led to a job offer for Tracy, and it was an accounting job in a finance department. But it was a temp job. The company told her there was a possibility it could turn into something more, but no guarantees. This was in the fall of 2011. Tracy loved this company, and she loved the people and the office was less than 10 minutes from her house. So even though she had a second job offer at another company for a permanent full-time role, she decided to take her chances with this internship and hope for the best. Well, she ended up blowing away all of their expectations, and the company not only made her a permanent offer at the beginning of 2012, but they made it even more interesting and challenging, because they knew what Tracy could handle. Fast forward to 2015, Tracy's been promoted. They've paid for her to get her MBA at night. She's even hired another relauncher to work for her. Tracy's temp job was a tryout, just like an internship, and it ended up being a win for both Tracy and her employer. Now, my goal is to bring the reentry internship concept to more and more employers. But in the meantime, if you are returning to work after a career break, don't hesitate to suggest an internship or an internship-like arrangement to an employer that does not have a formal reentry internship program. Be their first success story, and you can be the example for more relaunchers to come. Thank you. (Applause) |
You have no idea where camels really come from | {0: 'Latif Nasser is the director of research at Radiolab, where he has reported on such disparate topics as culture-bound illnesses, snowflake photography, sinking islands and 16th-century automata.'} | TED Talks Live | So, this is a story about how we know what we know. It's a story about this woman, Natalia Rybczynski. She's a paleobiologist, which means she specializes in digging up really old dead stuff. (Audio) Natalia Rybczynski: Yeah, I had someone call me "Dr. Dead Things." Latif Nasser: And I think she's particularly interesting because of where she digs that stuff up, way above the Arctic Circle in the remote Canadian tundra. Now, one summer day in 2006, she was at a dig site called the Fyles Leaf Bed, which is less than 10 degrees latitude away from the magnetic north pole. (Audio) NR: Really, it's not going to sound very exciting, because it was a day of walking with your backpack and your GPS and notebook and just picking up anything that might be a fossil. LN: And at some point, she noticed something. (Audio) NR: Rusty, kind of rust-colored, about the size of the palm of my hand. It was just lying on the surface. LN: And at first she thought it was just a splinter of wood, because that's the sort of thing people had found at the Fyles Leaf Bed before — prehistoric plant parts. But that night, back at camp ... (Audio) NR: ... I get out the hand lens, I'm looking a little bit more closely and realizing it doesn't quite look like this has tree rings. Maybe it's a preservation thing, but it looks really like ... bone. LN: Huh. So over the next four years, she went to that spot over and over, and eventually collected 30 fragments of that exact same bone, most of them really tiny. (Audio) NR: It's not a whole lot. It fits in a small Ziploc bag. LN: And she tried to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle. But it was challenging. (Audio) NR: It's broken up into so many little tiny pieces, I'm trying to use sand and putty, and it's not looking good. So finally, we used a 3D surface scanner. LN: Ooh! NR: Yeah, right? (Laughter) LN: It turns out it was way easier to do it virtually. (Audio) NR: It's kind of magical when it all fits together. LN: How certain were you that you had it right, that you had put it together in the right way? Was there a potential that you'd put it together a different way and have, like, a parakeet or something? (Laughter) (Audio) NR: (Laughs) Um, no. No, we got this. LN: What she had, she discovered, was a tibia, a leg bone, and specifically, one that belonged to a cloven-hoofed mammal, so something like a cow or a sheep. But it couldn't have been either of those. It was just too big. (Audio) NR: The size of this thing, it was huge. It's a really big animal. LN: So what animal could it be? Having hit a wall, she showed one of the fragments to some colleagues of hers in Colorado, and they had an idea. (Audio) NR: We took a saw, and we nicked just the edge of it, and there was this really interesting smell that comes from it. LN: It smelled kind of like singed flesh. It was a smell that Natalia recognized from cutting up skulls in her gross anatomy lab: collagen. Collagen is what gives structure to our bones. And usually, after so many years, it breaks down. But in this case, the Arctic had acted like a natural freezer and preserved it. Then a year or two later, Natalia was at a conference in Bristol, and she saw that a colleague of hers named Mike Buckley was demoing this new process that he called "collagen fingerprinting." It turns out that different species have slightly different structures of collagen, so if you get a collagen profile of an unknown bone, you can compare it to those of known species, and, who knows, maybe you get a match. So she shipped him one of the fragments, FedEx. (Audio) NR: Yeah, you want to track it. It's kind of important. (Laughter) LN: And he processed it, and compared it to 37 known and modern-day mammal species. And he found a match. It turns out that the 3.5 million-year-old bone that Natalia had dug out of the High Arctic belonged to ... a camel. (Laughter) (Audio) NR: And I'm thinking, what? That's amazing — if it's true. LN: So they tested a bunch of the fragments, and they got the same result for each one. However, based on the size of the bone that they found, it meant that this camel was 30 percent larger than modern-day camels. So this camel would have been about nine feet tall, weighed around a ton. (Audience reacts) Yeah. Natalia had found a Giant Arctic camel. (Laughter) Now, when you hear the word "camel," what may come to mind is one of these, the Bactrian camel of East and Central Asia. But chances are the postcard image you have in your brain is one of these, the dromedary, quintessential desert creature — hangs out in sandy, hot places like the Middle East and the Sahara, has a big old hump on its back for storing water for those long desert treks, has big, broad feet to help it tromp over sand dunes. So how on earth would one of these guys end up in the High Arctic? Well, scientists have known for a long time, turns out, even before Natalia's discovery, that camels are actually originally American. (Music: The Star-Spangled Banner) (Laughter) They started here. For nearly 40 of the 45 million years that camels have been around, you could only find them in North America, around 20 different species, maybe more. (Audio) LN: If I put them all in a lineup, would they look different? NR: Yeah, you're going to have different body sizes. You'll have some with really long necks, so they're actually functionally like giraffes. LN: Some had snouts, like crocodiles. (Audio) NR: The really primitive, early ones would have been really small, almost like rabbits. LN: What? Rabbit-sized camels? (Audio) NR: The earliest ones. So those ones you probably would not recognize. LN: Oh my God, I want a pet rabbit-camel. (Audio) NR: I know, wouldn't that be great? (Laughter) LN: And then about three to seven million years ago, one branch of camels went down to South America, where they became llamas and alpacas, and another branch crossed over the Bering Land Bridge into Asia and Africa. And then around the end of the last ice age, North American camels went extinct. So, scientists knew all of that already, but it still doesn't fully explain how Natalia found one so far north. Like, this is, temperature-wise, the polar opposite of the Sahara. Now to be fair, three and a half million years ago, it was on average 22 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now. So it would have been boreal forest, so more like the Yukon or Siberia today. But still, like, they would have six-month-long winters where the ponds would freeze over. You'd have blizzards. You'd have 24 hours a day of straight darkness. Like, how ... How? How is it that one of these Saharan superstars could ever have survived those arctic conditions? (Laughter) Natalia and her colleagues think they have an answer. And it's kind of brilliant. What if the very features that we imagine make the camel so well-suited to places like the Sahara, actually evolved to help it get through the winter? What if those broad feet were meant to tromp not over sand, but over snow, like a pair of snowshoes? What if that hump — which, huge news to me, does not contain water, it contains fat — (Laughter) was there to help the camel get through that six-month-long winter, when food was scarce? And then, only later, long after it crossed over the land bridge did it retrofit those winter features for a hot desert environment? Like, for instance, the hump may be helpful to camels in hotter climes because having all your fat in one place, like a, you know, fat backpack, means that you don't have to have that insulation all over the rest of your body. So it helps heat dissipate easier. It's this crazy idea, that what seems like proof of the camel's quintessential desert nature could actually be proof of its High Arctic past. Now, I'm not the first person to tell this story. Others have told it as a way to marvel at evolutionary biology or as a keyhole into the future of climate change. But I love it for a totally different reason. For me, it's a story about us, about how we see the world and about how that changes. So I was trained as a historian. And I've learned that, actually, a lot of scientists are historians, too. They make sense of the past. They tell the history of our universe, of our planet, of life on this planet. And as a historian, you start with an idea in your mind of how the story goes. (Audio) NR: We make up stories and we stick with it, like the camel in the desert, right? That's a great story! It's totally adapted for that. Clearly, it always lived there. LN: But at any moment, you could uncover some tiny bit of evidence. You could learn some tiny thing that forces you to reframe everything you thought you knew. Like, in this case, this one scientist finds this one shard of what she thought was wood, and because of that, science has a totally new and totally counterintuitive theory about why this absurd Dr. Seuss-looking creature looks the way it does. And for me, it completely upended the way I think of the camel. It went from being this ridiculously niche creature suited only to this one specific environment, to being this world traveler that just happens to be in the Sahara, and could end up virtually anywhere. (Applause) This is Azuri. Azuri, hi, how are you doing? OK, here, I've got one of these for you here. (Laughter) So Azuri is on a break from her regular gig at the Radio City Music Hall. (Laughter) That's not even a joke. Anyway — But really, Azuri is here as a living reminder that the story of our world is a dynamic one. It requires our willingness to readjust, to reimagine. (Laughter) Right, Azuri? And, really, that we're all just one shard of bone away from seeing the world anew. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How young Africans found a voice on Twitter | {0: 'When her hashtag #IfAfricaWasABar went viral, Botswana writer Siyanda Mohutsiwa triggered a lighthearted but electrifying discussion of some serious African issues.'} | TED2016 | It began with one question: If Africa was a bar, what would your country be drinking or doing? I kicked it off with a guess about South Africa, which wasn't exactly according to the rules because South Africa's not my country. But alluding to the country's continual attempts to build a postracial society after being ravaged for decades by apartheid, I tweeted, #ifafricawasabar South Africa would be drinking all kinds of alcohol and begging them to get along in its stomach. And then I waited. And then I had that funny feeling where I wondered if I crossed the line. So, I sent out a few other tweets about my own country and a few other African countries I'm familiar with. And then I waited again, but this time I read through almost every tweet I had ever tweeted to convince myself, no, to remind myself that I'm really funny and that if nobody gets it, that's fine. But luckily, I didn't have to do that for very long. Very soon, people were participating. In fact, by the end of that week in July, the hashtag #ifafricawasabar would have garnered around 60,000 tweets, lit up the continent and made its way to publications all over the world. People were using the hashtag to do many different things. To poke fun at their stereotypes: [#IfAfricaWasABar Nigeria would be outside explaining that he will pay the entrance fee, all he needs is the bouncer's account details.] (Laughter) To criticize government spending: [#ifafricawasabar South Africa would be ordering bottles it can't pronounce running a tab it won't be able to pay] To make light of geopolitical tensions: [#IfAfricaWasABar South Sudan would be the new guy with serious anger management issues.] To remind us that even in Africa there are some countries we don't know exist: [#IfAfricaWasABar Lesotho would be that person who nobody really knows but is always in the pictures.] And also to make fun of the countries that don't think that they're in Africa: [#IfAfricaWasABar Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco be like "What the hell are we doing here?!!"] (Laughter) And to note the countries that had made a big turnaround: [#ifAfricawasabar Rwanda would be that girl that comes with no money and no transport but leaves drunk, happy and rich] But most importantly, people were using the hashtag to connect. People were connecting over their Africanness. So for one week in July, Twitter became a real African bar. And I was really thrilled, mainly because I realized that Pan-Africanism could work, that we had before us, between us, at our fingertips a platform that just needed a small spark to light in us a hunger for each other. My name is Siyanda Mohutsiwa, I'm 22 years old and I am Pan-Africanist by birth. Now, I say I'm Pan-Africanist by birth because my parents are from two different African countries. My father's from a country called Botswana in southern Africa. It's only slightly bigger than Germany. This year we celebrate our 50th year of stable democracy. And it has some very progressive social policies. My mother's country is the Kingdom of Swaziland. It's a very, very small country, also in southern Africa. It is Africa's last complete monarchy. So it's been ruled by a king and a royal family in line with their tradition, for a very long time. On paper, these countries seem very different. And when I was a kid, I could see the difference. It rained a lot in one country, it didn't rain quite as much in the other. But outside of that, I didn't really realize why it mattered that my parents were from two different places. But it would go on to have a very peculiar effect on me. You see, I was born in one country and raised in the other. When we moved to Botswana, I was a toddler who spoke fluent SiSwati and nothing else. So I was being introduced to my new home, my new cultural identity, as a complete outsider, incapable of comprehending anything that was being said to me by the family and country whose traditions I was meant to move forward. But very soon, I would shed SiSwati. And when I would go back to Swaziland, I would be constantly confronted by how very non-Swazi I was becoming. Add to that my entry into Africa's private school system, whose entire purpose is to beat the Africanness out of you, and I would have a very peculiar adolescence. But I think that my interest in ideas of identity was born here, in the strange intersection of belonging to two places at once but not really belonging to either one very well and belonging to this vast space in between and around simultaneously. I became obsessed with the idea of a shared African identity. Since then, I have continued to read about politics and geography and identity and what all those things mean. I've also held on to a deep curiosity about African philosophies. When I began to read, I gravitated towards the works of black intellectuals like Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon, who tackled complex ideas like decolonization and black consciousness. And when I thought, at 14, that I had digested these grand ideas, I moved on to the speeches of iconic African statesmen like Burkina Faso's Thomas Sankara and Congo's Patrice Lumumba. I read every piece of African fiction that I could get my hands on. So when Twitter came, I hopped on with the enthusiasm of a teenage girl whose friends are super, super bored of hearing about all this random stuff. The year was 2011 and all over southern Africa and the whole continent, affordable data packages for smartphones and Internet surfing became much easier to get. So my generation, we were sending messages to each other on this platform that just needed 140 characters and a little bit of creativity. On long commutes to work, in lectures that some of us should have been paying attention to, on our lunch breaks, we would communicate as much as we could about the everyday realities of being young and African. But of course, this luxury was not available to everybody. So this meant that if you were a teenage girl in Botswana and you wanted to have fun on the Internet, one, you had to tweet in English. Two, you had to follow more than just the three other people you knew online. You had to follow South Africans, Zimbabweans, Ghanaians, Nigerians. And suddenly, your whole world opened up. And my whole world did open up. I followed vibrant Africans who were travelling around the continent, taking pictures of themselves and posting them under the hashtag #myafrica. Because at that time, if you were to search Africa on Twitter or on Google or any kind of social media, you would think that the entire continent was just pictures of animals and white guys drinking cocktails in hotel resorts. (Laughter) But Africans were using this platform to take some kind of ownership of the tourism sectors. It was Africans taking selfies on the beaches of Nigeria. It was Africans in cocktail bars in Nairobi. And these were the same Africans that I began to meet in my own travels around the continent. We would discuss African literature, politics, economic policy. But almost invariably, every single time, we would end up discussing Twitter. And that's when I realized what this was. We were standing in the middle of something amazing, because for the first time ever young Africans could discuss the future of our continent in real time, without the restriction of borders, finances and watchful governments. Because the little known truth is many Africans know a lot less about other African countries than some Westerners might know about Africa as a whole. This is by accident, but sometimes, it's by design. For example, in apartheid South Africa, black South Africans were constantly being bombarded with this message that any country ruled by black people was destined for failure. And this was done to convince them that they were much better off under crushing white rule than they were living in a black and free nation. Add to that Africa's colonial, archaic education system, which has been unthinkingly carried over from the 1920s — and at the age of 15, I could name all the various causes of the wars that had happened in Europe in the past 200 years, but I couldn't name the president of my neighboring country. And to me, this doesn't make any sense because whether we like it or not, the fates of African people are deeply intertwined. When disaster hits, when turmoil hits, we share the consequences. When Burundians flee political turmoil, they go to us, to other African countries. Africa has six of the world's largest refugee centers. What was once a Burundian problem becomes an African problem. So to me, there are no Sudanese problems or South African problems or Kenyan problems, only African problems because eventually, we share the turmoil. So if we share the problems, why aren't we doing a better job of sharing the successes? How can we do that? Well, in the long term, we can shoot towards increasing inter-African trade, removing borders and putting pressure on leaders to fulfill regional agreements they've already signed. But I think that the biggest way for Africa to share its successes is to foster something I like to call social Pan-Africanism. Now, political Pan-Africanism already exists, so I'm not inventing anything totally new here. But political Pan-Africanism is usually the African unity of the political elite. And who does that benefit? Well, African leaders, almost exclusively. No, what I'm talking about is the Pan-Africanism of the ordinary African. Young Africans like me, we are bursting with creative energy, with innovative ideas. But with bad governance and shaky institutions, all of this potential could go to waste. On a continent where more than a handful of leaders have been in power longer than the majority of the populations has been alive, we are in desperate need of something new, something that works. And I think that thing is social Pan-Africanism. My dream is that young Africans stop allowing borders and circumstance to suffocate our innovation. My dream is that when a young African comes up with something brilliant, they don't say, "Well, this wouldn't work in my country," and then give up. My dream is that young Africans begin to realize that the entire continent is our canvas, is our home. Using the Internet, we can begin to think collaboratively, we can begin to innovate together. In Africa, we say, "If you want to go fast, you go alone, but if you want to go far, you go together." And I believe that social Pan-Africanism is how we can go far together. And this is already happening. Access to these online networks has given young Africans something we've always had to violently take: a voice. We now have a platform. Before now, if you wanted to hear from the youth in Africa, you waited for the 65-year-old minister of youth — (Laughter) to wake up in the morning, take his heartburn medication and then tell you the plans he has for your generation in 20 years time. Before now, if you wanted to be heard by your possibly tyrannical government, you were pushed to protest, suffer the consequences and have your fingers crossed that some Western paper somewhere might make someone care. But now we have opportunities to back each other up in ways we never could before. We support South African students who are marching against ridiculously high tertiary fees. We support Zimbabwean women who are marching to parliament. We support Angolan journalists who are being illegally detained. For the first time ever, African pain and African aspiration has the ability to be witnessed by those who can empathize with it the most: other Africans. I believe that with a social Pan-Africanist thinking and using the Internet as a tool, we can begin to rescue each other, and ultimately, to rescue ourselves. Thank you. (Applause) |
A futuristic vision of the age of holograms | {0: 'With his latest invention, HoloLens, Kinect creator Alex Kipman has opened a virtual holographic universe for users to explore -- and he may have changed the face of computing forever.'} | TED2016 | Thousands of years from now, we'll look back at the first century of computing as a fascinating but very peculiar time — the only time in history where humans were reduced to live in 2D space, interacting with technology as if we were machines; a singular, 100-year period in the vastness of time where humans communicated, were entertained and managed their lives from behind a screen. Today, we spend most of our time tapping and looking at screens. What happened to interacting with each other? I don't know about you, but I feel limited inside this 2D world of monitors and pixels. And it is this very limitation and my desire to connect with people that inspires me as a creator. Put simply: I want to create a new reality, a reality where technology brings us infinitely closer to each other, a reality where people, not devices, are the center of everything. I dream of a reality where technology senses what we see, touch and feel; a reality where technology no longer gets in our way, but instead embraces who we are. I dream of technology on a human path. We have all experienced technology that enables people to act more like people, products that enable natural interactions, voice controls or biometrics. This is the next step in the evolution. This is Microsoft HoloLens, the first fully untethered holographic computer. Devices like this will bring 3D holographic content right into our world, enhancing the way we experience life beyond our ordinary range of perceptions. Now, I'm not thinking about a distant future. I'm talking about today. We are already seeing car companies like Volvo designing cars differently with HoloLens; universities like Case Western redefining the way medical students learn; and my personal favorite, NASA is using HoloLens to let scientists explore planets holographically. Now, this is important. By bringing holograms into our world, I'm not just talking about a new device or a better computer. I'm talking about freeing ourselves from the 2D confines of traditional computing. Put it this way: temporally adjusted, we're like cave people in computer terms. We've barely discovered charcoal and started drawing the first stick figures in our cave. Now, this is the perspective I apply to my work every single day. And now for the next few minutes, I invite all of you to apply the same perspective to the journey ahead of us. Now, as I put this HoloLens on, let me explain the setup a little bit. It's probably the most risky demo we have ever done on any stage with HoloLens, and I can't think of a better place to do it than here at TED. Momentarily, I am going to be seeing holograms right on this stage, just as clearly as I can see all of you. Now at the same time, we have also this special camera that just walked in onstage so that all of you can share in this experience with me up on all the monitors. So let's start our journey. And what better place to begin our journey, than in the computer cave of 2D. Let's explore the world all around us with this new lens, and understand the computer world from a brand new perspective. The computer universe is both marvelous and primitive. It's a universe based on causality. As developers, we dream the different causes and then we program the different effects. Double click on an icon, that's a cause. Open an application, that's an effect. Now when we compare this to our physical universe, it is overly constraining, because our universe is not digital. Our universe is analog. Our universe doesn't think in terms of zero or one, true or false, or black or white. We exist in a world governed by quantum physics, a universe of zero and one both at the same time, a reality based on infinite probabilities and shades of gray. You can see how these two worlds collide. So why are screens so pervasive in our analog life? We see screens from the moment we wake up, to the moment we fall asleep. Why? I think it's because computers give us superpowers. Within the digital universe, we have the power to displace space and the power to displace time. It doesn't matter if you're using technology for entertainment, productivity or communication. Think of it this way: let's all go home tonight and watch our favorite show on television. This is theater — time and space displaced. As soon as I'm done with this TED Talk, I'm going to immediately call my lovely family in Seattle. That's displacement of space. Now, these are such great superpowers that we put up with the two-dimensional limitations of our current digital world. But what if we didn't have to? What if we could have these same digital powers in our world? You can already see glimmers of this, but I believe our children's children will grow up in a world devoid of 2D technology. It's remarkable to dream of this world, a world where technology truly understands us — where we live, work and communicate — with tools that enhance the human experience, not machines that limit our humanity. So how do we get there? For me, the answer required looking at the problem from a different perspective. It required sensing the world from the perspective of a machine. If you're a machine trying to sense our world, how would you actually break the problem down? You'd probably try to classify things as a human, an environment or an object. But how would that machine then interact with reality? And I can think of three ways. First, as a machine, I would observe or I would input reality. Speech recognition and biometric authentication are great examples of a machine interacting with humans from an input perspective. Secondly, as a machine, I could place digital information, or output information, into reality. Holograms are examples of a machine interacting with an environment from an output perspective. Finally, as a machine, I could exchange energy with the world via haptics. Now, imagine being able to feel the temperature of a virtual object, or better yet, imagine pushing a hologram and having it push you back with equal force. With this perspective, we are able to collapse reality into a simple matrix. Now here's a secret: as an engineer, I get really excited anytime I can reduce something to the matrix. From self-driving cars to smartphones to this holographic computer on my head, machines are becoming capable of understanding our world. And they are starting to interact with us in significantly more personal ways. Now, imagine having granular control over everything in the world. Move the dial one way, and you get reality. Move the dial the other way, and you get virtual reality. Now, imagine dialing your entire environment between virtual and real worlds. I love it down here. Now, imagine if I could look at all of you and dial from real humans into elves. When technology truly understands our world, it will again transform the ways we interact, the ways we work and the ways we play. Less than half a century ago, two courageous men landed on the moon, using computers that were less powerful than the phones in your pockets. Six hundred million humans watched them on grainy, black-and-white televisions. And the world? The world was mesmerized. Now imagine how our children and their children will experience the continued exploration of space with technology that understands this world. We already live in a world where real-time universal translators exist. And I can squint, and I can already see holographic telepresence in our near future. In fact, since we've been lucky with our demo so far, let's try doing something else even more crazy. I invite you to experience, for the first time anywhere in the world, here on the TED stage, a real-life holographic teleportation, between me and my friend, Dr. Jeffrey Norris, from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Finger crossed. Hi, Jeff. Jeff Norris: Hey, Alex. Alex Kipman: Phew! That worked. How are you doing today, Jeff? (Applause) JN: Doing great. I had an awesome week. AK: So, can you tell us a little bit, Jeff, about where you are? JN: Well, I'm actually in three places. I'm standing in a room across the street, while I'm standing on this stage with you, while I'm standing on Mars, a hundred million miles away. AK: Wow, a hundred million miles away. This is crazy! Can you tell us a little bit more about where all this data from Mars is coming from? JN: Absolutely. This is a precise holographic replica of Mars, built from data captured by the Curiosity Mars Rover, that I can explore as easily as a place on Earth. Humans are natural explorers. We can instantly understand an environment, just by being present in it. We've built tools like our Mars Rover to extend our vision and lengthen our reach. But for decades, we've explored from a seat behind screens and keyboards. Now, we're leaping over all of that, over the giant antennas and the relay satellites and the vastness between worlds to take our first steps on this landscape as if we were truly there. Today, a group of scientists on our mission are seeing Mars as never before — an alien world made a little more familiar, because they're finally exploring it as humans should. But our dreams don't have to end with making it just like being there. When we dial this real world to the virtual, we can do magical things. We can see in invisible wavelengths or teleport to the top of a mountain. Perhaps someday, we'll feel the minerals in a rock just by touching it. We're taking the first steps. But we want the whole world to join us in taking the next, because this is not a journey for a few, but for all of us. AK: Thank you Jeff, this was amazing. Thank you so much for joining us on the TED stage today. (Applause) JN: Thank you Alex, bye bye. AK: Bye, Jeff. (Applause) I dream about this future every single day. I take inspiration from our ancestors. We used to live in tribes where we interacted, communicated and worked together. We are all beginning to build technology that will enable us to return to the humanity that brought us where we are today — technology that will let us stop living inside this 2D world of monitors and pixels, and let us start remembering what it feels like to live in our 3D world. It's a phenomenal time to be human. Thank you. (Applause) Helen Walters: Thanks so much. I have some questions. AK: OK. HW: So there's been some talk in the press. And I'll just ask you straight, then we have a straight answer. There's been talk about the difference between the demos and the reality of the commercial product. Talk about this field of view issue. Is this type of experience what someone who buys the product will get? AK: It's a great question, Or, said better, this is a question we've been receiving in the media for possibly the last year. If you do your research, I haven't answered that question. I've purposely ignored it, because ultimately, it's the wrong question to ask. That's the equivalent of me showing holograms to someone for the first time, and you then saying, "What's the size of your television?" The field of view for the product is almost irrelevant. What we should be talking about is the density of lights, or radiance, that shows up. Better said, what the angular resolution is of the things that you see. So from that perspective, what you saw — you know, the camera is wearing a HoloLens. So even if I wanted to cheat, I can't. HW: But the camera has a different lens on it than our eye. Right? AK: The camera has a fish-eye lens on it. It's seeing a much wider view than the human eye is. So if you think about the points of light that show up radially from the vision of the camera, which is the thing that matters: how many points of light can I get in a given volume? That's the same as I get on this HoloLens as I will on that one. Now, this camera sees a much wider view of the world, right? HW: Jesus Christ! (Laughter) AK: He did show up! I told you he'd show up. Come this way. (Laughter) HW: Oh, shit. AK: And there's holographic Jeff Norris. HW: I knew something was happening, but I really wasn't sure what. AK: So in short: to be super crisp, the camera that you see on the screen has a wider field of view than the human eye. But the angular resolution of the holograms that you see, the points of light per unit of area, are actually the same. HW: So you spent — Jeff, I'll get to you in a minute — so you spent a lot of time mapping the stage — AK: That's right. HW: So help me out here: if I buy a HoloLens and have it at home, I don't need to map my apartment, right? AK: The HoloLens maps in real time at about five frames per second, with this technology that we call spatial mapping. So in your home, as soon as you put it on, holograms will start showing up, and you'll start placing them and they'll start learning your home. In a stage environment where we're trying to get something on my head to communicate with something over there with all of the wireless connectivity that usually brings all conferences down, we don't take the risk of trying to do this live. So what we do is pre-map the stage at five frames per second with the same spatial-mapping technology that you'll use with the product at home, and then we store it, so that when there's shenanigans of wireless in an environment like this, between the camera's HoloLens and the one on my head, we don't have things disappear. Because ultimately, the holograms are coming from this HoloLens, and that one is just viewing the HoloLens. So if I lose connectivity, you would stop seeing beautiful things on the screen. HW: And it was beautiful. Um ... Jeff? JN: Yes? HW: Hi. AK: I'll take a step back. HW: So Jeff, you were on Mars, you were here, you were in a room across the street. Tell me more about the fact that, with holograms, you have sight but you don't have touch, you don't have smell. Is this scientifically useful now? That's my question for a hologram. JN: Thanks for the question. Absolutely, I believe that these technologies are scientifically useful right now, and that's why we're using them in multiple parts of our work at NASA. So we're using it to improve the ways that we explore Mars. We're also using it for our astronauts on the space station. We're even using it now to design the next generation of our spacecraft. HW: Amazing. OK, Jeff, please go away. Thank you very much. (Laughter) Alex, really, that was amazing. Thank you so much. AK: Thank you. HW: Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
The beauty of human skin in every color | {0: 'By cataloging every conceivable human skin tone, Angélica Dass illustrates that skin color and race are more complex than they might appear at first glance.'} | TED2016 | It has been 128 years since the last country in the world abolished slavery and 53 years since Martin Luther King pronounced his "I Have A Dream" speech. But we still live in a world where the color of our skin not only gives a first impression, but a lasting one that remains. I was born in a family full of colors. My father is the son of a maid from whom he inherited an intense dark chocolate tone. He was adopted by those who I know as my grandparents. The matriarch, my grandma, has a porcelain skin and cotton-like hair. My grandpa was somewhere between a vanilla and strawberry yogurt tone, like my uncle and my cousin. My mother is a cinnamon-skin daughter of a native Brazilian, with a pinch of hazel and honey, and a man [who is] a mix of coffee with milk, but with a lot of coffee. She has two sisters. One in a toasted-peanut skin and the other, also adopted, more on the beige side, like a pancake. (Laughter) Growing up in this family, color was never important for me. Outside home, however, things were different soon. Color had many other meanings. I remember my first drawing lessons in school as a bunch of contradictory feelings. It was exciting and creative but I never understood the unique flesh-colored pencil. I was made of flesh but I wasn't pink. My skin was brown, and people said I was black. I was seven years old with a mess of colors in my head. Later, when I took my cousin to school, I was usually taken for the nanny. By helping in the kitchen at a friend's party, people thought I was the maid. I was even treated like a prostitute just because I was walking alone on the beach with European friends. And many times, visiting my grandma or friends in upper class buildings, I was invited not to use the main elevator. Because in the end, with this color and this hair, I cannot belong to some places. In some way, I get to used to it and accept part of it. However, something inside of me keeps revolving and struggling. Years later I married a Spaniard. But not any Spaniard. I chose one with the skin color of a lobster when sunburnt. (Laughter) Since then, a new question started to chase me. What will be the color of your children? As you can understand, this is my last concern. But thinking about it, with my previous background, my story led me to make my personal exercise as a photographer. And that is how Humanae was born. Humanae is a pursuit to highlight our true colors, rather than the untrue white, red, black or yellow associated with race. It's a kind of game to question our codes. It's a work in progress from a personal story to a global history. I portray the subjects in a white background. Then I choose an 11-pixel square from the nose, paint the background, and look for the corresponding color in the industrial palette, Pantone. I started with my family and friends, then more and more people joined the adventure, thanks to public calls coming through the social media. I thought that the main space to show my work was the Internet because I want an open concept that invites everybody to push the share button in both the computer and their brain. The snowball started to roll. The project had a great welcome — invitations, exhibitions, physical formats, galleries and museums ... just happened. And among them, my favorite: when Humanae occupies public spaces and appears in the street, it fosters a popular debate and creates a feeling of community. I have portrayed more than 3,000 people in 13 different countries, 19 different cities around the world. Just to mention some of them — from someone included in the Forbes list, to refugees who crossed the Mediterranean by boat. In Paris, from the UNESCO Headquarters to a shelter. And students both in Switzerland and favelas in Rio de Janeiro. All kinds of beliefs, gender identities or physical impairments, a newborn or terminally ill. We all together build Humanae. Those portraits make us rethink how we see each other. When modern science is questioning the race concept, what does it mean for us to be black, white, yellow, red? Is it the eye, the nose, the mouth, the hair? Or does it have to do with our origin, nationality or bank account? This personal exercise turned out to be a discovery. Suddenly I realized that Humanae was useful for many people. It represents a sort of mirror for those who cannot find themselves reflected in any label. It was amazing that people started to share their thoughts about the work with me. I have hundreds of that, I will share with you, too. A mother of 11 years — A mother of an 11-year-old girl wrote me, "Very good for me as a tool to work on her confidence, as this past weekend one of her girlfriends argued with her that she does not belong and should not be allowed to live in Norway. So your work has a very special place in my heart and it's very important for me." A woman shared her portrait on Facebook and wrote, "All my life, people from across the globe had difficulties to place me in a group, a stereotype, a box. Perhaps we should stop. Instead of framing, ask the individual, 'How would you label yourself?' Then I would say, 'Hi. I'm Massiel. I'm a Dominican-Dutch, I grew up in a mixed family and I'm a bisexual woman.' " Besides these unexpected and touching reactions, Humanae finds a new life in a different variety of fields. Just to show you some examples, illustrators and art students using it as a reference for their sketches and their studies. It's a collection of faces. Researchers in the fields of anthropology, physics and neuroscience use Humanae with different scientific approaches related to human ethnicity, optophysiology, face recognition or Alzheimer's. One of the most important impacts of the project is that Humanae was chosen to be the cover of Foreign Affairs, one of the most relevant political publications. And talking about foreign affairs, I found the perfect ambassadors for my project ... teachers. They are the ones that use Humanae as a tool for educational purposes. Their passion encourages me to go back to drawing classes, but this time as a teacher myself. My students, both adults and kids, paint their self-portraits, trying to discover their own unique color. As a photographer, I realize that I can be a channel for others to communicate. As an individual, as Angélica, every time I take a picture, I feel that I am sitting in front of a therapist. All the frustration, fear and loneliness that I once felt ... becomes love. The last country — the last country in the world who abolished slavery is the country where I was born, Brazil. We still have to work hard to abolish discrimination. That remains a common practice worldwide, and that will not disappear by itself. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. |
Why gun violence can't be our new normal | {0: 'As president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Dan Gross seeks to cut US gun deaths in half by 2025.'} | TED2016 | OK, so, confession: I've always been weirdly obsessed with advertising. I remember watching Saturday morning cartoons, paying more attention to the commercials than to the shows, trying to figure out how they were trying to get inside my head. Ultimately, that led me to my dream job. I became a partner at a big New York ad agency. But then, all of that suddenly changed on February 23, 1997, when my little brother Matt was shot in the head in a shooting that happened on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Suddenly, my family was thrown into the middle of a nightmare, being told that my brother was going to die, actually being given the opportunity to say goodbye to him, then several emergency brain surgeries and now what's amounted, for Matt, to a lifetime spent courageously recovering from a traumatic brain injury. He is definitely my hero. But as much as (Applause) — yeah, deserves it — (Applause) But as much as this tragedy was a nightmare for my family, I often think about how much worse it could have been; in fact, how much worse it is for the 90 families every day who aren't as fortunate, who lose loved ones — brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, parents. They don't all make national headlines. In fact, most of them don't. They go largely unnoticed, in a nation that's kind of come to accept a disgraceful national epidemic as some kind of new normal. So I quit my job in advertising to try and do something about this disgraceful national epidemic, because I came to realize that the challenges to preventing gun violence are actually the same ones that made me love advertising, which is to try to figure out how to engage people. Only instead of doing it to sell products, doing it to save lives. And that comes down to finding common ground, where what I want overlaps with what you want. And you might be surprised to learn, when it comes to gun violence, just how much common ground there is. Let's look, for example, at people who love to hunt, a sport enjoyed by millions across the US. It's a proud tradition. Families. In some places, the first day of hunting season is actually a school holiday. What do hunters want? Well, they want to hunt. They love their guns. They believe deeply in the Second Amendment right to own those guns. But that doesn't mean there isn't common ground. In fact, there's a lot of it, starting with the basic idea of keeping guns out of dangerous hands. This isn't about taking certain guns away from all people. It's about keeping all guns away from certain people, and it's the people that, it turns out, we all agree shouldn't have guns: convicted violent criminals, domestic abusers, the dangerously mentally ill. We can all appreciate how Brady background checks have been incredibly effective in keeping guns out of those dangerous hands. In 20 years, Brady background checks at federally licensed firearm dealers have blocked 2.4 million gun sales to those people that we all agree shouldn't have guns. (Applause) And whether you love guns or hate guns, you probably also appreciate that there shouldn't be thousands of gun sales every day at guns shows or online without those Brady background checks, just like there shouldn't be two lines to get on an airplane — one with security and one with no security. And — (Applause) And the numbers show the overwhelming agreement among the American public: 90 percent of Americans support expanding Brady background checks to all gun sales — including 90 percent of Republicans, more than 80 percent of gun owners, more than 70 percent of NRA members. This is not a controversial idea. In fact, only six percent of the American public disagrees. That's about the percentage of the American public that believes the moon landing was a fake. (Laughter) And it's also about the percentage that believes the government is putting mind-controlling technology in our TV broadcast signals. That's the extent to which we agree about background checks. But what about the 300 million guns already out there in homes across America? Well first, it's important to realize that those guns are mostly in the hands and homes of decent, law-abiding people like you and me, who want what we all want — including keeping our families safe. In fact, that's why more and more people are choosing to own guns. Ten years ago, 42 percent of the American public believed — incorrectly — that a gun makes your home safer. Today, that number is 63 percent. Why? I kind of hate to say it, because it gets to the dark underbelly of advertising, which is if you tell a big enough lie enough times, eventually that lie becomes the truth. And that's exactly what's happened here. The corporate gun lobby has spent billions of dollars blocking the CDC from doing research into the public health epidemic of gun violence; blocking pediatricians from talking to parents about the dangers of guns in the home; blocking smart-gun technology and other technology that would prevent kids from firing parents' guns and would save lives. They're desperate to hide the truth, because they view the truth as a threat to their bottom line. And every day, people are dying as a result. And a lot of those people are children. Every day in the US, nine kids are just shot unintentionally. 900 children and teens take their own lives every year. And here's the thing: they're almost all with a parent's gun. Even two-thirds of school shootings happen with a gun taken from the home, including the terrible tragedy at Sandy Hook. I meet so many of these parents; it's the most heartbreaking part of my job. These are not bad people. They're just living with the unimaginable consequences of a very bad decision, made based on very bad information that was put into their minds by very bad people, who know good and well the misery that they're causing, but just don't care. And the result is a nightmare — not only for families like mine, but for, really, at the end of the day, all of us. But I'm not here to talk about the nightmare of gun violence. I'm here to talk about our dream, and it's a dream we all share, which is the dream of a better, safer, future. For my organization, for the Brady Campaign, that dream is reflected in the bold goal to cut the number of gun deaths in the US in half by 2025. And I hope to leave all of you here tonight with a strong sense of exactly why that dream is so absolutely within reach. Because folks, for every great movement around the world, there's a moment where you can look back and say, "That's when things really started to change." And I'm here to say that for the movement to end gun violence in America, that moment is here. (Applause) We are so clearly at a tipping point, because the American public has come together by the millions like never before, based on that common ground, to say, "Enough." Enough of the mass shootings in malls and movie theaters and churches and schools. Enough of the daily terror of gun violence in homes and streets that's claimed the lives of women and young black men in staggering proportions. Enough of easy access to guns by the people that we all agree shouldn't have them. And enough of a small group of craven politicians putting the interests of the corporate gun lobby ahead of the people they have been elected to represent. Enough. (Applause) And the really exciting thing is, it's not just the usual suspects like me that are saying it anymore. It's so much bigger than that. And if you want proof, let's start where most conversations in the US seem to start — with Kim Kardashian. (Laughter) And here's the thing: it's not really a joke. I mean, think about when issues change. It's when they go from being political and advocacy issues to being part of pop culture, voices coming from everywhere, celebrities using their platforms, musicians, athletes. The NBA has come forward. Conservative pundits that you never would have imagined have come forward. There's real cultural change — I even hear there's a TED Talk about it this year. That's the extent to which this cultural change is happening. And yes, Kim Kardashian has made an unsolicited passionate appeal to her 35 million Twitter followers for expanded background checks. Let's look at the political elections that are heating up. This used to be the classic third-rail issue for Democrats. Couldn't run from it fast enough. Now candidates are running on it. Some are being forced to reverse very bad positions they defended very comfortably, until very recently. For somebody like me, watching people wave around their negative NRA ratings — it's almost surreal to watch. We're still outfunded, yes, by the corporate gun lobby, and ultimately that needs to change. But you know what? We're smarter and we're scrappier, and we have the truth on our side. And we're on offense. You know, they say that the Internet democratizes information. Social media and some of the organizing tools that plug into it have democratized activism. It's allowed us to show what 90 percent support really looks like. Sometimes I think of it — you know, we're converging and attacking instantly by the millions, kind of like white blood cells. It's enabled us to start to really close — and this is the bottom line — close that disgraceful disconnect between what the American public wants and what our elected leaders are doing about it. Until recently, the narrative in Congress was that calls from the other side, from that six percent, outnumbered calls from our side 10 to one. We're flipping that narrative on its head. After that recent terrible tragedy in San Bernardino, we jammed Congressional switchboards. We put 15,000 calls into Congress in 24 hours. And you know what? We got a vote on a bill that nobody thought was going to see the light of day anytime soon. We're seeing real movement to repeal some of the most evil, ugly gun lobby legislation passed over the last dark decade. The stranglehold of the gun lobby is clearly being broken. We've seen President Obama's historic executive actions. They don't go all the way, but they are going to save lives, because they expand Brady background checks to thousands of gun sales that didn't have them previously. And we're marching across the country — we're not just waiting for Congress to act; that would almost be the definition of insanity. We're marching across the country, state by state, marriage-equality style. And you know what? We're winning. Congress is almost always the last to wake up and realize that it's on the wrong side of history. And when they do, it's always because the American public shakes them. And that's exactly what we're doing right now, as we're in this tipping point. You know, recently I was flying cross-country to give a speech to a large group like this, although far less intimidating, and the woman sitting next to me happened to be binge-watching one of my all-time favorite TV shows, "Mad Men," a period TV show about advertising in the 1960s. And as I was trying to think about how to end my remarks, I'd glance up at her screen every now and then, and it seemed that every time I did, I'd see somebody smoking in an office or around children or while pregnant or drinking and driving or driving without seat belts or sexually harassing a coworker. And ultimately it dawned on me: what tremendous inspiration to those of us who have this dream to end gun violence. I mean, think about how much the world has changed in a relatively short period of time, how all those behaviors that were once considered commonplace or normal — some even glamorous or sexy — have become stigmatized in just a generation or two, once they became conversations about our common ground. That is the magnitude of the change we have the potential to create around gun violence. And that's my dream, that maybe someday, some period TV show will depict the terrible nightmare of gun violence, and a future generation of children might only be able to imagine how terrible it must have been. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How humans could evolve to survive in space | {0: "Lisa Nip's work focuses on how we can use synthetic biology to allow humanity to explore space"} | TEDxBeaconStreet | So there are lands few and far between on Earth itself that are hospitable to humans by any measure, but survive we have. Our primitive ancestors, when they found their homes and livelihood endangered, they dared to make their way into unfamiliar territories in search of better opportunities. And as the descendants of these explorers, we have their nomadic blood coursing through our own veins. But at the same time, distracted by our bread and circuses and embroiled in the wars that we have waged on each other, it seems that we have forgotten this desire to explore. We, as a species, we're evolved uniquely for Earth, on Earth, and by Earth, and so content are we with our living conditions that we have grown complacent and just too busy to notice that its resources are finite, and that our Sun's life is also finite. While Mars and all the movies made in its name have reinvigorated the ethos for space travel, few of us seem to truly realize that our species' fragile constitution is woefully unprepared for long duration journeys into space. Let us take a trek to your local national forest for a quick reality check. So just a quick show of hands here: how many of you think you would be able to survive in this lush wilderness for a few days? Well, that's a lot of you. How about a few weeks? That's a decent amount. How about a few months? That's pretty good too. Now, let us imagine that this local national forest experiences an eternal winter. Same questions: how many of you think you would be able to survive for a few days? That's quite a lot. How about a few weeks? So for a fun twist, let us imagine that the only source of water available is trapped as frozen blocks miles below the surface. Soil nutrients are so minimal that no vegetation can be found, and of course hardly any atmosphere exists to speak of. Such examples are only a few of the many challenges we would face on a planet like Mars. So how do we steel ourselves for voyages whose destinations are so far removed from a tropical vacation? Will we continuously ship supplies from Planet Earth? Build space elevators, or impossible miles of transport belts that tether your planet of choice to our home planet? And how do we grow things like food that grew up on Earth like us? But I'm getting ahead of myself. In our species' journey to find a new home under a new sun, we are more likely than not going to be spending much time in the journey itself, in space, on a ship, a hermetic flying can, possibly for many generations. The longest continuous amount of time that any human has spent in space is in the vicinity of 12 to 14 months. From astronauts' experiences in space, we know that spending time in a microgravity environment means bone loss, muscle atrophy, cardiovascular problems, among many other complications that range for the physiological to the psychological. And what about macrogravity, or any other variation in gravitational pull of the planet that we find ourselves on? In short, our cosmic voyages will be fraught with dangers both known and unknown. So far we've been looking to this new piece of mechanical technology or that great next generation robot as part of a lineup to ensure our species safe passage in space. Wonderful as they are, I believe the time has come for us to complement these bulky electronic giants with what nature has already invented: the microbe, a single-celled organism that is itself a self-generating, self-replenishing, living machine. It requires fairly little to maintain, offers much flexibility in design and only asks to be carried in a single plastic tube. The field of study that has enabled us to utilize the capabilities of the microbe is known as synthetic biology. It comes from molecular biology, which has given us antibiotics, vaccines and better ways to observe the physiological nuances of the human body. Using the tools of synthetic biology, we can now edit the genes of nearly any organism, microscopic or not, with incredible speed and fidelity. Given the limitations of our man-made machines, synthetic biology will be a means for us to engineer not only our food, our fuel and our environment, but also ourselves to compensate for our physical inadequacies and to ensure our survival in space. To give you an example of how we can use synthetic biology for space exploration, let us return to the Mars environment. The Martian soil composition is similar to that of Hawaiian volcanic ash, with trace amounts of organic material. Let's say, hypothetically, what if martian soil could actually support plant growth without using Earth-derived nutrients? The first question we should probably ask is, how would we make our plants cold-tolerant? Because, on average, the temperature on Mars is a very uninviting negative 60 degrees centigrade. The next question we should ask is, how do we make our plants drought-tolerant? Considering that most of the water that forms as frost evaporates more quickly than I can say the word "evaporate." Well, it turns out we've already done things like this. By borrowing genes for anti-freeze protein from fish and genes for drought tolerance from other plants like rice and then stitching them into the plants that need them, we now have plants that can tolerate most droughts and freezes. They're known on Earth as GMOs, or genetically modified organisms, and we rely on them to feed all the mouths of human civilization. Nature does stuff like this already, without our help. We have simply found more precise ways to do it. So why would we want to change the genetic makeup of plants for space? Well, to not do so would mean needing to engineer endless acres of land on an entirely new planet by releasing trillions of gallons of atmospheric gasses and then constructing a giant glass dome to contain it all. It's an unrealistic engineering enterprise that quickly becomes a high-cost cargo transport mission. One of the best ways to ensure that we will have the food supplies and the air that we need is to bring with us organisms that have been engineered to adapt to new and harsh environments. In essence, using engineered organisms to help us terraform a planet both in the short and long term. These organisms can then also be engineered to make medicine or fuel. So we can use synthetic biology to bring highly engineered plants with us, but what else can we do? Well, I mentioned earlier that we, as a species, were evolved uniquely for planet Earth. That fact has not changed much in the last five minutes that you were sitting here and I was standing there. And so, if we were to dump any of us on Mars right this minute, even given ample food, water, air and a suit, we are likely to experience very unpleasant health problems from the amount of ionizing radiation that bombards the surface of planets like Mars that have little or nonexistent atmosphere. Unless we plan to stay holed up underground for the duration of our stay on every new planet, we must find better ways of protecting ourselves without needing to resort to wearing a suit of armor that weighs something equal to your own body weight, or needing to hide behind a wall of lead. So let us appeal to nature for inspiration. Among the plethora of life here on Earth, there's a subset of organisms known as extremophiles, or lovers of extreme living conditions, if you'll remember from high school biology. And among these organisms is a bacterium by the name of Deinococcus radiodurans. It is known to be able to withstand cold, dehydration, vacuum, acid, and, most notably, radiation. While its radiation tolerance mechanisms are known, we have yet to adapt the relevant genes to mammals. To do so is not particularly easy. There are many facets that go into its radiation tolerance, and it's not as simple as transferring one gene. But given a little bit of human ingenuity and a little bit of time, I think to do so is not very hard either. Even if we borrow just a fraction of its ability to tolerate radiation, it would be infinitely better than what we already have, which is just the melanin in our skin. Using the tools of synthetic biology, we can harness Deinococcus radiodurans' ability to thrive under otherwise very lethal doses of radiation. As difficult as it is to see, homo sapiens, that is humans, evolves every day, and still continues to evolve. Thousands of years of human evolution has not only given us humans like Tibetans, who can thrive in low-oxygen conditions, but also Argentinians, who can ingest and metabolize arsenic, the chemical element that can kill the average human being. Every day, the human body evolves by accidental mutations that equally accidentally allow certain humans to persevere in dismal situations. But, and this is a big but, such evolution requires two things that we may not always have, or be able to afford, and they are death and time. In our species' struggle to find our place in the universe, we may not always have the time necessary for the natural evolution of extra functions for survival on non-Earth planets. We're living in what E.O. Wilson has termed the age of gene circumvention, during which we remedy our genetic defects like cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy with temporary external supplements. But with every passing day, we approach the age of volitional evolution, a time during which we as a species will have the capacity to decide for ourselves our own genetic destiny. Augmenting the human body with new abilities is no longer a question of how, but of when. Using synthetic biology to change the genetic makeup of any living organisms, especially our own, is not without its moral and ethical quandaries. Will engineering ourselves make us less human? But then again, what is humanity but star stuff that happens to be conscious? Where should human genius direct itself? Surely it is a bit of a waste to sit back and marvel at it. How do we use our knowledge to protect ourselves from the external dangers and then protect ourselves from ourselves? I pose these questions not to engender the fear of science but to bring to light the many possibilities that science has afforded and continues to afford us. We must coalesce as humans to discuss and embrace the solutions not only with caution but also with courage. Mars is a destination, but it will not be our last. Our true final frontier is the line we must cross in deciding what we can and should make of our species' improbable intelligence. Space is cold, brutal and unforgiving. Our path to the stars will be rife with trials that will bring us to question not only who we are but where we will be going. The answers will lie in our choice to use or abandon the technology that we have gleaned from life itself, and it will define us for the remainder of our term in this universe. Thank you. (Applause) |
Two reasons companies fail -- and how to avoid them | {0: "Knut Haanaes believes that the secret to creating lasting, impactful companies is to find a balance between doing what you're good at and looking for new challenges to take on."} | TED@BCG London | Here are two reasons companies fail: they only do more of the same, or they only do what's new. To me the real, real solution to quality growth is figuring out the balance between two activities: exploration and exploitation. Both are necessary, but it can be too much of a good thing. Consider Facit. I'm actually old enough to remember them. Facit was a fantastic company. They were born deep in the Swedish forest, and they made the best mechanical calculators in the world. Everybody used them. And what did Facit do when the electronic calculator came along? They continued doing exactly the same. In six months, they went from maximum revenue ... and they were gone. Gone. To me, the irony about the Facit story is hearing about the Facit engineers, who had bought cheap, small electronic calculators in Japan that they used to double-check their calculators. (Laughter) Facit did too much exploitation. But exploration can go wild, too. A few years back, I worked closely alongside a European biotech company. Let's call them OncoSearch. The company was brilliant. They had applications that promised to diagnose, even cure, certain forms of blood cancer. Every day was about creating something new. They were extremely innovative, and the mantra was, "When we only get it right," or even, "We want it perfect." The sad thing is, before they became perfect — even good enough — they became obsolete. OncoSearch did too much exploration. I first heard about exploration and exploitation about 15 years ago, when I worked as a visiting scholar at Stanford University. The founder of the idea is Jim March. And to me the power of the idea is its practicality. Exploration. Exploration is about coming up with what's new. It's about search, it's about discovery, it's about new products, it's about new innovations. It's about changing our frontiers. Our heroes are people who have done exploration: Madame Curie, Picasso, Neil Armstrong, Sir Edmund Hillary, etc. I come from Norway; all our heroes are explorers, and they deserve to be. We all know that exploration is risky. We don't know the answers, we don't know if we're going to find them, and we know that the risks are high. Exploitation is the opposite. Exploitation is taking the knowledge we have and making good, better. Exploitation is about making our trains run on time. It's about making good products faster and cheaper. Exploitation is not risky — in the short term. But if we only exploit, it's very risky in the long term. And I think we all have memories of the famous pop groups who keep singing the same songs again and again, until they become obsolete or even pathetic. That's the risk of exploitation. So if we take a long-term perspective, we explore. If we take a short-term perspective, we exploit. Small children, they explore all day. All day it's about exploration. As we grow older, we explore less because we have more knowledge to exploit on. The same goes for companies. Companies become, by nature, less innovative as they become more competent. And this is, of course, a big worry to CEOs. And I hear very often questions phrased in different ways. For example, "How can I both effectively run and reinvent my company?" Or, "How can I make sure that our company changes before we become obsolete or are hit by a crisis?" So, doing one well is difficult. Doing both well as the same time is art — pushing both exploration and exploitation. So one thing we've found is only about two percent of companies are able to effectively explore and exploit at the same time, in parallel. But when they do, the payoffs are huge. So we have lots of great examples. We have Nestlé creating Nespresso, we have Lego going into animated films, Toyota creating the hybrids, Unilever pushing into sustainability — there are lots of examples, and the benefits are huge. Why is balancing so difficult? I think it's difficult because there are so many traps that keep us where we are. So I'll talk about two, but there are many. So let's talk about the perpetual search trap. We discover something, but we don't have the patience or the persistence to get at it and make it work. So instead of staying with it, we create something new. But the same goes for that, then we're in the vicious circle of actually coming up with ideas but being frustrated. OncoSearch was a good example. A famous example is, of course, Xerox. But we don't only see this in companies. We see this in the public sector as well. We all know that any kind of effective reform of education, research, health care, even defense, takes 10, 15, maybe 20 years to work. But still, we change much more often. We really don't give them the chance. Another trap is the success trap. Facit fell into the success trap. They literally held the future in their hands, but they couldn't see it. They were simply so good at making what they loved doing, that they wouldn't change. We are like that, too. When we know something well, it's difficult to change. Bill Gates has said: "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces us into thinking we cannot fail." That's the challenge with success. So I think there are some lessons, and I think they apply to us. And they apply to our companies. The first lesson is: get ahead of the crisis. And any company that's able to innovate is actually able to also buy an insurance in the future. Netflix — they could so easily have been content with earlier generations of distribution, but they always — and I think they will always — keep pushing for the next battle. I see other companies that say, "I'll win the next innovation cycle, whatever it takes." Second one: think in multiple time scales. I'll share a chart with you, and I think it's a wonderful one. Any company we look at, taking a one-year perspective and looking at the valuation of the company, innovation typically accounts for only about 30 percent. So when we think one year, innovation isn't really that important. Move ahead, take a 10-year perspective on the same company — suddenly, innovation and ability to renew account for 70 percent. But companies can't choose. They need to fund the journey and lead the long term. Third: invite talent. I don't think it's possible for any of us to be able to balance exploration and exploitation by ourselves. I think it's a team sport. I think we need to allow challenging. I think the mark of a great company is being open to be challenged, and the mark of a good corporate board is to constructively challenge. I think that's also what good parenting is about. Last one: be skeptical of success. Maybe it's useful to think back at the old triumph marches in Rome, when the generals, after a big victory, were given their celebration. Riding into Rome on the carriage, they always had a companion whispering in their ear, "Remember, you're only human." So I hope I made the point: balancing exploration and exploitation has a huge payoff. But it's difficult, and we need to be conscious. I want to just point out two questions that I think are useful. First question is, looking at your own company: In which areas do you see that the company is at the risk of falling into success traps, of just going on autopilot? And what can you do to challenge? Second question is: When did I explore something new last, and what kind of effect did it have on me? Is that something I should do more of? In my case, yes. So let me leave you with this. Whether you're an explorer by nature or whether you tend to exploit what you already know, don't forget: the beauty is in the balance. Thank you. (Applause) |
The surprising habits of original thinkers | {0: 'After years of studying the dynamics of success and productivity in the workplace, Adam Grant discovered a powerful and often overlooked motivator: helping others.'} | TED2016 | Seven years ago, a student came to me and asked me to invest in his company. He said, "I'm working with three friends, and we're going to try to disrupt an industry by selling stuff online." And I said, "OK, you guys spent the whole summer on this, right?" "No, we all took internships just in case it doesn't work out." "All right, but you're going to go in full time once you graduate." "Not exactly. We've all lined up backup jobs." Six months go by, it's the day before the company launches, and there is still not a functioning website. "You guys realize, the entire company is a website. That's literally all it is." So I obviously declined to invest. And they ended up naming the company Warby Parker. (Laughter) They sell glasses online. They were recently recognized as the world's most innovative company and valued at over a billion dollars. And now? My wife handles our investments. Why was I so wrong? To find out, I've been studying people that I come to call "originals." Originals are nonconformists, people who not only have new ideas but take action to champion them. They are people who stand out and speak up. Originals drive creativity and change in the world. They're the people you want to bet on. And they look nothing like I expected. I want to show you today three things I've learned about recognizing originals and becoming a little bit more like them. So the first reason that I passed on Warby Parker was they were really slow getting off the ground. Now, you are all intimately familiar with the mind of a procrastinator. Well, I have a confession for you. I'm the opposite. I'm a precrastinator. Yes, that's an actual term. You know that panic you feel a few hours before a big deadline when you haven't done anything yet. I just feel that a few months ahead of time. (Laughter) So this started early: when I was a kid, I took Nintendo games very seriously. I would wake up at 5am, start playing and not stop until I had mastered them. Eventually it got so out of hand that a local newspaper came and did a story on the dark side of Nintendo, starring me. (Laughter) (Applause) Since then, I have traded hair for teeth. (Laughter) But this served me well in college, because I finished my senior thesis four months before the deadline. And I was proud of that, until a few years ago. I had a student named Jihae, who came to me and said, "I have my most creative ideas when I'm procrastinating." And I was like, "That's cute, where are the four papers you owe me?" (Laughter) No, she was one of our most creative students, and as an organizational psychologist, this is the kind of idea that I test. So I challenged her to get some data. She goes into a bunch of companies. She has people fill out surveys about how often they procrastinate. Then she gets their bosses to rate how creative and innovative they are. And sure enough, the precrastinators like me, who rush in and do everything early are rated as less creative than people who procrastinate moderately. So I want to know what happens to the chronic procrastinators. She was like, "I don't know. They didn't fill out my survey." (Laughter) No, here are our results. You actually do see that the people who wait until the last minute are so busy goofing off that they don't have any new ideas. And on the flip side, the people who race in are in such a frenzy of anxiety that they don't have original thoughts either. There's a sweet spot where originals seem to live. Why is this? Maybe original people just have bad work habits. Maybe procrastinating does not cause creativity. To find out, we designed some experiments. We asked people to generate new business ideas, and then we get independent readers to evaluate how creative and useful they are. And some of them are asked to do the task right away. Others we randomly assign to procrastinate by dangling Minesweeper in front of them for either five or 10 minutes. And sure enough, the moderate procrastinators are 16 percent more creative than the other two groups. Now, Minesweeper is awesome, but it's not the driver of the effect, because if you play the game first before you learn about the task, there's no creativity boost. It's only when you're told that you're going to be working on this problem, and then you start procrastinating, but the task is still active in the back of your mind, that you start to incubate. Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps. So just as we were finishing these experiments, I was starting to write a book about originals, and I thought, "This is the perfect time to teach myself to procrastinate, while writing a chapter on procrastination." So I metaprocrastinated, and like any self-respecting precrastinator, I woke up early the next morning and I made a to-do list with steps on how to procrastinate. (Laughter) And then I worked diligently toward my goal of not making progress toward my goal. I started writing the procrastination chapter, and one day — I was halfway through — I literally put it away in mid-sentence for months. It was agony. But when I came back to it, I had all sorts of new ideas. As Aaron Sorkin put it, "You call it procrastinating. I call it thinking." And along the way I discovered that a lot of great originals in history were procrastinators. Take Leonardo da Vinci. He toiled on and off for 16 years on the Mona Lisa. He felt like a failure. He wrote as much in his journal. But some of the diversions he took in optics transformed the way that he modeled light and made him into a much better painter. What about Martin Luther King, Jr.? The night before the biggest speech of his life, the March on Washington, he was up past 3am, rewriting it. He's sitting in the audience waiting for his turn to go onstage, and he is still scribbling notes and crossing out lines. When he gets onstage, 11 minutes in, he leaves his prepared remarks to utter four words that changed the course of history: "I have a dream." That was not in the script. By delaying the task of finalizing the speech until the very last minute, he left himself open to the widest range of possible ideas. And because the text wasn't set in stone, he had freedom to improvise. Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity. What you see with a lot of great originals is that they are quick to start but they're slow to finish. And this is what I missed with Warby Parker. When they were dragging their heels for six months, I looked at them and said, "You know, a lot of other companies are starting to sell glasses online." They missed the first-mover advantage. But what I didn't realize was they were spending all that time trying to figure out how to get people to be comfortable ordering glasses online. And it turns out the first-mover advantage is mostly a myth. Look at a classic study of over 50 product categories, comparing the first movers who created the market with the improvers who introduced something different and better. What you see is that the first movers had a failure rate of 47 percent, compared with only 8 percent for the improvers. Look at Facebook, waiting to build a social network until after Myspace and Friendster. Look at Google, waiting for years after Altavista and Yahoo. It's much easier to improve on somebody else's idea than it is to create something new from scratch. So the lesson I learned is that to be original you don't have to be first. You just have to be different and better. But that wasn't the only reason I passed on Warby Parker. They were also full of doubts. They had backup plans lined up, and that made me doubt that they had the courage to be original, because I expected that originals would look something like this. (Laughter) Now, on the surface, a lot of original people look confident, but behind the scenes, they feel the same fear and doubt that the rest of us do. They just manage it differently. Let me show you: this is a depiction of how the creative process works for most of us. (Laughter) Now, in my research, I discovered there are two different kinds of doubt. There's self-doubt and idea doubt. Self-doubt is paralyzing. It leads you to freeze. But idea doubt is energizing. It motivates you to test, to experiment, to refine, just like MLK did. And so the key to being original is just a simple thing of avoiding the leap from step three to step four. Instead of saying, "I'm crap," you say, "The first few drafts are always crap, and I'm just not there yet." So how do you get there? Well, there's a clue, it turns out, in the Internet browser that you use. We can predict your job performance and your commitment just by knowing what web browser you use. Now, some of you are not going to like the results of this study — (Laughter) But there is good evidence that Firefox and Chrome users significantly outperform Internet Explorer and Safari users. Yes. (Applause) They also stay in their jobs 15 percent longer, by the way. Why? It's not a technical advantage. The four browser groups on average have similar typing speed and they also have similar levels of computer knowledge. It's about how you got the browser. Because if you use Internet Explorer or Safari, those came preinstalled on your computer, and you accepted the default option that was handed to you. If you wanted Firefox or Chrome, you had to doubt the default and ask, is there a different option out there, and then be a little resourceful and download a new browser. So people hear about this study and they're like, "Great, if I want to get better at my job, I just need to upgrade my browser?" (Laughter) No, it's about being the kind of person who takes the initiative to doubt the default and look for a better option. And if you do that well, you will open yourself up to the opposite of déjà vu. There's a name for it. It's called vuja de. (Laughter) Vuja de is when you look at something you've seen many times before and all of a sudden see it with fresh eyes. It's a screenwriter who looks at a movie script that can't get the green light for more than half a century. In every past version, the main character has been an evil queen. But Jennifer Lee starts to question whether that makes sense. She rewrites the first act, reinvents the villain as a tortured hero and Frozen becomes the most successful animated movie ever. So there's a simple message from this story. When you feel doubt, don't let it go. (Laughter) What about fear? Originals feel fear, too. They're afraid of failing, but what sets them apart from the rest of us is that they're even more afraid of failing to try. They know you can fail by starting a business that goes bankrupt or by failing to start a business at all. They know that in the long run, our biggest regrets are not our actions but our inactions. The things we wish we could redo, if you look at the science, are the chances not taken. Elon Musk told me recently, he didn't expect Tesla to succeed. He was sure the first few SpaceX launches would fail to make it to orbit, let alone get back, but it was too important not to try. And for so many of us, when we have an important idea, we don't bother to try. But I have some good news for you. You are not going to get judged on your bad ideas. A lot of people think they will. If you look across industries and ask people about their biggest idea, their most important suggestion, 85 percent of them stayed silent instead of speaking up. They were afraid of embarrassing themselves, of looking stupid. But guess what? Originals have lots and lots of bad ideas, tons of them, in fact. Take the guy who invented this. Do you care that he came up with a talking doll so creepy that it scared not only kids but adults, too? No. You celebrate Thomas Edison for pioneering the light bulb. (Laughter) If you look across fields, the greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they're the ones who try the most. Take classical composers, the best of the best. Why do some of them get more pages in encyclopedias than others and also have their compositions rerecorded more times? One of the best predictors is the sheer volume of compositions that they generate. The more output you churn out, the more variety you get and the better your chances of stumbling on something truly original. Even the three icons of classical music — Bach, Beethoven, Mozart — had to generate hundreds and hundreds of compositions to come up with a much smaller number of masterpieces. Now, you may be wondering, how did this guy become great without doing a whole lot? I don't know how Wagner pulled that off. But for most of us, if we want to be more original, we have to generate more ideas. The Warby Parker founders, when they were trying to name their company, they needed something sophisticated, unique, with no negative associations to build a retail brand, and they tested over 2,000 possibilities before they finally put together Warby and Parker. So if you put all this together, what you see is that originals are not that different from the rest of us. They feel fear and doubt. They procrastinate. They have bad ideas. And sometimes, it's not in spite of those qualities but because of them that they succeed. So when you see those things, don't make the same mistake I did. Don't write them off. And when that's you, don't count yourself out either. Know that being quick to start but slow to finish can boost your creativity, that you can motivate yourself by doubting your ideas and embracing the fear of failing to try, and that you need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones. Look, being original is not easy, but I have no doubt about this: it's the best way to improve the world around us. Thank you. (Applause) |
How a start-up in the White House is changing business as usual | {0: 'Haley Van Dyck is building a startup at the White House and recruiting world-class technology talent to change how government works for the American people. '} | TED2016 | I'm here to talk to you today about a story that we have all been conditioned to believe is not possible. It's a story about a living, breathing start-up flourishing in an unlikely environment: the United States government. Now, this start-up is fundamentally beginning to disrupt the way government does business from the inside out. But before I get there, let's start with the problem. For me, the problem begins with a number: 137. 137 is the average number of days a veteran has to wait to have benefits processed by the VA. 137 days. Now, in order to file that application in the first place, she has to navigate over 1,000 different websites and over 900 different call-in numbers, all owned and operated by the United States government. Now, we live in times of incredible change. The private sector is constantly changing and improving itself all the time. For that matter, it's removing every single inconvenience in my life that I could possibly think of. I could be sitting on my couch in my apartment, and from my phone, I can order a warm, gluten-free meal that can arrive at my door in less than 10 minutes. But meanwhile, a working mother who depends on food stamps to support her family has to complete an arduous, complicated application which she might not even be able to do online. And the inability of her to do that same work from her couch means that she might be having to take days or hours off of work that she can't spare. And this growing dichotomy between the beneficiaries of the tech revolution and those it's left behind is one of the greatest challenges of our time — (Applause) Because government's failure to deliver digital services that work is disproportionately impacting the very people who need it most. It's impacting the students trying to go to college, the single mothers trying to get health care, the veterans coming home from battle. They can't get what they need when they need it. And for these Americans, government is more than just a presidential election every four years. Government is a lifeline that provides services they need and depend on and deserve. Which is, quite frankly, why government needs to get its shit together and catch up. Just saying. (Applause) Now, this wasn't always a problem I was passionate about. When I joined President Obama's campaign in 2008, we brought the tech industry's best practices into politics. We earned more money, we engaged more volunteers and we earned more votes than any political campaign in history. We were a cutting-edge start-up that changed the game of politics forever. So when the President asked a small group of us to bring that very same disruption directly into government, I knew it wasn't going to be easy work, but I was eager and showed up ready to get to work. Now, on my first day in DC, my first day in government, I walked into the office and they handed me a laptop. And the laptop was running Windows 98. (Laughter) I mean, three entire presidential elections had come and gone since the government had updated the operating system on that computer. Three elections! Which is when we realized this problem was a whole lot bigger than we ever could have imagined. Let me paint the picture for you. The federal government is the largest institution in the world. It spends over 86 billion dollars a year — 86 billion — on federal IT projects. For context: that is more than the entire venture capital industry spends annually — on everything. Now, the problem here is that we the taxpayers are not getting what we pay for, because 94 percent of federal IT projects are over budget or behind schedule. 94 percent! For those of you keeping score, yes, the number 94 is very close to 100. (Laughter) There's another problem: 40 percent of those never end up seeing the light of day. They are completely scrapped or abandoned. Now, this is a very existentially painful moment for any organization, because it means as government continues to operate as it's programmed to do, failure is nearly inevitable. And when the status quo is the riskiest option, that means there is simply no other choice than radical disruption. So, what do we do about it? How do we fix this? Well, the irony of all of this is that we actually don't have to look any further than our backyard, because right here in America are the very ideas, the very people, who have swept our world into a radically different place than it was two decades ago. So what would it look like if it was actually as easy to get student loans or veterans' benefits as it is to order cat food to my house? What would it look like if there was an easy pathway for the very entrepreneurs and innovators who have disrupted our tech sector to come and disrupt their government? Well, my friends, here's where we get to talk about some of the exciting new formulas we've discovered for creating change in government. Enter the United States Digital Service. The United States Digital Service is a new network of start-ups, a team of teams, organizing themselves across government to create radical change. The mission of the United States Digital Service is to help government deliver world-class digital services for students, immigrants, children, the elderly — everybody — at dramatically lower costs. We are essentially trying to build a more awesome government, for the people, by the people, today. We don't care — (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Who doesn't want a more awesome government, right? We don't care about politics. We care about making government work better, because it's the only one we've got. (Applause) Now, you can think of our team — well, it's pretty funny — you can think of our team a little bit like the Peace Corps meets DARPA meets SEAL Team 6. We're like the Peace Corps for nerds, but instead of traveling to crazy, interesting, far-off places, you spend a lot of time indoors, behind computers, helping restore the fabric of our democracy. (Laughter) Now, this team — our playbook for the United States Digital Service is pretty simple. The first play is we recruit the very best talent our country has to offer, and recruit them for short tours of duty inside government. These are the very people who have helped build the products and companies that have made our tech sector amongst the most innovative in the world. Second, we pair these incredible people from the tech core with the dedicated civil servants already inside government on the ground creating change. Third, we strategically deploy them in a targeted formation at the most mission-critical, life-changing, important services that government offers. And finally, we give them massive air cover, from the leadership inside the agencies all the way up to the President himself, to transform these services for the better. Now, this team is beginning to disrupt how government does business from the inside out. If you study classic patterns of disruption, one very common pattern is rather simple. It's to take something that has become routine and standard in one industry and apply it to another where it's a radical departure from the status quo. Think about what Airbnb took that was normal from hospitality and revolutionized my apartment. The United States Digital Service is doing exactly that. We are taking what Silicon Valley and the private sector has learned through a ton of hard work about how to build planetary-scale digital services that delight users at lower cost, and we're applying that to government, where it is a radical departure from the status quo. Now, the good news is: it's starting to work. We know this because we can already see the results from some of our early projects, like the rescue effort of Healthcare.gov, when that went off the rails. Fixing Healthcare.gov was the first place that we ran this play, and today we are taking that same play and scaling it across a large number of government's most important citizen-facing services. Now, if I can take a moment and brag about the team for a second — it is the highest concentration of badasses I could have ever dreamed of. We have top talent from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and the likes, all on staff today, all choosing to join their government. And what's incredible is, everybody is as eager and kind as they are intelligent. And I might add, by the way, over half of us are women. (Applause) The best way to understand this strategy is actually to walk through a couple of examples of how it's working out in the wild. I'm going to give you two examples quickly. The first one is about immigration. This, my friends, is your typical immigration application. Yes, you guessed it — it's almost entirely paper-based. In the best case, the application takes about six to eight months to process. It is physically shipped thousands of miles — thousands of miles! — between no less than six processing centers. Now, little story: about a decade ago, the government thought that if it brought this system online, it could save taxpayer dollars and provide a better service, which was a great idea. So, the typical government process began. Six years and 1.2 billion dollars later, no working product was delivered — 1.2 billion with a "B." Now at this point, the agency responsible, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, could have kept pouring money into the failing program. Sadly, that's what often happens. That's the status quo today. But they didn't. The dedicated civil servants inside the agency decided to stand up and call for change. We deployed a small team of just six people, and what many people don't know is that's the same size as the rescue effort of Healthcare.gov — just six people. And that team jumped in, side-by-side, to support the agency in transitioning this project into more modern business practices, more modern development practices. Now, in non-tech speak, what that basically means is taking big, multi-year projects and breaking them up into bite-sized chunks, so that way we can reduce the risk and actually start to see results every couple of weeks, instead of waiting in a black box for years. So within less than three months of our team being on the ground, we were already able to push our first products to production. The first one, this is the form I-90. This is used to file for your replacement green card. Now, for immigrant visa holders, a replacement green card is a big deal. Your green card is your proof of identification, it's your work authorization, it's the proof that you can be here in this country. So waiting six months while the government processes the replacement is not cool. I'm excited to tell you that today, you can now, for the first time, file for a replacement green card entirely online without anyone touching a piece of paper. It is faster, it is cheaper, and it's a better user experience for the applicant and the government employees alike. (Applause) Another one, quickly. Last fall, we just released a brand-new practice civics test. So as part of becoming a US citizen, you have to pass a civics test. For anyone who has taken this test, it can be quite the stressful process. So our team released a very easy, simple-to-use tool in plain language to help people prepare, to help ease their nerves, to help them feel more confident in taking the next step in pursuing their American dream. Because all of this work, all of this work on immigration, is about taking complicated processes and making them more human. The other day, one of the dedicated civil servants on the ground said something incredibly profound. She said that she's never been this hopeful or optimistic about a project in her entire time in government. And she's been doing this for 30 years. That is exactly the kind of hope and culture change we are trying to create. For my second example, I want to bring it back to veterans for a second, and what we are doing to build them a VA that is worthy of their service and their sacrifice. I'm proud to say that just a few months ago, we released a brand-new beta of a new website, Vets.gov. Vets.gov is a simple, easy-to-use website that brings all of the online services a veteran needs into one place. One website, not thousands. The site is a work in progress, but it's significant progress, because it's designed with the users who matter most: the veterans themselves. This might sound incredibly obvious, because it should be, but sadly, this isn't normal for government. Far too often, product decisions are made by committees of stakeholders who do their best to represent the interests of the user, but they're not necessarily the users themselves. So our team at the VA went out, we looked at the data, we talked to veterans themselves and we started simple and small, with the two most important services that matter most to them: education benefits and disability benefits. I'm proud to say that they are live on the site today, and as the team continues to streamline more services, they will be ported over here, and the old sites, shut down. (Applause) To me, this is what change looks like in 2016. When you walk out of the Oval Office, the first time I was ever there, I noticed a quote the President had embroidered on the rug. It's the classic JFK quote. It says, "No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings." It's true. We have the tools to solve these problems. We have the tools to come together as a society, as a country, and to fix this together. Yes, it's hard. It's particularly hard when we have to fight, when we have to refuse to succumb to the belief that things won't change. But in my experience, it's often the hardest things that are the most worth doing, because if we don't do them, who will? This is on us, all of us, together, because government is not an abstract institution or a concept. Our government is us. (Applause) Today, it is no longer a question of if change is possible. The question is not, "Can we?" The question is, "Will we?" Will you? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How megacities are changing the map of the world | {0: 'Geopolitical futurist Parag Khanna foresees a world in which megacities, supply chains and connective technologies redraw the map away from states and borders.'} | TED2016 | I want you to reimagine how life is organized on earth. Think of the planet like a human body that we inhabit. The skeleton is the transportation system of roads and railways, bridges and tunnels, air and seaports that enable our mobility across the continents. The vascular system that powers the body are the oil and gas pipelines and electricity grids. that distribute energy. And the nervous system of communications is the Internet cables, satellites, cellular networks and data centers that allow us to share information. This ever-expanding infrastructural matrix already consists of 64 million kilometers of roads, four million kilometers of railways, two million kilometers of pipelines and one million kilometers of Internet cables. What about international borders? We have less than 500,000 kilometers of borders. Let's build a better map of the world. And we can start by overcoming some ancient mythology. There's a saying with which all students of history are familiar: "Geography is destiny." Sounds so grave, doesn't it? It's such a fatalistic adage. It tells us that landlocked countries are condemned to be poor, that small countries cannot escape their larger neighbors, that vast distances are insurmountable. But every journey I take around the world, I see an even greater force sweeping the planet: connectivity. The global connectivity revolution, in all of its forms — transportation, energy and communications — has enabled such a quantum leap in the mobility of people, of goods, of resources, of knowledge, such that we can no longer even think of geography as distinct from it. In fact, I view the two forces as fusing together into what I call "connectography." Connectography represents a quantum leap in the mobility of people, resources and ideas, but it is an evolution, an evolution of the world from political geography, which is how we legally divide the world, to functional geography, which is how we actually use the world, from nations and borders, to infrastructure and supply chains. Our global system is evolving from the vertically integrated empires of the 19th century, through the horizontally interdependent nations of the 20th century, into a global network civilization in the 21st century. Connectivity, not sovereignty, has become the organizing principle of the human species. (Applause) We are becoming this global network civilization because we are literally building it. All of the world's defense budgets and military spending taken together total just under two trillion dollars per year. Meanwhile, our global infrastructure spending is projected to rise to nine trillion dollars per year within the coming decade. And, well, it should. We have been living off an infrastructure stock meant for a world population of three billion, as our population has crossed seven billion to eight billion and eventually nine billion and more. As a rule of thumb, we should spend about one trillion dollars on the basic infrastructure needs of every billion people in the world. Not surprisingly, Asia is in the lead. In 2015, China announced the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which together with a network of other organizations aims to construct a network of iron and silk roads, stretching from Shanghai to Lisbon. And as all of this topographical engineering unfolds, we will likely spend more on infrastructure in the next 40 years, we will build more infrastructure in the next 40 years, than we have in the past 4,000 years. Now let's stop and think about it for a minute. Spending so much more on building the foundations of global society rather than on the tools to destroy it can have profound consequences. Connectivity is how we optimize the distribution of people and resources around the world. It is how mankind comes to be more than just the sum of its parts. I believe that is what is happening. Connectivity has a twin megatrend in the 21st century: planetary urbanization. Cities are the infrastructures that most define us. By 2030, more than two thirds of the world's population will live in cities. And these are not mere little dots on the map, but they are vast archipelagos stretching hundreds of kilometers. Here we are in Vancouver, at the head of the Cascadia Corridor that stretches south across the US border to Seattle. The technology powerhouse of Silicon Valley begins north of San Francisco down to San Jose and across the bay to Oakland. The sprawl of Los Angeles now passes San Diego across the Mexican border to Tijuana. San Diego and Tijuana now share an airport terminal where you can exit into either country. Eventually, a high-speed rail network may connect the entire Pacific spine. America's northeastern megalopolis begins in Boston through New York and Philadelphia to Washington. It contains more than 50 million people and also has plans for a high-speed rail network. But Asia is where we really see the megacities coming together. This continuous strip of light from Tokyo through Nagoya to Osaka contains more than 80 million people and most of Japan's economy. It is the world's largest megacity. For now. But in China, megacity clusters are coming together with populations reaching 100 million people. The Bohai Rim around Beijing, The Yangtze River Delta around Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta, stretching from Hong Kong north to Guangzhou. And in the middle, the Chongqing-Chengdu megacity cluster, whose geographic footprint is almost the same size as the country of Austria. And any number of these megacity clusters has a GDP approaching two trillion dollars — that's almost the same as all of India today. So imagine if our global diplomatic institutions, such as the G20, were to base their membership on economic size rather than national representation. Some Chinese megacities may be in and have a seat at the table, while entire countries, like Argentina or Indonesia would be out. Moving to India, whose population will soon exceed that of China, it too has a number of megacity clusters, such as the Delhi Capital Region and Mumbai. In the Middle East, Greater Tehran is absorbing one third of Iran's population. Most of Egypt's 80 million people live in the corridor between Cairo and Alexandria. And in the gulf, a necklace of city-states is forming, from Bahrain and Qatar, through the United Arab Emirates to Muscat in Oman. And then there's Lagos, Africa's largest city and Nigeria's commercial hub. It has plans for a rail network that will make it the anchor of a vast Atlantic coastal corridor, stretching across Benin, Togo and Ghana, to Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast. But these countries are suburbs of Lagos. In a megacity world, countries can be suburbs of cities. By 2030, we will have as many as 50 such megacity clusters in the world. So which map tells you more? Our traditional map of 200 discrete nations that hang on most of our walls, or this map of the 50 megacity clusters? And yet, even this is incomplete because you cannot understand any individual megacity without understanding its connections to the others. People move to cities to be connected, and connectivity is why these cities thrive. Any number of them, such as Sao Paulo or Istanbul or Moscow, has a GDP approaching or exceeding one third of one half of their entire national GDP. But equally importantly, you cannot calculate any of their individual value without understanding the role of the flows of people, of finance, of technology that enable them to thrive. Take the Gauteng province of South Africa, which contains Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria. It too represents just over a third of South Africa's GDP. But equally importantly, it is home to the offices of almost every single multinational corporation that invests directly into South Africa and indeed, into the entire African continent. Cities want to be part of global value chains. They want to be part of this global division of labor. That is how cities think. I've never met a mayor who said to me, "I want my city to be cut off." They know that their cities belong as much to the global network civilization as to their home countries. Now, for many people, urbanization causes great dismay. They think cities are wrecking the planet. But right now, there are more than 200 intercity learning networks thriving. That is as many as the number of intergovernmental organizations that we have. And all of these intercity networks are devoted to one purpose, mankind's number one priority in the 21st century: sustainable urbanization. Is it working? Let's take climate change. We know that summit after summit in New York and Paris is not going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But what we can see is that transferring technology and knowledge and policies between cities is how we've actually begun to reduce the carbon intensity of our economies. Cities are learning from each other. How to install zero-emissions buildings, how to deploy electric car-sharing systems. In major Chinese cities, they're imposing quotas on the number of cars on the streets. In many Western cities, young people don't even want to drive anymore. Cities have been part of the problem, now they are part of the solution. Inequality is the other great challenge to achieving sustainable urbanization. When I travel through megacities from end to end — it takes hours and days — I experience the tragedy of extreme disparity within the same geography. And yet, our global stock of financial assets has never been larger, approaching 300 trillion dollars. That's almost four times the actual GDP of the world. We have taken on such enormous debts since the financial crisis, but have we invested them in inclusive growth? No, not yet. Only when we build sufficient, affordable public housing, when we invest in robust transportation networks to allow people to connect to each other both physically and digitally, that's when our divided cities and societies will come to feel whole again. (Applause) And that is why infrastructure has just been included in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, because it enables all the others. Our political and economic leaders are learning that connectivity is not charity, it's opportunity. And that's why our financial community needs to understand that connectivity is the most important asset class of the 21st century. Now, cities can make the world more sustainable, they can make the world more equitable, I also believe that connectivity between cities can make the world more peaceful. If we look at regions of the world with dense relations across borders, we see more trade, more investment and more stability. We all know the story of Europe after World War II, where industrial integration kicked off a process that gave rise to today's peaceful European Union. And you can see that Russia, by the way, is the least connected of major powers in the international system. And that goes a long way towards explaining the tensions today. Countries that have less stake in the system also have less to lose in disturbing it. In North America, the lines that matter most on the map are not the US-Canada border or the US-Mexico border, but the dense network of roads and railways and pipelines and electricity grids and even water canals that are forming an integrated North American union. North America does not need more walls, it needs more connections. (Applause) But the real promise of connectivity is in the postcolonial world. All of those regions where borders have historically been the most arbitrary and where generations of leaders have had hostile relations with each other. But now a new group of leaders has come into power and is burying the hatchet. Let's take Southeast Asia, where high-speed rail networks are planned to connect Bangkok to Singapore and trade corridors from Vietnam to Myanmar. Now this region of 600 million people coordinates its agricultural resources and its industrial output. It is evolving into what I call a Pax Asiana, a peace among Southeast Asian nations. A similar phenomenon is underway in East Africa, where a half dozen countries are investing in railways and multimodal corridors so that landlocked countries can get their goods to market. Now these countries coordinate their utilities and their investment policies. They, too, are evolving into a Pax Africana. One region we know could especially use this kind of thinking is the Middle East. As Arab states tragically collapse, what is left behind but the ancient cities, such as Cairo, Beirut and Baghdad? In fact, the nearly 400 million people of the Arab world are almost entirely urbanized. As societies, as cities, they are either water rich or water poor, energy rich or energy poor. And the only way to correct these mismatches is not through more wars and more borders, but through more connectivity of pipelines and water canals. Sadly, this is not yet the map of the Middle East. But it should be, a connected Pax Arabia, internally integrated and productively connected to its neighbors: Europe, Asia and Africa. Now, it may not seem like connectivity is what we want right now towards the world's most turbulent region. But we know from history that more connectivity is the only way to bring about stability in the long run. Because we know that in region after region, connectivity is the new reality. Cities and countries are learning to aggregate into more peaceful and prosperous wholes. But the real test is going to be Asia. Can connectivity overcome the patterns of rivalry among the great powers of the Far East? After all, this is where World War III is supposed to break out. Since the end of the Cold War, a quarter century ago, at least six major wars have been predicted for this region. But none have broken out. Take China and Taiwan. In the 1990s, this was everyone's leading World War III scenario. But since that time, the trade and investment volumes across the straits have become so intense that last November, leaders from both sides held a historic summit to discuss eventual peaceful reunification. And even the election of a nationalist party in Taiwan that's pro-independence earlier this year does not undermine this fundamental dynamic. China and Japan have an even longer history of rivalry and have been deploying their air forces and navies to show their strength in island disputes. But in recent years, Japan has been making its largest foreign investments in China. Japanese cars are selling in record numbers there. And guess where the largest number of foreigners residing in Japan today comes from? You guessed it: China. China and India have fought a major war and have three outstanding border disputes, but today India is the second largest shareholder in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. They're building a trade corridor stretching from Northeast India through Myanmar and Bangladesh to Southern China. Their trade volume has grown from 20 billion dollars a decade ago to 80 billion dollars today. Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan have fought three wars and continue to dispute Kashmir, but they're also negotiating a most-favored-nation trade agreement and want to complete a pipeline stretching from Iran through Pakistan to India. And let's talk about Iran. Wasn't it just two years ago that war with Iran seemed inevitable? Then why is every single major power rushing to do business there today? Ladies and gentlemen, I cannot guarantee that World War III will not break out. But we can definitely see why it hasn't happened yet. Even though Asia is home to the world's fastest growing militaries, these same countries are also investing billions of dollars in each other's infrastructure and supply chains. They are more interested in each other's functional geography than in their political geography. And that is why their leaders think twice, step back from the brink, and decide to focus on economic ties over territorial tensions. So often it seems like the world is falling apart, but building more connectivity is how we put Humpty Dumpty back together again, much better than before. And by wrapping the world in such seamless physical and digital connectivity, we evolve towards a world in which people can rise above their geographic constraints. We are the cells and vessels pulsing through these global connectivity networks. Everyday, hundreds of millions of people go online and work with people they've never met. More than one billion people cross borders every year, and that's expected to rise to three billion in the coming decade. We don't just build connectivity, we embody it. We are the global network civilization, and this is our map. A map of the world in which geography is no longer destiny. Instead, the future has a new and more hopeful motto: connectivity is destiny. Thank you. (Applause) |
The magic ingredient that brings Pixar movies to life | {0: 'At Pixar, Danielle Feinberg delights in bending the rules of light to her every whim.'} | TED Talks Live | When I was seven years old, some well-meaning adult asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Proudly, I said: "An artist." "No, you don't," he said, "You can't make a living being an artist!" My little seven-year-old Picasso dreams were crushed. But I gathered myself, went off in search of a new dream, eventually settling on being a scientist, perhaps something like the next Albert Einstein. (Laughter) I have always loved math and science, later, coding. And so I decided to study computer programming in college. In my junior year, my computer graphics professor showed us these wonderful short films. It was the first computer animation any of us had ever seen. I watched these films in wonder, transfixed, fireworks going off in my head, thinking, "That is what I want to do with my life." The idea that all the math, science and code I had been learning could come together to create these worlds and characters and stories I connected with, was pure magic for me. Just two years later, I started working at the place that made those films, Pixar Animation Studios. It was here I learned how we actually execute those films. To create our movies, we create a three-dimensional world inside the computer. We start with a point that makes a line that makes a face that creates characters, or trees and rocks that eventually become a forest. And because it's a three-dimensional world, we can move a camera around inside that world. I was fascinated by all of it. But then I got my first taste of lighting. Lighting in practice is placing lights inside this three-dimensional world. I actually have icons of lights I move around in there. Here you can see I've added a light, I'm turning on the rough version of lighting in our software, turn on shadows and placing the light. As I place a light, I think about what it might look like in real life, but balance that out with what we need artistically and for the story. So it might look like this at first, but as we adjust this and move that in weeks of work, in rough form it might look like this, and in final form, like this. There's this moment in lighting that made me fall utterly in love with it. It's where we go from this to this. It's the moment where all the pieces come together, and suddenly the world comes to life as if it's an actual place that exists. This moment never gets old, especially for that little seven-year-old girl that wanted to be an artist. As I learned to light, I learned about using light to help tell story, to set the time of day, to create the mood, to guide the audience's eye, how to make a character look appealing or stand out in a busy set. Did you see WALL-E? (Laughter) There he is. As you can see, we can create any world that we want inside the computer. We can make a world with monsters, with robots that fall in love, we can even make pigs fly. (Laughter) While this is an incredible thing, this untethered artistic freedom, it can create chaos. It can create unbelievable worlds, unbelievable movement, things that are jarring to the audience. So to combat this, we tether ourselves with science. We use science and the world we know as a backbone, to ground ourselves in something relatable and recognizable. "Finding Nemo" is an excellent example of this. A major portion of the movie takes place underwater. But how do you make it look underwater? In early research and development, we took a clip of underwater footage and recreated it in the computer. Then we broke it back down to see which elements make up that underwater look. One of the most critical elements was how the light travels through the water. So we coded up a light that mimics this physics — first, the visibility of the water, and then what happens with the color. Objects close to the eye have their full, rich colors. As light travels deeper into the water, we lose the red wavelengths, then the green wavelengths, leaving us with blue at the far depths. In this clip you can see two other important elements. The first is the surge and swell, or the invisible underwater current that pushes the bits of particulate around in the water. The second is the caustics. These are the ribbons of light, like you might see on the bottom of a pool, that are created when the sun bends through the crests of the ripples and waves on the ocean's surface. Here we have the fog beams. These give us color depth cues, but also tells which direction is up in shots where we don't see the water surface. The other really cool thing you can see here is that we lit that particulate only with the caustics, so that as it goes in and out of those ribbons of light, it appears and disappears, lending a subtle, magical sparkle to the underwater. You can see how we're using the science — the physics of water, light and movement — to tether that artistic freedom. But we are not beholden to it. We considered each of these elements and which ones had to be scientifically accurate and which ones we could push and pull to suit the story and the mood. We realized early on that color was one we had some leeway with. So here's a traditionally colored underwater scene. But here, we can take Sydney Harbor and push it fairly green to suit the sad mood of what's happening. In this scene, it's really important we see deep into the underwater, so we understand what the East Australian Current is, that the turtles are diving into and going on this roller coaster ride. So we pushed the visibility of the water well past anything you would ever see in real life. Because in the end, we are not trying to recreate the scientifically correct real world, we're trying to create a believable world, one the audience can immerse themselves in to experience the story. We use science to create something wonderful. We use story and artistic touch to get us to a place of wonder. This guy, WALL-E, is a great example of that. He finds beauty in the simplest things. But when he came in to lighting, we knew we had a big problem. We got so geeked-out on making WALL-E this convincing robot, that we made his binoculars practically optically perfect. (Laughter) His binoculars are one of the most critical acting devices he has. He doesn't have a face or even traditional dialogue, for that matter. So the animators were heavily dependent on the binoculars to sell his acting and emotions. We started lighting and we realized the triple lenses inside his binoculars were a mess of reflections. He was starting to look glassy-eyed. (Laughter) Now, glassy-eyed is a fundamentally awful thing when you are trying to convince an audience that a robot has a personality and he's capable of falling in love. So we went to work on these optically perfect binoculars, trying to find a solution that would maintain his true robot materials but solve this reflection problem. So we started with the lenses. Here's the flat-front lens, we have a concave lens and a convex lens. And here you see all three together, showing us all these reflections. We tried turning them down, we tried blocking them, nothing was working. You can see here, sometimes we needed something specific reflected in his eyes — usually Eve. So we couldn't just use some faked abstract image on the lenses. So here we have Eve on the first lens, we put Eve on the second lens, it's not working. We turn it down, it's still not working. And then we have our eureka moment. We add a light to WALL-E that accidentally leaks into his eyes. You can see it light up these gray aperture blades. Suddenly, those aperture blades are poking through that reflection the way nothing else has. Now we recognize WALL-E as having an eye. As humans we have the white of our eye, the colored iris and the black pupil. Now WALL-E has the black of an eye, the gray aperture blades and the black pupil. Suddenly, WALL-E feels like he has a soul, like there's a character with emotion inside. Later in the movie towards the end, WALL-E loses his personality, essentially going dead. This is the perfect time to bring back that glassy-eyed look. In the next scene, WALL-E comes back to life. We bring that light back to bring the aperture blades back, and he returns to that sweet, soulful robot we've come to love. (Video) WALL-E: Eva? Danielle Feinberg: There's a beauty in these unexpected moments — when you find the key to unlocking a robot's soul, the moment when you discover what you want to do with your life. The jellyfish in "Finding Nemo" was one of those moments for me. There are scenes in every movie that struggle to come together. This was one of those scenes. The director had a vision for this scene based on some wonderful footage of jellyfish in the South Pacific. As we went along, we were floundering. The reviews with the director turned from the normal look-and-feel conversation into more and more questions about numbers and percentages. Maybe because unlike normal, we were basing it on something in real life, or maybe just because we had lost our way. But it had become about using our brain without our eyes, the science without the art. That scientific tether was strangling the scene. But even through all the frustrations, I still believed it could be beautiful. So when it came in to lighting, I dug in. As I worked to balance the blues and the pinks, the caustics dancing on the jellyfish bells, the undulating fog beams, something promising began to appear. I came in one morning and checked the previous night's work. And I got excited. And then I showed it to the lighting director and she got excited. Soon, I was showing to the director in a dark room full of 50 people. In director review, you hope you might get some nice words, then you get some notes and fixes, generally. And then, hopefully, you get a final, signaling to move on to the next stage. I gave my intro, and I played the jellyfish scene. And the director was silent for an uncomfortably long amount of time. Just long enough for me to think, "Oh no, this is doomed." And then he started clapping. And then the production designer started clapping. And then the whole room was clapping. This is the moment that I live for in lighting. The moment where it all comes together and we get a world that we can believe in. We use math, science and code to create these amazing worlds. We use storytelling and art to bring them to life. It's this interweaving of art and science that elevates the world to a place of wonder, a place with soul, a place we can believe in, a place where the things you imagine can become real — and a world where a girl suddenly realizes not only is she a scientist, but also an artist. Thank you. (Applause) |
The most mysterious star in the universe | {0: 'Tabetha Boyajian is best known for her research on KIC 8462852, a puzzling celestial body that has inspired otherwise sober scientists to brainstorm outlandish hypotheses.'} | TED2016 | Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is my job, my responsibility, as an astronomer to remind people that alien hypotheses should always be a last resort. Now, I want to tell you a story about that. It involves data from a NASA mission, ordinary people and one of the most extraordinary stars in our galaxy. It began in 2009 with the launch of NASA's Kepler mission. Kepler's main scientific objective was to find planets outside of our solar system. It did this by staring at a single field in the sky, this one, with all the tiny boxes. And in this one field, it monitored the brightness of over 150,000 stars continuously for four years, taking a data point every 30 minutes. It was looking for what astronomers call a transit. This is when the planet's orbit is aligned in our line of sight, just so that the planet crosses in front of a star. And when this happens, it blocks out a tiny bit of starlight, which you can see as a dip in this curve. And so the team at NASA had developed very sophisticated computers to search for transits in all the Kepler data. At the same time of the first data release, astronomers at Yale were wondering an interesting thing: What if computers missed something? And so we launched the citizen science project called Planet Hunters to have people look at the same data. The human brain has an amazing ability for pattern recognition, sometimes even better than a computer. However, there was a lot of skepticism around this. My colleague, Debra Fischer, founder of the Planet Hunters project, said that people at the time were saying, "You're crazy. There's no way that a computer will miss a signal." And so it was on, the classic human versus machine gamble. And if we found one planet, we would be thrilled. When I joined the team four years ago, we had already found a couple. And today, with the help of over 300,000 science enthusiasts, we have found dozens, and we've also found one of the most mysterious stars in our galaxy. So to understand this, let me show you what a normal transit in Kepler data looks like. On this graph on the left-hand side you have the amount of light, and on the bottom is time. The white line is light just from the star, what astronomers call a light curve. Now, when a planet transits a star, it blocks out a little bit of this light, and the depth of this transit reflects the size of the object itself. And so, for example, let's take Jupiter. Planets don't get much bigger than Jupiter. Jupiter will make a one percent drop in a star's brightness. Earth, on the other hand, is 11 times smaller than Jupiter, and the signal is barely visible in the data. So back to our mystery. A few years ago, Planet Hunters were sifting through data looking for transits, and they spotted a mysterious signal coming from the star KIC 8462852. The observations in May of 2009 were the first they spotted, and they started talking about this in the discussion forums. They said and object like Jupiter would make a drop like this in the star's light, but they were also saying it was giant. You see, transits normally only last for a few hours, and this one lasted for almost a week. They were also saying that it looks asymmetric, meaning that instead of the clean, U-shaped dip that we saw with Jupiter, it had this strange slope that you can see on the left side. This seemed to indicate that whatever was getting in the way and blocking the starlight was not circular like a planet. There are few more dips that happened, but for a couple of years, it was pretty quiet. And then in March of 2011, we see this. The star's light drops by a whole 15 percent, and this is huge compared to a planet, which would only make a one percent drop. We described this feature as both smooth and clean. It also is asymmetric, having a gradual dimming that lasts almost a week, and then it snaps right back up to normal in just a matter of days. And again, after this, not much happens until February of 2013. Things start to get really crazy. There is a huge complex of dips in the light curve that appear, and they last for like a hundred days, all the way up into the Kepler mission's end. These dips have variable shapes. Some are very sharp, and some are broad, and they also have variable durations. Some last just for a day or two, and some for more than a week. And there's also up and down trends within some of these dips, almost like several independent events were superimposed on top of each other. And at this time, this star drops in its brightness over 20 percent. This means that whatever is blocking its light has an area of over 1,000 times the area of our planet Earth. This is truly remarkable. And so the citizen scientists, when they saw this, they notified the science team that they found something weird enough that it might be worth following up. And so when the science team looked at it, we're like, "Yeah, there's probably just something wrong with the data." But we looked really, really, really hard, and the data were good. And so what was happening had to be astrophysical, meaning that something in space was getting in the way and blocking starlight. And so at this point, we set out to learn everything we could about the star to see if we could find any clues to what was going on. And the citizen scientists who helped us in this discovery, they joined along for the ride watching science in action firsthand. First, somebody said, you know, what if this star was very young and it still had the cloud of material it was born from surrounding it. And then somebody else said, well, what if the star had already formed planets, and two of these planets had collided, similar to the Earth-Moon forming event. Well, both of these theories could explain part of the data, but the difficulties were that the star showed no signs of being young, and there was no glow from any of the material that was heated up by the star's light, and you would expect this if the star was young or if there was a collision and a lot of dust was produced. And so somebody else said, well, how about a huge swarm of comets that are passing by this star in a very elliptical orbit? Well, it ends up that this is actually consistent with our observations. But I agree, it does feel a little contrived. You see, it would take hundreds of comets to reproduce what we're observing. And these are only the comets that happen to pass between us and the star. And so in reality, we're talking thousands to tens of thousands of comets. But of all the bad ideas we had, this one was the best. And so we went ahead and published our findings. Now, let me tell you, this was one of the hardest papers I ever wrote. Scientists are meant to publish results, and this situation was far from that. And so we decided to give it a catchy title, and we called it: "Where's The Flux?" I will let you work out the acronym. (Laughter) So this isn't the end of the story. Around the same time I was writing this paper, I met with a colleague of mine, Jason Wright, and he was also writing a paper on Kepler data. And he was saying that with Kepler's extreme precision, it could actually detect alien megastructures around stars, but it didn't. And then I showed him this weird data that our citizen scientists had found, and he said to me, "Aw crap, Tabby. Now I have to rewrite my paper." So yes, the natural explanations were weak, and we were curious now. So we had to find a way to rule out aliens. So together, we convinced a colleague of ours who works on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, that this would be an extraordinary target to pursue. We wrote a proposal to observe the star with the world's largest radio telescope at the Green Bank Observatory. A couple months later, news of this proposal got leaked to the press and now there are thousands of articles, over 10,000 articles, on this star alone. And if you search Google Images, this is what you'll find. Now, you may be wondering, OK, Tabby, well, how do aliens actually explain this light curve? OK, well, imagine a civilization that's much more advanced than our own. In this hypothetical circumstance, this civilization would have exhausted the energy supply of their home planet, so where could they get more energy? Well, they have a host star just like we have a sun, and so if they were able to capture more energy from this star, then that would solve their energy needs. So they would go and build huge structures. These giant megastructures, like ginormous solar panels, are called Dyson spheres. This image above are lots of artists' impressions of Dyson spheres. It's really hard to provide perspective on the vastness of these things, but you can think of it this way. The Earth-Moon distance is a quarter of a million miles. The simplest element on one of these structures is 100 times that size. They're enormous. And now imagine one of these structures in motion around a star. You can see how it would produce anomalies in the data such as uneven, unnatural looking dips. But it remains that even alien megastructures cannot defy the laws of physics. You see, anything that uses a lot of energy is going to produce heat, and we don't observe this. But it could be something as simple as they're just reradiating it away in another direction, just not at Earth. Another idea that's one of my personal favorites is that we had just witnessed an interplanetary space battle and the catastrophic destruction of a planet. Now, I admit that this would produce a lot of dust that we don't observe. But if we're already invoking aliens in this explanation, then who is to say they didn't efficiently clean up all this mess for recycling purposes? (Laughter) You can see how this quickly captures your imagination. Well, there you have it. We're in a situation that could unfold to be a natural phenomenon we don't understand or an alien technology we don't understand. Personally, as a scientist, my money is on the natural explanation. But don't get me wrong, I do think it would be awesome to find aliens. Either way, there is something new and really interesting to discover. So what happens next? We need to continue to observe this star to learn more about what's happening. But professional astronomers, like me, we have limited resources for this kind of thing, and Kepler is on to a different mission. And I'm happy to say that once again, citizen scientists have come in and saved the day. You see, this time, amateur astronomers with their backyard telescopes stepped up immediately and started observing this star nightly at their own facilities, and I am so excited to see what they find. What's amazing to me is that this star would have never been found by computers because we just weren't looking for something like this. And what's more exciting is that there's more data to come. There are new missions that are coming up that are observing millions more stars all over the sky. And just think: What will it mean when we find another star like this? And what will it mean if we don't find another star like this? Thank you. (Applause) |
The mind behind Linux | {0: 'In 1991, Linus Torvalds shared the Linux kernel with a few computer hobbyists. The operating system they built reshaped the software industry.'} | TED2016 | Chris Anderson: This is such a strange thing. Your software, Linux, is in millions of computers, it probably powers much of the Internet. And I think that there are, like, a billion and a half active Android devices out there. Your software is in every single one of them. It's kind of amazing. You must have some amazing software headquarters driving all this. That's what I thought — and I was shocked when I saw a picture of it. I mean, this is — this is the Linux world headquarters. (Laughter) (Applause) Linus Torvalds: It really doesn't look like much. And I have to say, the most interesting part in this picture, that people mostly react to, is the walking desk. It is the most interesting part in my office and I'm not actually using it anymore. And I think the two things are related. The way I work is ... I want to not have external stimulation. You can kind of see, on the walls are this light green. I'm told that at mental institutions they use that on the walls. (Laughter) It's like a calming color, it's not something that really stimulates you. What you can't see is the computer here, you only see the screen, but the main thing I worry about in my computer is — it doesn't have to be big and powerful, although I like that — it really has to be completely silent. I know people who work for Google and they have their own small data center at home, and I don't do that. My office is the most boring office you'll ever see. And I sit there alone in the quiet. If the cat comes up, it sits in my lap. And I want to hear the cat purring, not the sound of the fans in the computer. CA: So this is astonishing, because working this way, you're able to run this vast technology empire — it is an empire — so that's an amazing testament to the power of open source. Tell us how you got to understand open source and how it lead to the development of Linux. LT: I mean, I still work alone. Really — I work alone in my house, often in my bathrobe. When a photographer shows up, I dress up, so I have clothes on. (Laughter) And that's how I've always worked. I mean, this was how I started Linux, too. I did not start Linux as a collaborative project. I started it as one in a series of many projects I had done at the time for myself, partly because I needed the end result, but even more because I just enjoyed programming. So it was about the end of the journey, which, 25 years later, we still have not reached. But it was really about the fact that I was looking for a project on my own and there was no open source, really, on my radar at all. And what happened is ... the project grows and becomes something you want to show off to people. Really, this is more of a, "Wow, look at what I did!" And trust me — it was not that great back then. I made it publicly available, and it wasn't even open source at that point. At that point it was source that was open, but there was no intention behind using the kind of open-source methodology that we think of today to improve it. It was more like, "Look, I've been working on this for half a year, I'd love to have comments." And other people approached me. At the University of Helsinki, I had a friend who was one of the open source — it was called mainly "free software" back then — and he actually introduced me to the notion that, hey, you can use these open-source licenses that had been around. And I thought about it for a while. I was actually worried about the whole commercial interests coming in. I mean, that's one of the worries I think most people who start out have, is that they worry about somebody taking advantage of their work, right? And I decided, "What the hell?" And — CA: And then at some point, someone contributed some code that you thought, "Wow, that really is interesting, I would not have thought of that. This could actually improve this." LT: It didn't even start by people contributing code, it was more that people started contributing ideas. And just the fact that somebody else takes a look at your project — and I'm sure it's true of other things, too, but it's definitely true in code — is that somebody else takes an interest in your code, looks at it enough to actually give you feedback and give you ideas. That was a huge thing for me. I was 21 at the time, so I was young, but I had already programmed for half my life, basically. And every project before that had been completely personal and it was a revelation when people just started commenting, started giving feedback on your code. And even before they started giving code back, that was, I think, one of the big moments where I said, "I love other people!" Don't get me wrong — I'm actually not a people person. (Laughter) I don't really love other people — (Laughter) But I love computers, I love interacting with other people on email, because it kind of gives you that buffer. But I do love other people who comment and get involved in my project. And it made it so much more. CA: So was there a moment when you saw what was being built and it suddenly started taking off, and you thought, "Wait a sec, this actually could be something huge, not just a personal project that I'm getting nice feedback on, but a kind of explosive development in the whole technology world"? LT: Not really. I mean, the big point for me, really, was not when it was becoming huge, it was when it was becoming little. The big point for me was not being alone and having 10, maybe 100 people being involved — that was a big point. Then everything else was very gradual. Going from 100 people to a million people is not a big deal — to me. Well, I mean, maybe it is if you're — (Laughter) If you want to sell your result then it's a huge deal — don't get me wrong. But if you're interested in the technology and you're interested in the project, the big part was getting the community. Then the community grew gradually. And there's actually not a single point where I went like, "Wow, that just took off!" because it — I mean — it took a long time, relatively. CA: So all the technologists that I talk to really credit you with massively changing their work. And it's not just Linux, it's this thing called Git, which is this management system for software development. Tell us briefly about that and your role in that. LT: So one of the issues we had, and this took a while to start to appear, is when you ... When you grow from having 10 people or 100 people working on a project to having 10,000 people, which — I mean, right now we're in the situation where just on the kernel, we have 1,000 people involved in every single release and that's every two months, roughly two or three months. Some of those people don't do a lot. There's a lot of people who make small, small changes. But to maintain this, the scale changes how you have to maintain it. And we went through a lot of pain. And there are whole projects that do only source-code maintenance. CVS is the one that used to be the most commonly used, and I hated CVS with a passion and refused to touch it and tried something else that was radical and interesting and everybody else hated. CA: (Laughs) LT: And we were in this bad spot, where we had thousands of people who wanted to participate, but in many ways, I was the kind of break point, where I could not scale to the point where I could work with thousands of people. So Git is my second big project, which was only created for me to maintain my first big project. And this is literally how I work. I don't code for — well, I do code for fun — but I want to code for something meaningful so every single project I've ever done has been something I needed and — CA: So really, both Linux and Git kind of arose almost as an unintended consequence of your desire not to have to work with too many people. LT: Absolutely. Yes. (Laughter) CA: That's amazing. LT: Yeah. (Applause) And yet, you're the man who's transformed technology not just once but twice, and we have to try and understand why it is. You've given us some clues, but ... Here's a picture of you as a kid, with a Rubik's Cube. You mentioned that you've been programming since you were like 10 or 11, half your life. Were you this sort of computer genius, you know, übernerd, were you the star at school who could do everything? What were you like as a kid? LT: Yeah, I think I was the prototypical nerd. I mean, I was ... I was not a people person back then. That's my younger brother. I was clearly more interested in the Rubik's Cube than my younger brother. (Laughter) My younger sister, who's not in the picture, when we had family meetings — and it's not a huge family, but I have, like, a couple of cousins — she would prep me beforehand. Like, before I stepped into the room she would say, "OK. That's so-and-so ..." Because I was not — I was a geek. I was into computers, I was into math, I was into physics. I was good at that. I don't think I was particularly exceptional. Apparently, my sister said that my biggest exceptional quality was that I would not let go. CA: OK, so let's go there, because that's interesting. You would not let go. So that's not about being a geek and being smart, that's about being ... stubborn? LT: That's about being stubborn. That's about, like, just starting something and not saying, "OK, I'm done, let's do something else — Look: shiny!" And I notice that in many other parts in my life, too. I lived in Silicon Valley for seven years. And I worked for the same company, in Silicon Valley, for the whole time. That is unheard of. That's not how Silicon Valley works. The whole point of Silicon Valley is that people jump between jobs to kind of mix up the pot. And that's not the kind of person I am. CA: But during the actual development of Linux itself, that stubbornness sometimes brought you in conflict with other people. Talk about that a bit. Was that essential to sort of maintain the quality of what was being built? How would you describe what happened? LT: I don't know if it's essential. Going back to the "I'm not a people person," — sometimes I'm also ... shall we say, "myopic" when it comes to other people's feelings, and that sometimes makes you say things that hurt other people. And I'm not proud of that. (Applause) But, at the same time, it's — I get people who tell me that I should be nice. And then when I try to explain to them that maybe you're nice, maybe you should be more aggressive, they see that as me being not nice. (Laughter) What I'm trying to say is we are different. I'm not a people person; it's not something I'm particularly proud of, but it's part of me. And one of the things I really like about open source is it really allows different people to work together. We don't have to like each other — and sometimes we really don't like each other. Really — I mean, there are very, very heated arguments. But you can, actually, you can find things that — you don't even agree to disagree, it's just that you're interested in really different things. And coming back to the point where I said earlier that I was afraid of commercial people taking advantage of your work, it turned out, and very quickly turned out, that those commercial people were lovely, lovely people. And they did all the things that I was not at all interested in doing, and they had completely different goals. And they used open source in ways that I just did not want to go. But because it was open source they could do it, and it actually works really beautifully together. And I actually think it works the same way. You need to have the people-people, the communicators, the warm and friendly people who like — (Laughter) really want to hug you and get you into the community. But that's not everybody. And that's not me. I care about the technology. There are people who care about the UI. I can't do UI to save my life. I mean, if I was stranded on an island and the only way to get off that island was the make a pretty UI, I'd die there. (Laughter) So there's different kinds of people, and I'm not making excuses, I'm trying to explain. CA: Now, when we talked last week, you talked about some other trait that you have, which I found really interesting. It's this idea called taste. And I've just got a couple of images here. I think this is an example of not particularly good taste in code, and this one is better taste, which one can immediately see. What is the difference between these two? LT: So this is — How many people here actually have coded? CA: Oh my goodness. LT: So I guarantee you, everybody who raised their hand, they have done what's called a singly-linked list. And it's taught — This, the first not very good taste approach, is basically how it's taught to be done when you start out coding. And you don't have to understand the code. The most interesting part to me is the last if statement. Because what happens in a singly-linked list — this is trying to remove an existing entry from a list — and there's a difference between if it's the first entry or whether it's an entry in the middle. Because if it's the first entry, you have to change the pointer to the first entry. If it's in the middle, you have to change the pointer of a previous entry. So they're two completely different cases. CA: And that's better. LT: And this is better. It does not have the if statement. And it doesn't really matter — I don't want you understand why it doesn't have the if statement, but I want you to understand that sometimes you can see a problem in a different way and rewrite it so that a special case goes away and becomes the normal case. And that's good code. But this is simple code. This is CS 101. This is not important — although, details are important. To me, the sign of people I really want to work with is that they have good taste, which is how ... I sent you this stupid example that is not relevant because it's too small. Good taste is much bigger than this. Good taste is about really seeing the big patterns and kind of instinctively knowing what's the right way to do things. CA: OK, so we're putting the pieces together here now. You have taste, in a way that's meaningful to software people. You're — (Laughter) LT: I think it was meaningful to some people here. CA: You're a very smart computer coder, and you're hellish stubborn. But there must be something else. I mean, you've changed the future. You must have the ability of these grand visions of the future. You're a visionary, right? LT: I've actually felt slightly uncomfortable at TED for the last two days, because there's a lot of vision going on, right? And I am not a visionary. I do not have a five-year plan. I'm an engineer. And I think it's really — I mean — I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, "I want to go there." But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in. This is the kind of person I am. (Cheers) (Applause) CA: So you spoke to me last week about these two guys. Who are they and how do you relate to them? LT: Well, so this is kind of cliché in technology, the whole Tesla versus Edison, where Tesla is seen as the visionary scientist and crazy idea man. And people love Tesla. I mean, there are people who name their companies after him. (Laughter) The other person there is Edison, who is actually often vilified for being kind of pedestrian and is — I mean, his most famous quote is, "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." And I'm in the Edison camp, even if people don't always like him. Because if you actually compare the two, Tesla has kind of this mind grab these days, but who actually changed the world? Edison may not have been a nice person, he did a lot of things — he was maybe not so intellectual, not so visionary. But I think I'm more of an Edison than a Tesla. CA: So our theme at TED this week is dreams — big, bold, audacious dreams. You're really the antidote to that. LT: I'm trying to dial it down a bit, yes. CA: That's good. (Laughter) We embrace you, we embrace you. Companies like Google and many others have made, arguably, like, billions of dollars out of your software. Does that piss you off? LT: No. No, it doesn't piss me off for several reasons. And one of them is, I'm doing fine. I'm really doing fine. But the other reason is — I mean, without doing the whole open source and really letting go thing, Linux would never have been what it is. And it's brought experiences I don't really enjoy, public talking, but at the same time, this is an experience. Trust me. So there's a lot of things going on that make me a very happy man and thinking I did the right choices. CA: Is the open source idea — this is, I think we'll end here — is the open source idea fully realized now in the world, or is there more that it could go, are there more things that it could do? LT: So, I'm of two minds there. I think one reason open source works so well in code is that at the end of the day, code tends to be somewhat black and white. There's often a fairly good way to decide, this is done correctly and this is not done well. Code either works or it doesn't, which means that there's less room for arguments. And we have arguments despite this, right? In many other areas — I mean, people have talked about open politics and things like that — and it's really hard sometimes to say that, yes, you can apply the same principles in some other areas just because the black and white turns into not just gray, but different colors. So, obviously open source in science is making a comeback. Science was there first. But then science ended up being pretty closed, with very expensive journals and some of that going on. And open source is making a comeback in science, with things like arXiv and open journals. Wikipedia changed the world, too. So there are other examples, I'm sure there are more to come. CA: But you're not a visionary, and so it's not up to you to name them. LT: No. (Laughter) It's up to you guys to make them, right? CA: Exactly. Linus Torvalds, thank you for Linux, thank you for the Internet, thank you for all those Android phones. Thank you for coming here to TED and revealing so much of yourself. LT: Thank you. (Applause) |
The Panama Papers exposed a huge global problem. What's next? | {0: 'Robert Palmer investigates how the financial system facilitates corruption and other crimes.'} | Global Witness | [On April 3, 2016 we saw the largest data leak in history.] [The Panama Papers exposed rich and powerful people] [hiding vast amounts of money in offshore accounts.] [What does this mean?] [We called Robert Palmer of Global Witness to explain.] This week, there have been a whole slew and deluge of stories coming out from the leak of 11 million documents from a Panamanian-based law firm called Mossack Fonseca. The release of these papers from Panama lifts the veil on a tiny piece of the secretive offshore world. We get an insight into how clients and banks and lawyers go to companies like Mossack Fonseca and say, "OK, we want an anonymous company, can you give us one?" So you actually get to see the emails, you get to see the exchanges of messages, you get to see the mechanics of how this works, how this operates. Now, this has already started to have pretty immediate repercussions. The Prime Minister of Iceland has resigned. We've also had news that an ally of the brutal Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad has also got offshore companies. There's been allegations of a $2 billion money trail that leads back to President Vladimir Putin of Russia via his close childhood friend, who happens to be a top cellist. And there will be a lot of rich individuals out there and others who will be nervous about the next set of stories and the next set of leaked documents. Now, this sounds like the plot of a spy thriller or a John Grisham novel. It seems very distant from you, me, ordinary people. Why should we care about this? But the truth is that if rich and powerful individuals are able to keep their money offshore and not pay the taxes that they should, it means that there is less money for vital public services like healthcare, education, roads. And that affects all of us. Now, for my organization Global Witness, this exposé has been phenomenal. We have the world's media and political leaders talking about how individuals can use offshore secrecy to hide and disguise their assets — something we have been talking about and exposing for a decade. Now, I think a lot of people find this entire world baffling and confusing, and hard to understand how this sort of offshore world works. I like to think of it a bit like a Russian doll. So you can have one company stacked inside another company, stacked inside another company, making it almost impossible to really understand who is behind these structures. It can be very difficult for law enforcement or tax authorities, journalists, civil society to really understand what's going on. I also think it's interesting that there's been less coverage of this issue in the United States. And that's perhaps because some prominent US people just haven't figured in this exposé, in this scandal. Now, that's not because there are no rich Americans who are stashing their assets offshore. It's just because of the way in which offshore works, Mossack Fonseca has fewer American clients. I think if we saw leaks from the Cayman Islands or even from Delaware or Wyoming or Nevada, you would see many more cases and examples linking back to Americans. In fact, in a number of US states you need less information, you need to provide less information to get a company than you do to get a library card. That sort of secrecy in America has allowed employees of school districts to rip off schoolchildren. It has allowed scammers to rip off vulnerable investors. This is the sort of behavior that affects all of us. Now, at Global Witness, we wanted to see what this actually looked like in practice. How does this actually work? So what we did is we sent in an undercover investigator to 13 Manhattan law firms. Our investigator posed as an African minister who wanted to move suspect funds into the United States to buy a house, a yacht, a jet. Now, what was truly shocking was that all but one of those lawyers provided our investigator with suggestions on how to move those suspect funds. These were all preliminary meetings, and none of the lawyers took us on as a client and of course no money moved hands, but it really shows the problem with the system. It's also important to not just think about this as individual cases. This is not just about an individual lawyer who's spoken to our undercover investigator and provided suggestions. It's not just about a particular senior politician who's been caught up in a scandal. This is about how a system works, that entrenches corruption, tax evasion, poverty and instability. And in order to tackle this, we need to change the game. We need to change the rules of the game to make this sort of behavior harder. This may seem like doom and gloom, like there's nothing we can do about it, like nothing has ever changed, like there will always be rich and powerful individuals. But as a natural optimist, I do see that we are starting to get some change. Over the last couple of years, we've seen a real push towards greater transparency when it comes to company ownership. This issue was put on the political agenda by the UK Prime Minister David Cameron at a big G8 Summit that was held in Northern Ireland in 2013. And since then, the European Union is going to be creating central registers at a national level of who really owns and controls companies across Europe. One of the things that is sad is that, actually, the US is lagging behind. There's bipartisan legislation that had been introduced in the House and the Senate, but it isn't making as much progress as we'd like to see. So we'd really want to see the Panama leaks, this huge peek into the offshore world, be used as a way of opening up in the US and around the world. For us at Global Witness, this is a moment for change. We need ordinary people to get angry at the way in which people can hide their identity behind secret companies. We need business leaders to stand up and say, "Secrecy like this is not good for business." We need political leaders to recognize the problem, and to commit to changing the law to open up this sort of secrecy. Together, we can end the secrecy that is currently allowing tax evasion, corruption, money laundering to flourish. |
What does it mean to be a citizen of the world? | {0: 'Through the Global Citizen platform, humanitarian Hugh Evans has created an online community of millions of people -- all driven to eradicate extreme poverty by the year 2030.'} | TED2016 | I want to introduce you to an amazing woman. Her name is Davinia. Davinia was born in Jamaica, emigrated to the US at the age of 18, and now lives just outside of Washington, DC. She's not a high-powered political staffer, nor a lobbyist. She'd probably tell you she's quite unremarkable, but she's having the most remarkable impact. What's incredible about Davinia is that she's willing to spend time every single week focused on people who are not her: people not her in her neighborhood, her state, nor even in her country — people she'd likely never meet. Davinia's impact started a few years ago when she reached out to all of her friends on Facebook, and asked them to donate their pennies so she could fund girls' education. She wasn't expecting a huge response, but 700,000 pennies later, she's now sent over 120 girls to school. When we spoke last week, she told me she's become a little infamous at the local bank every time she rocks up with a shopping cart full of pennies. Now — Davinia is not alone. Far from it. She's part of a growing movement. And there's a name for people like Davinia: global citizens. A global citizen is someone who self-identifies first and foremost not as a member of a state, a tribe or a nation, but as a member of the human race, and someone who is prepared to act on that belief, to tackle our world's greatest challenges. Our work is focused on finding, supporting and activating global citizens. They exist in every country and among every demographic. I want to make the case to you today that the world's future depends on global citizens. I'm convinced that if we had more global citizens active in our world, then every single one of the major challenges we face — from poverty, climate change, gender inequality — these issues become solvable. They are ultimately global issues, and they can ultimately only be solved by global citizens demanding global solutions from their leaders. Now, some people's immediate reaction to this idea is that it's either a bit utopian or even threatening. So I'd like to share with you a little of my story today, how I ended up here, how it connects with Davinia and, hopefully, with you. Growing up in Melbourne, Australia, I was one of those seriously irritating little kids that never, ever stopped asking, "Why?" You might have been one yourself. I used to ask my mum the most annoying questions. I'd ask her questions like, "Mum, why I can't I dress up and play with puppets all day?" "Why do you want fries with that?" "What is a shrimp, and why do we have to keep throwing them on the barbie?" (Laughter) "And mum — this haircut. Why?" (Laughter) The worst haircut, I think. Still terrible. As a "why" kid, I thought I could change the world, and it was impossible to convince me otherwise. And when I was 12 and in my first year of high school, I started raising money for communities in the developing world. We were a really enthusiastic group of kids, and we raised more money than any other school in Australia. And so I was awarded the chance to go to the Philippines to learn more. It was 1998. We were taken into a slum in the outskirts of Manila. It was there I became friends with Sonny Boy, who lived on what was literally a pile of steaming garbage. "Smoky Mountain" was what they called it. But don't let the romance of that name fool you, because it was nothing more than a rancid landfill that kids like Sonny Boy spent hours rummaging through every single day to find something, anything of value. That night with Sonny Boy and his family changed my life forever, because when it came time to go to sleep, we simply laid down on this concrete slab the size of half my bedroom with myself, Sonny Boy, and the rest of his family, seven of us in this long line, with the smell of rubbish all around us and cockroaches crawling all around. And I didn't sleep a wink, but I lay awake thinking to myself, "Why should anyone have to live like this when I have so much? Why should Sonny Boy's ability to live out his dreams be determined by where he's born, or what Warren Buffett called 'the ovarian lottery?'" I just didn't get it, and I needed to understand why. Now, I only later came to understand that the poverty I'd seen in the Philippines was the result of decisions made or not made, man-made, by a succession of colonial powers and corrupt governments who had anything but the interests of Sonny Boy at heart. Sure, they didn't create Smoky Mountain, but they may as well have. And if we're to try to help kids like Sonny Boy, it wouldn't work just to try to send him a few dollars or to try to clean up the garbage dump on which he lived, because the core of the problem lay elsewhere. And as I worked on community development projects over the coming years trying to help build schools, train teachers, and tackle HIV and AIDS, I came to see that community development should be driven by communities themselves, and that although charity is necessary, it's not sufficient. We need to confront these challenges on a global scale and in a systemic way. And the best thing I could do is try to mobilize a large group of citizens back home to insist that our leaders engage in that systemic change. That's why, a few years later, I joined with a group of college friends in bringing the Make Poverty History campaign to Australia. We had this dream of staging this small concert around the time of the G20 with local Aussie artists, and it suddenly exploded one day when we got a phone call from Bono, the Edge and Pearl Jam, who all agreed to headline our concert. I got a little bit excited that day, as you can see. (Laughter) But to our amazement, the Australian government heard our collective voices, and they agreed to double investment into global health and development — an additional 6.2 billion dollars. It felt like — (Applause) It felt like this incredible validation. By rallying citizens together, we helped persuade our government to do the unthinkable, and act to fix a problem miles outside of our borders. But here's the thing: it didn't last. See, there was a change in government, and six years later, all that new money disappeared. What did we learn? We learned that one-off spikes are not enough. We needed a sustainable movement, not one that is susceptible to the fluctuating moods of a politician or the hint of an economic downturn. And it needed to happen everywhere; otherwise, every individual government would have this built-in excuse mechanism that they couldn't possibly carry the burden of global action alone. And so this is what we embarked upon. And as we embarked upon this challenge, we asked ourselves, how do we gain enough pressure and build a broad enough army to win these fights for the long term? We could only think of one way. We needed to somehow turn that short-term excitement of people involved with the Make Poverty History campaign into long-term passion. It had to be part of their identity. So in 2012, we cofounded an organization that had exactly that as its goal. And there was only one name for it: Global Citizen. But this is not about any one organization. This is about citizens taking action. And research data tells us that of the total population who even care about global issues, only 18 percent have done anything about it. It's not that people don't want to act. It's often that they don't know how to take action, or that they believe that their actions will have no effect. So we had to somehow recruit and activate millions of citizens in dozens of countries to put pressure on their leaders to behave altruistically. And as we did so, we discovered something really thrilling, that when you make global citizenship your mission, you suddenly find yourself with some extraordinary allies. See, extreme poverty isn't the only issue that's fundamentally global. So, too, is climate change, human rights, gender equality, even conflict. We found ourselves shoulder to shoulder with people who are passionate about targeting all these interrelated issues. But how did we actually go about recruiting and engaging those global citizens? Well, we used the universal language: music. We launched the Global Citizen Festival in the heart of New York City in Central Park, and we persuaded some of the world's biggest artists to participate. We made sure that these festivals coincided with the UN General Assembly meeting, so that leaders who need to hear our voices couldn't possible ignore them. But there was a twist: you couldn't buy a ticket. You had to earn it. You had to take action on behalf of a global cause, and only once you'd done that could you earn enough points to qualify. Activism is the currency. I had no interest in citizenship purely as some sort of feel-good thing. For me, citizenship means you have to act, and that's what we required. And amazingly, it worked. Last year, more than 155,000 citizens in the New York area alone earned enough points to qualify. Globally, we've now signed up citizens in over 150 countries around the world. And last year, we signed up more than 100,000 new members each and every week of the whole year. See, we don't need to create global citizens from nothing. We're already everywhere. We just need to be organized and motivated to start acting. And this is where I believe we can learn a lot from Davinia, who started taking action as a global citizen back in 2012. Here's what she did. It wasn't rocket science. She started writing letters, emailing politicians' offices. She volunteered her time in her local community. That's when she got active on social media and started to collect pennies — a lot of pennies. Now, maybe that doesn't sound like a lot to you. How will that achieve anything? Well, it achieved a lot because she wasn't alone. Her actions, alongside 142,000 other global citizens', led the US government to double their investment into Global Partnership for Education. And here's Dr. Raj Shah, the head of USAID, making that announcement. See, when thousands of global citizens find inspiration from each other, it's amazing to see their collective power. Global citizens like Davinia helped persuade the World Bank to boost their investment into water and sanitation. Here's the Bank's president Jim Kim announcing 15 billion dollars onstage at Global Citizen, and Prime Minister Modi of India affirmed his commitment to put a toilet in every household and school across India by 2019. Global citizens encouraged by the late-night host Stephen Colbert launched a Twitter invasion on Norway. Erna Solberg, the country's Prime Minister, got the message, committing to double investment into girls' education. Global citizens together with Rotarians called on the Canadian, UK, and Australian governments to boost their investment into polio eradication. They got together and committed 665 million dollars. But despite all of this momentum, we face some huge challenges. See, you might be thinking to yourself, how can we possibly persuade world leaders to sustain a focus on global issues? Indeed, the powerful American politician Tip O'Neill once said, "All politics is local." That's what always got politicians elected: to seek, gain and hold onto power through the pursuit of local or at very best national interests. I experienced this for the first time when I was 21 years old. I took a meeting with a then-Australian Foreign Minister who shall remain nameless — [Alexander Downer] (Laughter) And behind closed doors, I shared with him my passion to end extreme poverty. I said, "Minister — Australia has this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals. We can do this." And he paused, looked down on me with cold, dismissive eyes, and he said, "Hugh, no one gives a funk about foreign aid." Except he didn't use the word "funk." He went on. He said we need to look after our own backyard first. This is, I believe, outdated, even dangerous thinking. Or as my late grandfather would say, complete BS. Parochialism offers this false dichotomy because it pits the poor in one country against the poor in another. It pretends we can isolate ourselves and our nations from one another. The whole world is our backyard, and we ignore it at our peril. See, look what happened when we ignored Rwanda, when we ignore Syria, when we ignore climate change. Political leaders ought to give a "funk" because the impact of climate change and extreme poverty comes right to our shore. Now, global citizens — they understand this. We live in a time that favors the global citizen, in an age where every single voice can be heard. See, do you remember when the Millennium Development Goals were signed back in the year 2000? The most we could do in those days was fire off a letter and wait for the next election. There was no social media. Today, billions of citizens have more tools, more access to information, more capacity to influence than ever before. Both the problems and the tools to solve them are right before us. The world has changed, and those of us who look beyond our borders are on the right side of history. So where are we? So we run this amazing festival, we've scored some big policy wins, and citizens are signing up all over the world. But have we achieved our mission? No. We have such a long way to go. But this is the opportunity that I see. The concept of global citizenship, self-evident in its logic but until now impractical in many ways, has coincided with this particular moment in which we are privileged to live. We, as global citizens, now have a unique opportunity to accelerate large-scale positive change around the world. So in the months and years ahead, global citizens will hold world leaders accountable to ensure that the new Global Goals for Sustainable Development are tracked and implemented. Global citizens will partner with the world's leading NGOs to end diseases like polio and malaria. Global citizens will sign up in every corner of this globe, increasing the frequency, quality and impact of their actions. These dreams are within reach. Imagine an army of millions growing into tens of millions, connected, informed, engaged and unwilling to take no for an answer. Over all these years, I've tried to reconnect with Sonny Boy. Sadly, I've been unable to. We met long before social media, and his address has now been relocated by the authorities, as often happens with slums. I'd love to sit down with him, wherever he is, and share with him how much the time I spent on Smoky Mountain inspired me. Thanks to him and so many others, I came to understand the importance of being part of a movement of people — the kids willing to look up from their screens and out to the world, the global citizens. Global citizens who stand together, who ask the question "Why?," who reject the naysayers, and embrace the amazing possibilities of the world we share. I'm a global citizen. Are you? Thank you. (Applause) |
Your kids might live on Mars. Here's how they'll survive | {0: 'Stephen Petranek untangles emerging technologies to predict which will become fixtures of our future lives -- and which could potentially save them. '} | TED2015 | Strap yourselves in, we're going to Mars. Not just a few astronauts — thousands of people are going to colonize Mars. And I am telling you that they're going to do this soon. Some of you will end up working on projects on Mars, and I guarantee that some of your children will end up living there. That probably sounds preposterous, so I'm going to share with you how and when that will happen. But first I want to discuss the obvious question: Why the heck should we do this? 12 years ago, I gave a TED talk on 10 ways the world could end suddenly. We are incredibly vulnerable to the whims of our own galaxy. A single, large asteroid could take us out forever. To survive we have to reach beyond the home planet. Think what a tragedy it would be if all that humans have accomplished were suddenly obliterated. And there's another reason we should go: exploration is in our DNA. Two million years ago humans evolved in Africa and then slowly but surely spread out across the entire planet by reaching into the wilderness that was beyond their horizons. This stuff is inside us. And they prospered doing that. Some of the greatest advances in civilization and technology came because we explored. Yes, we could do a lot of good with the money it will take to establish a thriving colony on Mars. And yes we should all be taking far better care of our own home planet. And yes, I worry we could screw up Mars the way we've screwed up Earth. But think for a moment, what we had when John F. Kennedy told us we would put a human on the moon. He excited an entire generation to dream. Think how inspired we will be to see a landing on Mars. Perhaps then we will look back at Earth and see that that is one people instead of many and perhaps then we will look back at Earth, as we struggle to survive on Mars, and realize how precious the home planet is. So let me tell you about the extraordinary adventure we're about to undertake. But first, a few fascinating facts about where we're going. This picture actually represents the true size of Mars compared to Earth. Mars is not our sister planet. It's far less than half the size of the Earth, and yet despite the fact that it's smaller, the surface area of Mars that you can stand on is equivalent to the surface area of the Earth that you can stand on, because the Earth is mostly covered by water. The atmosphere on Mars is really thin — 100 times thinner than on Earth — and it's not breathable, it's 96 percent carbon dioxide. It's really cold there. The average temperature is minus 81 degrees, although there is quite a range of temperature. A day on Mars is about as long as a day on Earth, plus about 39 minutes. Seasons and years on Mars are twice as long as they are on Earth. And for anybody who wants to strap on some wings and go flying one day, Mars has a lot less gravity than on Earth, and it's the kind of place where you can jump over your car instead of walk around it. Now, as you can see, Mars isn't exactly Earth-like, but it's by far the most livable other place in our entire solar system. Here's the problem. Mars is a long way away, a thousand times farther away from us than our own moon. The Moon is 250,000 miles away and it took Apollo astronauts three days to get there. Mars is 250 million miles away and it will take us eight months to get there — 240 days. And that's only if we launch on a very specific day, at a very specific time, once every two years, when Mars and the Earth are aligned just so, so the distance that the rocket would have to travel will be the shortest. 240 days is a long time to spend trapped with your colleagues in a tin can. And meanwhile, our track record of getting to Mars is lousy. We and the Russians, the Europeans, the Japanese, the Chinese and the Indians, have actually sent 44 rockets there, and the vast majority of them have either missed or crashed. Only about a third of the missions to Mars have been successful. And we don't at the moment have a rocket big enough to get there anyway. We once had that rocket, the Saturn V. A couple of Saturn Vs would have gotten us there. It was the most magnificent machine ever built by humans, and it was the rocket that took us to the Moon. But the last Saturn V was used in 1973 to launch the Skylab space station, and we decided to do something called the shuttle instead of continuing on to Mars after we landed on the Moon. The biggest rocket we have now is only half big enough to get us anything to Mars. So getting to Mars is not going to be easy and that brings up a really interesting question ... how soon will the first humans actually land here? Now, some pundits think if we got there by 2050, that'd be a pretty good achievement. These days, NASA seems to be saying that it can get humans to Mars by 2040. Maybe they can. I believe that they can get human beings into Mars orbit by 2035. But frankly, I don't think they're going to bother in 2035 to send a rocket to Mars, because we will already be there. We're going to land on Mars in 2027. And the reason is this man is determined to make that happen. His name is Elon Musk, he's the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. Now, he actually told me that we would land on Mars by 2025, but Elon Musk is more optimistic than I am — and that's going a ways — so I'm giving him a couple of years of slack. Still ... you've got to ask yourself, can this guy really do this by 2025 or 2027? Well, let's put a decade with Elon Musk into a little perspective. Where was this 10 years ago? That's the Tesla electric automobile. In 2005, a lot of people in the automobile industry were saying, we would not have a decent electric car for 50 years. And where was that? That is SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, lifting six tons of supplies to the International Space Station. 10 years ago, SpaceX had not launched anything, or fired a rocket to anywhere. So I think it's a pretty good bet that the person who is revolutionizing the automobile industry in less than 10 years and the person who created an entire rocket company in less than 10 years will get us to Mars by 2027. Now, you need to know this: governments and robots no longer control this game. Private companies are leaping into space and they will be happy to take you to Mars. And that raises a really big question. Can we actually live there? Now, NASA may not be able to get us there until 2040, or we may get there a long time before NASA, but NASA has taken a huge responsibility in figuring out how we can live on Mars. Let's look at the problem this way. Here's what you need to live on Earth: food, water, shelter and clothing. And here's what you need to live on Mars: all of the above, plus oxygen. So let's look at the most important thing on this list first. Water is the basis of all life as we know it, and it's far too heavy for us to carry water from the Earth to Mars to live, so we have to find water if our life is going to succeed on Mars. And if you look at Mars, it looks really dry, it looks like the entire planet is a desert. But it turns out that it's not. The soil alone on Mars contains up to 60 percent water. And a number of orbiters that we still have flying around Mars have shown us — and by the way, that's a real photograph — that lots of craters on Mars have a sheet of water ice in them. It's not a bad place to start a colony. Now, here's a view of a little dig the Phoenix Lander did in 2008, showing that just below the surface of the soil is ice — that white stuff is ice. In the second picture, which is four days later than the first picture, you can see that some of it is evaporating. Orbiters also tell us that there are huge amounts of underground water on Mars as well as glaciers. In fact, if only the water ice at the poles on Mars melted, most of the planet would be under 30 feet of water. So there's plenty of water there, but most of it's ice, most of it's underground, it takes a lot of energy to get it and a lot of human labor. This is a device cooked up at the University of Washington back in 1998. It's basically a low-tech dehumidifier. And it turns out the Mars atmosphere is often 100 percent humid. So this device can extract all the water that humans will need simply from the atmosphere on Mars. Next we have to worry about what we will breathe. Frankly, I was really shocked to find out that NASA has this problem worked out. This is a scientist at MIT named Michael Hecht. And he's developed this machine, Moxie. I love this thing. It's a reverse fuel cell, essentially, that sucks in the Martian atmosphere and pumps out oxygen. And you have to remember that CO2 — carbon dioxide, which is 96 percent of Mars' atmosphere — CO2 is basically 78 percent oxygen. Now, the next big rover that NASA sends to Mars in 2020 is going to have one of these devices aboard, and it will be able to produce enough oxygen to keep one person alive indefinitely. But the secret to this — and that's just for testing — the secret to this is that this thing was designed from the get-go to be scalable by a factor of 100. Next, what will we eat? Well, we'll use hydroponics to grow food, but we're not going to be able to grow more than 15 to 20 percent of our food there, at least not until water is running on the surface of Mars and we actually have the probability and the capability of planting crops. In the meantime, most of our food will arrive from Earth, and it will be dried. And then we need some shelter. At first we can use inflatable, pressurized buildings as well as the landers themselves. But this really only works during the daytime. There is too much solar radiation and too much radiation from cosmic rays. So we really have to go underground. Now, it turns out that the soil on Mars, by and large, is perfect for making bricks. And NASA has figured this one out, too. They're going to throw some polymer plastic into the bricks, shove them in a microwave oven, and then you will be able to build buildings with really thick walls. Or we may choose to live underground in caves or in lava tubes, of which there are plenty. And finally there's clothing. On Earth we have miles of atmosphere piled up on us, which creates 15 pounds of pressure on our bodies at all times, and we're constantly pushing out against that. On Mars there's hardly any atmospheric pressure. So Dava Newman, a scientist at MIT, has created this sleek space suit. It will keep us together, block radiation and keep us warm. So let's think about this for a minute. Food, shelter, clothing, water, oxygen ... we can do this. We really can. But it's still a little complicated and a little difficult. So that leads to the next big — really big step — in living the good life on Mars. And that's terraforming the planet: making it more like Earth, reengineering an entire planet. That sounds like a lot of hubris, but the truth is that the technology to do everything I'm about to tell you already exists. First we've got to warm it up. Mars is incredibly cold because it has a very thin atmosphere. The answer lies here, at the south pole and at the north pole of Mars, both of which are covered with an incredible amount of frozen carbon dioxide — dry ice. If we heat it up, it sublimes directly into the atmosphere and thickens the atmosphere the same way it does on Earth. And as we know, CO2 is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas. Now, my favorite way of doing this is to erect a very, very large solar sail and focus it — it essentially serves as a mirror — and focus it on the south pole of Mars at first. As the planet spins, it will heat up all that dry ice, sublime it, and it will go into the atmosphere. It actually won't take long for the temperature on Mars to start rising, probably less than 20 years. Right now, on a perfect day at the equator, in the middle of summer on Mars, temperatures can actually reach 70 degrees, but then they go down to minus 100 at night. (Laughter) What we're shooting for is a runaway greenhouse effect: enough temperature rise to see a lot of that ice on Mars — especially the ice in the ground — melt. Then we get some real magic. As the atmosphere gets thicker, everything gets better. We get more protection from radiation, more atmosphere makes us warmer, makes the planet warmer, so we get running water and that makes crops possible. Then more water vapor goes into the air, forming yet another potent greenhouse gas. It will rain and it will snow on Mars. And a thicker atmosphere will create enough pressure so that we can throw away those space suits. We only need about five pounds of pressure to survive. Eventually, Mars will be made to feel a lot like British Columbia. We'll still be left with the complicated problem of making the atmosphere breathable, and frankly that could take 1,000 years to accomplish. But humans are amazingly smart and incredibly adaptable. There is no telling what our future technology will be able to accomplish and no telling what we can do with our own bodies. In biology right now, we are on the very verge of being able to control our own genetics, what the genes in our own bodies are doing, and certainly, eventually, our own evolution. We could end up with a species of human being on Earth that is slightly different from the species of human beings on Mars. But what would you do there? How would you live? It's going to be the same as it is on Earth. Somebody's going to start a restaurant, somebody's going to build an iron foundry. Someone will make documentary movies of Mars and sell them on Earth. Some idiot will start a reality TV show. (Laughter) There will be software companies, there will be hotels, there will be bars. This much is certain: it will be the most disruptive event in our lifetimes, and I think it will be the most inspiring. Ask any 10-year-old girl if she wants to go to Mars. Children who are now in elementary school are going to choose to live there. Remember when we landed humans on the Moon? When that happened, people looked at each other and said, "If we can do this, we can do anything." What are they going to think when we actually form a colony on Mars? Most importantly, it will make us a spacefaring species. And that means humans will survive no matter what happens on Earth. We will never be the last of our kind. Thank you. (Applause) |
A new superweapon in the fight against cancer | {0: "Paula Hammond, head of MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering, is developing new technologies to kill cancer cells."} | TED Talks Live | Cancer affects all of us — especially the ones that come back over and over again, the highly invasive and drug-resistant ones, the ones that defy medical treatment, even when we throw our best drugs at them. Engineering at the molecular level, working at the smallest of scales, can provide exciting new ways to fight the most aggressive forms of cancer. Cancer is a very clever disease. There are some forms of cancer, which, fortunately, we've learned how to address relatively well with known and established drugs and surgery. But there are some forms of cancer that don't respond to these approaches, and the tumor survives or comes back, even after an onslaught of drugs. We can think of these very aggressive forms of cancer as kind of supervillains in a comic book. They're clever, they're adaptable, and they're very good at staying alive. And, like most supervillains these days, their superpowers come from a genetic mutation. The genes that are modified inside these tumor cells can enable and encode for new and unimagined modes of survival, allowing the cancer cell to live through even our best chemotherapy treatments. One example is a trick in which a gene allows a cell, even as the drug approaches the cell, to push the drug out, before the drug can have any effect. Imagine — the cell effectively spits out the drug. This is just one example of the many genetic tricks in the bag of our supervillain, cancer. All due to mutant genes. So, we have a supervillain with incredible superpowers. And we need a new and powerful mode of attack. Actually, we can turn off a gene. The key is a set of molecules known as siRNA. siRNA are short sequences of genetic code that guide a cell to block a certain gene. Each siRNA molecule can turn off a specific gene inside the cell. For many years since its discovery, scientists have been very excited about how we can apply these gene blockers in medicine. But, there is a problem. siRNA works well inside the cell. But if it gets exposed to the enzymes that reside in our bloodstream or our tissues, it degrades within seconds. It has to be packaged, protected through its journey through the body on its way to the final target inside the cancer cell. So, here's our strategy. First, we'll dose the cancer cell with siRNA, the gene blocker, and silence those survival genes, and then we'll whop it with a chemo drug. But how do we carry that out? Using molecular engineering, we can actually design a superweapon that can travel through the bloodstream. It has to be tiny enough to get through the bloodstream, it's got to be small enough to penetrate the tumor tissue, and it's got to be tiny enough to be taken up inside the cancer cell. To do this job well, it has to be about one one-hundredth the size of a human hair. Let's take a closer look at how we can build this nanoparticle. First, let's start with the nanoparticle core. It's a tiny capsule that contains the chemotherapy drug. This is the poison that will actually end the tumor cell's life. Around this core, we'll wrap a very thin, nanometers-thin blanket of siRNA. This is our gene blocker. Because siRNA is strongly negatively charged, we can protect it with a nice, protective layer of positively charged polymer. The two oppositely charged molecules stick together through charge attraction, and that provides us with a protective layer that prevents the siRNA from degrading in the bloodstream. We're almost done. (Laughter) But there is one more big obstacle we have to think about. In fact, it may be the biggest obstacle of all. How do we deploy this superweapon? I mean, every good weapon needs to be targeted, we have to target this superweapon to the supervillain cells that reside in the tumor. But our bodies have a natural immune-defense system: cells that reside in the bloodstream and pick out things that don't belong, so that it can destroy or eliminate them. And guess what? Our nanoparticle is considered a foreign object. We have to sneak our nanoparticle past the tumor defense system. We have to get it past this mechanism of getting rid of the foreign object by disguising it. So we add one more negatively charged layer around this nanoparticle, which serves two purposes. First, this outer layer is one of the naturally charged, highly hydrated polysaccharides that resides in our body. It creates a cloud of water molecules around the nanoparticle that gives us an invisibility cloaking effect. This invisibility cloak allows the nanoparticle to travel through the bloodstream long and far enough to reach the tumor, without getting eliminated by the body. Second, this layer contains molecules which bind specifically to our tumor cell. Once bound, the cancer cell takes up the nanoparticle, and now we have our nanoparticle inside the cancer cell and ready to deploy. Alright! I feel the same way. Let's go! (Applause) The siRNA is deployed first. It acts for hours, giving enough time to silence and block those survival genes. We have now disabled those genetic superpowers. What remains is a cancer cell with no special defenses. Then, the chemotherapy drug comes out of the core and destroys the tumor cell cleanly and efficiently. With sufficient gene blockers, we can address many different kinds of mutations, allowing the chance to sweep out tumors, without leaving behind any bad guys. So, how does our strategy work? We've tested these nanostructure particles in animals using a highly aggressive form of triple-negative breast cancer. This triple-negative breast cancer exhibits the gene that spits out cancer drug as soon as it is delivered. Usually, doxorubicin — let's call it "dox" — is the cancer drug that is the first line of treatment for breast cancer. So, we first treated our animals with a dox core, dox only. The tumor slowed their rate of growth, but they still grew rapidly, doubling in size over a period of two weeks. Then, we tried our combination superweapon. A nanolayer particle with siRNA against the chemo pump, plus, we have the dox in the core. And look — we found that not only did the tumors stop growing, they actually decreased in size and were eliminated in some cases. The tumors were actually regressing. (Applause) What's great about this approach is that it can be personalized. We can add many different layers of siRNA to address different mutations and tumor defense mechanisms. And we can put different drugs into the nanoparticle core. As doctors learn how to test patients and understand certain tumor genetic types, they can help us determine which patients can benefit from this strategy and which gene blockers we can use. Ovarian cancer strikes a special chord with me. It is a very aggressive cancer, in part because it's discovered at very late stages, when it's highly advanced and there are a number of genetic mutations. After the first round of chemotherapy, this cancer comes back for 75 percent of patients. And it usually comes back in a drug-resistant form. High-grade ovarian cancer is one of the biggest supervillains out there. And we're now directing our superweapon toward its defeat. As a researcher, I usually don't get to work with patients. But I recently met a mother who is an ovarian cancer survivor, Mimi, and her daughter, Paige. I was deeply inspired by the optimism and strength that both mother and daughter displayed and by their story of courage and support. At this event, we spoke about the different technologies directed at cancer. And Mimi was in tears as she explained how learning about these efforts gives her hope for future generations, including her own daughter. This really touched me. It's not just about building really elegant science. It's about changing people's lives. It's about understanding the power of engineering on the scale of molecules. I know that as students like Paige move forward in their careers, they'll open new possibilities in addressing some of the big health problems in the world — including ovarian cancer, neurological disorders, infectious disease — just as chemical engineering has found a way to open doors for me, and has provided a way of engineering on the tiniest scale, that of molecules, to heal on the human scale. Thank you. (Applause) |
The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure | {0: 'As "Captain of Moonshots" for X, Astro Teller oversees the secret projects that could reshape our lives in coming decades.'} | TED2016 | In 1962 at Rice University, JFK told the country about a dream he had, a dream to put a person on the moon by the end of the decade. The eponymous moonshot. No one knew if it was possible to do but he made sure a plan was put in place to do it if it was possible. That's how great dreams are. Great dreams aren't just visions, they're visions coupled to strategies for making them real. I have the incredible good fortune to work at a moonshot factory. At X — formerly called Google X — you'll find an aerospace engineer working alongside a fashion designer and former military ops commanders brainstorming with laser experts. These inventors, engineers and makers are dreaming up technologies that we hope can make the world a wonderful place. We use the word "moonshots" to remind us to keep our visions big — to keep dreaming. And we use the word "factory" to remind ourselves that we want to have concrete visions — concrete plans to make them real. Here's our moonshot blueprint. Number one: we want to find a huge problem in the world that affects many millions of people. Number two: we want to find or propose a radical solution for solving that problem. And then number three: there has to be some reason to believe that the technology for such a radical solution could actually be built. But I have a secret for you. The moonshot factory is a messy place. But rather than avoid the mess, pretend it's not there, we've tried to make that our strength. We spend most of our time breaking things and trying to prove that we're wrong. That's it, that's the secret. Run at all the hardest parts of the problem first. Get excited and cheer, "Hey! How are we going to kill our project today?" We've got this interesting balance going where we allow our unchecked optimism to fuel our visions. But then we also harness enthusiastic skepticism to breathe life, breathe reality into those visions. I want to show you a few of the projects that we've had to leave behind on the cutting room floor, and also a few of the gems that at least so far, have not only survived that process, but have been accelerated by it. Last year we killed a project in automated vertical farming. This is some of the lettuce that we grew. One in nine people in the world suffers from undernourishment. So this is a moonshot that needs to happen. Vertical farming uses 10 times less water and a hundred times less land than conventional farming. And because you can grow the food close to where it's consumed, you don't have to transport it large distances. We made progress in a lot of the areas like automated harvesting and efficient lighting. But unfortunately, we couldn't get staple crops like grains and rice to grow this way. So we killed the project. Here's another huge problem. We pay enormous costs in resources and environmental damage to ship goods worldwide. Economic development of landlocked countries is limited by lack of shipping infrastructure. The radical solution? A lighter-than-air, variable-buoyancy cargo ship. This has the potential to lower, at least overall, the cost, time and carbon footprint of shipping without needing runways. We came up with this clever set of technical breakthroughs that together might make it possible for us to lower the cost enough that we could actually make these ships — inexpensively enough in volume. But however cheap they would have been to make in volume it turned out that it was going to cost close to 200 million dollars to design and build the first one. 200 million dollars is just way too expensive. Because X is structured with these tight feedback loops of making mistakes and learning and new designs, we can't spend 200 million dollars to get the first data point about whether we're on the right track or not. If there's an Achilles' heel in one our projects, we want to know it now, up front, not way down the road. So we killed this project, too. Discovering a major flaw in a project doesn't always mean that it ends the project. Sometimes it actually gets us onto a more productive path. This is our fully self-driving vehicle prototype, which we built without a steering wheel or break pedal. But that wasn't actually our goal when we started. With 1.2 million people dying on the roads globally every year, building a car that drives itself was a natural moonshot to take. Three and a half years ago, when we had these Lexus, retrofitted, self-driving cars in testing, they were doing so well, we gave them out to other Googlers to find out what they thought of the experience. And what we discovered was that our plan to have the cars do almost all the driving and just hand over to the users in case of emergency was a really bad plan. It wasn't safe because the users didn't do their job. They didn't stay alert in case the car needed to hand control back to them. This was a major crisis for the team. It sent them back to the drawing board. And they came up with a beautiful, new perspective. Aim for a car where you're truly a passenger. You tell the car where you want to go, you push a button and it takes you from point A to point B by itself. We're really grateful that we had this insight as early on in the project as we did. And it's shaped everything we've done since then. And now our cars have self-driven more than 1.4 million miles, and they're out everyday on the streets of Mountain View, California and Austin, Texas. The cars team shifted their perspective. This is one of X's mantras. Sometimes shifting your perspective is more powerful than being smart. Take wind energy. It's one of my favorite examples of perspective shifting. There's no way that we're going to build a better standard wind turbine than the experts in that industry. But we found a way to get up higher into the sky, and so get access to faster, more consistent winds, and so more energy without needing hundreds of tons of steel to get there. Our Makani energy kite rises up from its perch by spinning up those propellers along its wing. And it pulls out a tether as it rises, pulling energy up through the tether. Once the tether's all the way out, it goes into crosswind circles in the sky. And now those propellers that lifted it up have become flying turbines. And that sends energy back down the tether. We haven't yet found a way to kill this project. And the longer it survives that pressure, the more excited we get that this could become a cheaper and more deployable form of wind energy for the world. Probably the craziest sounding project we have is Project Loon. We're trying to make balloon-powered Internet. A network of balloons in the stratosphere that beam an internet connection down to rural and remote areas of the world. This could bring online as many as four billion more people, who today have little or no internet connection. But you can't just take a cell tower, strap it to a balloon and stick it in the sky. The winds are too strong, it would be blown away. And the balloons are too high up to tie it to the ground. Here comes the crazy moment. What if, instead, we let the balloons drift and we taught them how to sail the winds to go where the needed to go? It turns out the stratosphere has winds that are going in quite different speeds and directions in thin strata. So we hoped that using smart algorithms and wind data from around the world, we could maneuver the balloons a bit, getting them to go up and down just a tiny bit in the stratosphere to grab those winds going in those different directions and speeds. The idea is to have enough balloons so as one balloon floats out of your area, there's another balloon ready to float into place, handing off the internet connection, just like your phone hands off between cell towers as you drive down the freeway. We get how crazy that vision sounds — there's the name of the project to remind us of that. So since 2012, the Loon team has prioritized the work that seems the most difficult and so the most likely to kill their project. The first thing that they did was try to get a Wi-Fi connection from a balloon in the stratosphere down to an antenna on the ground. It worked. And I promise you there were bets that it wasn't going to. So we kept going. Could we get the balloon to talk directly to handsets, so that we didn't need the antenna as an intermediary receiver? Yeah. Could we get the balloon bandwidth high enough so it was a real Internet connection? So that people could have something more than just SMS? The early tests weren't even a megabit per second, but now we can do up to 15 megabits per second. Enough to watch a TED Talk. Could we get the balloons to talk to each other through the sky so that we could reach our signal deeper into rural areas? Check. Could we get balloons the size of a house to stay up for more than 100 days, while costing less than five percent of what traditional, long-life balloons have cost to make? Yes. In the end. But I promise you, you name it, we had to try it to get there. We made round, silvery balloons. We made giant pillow-shaped balloons. We made balloons the size of a blue whale. We busted a lot of balloons. (Laughter) Since one of the things that was most likely to kill the Loon project was whether we could guide the balloons through the sky, one of our most important experiments was putting a balloon inside a balloon. So there are two compartments here, one with air and then one with helium. The balloon pumps air in to make itself heavier, or lets air out to make it lighter. And these weight changes allow it to rise or fall, and that simple movement of the balloon is its steering mechanism. It floats up or down, hoping to grab winds going in the speed and direction that it wants. But is that good enough for it to navigate through the world? Barely at first, but better all the time. This particular balloon, our latest balloon, can navigate a two-mile vertical stretch of sky and can sail itself to within 500 meters of where it wants to go from 20,000 kilometers away. We have lots more to do in terms of fine-tuning the system and reducing costs. But last year, a balloon built inexpensively went around the world 19 times over 187 days. So we're going to keep going. (Applause) Our balloons today are doing pretty much everything a complete system needs to do. We're in discussions with telcos around the world, and we're going to fly over places like Indonesia for real service testing this year. This probably all sounds too good to be true, and you're right. Being audacious and working on big, risky things makes people inherently uncomfortable. You cannot yell at people and force them to fail fast. People resist. They worry. "What will happen to me if I fail? Will people laugh at me? Will I be fired?" I started with our secret. I'm going to leave you with how we actually make it happen. The only way to get people to work on big, risky things — audacious ideas — and have them run at all the hardest parts of the problem first, is if you make that the path of least resistance for them. We work hard at X to make it safe to fail. Teams kill their ideas as soon as the evidence is on the table because they're rewarded for it. They get applause from their peers. Hugs and high fives from their manager, me in particular. They get promoted for it. We have bonused every single person on teams that ended their projects, from teams as small as two to teams of more than 30. We believe in dreams at the moonshot factory. But enthusiastic skepticism is not the enemy of boundless optimism. It's optimism's perfect partner. It unlocks the potential in every idea. We can create the future that's in our dreams. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The nit-picking glory of The New Yorker's Comma Queen | {0: 'As a copy editor for the New Yorker, Mary Norris enforces some of the most authoritative (some might say eccentric) style rules in publishing.'} | TED2016 | I have spent the past 38 years trying to be invisible. I'm a copy editor. I work at The New Yorker, and copyediting for The New Yorker is like playing shortstop for a Major League Baseball team: every little movement gets picked over by the critics — God forbid you should commit an error. Just to clarify: copy editors don't choose what goes into the magazine. We work at the level of the sentence, maybe the paragraph, the words, the punctuation. Our business is in the details. We put the diaeresis, the double dot, over the "i" in "naïve." We impose house style. Every publication has a house style. The New Yorker's is particularly distinctive. We sometimes get teased for our style. Imagine — we still spell "teen-ager" with a hyphen, as if that word had just been coined. But you see that hyphen in "teen-age" and that diaeresis over "coöperate," and you know you're reading The New Yorker. Copyediting at The New Yorker is a mechanical process. There is a related role called query proofreading, or page-OK'ing. Whereas copyediting is mechanical, query proofreading is interpretive. We make suggestions to the author through the editor to improve the emphasis of a sentence or point out unintentional repetitions and supply compelling alternatives. Our purpose is to make the author look good. Note that we give our proofs not directly to the author, but to the editor. This often creates a good cop/bad cop dynamic in which the copy editor — I'll use that as an umbrella term — is invariably the bad cop. If we do our job well, we're invisible, but as soon as we make a mistake, we copy editors become glaringly visible. Here is the most recent mistake that was laid at my door. [Last Tuesday, Sarah Palin, the pre-Trump embodiment of populist no-nothingism in the Republican Party, endorsed Trump.] "Where were The New Yorker's fabled copy editors?" a reader wrote. "Didn't the writer mean 'know-nothingism'?" Ouch. There's no excuse for this mistake. But I like it: "no-nothingism." It might be American vernacular for "nihilism." (Laughter) Here, another reader quotes a passage from the magazine: [Ruby was seventy-six, but she retained her authoritative bearing; only her unsteady gait belied her age.] He added: "Surely, someone at The New Yorker knows the meaning of 'belied,' and that it is the opposite of how it is used in this sentence. Come on! Get it together." Belie: to give a false impression. It should have been "betrayed." E.B. White once wrote of commas in The New Yorker: "They fall with the precision of knives outlining a body." (Laughter) And it's true — we get a lot of complaints about commas. "Are there really two commas in 'Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard'?" There may not be on the sign, but yes, that is New Yorker style for "Jr." One wag wrote: ["Please, could you expel, or, at least, restrain, the comma-maniac, on your editorial staff?"] (Laughter) Ah, well. In this case, those commas are well-placed, except that there should not be one between "maniac" and "on." (Laughter) Also, if we must have commas around "at least," we might change it up by using dashes around that phrase: "... — or, at least, restrain —" Perfect. (Applause) Then there's this: "Love you, love your magazine, but can you please stop writing massive numbers as text?" [two and a half million ...] No. (Laughter) One last cri de coeur from a spelling stickler: ["Those long stringy things are vocal cords, not chords."] The outraged reader added, "I'm sure I'm not the first to write regarding this egregious proofreading error, but I'm equally sure I won't be the last. Fie!" (Laughter) I used to like getting mail. There is a pact between writers and editors. The editor never sells out the writer, never goes public about bad jokes that had to be cut or stories that went on too long. A great editor saves a writer from her excesses. Copy editors, too, have a code; we don't advertise our oversights. I feel disloyal divulging them here, so let's have look at what we do right. Somehow, I've gotten a reputation for sternness. But I work with writers who know how to have their way with me. I've known Ian Frazier, or "Sandy," since the early 80s. And he's one of my favorites, even though he sometimes writes a sentence that gives a copy editor pause. Here is one from a story about Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy: [A dock that had been broken in the middle and lost its other half sloped down toward the water, its support pipes and wires leaning forward like when you open a box of linguine and it slides out.] (Laughter) This would never have got past the grammarian in the days of yore. But what could I do? Technically, the "like" should be an "as," but it sounds ridiculous, as if the author were about to embark on an extended Homeric simile — "as when you open a box of linguine." (Laughter) I decided that the hurricane conferred poetic justice on Sandy and let the sentence stand. (Laughter) Generally, if I think something is wrong, I query it three times. I told Sandy that not long ago in a moment of indiscretion and he said, "Only three?" So, he has learned to hold out. Recently, he wrote a story for "Talk of the Town," that's the section at the front of the magazine with short pieces on subjects ranging from Ricky Jay's exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum to the introduction of doggie bags in France. Sandy's story was about the return to the Bronx of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. There were three things in it that I had to challenge. First, a grammar query. The justice was wearing black and Sandy wrote, [Her face and hands stood out like in an old, mostly dark painting.] Now, unlike with the hurricane, with this "like," the author didn't have the excuse of describing hurricane damage. "Like" in this sense is a preposition, and a preposition takes an object, which is a noun. This "like" had to be an "as." "As in an old, mostly dark painting." Second, a spelling issue. The author was quoting someone who was assisting the justice: ["It will be just a minute. We are getting the justice mic'ed,"] Mic'ed? The music industry spells it "mic" because that's how it's spelled on the equipment. I'd never seen it used as a verb with this spelling, and I was distraught to think that "mic'ed" would get into the magazine on my watch. (Laughter) New Yorker style for "microphone" in its abbreviated form is "mike." Finally, there was a sticky grammar and usage issue in which the pronoun has to have the same grammatical number as its antecedent. [everyone in the vicinity held their breath] "Their" is plural and "everyone," its antecedent, is singular. You would never say, "Everyone were there." Everyone was there. Everyone is here. But people say things like, "Everyone held their breath" all the time. To give it legitimacy, copy editors call it "the singular 'their,'" as if calling it singular makes it no longer plural. (Laughter) It is my job when I see it in print to do my best to eliminate it. I couldn't make it, "Everyone held her breath," or "Everyone held his breath," or "Everyone held his or her breath." Whatever I suggested had to blend in. I asked, through the editor, if the author would consider changing it to "All in the vicinity held their breath," because "all" is plural. Nope. I tried again: "All those present held their breath?" I thought this sounded vaguely judicial. But the editor pointed out that we could not have "present" and "presence" in the same sentence. When the final proof came back, the author had accepted "as" for "like," and "miked" for "mic'ed." But on "Everyone held their breath," he stood his ground. Two out of three isn't bad. In the same issue, in that piece on doggie bags in France, there was the gratuitous use of the f-word by a Frenchman. I wonder, when the mail comes in, which will have offended the readers more. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
The inside story of the Paris climate agreement | {0: 'Christiana Figueres is an internationally recognized leader on global climate change.'} | TED2016 | I have one more reason for optimism: climate change. Maybe you don't believe it, but here is the fact. On December 12, 2015, in Paris, under the United Nations, 195 governments got together and unanimously — if you've worked with governments, you know how difficult that is — unanimously decided to intentionally change the course of the global economy in order to protect the most vulnerable and improve the life of all of us. Now, that is a remarkable achievement. (Applause) But it is even more remarkable if you consider where we had been just a few years ago. 2009, Copenhagen. Who remembers Copenhagen? Well, after years of working toward a climate agreement, the same governments convened in Copenhagen and failed miserably. Why did it fail miserably? For many different reasons, but primarily because of the deeply entrenched divide between the global North and the global South. So now, six months after this failure, I was called in to assume the responsibility of the global climate change negotiations. You can imagine, the perfect moment to start this new job. The global mood on climate change was in the trash can. No one believed that a global agreement could ever be possible. In fact, neither did I. If you promise not to tell anyone outside of this wonderful TED audience, I'm going to divulge a secret that has been gratefully buried by history. On my first press conference, a journalist asked, "Um, Ms. Figueres, do you think that a global agreement is ever going to be possible?" And without engaging brain, I heard me utter, "Not in my lifetime." Well, you can imagine the faces of my press team who were horrified at this crazy Costa Rican woman who was their new boss. And I was horrified, too. Now, I wasn't horrified at me, because I'm kind of used to myself. I was actually horrified at the consequences of what I had just said, at the consequences for the world in which all our children are going to have to live. It was frankly a horrible moment for me, and I thought, well, no, hang on, hang on. Impossible is not a fact, it's an attitude. It's only an attitude. And I decided right then and there that I was going to change my attitude and I was going to help the world change its attitude on climate change. So I don't know — No, just this? Thanks. I don't know — what you would do if you were told your job is to save the planet. Put that on the job description. And you have full responsibility, but you have absolutely no authority, because governments are sovereign in every decision that they take. Well, I would really love to know what you would do on the first Monday morning, but here's what I did: I panicked. (Laughter) And then I panicked again, because I realized I have no idea how we're going to solve this problem. And then I realized I have no idea how we're going to solve this problem, but I do know one thing: we have got to change the tone of this conversation. Because there is no way you can deliver victory without optimism. And here, I use optimism as a very simple word, but let's understand it in its broader sense. Let's understand it as courage, hope, trust, solidarity, the fundamental belief that we humans can come together and can help each other to better the fate of mankind. Well, you can imagine that I thought that without that, there was no way we were going to get out of the paralysis of Copenhagen. And for six years, I have stubbornly, relentlessly injected optimism into the system, no matter what the questions from the press — and I have gotten better at those — and no matter what the evidence to the contrary. And believe you me, there has been a lot of contrary evidence. But relentless optimism into the system. And pretty soon, we began to see changes happening in many areas, precipitated by thousands of people, including many of you here today, and I thank you. And this TED community will not be surprised if I tell you the first area in which we saw remarkable change was ... technology. We began to see that clean technologies, in particular renewable energy technologies, began to drop price and increase in capacity, to the point where today we are already building concentrated solar power plants that have the capacity to power entire cities, to say nothing of the fact of what we are doing on mobility and intelligent buildings. And with this shift in technologies, we were able to begin to understand that there was a shift in the economic equation, because we were able to recognize that yes, there are huge costs to climate change, and yes, there are compounded risks. But there also are economic advantages and intrinsic benefits, because the dissemination of the clean technologies is going to bring us cleaner air, better health, better transportation, more livable cities, more energy security, more energy access to the developing world. In sum, a better world than what we have now. And with that understanding, you should have witnessed, in fact, part of you were, the spread of ingenuity and excitement that went through, first through nonnational governments, the private sector, captains of industry, insurance companies, investors, city leaders, faith communities, because they all began to understand, this actually can be in their interest. This can actually improve their bottom line. And it wasn't just the usual suspects. I have to tell you I had the CEO of a major, major oil and gas company come to me at the beginning of last year and say — privately, of course — he did not know how he was going to change his company, but he is going to change it, because he's interested in long-term viability. Well, now we have a shift in the economic equation, and with that, with broader support from everyone, it did not take very long before we saw that national governments woke up to the fact that this is in their national interest. And when we asked countries to begin to identify how they could contribute to global efforts but based on their national interest, 189 countries out of 195, 189 countries sent their comprehensive climate change plans, based on their national interest, concurrent with their priorities, consistent with their national sustainable development plans. Well, once you protect the core interests of nations, then you can understand that nations were ready to begin to converge onto a common path, onto a common direction of travel that is going to take us probably several decades, but over those several decades is going to take us into the new economy, into a decarbonized, highly resilient economy, And the national contributions that are currently on the table on behalf of national governments are insufficient to get us to a stabilized climate, but they are only the first step, and they will improve over time. And the measurement, reporting and verification of all of those efforts is legally binding. And the checkpoints that we're going to have every five years to assess collective progress towards our goal are legally binding, and the path itself toward a decarbonized and more resilient economy is legally binding. And here's the more important part: What did we have before? A very small handful of countries who had undertaken very reduced, short-term emission reduction commitments that were completely insufficient and furthermore, largely perceived as a burden. Now what do we have? Now we have all countries of the world contributing with different intensities from different approaches in different sectors, but all of them contributing to a common goal and along a path with environmental integrity. Well, once you have all of this in place and you have shifted this understanding, then you see that governments were able to go to Paris and adopt the Paris agreement. (Applause) So, as I look back over the past six years, first I remember the day the Paris agreement was adopted. I cannot tell you the euphoria in the room. 5,000 people jumping out of their seats, crying, clapping, screaming, yelling, torn between euphoria and still disbelief at what they had just seen, because so many people had worked for years towards this, and this was finally their reality. And it wasn't just those who had participated directly. A few weeks ago, I was with a colleague who was trying to decide on a Tahitian pearl that he wanted to give to his wonderful wife Natasha. And once he had finally decided what he was going to buy, the jeweler said to him, "You know, you're very lucky that you're buying this now, because these pearls could go extinct very soon because of climate change." "But," the jeweler said, "have you heard, the governments have just come to a decision, and Tahiti could have a chance." Well, what a fantastic confirmation that perhaps, perhaps here is hope, here is a possible chance. I'm the first one to recognize that we have a lot of work still to do. We've only just started our work on climate change. And in fact, we need to make sure that we redouble our efforts over the next five years that are the urgent five years. But I do believe that we have come over the past six years from the impossible to the now unstoppable. And how did we do that? By injecting transformational optimism that allowed us to go from confrontation to collaboration, that allowed us to understand that national and local interests are not necessarily at odds with global needs, and that if we understand that, we can bring them together and we can merge them harmoniously. And as I look forward to other global issues that will require our attention this century — food security, water security, home security, forced migration — I see that we certainly do not know how we are going to solve those problems yet. But we can take a page out of what we have done on climate change and we can understand that we have got to reinterpret the zero-sum mentality. Because we were trained to believe that there always are winners and losers, and that your loss is my gain. Well, now that we're in a world in which we have reached planetary boundaries and that we are not just so interconnected, but increasingly interdependent on each other, your loss is no longer my gain. We're either all losers or we all can be winners. But we are going to have to decide between zero and sum. We're going to have to decide between zero benefit for all or living life as the sum of all of us. We've done it once. We can do it again. Thanks. (Applause) |
Wisdom from great writers on every year of life | {0: 'Joshua Prager’s journalism unravels historical secrets -- and his own.'} | TEDActive 2015 | I'm turning 44 next month, and I have the sense that 44 is going to be a very good year, a year of fulfillment, realization. I have that sense, not because of anything particular in store for me, but because I read it would be a good year in a 1968 book by Norman Mailer. "He felt his own age, forty-four ..." wrote Mailer in "The Armies of the Night," "... felt as if he were a solid embodiment of bone, muscle, heart, mind, and sentiment to be a man, as if he had arrived." Yes, I know Mailer wasn't writing about me. But I also know that he was; for all of us — you, me, the subject of his book, age more or less in step, proceed from birth along the same great sequence: through the wonders and confinements of childhood; the emancipations and frustrations of adolescence; the empowerments and millstones of adulthood; the recognitions and resignations of old age. There are patterns to life, and they are shared. As Thomas Mann wrote: "It will happen to me as to them." We don't simply live these patterns. We record them, too. We write them down in books, where they become narratives that we can then read and recognize. Books tell us who we've been, who we are, who we will be, too. So they have for millennia. As James Salter wrote, "Life passes into pages if it passes into anything." And so six years ago, a thought leapt to mind: if life passed into pages, there were, somewhere, passages written about every age. If I could find them, I could assemble them into a narrative. I could assemble them into a life, a long life, a hundred-year life, the entirety of that same great sequence through which the luckiest among us pass. I was then 37 years old, "an age of discretion," wrote William Trevor. I was prone to meditating on time and age. An illness in the family and later an injury to me had long made clear that growing old could not be assumed. And besides, growing old only postponed the inevitable, time seeing through what circumstance did not. It was all a bit disheartening. A list, though, would last. To chronicle a life year by vulnerable year would be to clasp and to ground what was fleeting, would be to provide myself and others a glimpse into the future, whether we made it there or not. And when I then began to compile my list, I was quickly obsessed, searching pages and pages for ages and ages. Here we were at every annual step through our first hundred years. "Twenty-seven ... a time of sudden revelations," "sixty-two, ... of subtle diminishments." I was mindful, of course, that such insights were relative. For starters, we now live longer, and so age more slowly. Christopher Isherwood used the phrase "the yellow leaf" to describe a man at 53, only one century after Lord Byron used it to describe himself at 36. (Laughter) I was mindful, too, that life can swing wildly and unpredictably from one year to the next, and that people may experience the same age differently. But even so, as the list coalesced, so, too, on the page, clear as the reflection in the mirror, did the life that I had been living: finding at 20 that "... one is less and less sure of who one is;" emerging at 30 from the "... wasteland of preparation into active life;" learning at 40 "... to close softly the doors to rooms [I would] not be coming back to." There I was. Of course, there we all are. Milton Glaser, the great graphic designer whose beautiful visualizations you see here, and who today is 85 — all those years "... a ripening and an apotheosis," wrote Nabokov — noted to me that, like art and like color, literature helps us to remember what we've experienced. And indeed, when I shared the list with my grandfather, he nodded in recognition. He was then 95 and soon to die, which, wrote Roberto Bolaño, "... is the same as never dying." And looking back, he said to me that, yes, Proust was right that at 22, we are sure we will not die, just as a thanatologist named Edwin Shneidman was right that at 90, we are sure we will. It had happened to him, as to them. Now the list is done: a hundred years. And looking back over it, I know that I am not done. I still have my life to live, still have many more pages to pass into. And mindful of Mailer, I await 44. Thank you. (Applause) |
TED's secret to great public speaking | {0: 'After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.'} | TED Studio | Some people think that there's a TED Talk formula: "Give a talk on a round, red rug." "Share a childhood story." "Divulge a personal secret." "End with an inspiring call to action." No. That's not how to think of a TED Talk. In fact, if you overuse those devices, you're just going to come across as clichéd or emotionally manipulative. But there is one thing that all great TED Talks have in common, and I would like to share that thing with you, because over the past 12 years, I've had a ringside seat, listening to many hundreds of amazing TED speakers, like these. I've helped them prepare their talks for prime time, and learned directly from them their secrets of what makes for a great talk. And even though these speakers and their topics all seem completely different, they actually do have one key common ingredient. And it's this: Your number one task as a speaker is to transfer into your listeners' minds an extraordinary gift — a strange and beautiful object that we call an idea. Let me show you what I mean. Here's Haley. She is about to give a TED Talk and frankly, she's terrified. (Video) Presenter: Haley Van Dyck! (Applause) Over the course of 18 minutes, 1,200 people, many of whom have never seen each other before, are finding that their brains are starting to sync with Haley's brain and with each other. They're literally beginning to exhibit the same brain-wave patterns. And I don't just mean they're feeling the same emotions. There's something even more startling happening. Let's take a look inside Haley's brain for a moment. There are billions of interconnected neurons in an impossible tangle. But look here, right here — a few million of them are linked to each other in a way which represents a single idea. And incredibly, this exact pattern is being recreated in real time inside the minds of everyone listening. That's right; in just a few minutes, a pattern involving millions of neurons is being teleported into 1,200 minds, just by people listening to a voice and watching a face. But wait — what is an idea anyway? Well, you can think of it as a pattern of information that helps you understand and navigate the world. Ideas come in all shapes and sizes, from the complex and analytical to the simple and aesthetic. Here are just a few examples shared from the TED stage. Sir Ken Robinson — creativity is key to our kids' future. (Video) Sir Ken Robinson: My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. Chris Anderson: Elora Hardy — building from bamboo is beautiful. (Video) Elora Hardy: It is growing all around us, it's strong, it's elegant, it's earthquake-resistant. CA: Chimamanda Adichie — people are more than a single identity. (Video) Chimamanda Adichie: The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. CA: Your mind is teeming with ideas, and not just randomly. They're carefully linked together. Collectively they form an amazingly complex structure that is your personal worldview. It's your brain's operating system. It's how you navigate the world. And it is built up out of millions of individual ideas. So, for example, if one little component of your worldview is the idea that kittens are adorable, then when you see this, you'll react like this. But if another component of your worldview is the idea that leopards are dangerous, then when you see this, you'll react a little bit differently. So, it's pretty obvious why the ideas that make up your worldview are crucial. You need them to be as reliable as possible — a guide, to the scary but wonderful real world out there. Now, different people's worldviews can be dramatically different. For example, how does your worldview react when you see this image: (Video) Dalia Mogahed: What do you think when you look at me? "A woman of faith," "an expert," maybe even "a sister"? Or "oppressed," "brainwashed," "a terrorist"? CA: Whatever your answer, there are millions of people out there who would react very differently. So that's why ideas really matter. If communicated properly, they're capable of changing, forever, how someone thinks about the world, and shaping their actions both now and well into the future. Ideas are the most powerful force shaping human culture. So if you accept that your number one task as a speaker is to build an idea inside the minds of your audience, here are four guidelines for how you should go about that task: One, limit your talk to just one major idea. Ideas are complex things; you need to slash back your content so that you can focus on the single idea you're most passionate about, and give yourself a chance to explain that one thing properly. You have to give context, share examples, make it vivid. So pick one idea, and make it the through-line running through your entire talk, so that everything you say links back to it in some way. Two, give your listeners a reason to care. Before you can start building things inside the minds of your audience, you have to get their permission to welcome you in. And the main tool to achieve that? Curiosity. Stir your audience's curiosity. Use intriguing, provocative questions to identify why something doesn't make sense and needs explaining. If you can reveal a disconnection in someone's worldview, they'll feel the need to bridge that knowledge gap. And once you've sparked that desire, it will be so much easier to start building your idea. Three, build your idea, piece by piece, out of concepts that your audience already understands. You use the power of language to weave together concepts that already exist in your listeners' minds — but not your language, their language. You start where they are. The speakers often forget that many of the terms and concepts they live with are completely unfamiliar to their audiences. Now, metaphors can play a crucial role in showing how the pieces fit together, because they reveal the desired shape of the pattern, based on an idea that the listener already understands. For example, when Jennifer Kahn wanted to explain the incredible new biotechnology called CRISPR, she said, "It's as if, for the first time, you had a word processor to edit DNA. CRISPR allows you to cut and paste genetic information really easily." Now, a vivid explanation like that delivers a satisfying aha moment as it snaps into place in our minds. It's important, therefore, to test your talk on trusted friends, and find out which parts they get confused by. Four, here's the final tip: Make your idea worth sharing. By that I mean, ask yourself the question: "Who does this idea benefit?" And I need you to be honest with the answer. If the idea only serves you or your organization, then, I'm sorry to say, it's probably not worth sharing. The audience will see right through you. But if you believe that the idea has the potential to brighten up someone else's day or change someone else's perspective for the better or inspire someone to do something differently, then you have the core ingredient to a truly great talk, one that can be a gift to them and to all of us. |
We can reprogram life. How to do it wisely | {0: 'Juan Enriquez thinks and writes about the profound changes that genomics and brain research will bring about in business, technology, politics and society.'} | TED Talks Live | So, there's an actor called Dustin Hoffman. And years ago, he made this movie which some of you may have heard of, called "The Graduate." And there's two key scenes in that movie. The first one is the seduction scene. I'm not going to talk about that tonight. (Laughter) The second scene is where he's taken out by the old guy to the pool, and as a young college graduate, the old guy basically says one word, just one word. And of course, all of you know what that word is. It's "plastics." (Laughter) And the only problem with that is, it was completely the wrong advice. (Laughter) Let me tell you why it was so wrong. The word should have been "silicon." And the reason it should have been silicon is because the basic patents for semiconductors had already been made, had already been filed, and they were already building them. So Silicon Valley was just being built in 1967, when this movie was released. And the year after the movie was released, Intel was founded. So had the graduate heard the right one word, maybe he would have ended up onstage — oh, I don't know — maybe with these two. (Laughter) So as you're thinking of that, let's see what bit of advice we might want to give so that your next graduate doesn't become a Tupperware salesman. (Laughter) So in 2015, what word of advice would you give people, when you took a college graduate out by the pool and you said one word, just one word? I think the answer would be "lifecode." So what is "lifecode?" Lifecode is the various ways we have of programming life. So instead of programming computers, we're using things to program viruses or retroviruses or proteins or DNA or RNA or plants or animals, or a whole series of creatures. And as you're thinking about this incredible ability to make life do what you want it to do, what it's programmed to do, what you end up doing is taking what we've been doing for thousands of years, which is breeding, changing, mixing, matching all kinds of life-forms, and we accelerate it. And this is not something new. This humble mustard weed has been modified so that if you change it in one way, you get broccoli. And if you change it in a second way, you get kale. And if you change it in a third way, you get cauliflower. So when you go to these all-natural, organic markets, you're really going to a place where people have been changing the lifecode of plants for a long time. The difference today, to pick a completely politically neutral term — [Intelligent design] (Laughter) We're beginning to practice intelligent design. That means that instead of doing this at random and seeing what happens over generations, we're inserting specific genes, we're inserting specific proteins, and we're changing lifecode for very deliberate purposes. And that allows us to accelerate how this stuff happens. Let me just give you one example. Some of you occasionally might think about sex. And we kind of take it for granted how we've changed sex. So we think it's perfectly normal and natural to change it. What's happened with sex over time is — normally, sex equals baby, eventually. But in today's world, sex plus pill equals no baby. (Laughter) And again, we think that's perfectly normal and natural, but that has not been the case for most of human history. And it's not the case for animals. What it is does is it gives us control, so sex becomes separate from conception. And as you're thinking of the consequences of that, then we've been playing with stuff that's a little bit more advanced, like art. Not in the sense of painting and sculpture, but in the sense of assisted reproductive technologies. So what are assisted reproductive technologies? Assisted reproductive technologies are things like in vitro fertilization. And when you do in vitro fertilization, there's very good reasons to do it. Sometimes you just can't conceive otherwise. But when you do that, what you’re doing is separating sex, conception, baby. So you haven't just taken control of when you have a baby, you've separated when the baby and where the baby is fertilized. So you've separated the baby from the body from the act. And as you're thinking of other things we've been doing, think about twins. So you can freeze sperm, you can freeze eggs, you can freeze fertilized eggs. And what does that mean? Well, that's a good thing if you're a cancer patient. You're about to go under chemotherapy or under radiation, so you save these things. You don't irradiate them. But if you can save them and you can freeze them, and you can have a surrogate mother, it means that you've decoupled sex from time. It means you can have twins born — oh, in 50 years? (Laughter) In a hundred years? Two hundred years? And these are three really profound changes that are not, like, future stuff. This is stuff we take for granted today. So this lifecode stuff turns out to be a superpower. It turns out to be this incredibly powerful way of changing viruses, of changing plants, of changing animals, perhaps even of evolving ourselves. It's something that Steve Gullans and I have been thinking about for a while. Let's have some risks. Like every powerful technology, like electricity, like an automobile, like computers, this stuff potentially can be misused. And that scares a lot of people. And as you apply these technologies, you can even turn human beings into chimeras. Remember the Greek myth where you mix animals? Well, some of these treatments actually end up changing your blood type. Or they'll put male cells in a female body or vice versa, which sounds absolutely horrible until you realize, the reason you're doing that is you're substituting bone marrow during cancer treatments. So by taking somebody else's bone marrow, you may be changing some fundamental aspects of yourself, but you're also saving your life. And as you're thinking about this stuff, here's something that happened 20 years ago. This is Emma Ott. She's a recent college admittee. She's studying accounting. She played two varsity sports. She graduated as a valedictorian. And that's not particularly extraordinary, except that she's the first human being born to three parents. Why? Because she had a deadly mitochondrial disease that she might have inherited. So when you swap out a third person's DNA and you put it in there, you save the lives of people. But you also are doing germline engineering, which means her kids, if she has kids, will be saved and won't go through this. And [their] kids will be saved, and their grandchildren will be saved, and this passes on. That makes people nervous. So 20 years ago, the various authorities said, why don't we study this for a while? There are risks to doing stuff, and there are risks to not doing stuff, because there were a couple dozen people saved by this technology, and then we've been thinking about it for the next 20 years. So as we think about it, as we take the time to say, "Hey, maybe we should have longer studies, maybe we should do this, maybe we should do that," there are consequences to acting, and there are consequences to not acting. Like curing deadly diseases — which, by the way, is completely unnatural. It is normal and natural for humans to be felled by massive epidemics of polio, of smallpox, of tuberculosis. When we put vaccines into people, we are putting unnatural things into their body because we think the benefit outweighs the risk. Because we've built unnatural plants, unnatural animals, we can feed about seven billion people. We can do things like create new life-forms. And as you create new life-forms, again, that sounds terribly scary and terribly bothersome, until you realize that those life-forms live on your dining room table. Those flowers you've got on your dining room table — there's not a lot that's natural about them, because people have been breeding the flowers to make this color, to be this size, to last for a week. You don't usually give your loved one wildflowers because they don't last a whole lot of time. What all this does is it flips Darwin completely on his head. See, for four billion years, what lived and died on this planet depended on two principles: on natural selection and random mutation. And so what lived and died, what was structured, has now been flipped on its head. And what we've done is created this completely parallel evolutionary system where we are practicing unnatural selection and non-random mutation. So let me explain these things. This is natural selection. This is unnatural selection. (Laughter) So what happens with this stuff is, we started breeding wolves thousands of years ago in central Asia to turn them into dogs. And then we started turning them into big dogs and into little dogs. But if you take one of the chihuahuas you see in the Hermès bags on Fifth Avenue and you let it loose on the African plain, you can watch natural selection happen. (Laughter) Few things on Earth are less natural than a cornfield. You will never, under any scenario, walk through a virgin forest and see the same plant growing in orderly rows at the same time, nothing else living there. When you do a cornfield, you're selecting what lives and what dies. And you're doing that through unnatural selection. It's the same with a wheat field, it's the same with a rice field. It's the same with a city, it's the same with a suburb. In fact, half the surface of Earth has been unnaturally engineered so that what lives and what dies there is what we want, which is the reason why you don't have grizzly bears walking through downtown Manhattan. How about this random mutation stuff? Well, this is random mutation. This is Antonio Alfonseca. He's otherwise known as the Octopus, his nickname. He was the Relief Pitcher of the Year in 2000. And he had a random mutation that gave him six fingers on each hand, which turns out to be really useful if you're a pitcher. (Laughter) How about non-random mutation? A non-random mutation is beer. It's wine. It's yogurt. How many times have you walked through the forest and found all-natural cheese? Or all-natural yogurt? So we've been engineering this stuff. Now, the interesting thing is, we get to know the stuff better. We found one of the single most powerful gene-editing instruments, CRISPR, inside yogurt. And as we start engineering cells, we're producing eight out of the top 10 pharmaceutical products, including the stuff that you use to treat arthritis, which is the number one best-selling drug, Humira. So this lifecode stuff. It really is a superpower. It really is a way of programming stuff, and there's nothing that's going to change us more than this lifecode. So as you're thinking of lifecode, let's think of five principles as to how we start guiding, and I'd love you to give me more. So, principle number one: we have to take responsibility for this stuff. The reason we have to take responsibility is because we're in charge. These aren't random mutations. This is what we are doing, what we are choosing. It's not, "Stuff happened." It didn't happen at random. It didn't come down by a verdict of somebody else. We engineer this stuff, and it's the Pottery Barn rule: you break it, you own it. Principle number two: we have to recognize and celebrate diversity in this stuff. There have been at least 33 versions of hominids that have walked around this Earth. Most all of them went extinct except us. But the normal and natural state of this Earth is we have various versions of humans walking around at the same time, which is why most of us have some Neanderthal in us. Some of us have some Denisova in us. And some in Washington have a lot more of it. (Laughter) Principle number three: we have to respect other people's choices. Some people will choose to never alter. Some people will choose to alter all. Some people will choose to alter plants but not animals. Some people will choose to alter themselves. Some people will choose to evolve themselves. Diversity is not a bad thing, because even though we think of humans as very diverse, we came so close to extinction that all of us descend from a single African mother and the consequence of that is there's more genetic diversity in 55 African chimpanzees than there are in seven billion humans. Principle number four: we should take about a quarter of the Earth and only let Darwin run the show there. It doesn't have to be contiguous, doesn't have to all be tied together. It should be part in the oceans, part on land. But we should not run every evolutionary decision on this planet. We want to have our evolutionary system running. We want to have Darwin's evolutionary system running. And it's just really important to have these two things running in parallel and not overwhelm evolution. (Applause) Last thing I'll say. This is the single most exciting adventure human beings have been on. This is the single greatest superpower humans have ever had. It would be a crime for you not to participate in this stuff because you're scared of it, because you're hiding from it. You can participate in the ethics. You can participate in the politics. You can participate in the business. You can participate in just thinking about where medicine is going, where industry is going, where we're going to take the world. It would be a crime for all of us not to be aware when somebody shows up at a swimming pool and says one word, just one word, if you don't listen if that word is "lifecode." Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A taboo-free way to talk about periods | {0: 'Aditi Gupta uses storytelling and art to educate young girls about menstruation.'} | TEDxGatewayWomen | Periods. Blood. Menstruation. Gross. Secret. Hidden. Why? A natural biological process that every girl and woman goes through every month for about half of her life. A phenomenon that is so significant that the survival and propagation of our species depends on it. Yet we consider it a taboo. We feel awkward and shameful talking about it. When I got my first periods, I was told to keep it a secret from others — even from my father and brother. Later when this chapter appeared in our textbooks, our biology teacher skipped the subject. (Laughter) You know what I learned from it? I learned that it is really shameful to talk about it. I learned to be ashamed of my body. I learned to stay unaware of periods in order to stay decent. Research in various parts of India shows that three out of every 10 girls are not aware of menstruation at the time of their first periods. And in some parts of Rajasthan this number is as high as nine out of 10 girls being unaware of it. You'd be surprised to know that most of the girls that I have spoken to, who did not know about periods at the time of their first menstruation thought that they have got blood cancer and they're going to die soon. Menstrual hygiene is a very important risk factor for reproductive tract infections. But in India, only 12 percent of girls and women have access to hygienic ways of managing their periods. If you do the math, 88 percent of girls and women use unhygienic ways to manage their periods. I was one of them. I grew up in a small town called Garhwa, in Jharkhand, where even buying a sanitary napkin is considered shameful. So when I started getting my periods, I began with using rags. After every use I would wash and reuse them. But to store them, I would hide and keep it in a dark, damp place so that nobody finds out that I'm menstruating. Due to repeated washing the rags would become coarse, and I would often get rashes and infections using them. I wore these already for five years until I moved out of that town. Another issue that periods brought in my life those of the social restrictions that are imposed upon our girls and women when they're on their periods. I think you all must be aware of it, but I'll still list it for the few who don't. I was not allowed to touch or eat pickles. I was not allowed to sit on the sofa or some other family member's bed. I had to wash my bed sheet after every period, even if it was not stained. I was considered impure and forbidden from worshipping or touching any object of religious importance. You'll find signposts outside temples denying the entry of menstruating girls and women. Ironically, most of the time it is the older woman who imposes such restrictions on younger girls in a family. After all, they have grown up accepting such restrictions as norms. And in the absence of any intervention, it is the myth and misconception that propagate from generation to generation. During my years of work in this field, I have even come across stories where girls have to eat and wash their dishes separately. They're not allowed to take baths during periods, and in some households they are even secluded from other family members. About 85 percent of girls and women in India would follow one or more restrictive customs on their periods every month. Can you imagine what this does to the self-esteem and self-confidence of a young girl? The psychological trauma that this inflicts, affecting her personality, her academic performance and every single aspect of growing up during her early formative years? I religiously followed all these restrictive customs for 13 years, until a discussion with my partner, Tuhin, changed my perception about menstruation forever. In 2009, Tuhin and I were pursuing our postgraduation in design. We fell in love with each other and I was at ease discussing periods with him. Tuhin knew little about periods. (Laughter) He was astonished to know that girls get painful cramps and we bleed every month. (Laughter) Yeah. He was completely shocked to know about the restrictions that are imposed upon menstruating girls and women by their own families and their society. In order to help me with my cramps, he would go on the Internet and learn more about menstruation. When he shared his findings with me, I realized how little I knew about menstruation myself. And many of my beliefs actually turned out to be myths. That's when we wondered: if we, being so well educated, were so ill-informed about menstruation, there would be millions of girls out there who would be ill-informed, too. To study — to understand the problem better, I undertook a year-long research to study the lack of awareness about menstruation and the root cause behind it. While it is generally believed that menstrual unawareness and misconception is a rural phenomenon, during my research, I found that it is as much an urban phenomenon as well. And it exists with the educated urban class, also. While talking to many parents and teachers, I found that many of them actually wanted to educate girls about periods before they have started getting their menstrual cycle. And — but they lacked the proper means themselves. And since it is a taboo, they feel inhibition and shameful in talking about it. Girls nowadays get their periods in classes six and seven, but our educational curriculum teaches girls about periods only in standard eight and nine. And since it is a taboo, teachers still skip the subject altogether. So school does not teach girls about periods, parents don't talk about it. Where do the girls go? Two decades ago and now — nothing has changed. I shared these finding with Tuhin and we wondered: What if we could create something that would help girls understand about menstruation on their own — something that would help parents and teachers talk about periods comfortably to young girls? During my research, I was collecting a lot of stories. These were stories of experiences of girls during their periods. These stories would make girls curious and interested in talking about menstruation in their close circle. That's what we wanted. We wanted something that would make the girls curious and drive them to learn about it. We wanted to use these stories to teach girls about periods. So we decided to create a comic book, where the cartoon characters would enact these stories and educate girls about menstruation in a fun and engaging way. To represent girls in their different phases of puberty, we have three characters. Pinki, who has not gotten her period yet, Jiya who gets her period during the narrative of the book and Mira who has already been getting her period. There is a fourth character, Priya Didi. Through her, girls come to know about the various aspects of growing up and menstrual hygiene management. While making the book, we took great care that none of the illustrations were objectionable in any way and that it is culturally sensitive. During our prototype testing, we found that the girls loved the book. They were keen on reading it and knowing more and more about periods on their own. Parents and teachers were comfortable in talking about periods to young girls using the book, and sometimes even boys were interested in reading it. (Laughter) (Applause) The comic book helped in creating an environment where menstruation ceased to be a taboo. Many of the volunteers took this prototype themselves to educate girls and take menstrual awareness workshops in five different states in India. And one of the volunteers took this prototype to educate young monks and took it to this monastery in Ladakh. We made the final version of the book, called "Menstrupedia Comic" and launched in September last year. And so far, more than 4,000 girls have been educated by using the book in India and — (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) And 10 different countries. We are constantly translating the book into different languages and collaborating with local organizations to make this book available in different countries. 15 schools in different parts of India have made this book a part of their school curriculum to teach girls about menstruation. (Applause) I am amazed to see how volunteers, individuals, parents, teachers, school principals, have come together and taken this menstrual awareness drive to their own communities, have made sure that the girls learn about periods at the right age and helped in breaking this taboo. I dream of a future where menstruation is not a curse, not a disease, but a welcoming change in a girl's life. And I would — (Applause) And I would like to end this with a small request to all the parents here. Dear parents, if you would be ashamed of periods, your daughters would be, too. So please be period positive. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
Hunting for dinosaurs showed me our place in the universe | {0: 'In his quest to understand the largest dinosaurs to have walked the Earth, Lacovara blends exploration with the latest imaging and modeling techniques from engineering to medicine.'} | TED2016 | How do you find a dinosaur? Sounds impossible, doesn't it? It's not. And the answer relies on a formula that all paleontologists use. And I'm going to tell you the secret. First, find rocks of the right age. Second, those rocks must be sedimentary rocks. And third, layers of those rocks must be naturally exposed. That's it. Find those three things and get yourself on the ground, chances are good that you will find fossils. Now let me break down this formula. Organisms exist only during certain geological intervals. So you have to find rocks of the right age, depending on what your interests are. If you want to find trilobites, you have to find the really, really old rocks of the Paleozoic — rocks between a half a billion and a quarter-billion years old. Now, if you want to find dinosaurs, don't look in the Paleozoic, you won't find them. They hadn't evolved yet. You have to find the younger rocks of the Mesozoic, and in the case of dinosaurs, between 235 and 66 million years ago. Now, it's fairly easy to find rocks of the right age at this point, because the Earth is, to a coarse degree, geologically mapped. This is hard-won information. The annals of Earth history are written in rocks, one chapter upon the next, such that the oldest pages are on bottom and the youngest on top. Now, were it quite that easy, geologists would rejoice. It's not. The library of Earth is an old one. It has no librarian to impose order. Operating over vast swaths of time, myriad geological processes offer every possible insult to the rocks of ages. Most pages are destroyed soon after being written. Some pages are overwritten, creating difficult-to-decipher palimpsests of long-gone landscapes. Pages that do find sanctuary under the advancing sands of time are never truly safe. Unlike the Moon — our dead, rocky companion — the Earth is alive, pulsing with creative and destructive forces that power its geological metabolism. Lunar rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts all date back to about the age of the Solar System. Moon rocks are forever. Earth rocks, on the other hand, face the perils of a living lithosphere. All will suffer ruination, through some combination of mutilation, compression, folding, tearing, scorching and baking. Thus, the volumes of Earth history are incomplete and disheveled. The library is vast and magnificent — but decrepit. And it was this tattered complexity in the rock record that obscured its meaning until relatively recently. Nature provided no card catalog for geologists — this would have to be invented. Five thousand years after the Sumerians learned to record their thoughts on clay tablets, the Earth's volumes remained inscrutable to humans. We were geologically illiterate, unaware of the antiquity of our own planet and ignorant of our connection to deep time. It wasn't until the turn of the 19th century that our blinders were removed, first, with the publication of James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth," in which he told us that the Earth reveals no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end; and then, with the printing of William Smith's map of Britain, the first country-scale geological map, giving us for the first time predictive insight into where certain types of rocks might occur. After that, you could say things like, "If we go over there, we should be in the Jurassic," or, "If we go up over that hill, we should find the Cretaceous." So now, if you want to find trilobites, get yourself a good geological map and go to the rocks of the Paleozoic. If you want to find dinosaurs like I do, find the rocks of Mesozoic and go there. Now of course, you can only make a fossil in a sedimentary rock, a rock made by sand and mud. You can't have a fossil in an igneous rock formed by magma, like a granite, or in a metamorphic rock that's been heated and squeezed. And you have to get yourself in a desert. It's not that dinosaurs particularly lived in deserts; they lived on every land mass and in every imaginable environment. It's that you need to go to a place that's a desert today, a place that doesn't have too many plants covering up the rocks, and a place where erosion is always exposing new bones at the surface. So find those three things: rocks of the right age, that are sedimentary rocks, in a desert, and get yourself on the ground, and you literally walk until you see a bone sticking out of the rock. Here's a picture that I took in Southern Patagonia. Every pebble that you see on the ground there is a piece of dinosaur bone. So when you're in that right situation, it's not a question of whether you'll find fossils or not; you're going to find fossils. The question is: Will you find something that is scientifically significant? And to help with that, I'm going to add a fourth part to our formula, which is this: get as far away from other paleontologists as possible. (Laughter) It's not that I don't like other paleontologists. When you go to a place that's relatively unexplored, you have a much better chance of not only finding fossils but of finding something that's new to science. So that's my formula for finding dinosaurs, and I've applied it all around the world. In the austral summer of 2004, I went to the bottom of South America, to the bottom of Patagonia, Argentina, to prospect for dinosaurs: a place that had terrestrial sedimentary rocks of the right age, in a desert, a place that had been barely visited by paleontologists. And we found this. This is a femur, a thigh bone, of a giant, plant-eating dinosaur. That bone is 2.2 meters across. That's over seven feet long. Now, unfortunately, that bone was isolated. We dug and dug and dug, and there wasn't another bone around. But it made us hungry to go back the next year for more. And on the first day of that next field season, I found this: another two-meter femur, only this time not isolated, this time associated with 145 other bones of a giant plant eater. And after three more hard, really brutal field seasons, the quarry came to look like this. And there you see the tail of that great beast wrapping around me. The giant that lay in this grave, the new species of dinosaur, we would eventually call "Dreadnoughtus schrani." Dreadnoughtus was 85 feet from snout to tail. It stood two-and-a-half stories at the shoulder, and all fleshed out in life, it weighed 65 tons. People ask me sometimes, "Was Dreadnoughtus bigger than a T. rex?" That's the mass of eight or nine T. rex. Now, one of the really cool things about being a paleontologist is when you find a new species, you get to name it. And I've always thought it a shame that these giant, plant-eating dinosaurs are too often portrayed as passive, lumbering platters of meat on the landscape. (Laughter) They're not. Big herbivores can be surly, and they can be territorial — you do not want to mess with a hippo or a rhino or a water buffalo. The bison in Yellowstone injure far more people than do the grizzly bears. So can you imagine a big bull, 65-ton Dreadnoughtus in the breeding season, defending a territory? That animal would have been incredibly dangerous, a menace to all around, and itself would have had nothing to fear. And thus the name, "Dreadnoughtus," or, "fears nothing." Now, to grow so large, an animal like Dreadnoughtus would've had to have been a model of efficiency. That long neck and long tail help it radiate heat into the environment, passively controlling its temperature. And that long neck also serves as a super-efficient feeding mechanism. Dreadnoughtus could stand in one place and with that neck clear out a huge envelope of vegetation, taking in tens of thousands of calories while expending very few. And these animals evolved a bulldog-like wide-gait stance, giving them immense stability, because when you're 65 tons, when you're literally as big as a house, the penalty for falling over is death. Yeah, these animals are big and tough, but they won't take a blow like that. Dreadnoughtus falls over, ribs break and pierce lungs. Organs burst. If you're a big 65-ton Dreadnoughtus, you don't get to fall down in life — even once. Now, after this particular Dreadnoughtus carcass was buried and de-fleshed by a multitude of bacteria, worms and insects, its bones underwent a brief metamorphosis, exchanging molecules with the groundwater and becoming more and more like the entombing rock. As layer upon layer of sediment accumulated, pressure from all sides weighed in like a stony glove whose firm and enduring grip held each bone in a stabilizing embrace. And then came the long ... nothing. Epoch after epoch of sameness, nonevents without number. All the while, the skeleton lay everlasting and unchanging in perfect equilibrium within its rocky grave. Meanwhile, Earth history unfolded above. The dinosaurs would reign for another 12 million years before their hegemony was snuffed out in a fiery apocalypse. The continents drifted. The mammals rose. The Ice Age came. And then, in East Africa, an unpromising species of ape evolved the odd trick of sentient thought. These brainy primates were not particularly fast or strong. But they excelled at covering ground, and in a remarkable diaspora surpassing even the dinosaurs' record of territorial conquest, they dispersed across the planet, ravishing every ecosystem they encountered, along the way, inventing culture and metalworking and painting and dance and music and science and rocket ships that would eventually take 12 particularly excellent apes to the surface of the Moon. With seven billion peripatetic Homo sapiens on the planet, it was perhaps inevitable that one of them would eventually trod on the grave of the magnificent titan buried beneath the badlands of Southern Patagonia. I was that ape. And standing there, alone in the desert, it was not lost on me that the chance of any one individual entering the fossil record is vanishingly small. But the Earth is very, very old. And over vast tracts of time, the improbable becomes the probable. That's the magic of the geological record. Thus, multitudinous creatures living and dying on an old planet leave behind immense numbers of fossils, each one a small miracle, but collectively, inevitable. Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hits the Earth and wipes out the dinosaurs. This easily might not have been. But we only get one history, and it's the one that we have. But this particular reality was not inevitable. The tiniest perturbation of that asteroid far from Earth would have caused it to miss our planet by a wide margin. The pivotal, calamitous day during which the dinosaurs were wiped out, setting the stage for the modern world as we know it didn't have to be. It could've just been another day — a Thursday, perhaps — among the 63 billion days already enjoyed by the dinosaurs. But over geological time, improbable, nearly impossible events do occur. Along the path from our wormy, Cambrian ancestors to primates dressed in suits, innumerable forks in the road led us to this very particular reality. The bones of Dreadnoughtus lay underground for 77 million years. Who could have imagined that a single species of shrew-like mammal living in the cracks of the dinosaur world would evolve into sentient beings capable of characterizing and understanding the very dinosaurs they must have dreaded? I once stood at the head of the Missouri River and bestraddled it. There, it's nothing more than a gurgle of water that issues forth from beneath a rock in a boulder in a pasture, high in the Bitterroot Mountains. The stream next to it runs a few hundred yards and ends in a small pond. Those two streams — they look identical. But one is an anonymous trickle of water, and the other is the Missouri River. Now go down to the mouth of the Missouri, near St. Louis, and it's pretty obvious that that river is a big deal. But go up into the Bitterroots and look at the Missouri, and human prospection does not allow us to see it as anything special. Now go back to the Cretaceous Period and look at our tiny, fuzzball ancestors. You would never guess that they would amount to anything special, and they probably wouldn't have, were it not for that pesky asteroid. Now, make a thousand more worlds and a thousand more solar systems and let them run. You will never get the same result. No doubt, those worlds would be both amazing and amazingly improbable, but they would not be our world and they would not have our history. There are an infinite number of histories that we could've had. We only get one, and wow, did we ever get a good one. Dinosaurs like Dreadnoughtus were real. Sea monsters like the mosasaur were real. Dragonflies with the wingspan of an eagle and pill bugs the length of a car really existed. Why study the ancient past? Because it gives us perspective and humility. The dinosaurs died in the world's fifth mass extinction, snuffed out in a cosmic accident through no fault of their own. They didn't see it coming, and they didn't have a choice. We, on the other hand, do have a choice. And the nature of the fossil record tells us that our place on this planet is both precarious and potentially fleeting. Right now, our species is propagating an environmental disaster of geological proportions that is so broad and so severe, it can rightly be called the sixth extinction. Only unlike the dinosaurs, we can see it coming. And unlike the dinosaurs, we can do something about it. That choice is ours. Thank you. (Applause) |
The oil spill's toxic trade-off | {0: 'Susan Shaw is an internationally recognized marine toxicologist, author and explorer.'} | TEDxOilSpill | I am a marine toxicologist, and I've been very, very concerned about the Gulf, particularly about the massive applications of the toxic dispersants, the Corexits. I've been working on ocean pollution for quite a long time — the impacts on marine life and particularly the impacts on marine mammals. As it turns out, marine mammals are at the top of this food chain that we're pouring millions of tons of toxic substances into every year. And they are showing the signs of this. I'm sorry to have a sad slide like this, but not everything is all that happy, especially in my work. They are loaded with toxic chemicals in their body, hundreds of compounds, all kinds of compounds — it's staggering. And they're dying off rather regularly, tens of thousands around the world. It's predicted they may go extinct — about a third of them — within about 30 years. So my project is along the Northwest Atlantic. It's called Seals as Sentinels. We're tracking pollution at the top of the food web, in marine mammals and fish. It's a region-wide, eco-toxicological investigation. We're looking at a lot of compounds, but recently been quite interested in the flame retardants, the brominated flame retardants that are in many, many things that we use in our everyday life, from the cushions in the chairs we're all sitting on to the plastic casings of our computers, our television sets and so on. So we are tracking how do these things get from the products into the ocean, which is the final sink for them. And there's quite a complicated pathway for that because, as these products age, they get concentrated in dust, and then they also get thrown out, so they go to the landfills. They wind up in waste water treatment plants. As you all know, we throw out billions of computers and TVs every year. And those go to e-waste dumps. And all that gets into surface waters, eventually reaching the ocean, the final sink. So, in our study, we did find quite high levels, as we expected, of these flame retardants in the harbor seals' bodies. And we reported this. It led to a ban of this neuro-toxic flame retardant called Deca in Maine, where I am based, and also then a phase-out, U.S.-wide, at the end of last year. But we said, well, on the bright side, our harbor seals at least will not be bursting into flame anytime soon. So then I got really curious, myself, as a toxicologist, and I donated some blood to my lab and said, "Okay, let's do it." Well, we detected 113 different compounds in my blood. And I must say, if any of you would have this done, you'd probably find a similar profile, or cocktail, as they call it. But I was the recipient of a lot of flame retardant material for some reason. And just to point out the levels — Americans have 10 to 40 times higher levels of these compounds in our bodies than the Europeans. Why? Because we are flame-retarding everything, and we have weak regulations for toxic chemicals. But lo and behold, I'm one of the high-end individuals. Lucky me. But then I thought, well, in case of a fire, I might be the last one to ignite. (Laughter) So anyway, here's the problem — and it is a problem that we're looking at in the Gulf today — we're not regulating chemicals in this country properly. We're hardly regulating them at all. And we're letting industry run the show. And Jackie Savitz spoke this morning about Big Oil and the propaganda and how we're all brainwashed with their, you know, lies and so forth. Well, Big Chemical is what we're dealing with here. And they're allowed to keep trade secrets, so they don't even give the ingredients out. Plus they don't give health and safety data, so, consequently, they cannot be regulated before they go to market. So it's a case of innocent until proven guilty. The burden of proof is not on the producer. So I then was invited to go to the Gulf in May. I went down there on a preliminary investigation to look into dispersants and how they're going into the water column and so forth. And I was told that I was the only toxicologist to date who was dumb enough to get into the water, but I did. And we dove in the slick without even HazMat gear. And I did get sick. I got a ferocious sore throat two days later. I felt like my throat was on fire. But it did pass. And what I did see in the water as we went down, what really shocked me — and it's haunted me ever since — because I could see the droplets of oil dispersing. And as you go down, they're catching all kinds of plankton, bumping into, you know, little wisps of life that are the food for the planktivores, the herring kind of fish. And you could just see the web of death as you go down in the water column. Well, you know, we got into this in the beginning as a trade-off, they say, between the wetlands versus the ocean depth. And I didn't agree with that decision at the time; I still don't. The decision was to protect the marshes. When the oil gets into the marshes, you can't get it out. And as you know, there's been a very weak response, up until recently, to actually collect the oil. It's gotten much more aggressive. This is an Exxon slide showing what happens, the scenario and the trade-off. So this shows oil on the surface. You can see it getting up into the mangrove, but it is not harming the corals or the sea grass, right. So here we have the other scenario. If you disperse, the sea grass and the corals are getting hit pretty hard, but you're saving the mangrove. So this, to me, is like going to the eye doctor, okay? Is it better with one or two? (Laughter) The problem is that we have released so darn much of this stuff, we're climbing up to two million gallons very quickly. And then there's the problem of the plumes. What plumes? It turns out there are plumes. Independent researchers found that. And then there's the looming, messy problem of human health, reported human health effects. And actually, one of our federal officials said that it was probably heat stress. So ... Having been in that water just for the short time I was there, I can tell you, it is not heat stress. There are volumes of volatile petroleum fumes coming off that water, plus the Corexit, which has solvent in it. So it is not at all rational. So what do we have? The BP show is going on. Our officials complained about Corexit, which is the most toxic line of dispersants. But heck, they're still using it, and they used the most toxic one, the 9527, until they ran out of supplies. Now they're on 9500. 9527 had 2-butoxyethanol in it that causes internal bleeding. We know that from the Exxon Valdez spill, by the way. So what we're doing, we're putting compounds with petroleum solvents onto a petroleum spill. Does this make sense? So this is the way it works. And I want to show you this cute little thing that happens here. It's a micelle. Micelles form around the oil. And what happens first is the solvents break into the oil, the lipid membrane, they let the surfactants in there. The surfactants — which are like things we use on fast food wrappers — they grab around the droplets of oil, and they make little, tiny droplets with nice, little surfactant edges to them. The thing to remember about the micelles — these little floating globules of toxin — is they are there to deliver. They're like the FedEx guys. And if you're a fish, and you haven't gotten your glob in the morning, you're going to get it in the afternoon, because they've got your number. So from a toxicology perspective, this is really awful because Corexit and the dispersed oil are much more toxic together than either alone. And usually the exposure is a combined exposure. The dispersants — as I was saying — their job is to break down the lipid membrane. The solvents in them do that very efficiently. So they break down lipid membranes in our body, starting with cells of the skin, the cells of organs. So it actually hastens oil getting into the body easily and readily. Oil contains hundreds of hydrocarbon compounds and other compounds that are toxic to every organ in the body. And so with the dispersants combined, you have this very synergistic combined toxicity. Corexit also contains petroleum solvents and many other toxic compounds. And I'm part of a chat group, which is a national group of toxicologists and chemists that are, you know, basically turning cartwheels trying to figure out what's in this stuff, and what is it doing and what are the interactions of these chemicals, most of which we don't know, and what are their byproducts, which are usually more toxic than the parent compound. So we did find that Corexit 9500 contains heavy metals, arsenic and chromium — arsenic at high enough levels to have cancer-causing effects. So this is what we have to look at, these, you know, ridiculous safety data sheets, which have nothing on them much. And now they were forced to release the ultimate list of everything that's in Corexit. And guess what, tons of stuff is missing. Derivatives, derivatives, these are whole big groups of many, many compounds, these sorbitans. And then you get down to the petroleum distillates, which are the solvents, hundreds of them. They are not identified. And why? Trade secrets again. BP's running the show, and the Nalco company, this is all they have to do. So far these ingredients have not been released, and toxicologists are actually going nuts because we cannot predict with certainty what the interactions and toxic results are going to be. But we do have quite a lot at risk down there, as we all know, the 33 wildlife refuges, so much wildlife and fish and diversity. So we know from previous spills. And then part of this is just part of my bad dreams. And I appreciate being able to vent some of my anguish upon you. What we do know is that the corals are going to get hit hard. And this is a study that was done on the Australian coast, the coast of Tasmania. Corals are, you know, the home to about a quarter of all marine species. And with the Corexit and the oil, there's zero percent fertilization. With oil alone, there's 98 percent fertilization. So they're a very sensitive species to this combo. Here's another group. I could see myself easily in the water column. The plankton and the plankton eaters, you know, these are the little herring fish that go through the water column with their mouths open, feeding indiscriminately and just lapping up this brown pudding of toxic stuff. And we do know from other studies that this is a highly toxic mixture. See the oil and Corexit is causing death at a much, much lower dose than oil alone. That's probably as far as what we do know about toxic effects. But my bad dreams go like this. The piscivorous fish, the cobia, grouper, amberjacks, those big fish, also the tuna and sharks, are going to hit by this. And the gills are quite sensitive. The respiratory system is very sensitive. Think about it with the Corexit hitting the membranes, and it will clog up the gills, and then these animals are going to be getting something like what you call chemical pneumonia, trying to aspirate the compounds. It also will cause internal bleeding upon ingestion. I'm very worried about the air-breathing mammals because I study them, but also, the way their going to be exposed is every time they come to the surface to take a breath, they're going to inhale these volatile fumes. And what does happen with that eventually is pneumonia sets in and liver, kidney, brain damage. The Corexit is transporting the oil into every membrane and every system of the body. And you're having a lot of different unpleasant effects, but burns to the eyes and mouth, skin ulcers, lesions. And I think, personally, that we have not begun to see the impacts of this spill on the wildlife of the Gulf. We started hypothesizing: what do we know? what do with think would be a trophic cascade? which means that somebody gets wiped out, and then everything above that's eating those guys will crash. So our thought was — this is a simple thinking process, but ... obviously the plankton, the planktivores, and that's about as far as we got. And then it turns out we're not very good at figuring this stuff out. This is what the Exxon Valdez scientists thought would happen, this trophic cascade where you lose the kelp and the herring and other fishes and going up. They thought that eventually the killer whale would be at the top of this cascade. And then here's what really happened, much more complicated, much more specific. Actually the kelp and the barnacles that attach to the rock were decimated by the combination of Corexit and the oil. They were replaced by invasive species, which had less holding power to the rock. Storms came along. They ripped out of the rock. And this was the entire food web for the sea ducks. And as you know, we lost about 300,000 sea ducks from the Exxon Valdez spill, and they haven't come back. So we are launching an independent study. And by independent, I do not mean alone; I mean independent in the sense of not tied to the kind of crime-scene secrecy that's going on in the Gulf now. But we are actually going to be assessing toxic impacts, but we need lots and lots of partners to do this intelligently. We have some of the partners lined up. And Dave Gallo signed on. Sylvia's in here. And we hope that some of you will help us. My question to you is: why shouldn't we know? Don't we have the right to know? Surely we have the right to learn what loss we are going through in the Gulf. And my wish would be — for the gulf prize — would be that we have the truth. Whatever it is, please let us have the truth. And to get there, we need to do the assessment. So I appreciate being here. Thank you. (Applause) |
A smart loan for people with no credit history (yet) | {0: 'Shivani Siroya created a tool that allows anyone with a cell phone to build a financial track record.'} | TED2016 | How much do you need to know about a person before you'd feel comfortable making a loan? Suppose you wanted to lend 1,000 dollars to the person sitting two rows behind you. What would you need to know about that person before you'd feel comfortable? My mom came to the US from India in her late thirties. She's a doctor in Brooklyn, and she often lets friends and neighbors come to see her for health services, whether they can pay right away or not. I remember running into her patients with her at the grocery store or on the sidewalk, and sometimes they would come and pay her right on the spot for previous appointments. She would thank them, and ask them about their families and their health. She gave them credit because she trusted them. Most of us are like my mom. We would give credit to someone we know or that we live next to. But most of us are probably not going to lend to a stranger unless we know a little something about them. Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions don't know us on a personal level, but they do have a way of trusting us, and that's through our credit scores. Our credit scores have been created through an aggregation and analysis of our public consumer credit data. And because of them, we have pretty much easy access to all of the goods and services that we need, from getting electricity to buying a home, or taking a risk and starting a business. But ... there are 2.5 billion people around the world that don't have a credit score. That's a third of the world's population. They don't have a score because there are no formal public records on them — no bank accounts, no credit histories and no social security numbers. And because they don't have a score, they don't have access to the credit or financial products that can improve their lives. They are not trusted. So we wanted to find a way to build trust and to open up financial access for these 2.5 billion. So we created a mobile application that builds credit scores for them using mobile data. There are currently over one billion smartphones in emerging markets. And people are using them the same way that we do. They're texting their friends, they're looking up directions, they're browsing the Internet and they're even making financial transactions. Over time, this data is getting captured on our phones, and it provides a really rich picture of a person's life. Our customers give us access to this data and we capture it through our mobile application. It helps us understand the creditworthiness of people like Jenipher, a small-business owner in Nairobi, Kenya. Jenipher is 65 years old, and for decades has been running a food stall in the central business district. She has three sons who she put through vocational school, and she's also the leader of her local chama, or savings group. Jenipher's food stall does well. She makes just enough every day to cover her expenses. But she's not financially secure. Any emergency could force her into debt. And she has no discretionary income to improve her family's way of living, for emergencies, or for investing into growing her business. If Jenipher wants credit, her options are limited. She could get a microloan, but she'd have to form a group that could help vouch for her credibility. And even then, the loan sizes would be way too small to really have an impact on her business, averaging around 150 dollars. Loan sharks are always an option, but with interest rates that are well above 300 percent, they're financially risky. And because Jenipher doesn't have collateral or a credit history, she can't walk into a bank and ask for a business loan. But one day, Jenipher's son convinced her to download our application and apply for a loan. Jenipher answered a few questions on her phone and she gave us access to a few key data points on her device. And here's what we saw. So, bad news first. Jenipher had a low savings balance and no previous loan history. These are factors that would have thrown up a red flag to a traditional bank. But there were other points in her history that showed us a much richer picture of her potential. So for one, we saw that she made regular phone calls to her family in Uganda. Well, it turns out that the data shows a four percent increase in repayment among people who consistently communicate with a few close contacts. We could also see that though she traveled around a lot throughout the day, she actually had pretty regular travel patterns, and she was either at home or at her food stall. And the data shows a six percent increase in repayment among customers who are consistent with where they spend most of their time. We could also see that she communicated a lot with many different people throughout the day and that she had a strong support network. Our data shows that people who communicate with more than 58 different contacts tend to be more likely to be good borrowers. In Jenipher's case, she communicated with 89 different individuals, which showed a nine percent increase in her repayment. These are just some of the thousands of different data points that we look at to understand a person's creditworthiness. And after analyzing all of these different data points, we took the first risk and gave Jenipher a loan. This is data that would not be found on a paper trail or in any formal financial record. But it proves trust. By looking beyond income, we can see that people in emerging markets that may seem risky and unpredictable on the surface are actually willing and have the capacity to repay. Our credit scores have helped us deliver over 200,000 loans in Kenya in just the past year. And our repayment rates are above 90 percent — which, by the way, is in line with traditional bank repayment rates. With something as simple as a credit score, we're giving people the power to build their own futures. Our customers have used their loans for family expenses, emergencies, travel and for investing back into growing their businesses. They're now building better economies and communities where more people can succeed. Over the past two years of using our product, Jenipher has increased her savings by 60 percent. She's also started two additional food stalls and is now making plans for her own restaurant. She's applying for a small-business loan from a commercial bank, because she now has the credit history to prove she deserves it. I saw Jenipher in Nairobi just last week, and she told me how excited she was to get started. She said, "Only my son believed I could do this. I didn't think this was for me." She's lived her whole life believing that there was a part of the world that was closed off to her. Our job now is to open the world to Jenipher and the billions like her that deserve to be trusted. Thank you. (Applause) |
Insightful human portraits made from data | {0: 'R. Luke DuBois weaves information from a multitude of sources into art and music exploring the tensions between algorithms, portraiture and temporal space.'} | TED2016 | So I'm an artist, but a little bit of a peculiar one. I don't paint. I can't draw. My shop teacher in high school wrote that I was a menace on my report card. You probably don't really want to see my photographs. But there is one thing I know how to do: I know how to program a computer. I can code. And people will tell me that 100 years ago, folks like me didn't exist, that it was impossible, that art made with data is a new thing, it's a product of our age, it's something that's really important to think of as something that's very "now." And that's true. But there is an art form that's been around for a very long time that's really about using information, abstract information, to make emotionally resonant pieces. And it's called music. We've been making music for tens of thousands of years, right? And if you think about what music is — notes and chords and keys and harmonies and melodies — these things are algorithms. These things are systems that are designed to unfold over time, to make us feel. I came to the arts through music. I was trained as a composer, and about 15 years ago, I started making pieces that were designed to look at the intersection between sound and image, to use an image to unveil a musical structure or to use a sound to show you something interesting about something that's usually pictorial. So what you're seeing on the screen is literally being drawn by the musical structure of the musicians onstage, and there's no accident that it looks like a plant, because the underlying algorithmic biology of the plant is what informed the musical structure in the first place. So once you know how to do this, once you know how to code with media, you can do some pretty cool stuff. This is a project I did for the Sundance Film Festival. Really simple idea: you take every Academy Award Best Picture, you speed it up to one minute each and string them all together. And so in 75 minutes, I can show you the history of Hollywood cinema. And what it really shows you is the history of editing in Hollywood cinema. So on the left, we've got Casablanca; on the right, we've got Chicago. And you can see that Casablanca is a little easier to read. That's because the average length of a cinematic shot in the 1940s was 26 seconds, and now it's around six seconds. This is a project that was inspired by some work that was funded by the US Federal Government in the early 2000s, to look at video footage and find a specific actor in any video. And so I repurposed this code to train a system on one person in our culture who would never need to be surveilled in that manner, which is Britney Spears. I downloaded 2,000 paparazzi photos of Britney Spears and trained my computer to find her face and her face alone. I can run any footage of her through it and will center her eyes in the frame, and this sort of is a little double commentary about surveillance in our society. We are very fraught with anxiety about being watched, but then we obsess over celebrity. What you're seeing on the screen here is a collaboration I did with an artist named Lián Amaris. What she did is very simple to explain and describe, but very hard to do. She took 72 minutes of activity, getting ready for a night out on the town, and stretched it over three days and performed it on a traffic island in slow motion in New York City. I was there, too, with a film crew. We filmed the whole thing, and then we reversed the process, speeding it up to 72 minutes again, so it looks like she's moving normally and the whole world is flying by. At a certain point, I figured out that what I was doing was making portraits. When you think about portraiture, you tend to think about stuff like this. The guy on the left is named Gilbert Stuart. He's sort of the first real portraitist of the United States. And on the right is his portrait of George Washington from 1796. This is the so-called Lansdowne portrait. And if you look at this painting, there's a lot of symbolism, right? We've got a rainbow out the window. We've got a sword. We've got a quill on the desk. All of these things are meant to evoke George Washington as the father of the nation. This is my portrait of George Washington. And this is an eye chart, only instead of letters, they're words. And what the words are is the 66 words in George Washington's State of the Union addresses that he uses more than any other president. So "gentlemen" has its own symbolism and its own rhetoric. And it's really kind of significant that that's the word he used the most. This is the eye chart for George W. Bush, who was president when I made this piece. And how you get there, from "gentlemen" to "terror" in 43 easy steps, tells us a lot about American history, and gives you a different insight than you would have looking at a series of paintings. These pieces provide a history lesson of the United States through the political rhetoric of its leaders. Ronald Reagan spent a lot of time talking about deficits. Bill Clinton spent a lot of time talking about the century in which he would no longer be president, but maybe his wife would be. Lyndon Johnson was the first President to give his State of the Union addresses on prime-time television; he began every paragraph with the word "tonight." And Richard Nixon, or more accurately, his speechwriter, a guy named William Safire, spent a lot of time thinking about language and making sure that his boss portrayed a rhetoric of honesty. This project is shown as a series of monolithic sculptures. It's an outdoor series of light boxes. And it's important to note that they're to scale, so if you stand 20 feet back and you can read between those two black lines, you have 20/20 vision. (Laughter) This is a portrait. And there's a lot of these. There's a lot of ways to do this with data. I started looking for a way to think about how I can do a more democratic form of portraiture, something that's more about my country and how it works. Every 10 years, we make a census in the United States. We literally count people, find out who lives where, what kind of jobs we've got, the language we speak at home. And this is important stuff — really important stuff. But it doesn't really tell us who we are. It doesn't tell us about our dreams and our aspirations. And so in 2010, I decided to make my own census. And I started looking for a corpus of data that had a lot of descriptions written by ordinary Americans. And it turns out that there is such a corpus of data that's just sitting there for the taking. It's called online dating. So in 2010, I joined 21 different online dating services, as a gay man, a straight man, a gay woman and a straight woman, in every zip code in America and downloaded about 19 million people's dating profiles — about 20 percent of the adult population of the United States. I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. This is going to become really freaking obvious. Just go with me. (Laughter) So what I did was I sorted all this stuff by zip code. And I looked at word analysis. These are some dating profiles from 2010 with the word "lonely" highlighted. If you look at these things topographically, if you imagine dark colors to light colors are more use of the word, you can see that Appalachia is a pretty lonely place. You can also see that Nebraska ain't that funny. This is the kinky map, so what this is showing you is that the women in Alaska need to get together with the men in southern New Mexico, and have a good time. And I have this at a pretty granular level, so I can tell you that the men in the eastern half of Long Island are way more interested in being spanked than men in the western half of Long Island. This will be your one takeaway from this whole conference. You're going to remember that fact for, like, 30 years. (Laughter) When you bring this down to a cartographic level, you can make maps and do the same trick I was doing with the eye charts. You can replace the name of every city in the United States with the word people use more in that city than anywhere else. If you've ever dated anyone from Seattle, this makes perfect sense. You've got "pretty." You've got "heartbreak." You've got "gig." You've got "cigarette." They play in a band and they smoke. And right above that you can see "email." That's Redmond, Washington, which is the headquarters of the Microsoft Corporation. Some of these you can guess — so, Los Angeles is "acting" and San Francisco is "gay." Some are a little bit more heartbreaking. In Baton Rouge, they talk about being curvy; downstream in New Orleans, they still talk about the flood. Folks in the American capital will say they're interesting. People in Baltimore, Maryland, will say they're afraid. This is New Jersey. I grew up somewhere between "annoying" and "cynical." (Laughter) (Applause) And New York City's number one word is "now," as in, "Now I'm working as a waiter, but actually I'm an actor." (Laughter) Or, "Now I'm a professor of engineering at NYU, but actually I'm an artist." If you go upstate, you see "dinosaur." That's Syracuse. The best place to eat in Syracuse, New York, is a Hell's Angels barbecue joint called Dinosaur Barbecue. That's where you would take somebody on a date. I live somewhere between "unconditional" and "midsummer," in Midtown Manhattan. And this is gentrified North Brooklyn, so you've got "DJ" and "glamorous" and "hipsters" and "urbane." So that's maybe a more democratic portrait. And the idea was, what if we made red-state and blue-state maps based on what we want to do on a Friday night? This is a self-portrait. This is based on my email, about 500,000 emails sent over 20 years. You can think of this as a quantified selfie. So what I'm doing is running a physics equation based on my personal data. You have to imagine everybody I've ever corresponded with. It started out in the middle and it exploded with a big bang. And everybody has gravity to one another, gravity based on how much they've been emailing, who they've been emailing with. And it also does sentimental analysis, so if I say "I love you," you're heavier to me. And you attract to my email addresses in the middle, which act like mainline stars. And all the names are handwritten. Sometimes you do this data and this work with real-time data to illuminate a specific problem in a specific city. This is a Walther PPK 9mm semiautomatic handgun that was used in a shooting in the French Quarter of New Orleans about two years ago on Valentine's Day in an argument over parking. Those are my cigarettes. This is the house where the shooting took place. This project involved a little bit of engineering. I've got a bike chain rigged up as a cam shaft, with a computer driving it. That computer and the mechanism are buried in a box. The gun's on top welded to a steel plate. There's a wire going through to the trigger, and the computer in the box is online. It's listening to the 911 feed of the New Orleans Police Department, so that anytime there's a shooting reported in New Orleans, (Gunshot sound) the gun fires. Now, there's a blank, so there's no bullet. There's big light, big noise and most importantly, there's a casing. There's about five shootings a day in New Orleans, so over the four months this piece was installed, the case filled up with bullets. You guys know what this is — you call this "data visualization." When you do it right, it's illuminating. When you do it wrong, it's anesthetizing. It reduces people to numbers. So watch out. One last piece for you. I spent the last summer as the artist in residence for Times Square. And Times Square in New York is literally the crossroads of the world. One of the things people don't notice about it is it's the most Instagrammed place on Earth. About every five seconds, someone commits a selfie in Times Square. That's 17,000 a day, and I have them all. (Laughter) These are some of them with their eyes centered. Every civilization, will use the maximum level of technology available to make art. And it's the responsibility of the artist to ask questions about what that technology means and how it reflects our culture. So I leave you with this: we're more than numbers. We're people, and we have dreams and ideas. And reducing us to statistics is something that's done at our peril. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Why I put myself in danger to tell the stories of Gaza | {0: 'Ameera Harouda leads journalists to the harrowing (and often hidden) stories of the Gaza Strip that they couldn’t find on their own.'} | TED2016 | Hello. This is my first trip, first time in life I'm outside of the walls of Gaza. I'm so happy to be here. (Applause) My ambition always was to be a pilot, to fly a plane, to feel free to fly the sky, to touch the sky. But that didn't happen. Simply, I live in Gaza, there is no airport. All borders are closed on every side. We live in one of the biggest prisons in the world. The only thing I can do is just to look up to the sky. On some days, we are lucky if we have electricity for four or five hours. When it's cold, we make a fire on the front or on the roof of our homes. Sometimes we make food, too. My job in Gaza is to arrange everything for journalists who come to my homeland to tell the stories about what's going on in Gaza. Many mornings, I had to go to the border area to collect a journalist. If anything should happen to the journalist, or if the journalist decides to cover a story the government doesn't want us to cover, bad things could happen. Navigating through my country helping journalists, filmmakers, news crews, is my working life. I believe my success comes from building a relationship not only with journalists and the news crews, but also with the communities in the Gaza Strip. These communities who don't want their stories to be told, I never looked to them as stories or numbers. But like me, they are human beings. I have built up many relationships over 10 years. And guess what? This gives me the chance to get access to people, to stories that others can't. In some certain situations, I feel, as a woman, I have more power. Many male journalists in my society, they want to cover a story about drug addiction in my country. That problem started when the Gaza tunnel was being built. With the siege on Gaza, tunnels brought people all the basic needs like food, building material, other stuff we needed. But not anymore, because the Egyptian side flooded them up with water and they are not working anymore. Drugs were being smuggled, and many young people got addicted, too. In the tradition of the Palestinian society, it's forbidden for men to enter the household. So, no male journalists get the story. But I did. I have a wonderful husband, a wonderful husband who supports me despite all the criticism he gets from the society. He's at home now with my two kids, and I have another one that's growing in here. (Applause) When I'm working, I call him every two hours, and he knows if he doesn't hear from me, he should call my contact, the one who gives me access to the story, which is the one who I trust. One of the times in Gaza, during the kidnapping of the British journalist Alan Johnston, I was asked by an American magazine to set up a meeting with the kidnappers in Gaza, and I did. The journalist covering the story and I were asked to meet outside of his hotel. They came, they picked us up in a black van with black windows, they were wearing masks on that day. And they drove us away, far away in the middle of a field. They took our cell phones and we did the interview with the kidnapper outside in that field. I was so scared that day, a day I will never forget. So, why do I do what I do? I do it because I believe if I didn't, a huge part of the story about Gaza will be missing. There are some more stories I could tell you about my country. And not all of them are bad. I love my country, despite the terrible situation we live in — siege, poverty, unemployment — but there is life. There are people who are dreamers and amazing people full of energy. We have wonderful music, and a great music school. We have parkour dancers who dance in the rubble of their homes. And Gaza is the only place in the Arab world where Muslims and Christians live in strong brotherhood. (Applause) During the time of war, the hardest part for me is leaving the house early in the morning, leaving my children. I take a picture of them everyday because I never know if I will make it back to them. Being a fixer and a journalist is difficult and dangerous in Gaza. But when I hear the sound of the shelling or the sound of the bombing, I just head straight toward it, because I want to be there first, because these stories should be told. When my children were small and we heard the sound of the war, I used to tell them that they were fireworks. Now they are older, they understand. I do have terrible nightmares because of all that I witnessed during war times, especially these lifeless bodies of young children. I still remember a little girl, her name is Hala. She's the only survivor from her family. Her picture will be with me forever. I will never forget her. I'm proud that I can stand here and be here today with you. I'm proud that I can tell you stories, sad and happy, stories about my small corner of the world, Gaza. I'm proud that I am the first female fixer working in Gaza. And the funny thing is they call me Mr. Rambo in Gaza. (Laughter) I hope one day, I will get the chance to tell the stories of all other women, all other amazing women I know in my country. I hope that one day I can help other women in my country to be fixers like me. And of course sometimes, I feel I can't do this work anymore, it's just too much for me. But I remember these words: "Don't limit your challenge, but challenge your limit. Don't allow others to stand in front of your dreams." Thank you. (Applause) |
A provocative way to finance the fight against climate change | {0: 'A senior managing director and head of global macro strategy at State Street Global Markets, Michael Metcalfe provides high quality capital flow research.'} | TED@State Street Boston | Will we do whatever it takes to tackle climate change? I come at this question not as a green campaigner, in fact, I confess to be rather hopeless at recycling. I come at it as a professional observer of financial policy making and someone that wonders how history will judge us. One day, this ring that belonged to my grandfather will pass to my son, Charlie. And I wonder what his generation and perhaps the one that follows will make of the two lives this ring has worked. My grandfather was a coal miner. In his time, burning fossil fuels for energy and for allowing economies to develop was accepted. We know now that that is not the case because of the greenhouse gases that coal produces. But today, I fear it's the industry in which I work that will be judged more harshly because of its impact on the climate — more harshly than my grandfather's industry, even. I work, of course, in the banking industry, which will be remembered for its crisis in 2008 — a crisis that diverted the attention and finances of governments away from some really, really important promises, like promises made at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 to mobilize 100 billion dollars a year to help developing countries move away from burning fossil fuels and transition to using cleaner energy. That promise is already in jeopardy. And that's a real problem, because that transition to cleaner energy needs to happen sooner rather than later. Firstly, because greenhouse gases, once released, stay in the atmosphere for decades. And secondly, if a developing economy builds its power grid around fossil fuels today, it's going to be way more costly to change later on. So for the climate, history may judge that the banking crisis happened at just the wrong time. The story need not be this gloomy, though. Three years ago, I argued that governments could use the tools deployed to save the financial system to meet other global challenges. And these arguments are getting stronger, not weaker, with time. Let's take a brief reminder of what those tools looked like. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the central banks of the US and UK began buying bonds issued by their own governments in a policy known as "quantitative easing." Depending on what happens to those bonds when they mature, this is money printing by another name. And boy, did they print. The US alone created four trillion dollars' worth of its own currency. This was not done in isolation. In a remarkable act of cooperation, the 188 countries that make up the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, agreed to issue 250 billion dollars' worth of their own currency — the Special Drawing Right — to boost reserves around the world. When the financial crisis moved to Europe, the European Central Bank President, Mario Draghi, promised "to do whatever it takes." And they did. The Bank of Japan repeated those words — that exact same commitment — to do "whatever it takes" to reflate their economy. In both cases, "whatever it takes" meant trillions of dollars more in money-printing policies that continue today. What this shows is that when faced with some global challenges, policy makers are able to act collectively, with urgency, and run the risks of unconventional policies like money printing. So, let's go back to that original question: Can we print money for climate finance? Three years ago, the idea of using money in this way was something of a taboo. Once you break down and dismantle the idea that money is a finite resource, governments can quickly get overwhelmed by demands from their people to print more and more money for other causes: education, health care, welfare — even defense. And there are some truly terrible historical examples of money printing — uncontrolled money printing — leading to hyperinflation. Think: Weimar Republic in 1930; Zimbabwe more recently, in 2008, when the prices of basic goods like bread are doubling every day. But all of this is moving the public debate forward, so much so, that money printing for the people is now discussed openly in the financial media, and even in some political manifestos. But it's important the debate doesn't stop here, with printing national currencies. Because climate change is a shared global problem, there are some really compelling reasons why we should be printing that international currency that's issued by the IMF, to fund it. The Special Drawing Right, or SDR, is the IMF's electronic unit of account that governments use to transfer funds amongst each other. Think of it as a peer-to-peer payment network, like Bitcoin, but for governments. And it's truly global. Each of the 188 members of the IMF hold SDR quotas as part of their foreign exchange reserves. These are national stores of wealth that countries keep to protect themselves against currency crises. And that global nature is why, at the height of the financial crisis in 2009, the IMF issued those extra 250 billion dollars — because it served as a collective global action that safeguarded countries large and small in one fell swoop. But here — here's the intriguing part. More than half of those extra SDRs that were printed in 2009 — 150 billion dollars' worth — went to developed market countries who, for the most part, have a modest need for these foreign exchange reserves, because they have flexible exchange rates. So those extra reserves that were printed in 2009, in the end, for developed market countries at least, weren't really needed. And they remain unused today. So here's an idea. As a first step, why don't we start spending those unused, those extra SDRs that were printed in 2009, to combat climate change? They could, for example, be used to buy bonds issued by the UN's Green Climate Fund. This was a fund created in 2009, following that climate agreement in Copenhagen. And it was designed to channel funds towards developing countries to meet their climate projects. It's been one of the most successful funds of its type, raising almost 10 billion dollars. But if we use those extra SDRs that were issued, it helps governments get back on track, to meet that promise of 100 billion dollars a year that was derailed by the financial crisis. It could also — it could also serve as a test case. If the inflationary consequences of using SDRs in this way are benign, it could be used to justify the additional, extra issuance of SDRs, say, every five years, again, with the commitment that developed-market countries would direct their share of the new reserves to the Green Climate Fund. Printing international money in this way has several advantages over printing national currencies. The first is it's really easy to argue that spending money to mitigate climate change benefits everyone. No one section of society benefits from the printing press over another. That problem of competing claims is mitigated. It's also fair to say that because it takes so many countries to agree to issue these extra SDRs, it's highly unlikely that money printing would get out of control. What you end up with is a collective, global action aimed — and it's controlled global action — aimed at a global good. And, as we've learned with the money-printing schemes, whatever concerns we have can be allayed by rules. So, for example, the issuance of these extra SDRs every five years could be capped, such that this international currency is never more than five percent of global foreign exchange reserves. That's important because it would allay well, let's say, the ridiculous concerns that the US might have that the SDR could ever challenge the dollar's dominant role in international finance. And in fact, I think the only thing that the SDR would likely steal from the dollar under this scheme is its nickname, the "greenback." Because even with that cap in place, the IMF could have followed up its issuance — its massive issuance of SDRs in 2009 — with a further 200 billion dollars of SDRs in 2014. So hypothetically, that would mean that developed countries could have contributed up to 300 billion dollars' worth of SDRs to the Green Climate Fund. That's 30 times what it has today. And you know, as spectacular as that sounds, it's only just beginning to look like "whatever it takes." And just to think what amazing things could be done with that money, consider this: in 2009, Norway promised one billion dollars of its reserves to Brazil if they followed through on their goals on deforestation. That program has since delivered a 70 percent reduction in deforestation in the past decade. That's saving 3.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions, which is the equivalent of taking all American cars off the roads for three whole years. So what could we do with 300 other pay-for-performance climate projects like that, organized on a global scale? We could take cars off the roads for a generation. So, let's not quibble about whether we can afford to fund climate change. The real question is: Do we care enough about future generations to take the very same policy risks we took to save the financial system? After all, we could do it, we did do it and we are doing it today. We must, must, must do "whatever it takes." Thank you. (Applause) |
How to read the genome and build a human being | {0: 'Riccardo Sabatini applies his expertise in numerical modeling and data to projects ranging from material science to computational genomics and food market predictions. '} | TED2016 | For the next 16 minutes, I'm going to take you on a journey that is probably the biggest dream of humanity: to understand the code of life. So for me, everything started many, many years ago when I met the first 3D printer. The concept was fascinating. A 3D printer needs three elements: a bit of information, some raw material, some energy, and it can produce any object that was not there before. I was doing physics, I was coming back home and I realized that I actually always knew a 3D printer. And everyone does. It was my mom. (Laughter) My mom takes three elements: a bit of information, which is between my father and my mom in this case, raw elements and energy in the same media, that is food, and after several months, produces me. And I was not existent before. So apart from the shock of my mom discovering that she was a 3D printer, I immediately got mesmerized by that piece, the first one, the information. What amount of information does it take to build and assemble a human? Is it much? Is it little? How many thumb drives can you fill? Well, I was studying physics at the beginning and I took this approximation of a human as a gigantic Lego piece. So, imagine that the building blocks are little atoms and there is a hydrogen here, a carbon here, a nitrogen here. So in the first approximation, if I can list the number of atoms that compose a human being, I can build it. Now, you can run some numbers and that happens to be quite an astonishing number. So the number of atoms, the file that I will save in my thumb drive to assemble a little baby, will actually fill an entire Titanic of thumb drives — multiplied 2,000 times. This is the miracle of life. Every time you see from now on a pregnant lady, she's assembling the biggest amount of information that you will ever encounter. Forget big data, forget anything you heard of. This is the biggest amount of information that exists. (Applause) But nature, fortunately, is much smarter than a young physicist, and in four billion years, managed to pack this information in a small crystal we call DNA. We met it for the first time in 1950 when Rosalind Franklin, an amazing scientist, a woman, took a picture of it. But it took us more than 40 years to finally poke inside a human cell, take out this crystal, unroll it, and read it for the first time. The code comes out to be a fairly simple alphabet, four letters: A, T, C and G. And to build a human, you need three billion of them. Three billion. How many are three billion? It doesn't really make any sense as a number, right? So I was thinking how I could explain myself better about how big and enormous this code is. But there is — I mean, I'm going to have some help, and the best person to help me introduce the code is actually the first man to sequence it, Dr. Craig Venter. So welcome onstage, Dr. Craig Venter. (Applause) Not the man in the flesh, but for the first time in history, this is the genome of a specific human, printed page-by-page, letter-by-letter: 262,000 pages of information, 450 kilograms, shipped from the United States to Canada thanks to Bruno Bowden, Lulu.com, a start-up, did everything. It was an amazing feat. But this is the visual perception of what is the code of life. And now, for the first time, I can do something fun. I can actually poke inside it and read. So let me take an interesting book ... like this one. I have an annotation; it's a fairly big book. So just to let you see what is the code of life. Thousands and thousands and thousands and millions of letters. And they apparently make sense. Let's get to a specific part. Let me read it to you: (Laughter) "AAG, AAT, ATA." To you it sounds like mute letters, but this sequence gives the color of the eyes to Craig. I'll show you another part of the book. This is actually a little more complicated. Chromosome 14, book 132: (Laughter) As you might expect. (Laughter) "ATT, CTT, GATT." This human is lucky, because if you miss just two letters in this position — two letters of our three billion — he will be condemned to a terrible disease: cystic fibrosis. We have no cure for it, we don't know how to solve it, and it's just two letters of difference from what we are. A wonderful book, a mighty book, a mighty book that helped me understand and show you something quite remarkable. Every one of you — what makes me, me and you, you — is just about five million of these, half a book. For the rest, we are all absolutely identical. Five hundred pages is the miracle of life that you are. The rest, we all share it. So think about that again when we think that we are different. This is the amount that we share. So now that I have your attention, the next question is: How do I read it? How do I make sense out of it? Well, for however good you can be at assembling Swedish furniture, this instruction manual is nothing you can crack in your life. (Laughter) And so, in 2014, two famous TEDsters, Peter Diamandis and Craig Venter himself, decided to assemble a new company. Human Longevity was born, with one mission: trying everything we can try and learning everything we can learn from these books, with one target — making real the dream of personalized medicine, understanding what things should be done to have better health and what are the secrets in these books. An amazing team, 40 data scientists and many, many more people, a pleasure to work with. The concept is actually very simple. We're going to use a technology called machine learning. On one side, we have genomes — thousands of them. On the other side, we collected the biggest database of human beings: phenotypes, 3D scan, NMR — everything you can think of. Inside there, on these two opposite sides, there is the secret of translation. And in the middle, we build a machine. We build a machine and we train a machine — well, not exactly one machine, many, many machines — to try to understand and translate the genome in a phenotype. What are those letters, and what do they do? It's an approach that can be used for everything, but using it in genomics is particularly complicated. Little by little we grew and we wanted to build different challenges. We started from the beginning, from common traits. Common traits are comfortable because they are common, everyone has them. So we started to ask our questions: Can we predict height? Can we read the books and predict your height? Well, we actually can, with five centimeters of precision. BMI is fairly connected to your lifestyle, but we still can, we get in the ballpark, eight kilograms of precision. Can we predict eye color? Yeah, we can. Eighty percent accuracy. Can we predict skin color? Yeah we can, 80 percent accuracy. Can we predict age? We can, because apparently, the code changes during your life. It gets shorter, you lose pieces, it gets insertions. We read the signals, and we make a model. Now, an interesting challenge: Can we predict a human face? It's a little complicated, because a human face is scattered among millions of these letters. And a human face is not a very well-defined object. So, we had to build an entire tier of it to learn and teach a machine what a face is, and embed and compress it. And if you're comfortable with machine learning, you understand what the challenge is here. Now, after 15 years — 15 years after we read the first sequence — this October, we started to see some signals. And it was a very emotional moment. What you see here is a subject coming in our lab. This is a face for us. So we take the real face of a subject, we reduce the complexity, because not everything is in your face — lots of features and defects and asymmetries come from your life. We symmetrize the face, and we run our algorithm. The results that I show you right now, this is the prediction we have from the blood. (Applause) Wait a second. In these seconds, your eyes are watching, left and right, left and right, and your brain wants those pictures to be identical. So I ask you to do another exercise, to be honest. Please search for the differences, which are many. The biggest amount of signal comes from gender, then there is age, BMI, the ethnicity component of a human. And scaling up over that signal is much more complicated. But what you see here, even in the differences, lets you understand that we are in the right ballpark, that we are getting closer. And it's already giving you some emotions. This is another subject that comes in place, and this is a prediction. A little smaller face, we didn't get the complete cranial structure, but still, it's in the ballpark. This is a subject that comes in our lab, and this is the prediction. So these people have never been seen in the training of the machine. These are the so-called "held-out" set. But these are people that you will probably never believe. We're publishing everything in a scientific publication, you can read it. But since we are onstage, Chris challenged me. I probably exposed myself and tried to predict someone that you might recognize. So, in this vial of blood — and believe me, you have no idea what we had to do to have this blood now, here — in this vial of blood is the amount of biological information that we need to do a full genome sequence. We just need this amount. We ran this sequence, and I'm going to do it with you. And we start to layer up all the understanding we have. In the vial of blood, we predicted he's a male. And the subject is a male. We predict that he's a meter and 76 cm. The subject is a meter and 77 cm. So, we predicted that he's 76; the subject is 82. We predict his age, 38. The subject is 35. We predict his eye color. Too dark. We predict his skin color. We are almost there. That's his face. Now, the reveal moment: the subject is this person. (Laughter) And I did it intentionally. I am a very particular and peculiar ethnicity. Southern European, Italians — they never fit in models. And it's particular — that ethnicity is a complex corner case for our model. But there is another point. So, one of the things that we use a lot to recognize people will never be written in the genome. It's our free will, it's how I look. Not my haircut in this case, but my beard cut. So I'm going to show you, I'm going to, in this case, transfer it — and this is nothing more than Photoshop, no modeling — the beard on the subject. And immediately, we get much, much better in the feeling. So, why do we do this? We certainly don't do it for predicting height or taking a beautiful picture out of your blood. We do it because the same technology and the same approach, the machine learning of this code, is helping us to understand how we work, how your body works, how your body ages, how disease generates in your body, how your cancer grows and develops, how drugs work and if they work on your body. This is a huge challenge. This is a challenge that we share with thousands of other researchers around the world. It's called personalized medicine. It's the ability to move from a statistical approach where you're a dot in the ocean, to a personalized approach, where we read all these books and we get an understanding of exactly how you are. But it is a particularly complicated challenge, because of all these books, as of today, we just know probably two percent: four books of more than 175. And this is not the topic of my talk, because we will learn more. There are the best minds in the world on this topic. The prediction will get better, the model will get more precise. And the more we learn, the more we will be confronted with decisions that we never had to face before about life, about death, about parenting. So, we are touching the very inner detail on how life works. And it's a revolution that cannot be confined in the domain of science or technology. This must be a global conversation. We must start to think of the future we're building as a humanity. We need to interact with creatives, with artists, with philosophers, with politicians. Everyone is involved, because it's the future of our species. Without fear, but with the understanding that the decisions that we make in the next year will change the course of history forever. Thank you. (Applause) |
How my son's short life made a lasting difference | {0: 'Sarah Gray found meaning in tragic loss\xad\xad by donating the organs of her newborn son to advance scientific research.'} | TEDMED 2015 | I was three months pregnant with twins when my husband Ross and I went to my second sonogram. I was 35 years old at the time, and I knew that that meant we had a higher risk of having a child with a birth defect. So, Ross and I researched the standard birth defects, and we felt reasonably prepared. Well, nothing would have prepared us for the bizarre diagnosis that we were about to face. The doctor explained that one of our twins, Thomas, had a fatal birth defect called anencephaly. This means that his brain was not formed correctly because part of his skull was missing. Babies with this diagnosis typically die in utero or within a few minutes, hours or days of being born. But the other twin, Callum, appeared to be healthy, as far as the doctor could tell, and these twins were identical, genetically identical. So after a lot of questions about how this could have possibly happened, a selective reduction was mentioned, and while this procedure was not impossible, it posed some unique risks for the healthy twin and for me, so we decided to carry the pregnancy to term. So there I was, three months pregnant, with two trimesters ahead of me, and I had to find a way to manage my blood pressure and my stress. And it felt like having a roommate point a loaded gun at you for six months. But I stared down the barrel of that gun for so long that I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. While there was nothing we could do to prevent the tragedy, I wanted to find a way for Thomas's brief life to have some kind of positive impact. So I asked my nurse about organ, eye and tissue donation. She connected with our local organ-procurement organization, the Washington Regional Transplant Community. WRTC explained to me that Thomas would probably be too small at birth to donate for transplant, and I was shocked: I didn't even know you could be rejected for that. But they said that he would be a good candidate to donate for research. This helped me see Thomas in a new light. As opposed to just a victim of a disease, I started to see him as a possible key to unlock a medical mystery. On March 23, 2010, the twins were born, and they were both born alive. And just like the doctor said, Thomas was missing the top part of his skull, but he could nurse, drink from a bottle, cuddle and grab our fingers like a normal baby, and he slept in our arms. After six days, Thomas died in Ross's arms surrounded by our family. We called WRTC, who sent a van to our home and brought him to Children's National Medical Center. A few hours later, we got a call to say that the recovery was a success, and Thomas's donations would be going to four different places. His cord blood would go to Duke University. His liver would go to a cell-therapy company called Cytonet in Durham. His corneas would go to Schepens Eye Research Institute, which is part of Harvard Medical School, and his retinas would go to the University of Pennsylvania. A few days later, we had a funeral with our immediate family, including baby Callum, and we basically closed this chapter in our lives. But I did find myself wondering, what's happening now? What are the researchers learning? And was it even worthwhile to donate? WRTC invited Ross and I to a grief retreat, and we met about 15 other grieving families who had donated their loved one's organs for transplant. Some of them had even received letters from the people who received their loved one's organs, saying thank you. I learned that they could even meet each other if they'd both sign a waiver, almost like an open adoption. And I was so excited, I thought maybe I could write a letter or I could get a letter and learn about what happened. But I was disappointed to learn that this process only exists for people who donate for transplant. So I was jealous. I had transplant envy, I guess. (Laughter) But over the years that followed, I learned a lot more about donation, and I even got a job in the field. And I came up with an idea. I wrote a letter that started out, "Dear Researcher." I explained who I was, and I asked if they could tell me why they requested infant retinas in March of 2010, and I asked if my family could visit their lab. I emailed it to the eye bank that arranged the donation, the Old Dominion Eye Foundation, and asked if they could send it to the right person. They said that they had never done this before, and they couldn't guarantee a response, but they wouldn't be an obstacle, and they would deliver it. Two days later, I got a response from Dr. Arupa Ganguly of the University of Pennsylvania. She thanked me for the donation, and she explained that she is studying retinoblastoma, which is a deadly cancer of the retina that affects children under the age of five, and she said that yes, we were invited to visit her lab. So next we talked on the phone, and one of the first things she said to me was that she couldn't possibly imagine how we felt, and that Thomas had given the ultimate sacrifice, and that she seemed to feel indebted to us. So I said, "Nothing against your study, but we didn't actually pick it. We donated to the system, and the system chose your study. I said, "And second of all, bad things happen to children every day, and if you didn't want these retinas, they would probably be buried in the ground right now. So to be able to participate in your study gives Thomas's life a new layer of meaning. So, never feel guilty about using this tissue." Next, she explained to me how rare it was. She had placed a request for this tissue six years earlier with the National Disease Research Interchange. She got only one sample of tissue that fit her criteria, and it was Thomas's. Next, we arranged a date for me to come visit the lab, and we chose March 23, 2015, which was the twins' fifth birthday. After we hung up, I emailed her some pictures of Thomas and Callum, and a few weeks later, we received this T-shirt in the mail. A few months later, Ross, Callum and I piled in the car and we went for a road trip. We met Arupa and her staff, and Arupa said that when I told her not to feel guilty, that it was a relief, and that she hadn't seen it from our perspective. She also explained that Thomas had a secret code name. The same way Henrietta Lacks is called HeLa, Thomas was called RES 360. RES means research, and 360 means he was the 360th specimen over the course of about 10 years. She also shared with us a unique document, and it was the shipping label that sent his retinas from DC to Philadelphia. This shipping label is like an heirloom to us now. It's the same way that a military medal or a wedding certificate might be. Arupa also explained that she is using Thomas's retina and his RNA to try to inactivate the gene that causes tumor formation, and she even showed us some results that were based on RES 360. Then she took us to the freezer and she showed us the two samples that she still has that are still labeled RES 360. There's two little ones left. She said she saved it because she doesn't know when she might get more. After this, we went to the conference room and we relaxed and we had lunch together, and the lab staff presented Callum with a birthday gift. It was a child's lab kit. And they also offered him an internship. (Laughter) So in closing, I have two simple messages today. One is that most of us probably don't think about donating to research. I know I didn't. I think I'm a normal person. But I did it. It was a good experience, and I recommend it, and it brought my family a lot of peace. And second is if you work with human tissue and you wonder about the donor and about the family, write them a letter. Tell them you received it, tell them what you're working on, and invite them to visit your lab, because that visit may be even more gratifying for you than it is for them. And I'd also like to ask you a favor. If you're ever successful in arranging one of these visits, please tell me about it. The other part of my family's story is that we ended up visiting all four facilities that received Thomas's donations. And we met amazing people doing inspiring work. The way I see it now is that Thomas got into Harvard, Duke and Penn — (Laughter) And he has a job at Cytonet, and he has colleagues and he has coworkers who are in the top of their fields. And they need him in order to do their job. And a life that once seemed brief and insignificant revealed itself to be vital, everlasting and relevant. And I only hope that my life can be as relevant. Thank you. (Applause) |
Pirates, nurses and other rebel designers | {0: 'Columnist and author Alice Rawsthorn illuminates the mesh of design woven into every aspect of our everyday lives and communities.'} | TED2016 | Design is a slippery and elusive phenomenon, which has meant different things at different times. But all truly inspiring design projects have one thing in common: they began with a dream. And the bolder the dream, the greater the design feat that will be required to achieve it. And this is why the greatest designers are almost always the biggest dreamers and rebels and renegades. This has been the case throughout history, all the way back to the year 300 BC, when a 13-year-old became the king of a remote, very poor and very small Asian country. He dreamt of acquiring land, riches and power through military conquest. And his design skills — improbable though it sounds — would be essential in enabling him to do so. At the time, all weapons were made by hand to different specifications. So if an archer ran out of arrows during a battle, they wouldn't necessarily be able to fire another archer's arrows from their bow. This of course meant that they would be less effective in combat and very vulnerable, too. Ying solved this problem by insisting that all bows and arrows were designed identically, so they were interchangeable. And he did the same for daggers, axes, spears, shields and every other form of weaponry. His formidably equipped army won batter after battle, and within 15 years, his tiny kingdom had succeeded in conquering all its larger, richer, more powerful neighbors, to found the mighty Chinese Empire. Now, no one, of course, would have thought of describing Ying Zheng as a designer at the time — why would they? And yet he used design unknowingly and instinctively but with tremendous ingenuity to achieve his ends. And so did another equally improbable, accidental designer, who was also not above using violence to get what he wanted. This was Edward Teach, better known as the British pirate, Blackbeard. This was the golden age of piracy, where pirates like Teach were terrorizing the high seas. Colonial trade was flourishing, and piracy was highly profitable. And the smarter pirates like him realized that to maximize their spoils, they needed to attack their enemies so brutally that they would surrender on sight. So in other words, they could take the ships without wasting ammunition, or incurring casualties. So Edward Teach redesigned himself as Blackbeard by playing the part of a merciless brute. He wore heavy jackets and big hats to accentuate his height. He grew the bushy black beard that obscured his face. He slung braces of pistols on either shoulder. He even attached matches to the brim of his hat and set them alight, so they sizzled menacingly whenever his ship was poised to attack. And like many pirates of that era, he flew a flag that bore the macabre symbols of a human skull and a pair of crossed bones, because those motifs had signified death in so many cultures for centuries, that their meaning was instantly recognizable, even in the lawless, illiterate world of the high seas: surrender or you'll suffer. So of course, all his sensible victims surrendered on sight. Put like that, it's easy to see why Edward Teach and his fellow pirates could be seen as pioneers of modern communications design, and why their deadly symbol — (Laughter) there's more — why their deadly symbol of the skull and crossbones was a precursor of today's logos, rather like the big red letters standing behind me, but of course with a different message. (Laughter) Yet design was also used to nobler ends by an equally brilliant and equally improbable designer, the 19th-century British nurse, Florence Nightingale. Her mission was to provide decent healthcare for everyone. Nightingale was born into a rather grand, very wealthy British family, who were horrified when she volunteered to work in military hospitals during the Crimean War. Once there, she swiftly realized that more patients were dying of infections that they caught there, in the filthy, fetid wards, than they were of battle wounds. So she campaigned for cleaner, lighter, airier clinics to be designed and built. Back in Britain, she mounted another campaign, this time for civilian hospitals, and insisted that the same design principles were applied to them. The Nightingale ward, as it is called, dominated hospital design for decades to come, and elements of it are still used today. But by then, design was seen as a tool of the Industrial Age. It was formalized and professionalized, but it was restricted to specific roles and generally applied in pursuit of commercial goals rather than being used intuitively, as Florence Nightingale, Blackbeard and Ying Zheng had done. By the 20th century, this commercial ethos was so powerful, that any designers who deviated from it risked being seen as cranks or subversives. Now among them is one of my great design heroes, the brilliant László Moholy-Nagy. He was the Hungarian artist and designer whose experiments with the impact of technology on daily life were so powerful that they still influence the design of the digital images we see on our phone and computer screens. He radicalized the Bauhaus Design School in 1920s Germany, and yet some of his former colleagues shunned him when he struggled to open a new Bauhaus in Chicago years later. Moholy's ideas were as bold and incisive as ever, but his approach to design was too experimental, as was his insistence on seeing it, as he put it, as an attitude, not a profession to be in tune with the times. And sadly, the same applied to another design maverick: Richard Buckminster Fuller. He was yet another brilliant design visionary and design activist, who was completely committed to designing a sustainable society in such a forward-thinking way that he started talking about the importance of environmentalism in design in the 1920s. Now he, despite his efforts, was routinely mocked as a crank by many in the design establishment, and admittedly, some of his experiments failed, like the flying car that never got off the ground. And yet, the geodesic dome, his design formula to build an emergency shelter from scraps of wood, metal, plastic, bits of tree, old blankets, plastic sheeting — just about anything that's available at the time — is one of the greatest feats of humanitarian design, and has provided sorely needed refuge to many, many people in desperate circumstances ever since. Now, it was the courage and verve of radical designers like Bucky and Moholy that drew me to design. I began my career as a news journalist and foreign correspondent. I wrote about politics, economics and corporate affairs, and I could have chosen to specialize in any of those fields. But I picked design, because I believe it's one of the most powerful tools at our disposal to improve our quality of life. Thank you, fellow TED design buffs. (Applause) And greatly as I admire the achievements of professional designers, which have been extraordinary and immense, I also believe that design benefits hugely from the originality, the lateral thinking and the resourcefulness of its rebels and renegades. And we're living at a remarkable moment in design, because this is a time when the two camps are coming closer together. Because even very basic advances in digital technology have enabled them to operate increasingly independently, in or out of a commercial context, to pursue ever more ambitious and eclectic objectives. So in theory, basic platforms like crowdfunding, cloud computing, social media are giving greater freedom to professional designers and giving more resources for the improvisational ones, and hopefully, a more receptive response to their ideas. Now, some of my favorite examples of this are in Africa, where a new generation of designers are developing incredible Internet of Things technologies to fulfill Florence Nightingale's dream of improving healthcare in countries where more people now have access to cell phones than to clean, running water. And among them is Arthur Zang. He's a young, Cameroonian design engineer who has a adapted a tablet computer into the Cardiopad, a mobile heart-monitoring device. It can be used to monitor the hearts of patients in remote, rural areas. The data is then sent on a cellular network to well-equipped hospitals hundreds of miles away for analysis. And if any problems are spotted by the specialists there, a suitable course of treatment is recommended. And this of course saves many patients from making long, arduous, expensive and often pointless journeys to those hospitals, and makes it much, much likelier that their hearts will actually be checked. Arthur Zang started working on the Cardiopad eight years ago, in his final year at university. But he failed to persuade any conventional sources to give him investment to get the project off the ground. He posted the idea on Facebook, where a Cameroonian government official saw it and managed to secure a government grant for him. He's now developing not only the Cardiopad, but other mobile medical devices to treat different conditions. And he isn't alone, because there are many other inspiring and enterprising designers who are also pursuing extraordinary projects of their own. And I'm going to finish by looking at just a few of them. One is Peek Vision. This is a group of doctors and designers in Kenya, who've developed an Internet of Things technology of their own, as a portable eye examination kit. Then there's Gabriel Maher, who is developing a new design language to enable us to articulate the subtleties of our changing gender identities, without recourse to traditional stereotypes. All of these designers and many more are pursuing their dreams, by the making the most of their newfound freedom, with the discipline of professional designers and the resourcefulness of rebels and renegades. And we all stand to benefit. Thank you. (Applause) |
The dream we haven't dared to dream | {0: 'We dream boldly in the dimension of our doing, but set the bar no higher than stability in our emotional lives. It’s time to dream in multiple dimensions at the same time, says AIDSRide Founder Dan Pallotta. He aims to transform the way society thinks about giving, and being.'} | TED2016 | When I think about dreams, like many of you, I think about this picture. I was eight when I watched Neil Armstrong step off the Lunar Module onto the surface of the Moon. I had never seen anything like it before, and I've never seen anything like it since. We got to the Moon for one simple reason: John Kennedy committed us to a deadline. And in the absence of that deadline, we would still be dreaming about it. Leonard Bernstein said two things are necessary for great achievement: a plan and not quite enough time. (Laughter) Deadlines and commitments are the great and fading lessons of Apollo. And they are what give the word "moonshot" its meaning. And our world is in desperate need of political leaders willing to set bold deadlines for the achievement of daring dreams on the scale of Apollo again. When I think about dreams, I think about the drag queens of LA and Stonewall and millions of other people risking everything to come out when that was really dangerous, and of this picture of the White House lit up in rainbow colors, yes — (Applause) — celebrating America's gay and lesbian citizens' right to marry. It is a picture that in my wildest dreams I could never have imagined when I was 18 and figuring out that I was gay and feeling estranged from my country and my dreams because of it. I think about this picture of my family that I never dreamed I could ever have — (Applause) — and of our children holding this headline I never dreamed could ever be printed about the Supreme Court ruling. We need more of the courage of drag queens and astronauts. (Laughter) (Applause) But I want to talk about the need for us to dream in more than one dimension, because there was something about Apollo that I didn't know when I was 8, and something about organizing that the rainbow colors over. Of the 30 astronauts in the original Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, only seven marriages survived. Those iconic images of the astronauts bouncing on the Moon obscure the alcoholism and depression on Earth. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, asked during the time of Apollo, "What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?" And what can we gain by the right to marry if we are not able to cross the acrimony and emotional distance that so often separates us from our love? And not just in marriage. I have seen the most hurtful, destructive, tragic infighting in LGBT and AIDS and breast cancer and non-profit activism, all in the name of love. Thomas Merton also wrote about wars among saints and that "there is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace." Too often our dreams become these compartmentalized fixations on some future that destroy our ability to be present for our lives right now. Our dreams of a better life for some future humanity or some other humanity in another country alienate us from the beautiful human beings sitting next to us at this very moment. Well, that's just the price of progress, we say. You can go to the Moon or you can have stability in your family life. And we can't conceive of dreaming in both dimensions at the same time. And we don't set the bar much higher than stability when it comes to our emotional life. Which is why our technology for talking to one another has gone vertical, our ability to listen and understand one another has gone nowhere. Our access to information is through the roof, our access to joy, grounded. But this idea, that our present and our future are mutually exclusive, that to fulfill our potential for doing we have to surrender our profound potential for being, that the number of transistors on a circuit can be doubled and doubled, but our capacity for compassion and humanity and serenity and love is somehow limited is a false and suffocating choice. Now, I'm not suggesting simply the uninspiring idea of more work-life balance. What good is it for me to spend more time with my kids at home if my mind is always somewhere else while I'm doing it? I'm not even talking about mindfulness. Mindfulness is all of a sudden becoming a tool for improving productivity. (Laughter) Right? I'm talking about dreaming as boldly in the dimension of our being as we do about industry and technology. I'm talking about an audacious authenticity that allows us to cry with one another, a heroic humility that allows us to remove our masks and be real. It is our inability to be with one another, our fear of crying with one another, that gives rise to so many of the problems we are frantically trying to solve in the first place, from Congressional gridlock to economic inhumanity. (Applause) I'm talking about what Jonas Salk called an Epoch B, a new epoch in which we become as excited about and curious about and scientific about the development of our humanity as we are about the development of our technology. We should not shrink from this opportunity simply because we don't really understand it. There was a time when we didn't understand space. Or because we're more used to technology and activism. That is the very definition of being stuck in a comfort zone. We are now very comfortable imagining unimaginable technological achievement. In 2016, it is the dimension of our being itself that cries out for its fair share of our imagination. Now, we're all here to dream, but maybe if we're honest about it, each of us chasing our own dream. You know, looking at the name tags to see who can help me with my dream, sometimes looking right through one another's humanity. I can't be bothered with you right now. I have an idea for saving the world. Right? (Laughter) Years ago, once upon a time, I had this beautiful company that created these long journeys for heroic civic engagement. And we had this mantra: "Human. Kind. Be Both." And we encouraged people to experiment outrageously with kindness. Like, "Go help everybody set up their tents." And there were a lot of tents. (Laughter) "Go buy everybody Popsicles." "Go help people fix their flat tires even though you know the dinner line is going to get longer." And people really took us up on this, so much so that if you got a flat tire on the AIDS ride, you had trouble fixing it, because there were so many people there asking you if you needed help. For a few days, for tens of thousands of people, we created these worlds that everybody said were the way they wish the world could always be. What if we experimented with creating that kind of world these next few days? And instead of going up to someone and asking them, "What do you do?" ask them, "So what are your dreams?" or "What are your broken dreams?" You know, "TED." Tend to Each other's Dreams. (Applause) Maybe it's "I want to stay sober" or "I want to build a tree house with my kid." You know, instead of going up to the person everybody wants to meet, go up to the person who is all alone and ask them if they want to grab a cup of coffee. I think what we fear most is that we will be denied the opportunity to fulfill our true potential, that we are born to dream and we might die without ever having the chance. Imagine living in a world where we simply recognize that deep, existential fear in one another and love one another boldly because we know that to be human is to live with that fear. It's time for us to dream in multiple dimensions simultaneously, and somewhere that transcends all of the wondrous things we can and will and must do lies the domain of all the unbelievable things we could be. It's time we set foot into that dimension and came out about the fact that we have dreams there, too. If the Moon could dream, I think that would be its dream for us. It's an honor to be with you. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A sci-fi vision of love from a 318-year-old hologram | {0: "Novelist, writer, culture critic and playwright Monica Byrne thinks that there's an infinite number of stories to tell, and she intends to tell as many as she can."} | TED2016 | Do I look real to you? Hope so. I have no idea if you're seeing this, but I'm just going to look ahead and trust that you're there. I've drawn a semicircle in the sand in front of me so I don't walk past it and look like I'm floating in midair. Right now I'm standing in the open air, on a beach under a palm tree, in the exact spot where your stage used to be. I have 12 minutes with you. I set a limit. My wife Navid once said that infinite possibility is a creator's worst enemy. For example, this dress: I'd asked her to design something that a priest might have worn in 23rd-century Cairo. But we only had three days to make it, and the only fabric we had was an old duvet cover that another resident left behind. But she did it, and it's perfect. And she looked at it and said, "Proof of concept — creation needs constraint." So with these 12 minutes, I'm going to tell you about my greatest discovery. For my whole life, my obsession has been eternal life, as I know it is so many of yours. You may be happy to know that your research will pay off. I am 318 years old. The average human lifespan is now 432 years, and my work has been to extend the human lifespan indefinitely. And I've never questioned that someday, we'll reach a point where we'll be content. But the opposite keeps happening: the longer we live, the longer we want to live, the less we want to die. Who can blame us? The universe is so big. There won't ever not be more to see. Just yesterday, I was reading about how you can take out a boat on Europa and sail from island to island all over the planet, and some of the islands have villages that you can stay and visit and sleep under the shadow of Jupiter. And then there's this other island where there's just one songwriter who sits and plays mandolin for the ocean. And then there are others where there's no one and there never has been, and so you go just for the pleasure of touching your foot to sand that no foot has ever touched before. You could spend 400 years doing just that. Right now the Moon is rising in the Northeast. I can see the cities on it with my naked eye. They're connected like nerve clusters: Mariapolis on the South Pole, and Ramachandran on the Equator. And New Tehran in the Sea of Tranquility. That's where Navid and I met. We were both artists downtown. The day we met, we were passing each other in Azadi Square, and we bumped shoulders. And I turned to apologize and she, without saying hello or introducing herself or anything, said, "Well, why do you think we didn't just pass through each other?" And first of all, I thought, "Who the hell are you?" But second, the question annoyed me, because the answer is so simple. I said, "We didn't pass through each other because elementary particles have mass and because the space between elementary particles is filled with the binding energy that also has the properties of mass, and we've known that for 800 years." She must have been in one of those moods where she likes to mess with strangers. Or maybe she was just flirting with me, because she looked at me and said, "I thought you'd say that. Think deeper." And then she took off her belt, this belt that I'm wearing now, and she said, "Our universe is built so that particles have mass. Without that basic constraint, we'd have just passed right through each other at the speed of light and never even known." And that's how our romance began. Navid and I never ran out of things to talk about. Never. It was incredible. It was like we were both heroes climbing up into a mountain range together and we kept arriving at new vistas, and these new, perfect constellations of words would come out of us to describe them. And we'd forget them as soon as we made them, and throw them over our shoulder and go on to the next thing, on and up. Or one time, Navid said that our talk was like we were always making bread, and that we were always adding in a little more flour and a little more water, and folding it in and turning it over and never getting around to baking it. If my obsession was eternal life, Navid's obsession was touch. She had a genius for it. All of her work revolved around it. My body was like a canvas for her, and she would draw her fingertip down over my face so slowly that I couldn't feel it moving. And she was obsessed with the exact moment when I would stop being able to tell the difference between her body and mine. Or she would just lie across me and dig her shoulder into mine and say, "Pilar, why does this feel so good?" I'd say, "I don't know!" And she always had a facetious answer for her facetious question, but the answer I remember today is, "It feels good because the universe chose its constraints, and we are its art." It's always funny what you think the future is going to be like versus what it turns out to be. In your time, scientists thought humans could freeze themselves and wake up in the future. And they did — but then they died. In your time, scientists thought humans could replace organs and extend life for hundreds of years. And they did, but eventually, they died anyway. In your time, Earth is the only place people live. In my time, Earth is the place people come to die. So when Navid started to show the signs, our friends assumed I would do what everyone does, which is say goodbye and send her to Earth, so that none of us would have to look at her or be around her or think about her and her ... failure to keep living. More than anything, they didn't want to be around her actual physical body. They kept referring to it as "declining," even though she herself was fascinated by it, the changes it was going through, following the rules of its nature day by day, independent of her will. I did send Navid to Earth. But I came with her. I remember a friend of ours, just before we left, said, "I just think it's arrogant, like the rules don't apply to you, like you think your love is that special." But I did. So, even here on Earth, I kept working on how to extend life. It didn't occur to me that there could be any other response. I kept going back to that thing that Navid said to me that day in Azadi Square, that without that basic constraint — a universe that granted mass to matter — we would not exist. That's one rule. Another rule is that all mass is subject to entropy. And there is no way to be in this universe without mass. I know. I tried everything. I tried creating a photon box where the Higgs field was altered. I tried recording all subatomic movements in my body and replaying them on closed loop. Nothing worked. But my final innovation was to create a coil dimension with the boundaries of a body in which time moved infinitely slower, but whose projection would appear to move in normal time. That body would then appear in our universe as a hologram — here but not here. When I realized I'd done it, I ran to her room, so happy to tell her I'd done it, moving through space almost normally to all eyes, even to my own, and went to lie down next to her, and forgot, and fell right through her. I'd found a way to eternal life, at the expense of the one thing Navid loved most, which was to touch and be touched. And she threw me out. I still got to watch, though. Humans live 400 years now, and we still die. And when death comes, the dying still pick at their bedsheets, and their arms break out in blue and violet blooms on the insides, and their breaths get further and further apart, like they're falling asleep. I've always thought that what gives a life meaning is adventure. And death is just a problem we haven't discovered the solution to yet. But maybe a life has meaning only because it ends. Maybe that's the paradox: constraints don't constrain, they allow perfect freedom. (Sighs) There was a thunderstorm here this morning. There is another forecast for tonight, but for now the sky is clear. I can't feel the wind here, but I just asked one of the caretakers who passed by what it felt like, and she said it felt warm, like melted butter. An answer worthy of my wife. I have to find my way back to the flesh. Until then, I take up no space but the space you give me. |
This virtual lab will revolutionize science class | {0: 'Michael Bodekaer is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for building innovative technology companies that have the potential to change the world. '} | TEDxCERN | Today, I am going to show you how this tablet and this virtual-reality headset that I'm wearing are going to completely revolutionize science education. And I'm also going to show you how it can make any science teacher more than twice as effective. But before I show you how all of this is possible, let's talk briefly about why improving the quality of science education is so vitally important. If you think about it, the world is growing incredibly fast. And with that growth comes a whole list of growing challenges, challenges such as dealing with global warming, solving starvation and water shortages and curing diseases, to name just a few. And who, exactly, is going to help us solve all of these great challenges? Well, to a very last degree, it is these young students. This is the next generation of young, bright scientists. And in many ways, we all rely on them for coming up with new, great innovations to help us solve all these challenges ahead of us. And so a couple of years back, my cofounder and I were teaching university students just like these, only the students we were teaching looked a little bit more like this here. (Laughter) And yes, this is really the reality out there in way too many universities around the world: students that are bored, disengaged and sometimes not even sure why they're learning about a topic in the first place. So we started looking around for new, innovative teaching methods, but what we found was quite disappointing. We saw that books were being turned into e-books, blackboards were being turned into YouTube videos and lecture hall monologues were being turned into MOOCs — massive online open courses. And if you think about it, all we're really doing here is taking the same content and the same format, and bringing it out to more students — which is great, don't get me wrong, that is really great — but the teaching method is still more or less the same, no real innovation there. So we started looking elsewhere. What we found was that flight simulators had been proven over and over again to be far more effective when used in combination with real, in-flight training to train the pilots. And so we thought to ourselves: Why not just apply that to science? Why not build a virtual laboratory simulator? Well, we did it. We basically set out to create a fully simulated, one-to-one, virtual reality laboratory simulator, where the students could perform experiments with mathematical equations that would simulate what would happen in a real-world lab. But not just simple simulations — we would also create advanced simulations with top universities like MIT, to bring out cutting-edge cancer research to these students. And suddenly, the universities could save millions of dollars by letting the students perform virtual experiments before they go into the real laboratory. And not only that; now, they could also understand — even on a molecular level inside the machine — what is happening to the machines. And then they could suddenly perform dangerous experiments in the labs as well. For instance also here, learning about salmonella bacteria, which is an important topic that many schools cannot teach for good safety reasons. And we, of course, quiz the students and then give the teachers a full dashboard, so they fully understand where the students are at. But we didn't stop there, because we had seen just how important meaning is for the students' engagement in the class. So we brought in game designers to create fun and engaging stories. For instance, here in this case, where the students have to solve a mysterious CSI murder case using their core science skills. And the feedback we got when we launched all of this was quite overwhelmingly positive. Here we have 300 students, all passionately solving CSI murder cases while learning core science skills. And what I love the most about this is really when the students come up to me sometimes afterwards, all surprised and a little confused, and say, "I just spent two hours in this virtual lab, and ... and I didn't check Facebook." (Laughter) That's how engaging and immersive this really is for the students. And so, to investigate whether this really worked, a learning psychologist did a study with 160 students — that was from Stanford University and Technical University of Denmark. And what they did is split the students into two groups. One group would only use the virtual laboratory simulations, the other group would only use traditional teaching methods, and they had the same amount of time. Then, interestingly, they gave the students a test before and after the experiment, so they could clearly measure the learning impact of the students. And what they found was a surprisingly high 76 percent increase in the learning effectiveness when using virtual laboratories over traditional teaching methods. But even more interestingly, the second part of this study investigated what the teacher's impact was on the learning. And what they found was that when you combined the virtual laboratories with teacher-led coaching and mentoring, then we saw a total 101 percent increase in the learning effectiveness, which effectively doubles the science teacher's impact with the same amount of time spent. So a couple of months back, we started asking ourselves — we have a wonderful team now of learning psychologists and teachers and scientists and game developers — and we started asking ourselves: How can we keep ourselves to our promise of constantly reimagining education? And today, I am really excited to be presenting what we came up with and have been working incredibly hard to create. I will explain briefly what this is. Basically, I take my mobile phone — most students already have these, smartphones — and I plug it into this virtual-reality headset, a low-cost headset. And now what I can effectively do is, I can literally step into this virtual world. We'll have some of you in the audience also get to try this, because it is really something that you have to try to fully feel how immersive it really is. It literally feels like I just stepped inside this virtual lab. Do you see me up on the screen? Audience: Yes. Michael Bodekaer: Great! Awesome. So basically, I have just turned my mobile phone into a fully simulated, million-dollar Ivy League laboratory with all this amazing equipment that I can interact with. I can, for instance, pick up the pipette and do experiments with it. I have my E-Ggel, my PCR and — oh, look there, I have my next-generation sequencing machine, and there I even have my electron microscope. I mean, who's carrying around an electron microscope in their pocket? And here I have my machine, I can do different experiments on the machine. And over here I have the door, I can go into other experiments, I can perform in the laboratories. And here, I have my learning tablet. This is an intelligent tablet that allows me to read about relevant theory. As you can see, I can interact with it. I can watch videos and see content that is relevant to the experiment that I'm performing right now. Then over here, I have Marie. She is my teacher — my lab assistant — and what she does is guides me through this whole laboratory. And very soon, the teachers will be able to literally teleport themselves into this virtual world that I'm in right now and help me, guide me, through this whole experiment. And now before I finalize this, I want to show you an even cooler thing, I think — something you cannot even do in real laboratories. This is a PCR machine. I'm now going to start this experiment. And what I just did is literally shrunk myself a million times into the size of a molecule — and it really feels like it, you have to try this. So now it feels like I'm standing inside the machine and I'm seeing all the DNA, and I see the molecules. I see the polymerase and the enzymes and so forth. And I can see how in this case, DNA is being replicated millions of times, just like it's happening inside your body right now. And I can really feel and understand how all of this works. Now, I hope that gives you a little bit of a sense of the possibilities in these new teaching methods. And I want to also emphasize that everything you just saw also works on iPads and laptops without the headsets. I say that for a very important reason. In order for us to really empower and inspire the next generation of scientists, we really need teachers to drive the adoption of new technologies in the classroom. And so in many ways, I believe that the next big, quantum leap in science education lies no longer with the technology, but rather with the teachers' decision to push forward and adopt these technologies inside the classrooms. And so it is our hope that more universities and schools and teachers will collaborate with technology companies to realize this full potential. And so, lastly, I'd like to leave you with a little story that really inspires me. And that is the story of Jack Andraka. Some of you might already know him. Jack invented a new, groundbreaking low-cost test for pancreatic cancer at the age 15. And when Jack shares his story of how he did this huge breakthrough, he also explains that one thing almost prevented him from making this breakthrough. And that was that he did not have access to real laboratories, because he was too inexperienced to be allowed in. Now, imagine if we could bring Ivy League, million-dollar virtual laboratories out to all these students just like Jack, all over the world, and give them the latest, greatest, most fancy machines you can imagine that would quite literally make any scientist in here jump up and down out of pure excitement. And then imagine how that would empower and inspire a whole new generation of young and bright scientists, ready to innovate and change the world. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Gene editing can now change an entire species -- forever | {0: 'In articles that span the gene-editing abilities of CRISPR, the roots of psychopathic behavior in children, and much more, Jennifer Kahn weaves gripping stories from unlikely sources.'} | TED2016 | So this is a talk about gene drives, but I'm going to start by telling you a brief story. 20 years ago, a biologist named Anthony James got obsessed with the idea of making mosquitos that didn't transmit malaria. It was a great idea, and pretty much a complete failure. For one thing, it turned out to be really hard to make a malaria-resistant mosquito. James managed it, finally, just a few years ago, by adding some genes that make it impossible for the malaria parasite to survive inside the mosquito. But that just created another problem. Now that you've got a malaria-resistant mosquito, how do you get it to replace all the malaria-carrying mosquitos? There are a couple options, but plan A was basically to breed up a bunch of the new genetically-engineered mosquitos release them into the wild and hope that they pass on their genes. The problem was that you'd have to release literally 10 times the number of native mosquitos to work. So in a village with 10,000 mosquitos, you release an extra 100,000. As you might guess, this was not a very popular strategy with the villagers. (Laughter) Then, last January, Anthony James got an email from a biologist named Ethan Bier. Bier said that he and his grad student Valentino Gantz had stumbled on a tool that could not only guarantee that a particular genetic trait would be inherited, but that it would spread incredibly quickly. If they were right, it would basically solve the problem that he and James had been working on for 20 years. As a test, they engineered two mosquitos to carry the anti-malaria gene and also this new tool, a gene drive, which I'll explain in a minute. Finally, they set it up so that any mosquitos that had inherited the anti-malaria gene wouldn't have the usual white eyes, but would instead have red eyes. That was pretty much just for convenience so they could tell just at a glance which was which. So they took their two anti-malarial, red-eyed mosquitos and put them in a box with 30 ordinary white-eyed ones, and let them breed. In two generations, those had produced 3,800 grandchildren. That is not the surprising part. This is the surprising part: given that you started with just two red-eyed mosquitos and 30 white-eyed ones, you expect mostly white-eyed descendants. Instead, when James opened the box, all 3,800 mosquitos had red eyes. When I asked Ethan Bier about this moment, he became so excited that he was literally shouting into the phone. That's because getting only red-eyed mosquitos violates a rule that is the absolute cornerstone of biology, Mendelian genetics. I'll keep this quick, but Mendelian genetics says when a male and a female mate, their baby inherits half of its DNA from each parent. So if our original mosquito was aa and our new mosquito is aB, where B is the anti-malarial gene, the babies should come out in four permutations: aa, aB, aa, Ba. Instead, with the new gene drive, they all came out aB. Biologically, that shouldn't even be possible. So what happened? The first thing that happened was the arrival of a gene-editing tool known as CRISPR in 2012. Many of you have probably heard about CRISPR, so I'll just say briefly that CRISPR is a tool that allows researchers to edit genes very precisely, easily and quickly. It does this by harnessing a mechanism that already existed in bacteria. Basically, there's a protein that acts like a scissors and cuts the DNA, and there's an RNA molecule that directs the scissors to any point on the genome you want. The result is basically a word processor for genes. You can take an entire gene out, put one in, or even edit just a single letter within a gene. And you can do it in nearly any species. OK, remember how I said that gene drives originally had two problems? The first was that it was hard to engineer a mosquito to be malaria-resistant. That's basically gone now, thanks to CRISPR. But the other problem was logistical. How do you get your trait to spread? This is where it gets clever. A couple years ago, a biologist at Harvard named Kevin Esvelt wondered what would happen if you made it so that CRISPR inserted not only your new gene but also the machinery that does the cutting and pasting. In other words, what if CRISPR also copied and pasted itself. You'd end up with a perpetual motion machine for gene editing. And that's exactly what happened. This CRISPR gene drive that Esvelt created not only guarantees that a trait will get passed on, but if it's used in the germline cells, it will automatically copy and paste your new gene into both chromosomes of every single individual. It's like a global search and replace, or in science terms, it makes a heterozygous trait homozygous. So, what does this mean? For one thing, it means we have a very powerful, but also somewhat alarming new tool. Up until now, the fact that gene drives didn't work very well was actually kind of a relief. Normally when we mess around with an organism's genes, we make that thing less evolutionarily fit. So biologists can make all the mutant fruit flies they want without worrying about it. If some escape, natural selection just takes care of them. What's remarkable and powerful and frightening about gene drives is that that will no longer be true. Assuming that your trait does not have a big evolutionary handicap, like a mosquito that can't fly, the CRISPR-based gene drive will spread the change relentlessly until it is in every single individual in the population. Now, it isn't easy to make a gene drive that works that well, but James and Esvelt think that we can. The good news is that this opens the door to some remarkable things. If you put an anti-malarial gene drive in just 1 percent of Anopheles mosquitoes, the species that transmits malaria, researchers estimate that it would spread to the entire population in a year. So in a year, you could virtually eliminate malaria. In practice, we're still a few years out from being able to do that, but still, a 1,000 children a day die of malaria. In a year, that number could be almost zero. The same goes for dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever. And it gets better. Say you want to get rid of an invasive species, like get Asian carp out of the Great Lakes. All you have to do is release a gene drive that makes the fish produce only male offspring. In a few generations, there'll be no females left, no more carp. In theory, this means we could restore hundreds of native species that have been pushed to the brink. OK, that's the good news, this is the bad news. Gene drives are so effective that even an accidental release could change an entire species, and often very quickly. Anthony James took good precautions. He bred his mosquitos in a bio-containment lab and he also used a species that's not native to the US so that even if some did escape, they'd just die off, there'd be nothing for them to mate with. But it's also true that if a dozen Asian carp with the all-male gene drive accidentally got carried from the Great Lakes back to Asia, they could potentially wipe out the native Asian carp population. And that's not so unlikely, given how connected our world is. In fact, it's why we have an invasive species problem. And that's fish. Things like mosquitos and fruit flies, there's literally no way to contain them. They cross borders and oceans all the time. OK, the other piece of bad news is that a gene drive might not stay confined to what we call the target species. That's because of gene flow, which is a fancy way of saying that neighboring species sometimes interbreed. If that happens, it's possible a gene drive could cross over, like Asian carp could infect some other kind of carp. That's not so bad if your drive just promotes a trait, like eye color. In fact, there's a decent chance that we'll see a wave of very weird fruit flies in the near future. But it could be a disaster if your drive is deigned to eliminate the species entirely. The last worrisome thing is that the technology to do this, to genetically engineer an organism and include a gene drive, is something that basically any lab in the world can do. An undergraduate can do it. A talented high schooler with some equipment can do it. Now, I'm guessing that this sounds terrifying. (Laughter) Interestingly though, nearly every scientist I talk to seemed to think that gene drives were not actually that frightening or dangerous. Partly because they believe that scientists will be very cautious and responsible about using them. (Laughter) So far, that's been true. But gene drives also have some actual limitations. So for one thing, they work only in sexually reproducing species. So thank goodness, they can't be used to engineer viruses or bacteria. Also, the trait spreads only with each successive generation. So changing or eliminating a population is practical only if that species has a fast reproductive cycle, like insects or maybe small vertebrates like mice or fish. In elephants or people, it would take centuries for a trait to spread widely enough to matter. Also, even with CRISPR, it's not that easy to engineer a truly devastating trait. Say you wanted to make a fruit fly that feeds on ordinary fruit instead of rotting fruit, with the aim of sabotaging American agriculture. First, you'd have to figure out which genes control what the fly wants to eat, which is already a very long and complicated project. Then you'd have to alter those genes to change the fly's behavior to whatever you'd want it to be, which is an even longer and more complicated project. And it might not even work, because the genes that control behavior are complex. So if you're a terrorist and have to choose between starting a grueling basic research program that will require years of meticulous lab work and still might not pan out, or just blowing stuff up? You'll probably choose the later. This is especially true because at least in theory, it should be pretty easy to build what's called a reversal drive. That's one that basically overwrites the change made by the first gene drive. So if you don't like the effects of a change, you can just release a second drive that will cancel it out, at least in theory. OK, so where does this leave us? We now have the ability to change entire species at will. Should we? Are we gods now? I'm not sure I'd say that. But I would say this: first, some very smart people are even now debating how to regulate gene drives. At the same time, some other very smart people are working hard to create safeguards, like gene drives that self-regulate or peter out after a few generations. That's great. But this technology still requires a conversation. And given the nature of gene drives, that conversation has to be global. What if Kenya wants to use a drive but Tanzania doesn't? Who decides whether to release a gene drive that can fly? I don't have the answer to that question. All we can do going forward, I think, is talk honestly about the risks and benefits and take responsibility for our choices. By that I mean, not just the choice to use a gene drive, but also the choice not to use one. Humans have a tendency to assume that the safest option is to preserve the status quo. But that's not always the case. Gene drives have risks, and those need to be discussed, but malaria exists now and kills 1,000 people a day. To combat it, we spray pesticides that do grave damage to other species, including amphibians and birds. So when you hear about gene drives in the coming months, and trust me, you will be hearing about them, remember that. It can be frightening to act, but sometimes, not acting is worse. (Applause) |
This is your brain on communication | {0: 'Why do great thoughts and stories resonate so strongly with so many people, and how do we communicate them? Using fMRI experiments, Uri Hasson is looking for the answers. '} | TED2016 | Imagine that you invented a device that can record my memories, my dreams, my ideas, and transmit them to your brain. That would be a game-changing technology, right? But in fact, we already possess this device, and it's called human communication system and effective storytelling. To understand how this device works, we have to look into our brains. And we have to formulate the question in a slightly different manner. Now we have to ask how these neuron patterns in my brain that are associated with my memories and ideas are transmitted into your brains. And we think there are two factors that enable us to communicate. First, your brain is now physically coupled to the sound wave that I'm transmitting to your brain. And second, we developed a common neural protocol that enabled us to communicate. So how do we know that? In my lab in Princeton, we bring people to the fMRI scanner and we scan their brains while they are either telling or listening to real-life stories. And to give you a sense of the stimulus we are using, let me play 20 seconds from a story that we used, told by a very talented storyteller, Jim O'Grady. (Audio) Jim O'Grady: So I'm banging out my story and I know it's good, and then I start to make it better — (Laughter) by adding an element of embellishment. Reporters call this "making shit up." (Laughter) And they recommend against crossing that line. But I had just seen the line crossed between a high-powered dean and assault with a pastry. And I kinda liked it." Uri Hasson: OK, so now let's look into your brain and see what's happening when you listen to these kinds of stories. And let's start simple — let's start with one listener and one brain area: the auditory cortex that processes the sounds that come from the ear. And as you can see, in this particular brain area, the responses are going up and down as the story is unfolding. Now we can take these responses and compare them to the responses in other listeners in the same brain area. And we can ask: How similar are the responses across all listeners? So here you can see five listeners. And we start to scan their brains before the story starts, when they're simply lying in the dark and waiting for the story to begin. As you can see, the brain area is going up and down in each one of them, but the responses are very different, and not in sync. However, immediately as the story is starting, something amazing is happening. (Audio) JO: So I'm banging out my story and I know it's good, and then I start to make it — UH: Suddenly, you can see that the responses in all of the subjects lock to the story, and now they are going up and down in a very similar way across all listeners. And in fact, this is exactly what is happening now in your brains when you listen to my sound speaking. We call this effect "neural entrainment." And to explain to you what is neural entrainment, let me first explain what is physical entrainment. So, we'll look and see five metronomes. Think of these five metronomes as five brains. And similar to the listeners before the story starts, these metronomes are going to click, but they're going to click out of phase. (Clicking) Now see what will happen when I connect them together by placing them on these two cylinders. (Clicking) Now these two cylinders start to rotate. This rotation vibration is going through the wood and is going to couple all the metronomes together. And now listen to the click. (Synchronized clicking) This is what you call physical entrainment. Now let's go back to the brain and ask: What's driving this neural entrainment? Is it simply the sounds that the speaker is producing? Or maybe it's the words. Or maybe it's the meaning that the speaker is trying to convey. So to test it, we did the following experiment. First, we took the story and played it backwards. And that preserved many of the original auditory features, but removed the meaning. And it sounds something like that. (Audio) JO: (Unintelligible) And we flashed colors in the two brains to indicate brain areas that respond very similarly across people. And as you can see, this incoming sound induced entrainment or alignment in all of the brains in auditory cortices that process the sounds, but it didn't spread deeper into the brain. Now we can take these sounds and build words out of it. So if we take Jim O'Grady and scramble the words, we'll get a list of words. (Audio) JO: ... an animal ... assorted facts ... and right on ... pie man ... potentially ... my stories UH: And you can see that these words start to induce alignment in early language areas, but not more than that. Now we can take the words and start to build sentences out of them. (Audio) JO: And they recommend against crossing that line. He says: "Dear Jim, Good story. Nice details. Didn't she only know about him through me?" UH: Now you can see that the responses in all the language areas that process the incoming language become aligned or similar across all listeners. However, only when we use the full, engaging, coherent story do the responses spread deeper into the brain into higher-order areas, which include the frontal cortex and the parietal cortex, and make all of them respond very similarly. And we believe that these responses in higher-order areas are induced or become similar across listeners because of the meaning conveyed by the speaker, and not by words or sound. And if we are right, there's a strong prediction over here if I tell you the exact same ideas using two very different sets of words, your brain responses will still be similar. And to test it, we did the following experiment in my lab. We took the English story and translated it to Russian. Now you have two different sounds and linguistic systems that convey the exact same meaning. And you play the English story to the English listeners and the Russian story to the Russian listeners, and we can compare their responses across the groups. And when we did that, we didn't see responses that are similar in auditory cortices in language, because the language and sound are very different. However, you can see that the responses in high-order areas were still similar across these two groups. We believe this is because they understood the story in a very similar way, as we confirmed, using a test after the story ended. And we think that this alignment is necessary for communication. For example, as you can tell, I am not a native English speaker. I grew up with another language, and the same might be for many of you in the audience. And still, we can communicate. How come? We think we can communicate because we have this common code that presents meaning. So far, I've only talked about what's happening in the listener's brain, in your brain, when you're listening to talks. But what's happening in the speaker's brain, in my brain, when I'm speaking to you? To look in the speaker's brain, we asked the speaker to go into the scanner, we scan his brain and then compare his brain responses to the brain responses of the listeners listening to the story. You have to remember that producing speech and comprehending speech are very different processes. Here we're asking: How similar are they? To our surprise, we saw that all these complex patterns within the listeners actually came from the speaker brain. So production and comprehension rely on very similar processes. And we also found the stronger the similarity between the listener's brain and the speaker's brain, the better the communication. So I know that if you are completely confused now, and I do hope that this is not the case, your brain responses are very different than mine. But I also know that if you really understand me now, then your brain ... and your brain ... and your brain are really similar to mine. Now, let's take all this information together and ask: How can we use it to transmit a memory that I have from my brain to your brains? So we did the following experiment. We let people watch, for the first time in their life, a TV episode from the BBC series "Sherlock," while we scanned their brains. And then we asked them to go back to the scanner and tell the story to another person that never watched the movie. So let's be specific. Think about this exact scene, when Sherlock is entering the cab in London driven by the murderer he is looking for. With me, as a viewer, there is a specific brain pattern in my brain when I watch it. Now, the exact same pattern, I can reactivate in my brain again by telling the word: Sherlock, London, murderer. And when I'm transmitting these words to your brains now, you have to reconstruct it in your mind. In fact, we see that pattern emerging now in your brains. And we were really surprised to see that the pattern you have now in your brains when I'm describing to you these scenes would be very similar to the pattern I had when I watched this movie a few months ago in the scanner. This starts to tell you about the mechanism by which we can tell stories and transmit information. Because, for example, now you're listening really hard and trying to understand what I'm saying. And I know that it's not easy. But I hope that at one point in the talk we clicked, and you got me. And I think that in a few hours, a few days, a few months, you're going to meet someone at a party, and you're going to tell him about this lecture, and suddenly it will be as if he is standing now here with us. Now you can see how we can take this mechanism and try to transmit memories and knowledge across people, which is wonderful, right? But our ability to communicate relies on our ability to have common ground. Because, for example, if I'm going to use the British synonym "hackney carriage" instead of "cab," I know that I'm going to be misaligned with most of you in the audience. This alignment depends not only on our ability to understand the basic concept; it also depends on our ability to develop common ground and understanding and shared belief systems. Because we know that in many cases, people understand the exact same story in very different ways. So to test it in the lab, we did the following experiment. We took a story by J.D. Salinger, in which a husband lost track of his wife in the middle of a party, and he's calling his best friend, asking, "Did you see my wife?" For half of the subjects, we said that the wife was having an affair with the best friend. For the other half, we said that the wife is loyal and the husband is very jealous. This one sentence before the story started was enough to make the brain responses of all the people that believed the wife was having an affair be very similar in these high-order areas and different than the other group. And if one sentence is enough to make your brain similar to people that think like you and very different than people that think differently than you, think how this effect is going to be amplified in real life, when we are all listening to the exact same news item after being exposed day after day after day to different media channels, like Fox News or The New York Times, that give us very different perspectives on reality. So let me summarize. If everything worked as planned tonight, I used my ability to vocalize sound to be coupled to your brains. And I used this coupling to transmit my brain patterns associated with my memories and ideas into your brains. In this, I start to reveal the hidden neural mechanism by which we communicate. And we know that in the future it will enable us to improve and facilitate communication. But these studies also reveal that communication relies on a common ground. And we have to be really worried as a society if we lose this common ground and our ability to speak with people that are slightly different than us because we let a few very strong media channels take control of the mic, and manipulate and control the way we all think. And I'm not sure how to fix it because I'm only a scientist. But maybe one way to do it is to go back to the more natural way of communication, which is a dialogue, in which it's not only me speaking to you now, but a more natural way of talking, in which I am speaking and I am listening, and together we are trying to come to a common ground and new ideas. Because after all, the people we are coupled to define who we are. And our desire to be coupled to another brain is something very basic that starts at a very early age. So let me finish with an example from my own private life that I think is a good example of how coupling to other people is really going to define who we are. This my son Jonathan at a very early age. See how he developed a vocal game together with my wife, only from the desire and pure joy of being coupled to another human being. (Both vocalizing) (Laughter) Now, think how the ability of my son to be coupled to us and other people in his life is going to shape the man he is going to become. And think how you change on a daily basis from the interaction and coupling to other people in your life. So keep being coupled to other people. Keep spreading your ideas, because the sum of all of us together, coupled, is greater than our parts. Thank you. (Applause) |
An artist's unflinching look at racial violence | {0: 'Sanford Biggers creates art that upends traditional narratives about topics ranging from hip hop to Buddhism to American history.'} | TED2016 | As a conceptual artist, I'm constantly looking for creative ways to spark challenging conversations. I do this though painting, sculpture, video and performance. But regardless of the format, two of my favorite materials are history and dialogue. In 2007, I created "Lotus," a seven-and-a-half-foot diameter, 600-pound glass depiction of a lotus blossom. In Buddhism, the lotus is a symbol for transcendence and for purity of mind and spirit. But a closer look at this lotus reveals each petal to be the cross-section of a slave ship. This iconic diagram was taken from a British slaving manual and later used by abolitionists to show the atrocities of slavery. In America, we don't like to talk about slavery, nor do we look at it as a global industry. But by using this Buddhist symbol, I hope to universalize and transcend the history and trauma of black America and encourage discussions about our shared past. To create "Lotus," we carved over 6,000 figures. And this later led to a commission by the City of New York to create a 28-foot version in steel as a permanent installation at the Eagle Academy for Young Men, a school for black and latino students, the two groups most affected by this history. The same two groups are very affected by a more recent phenomenon, but let me digress. I've been collecting wooden African figures from tourist shops and flea markets around the world. The authenticity and origin of them is completely debatable, but people believe these to be imbued with power, or even magic. Only recently have I figured out how to use this in my own work. (Gun shots) Since 2012, the world has witnessed the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice and literally countless other unarmed black citizens at the hands of the police, who frequently walk away with no punishment at all. In consideration of these victims and the several times that even I, a law-abiding, Ivy League professor, have been targeted and harassed at gunpoint by the police. I created this body of work simply entitled "BAM." It was important to erase the identity of each of these figures, to make them all look the same and easier to disregard. To do this, I dip them in a thick, brown wax before taking them to a shooting range where I re-sculpted them using bullets. And it was fun, playing with big guns and high-speed video cameras. But my reverence for these figures kept me from actually pulling the trigger, somehow feeling as if I would be shooting myself. Finally, my cameraman, Raul, fired the shots. I then took the fragments of these and created molds, and cast them first in wax, and finally in bronze like the image you see here, which bears the marks of its violent creation like battle wounds or scars. When I showed this work recently in Miami, a woman told me she felt every gun shot to her soul. But she also felt that these artworks memorialized the victims of these killings as well as other victims of racial violence throughout US history. But "Lotus" and "BAM" are larger than just US history. While showing in Berlin last year, a philosophy student asked me what prompted these recent killings. I showed him a photo of a lynching postcard from the early 1900s and reminded him that these killings have been going on for over 500 years. But it's only through questions like his and more thoughtful dialogue about history and race can we evolve as individuals and society. I hope my artwork creates a safe space for this type of honest exchange and an opportunity for people to engage one another in real and necessary conversation. Thank you. (Applause) |
This tiny particle could roam your body to find tumors | {0: 'Sangeeta Bhatia is a cancer researcher, MIT professor and biotech entrepreneur who works to adapt technologies developed in the computer industry for medical innovation. '} | TED Talks Live | In the space that used to house one transistor, we can now fit one billion. That made it so that a computer the size of an entire room now fits in your pocket. You might say the future is small. As an engineer, I'm inspired by this miniaturization revolution in computers. As a physician, I wonder whether we could use it to reduce the number of lives lost due to one of the fastest-growing diseases on Earth: cancer. Now when I say that, what most people hear me say is that we're working on curing cancer. And we are. But it turns out that there's an incredible opportunity to save lives through the early detection and prevention of cancer. Worldwide, over two-thirds of deaths due to cancer are fully preventable using methods that we already have in hand today. Things like vaccination, timely screening and of course, stopping smoking. But even with the best tools and technologies that we have today, some tumors can't be detected until 10 years after they've started growing, when they are 50 million cancer cells strong. What if we had better technologies to detect some of these more deadly cancers sooner, when they could be removed, when they were just getting started? Let me tell you about how miniaturization might get us there. This is a microscope in a typical lab that a pathologist would use for looking at a tissue specimen, like a biopsy or a pap smear. This $7,000 microscope would be used by somebody with years of specialized training to spot cancer cells. This is an image from a colleague of mine at Rice University, Rebecca Richards-Kortum. What she and her team have done is miniaturize that whole microscope into this $10 part, and it fits on the end of an optical fiber. Now what that means is instead of taking a sample from a patient and sending it to the microscope, you can bring the microscope to the patient. And then, instead of requiring a specialist to look at the images, you can train the computer to score normal versus cancerous cells. Now this is important, because what they found working in rural communities, is that even when they have a mobile screening van that can go out into the community and perform exams and collect samples and send them to the central hospital for analysis, that days later, women get a call with an abnormal test result and they're asked to come in. Fully half of them don't turn up because they can't afford the trip. With the integrated microscope and computer analysis, Rebecca and her colleagues have been able to create a van that has both a diagnostic setup and a treatment setup. And what that means is that they can do a diagnosis and perform therapy on the spot, so no one is lost to follow up. That's just one example of how miniaturization can save lives. Now as engineers, we think of this as straight-up miniaturization. You took a big thing and you made it little. But what I told you before about computers was that they transformed our lives when they became small enough for us to take them everywhere. So what is the transformational equivalent like that in medicine? Well, what if you had a detector that was so small that it could circulate in your body, find the tumor all by itself and send a signal to the outside world? It sounds a little bit like science fiction. But actually, nanotechnology allows us to do just that. Nanotechnology allows us to shrink the parts that make up the detector from the width of a human hair, which is 100 microns, to a thousand times smaller, which is 100 nanometers. And that has profound implications. It turns out that materials actually change their properties at the nanoscale. You take a common material like gold, and you grind it into dust, into gold nanoparticles, and it changes from looking gold to looking red. If you take a more exotic material like cadmium selenide — forms a big, black crystal — if you make nanocrystals out of this material and you put it in a liquid, and you shine light on it, they glow. And they glow blue, green, yellow, orange, red, depending only on their size. It's wild! Can you imagine an object like that in the macro world? It would be like all the denim jeans in your closet are all made of cotton, but they are different colors depending only on their size. (Laughter) So as a physician, what's just as interesting to me is that it's not just the color of materials that changes at the nanoscale; the way they travel in your body also changes. And this is the kind of observation that we're going to use to make a better cancer detector. So let me show you what I mean. This is a blood vessel in the body. Surrounding the blood vessel is a tumor. We're going to inject nanoparticles into the blood vessel and watch how they travel from the bloodstream into the tumor. Now it turns out that the blood vessels of many tumors are leaky, and so nanoparticles can leak out from the bloodstream into the tumor. Whether they leak out depends on their size. So in this image, the smaller, hundred-nanometer, blue nanoparticles are leaking out, and the larger, 500-nanometer, red nanoparticles are stuck in the bloodstream. So that means as an engineer, depending on how big or small I make a material, I can change where it goes in your body. In my lab, we recently made a cancer nanodetector that is so small that it could travel into the body and look for tumors. We designed it to listen for tumor invasion: the orchestra of chemical signals that tumors need to make to spread. For a tumor to break out of the tissue that it's born in, it has to make chemicals called enzymes to chew through the scaffolding of tissues. We designed these nanoparticles to be activated by these enzymes. One enzyme can activate a thousand of these chemical reactions in an hour. Now in engineering, we call that one-to-a-thousand ratio a form of amplification, and it makes something ultrasensitive. So we've made an ultrasensitive cancer detector. OK, but how do I get this activated signal to the outside world, where I can act on it? For this, we're going to use one more piece of nanoscale biology, and that has to do with the kidney. The kidney is a filter. Its job is to filter out the blood and put waste into the urine. It turns out that what the kidney filters is also dependent on size. So in this image, what you can see is that everything smaller than five nanometers is going from the blood, through the kidney, into the urine, and everything else that's bigger is retained. OK, so if I make a 100-nanometer cancer detector, I inject it in the bloodstream, it can leak into the tumor where it's activated by tumor enzymes to release a small signal that is small enough to be filtered out of the kidney and put into the urine, I have a signal in the outside world that I can detect. OK, but there's one more problem. This is a tiny little signal, so how do I detect it? Well, the signal is just a molecule. They're molecules that we designed as engineers. They're completely synthetic, and we can design them so they are compatible with our tool of choice. If we want to use a really sensitive, fancy instrument called a mass spectrometer, then we make a molecule with a unique mass. Or maybe we want make something that's more inexpensive and portable. Then we make molecules that we can trap on paper, like a pregnancy test. In fact, there's a whole world of paper tests that are becoming available in a field called paper diagnostics. Alright, where are we going with this? What I'm going to tell you next, as a lifelong researcher, represents a dream of mine. I can't say that's it's a promise; it's a dream. But I think we all have to have dreams to keep us pushing forward, even — and maybe especially — cancer researchers. I'm going to tell you what I hope will happen with my technology, that my team and I will put our hearts and souls into making a reality. OK, here goes. I dream that one day, instead of going into an expensive screening facility to get a colonoscopy, or a mammogram, or a pap smear, that you could get a shot, wait an hour, and do a urine test on a paper strip. I imagine that this could even happen without the need for steady electricity, or a medical professional in the room. Maybe they could be far away and connected only by the image on a smartphone. Now I know this sounds like a dream, but in the lab we already have this working in mice, where it works better than existing methods for the detection of lung, colon and ovarian cancer. And I hope that what this means is that one day we can detect tumors in patients sooner than 10 years after they've started growing, in all walks of life, all around the globe, and that this would lead to earlier treatments, and that we could save more lives than we can today, with early detection. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can you really tell if a kid is lying? | {0: 'Kang Lee has devoted his career to understanding the development of social cognition and behavior.'} | TED2016 | Hi. Let me ask the audience a question: Did you ever lie as a child? If you did, could you please raise your hand? Wow! This is the most honest group of people I've ever met. (Laughter) So for the last 20 years, I've been studying how children learn to tell lies. And today, I'm going to share with you some of the discoveries we have made. But to begin, I'm going to tell you a story from Mr. Richard Messina, who is my friend and an elementary school principal. He got a phone call one day. The caller says, "Mr. Messina, my son Johnny will not come to school today because he's sick." Mr. Messina asks, "Who am I speaking to, please?" And the caller says, "I am my father." (Laughter) So this story — (Laughter) sums up very nicely three common beliefs we have about children and lying. One, children only come to tell lies after entering elementary school. Two, children are poor liars. We adults can easily detect their lies. And three, if children lie at a very young age, there must be some character flaws with them, and they are going to become pathological liars for life. Well, it turns out all of the three beliefs are wrong. We have been playing guessing games with children all over the world. Here is an example. So in this game, we asked children to guess the numbers on the cards. And we tell them if they win the game, they are going to get a big prize. But in the middle of the game, we make an excuse and leave the room. And before we leave the room, we tell them not to peek at the cards. Of course, we have hidden cameras in the room to watch their every move. Because the desire to win the game is so strong, more than 90 percent of children will peek as soon as we leave the room. (Laughter) The crucial question is: When we return and ask the children whether or not they have peeked, will the children who peeked confess or lie about their transgression? We found that regardless of gender, country, religion, at two years of age, 30 percent lie, 70 percent tell the truth about their transgression. At three years of age, 50 percent lie and 50 percent tell the truth. At four years of age, more than 80 percent lie. And after four years of age, most children lie. So as you can see, lying is really a typical part of development. And some children begin to tell lies as young as two years of age. So now, let's take a closer look at the younger children. Why do some but not all young children lie? In cooking, you need good ingredients to cook good food. And good lying requires two key ingredients. The first key ingredient is theory of mind, or the mind-reading ability. Mind reading is the ability to know that different people have different knowledge about the situation and the ability to differentiate between what I know and what you know. Mind reading is important for lying because the basis of lying is that I know you don't know what I know. Therefore, I can lie to you. The second key ingredient for good lying is self-control. It is the ability to control your speech, your facial expression and your body language, so that you can tell a convincing lie. And we found that those young children who have more advanced mind-reading and self-control abilities tell lies earlier and are more sophisticated liars. As it turns out, these two abilities are also essential for all of us to function well in our society. In fact, deficits in mind-reading and self-control abilities are associated with serious developmental problems, such as ADHD and autism. So if you discover your two-year-old is telling his or her first lie, instead of being alarmed, you should celebrate — (Laughter) because it signals that your child has arrived at a new milestone of typical development. Now, are children poor liars? Do you think you can easily detect their lies? Would you like to give it a try? Yes? OK. So I'm going to show you two videos. In the videos, the children are going to respond to a researcher's question, "Did you peek?" So try to tell me which child is lying and which child is telling the truth. Here's child number one. Are you ready? (Video) Adult: Did you peek? Child: No. Kang Lee: And this is child number two. (Video) Adult: Did you peek? Child: No. KL: OK, if you think child number one is lying, please raise your hand. And if you think child number two is lying, please raise your hand. OK, so as a matter of fact, child number one is telling the truth, child number two is lying. Looks like many of you are terrible detectors of children's lies. (Laughter) Now, we have played similar kinds of games with many, many adults from all walks of life. And we show them many videos. In half of the videos, the children lied. In the other half of the videos, the children told the truth. And let's find out how these adults performed. Because there are as many liars as truth tellers, if you guess randomly, there's a 50 percent chance you're going to get it right. So if your accuracy is around 50 percent, it means you are a terrible detector of children's lies. So let's start with undergrads and law school students, who typically have limited experience with children. No, they cannot detect children's lies. Their performance is around chance. Now how about social workers and child-protection lawyers, who work with children on a daily basis? Can they detect children's lies? No, they cannot. (Laughter) What about judges, customs officers and police officers, who deal with liars on a daily basis? Can they detect children's lies? No, they cannot. What about parents? Can parents detect other children's lies? No, they cannot. What about, can parents detect their own children's lies? No, they cannot. (Laughter) (Applause) So now you may ask why children's lies are so difficult to detect. Let me illustrate this with my own son, Nathan. This is his facial expression when he lies. (Laughter) So when children lie, their facial expression is typically neutral. However, behind this neutral expression, the child is actually experiencing a lot of emotions, such as fear, guilt, shame and maybe a little bit of liar's delight. (Laughter) Unfortunately, such emotions are either fleeting or hidden. Therefore, it's mostly invisible to us. So in the last five years, we have been trying to figure out a way to reveal these hidden emotions. Then we made a discovery. We know that underneath our facial skin, there's a rich network of blood vessels. When we experience different emotions, our facial blood flow changes subtly. And these changes are regulated by the autonomic system that is beyond our conscious control. By looking at facial blood flow changes, we can reveal people's hidden emotions. Unfortunately, such emotion-related facial blood flow changes are too subtle to detect by our naked eye. So to help us reveal people's facial emotions, we have developed a new imaging technology we call "transdermal optical imaging." To do so, we use a regular video camera to record people when they experience various hidden emotions. And then, using our image processing technology, we can extract transdermal images of facial blood flow changes. By looking at transdermal video images, now we can easily see facial blood flow changes associated with the various hidden emotions. And using this technology, we can now reveal the hidden emotions associated with lying, and therefore detect people's lies. We can do so noninvasively, remotely, inexpensively, with an accuracy at about 85 percent, which is far better than chance level. And in addition, we discovered a Pinocchio effect. No, not this Pinocchio effect. (Laughter) This is the real Pinocchio effect. When people lie, the facial blood flow on the cheeks decreases, and the facial blood flow on the nose increases. Of course, lying is not the only situation that will evoke our hidden emotions. So then we asked ourselves, in addition to detecting lies, how can our technology be used? One application is in education. For example, using this technology, we can help this mathematics teacher to identify the student in his classroom who may experience high anxiety about the topic he's teaching so that he can help him. And also we can use this in health care. For example, every day I Skype my parents, who live thousands of miles away. And using this technology, I can not only find out what's going on in their lives but also simultaneously monitor their heart rate, their stress level, their mood and whether or not they are experiencing pain. And perhaps in the future, their risks for heart attack or hypertension. And you may ask: Can we use this also to reveal politicians' emotions? (Laughter) For example, during a debate. Well, the answer is yes. Using TV footage, we could detect the politicians' heart rate, mood and stress, and perhaps in the future, whether or not they are lying to us. We can also use this in marketing research, for example, to find out whether or not people like certain consumer products. We can even use it in dating. So for example, if your date is smiling at you, this technology can help you to determine whether she actually likes you or she is just trying to be nice to you. And in this case, she is just trying to be nice to you. (Laughter) So transdermal optical imaging technology is at a very early stage of development. Many new applications will come about that we don't know today. However, one thing I know for sure is that lying will never be the same again. Thank you very much. Xiè xie. (Applause) |
Good news in the fight against pancreatic cancer | {0: 'Laura Indolfi is revolutionizing cancer treatment with new technologies including implantable devices for delivering drugs locally to the site of a tumor.'} | TED2016 | By raising your hand, how many of you know at least one person on the screen? Wow, it's almost a full house. It's true, they are very famous in their fields. And do you know what all of them have in common? They all died of pancreatic cancer. However, although it's very, very sad this news, it's also thanks to their personal stories that we have raised awareness of how lethal this disease can be. It's become the third cause of cancer deaths, and only eight percent of the patients will survive beyond five years. That's a very tiny number, especially if you compare it with breast cancer, where the survival rate is almost 90 percent. So it doesn't really come as a surprise that being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer means facing an almost certain death sentence. What's shocking, though, is that in the last 40 years, this number hasn't changed a bit, while much more progress has been made with other types of tumors. So how can we make pancreatic cancer treatment more effective? As a biomedical entrepreneur, I like to work on problems that seem impossible, understanding their limitations and trying to find new, innovative solutions that can change their outcome. The first piece of bad news with pancreatic cancer is that your pancreas is in the middle of your belly, literally. It's depicted in orange on the screen. But you can barely see it until I remove all the other organs in front. It's also surrounded by many other vital organs, like the liver, the stomach, the bile duct. And the ability of the tumor to grow into those organs is the reason why pancreatic cancer is one of the most painful tumor types. The hard-to-reach location also prevents the doctor from surgically removing it, as is routinely done for breast cancer, for example. So all of these reasons leave chemotherapy as the only option for the pancreatic cancer patient. This brings us to the second piece of bad news. Pancreatic cancer tumors have very few blood vessels. Why should we care about the blood vessel of a tumor? Let's think for a second how chemotherapy works. The drug is injected in the vein and it navigates throughout the body until it reaches the tumor site. It's like driving on a highway, trying to reach a destination. But what if your destination doesn't have an exit on the highway? You will never get there. And that's exactly the same problem for chemotherapy and pancreatic cancer. The drugs navigate throughout all of your body. They will reach healthy organs, resulting in high toxic effect for the patients overall, but very little will go to the tumor. Therefore, the efficacy is very limited. To me, it seems very counterintuitive to have a whole-body treatment to target a specific organ. However, in the last 40 years, a lot of money, research and effort have gone towards finding new, powerful drugs to treat pancreatic cancer, but nothing has been done in changing the way we deliver them to the patient. So after two pieces of bad news, I'm going to give you good news, hopefully. With a collaborator at MIT and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, we have revolutionized the way we treat cancer by making localized drug delivery a reality. We are basically parachuting you on top of your destination, avoiding your having to drive all around the highway. We have embedded the drug into devices that look like this one. They are flexible enough that they can be folded to fit into the catheter, so the doctor can implant it directly on top of the tumor with minimally invasive surgery. But they are solid enough that once they are positioned on top of the tumor, they will act as a cage. They will actually physically prevent the tumor from entering other organs, controlling the metastasis. The devices are also biodegradable. That means that once in the body, they start dissolving, delivering the drug only locally, slowly and more effectively than what is done with the current whole-body treatment. In pre-clinical study, we have demonstrated that this localized approach is able to improve by 12 times the response to treatment. So we took a drug that is already known and by just delivering it locally where it's needed the most, we allow a response that is 12 times more powerful, reducing the systemic toxic effect. We are working relentlessly to bring this technology to the next level. We are finalizing the pre-clinical testing and the animal model required prior to asking the FDA for approval for clinical trials. Currently, the majority of patients will die from pancreatic cancer. We are hoping that one day, we can reduce their pain, extend their life and potentially make pancreatic cancer a curable disease. By rethinking the way we deliver the drug, we don't only make it more powerful and less toxic, we are also opening the door to finding new innovative solutions for almost all other impossible problems in pancreatic cancer patients and beyond. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Our lonely society makes it hard to come home from war | {0: 'The author of "The Perfect Storm" and the director of the documentaries "Restrepo" and "Korengal," Sebastian Junger tells non-fiction stories with grit and emotion.'} | TED Talks Live | I worked as a war reporter for 15 years before I realized that I really had a problem. There was something really wrong with me. This was about a year before 9/11, and America wasn't at war yet. We weren't talking about PTSD. We were not yet talking about the effect of trauma and war on the human psyche. I'd been in Afghanistan for a couple of months with the Northern Alliance as they were fighting the Taliban. And at that point the Taliban had an air force, they had fighter planes, they had tanks, they had artillery, and we really got hammered pretty badly a couple of times. We saw some very ugly things. But I didn't really think it affected me. I didn't think much about it. I came home to New York, where I live. Then one day I went down into the subway, and for the first time in my life, I knew real fear. I had a massive panic attack. I was way more scared than I had ever been in Afghanistan. Everything I was looking at seemed like it was going to kill me, but I couldn't explain why. The trains were going too fast. There were too many people. The lights were too bright. Everything was too loud, everything was moving too quickly. I backed up against a support column and just waited for it. When I couldn't take it any longer, I ran out of the subway station and walked wherever I was going. Later, I found out that what I had was short-term PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder. We evolved as animals, as primates, to survive periods of danger, and if your life has been in danger, you want to react to unfamiliar noises. You want to sleep lightly, wake up easily. You want to have nightmares and flashbacks of the thing that could kill you. You want to be angry because it makes you predisposed to fight, or depressed, because it keeps you out of circulation a little bit. Keeps you safe. It's not very pleasant, but it's better than getting eaten. Most people recover from that pretty quickly. It takes a few weeks, a few months. I kept having panic attacks, but they eventually went away. I had no idea it was connected to the war that I'd seen. I just thought I was going crazy, and then I thought, well, now I'm not going crazy anymore. About 20 percent of people, however, wind up with chronic, long-term PTSD. They are not adapted to temporary danger. They are maladapted for everyday life, unless they get help. We know that the people who are vulnerable to long-term PTSD are people who were abused as children, who suffered trauma as children, people who have low education levels, people who have psychiatric disorders in their family. If you served in Vietnam and your brother is schizophrenic, you're way more likely to get long-term PTSD from Vietnam. So I started to study this as a journalist, and I realized that there was something really strange going on. The numbers seemed to be going in the wrong direction. Every war that we have fought as a country, starting with the Civil War, the intensity of the combat has gone down. As a result, the casualty rates have gone down. But disability rates have gone up. They should be going in the same direction, but they're going in different directions. The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced, thank God, a casualty rate about one third of what it was in Vietnam. But they've also created — they've also produced three times the disability rates. Around 10 percent of the US military is actively engaged in combat, 10 percent or under. They're shooting at people, killing people, getting shot at, seeing their friends get killed. It's incredibly traumatic. But it's only about 10 percent of our military. But about half of our military has filed for some kind of PTSD compensation from the government. And suicide doesn't even fit into this in a very logical way. We've all heard the tragic statistic of 22 vets a day, on average, in this country, killing themselves. Most people don't realize that the majority of those suicides are veterans of the Vietnam War, that generation, and their decision to take their own lives actually might not be related to the war they fought 50 years earlier. In fact, there's no statistical connection between combat and suicide. If you're in the military and you're in a lot of combat, you're no more likely to kill yourself than if you weren't. In fact, one study found that if you deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, you're actually slightly less likely to commit suicide later. I studied anthropology in college. I did my fieldwork on the Navajo reservation. I wrote a thesis on Navajo long-distance runners. And recently, while I was researching PTSD, I had this thought. I thought back to the work I did when I was young, and I thought, I bet the Navajo, the Apache, the Comanche — I mean, these are very warlike nations — I bet they weren't getting PTSD like we do. When their warriors came back from fighting the US military or fighting each other, I bet they pretty much just slipped right back into tribal life. And maybe what determines the rate of long-term PTSD isn't what happened out there, but the kind of society you come back to. And maybe if you come back to a close, cohesive, tribal society, you can get over trauma pretty quickly. And if you come back to an alienating, modern society, you might remain traumatized your entire life. In other words, maybe the problem isn't them, the vets; maybe the problem is us. Certainly, modern society is hard on the human psyche by every metric that we have. As wealth goes up in a society, the suicide rate goes up instead of down. If you live in modern society, you're up to eight times more likely to suffer from depression in your lifetime than if you live in a poor, agrarian society. Modern society has probably produced the highest rates of suicide and depression and anxiety and loneliness and child abuse ever in human history. I saw one study that compared women in Nigeria, one of the most chaotic and violent and corrupt and poorest countries in Africa, to women in North America. And the highest rates of depression were urban women in North America. That was also the wealthiest group. So let's go back to the US military. Ten percent are in combat. Around 50 percent have filed for PTSD compensation. So about 40 percent of veterans really were not traumatized overseas but have come home to discover they are dangerously alienated and depressed. So what is happening with them? What's going on with those people, the phantom 40 percent that are troubled but don't understand why? Maybe it's this: maybe they had an experience of sort of tribal closeness in their unit when they were overseas. They were eating together, sleeping together, doing tasks and missions together. They were trusting each other with their lives. And then they come home and they have to give all that up and they're coming back to a society, a modern society, which is hard on people who weren't even in the military. It's just hard on everybody. And we keep focusing on trauma, PTSD. But for a lot of these people, maybe it's not trauma. I mean, certainly, soldiers are traumatized and the ones who are have to be treated for that. But a lot of them — maybe what's bothering them is actually a kind of alienation. I mean, maybe we just have the wrong word for some of it, and just changing our language, our understanding, would help a little bit. "Post-deployment alienation disorder." Maybe even just calling it that for some of these people would allow them to stop imagining trying to imagine a trauma that didn't really happen in order to explain a feeling that really is happening. And in fact, it's an extremely dangerous feeling. That alienation and depression can lead to suicide. These people are in danger. It's very important to understand why. The Israeli military has a PTSD rate of around one percent. The theory is that everyone in Israel is supposed to serve in the military. When soldiers come back from the front line, they're not going from a military environment to a civilian environment. They're coming back to a community where everyone understands about the military. Everyone's been in it or is going to be in it. Everyone understands the situation they're all in. It's as if they're all in one big tribe. We know that if you take a lab rat and traumatize it and put it in a cage by itself, you can maintain its trauma symptoms almost indefinitely. And if you take that same lab rat and put it in a cage with other rats, after a couple of weeks, it's pretty much OK. After 9/11, the murder rate in New York City went down by 40 percent. The suicide rate went down. The violent crime rate in New York went down after 9/11. Even combat veterans of previous wars who suffered from PTSD said that their symptoms went down after 9/11 happened. The reason is that if you traumatize an entire society, we don't fall apart and turn on one another. We come together. We unify. Basically, we tribalize, and that process of unifying feels so good and is so good for us, that it even helps people who are struggling with mental health issues. During the blitz in London, admissions to psychiatric wards went down during the bombings. For a while, that was the kind of country that American soldiers came back to — a unified country. We were sticking together. We were trying to understand the threat against us. We were trying to help ourselves and the world. But that's changed. Now, American soldiers, American veterans are coming back to a country that is so bitterly divided that the two political parties are literally accusing each other of treason, of being an enemy of the state, of trying to undermine the security and the welfare of their own country. The gap between rich and poor is the biggest it's ever been. It's just getting worse. Race relations are terrible. There are demonstrations and even riots in the streets because of racial injustice. And veterans know that any tribe that treated itself that way — in fact, any platoon that treated itself that way — would never survive. We've gotten used to it. Veterans have gone away and are coming back and seeing their own country with fresh eyes. And they see what's going on. This is the country they fought for. No wonder they're depressed. No wonder they're scared. Sometimes, we ask ourselves if we can save the vets. I think the real question is if we can save ourselves. If we can, I think the vets are going to be fine. It's time for this country to unite, if only to help the men and women who fought to protect us. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The laws that sex workers really want | {0: 'Juno Mac campaigns for better working conditions for sex workers by fighting criminalization and supporting public education projects around issues relating to sex worker rights.'} | TEDxEastEnd | I want to talk about sex for money. I'm not like most of the people you'll have heard speaking about prostitution before. I'm not a police officer or a social worker. I'm not an academic, a journalist or a politician. And as you'll probably have picked up from Maryam's blurb, I'm not a nun, either. (Laughter) Most of those people would tell you that selling sex is degrading; that no one would ever choose to do it; that it's dangerous; women get abused and killed. In fact, most of those people would say, "There should be a law against it!" Maybe that sounds reasonable to you. It sounded reasonable to me until the closing months of 2009, when I was working two dead-end, minimum-wage jobs. Every month my wages would just replenish my overdraft. I was exhausted and my life was going nowhere. Like many others before me, I decided sex for money was a better option. Now don't get me wrong — I would have loved to have won the lottery instead. But it wasn't going to happen anytime soon, and my rent needed paying. So I signed up for my first shift in a brothel. In the years that have passed, I've had a lot of time to think. I've reconsidered the ideas I once had about prostitution. I've given a lot of thought to consent and the nature of work under capitalism. I've thought about gender inequality and the sexual and reproductive labor of women. I've experienced exploitation and violence at work. I've thought about what's needed to protect other sex workers from these things. Maybe you've thought about them, too. In this talk, I'll take you through the four main legal approaches applied to sex work throughout the world, and explain why they don't work; why prohibiting the sex industry actually exacerbates every harm that sex workers are vulnerable to. Then I'm going tell you about what we, as sex workers, actually want. The first approach is full criminalization. Half the world, including Russia, South Africa and most of the US, regulates sex work by criminalizing everyone involved. So that's seller, buyer and third parties. Lawmakers in these countries apparently hope that the fear of getting arrested will deter people from selling sex. But if you're forced to choose between obeying the law and feeding yourself or your family, you're going to do the work anyway, and take the risk. Criminalization is a trap. It's hard to get a conventional job when you have a criminal record. Potential employers won't hire you. Assuming you still need money, you'll stay in the more flexible, informal economy. The law forces you to keep selling sex, which is the exact opposite of its intended effect. Being criminalized leaves you exposed to mistreatment by the state itself. In many places you may be coerced into paying a bribe or even into having sex with a police officer to avoid arrest. Police and prison guards in Cambodia, for example, have been documented subjecting sex workers to what can only be described as torture: threats at gunpoint, beatings, electric shocks, rape and denial of food. Another worrying thing: if you're selling sex in places like Kenya, South Africa or New York, a police officer can arrest you if you're caught carrying condoms, because condoms can legally be used as evidence that you're selling sex. Obviously, this increases HIV risk. Imagine knowing if you're busted carrying condoms, it'll be used against you. It's a pretty strong incentive to leave them at home, right? Sex workers working in these places are forced to make a tough choice between risking arrest or having risky sex. What would you choose? Would you pack condoms to go to work? How about if you're worried the police officer would rape you when he got you in the van? The second approach to regulating sex work seen in these countries is partial criminalization, where the buying and selling of sex are legal, but surrounding activities, like brothel-keeping or soliciting on the street, are banned. Laws like these — we have them in the UK and in France — essentially say to us sex workers, "Hey, we don't mind you selling sex, just make sure it's done behind closed doors and all alone." And brothel-keeping, by the way, is defined as just two or more sex workers working together. Making that illegal means that many of us work alone, which obviously makes us vulnerable to violent offenders. But we're also vulnerable if we choose to break the law by working together. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine was nervous after she was attacked at work, so I said that she could see her clients from my place for a while. During that time, we had another guy turn nasty. I told the guy to leave or I'd call the police. And he looked at the two of us and said, "You girls can't call the cops. You're working together, this place is illegal." He was right. He eventually left without getting physically violent, but the knowledge that we were breaking the law empowered that man to threaten us. He felt confident he'd get away with it. The prohibition of street prostitution also causes more harm than it prevents. Firstly, to avoid getting arrested, street workers take risks to avoid detection, and that means working alone or in isolated locations like dark forests where they're vulnerable to attack. If you're caught selling sex outdoors, you pay a fine. How do you pay that fine without going back to the streets? It was the need for money that saw you in the streets in the first place. And so the fines stack up, and you're caught in a vicious cycle of selling sex to pay the fines you got for selling sex. Let me tell you about Mariana Popa who worked in Redbridge, East London. The street workers on her patch would normally wait for clients in groups for safety in numbers and to warn each other about how to avoid dangerous guys. But during a police crackdown on sex workers and their clients, she was forced to work alone to avoid being arrested. She was stabbed to death in the early hours of October 29, 2013. She had been working later than usual to try to pay off a fine she had received for soliciting. So if criminalizing sex workers hurts them, why not just criminalize the people who buy sex? This is the aim of the third approach I want to talk about — the Swedish or Nordic model of sex-work law. The idea behind this law is that selling sex is intrinsically harmful and so you're, in fact, helping sex workers by removing the option. Despite growing support for what's often described as the "end demand" approach, there's no evidence that it works. There's just as much prostitution in Sweden as there was before. Why might that be? It's because people selling sex often don't have other options for income. If you need that money, the only effect that a drop in business is going have is to force you to lower your prices or offer more risky sexual services. If you need to find more clients, you might seek the help of a manager. So you see, rather than putting a stop to what's often descried as pimping, a law like this actually gives oxygen to potentially abusive third parties. To keep safe in my work, I try not to take bookings from someone who calls me from a withheld number. If it's a home or a hotel visit, I try to get a full name and details. If I worked under the Swedish model, a client would be too scared to give me that information. I might have no other choice but to accept a booking from a man who is untraceable if he later turns out to be violent. If you need their money, you need to protect your clients from the police. If you work outdoors, that means working alone or in isolated locations, just as if you were criminalized yourself. It might mean getting into cars quicker, less negotiating time means snap decisions. Is this guy dangerous or just nervous? Can you afford to take the risk? Can you afford not to? Something I'm often hearing is, "Prostitution would be fine if we made it legal and regulated it." We call that approach legalization, and it's used by countries like the Netherlands, Germany and Nevada in the US. But it's not a great model for human rights. And in state-controlled prostitution, commercial sex can only happen in certain legally-designated areas or venues, and sex workers are made to comply with special restrictions, like registration and forced health checks. Regulation sounds great on paper, but politicians deliberately make regulation around the sex industry expensive and difficult to comply with. It creates a two-tiered system: legal and illegal work. We sometimes call it "backdoor criminalization." Rich, well-connected brothel owners can comply with the regulations, but more marginalized people find those hoops impossible to jump through. And even if it's possible in principle, getting a license or proper venue takes time and costs money. It's not going to be an option for someone who's desperate and needs money tonight. They might be a refugee or fleeing domestic abuse. In this two-tiered system, the most vulnerable people are forced to work illegally, so they're still exposed to all the dangers of criminalization I mentioned earlier. So. It's looking like all attempts to control or prevent sex work from happening makes things more dangerous for people selling sex. Fear of law enforcement makes them work alone in isolated locations, and allows clients and even cops to get abusive in the knowledge they'll get away with it. Fines and criminal records force people to keep selling sex, rather than enabling them to stop. Crackdowns on buyers drive sellers to take dangerous risks and into the arms of potentially abusive managers. These laws also reinforce stigma and hatred against sex workers. When France temporarily brought in the Swedish model two years ago, ordinary citizens took it as a cue to start carrying out vigilante attacks against people working on the street. In Sweden, opinion surveys show that significantly more people want sex workers to be arrested now than before the law was brought in. If prohibition is this harmful, you might ask, why it so popular? Firstly, sex work is and always has been a survival strategy for all kinds of unpopular minority groups: people of color, migrants, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, particularly trans women. These are the groups most heavily profiled and punished through prohibitionist law. I don't think this is an accident. These laws have political support precisely because they target people that voters don't want to see or know about. Why else might people support prohibition? Well, lots of people have understandable fears about trafficking. Folks think that foreign women kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery can be saved by shutting a whole industry down. So let's talk about trafficking. Forced labor does occur in many industries, especially those where the workers are migrants or otherwise vulnerable, and this needs to be addressed. But it's best addressed with legislation targeting those specific abuses, not an entire industry. When 23 undocumented Chinese migrants drowned while picking cockles in Morecambe Bay in 2004, there were no calls to outlaw the entire seafood industry to save trafficking victims. The solution is clearly to give workers more legal protections, allowing them to resist abuse and report it to authorities without fear of arrest. The way the term trafficking is thrown around implies that all undocumented migration into prostitution is forced. In fact, many migrants have made a decision, out of economic need, to place themselves into the hands of people smugglers. Many do this with the full knowledge that they'll be selling sex when they reach their destination. And yes, it can often be the case that these people smugglers demand exorbitant fees, coerce migrants into work they don't want to do and abuse them when they're vulnerable. That's true of prostitution, but it's also true of agricultural work, hospitality work and domestic work. Ultimately, nobody wants to be forced to do any kind of work, but that's a risk many migrants are willing to take, because of what they're leaving behind. If people were allowed to migrate legally they wouldn't have to place their lives into the hands of people smugglers. The problems arise from the criminalization of migration, just as they do from the criminalization of sex work itself. This is a lesson of history. If you try to prohibit something that people want or need to do, whether that's drinking alcohol or crossing borders or getting an abortion or selling sex, you create more problems than you solve. Prohibition barely makes a difference to the amount of people actually doing those things. But it makes a huge difference as to whether or not they're safe when they do them. Why else might people support prohibition? As a feminist, I know that the sex industry is a site of deeply entrenched social inequality. It's a fact that most buyers of sex are men with money, and most sellers are women without. You can agree with all that — I do — and still think prohibition is a terrible policy. In a better, more equal world, maybe there would be far fewer people selling sex to survive, but you can't simply legislate a better world into existence. If someone needs to sell sex because they're poor or because they're homeless or because they're undocumented and they can't find legal work, taking away that option doesn't make them any less poor or house them or change their immigration status. People worry that selling sex is degrading. Ask yourself: is it more degrading than going hungry or seeing your children go hungry? There's no call to ban rich people from hiring nannies or getting manicures, even though most of the people doing that labor are poor, migrant women. It's the fact of poor migrant women selling sex specifically that has some feminists uncomfortable. And I can understand why the sex industry provokes strong feelings. People have all kinds of complicated feelings when it comes to sex. But we can't make policy on the basis of mere feelings, especially not over the heads of the people actually effected by those policies. If we get fixated on the abolition of sex work, we end up worrying more about a particular manifestation of gender inequality, rather than about the underlying causes. People get really hung up on the question, "Well, would you want your daughter doing it?" That's the wrong question. Instead, imagine she is doing it. How safe is she at work tonight? Why isn't she safer? So we've looked at full criminalization, partial criminalization, the Swedish or Nordic Model and legalization, and how they all cause harm. Something I never hear asked is: "What do sex workers want?" After all, we're the ones most affected by these laws. New Zealand decriminalized sex work in 2003. It's crucial to remember that decriminalization and legalization are not the same thing. Decriminalization means the removal of laws that punitively target the sex industry, instead treating sex work much like any other kind of work. In New Zealand, people can work together for safety, and employers of sex workers are accountable to the state. A sex worker can refuse to see a client at any time, for any reason, and 96 percent of street workers report that they feel the law protects their rights. New Zealand hasn't actually seen an increase in the amount of people doing sex work, but decriminalizing it has made it a lot safer. But the lesson from New Zealand isn't just that its particular legislation is good, but that crucially, it was written in collaboration with sex workers; namely, the New Zealand Prostitutes' Collective. When it came to making sex work safer, they were ready to hear it straight from sex workers themselves. Here in the UK, I'm part of sex worker-led groups like the Sex Worker Open University and the English Collective of Prostitutes. And we form part of a global movement demanding decriminalization and self-determination. The universal symbol of our movement is the red umbrella. We're supported in our demands by global bodies like UNAIDS, the World Health Organization and Amnesty International. But we need more allies. If you care about gender equality or poverty or migration or public health, then sex worker rights matter to you. Make space for us in your movements. That means not only listening to sex workers when we speak but amplifying our voices. Resist those who silence us, those who say that a prostitute is either too victimized, too damaged to know what's best for herself, or else too privileged and too removed from real hardship, not representative of the millions of voiceless victims. This distinction between victim and empowered is imaginary. It exists purely to discredit sex workers and make it easy to ignore us. No doubt many of you work for a living. Well, sex work is work, too. Just like you, some of us like our jobs, some of us hate them. Ultimately, most of us have mixed feelings. But how we feel about our work isn't the point. And how others feel about our work certainly isn't. What's important is that we have the right to work safely and on our own terms. Sex workers are real people. We've had complicated experiences and complicated responses to those experiences. But our demands are not complicated. You can ask expensive escorts in New York City, brothel workers in Cambodia, street workers in South Africa and every girl on the roster at my old job in Soho, and they will all tell you the same thing. You can speak to millions of sex workers and countless sex work-led organizations. We want full decriminalization and labor rights as workers. I'm just one sex worker on the stage today, but I'm bringing a message from all over the world. Thank you. (Applause) |
How free is our freedom of the press? | {0: 'Trevor Timm is the co-founder and executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports and defends journalism dedicated to transparency and accountability.'} | TED2016 | So this is James Risen. You may know him as the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. Long before anybody knew Edward Snowden's name, Risen wrote a book in which he famously exposed that the NSA was illegally wiretapping the phone calls of Americans. But it's another chapter in that book that may have an even more lasting impact. In it, he describes a catastrophic US intelligence operation in which the CIA quite literally handed over blueprints of a nuclear bomb to Iran. If that sounds crazy, go read it. It's an incredible story. But you know who didn't like that chapter? The US government. For nearly a decade afterwards, Risen was the subject of a US government investigation in which prosecutors demanded that he testify against one of his alleged sources. And along the way, he became the face for the US government's recent pattern of prosecuting whistleblowers and spying on journalists. You see, under the First Amendment, the press has the right to publish secret information in the public interest. But it's impossible to exercise that right if the media can't also gather that news and protect the identities of the brave men and women who get it to them. So when the government came knocking, Risen did what many brave reporters have done before him: he refused and said he'd rather go to jail. So from 2007 to 2015, Risen lived under the specter of going to federal prison. That is, until just days before the trial, when a curious thing happened. Suddenly, after years of claiming it was vital to their case, the government dropped their demands to Risen altogether. It turns out, in the age of electronic surveillance, there are very few places reporters and sources can hide. And instead of trying and failing to have Risen testify, they could have his digital trail testify against him instead. So completely in secret and without his consent, prosecutors got Risen's phone records. They got his email records, his financial and banking information, his credit reports, even travel records with a list of flights he had taken. And it was among this information that they used to convict Jeffrey Sterling, Risen's alleged source and CIA whistleblower. Sadly, this is only one case of many. President Obama ran on a promise to protect whistleblowers, and instead, his Justice Department has prosecuted more than all other administrations combined. Now, you can see how this could be a problem, especially because the government considers so much of what it does secret. Since 9/11, virtually every important story about national security has been the result of a whistleblower coming to a journalist. So we risk seeing the press unable to do their job that the First Amendment is supposed to protect because of the government's expanded ability to spy on everyone. But just as technology has allowed the government to circumvent reporters' rights, the press can also use technology to protect their sources even better than before. And they can start from the moment they begin speaking with them, rather than on the witness stand after the fact. Communications software now exists that wasn't available when Risen was writing his book, and is much more surveillance-resistant than regular emails or phone calls. For example, one such tool is SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system that was originally created by the late Internet luminary Aaron Swartz, and is now developed at the non-profit where I work, Freedom of the Press Foundation. Instead of sending an email, you go to a news organization's website, like this one here on The Washington Post. From there, you can upload a document or send information much like you would on any other contact form. It'll then be encrypted and stored on a server that only the news organization has access to. So the government can no longer secretly demand the information, and much of the information they would demand wouldn't be available in the first place. SecureDrop, though, is really only a small part of the puzzle for protecting press freedom in the 21st century. Unfortunately, governments all over the world are constantly developing new spying techniques that put us all at risk. And it's up to us going forward to make sure that it's not just the tech-savvy whistleblowers, like Edward Snowden, who have an avenue for exposing wrongdoing. It's just as vital that we protect the next veteran's health care whistleblower alerting us to overcrowded hospitals, or the next environmental worker sounding the alarm about Flint's dirty water, or a Wall Street insider warning us of the next financial crisis. After all, these tools weren't just built to help the brave men and women who expose crimes, but are meant to protect all of our rights under the Constitution. Thank you. (Applause) |
The beauty of being a misfit | {0: 'In her acclaimed novels and memoir, author Lidia Yuknavitch navigates the intersection of tragedy and violence to draw new roadmaps for self\xad-discovery.'} | TED2016 | So I know TED is about a lot of things that are big, but I want to talk to you about something very small. So small, it's a single word. The word is "misfit." It's one of my favorite words, because it's so literal. I mean, it's a person who sort of missed fitting in. Or a person who fits in badly. Or this: "a person who is poorly adapted to new situations and environments." I'm a card-carrying misfit. And I'm here for the other misfits in the room, because I'm never the only one. I'm going to tell you a misfit story. Somewhere in my early 30s, the dream of becoming a writer came right to my doorstep. Actually, it came to my mailbox in the form of a letter that said I'd won a giant literary prize for a short story I had written. The short story was about my life as a competitive swimmer and about my crappy home life, and a little bit about how grief and loss can make you insane. The prize was a trip to New York City to meet big-time editors and agents and other authors. So kind of it was the wannabe writer's dream, right? You know what I did the day the letter came to my house? Because I'm me, I put the letter on my kitchen table, I poured myself a giant glass of vodka with ice and lime, and I sat there in my underwear for an entire day, just staring at the letter. I was thinking about all the ways I'd already screwed my life up. Who the hell was I to go to New York City and pretend to be a writer? Who was I? I'll tell you. I was a misfit. Like legions of other children, I came from an abusive household that I narrowly escaped with my life. I already had two epically failed marriages underneath my belt. I'd flunked out of college not once but twice and maybe even a third time that I'm not going to tell you about. (Laughter) And I'd done an episode of rehab for drug use. And I'd had two lovely staycations in jail. So I'm on the right stage. (Laughter) But the real reason, I think, I was a misfit, is that my daughter died the day she was born, and I hadn't figured out how to live with that story yet. After my daughter died I also spent a long time homeless, living under an overpass in a kind of profound state of zombie grief and loss that some of us encounter along the way. Maybe all of us, if you live long enough. You know, homeless people are some of our most heroic misfits, because they start out as us. So you see, I'd missed fitting in to just about every category out there: daughter, wife, mother, scholar. And the dream of being a writer was really kind of like a small, sad stone in my throat. It was pretty much in spite of myself that I got on that plane and flew to New York City, where the writers are. Fellow misfits, I can almost see your heads glowing. I can pick you out of a room. At first, you would've loved it. You got to choose the three famous writers you wanted to meet, and these guys went and found them for you. You got set up at the Gramercy Park Hotel, where you got to drink Scotch late in the night with cool, smart, swank people. And you got to pretend you were cool and smart and swank, too. And you got to meet a bunch of editors and authors and agents at very, very fancy lunches and dinners. Ask me how fancy. Audience: How fancy? Lidia Yuknavitch: I'm making a confession: I stole three linen napkins — (Laughter) from three different restaurants. And I shoved a menu down my pants. (Laughter) I just wanted some keepsakes so that when I got home, I could believe it had really happened to me. You know? The three writers I wanted to meet were Carole Maso, Lynne Tillman and Peggy Phelan. These were not famous, best-selling authors, but to me, they were women-writer titans. Carole Maso wrote the book that later became my art bible. Lynne Tillman gave me permission to believe that there was a chance my stories could be part of the world. And Peggy Phelan reminded me that maybe my brains could be more important than my boobs. They weren't mainstream women writers, but they were cutting a path through the mainstream with their body stories, I like to think, kind of the way water cut the Grand Canyon. It nearly killed me with joy to hang out with these three over-50-year-old women writers. And the reason it nearly killed me with joy is that I'd never known a joy like that. I'd never been in a room like that. My mother never went to college. And my creative career to that point was a sort of small, sad, stillborn thing. So kind of in those first nights in New York I wanted to die there. I was just like, "Kill me now. I'm good. This is beautiful." Some of you in the room will understand what happened next. First, they took me to the offices of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Farrar, Straus and Giroux was like my mega-dream press. I mean, T.S. Eliot and Flannery O'Connor were published there. The main editor guy sat me down and talked to me for a long time, trying to convince me I had a book in me about my life as a swimmer. You know, like a memoir. The whole time he was talking to me, I sat there smiling and nodding like a numb idiot, with my arms crossed over my chest, while nothing, nothing, nothing came out of my throat. So in the end, he patted me on the shoulder like a swim coach might. And he wished me luck and he gave me some free books and he showed me out the door. Next, they took me to the offices of W.W. Norton, where I was pretty sure I'd be escorted from the building just for wearing Doc Martens. But that didn't happen. Being at the Norton offices felt like reaching up into the night sky and touching the moon while the stars stitched your name across the cosmos. I mean, that's how big a deal it was to me. You get it? Their lead editor, Carol Houck Smith, leaned over right in my face with these beady, bright, fierce eyes and said, "Well, send me something then, immediately!" See, now most people, especially TED people, would have run to the mailbox, right? It took me over a decade to even imagine putting something in an envelope and licking a stamp. On the last night, I gave a big reading at the National Poetry Club. And at the end of the reading, Katharine Kidde of Kidde, Hoyt & Picard Literary Agency, walked straight up to me and shook my hand and offered me representation, like, on the spot. I stood there and I kind of went deaf. Has this ever happened to you? And I almost started crying because all the people in the room were dressed so beautifully, and all that came out of my mouth was: "I don't know. I have to think about it." And she said, "OK, then," and walked away. All those open hands out to me, that small, sad stone in my throat ... You see, I'm trying to tell you something about people like me. Misfit people — we don't always know how to hope or say yes or choose the big thing, even when it's right in front of us. It's a shame we carry. It's the shame of wanting something good. It's the shame of feeling something good. It's the shame of not really believing we deserve to be in the room with the people we admire. If I could, I'd go back and I'd coach myself. I'd be exactly like those over-50-year-old women who helped me. I'd teach myself how to want things, how to stand up, how to ask for them. I'd say, "You! Yeah, you! You belong in the room, too." The radiance falls on all of us, and we are nothing without each other. Instead, I flew back to Oregon, and as I watched the evergreens and rain come back into view, I just drank many tiny bottles of airplane "feel sorry for yourself." I thought about how, if I was a writer, I was some kind of misfit writer. What I'm saying is, I flew back to Oregon without a book deal, without an agent, and with only a headful and heart-ful of memories of having sat so near the beautiful writers. Memory was the only prize I allowed myself. And yet, at home in the dark, back in my underwear, I could still hear their voices. They said, "Don't listen to anyone who tries to get you to shut up or change your story." They said, "Give voice to the story only you know how to tell." They said, "Sometimes telling the story is the thing that saves your life." Now I am, as you can see, the woman over 50. And I'm a writer. And I'm a mother. And I became a teacher. Guess who my favorite students are. Although it didn't happen the day that dream letter came through my mailbox, I did write a memoir, called "The Chronology of Water." In it are the stories of how many times I've had to reinvent a self from the ruins of my choices, the stories of how my seeming failures were really just weird-ass portals to something beautiful. All I had to do was give voice to the story. There's a myth in most cultures about following your dreams. It's called the hero's journey. But I prefer a different myth, that's slightly to the side of that or underneath it. It's called the misfit's myth. And it goes like this: even at the moment of your failure, right then, you are beautiful. You don't know it yet, but you have the ability to reinvent yourself endlessly. That's your beauty. You can be a drunk, you can be a survivor of abuse, you can be an ex-con, you can be a homeless person, you can lose all your money or your job or your husband or your wife, or the worst thing of all, a child. You can even lose your marbles. You can be standing dead center in the middle of your failure and still, I'm only here to tell you, you are so beautiful. Your story deserves to be heard, because you, you rare and phenomenal misfit, you new species, are the only one in the room who can tell the story the way only you would. And I'd be listening. Thank you. (Applause) |
Your words may predict your future mental health | {0: 'In his provocative, mind-bending book "The Secret Life of the Mind," neuroscientist Mariano Sigman reveals his life’s work exploring the inner workings of the human brain.'} | TED2016 | We have historical records that allow us to know how the ancient Greeks dressed, how they lived, how they fought ... but how did they think? One natural idea is that the deepest aspects of human thought — our ability to imagine, to be conscious, to dream — have always been the same. Another possibility is that the social transformations that have shaped our culture may have also changed the structural columns of human thought. We may all have different opinions about this. Actually, it's a long-standing philosophical debate. But is this question even amenable to science? Here I'd like to propose that in the same way we can reconstruct how the ancient Greek cities looked just based on a few bricks, that the writings of a culture are the archaeological records, the fossils, of human thought. And in fact, doing some form of psychological analysis of some of the most ancient books of human culture, Julian Jaynes came up in the '70s with a very wild and radical hypothesis: that only 3,000 years ago, humans were what today we would call schizophrenics. And he made this claim based on the fact that the first humans described in these books behaved consistently, in different traditions and in different places of the world, as if they were hearing and obeying voices that they perceived as coming from the Gods, or from the muses ... what today we would call hallucinations. And only then, as time went on, they began to recognize that they were the creators, the owners of these inner voices. And with this, they gained introspection: the ability to think about their own thoughts. So Jaynes's theory is that consciousness, at least in the way we perceive it today, where we feel that we are the pilots of our own existence — is a quite recent cultural development. And this theory is quite spectacular, but it has an obvious problem which is that it's built on just a few and very specific examples. So the question is whether the theory that introspection built up in human history only about 3,000 years ago can be examined in a quantitative and objective manner. And the problem of how to go about this is quite obvious. It's not like Plato woke up one day and then he wrote, "Hello, I'm Plato, and as of today, I have a fully introspective consciousness." (Laughter) And this tells us actually what is the essence of the problem. We need to find the emergence of a concept that's never said. The word introspection does not appear a single time in the books we want to analyze. So our way to solve this is to build the space of words. This is a huge space that contains all words in such a way that the distance between any two of them is indicative of how closely related they are. So for instance, you want the words "dog" and "cat" to be very close together, but the words "grapefruit" and "logarithm" to be very far away. And this has to be true for any two words within the space. And there are different ways that we can construct the space of words. One is just asking the experts, a bit like we do with dictionaries. Another possibility is following the simple assumption that when two words are related, they tend to appear in the same sentences, in the same paragraphs, in the same documents, more often than would be expected just by pure chance. And this simple hypothesis, this simple method, with some computational tricks that have to do with the fact that this is a very complex and high-dimensional space, turns out to be quite effective. And just to give you a flavor of how well this works, this is the result we get when we analyze this for some familiar words. And you can see first that words automatically organize into semantic neighborhoods. So you get the fruits, the body parts, the computer parts, the scientific terms and so on. The algorithm also identifies that we organize concepts in a hierarchy. So for instance, you can see that the scientific terms break down into two subcategories of the astronomic and the physics terms. And then there are very fine things. For instance, the word astronomy, which seems a bit bizarre where it is, is actually exactly where it should be, between what it is, an actual science, and between what it describes, the astronomical terms. And we could go on and on with this. Actually, if you stare at this for a while, and you just build random trajectories, you will see that it actually feels a bit like doing poetry. And this is because, in a way, walking in this space is like walking in the mind. And the last thing is that this algorithm also identifies what are our intuitions, of which words should lead in the neighborhood of introspection. So for instance, words such as "self," "guilt," "reason," "emotion," are very close to "introspection," but other words, such as "red," "football," "candle," "banana," are just very far away. And so once we've built the space, the question of the history of introspection, or of the history of any concept which before could seem abstract and somehow vague, becomes concrete — becomes amenable to quantitative science. All that we have to do is take the books, we digitize them, and we take this stream of words as a trajectory and project them into the space, and then we ask whether this trajectory spends significant time circling closely to the concept of introspection. And with this, we could analyze the history of introspection in the ancient Greek tradition, for which we have the best available written record. So what we did is we took all the books — we just ordered them by time — for each book we take the words and we project them to the space, and then we ask for each word how close it is to introspection, and we just average that. And then we ask whether, as time goes on and on, these books get closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection. And this is exactly what happens in the ancient Greek tradition. So you can see that for the oldest books in the Homeric tradition, there is a small increase with books getting closer to introspection. But about four centuries before Christ, this starts ramping up very rapidly to an almost five-fold increase of books getting closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection. And one of the nice things about this is that now we can ask whether this is also true in a different, independent tradition. So we just ran this same analysis on the Judeo-Christian tradition, and we got virtually the same pattern. Again, you see a small increase for the oldest books in the Old Testament, and then it increases much more rapidly in the new books of the New Testament. And then we get the peak of introspection in "The Confessions of Saint Augustine," about four centuries after Christ. And this was very important, because Saint Augustine had been recognized by scholars, philologists, historians, as one of the founders of introspection. Actually, some believe him to be the father of modern psychology. So our algorithm, which has the virtue of being quantitative, of being objective, and of course of being extremely fast — it just runs in a fraction of a second — can capture some of the most important conclusions of this long tradition of investigation. And this is in a way one of the beauties of science, which is that now this idea can be translated and generalized to a whole lot of different domains. So in the same way that we asked about the past of human consciousness, maybe the most challenging question we can pose to ourselves is whether this can tell us something about the future of our own consciousness. To put it more precisely, whether the words we say today can tell us something of where our minds will be in a few days, in a few months or a few years from now. And in the same way many of us are now wearing sensors that detect our heart rate, our respiration, our genes, on the hopes that this may help us prevent diseases, we can ask whether monitoring and analyzing the words we speak, we tweet, we email, we write, can tell us ahead of time whether something may go wrong with our minds. And with Guillermo Cecchi, who has been my brother in this adventure, we took on this task. And we did so by analyzing the recorded speech of 34 young people who were at a high risk of developing schizophrenia. And so what we did is, we measured speech at day one, and then we asked whether the properties of the speech could predict, within a window of almost three years, the future development of psychosis. But despite our hopes, we got failure after failure. There was just not enough information in semantics to predict the future organization of the mind. It was good enough to distinguish between a group of schizophrenics and a control group, a bit like we had done for the ancient texts, but not to predict the future onset of psychosis. But then we realized that maybe the most important thing was not so much what they were saying, but how they were saying it. More specifically, it was not in which semantic neighborhoods the words were, but how far and fast they jumped from one semantic neighborhood to the other one. And so we came up with this measure, which we termed semantic coherence, which essentially measures the persistence of speech within one semantic topic, within one semantic category. And it turned out to be that for this group of 34 people, the algorithm based on semantic coherence could predict, with 100 percent accuracy, who developed psychosis and who will not. And this was something that could not be achieved — not even close — with all the other existing clinical measures. And I remember vividly, while I was working on this, I was sitting at my computer and I saw a bunch of tweets by Polo — Polo had been my first student back in Buenos Aires, and at the time he was living in New York. And there was something in this tweets — I could not tell exactly what because nothing was said explicitly — but I got this strong hunch, this strong intuition, that something was going wrong. So I picked up the phone, and I called Polo, and in fact he was not feeling well. And this simple fact, that reading in between the lines, I could sense, through words, his feelings, was a simple, but very effective way to help. What I tell you today is that we're getting close to understanding how we can convert this intuition that we all have, that we all share, into an algorithm. And in doing so, we may be seeing in the future a very different form of mental health, based on objective, quantitative and automated analysis of the words we write, of the words we say. Gracias. (Applause) |
Drawings that show the beauty and fragility of Earth | {0: 'Zaria Forman uses visual art to connect people with the impact of climate change.'} | TED Talks Live | I consider it my life's mission to convey the urgency of climate change through my work. I've traveled north to the Arctic to the capture the unfolding story of polar melt, and south to the Equator to document the subsequent rising seas. Most recently, I visited the icy coast of Greenland and the low-lying islands of the Maldives, connecting two seemingly disparate but equally endangered parts of our planet. My drawings explore moments of transition, turbulence and tranquility in the landscape, allowing viewers to emotionally connect with a place you might never have the chance to visit. I choose to convey the beauty as opposed to the devastation. If you can experience the sublimity of these landscapes, perhaps you'll be inspired to protect and preserve them. Behavioral psychology tells us that we take action and make decisions based on our emotions above all else. And studies have shown that art impacts our emotions more effectively than a scary news report. Experts predict ice-free Arctic summers as early as 2020. And sea levels are likely to rise between two and ten feet by century's end. I have dedicated my career to illuminating these projections with an accessible medium, one that moves us in a way that statistics may not. My process begins with traveling to the places at the forefront of climate change. On-site, I take thousands of photographs. Back in the studio, I work from both my memory of the experience and the photographs to create very large-scale compositions, sometimes over 10 feet wide. I draw with soft pastel, which is dry like charcoal, but colors. I consider my work drawings but others call them painting. I cringe, though, when I'm referred to as a "finger painter." (Laughter) But I don't use any tools and I have always used my fingers and palms to manipulate the pigment on the paper. Drawing is a form of meditation for me. It quiets my mind. I don't perceive what I'm drawing as ice or water. Instead, the image is stripped down to its most basic form of color and shape. Once the piece is complete, I can finally experience the composition as a whole, as an iceberg floating through glassy water, or a wave cresting with foam. On average, a piece this size takes me about, as you can see, 10 seconds. (Laughter) (Applause) Really, more like 200 hours, 250 hours for something that size. But I've been drawing ever since I could hold a crayon, really. My mom was an artist, and growing up, we always had art supplies all over the house. My mother's love of photography propelled her to the most remote regions of the earth, and my family and I were fortunate enough to join and support her on these adventures. We rode camels in Northern Africa and mushed on dog sleds near the North Pole. In August of 2012, I led my first expedition, taking a group of artists and scholars up the northwest coast of Greenland. My mother was originally supposed to lead this trip. She and I were in the early stages of planning, as we had intended to go together, when she fell victim to a brain tumor. The cancer quickly took over her body and mind, and she passed away six months later. During the months of her illness, though, her dedication to the expedition never wavered, and I made a promise to carry out her final journey. My mother's passion for the Arctic echoed through my experience in Greenland, and I felt the power and the fragility of the landscape. The sheer size of the icebergs is humbling. The ice fields are alive with movement and sound in a way that I never expected. I expanded the scale of my compositions to give you that same sense of awe that I experienced. Yet, while the grandeur of the ice is evident, so, too, is its vulnerability. From our boat, I could see the ice sweating under the unseasonably warm sun. We had a chance to visit many of the Inuit communities in Greenland that now face huge challenges. The locals spoke to me of vast areas of sea ice that are no longer freezing over as they once did. And without ice, their hunting and harvesting grounds are severely diminished, threatening their way of life and survival. The melting glaciers in Greenland are one of the largest contributing factors to rising sea levels, which have already begun to drown some of our world's lowest-lying islands. One year after my trip to Greenland, I visited the Maldives, the lowest and flattest country in the entire world. While I was there, I collected images and inspiration for a new body of work: drawings of waves lapping on the coast of a nation that could be entirely underwater within this century. Devastating events happen every day on scales both global and personal. When I was in Greenland, I scattered my mother's ashes amidst the melting ice. Now she remains a part of the landscape she loved so much, even as it, too, passes and takes on new form. Among the many gifts my mother gave me was the ability to focus on the positive, rather than the negative. My drawings celebrate the beauty of what we all stand to lose. I hope they can serve as records of sublime landscapes in flux, documenting the transition and inspiring our global community to take action for the future. Thank you. (Applause) |
How barbershops can keep men healthy | {0: 'Using unexpected channels like the pulpit and the barber’s chair, Dr. Joseph Ravenell delivers basic health care information to an at-risk demographic -- African-American men.'} | TED2016 | What do you see? Most of you see a barbershop, but I see an opportunity: an opportunity for health, an opportunity for health equity. For black men, the barbershop is not just a place where you get your hair cut or your beard trimmed. No, it's much more than that. Historically, the barbershop has been a safe haven for black men. It's a place where we go for friendship, solidarity and solace. It's a place where we go to get away from the stress of the grind of work and sometimes home life. It's a place where we don't have to worry about how we're being perceived by the outside world. It's a place where we don't feel threatened, or threatening. It's a place of loyalty and trust. For that reason, it's one of the few places where we can fearlessly be ourselves and just ... talk. The talk, the shop talk, the conversation, that is the essence of the black barbershop. I can remember going to the barbershop with my dad as a kid. We went to Mr. Mike's barbershop every other Saturday. And like clockwork, the same group of men would be there every time we went, either waiting on their favorite barber or just soaking up the atmosphere. I can remember the jovial greeting that warmly welcomed us every time we went. "Hey Rev," they would say to my dad. He's a local pastor, and they treated him like a celebrity. "Hey young fella, how you doing?" they would say to me, making me feel just as special. I remember the range of the conversations was immense. The men would talk about politics and sports and music and world news, national news, neighborhood news. There was some talk about women and what it was like to be a black man in America. But many times they also talked about health. The conversations about health were lengthy and deep. The men often recounted their doctor's recommendations to cut salt in their diet or to eat less fried foods or to stop smoking or to reduce stress. They talked about the different ways you could reduce stress, like simplifying one's love life — (Laughter) all ways to treat high blood pressure. There's a lot of talk about high blood pressure in the barbershop. That's because almost 40 percent of black men have it. That means that almost every single black man either has high blood pressure or knows a black man who has it. Sometimes, those conversations in the barbershop would be about what happens when high blood pressure is not adequately addressed. "Say, did you hear about Jimmy? He had a stroke." "Did you hear about Eddie? He died last week. Massive heart attack. He was 50." More black men die from high blood pressure than from anything else, even though decades of medical wisdom and science have demonstrated that death from high blood pressure can be prevented with timely diagnosis and appropriate treatment. So why is high blood pressure so differentially deadly for black men? Because too often, high blood pressure is either untreated or under-treated in black men, in part because of our lower engagement with the primary healthcare system. Black men, in particular those with high blood pressure, are less likely to have a primary care doctor than other groups. But why? Some of our earliest research on black men's health revealed that for many, the doctor's office is associated with fear, mistrust, disrespect, and unnecessary unpleasantness. The doctor's office is only a place that you go when you don't feel well. And when you do go, you might wait for hours only to get the run-around and to be evaluated by a stoic figure in a white coat who only has 10 minutes to give you and who doesn't value the talk. So it's no wonder that some men don't want to be bothered and skip going to the doctor altogether, especially if they feel fine. But herein lies the problem. You can feel just fine while high blood pressure ravages your most vital organs. This is Denny Moe, owner of Denny Moe's Superstar Barbershop in Harlem. I've been lucky enough to have Denny as my barber for the last eight years. He said to me once, "Hey Doc, you know, lots of black men trust their barbers more than they trust their doctors." This was stunning to me, at first, but not so much when you think about it. Black men have been with their current barbers on average as long as I've been with Denny, about eight years. And black men see their barbers about every two weeks. Not only do you trust your barber with your look and with your style, but you also trust him with your secrets and sometimes your life. Denny, like many barbers, is more than just an artist, a businessman and confidant. He's a leader and a passionate advocate for the well-being of his community. The very first time I walked into Denny Moe's shop, he wasn't just cutting hair. He was also orchestrating a voter registration drive to give a voice to his customers and his community. With this kind of activism, and community investment that typifies the black barbershop, of course the barbershop is a perfect place to talk about high blood pressure and other health concerns in the community. First, the barbershop is not a medical setting, and so it doesn't have all the negative psychological baggage that comes along with that. When you're in a barbershop, you're in your territory, and you're among friends who share your history, your struggle and your health risks. Second, because the barbershop is a place of connection, loyalty and trust, it's a place where you're more open to have a conversation about health and especially about high blood pressure. After all, conversations about high blood pressure have all the elements of great shop talk: stress and high blood pressure, food and high blood pressure, relationships and high blood pressure, and yes, what it's like to be a black man in America and high blood pressure. But you can do more than just talk about high blood pressure in the barbershop. You can concretely take action. Here we have an opportunity to partner with the Denny Moe's of the world and empower communities to address the health inequities that uniquely affect it. When high blood pressure screening expanded from clinics and hospitals to communities in the 1960s and '70s, black physicians like Dr. Eli Saunders in Baltimore and Dr. Keith Ferdinand in New Orleans were at the forefront of bringing health promotion to community hubs in urban black neighborhoods. These pioneers paved the way for my professional journey with barbershops and health, which began in Chicago in medical school. The very first research project that I worked on as a medical student was to help design healthcare interventions that would appeal to black men. We conducted about a dozen focus groups with a broad cross-section of black men, and we learned that for them, being healthy was as much about being perceived as healthy as it was about feeling healthy, and that feeling good went hand in hand with looking good. This work led to the development of Project Brotherhood, a community clinic founded by Dr. Eric Whitaker that provided tailored healthcare to black men. Part of this tailored care involved having a barber on the premises to reward the men who came for needed healthcare with a free haircut, to let the men know that we, too, valued how they looked as well as how they felt, and that what was important to them was also important to us. But while there's only one Project Brotherhood, there are thousands of black barbershops where the intersection of health and haircuts can be cultivated. The next stop on my journey was Dallas, Texas, where we learned that barbers were not only willing but fully able to roll up their sleeves and participate in delivering needed health services to improve the health of their customers and their community. We teamed up with an amazing cadre of black barbers and taught them how to measure blood pressure and how to counsel their customers and refer them to doctors to help manage high blood pressure. The barbers were not only willing to do it but they were damn good at it. Over a three-year period, the barbers measured thousands of blood pressures resulting in hundreds of black men being referred to doctors for medical care of their high blood pressure. These barber-doctor partnerships resulted in a 20 percent increase in the number of men who were able to achieve target blood pressure levels and a three-point drop, on average, in the blood pressure of each participant. If we were to extrapolate that three point drop to every single black man with high blood pressure in America, we would prevent 800 heart attacks, 500 strokes and 900 deaths from high blood pressure in just one year. And our experience with barbershops has been no different in New York City, where my journey has currently led me. With an incredible team of diverse research assistants, community health workers and volunteers, we've been able to partner with over 200 barbershops and other trusted community venues to reach over 7,000 older black men. And we've offered high blood pressure screening and counseling to each and every one of them. Thanks to Denny Moe and the myriad other barbers and community leaders who shared the vision of opportunity and empowerment to make a difference in their communities, we've been able to not only lower blood pressure in our participants, but we've also been able to impact other health indicators. So what do you see? What is your barbershop? Where is that place for you where people who are affected by a unique problem can meet a unique solution? When you find that place, see the opportunity. Thank you. (Applause) |
My journey from Marine to actor | {0: 'Adam Driver is working to bridge the cultural gap between the United States Armed Forces and the performing arts communities by bringing the best modern American theater to the military. ', 1: 'Jesse J. Perez works as a guest director and teacher at Juilliard, and he has done numerous readings for Arts in the Armed Forces.', 2: "Matt Johnson has played on some of the most critically acclaimed records in almost everyone's collections."} | TED Talks Live | I was a Marine with 1/1 Weapons Company, 81's platoon, out in Camp Pendleton, California. Oorah! Audience: Oorah! (Laughter) I joined a few months after September 11, feeling like I think most people in the country did at the time, filled with a sense of patriotism and retribution and the desire to do something — that, coupled with that fact that I wasn't doing anything. I was 17, just graduated from high school that past summer, living in the back room of my parents' house paying rent, in the small town I was raised in in Northern Indiana, called Mishawaka. I can spell that later for people who are interested — (Laughter) Mishawaka is many good things but cultural hub of the world it is not, so my only exposure to theater and film was limited to the plays I did in high school and Blockbuster Video, may she rest in peace. (Laughter) I was serious enough about acting that I auditioned for Juilliard when I was a senior in high school, didn't get in, determined college wasn't for me and applied nowhere else, which was a genius move. I also did that Hail Mary LA acting odyssey that I always heard stories about, of actors moving to LA with, like, seven dollars and finding work and successful careers. I got as far as Amarillo, Texas, before my car broke down. I spent all my money repairing it, finally made it to Santa Monica — not even LA — stayed for 48 hours wandering the beach, basically, got in my car, drove home, thus ending my acting career, so — (Laughter) Seventeen, Mishawaka ... parents' house, paying rent, selling vacuums ... telemarketing, cutting grass at the local 4-H fairgrounds. This was my world going into September, 2001. So after the 11th, and feeling an overwhelming sense of duty, and just being pissed off in general — at myself, my parents, the government; not having confidence, not having a respectable job, my shitty mini-fridge that I just drove to California and back — I joined the Marine Corps and loved it. I loved being a Marine. It's one of the things I'm most proud of having done in my life. Firing weapons was cool, driving and detonating expensive things was great. But I found I loved the Marine Corps the most for the thing I was looking for the least when I joined, which was the people: these weird dudes — a motley crew of characters from a cross section of the United States — that on the surface I had nothing in common with. And over time, all the political and personal bravado that led me to the military dissolved, and for me, the Marine Corps became synonymous with my friends. And then, a few years into my service and months away from deploying to Iraq, I dislocated my sternum in a mountain-biking accident, and had to be medically separated. Those never in the military may find this hard to understand, but being told I wasn't getting deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan was very devastating for me. I have a very clear image of leaving the base hospital on a stretcher and my entire platoon is waiting outside to see if I was OK. And then, suddenly, I was a civilian again. I knew I wanted to give acting another shot, because — again, this is me — I thought all civilian problems are small compared to the military. I mean, what can you really bitch about now, you know? "It's hot. Someone should turn on the air conditioner." "This coffee line is too long." I was a Marine, I knew how to survive. I'd go to New York and become an actor. If things didn't work out, I'd live in Central Park and dumpster-dive behind Panera Bread. (Laughter) I re-auditioned for Juilliard and this time I was lucky, I got in. But I was surprised by how complex the transition was from military to civilian. And I was relatively healthy; I can't imagine going through that process on top of a mental or physical injury. But regardless, it was difficult. In part, because I was in acting school — I couldn't justify going to voice and speech class, throwing imaginary balls of energy at the back of the room, doing acting exercises where I gave birth to myself — (Laughter) while my friends were serving without me overseas. But also, because I didn't know how to apply the things I learned in the military to a civilian context. I mean that both practically and emotionally. Practically, I had to get a job. And I was an Infantry Marine, where you're shooting machine guns and firing mortars. There's not a lot of places you can put those skills in the civilian world. (Laughter) Emotionally, I struggled to find meaning. In the military, everything has meaning. Everything you do is either steeped in tradition or has a practical purpose. You can't smoke in the field because you don't want to give away your position. You don't touch your face — you have to maintain a personal level of health and hygiene. You face this way when "Colors" plays, out of respect for people who went before you. Walk this way, talk this way because of this. Your uniform is maintained to the inch. How diligently you followed those rules spoke volumes about the kind of Marine you were. Your rank said something about your history and the respect you had earned. In the civilian world there's no rank. Here you're just another body, and I felt like I constantly had to prove my worth all over again. And the respect civilians were giving me while I was in uniform didn't exist when I was out of it. There didn't seem to be a ... a sense of community, whereas in the military, I felt this sense of community. How often in the civilian world are you put in a life-or-death situation with your closest friends and they constantly demonstrate that they're not going to abandon you? And meanwhile, at acting school ... (Laughter) I was really, for the first time, discovering playwrights and characters and plays that had nothing to do with the military, but were somehow describing my military experience in a way that before to me was indescribable. And I felt myself becoming less aggressive as I was able to put words to feelings for the first time and realizing what a valuable tool that was. And when I was reflecting on my time in the military, I wasn't first thinking on the stereotypical drills and discipline and pain of it; but rather, the small, intimate human moments, moments of great feeling: friends going AWOL because they missed their families, friends getting divorced, grieving together, celebrating together, all within the backdrop of the military. I saw my friends battling these circumstances, and I watched the anxiety it produced in them and me, not being able to express our feelings about it. The military and theater communities are actually very similar. You have a group of people trying to accomplish a mission greater than themselves; it's not about you. You have a role, you have to know your role within that team. Every team has a leader or director; sometimes they're smart, sometimes they're not. You're forced to be intimate with complete strangers in a short amount of time; the self-discipline, the self-maintenance. I thought, how great would it be to create a space that combined these two seemingly dissimilar communities, that brought entertainment to a group of people that, considering their occupation, could handle something a bit more thought-provoking than the typical mandatory-fun events that I remember being "volun-told" to go to in the military — (Laughter) all well-intended but slightly offensive events, like "Win a Date with a San Diego Chargers Cheerleader," where you answer a question about pop culture, and if you get it right you win a date, which was a chaperoned walk around the parade deck with this already married, pregnant cheerleader — (Laughter) Nothing against cheerleaders, I love cheerleaders. The point is more, how great would it be to have theater presented through characters that were accessible without being condescending. So we started this nonprofit called Arts in the Armed Forces, where we tried to do that, tried to join these two seemingly dissimilar communities. We pick a play or select monologues from contemporary American plays that are diverse in age and race like a military audience is, grab a group of incredible theater-trained actors, arm them with incredible material, keep production value as minimal as possible — no sets, no costumes, no lights, just reading it — to throw all the emphasis on the language and to show that theater can be created at any setting. It's a powerful thing, getting in a room with complete strangers and reminding ourselves of our humanity, and that self-expression is just as valuable a tool as a rifle on your shoulder. And for an organization like the military, that prides itself on having acronyms for acronyms, you can get lost in the sauce when it comes to explaining a collective experience. And I can think of no better community to arm with a new means of self-expression than those protecting our country. We've gone all over the United States and the world, from Walter Reed in Bethesda, Maryland, to Camp Pendleton, to Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, to USAG Bavaria, on- and off-Broadway theaters in New York. And for the performing artists we bring, it's a window into a culture they otherwise would not have had exposure to. And for the military, it's the exact same. And in doing this for the past six years, I'm always reminded that acting is many things. It's a craft, it's a political act, it's a business, it's — whatever adjective is most applicable to you. But it's also a service. I didn't get to finish mine, so whenever I get to be of service to this ultimate service industry, the military, for me, again — there's not many things better than that. Thank you. (Applause) We're going to be doing a piece from Marco Ramirez, called "I am not Batman." An incredible actor and good friend of mine, Jesse Perez, is going to be reading, and Matt Johnson, who I just met a couple hours ago. They're doing it together for the first time, so we'll see how it goes. Jesse Perez and Matt Johnson. (Applause) Jesse Perez: It's the middle of the night and the sky is glowing like mad, radioactive red. And if you squint, you can maybe see the moon through a thick layer of cigarette smoke and airplane exhaust that covers the whole city, like a mosquito net that won't let the angels in. (Drum beat) And if you look up high enough, you can see me standing on the edge of an 87-story building. And up there, a place for gargoyles and broken clock towers that have stayed still and dead for maybe like 100 years, up there is me. (Beat) And I'm frickin' Batman. (Beat) And I gots Batmobiles and batarangs and frickin' bat caves, like, for real. And all it takes is a broom closet or a back room or a fire escape, and Danny's hand-me-down jeans are gone. And my navy blue polo shirt, the one that looks kinda good on me but has that hole on it near the butt from when it got snagged on the chain-link fence behind Arturo's but it isn't even a big deal because I tuck that part in and it's, like, all good. That blue polo shirt — it's gone, too! And I get like, like ... transformational. (Beat) And nobody pulls out a belt and whips Batman for talkin' back. (Beat) Or for not talkin' back. And nobody calls Batman simple or stupid or skinny. And nobody fires Batman's brother from the Eastern Taxi Company 'cause they was making cutbacks, neither. 'Cause they got nothing but respect. And not like afraid-respect, just, like, respect-respect. (Laughter) 'Cause nobody's afraid of you. 'Cause Batman doesn't mean nobody no harm. (Beat) Ever. (Double beat) 'Cause all Batman really wants to do is save people and maybe pay abuela's bills one day and die happy. And maybe get, like, mad-famous for real. (Laughter) Oh — and kill the Joker. (Drum roll) Tonight, like most nights, I'm all alone. And I'm watchin' and I'm waitin' like a eagle or like a — no, yeah, like a eagle. (Laughter) And my cape is flapping in the wind cause it's frickin' long and my pointy ears are on, and that mask that covers like half my face is on, too, and I got, like, bulletproof stuff all in my chest so no one can hurt me. And nobody — nobody! — is gonna come between Batman ... and justice. (Drums) (Laughter) From where I am, I can hear everything. (Silence) Somewhere in the city, there's a old lady picking Styrofoam leftovers up out of a trash can and she's putting a piece of sesame chicken someone spit out into her own mouth. And somewhere there's a doctor with a wack haircut in a black lab coat trying to find a cure for the diseases that are gonna make us all extinct for real one day. And somewhere there's a man, a man in a janitor's uniform, stumbling home drunk and dizzy after spending half his paycheck on 40-ounce bottles of twist-off beer, and the other half on a four-hour visit to some lady's house on a street where the lights have all been shot out by people who'd rather do what they do in this city in the dark. And half a block away from janitor man, there's a group of good-for-nothings who don't know no better, waiting for janitor man with rusted bicycle chains and imitation Louisville Sluggers, and if they don't find a cent on him, which they won't, they'll just pound at him till the muscles in their arms start burning, till there's no more teeth to crack out. But they don't count on me. They don't count on no Dark Knight, with a stomach full of grocery-store brand macaroni and cheese and cut-up Vienna sausages. (Laughter) 'Cause they'd rather believe I don't exist. And from 87 stories up, I can hear one of the good-for-nothings say, "Gimme the cash!" — real fast like that, just, "Gimme me the fuckin' cash!" And I see janitor man mumble something in drunk language and turn pale, and from 87 stories up, I can hear his stomach trying to hurl its way out his Dickies. So I swoop down, like, mad-fast and I'm like darkness, I'm like, "Swoosh!" And I throw a batarang at the one naked lightbulb. (Cymbal) And they're all like, "Whoa, muthafucker! Who just turned out the lights?" (Laughter) "What's that over there?" "What?" "Gimme me what you got, old man!" "Did anybody hear that?" "Hear what? There ain't nothing. No, really — there ain't no bat!" But then ... one out of the three good-for-nothings gets it to the head — pow! And number two swings blindly into the dark cape before him, but before his fist hits anything, I grab a trash can lid and — right in the gut! And number one comes back with the jump kick, but I know judo karate, too, so I'm like — (Drums) Twice! (Drums) (Laughter) (Drums) But before I can do any more damage, suddenly we all hear a "click-click." And suddenly everything gets quiet. And the one good-for-nothing left standing grips a handgun and aims it straight up, like he's holding Jesus hostage, like he's threatening maybe to blow a hole in the moon. And the good-for-nothing who got it to the head, who tried to jump-kick me, and the other good-for-nothing who got it in the gut, is both scrambling back away from the dark figure before 'em. And the drunk man, the janitor man, is huddled in a corner, praying to Saint Anthony 'cause that's the only one he could remember. (Double beat) And there's me: eyes glowing white, cape blowing softly in the wind. (Beat) Bulletproof chest heaving, my heart beating right through it in a Morse code for: "Fuck with me just once come on just try." And the one good-for-nothing left standing, the one with the handgun — yeah, he laughs. And he lowers his arm. And he points it at me and gives the moon a break. And he aims it right between my pointy ears, like goal posts and he's special teams. And janitor man is still calling Saint Anthony, but he ain't pickin' up. And for a second, it seems like ... maybe I'm gonna lose. Nah! (Drums) Shoot! Shoot! Fwa-ka-ka! "Don't kill me, man!" Snap! Wrist crack! Neck! Slash! Skin meets acid: "Ahhhhhhh!" And he's on the floor and I'm standing over him and I got the gun in my hands now and I hate guns, I hate holding 'em 'cause I'm Batman. And, asterisk: Batman don't like guns 'cause his parents got iced by guns a long time ago. But for just a second, my eyes glow white, and I hold this thing for I could speak to the good-for-nothing in a language he maybe understands. Click-click! (Beat) And the good-for-nothings become good-for-disappearing into whatever toxic waste, chemical sludge shithole they crawled out of. And it's just me and janitor man. And I pick him up, and I wipe sweat and cheap perfume off his forehead. And he begs me not to hurt him and I grab him tight by his janitor-man shirt collar, and I pull him to my face and he's taller than me but the cape helps, so he listens when I look him straight in the eyes. And I say two words to him: "Go home." And he does, checking behind his shoulder every 10 feet. And I swoosh from building to building on his way there 'cause I know where he lives. And I watch his hands tremble as he pulls out his key chain and opens the door to his building. And I'm back in bed before he even walks in through the front door. And I hear him turn on the faucet and pour himself a glass of warm tap water. And he puts the glass back in the sink. And I hear his footsteps. And they get slower as they get to my room. And he creaks my door open, like, mad-slow. And he takes a step in, which he never does. (Beat) And he's staring off into nowhere, his face, the color of sidewalks in summer. And I act like I'm just waking up and I say, "Ah, what's up, Pop?" And janitor man says nothing to me. But I see in the dark, I see his arms go limp and his head turns back, like, towards me. And he lifts it for I can see his face, for I could see his eyes. And his cheeks is drippin', but not with sweat. And he just stands there breathing, like he remembers my eyes glowing white, like he remembers my bulletproof chest, like he remembers he's my pop. And for a long time I don't say nothin'. And he turns around, hand on the doorknob. And he ain't looking my way, but I hear him mumble two words to me: "I'm sorry." And I lean over, and I open my window just a crack. If you look up high enough, you could see me. And from where I am — (Cymbals) I could hear everything. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
A smarter, more precise way to think about public health | {0: 'Sue Desmond-Hellmann leads the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s mission to establish equity for every person.'} | TED2016 | OK, first, some introductions. My mom, Jennie, took this picture. That's my dad, Frank, in the middle. And on his left, my sisters: Mary Catherine, Judith Ann, Theresa Marie. John Patrick's sitting on his lap and Kevin Michael's on his right. And in the pale-blue windbreaker, Susan Diane. Me. I loved growing up in a big family. And one of my favorite things was picking names. But by the time child number seven came along, we had nearly run out of middle names. It was a long deliberation before we finally settled on Jennifer Bridget. Every parent in this audience knows the joy and excitement of picking a new baby's name. And I was excited and thrilled to help my mom in that special ceremonial moment. But it's not like that everywhere. I travel a lot and I see a lot. But it took me by surprise to learn in an area of Ethiopia, parents delay picking the names for their new babies by a month or more. Why delay? Why not take advantage of this special ceremonial time? Well, they delay because they're afraid. They're afraid their baby will die. And this loss might be a little more bearable without a name. A face without a name might help them feel just a little less attached. So here we are in one part of the world — a time of joy, excitement, dreaming of the future of that child — while in another world, parents are filled with dread, not daring to dream of a future for their child beyond a few precious weeks. How can that be? How can it be that 2.6 million babies die around the world before they're even one month old? 2.6 million. That's the population of Vancouver. And the shocking thing is: Why? In too many cases, we simply don't know. Now, I remember recently seeing an updated pie chart. And the pie chart was labeled, "Causes of death in children under five worldwide." And there was a pretty big section of that pie chart, about 40 percent — 40 percent was labeled "neonatal." Now, "neonatal" is not a cause of death. Neonatal is simply an adjective, an adjective that means that the child is less than one month old. For me, "neonatal" said: "We have no idea." Now, I'm a scientist. I'm a doctor. I want to fix things. But you can't fix what you can't define. So our first step in restoring the dreams of those parents is to answer the question: Why are babies dying? So today, I want to talk about a new approach, an approach that I feel will not only help us know why babies are dying, but is beginning to completely transform the whole field of global health. It's called "Precision Public Health." For me, precision medicine comes from a very special place. I trained as a cancer doctor, an oncologist. I got into it because I wanted to help people feel better. But too often my treatments made them feel worse. I still remember young women being driven to my clinic by their moms — adults, who had to be helped into my exam room by their mothers. They were so weak from the treatment I had given them. But at the time, in those front lines in the war on cancer, we had few tools. And the tools we did have couldn't differentiate between the cancer cells that we wanted to hit hard and those healthy cells that we wanted to preserve. And so the side effects that you're all very familiar with — hair loss, being sick to your stomach, having a suppressed immune system, so infection was a constant threat — were always surrounding us. And then I moved to the biotechnology industry. And I got to work on a new approach for breast cancer patients that could do a better job of telling the healthy cells from the unhealthy or cancer cells. It's a drug called Herceptin. And what Herceptin allowed us to do is to precisely target HER2-positive breast cancer, at the time, the scariest form of breast cancer. And that precision let us hit hard the cancer cells, while sparing and being more gentle on the normal cells. A huge breakthrough. It felt like a miracle, so much so that today, we're harnessing all those tools — big data, consumer monitoring, gene sequencing and more — to tackle a broad variety of diseases. That's allowing us to target individuals with the right remedies at the right time. Precision medicine revolutionized cancer therapy. Everything changed. And I want everything to change again. So I've been asking myself: Why should we limit this smarter, more precise, better way to tackle diseases to the rich world? Now, don't misunderstand me — I'm not talking about bringing expensive medicines like Herceptin to the developing world, although I'd actually kind of like that. What I am talking about is moving from this precise targeting for individuals to tackle public health problems in populations. Now, OK, I know probably you're thinking, "She's crazy. You can't do that. That's too ambitious." But here's the thing: we're already doing this in a limited way, and it's already starting to make a big difference. So here's what's happening. Now, I told you I trained as a cancer doctor. But like many, many doctors who trained in San Francisco in the '80s, I also trained as an AIDS doctor. It was a terrible time. AIDS was a death sentence. All my patients died. Now, things are better, but HIV/AIDS remains a terrible global challenge. Worldwide, about 17 million women are living with HIV. We know that when these women become pregnant, they can transfer the virus to their baby. We also know in the absence of therapy, half those babies will not survive until the age of two. But we know that antiretroviral therapy can virtually guarantee that she will not transmit the virus to the baby. So what do we do? Well, a one-size-fits-all approach, kind of like that blast of chemo, would mean we test and treat every pregnant woman in the world. That would do the job. But it's just not practical. So instead, we target those areas where HIV rates are the highest. We know in certain countries in sub-Saharan Africa we can test and treat pregnant women where rates are highest. This precision approach to a public health problem has cut by nearly half HIV transmission from mothers to baby in the last five years. (Applause) Screening pregnant women in certain areas in the developing world is a powerful example of how precision public health can change things on a big scale. So ... How do we do that? We can do that because we know. We know who to target, what to target, where to target and how to target. And that, for me, are the important elements of precision public health: who, what, where and how. But let's go back to the 2.6 million babies who die before they're one month old. Here's the problem: we just don't know. It may seem unbelievable, but the way we figure out the causes of infant mortality in those countries with the highest infant mortality is a conversation with mom. A health worker asks a mom who has just lost her child, "Was the baby vomiting? Did they have a fever?" And that conversation may take place as long as three months after the baby has died. Now, put yourself in the shoes of that mom. It's a heartbreaking, excruciating conversation. And even worse — it's not that helpful, because we might know there was a fever or vomiting, but we don't know why. So in the absence of knowing that knowledge, we cannot prevent that mom, that family, or other families in that community from suffering the same tragedy. But what if we applied a precision public health approach? Let's say, for example, we find out in certain areas of Africa that babies are dying because of a bacterial infection transferred from the mother to the baby, known as Group B streptococcus. In the absence of treatment, mom has a seven times higher chance that her next baby will die. Once we define the problem, we can prevent that death with something as cheap and safe as penicillin. We can do that because then we'll know. And that's the point: once we know, we can bring the right interventions to the right population in the right places to save lives. With this approach, and with these interventions and others like them, I have no doubt that a precision public health approach can help our world achieve our 15-year goal. And that would translate into a million babies' lives saved every single year. One million babies every single year. And why would we stop there? A much more powerful approach to public health — imagine what might be possible. Why couldn't we more effectively tackle malnutrition? Why wouldn't we prevent cervical cancer in women? And why not eradicate malaria? (Applause) Yes, clap for that! (Applause) So, you know, I live in two different worlds, one world populated by scientists, and another world populated by public health professionals. The promise of precision public health is to bring these two worlds together. But you know, we all live in two worlds: the rich world and the poor world. And what I'm most excited about about precision public health is bridging these two worlds. Every day in the rich world, we're bringing incredible talent and tools — everything at our disposal — to precisely target diseases in ways I never imagined would be possible. Surely, we can tap into that kind of talent and tools to stop babies dying in the poor world. If we did, then every parent would have the confidence to name their child the moment that child is born, daring to dream that that child's life will be measured in decades, not days. Thank you. (Applause) |
The real harm of the global arms trade | {0: 'Samantha Nutt envisions a world where no child knows war.'} | TED Talks Live | Thank you very much. Good evening. Some of you may have noticed that my last name is Nutt. And if you did, you are forgiven for wondering how a Nutt managed to end up in a war zone. I actually was offered, right out of medical school, and accepted a volunteer contract to work with UNICEF in war-torn Somalia, that was worth one dollar. And, you see, I had to be paid this dollar in the event that the UN needed to issue an evacuation order, so that I would be covered. I was, after all, heading into one of the world's most dangerous places. And by now, some of you may be asking yourselves, and I just want to reassure you, that I did get half the money up front. (Laughter) But you see, this is how, with 50 cents in my pocket, I ended up in Baidoa, Somalia. Journalists called it the "city of death." And they called it the city of death because 300,000 people had lost their lives there — 300,000 people, mostly as a result of war-related famine and disease. I was part of a team that was tasked with trying to figure out how best to respond to this humanitarian catastrophe. It was right on the heels of the Rwandan genocide, and aid money to the region was drying up. Many aid organizations, unfortunately, had been forced to close their doors. And so the question that I was asked to specifically help answer, which is one that aid workers ask themselves in war zones the world over, is: What the hell do we do now? You know, the security environment in Somalia at that moment in time — and nothing has really changed too much — can best be described as "Mad Max" by way of "A Clockwork Orange." And I remember very distinctly a couple of days after my arrival, I went up to a feeding clinic. There were dozens of women who were standing in line, and they were clutching their infants very close. About 20 minutes into this conversation I was having with this one young woman, I leaned forward and tried to put my finger in the palm of her baby's hand. And when I did this, I discovered that her baby was already in rigor. She was stiff, and her little, lifeless hand was curled into itself. She had died hours before of malnutrition and dehydration. I later learned that as her baby was dying, this young woman had been held for two days by some teenage boys who were armed with Kalashnikov rifles, and they were trying to shake her down for more money, money she very clearly did not have. And this is a scene that I have confronted in war zones the world over; places where kids, some as young as eight — they are this big — and those kids, they have never been to school. But they have fought and they have killed with automatic rifles. Is this just the way the world is? Some will you tell you that war is unavoidably human. After all, it is as old as existence itself. We say never again, and yet it happens again and again and again. But I will tell you that I have seen the absolute worst of what we as human beings are capable of doing to one another, and yet I still believe a different outcome is possible. Do you want to know why? Because over 20 years of doing this work, going in and out of war zones around the world, I have come to understand that there are aspects of this problem that we, all of us, as people occupying this shared space, that we can change — not through force or coercion or invasion, but by simply looking at all of the options available to us and choosing the ones that favor peace at the expense of war, instead of war at the expense of peace. How so? Well, I want you to consider this: there are at least 800 million small arms and light weapons in circulation in the world today. The vast majority of civilians, like that young baby, who are dying in war zones around the world, are dying at the hands of various armed groups who rely on a near-infinite supply of cheap, easy and efficient weapons to rape, threaten, intimidate and brutalize those civilians at every turn. How cheap? Well, in some parts of the world, you can buy an AK-47 for as little as 10 dollars. In many places in which I have worked, it is easier to get access to an automatic rifle than it is to get access to clean drinking water. And so now the important part: Can anything be done about this? To answer that question, let's take a look at this map of the world. And now, let's add in all of the countries that are currently at war, and the number of people who have either died or have been displaced as a result of that violence. It is a staggering number — more than 40 million people. But you will also notice something else about this map. You will notice that most of those countries are in the Global South. Now, let's look at the countries that are the world's top 20 exporters of small arms in the world. And what do we notice? Well, you see them in green. You will notice that those are mostly countries in the Global North, primarily Western countries. What does this tell us? This tells us that most of the people who are dying in war are living in poor countries, and yet most of the people who are profiting from war are living in rich countries — people like you and me. And then what if we go beyond small arms for a second. What if we look at all weapons in circulation in the world? Who does the biggest business? Well, roughly 80 percent of those weapons come from none other than the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany. It's shocking, isn't it? Now, some of you might be saying at this moment in time, "Oh yeah, but OK, hang on a second there ... Nutt." (Laughter) Grade school was spectacular for me. It was, really, a wonderful experience. (Laughter) But you might be saying to yourselves, You know, all of these weapons in war zones — they're not a cause, but an effect of the violence that plagues them each and every single day. You know, places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where they need these weapons to be able to maintain law and order, promote peace and security, to combat terror groups — surely this is a good thing. Let's take a look at that assumption for just one moment, because you see there has been a boom in the small-arms trade since the start of the War on Terror. In fact, it is a business that has grown threefold over the past 15 years. And now let's compare that to the number of people who have directly died in armed conflict around the world in that same period. What do you notice? Well, you notice that, in fact, that also goes up roughly three- to fourfold. They basically go up and end at the same point. Now, we can have a circular argument here about whether this increase in fatalities is a response to the increase of small arms, or the other way around. But here's what we should really take away from this. What we should take away from this is that this is a relationship worth scrutinizing, especially when you consider that small arms that were shipped to Iraq for use by the Iraqi Army, or to Syria for so-called moderate opposition fighters, that those arms, many of them, are now in the hands of ISIS; or when you consider that arms that were shipped to Libya are now actively drifting across the Sahel, and ending up with groups like Boko Haram and al Qaeda and other militant groups. And therein lies the problem. Because, you see, small arms anywhere are a menace everywhere, because their first stop is rarely their last. Spending on war per person per year now amounts to about 249 dollars — 249 dollars per person, which is roughly 12 times what we spend on foreign aid, money that is used to educate and vaccinate children and combat malnutrition in the Global South. But we can shift that balance. How do we do this? Well, it is essentially a problem of both supply and demand, so we can tackle it from both sides. On the supply side, we can push our governments to adopt international arms transparency mechanisms like the Arms Trade Treaty, which makes it so that rich countries have to be more accountable for where their arms are going and what their arms might be used for. Here in the United States, the largest arms-exporting country in the world by far, President Obama has rightly signed the Arms Trade Treaty, but none of it takes effect, it isn't binding, until it is approved and ratified by the Senate. This is where we need to make our voices heard. You know, the curbing of small arms — it's not going to solve the problem of war. Increased control mechanisms won't solve that problem. But it's an important step in the right direction. And it's up to all of us who live in those rich countries to make change here. What about on the demand side? You know, there are generations around the world who are being lost to war. It is possible to disrupt that cycle of violence with investments in education, in strengthening the rule of law and in economic development, especially for women. I have personally seen just how incredibly powerful those kinds of efforts can be around the world. But here's the thing: they take time, which means for you as individuals, if you want to give, please, by all means do it. But know that how you give is just as important as how much you give. Regular contributions like monthly contributions are a far more effective way of giving, because they allow humanitarian organizations to properly plan and be invested over the long term, and to be present in the lives of families who have been affected by war, wars that many of us, frankly, all too quickly forget. When I first got on that plane for Somalia as a young doctor, I had no idea what it meant to live with war. But I can tell you that I know what it means now. And I know what it means to lie in bed in the pitch-black night and listen to that haunting "pop-pop-pop-pop-pop!" of automatic gunfire, and wonder with absolute dread how many minutes I have left until it will be right on top of me. I can tell you that it is a terrifying and agonizing fear, one that millions of people around the world are forced to confront each and every single day, especially children. Over the years of doing this work, unfortunately, war has killed far too many people close to me. And on at least a couple of occasions, war has very nearly killed me as well. But I firmly believe, which is why I get up and do what I do every single day, that we can make different choices here. Because you see, war is ours, as human beings. We buy it, sell it, spread it and wage it. We are therefore not powerless to solve it. On the contrary, we are the only ones who can. Thank you very much, and I want to wish you the greatest success. (Applause) |
An entertainment icon on living a life of meaning | {0: 'Writer, producer and free-speech champion Norman Lear defined decades of US popular culture with his groundbreaking TV shows.', 1: "Eric Hirshberg leads Activision, one of the world's largest interactive entertainment companies."} | TED2016 | Eric Hirshberg: So I assume that Norman doesn't need much of an introduction, but TED's audience is global, it's diverse, so I've been tasked with starting with his bio, which could easily take up the entire 18 minutes. So instead we're going to do 93 years in 93 seconds or less. (Laughter) You were born in New Hampshire. Norman Lear: New Haven, Connecticut. EH: New Haven, Connecticut. (Laughter) NL: There goes seven more seconds. EH: Nailed it. (Laughter) You were born in New Haven, Connecticut. Your father was a con man — I got that right. He was taken away to prison when you were nine years old. You flew 52 missions as a fighter pilot in World War II. You came back to — NL: Radio operator. EH: You came to LA to break into Hollywood, first in publicity, then in TV. You had no training as a writer, formally, but you hustled your way in. Your breakthrough, your debut, was a little show called "All in the Family." You followed that up with a string of hits that to this day is unmatched in Hollywood: "Sanford and Son," "Maude," "Good Times," "The Jeffersons," "One Day at a Time," "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," to name literally a fraction of them. Not only are they all commercially — (Applause) Not only are they all commercially successful, but many of them push our culture forward by giving the underrepresented members of society their first prime-time voice. You have seven shows in the top 10 at one time. At one point, you aggregate an audience of 120 million people per week watching your content. That's more than the audience for Super Bowl 50, which happens once a year. NL: Holy shit. (Laughter) (Applause) EH: And we're not even to the holy shit part. (Laughter) You land yourself on Richard Nixon's enemies list — he had one. That's an applause line, too. (Applause) You're inducted into the TV Hall of Fame on the first day that it exists. Then came the movies. "Fried Green Tomatoes," "The Princess Bride," "Stand By Me," "This Is Spinal Tap." (Applause) Again, just to name a fraction. (Applause) Then you wipe the slate clean, start a third act as a political activist focusing on protecting the First Amendment and the separation of church and state. You start People For The American Way. You buy the Declaration of Independence and give it back to the people. You stay active in both entertainment and politics until the ripe old of age of 93, when you write a book and make a documentary about your life story. And after all that, they finally think you're ready for a TED Talk. (Laughter) (Applause) NL: I love being here. And I love you for agreeing to do this. EH: Thank you for asking. It's my honor. So here's my first question. Was your mother proud of you? (Laughter) NL: My mother ... what a place to start. Let me put it this way — when I came back from the war, she showed me the letters that I had written her from overseas, and they were absolute love letters. (Laughter) This really sums up my mother. They were love letters, as if I had written them to — they were love letters. A year later I asked my mother if I could have them, because I'd like to keep them all the years of my life ... She had thrown them away. (Laughter) That's my mother. (Laughter) The best way I can sum it up in more recent times is — this is also more recent times — a number of years ago, when they started the Hall of Fame to which you referred. It was a Sunday morning, when I got a call from the fellow who ran the TV Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was calling me to tell me they had met all day yesterday and he was confidentially telling me they were going to start a hall of fame and these were the inductees. I started to say "Richard Nixon," because Richard Nixon — EH: I don't think he was on their list. NL: William Paley, who started CBS, David Sarnoff, who started NBC, Edward R. Murrow, the greatest of the foreign correspondents, Paddy Chayefsky — I think the best writer that ever came out of television — Milton Berle, Lucille Ball and me. EH: Not bad. NL: I call my mother immediately in Hartford, Connecticut. "Mom, this is what's happened, they're starting a hall of fame." I tell her the list of names and me, and she says, "Listen, if that's what they want to do, who am I to say?" (Laughter) (Applause) That's my Ma. I think it earns that kind of a laugh because everybody has a piece of that mother. (Laughter) EH: And the sitcom Jewish mother is born, right there. So your father also played a large role in your life, mostly by his absence. NL: Yeah. EH: Tell us what happened when you were nine years old. NL: He was flying to Oklahoma with three guys that my mother said, "I don't want you to have anything to do with them, I don't trust those men." That's when I heard, maybe not for the first time, "Stifle yourself, Jeanette, I'm going." And he went. It turns out he was picking up some fake bonds, which he was flying across the country to sell. But the fact that he was going to Oklahoma in a plane, and he was going to bring me back a 10-gallon hat, just like Ken Maynard, my favorite cowboy wore. You know, this was a few years after Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. I mean, it was exotic that my father was going there. But when he came back, they arrested him as he got off the plane. That night newspapers were all over the house, my father was with his hat in front of his face, manacled to a detective. And my mother was selling the furniture, because we were leaving — she didn't want to stay in that state of shame, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. And selling the furniture — the house was loaded with people. And in the middle of all of that, some strange horse's ass put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Well, you're the man of the house now." I'm crying, and this asshole says, "You're the man of the house now." And I think that was the moment I began to understand the foolishness of the human condition. So ... it took a lot of years to look back at it and feel it was a benefit. But — EH: It's interesting you call it a benefit. NL: Benefit in that it gave me that springboard. I mean that I could think how foolish it was to say to this crying nine-year-old boy, "You're the man of the house now." And then I was crying, and then he said, "And men of the house don't cry." And I ... (Laughter) So ... I look back, and I think that's when I learned the foolishness of the human condition, and it's been that gift that I've used. EH: So you have a father who's absent, you have a mother for whom apparently nothing is good enough. Do you think that starting out as a kid who maybe never felt heard started you down a journey that ended with you being an adult with a weekly audience of 120 million people? NL: I love the way you put that question, because I guess I've spent my life wanting — if anything, wanting to be heard. I think — It's a simple answer, yes, that was what sparked — well, there were other things, too. When my father was away, I was fooling with a crystal radio set that we had made together, and I caught a signal that turned out to be Father Coughlin. (Laughter) Yeah, somebody laughed. (Laughter) But not funny, this was a horse's — another horse's ass — who was very vocal about hating the New Deal and Roosevelt and Jews. The first time I ran into an understanding that there were people in this world that hated me because I was born to Jewish parents. And that had an enormous effect on my life. EH: So you had a childhood with little in the way of strong male role models, except for your grandfather. Tell us about him. NL: Oh, my grandfather. Well here's the way I always talked about that grandfather. There were parades, lots of parades when I was a kid. There were parades on Veteran's Day — there wasn't a President's Day. There was Abraham Lincoln's birthday, George Washington's birthday and Flag Day ... And lots of little parades. My grandfather used to take me and we'd stand on the street corner, he'd hold my hand, and I'd look up and I'd see a tear running down his eye. And he meant a great deal to me. And he used to write presidents of the United States. Every letter started, "My dearest, darling Mr. President," and he'd tell him something wonderful about what he did. But when he disagreed with the President, he also wrote, "My dearest, darling Mr. President, Didn't I tell you last week ...?" (Laughter) And I would run down the stairs every now and then and pick up the mail. We were three flights up, 74 York Street, New Haven, Connecticut. And I'd pick up a little white envelope reading, "Shya C. called at this address." And that's the story I have told about my grandfather — EH: They wrote him back on the envelopes — NL: They wrote back. But I have shown them myself, going way back to Phil Donahue and others before him, literally dozens of interviews in which I told that story. This will be the second time I have said the whole story was a lie. The truth was my grandfather took me to parades, we had lots of those. The truth is a tear came down his eye. The truth is he would write an occasional letter, and I did pick up those little envelopes. But "My dearest darling Mr. President," all the rest of it, is a story I borrowed from a good friend whose grandfather was that grandfather who wrote those letters. And, I mean, I stole Arthur Marshall's grandfather and made him my own. Always. When I started to write my memoir — "Even this —" How about that? "Even This I Get to Experience." When I started to write the memoir and I started to think about it, and then I — I — I did a reasonable amount of crying, and I realized how much I needed the father. So much so that I appropriated Arthur Marshall's grandfather. So much so, the word "father" — I have six kids by the way. My favorite role in life. It and husband to my wife Lyn. But I stole the man's identity because I needed the father. Now I've gone through a whole lot of shit and come out on the other side, and I forgive my father — the best thing I — the worst thing I — The word I'd like to use about him and think about him is — he was a rascal. The fact that he lied and stole and cheated and went to prison ... I submerge that in the word "rascal." EH: Well there's a saying that amateurs borrow and professionals steal. NL: I'm a pro. EH: You're a pro. (Laughter) And that quote is widely attributed to John Lennon, but it turns out he stole it from T.S. Eliot. So you're in good company. (Laughter) EH: I want to talk about your work. Obviously the impact of your work has been written about and I'm sure you've heard about it all your life: what it meant to people, what it meant to our culture, you heard the applause when I just named the names of the shows, you raised half the people in the room through your work. But have there ever been any stories about the impact of your work that surprised you? NL: Oh, god — surprised me and delighted me from head to toe. There was "An Evening with Norman Lear" within the last year that a group of hip-hop impresarios, performers and the Academy put together. The subtext of "An Evening with ..." was: What do a 92-year-old Jew — then 92 — and the world of hip-hop have in common? Russell Simmons was among seven on the stage. And when he talked about the shows, he wasn't talking about the Hollywood, George Jefferson in "The Jeffersons," or the show that was a number five show. He was talking about a simple thing that made a big — EH: Impact on him? NL: An impact on him — I was hesitating over the word, "change." It's hard for me to imagine, you know, changing somebody's life, but that's the way he put it. He saw George Jefferson write a check on "The Jeffersons," and he never knew that a black man could write a check. And he says it just impacted his life so — it changed his life. And when I hear things like that — little things — because I know that there isn't anybody in this audience that wasn't likely responsible today for some little thing they did for somebody, whether it's as little as a smile or an unexpected "Hello," that's how little this thing was. It could have been the dresser of the set who put the checkbook on the thing, and George had nothing to do while he was speaking, so he wrote it, I don't know. But — EH: So in addition to the long list I shared in the beginning, I should have also mentioned that you invented hip-hop. (Laughter) NL: Well ... EH: I want to talk about — NL: Well, then do it. (Laughter) EH: You've lead a life of accomplishment, but you've also built a life of meaning. And all of us strive to do both of those things — not all of us manage to. But even those of us who do manage to accomplish both of those, very rarely do we figure out how to do them together. You managed to push culture forward through your art while also achieving world-beating commercial success. How did you do both? NL: Here's where my mind goes when I hear that recitation of all I accomplished. This planet is one of a billion, they tell us, in a universe of which there are billions — billions of universes, billions of planets ... which we're trying to save and it requires saving. But ... anything I may have accomplished is — my sister once asked me what she does about something that was going on in Newington, Connecticut. And I said, "Write your alderman or your mayor or something." She said, "Well I'm not Norman Lear, I'm Claire Lear." And that was the first time I said what I'm saying, I said, "Claire. With everything you think about what I may have done and everything you've done," — she never left Newington — "can you get your fingers close enough when you consider the size of the planet and so forth, to measure anything I may have done to anything you may have done?" So ... I am convinced we're all responsible for doing as much as I may have accomplished. And I understand what you're saying — EH: It's an articulate deflection — NL: But you have to really buy into the size and scope of the creator's enterprise, here. EH: But here on this planet you have really mattered. NL: I'm a son of a gun. (Laughter) EH: So I have one more question for you. How old do you feel? NL: I am the peer of whoever I'm talking to. EH: Well, I feel 93. (Applause) NL: We out of here? EH: Well, I feel 93 years old, but I hope to one day feel as young as the person I'm sitting across from. Ladies and gentlemen, the incomparable Norman Lear. (Applause) NL: Thank you. (Applause) |
The passing of time, caught in a single photo | {0: 'By blending up to 100 still photographs into a seamless composite that captures the transition from day to night, Stephen Wilkes reveals the stories hidden in familiar locations.'} | TED2016 | I'm driven by pure passion to create photographs that tell stories. Photography can be described as the recording of a single moment frozen within a fraction of time. Each moment or photograph represents a tangible piece of our memories as time passes. But what if you could capture more than one moment in a photograph? What if a photograph could actually collapse time, compressing the best moments of the day and the night seamlessly into one single image? I've created a concept called "Day to Night" and I believe it's going to change the way you look at the world. I know it has for me. My process begins by photographing iconic locations, places that are part of what I call our collective memory. I photograph from a fixed vantage point, and I never move. I capture the fleeting moments of humanity and light as time passes. Photographing for anywhere from 15 to 30 hours and shooting over 1,500 images, I then choose the best moments of the day and night. Using time as a guide, I seamlessly blend those best moments into one single photograph, visualizing our conscious journey with time. I can take you to Paris for a view from the Tournelle Bridge. And I can show you the early morning rowers along the River Seine. And simultaneously, I can show you Notre Dame aglow at night. And in between, I can show you the romance of the City of Light. I am essentially a street photographer from 50 feet in the air, and every single thing you see in this photograph actually happened on this day. Day to Night is a global project, and my work has always been about history. I'm fascinated by the concept of going to a place like Venice and actually seeing it during a specific event. And I decided I wanted to see the historical Regata, an event that's actually been taking place since 1498. The boats and the costumes look exactly as they did then. And an important element that I really want you guys to understand is: this is not a timelapse, this is me photographing throughout the day and the night. I am a relentless collector of magical moments. And the thing that drives me is the fear of just missing one of them. The entire concept came about in 1996. LIFE Magazine commissioned me to create a panoramic photograph of the cast and crew of Baz Luhrmann's film Romeo + Juliet. I got to the set and realized: it's a square. So the only way I could actually create a panoramic was to shoot a collage of 250 single images. So I had DiCaprio and Claire Danes embracing. And as I pan my camera to the right, I noticed there was a mirror on the wall and I saw they were actually reflecting in it. And for that one moment, that one image I asked them, "Would you guys just kiss for this one picture?" And then I came back to my studio in New York, and I hand-glued these 250 images together and stood back and went, "Wow, this is so cool! I'm changing time in a photograph." And that concept actually stayed with me for 13 years until technology finally has caught up to my dreams. This is an image I created of the Santa Monica Pier, Day to Night. And I'm going to show you a little video that gives you an idea of what it's like being with me when I do these pictures. To start with, you have to understand that to get views like this, most of my time is spent up high, and I'm usually in a cherry picker or a crane. So this is a typical day, 12-18 hours, non-stop capturing the entire day unfold. One of the things that's great is I love to people-watch. And trust me when I tell you, this is the greatest seat in the house to have. But this is really how I go about creating these photographs. So once I decide on my view and the location, I have to decide where day begins and night ends. And that's what I call the time vector. Einstein described time as a fabric. Think of the surface of a trampoline: it warps and stretches with gravity. I see time as a fabric as well, except I take that fabric and flatten it, compress it into single plane. One of the unique aspects of this work is also, if you look at all my pictures, the time vector changes: sometimes I'll go left to right, sometimes front to back, up or down, even diagonally. I am exploring the space-time continuum within a two-dimensional still photograph. Now when I do these pictures, it's literally like a real-time puzzle going on in my mind. I build a photograph based on time, and this is what I call the master plate. This can take us several months to complete. The fun thing about this work is I have absolutely zero control when I get up there on any given day and capture photographs. So I never know who's going to be in the picture, if it's going to be a great sunrise or sunset — no control. It's at the end of the process, if I've had a really great day and everything remained the same, that I then decide who's in and who's out, and it's all based on time. I'll take those best moments that I pick over a month of editing and they get seamlessly blended into the master plate. I'm compressing the day and night as I saw it, creating a unique harmony between these two very discordant worlds. Painting has always been a really important influence in all my work and I've always been a huge fan of Albert Bierstadt, the great Hudson River School painter. He inspired a recent series that I did on the National Parks. This is Bierstadt's Yosemite Valley. So this is the photograph I created of Yosemite. This is actually the cover story of the 2016 January issue of National Geographic. I photographed for over 30 hours in this picture. I was literally on the side of a cliff, capturing the stars and the moonlight as it transitions, the moonlight lighting El Capitan. And I also captured this transition of time throughout the landscape. The best part is obviously seeing the magical moments of humanity as time changed — from day into night. And on a personal note, I actually had a photocopy of Bierstadt's painting in my pocket. And when that sun started to rise in the valley, I started to literally shake with excitement because I looked at the painting and I go, "Oh my god, I'm getting Bierstadt's exact same lighting 100 years earlier." Day to Night is about all the things, it's like a compilation of all the things I love about the medium of photography. It's about landscape, it's about street photography, it's about color, it's about architecture, perspective, scale — and, especially, history. This is one of the most historical moments I've been able to photograph, the 2013 Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama. And if you look closely in this picture, you can actually see time changing in those large television sets. You can see Michelle waiting with the children, the president now greets the crowd, he takes his oath, and now he's speaking to the people. There's so many challenging aspects when I create photographs like this. For this particular photograph, I was in a 50-foot scissor lift up in the air and it was not very stable. So every time my assistant and I shifted our weight, our horizon line shifted. So for every picture you see, and there were about 1,800 in this picture, we both had to tape our feet into position every time I clicked the shutter. (Applause) I've learned so many extraordinary things doing this work. I think the two most important are patience and the power of observation. When you photograph a city like New York from above, I discovered that those people in cars that I sort of live with everyday, they don't look like people in cars anymore. They feel like a giant school of fish, it was a form of emergent behavior. And when people describe the energy of New York, I think this photograph begins to really capture that. When you look closer in my work, you can see there's stories going on. You realize that Times Square is a canyon, it's shadow and it's sunlight. So I decided, in this photograph, I would checkerboard time. So wherever the shadows are, it's night and wherever the sun is, it's actually day. Time is this extraordinary thing that we never can really wrap our heads around. But in a very unique and special way, I believe these photographs begin to put a face on time. They embody a new metaphysical visual reality. When you spend 15 hours looking at a place, you're going to see things a little differently than if you or I walked up with our camera, took a picture, and then walked away. This was a perfect example. I call it "Sacré-Coeur Selfie." I watched over 15 hours all these people not even look at Sacré-Coeur. They were more interested in using it as a backdrop. They would walk up, take a picture, and then walk away. And I found this to be an absolutely extraordinary example, a powerful disconnect between what we think the human experience is versus what the human experience is evolving into. The act of sharing has suddenly become more important than the experience itself. (Applause) And finally, my most recent image, which has such a special meaning for me personally: this is the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. And this is photographed in the middle of the Seronera, this is not a reserve. I went specifically during the peak migration to hopefully capture the most diverse range of animals. Unfortunately, when we got there, there was a drought going on during the peak migration, a five-week drought. So all the animals were drawn to the water. I found this one watering hole, and felt if everything remained the same way it was behaving, I had a real opportunity to capture something unique. We spent three days studying it, and nothing could have prepared me for what I witnessed during our shoot day. I photographed for 26 hours in a sealed crocodile blind, 18 feet in the air. What I witnessed was unimaginable. Frankly, it was Biblical. We saw, for 26 hours, all these competitive species share a single resource called water. The same resource that humanity is supposed to have wars over during the next 50 years. The animals never even grunted at each other. They seem to understand something that we humans don't. That this precious resource called water is something we all have to share. When I created this picture, I realized that Day to Night is really a new way of seeing, compressing time, exploring the space-time continuum within a photograph. As technology evolves along with photography, photographs will not only communicate a deeper meaning of time and memory, but they will compose a new narrative of untold stories, creating a timeless window into our world. Thank you. (Applause) |
What's so sexy about math? | {0: 'Cédric Villani tackles perplexing problems in mathematical physics, analysis and geometry with rigor, wit and a signature personal style.'} | TED2016 | What is it that French people do better than all the others? If you would take polls, the top three answers might be: love, wine and whining. (Laughter) Maybe. But let me suggest a fourth one: mathematics. Did you know that Paris has more mathematicians than any other city in the world? And more streets with mathematicians' names, too. And if you look at the statistics of the Fields Medal, often called the Nobel Prize for mathematics, and always awarded to mathematicians below the age of 40, you will find that France has more Fields medalists per inhabitant than any other country. What is it that we find so sexy in math? After all, it seems to be dull and abstract, just numbers and computations and rules to apply. Mathematics may be abstract, but it's not dull and it's not about computing. It is about reasoning and proving our core activity. It is about imagination, the talent which we most praise. It is about finding the truth. There's nothing like the feeling which invades you when after months of hard thinking, you finally understand the right reasoning to solve your problem. The great mathematician André Weil likened this — no kidding — to sexual pleasure. But noted that this feeling can last for hours, or even days. The reward may be big. Hidden mathematical truths permeate our whole physical world. They are inaccessible to our senses but can be seen through mathematical lenses. Close your eyes for moment and think of what is occurring right now around you. Invisible particles from the air around are bumping on you by the billions and billions at each second, all in complete chaos. And still, their statistics can be accurately predicted by mathematical physics. And open your eyes now to the statistics of the velocities of these particles. The famous bell-shaped Gauss Curve, or the Law of Errors — of deviations with respect to the mean behavior. This curve tells about the statistics of velocities of particles in the same way as a demographic curve would tell about the statistics of ages of individuals. It's one of the most important curves ever. It keeps on occurring again and again, from many theories and many experiments, as a great example of the universality which is so dear to us mathematicians. Of this curve, the famous scientist Francis Galton said, "It would have been deified by the Greeks if they had known it. It is the supreme law of unreason." And there's no better way to materialize that supreme goddess than Galton's Board. Inside this board are narrow tunnels through which tiny balls will fall down randomly, going right or left, or left, etc. All in complete randomness and chaos. Let's see what happens when we look at all these random trajectories together. (Board shaking) This is a bit of a sport, because we need to resolve some traffic jams in there. Aha. We think that randomness is going to play me a trick on stage. There it is. Our supreme goddess of unreason. the Gauss Curve, trapped here inside this transparent box as Dream in "The Sandman" comics. For you I have shown it, but to my students I explain why it could not be any other curve. And this is touching the mystery of that goddess, replacing a beautiful coincidence by a beautiful explanation. All of science is like this. And beautiful mathematical explanations are not only for our pleasure. They also change our vision of the world. For instance, Einstein, Perrin, Smoluchowski, they used the mathematical analysis of random trajectories and the Gauss Curve to explain and prove that our world is made of atoms. It was not the first time that mathematics was revolutionizing our view of the world. More than 2,000 years ago, at the time of the ancient Greeks, it already occurred. In those days, only a small fraction of the world had been explored, and the Earth might have seemed infinite. But clever Eratosthenes, using mathematics, was able to measure the Earth with an amazing accuracy of two percent. Here's another example. In 1673, Jean Richer noticed that a pendulum swings slightly slower in Cayenne than in Paris. From this observation alone, and clever mathematics, Newton rightly deduced that the Earth is a wee bit flattened at the poles, like 0.3 percent — so tiny that you wouldn't even notice it on the real view of the Earth. These stories show that mathematics is able to make us go out of our intuition measure the Earth which seems infinite, see atoms which are invisible or detect an imperceptible variation of shape. And if there is just one thing that you should take home from this talk, it is this: mathematics allows us to go beyond the intuition and explore territories which do not fit within our grasp. Here's a modern example you will all relate to: searching the Internet. The World Wide Web, more than one billion web pages — do you want to go through them all? Computing power helps, but it would be useless without the mathematical modeling to find the information hidden in the data. Let's work out a baby problem. Imagine that you're a detective working on a crime case, and there are many people who have their version of the facts. Who do you want to interview first? Sensible answer: prime witnesses. You see, suppose that there is person number seven, tells you a story, but when you ask where he got if from, he points to person number three as a source. And maybe person number three, in turn, points at person number one as the primary source. Now number one is a prime witness, so I definitely want to interview him — priority. And from the graph we also see that person number four is a prime witness. And maybe I even want to interview him first, because there are more people who refer to him. OK, that was easy, but now what about if you have a big bunch of people who will testify? And this graph, I may think of it as all people who testify in a complicated crime case, but it may just as well be web pages pointing to each other, referring to each other for contents. Which ones are the most authoritative? Not so clear. Enter PageRank, one of the early cornerstones of Google. This algorithm uses the laws of mathematical randomness to determine automatically the most relevant web pages, in the same way as we used randomness in the Galton Board experiment. So let's send into this graph a bunch of tiny, digital marbles and let them go randomly through the graph. Each time they arrive at some site, they will go out through some link chosen at random to the next one. And again, and again, and again. And with small, growing piles, we'll keep the record of how many times each site has been visited by these digital marbles. Here we go. Randomness, randomness. And from time to time, also let's make jumps completely randomly to increase the fun. And look at this: from the chaos will emerge the solution. The highest piles correspond to those sites which somehow are better connected than the others, more pointed at than the others. And here we see clearly which are the web pages we want to first try. Once again, the solution emerges from the randomness. Of course, since that time, Google has come up with much more sophisticated algorithms, but already this was beautiful. And still, just one problem in a million. With the advent of digital area, more and more problems lend themselves to mathematical analysis, making the job of mathematician a more and more useful one, to the extent that a few years ago, it was ranked number one among hundreds of jobs in a study about the best and worst jobs published by the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Mathematician — best job in the world. That's because of the applications: communication theory, information theory, game theory, compressed sensing, machine learning, graph analysis, harmonic analysis. And why not stochastic processes, linear programming, or fluid simulation? Each of these fields have monster industrial applications. And through them, there is big money in mathematics. And let me concede that when it comes to making money from the math, the Americans are by a long shot the world champions, with clever, emblematic billionaires and amazing, giant companies, all resting, ultimately, on good algorithm. Now with all this beauty, usefulness and wealth, mathematics does look more sexy. But don't you think that the life a mathematical researcher is an easy one. It is filled with perplexity, frustration, a desperate fight for understanding. Let me evoke for you one of the most striking days in my mathematician's life. Or should I say, one of the most striking nights. At that time, I was staying at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton — for many years, the home of Albert Einstein and arguably the most holy place for mathematical research in the world. And that night I was working and working on an elusive proof, which was incomplete. It was all about understanding the paradoxical stability property of plasmas, which are a crowd of electrons. In the perfect world of plasma, there are no collisions and no friction to provide the stability like we are used to. But still, if you slightly perturb a plasma equilibrium, you will find that the resulting electric field spontaneously vanishes, or damps out, as if by some mysterious friction force. This paradoxical effect, called the Landau damping, is one of the most important in plasma physics, and it was discovered through mathematical ideas. But still, a full mathematical understanding of this phenomenon was missing. And together with my former student and main collaborator Clément Mouhot, in Paris at the time, we had been working for months and months on such a proof. Actually, I had already announced by mistake that we could solve it. But the truth is, the proof was just not working. In spite of more than 100 pages of complicated, mathematical arguments, and a bunch discoveries, and huge calculation, it was not working. And that night in Princeton, a certain gap in the chain of arguments was driving me crazy. I was putting in there all my energy and experience and tricks, and still nothing was working. 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m., not working. Around 4 a.m., I go to bed in low spirits. Then a few hours later, waking up and go, "Ah, it's time to get the kids to school —" What is this? There was this voice in my head, I swear. "Take the second term to the other side, Fourier transform and invert in L2." (Laughter) Damn it, that was the start of the solution! You see, I thought I had taken some rest, but really my brain had continued to work on it. In those moments, you don't think of your career or your colleagues, it's just a complete battle between the problem and you. That being said, it does not harm when you do get a promotion in reward for your hard work. And after we completed our huge analysis of the Landau damping, I was lucky enough to get the most coveted Fields Medal from the hands of the President of India, in Hyderabad on 19 August, 2010 — an honor that mathematicians never dare to dream, a day that I will remember until I live. What do you think, on such an occasion? Pride, yes? And gratitude to the many collaborators who made this possible. And because it was a collective adventure, you need to share it, not just with your collaborators. I believe that everybody can appreciate the thrill of mathematical research, and share the passionate stories of humans and ideas behind it. And I've been working with my staff at Institut Henri Poincaré, together with partners and artists of mathematical communication worldwide, so that we can found our own, very special museum of mathematics there. So in a few years, when you come to Paris, after tasting the great, crispy baguette and macaroon, please come and visit us at Institut Henri Poincaré, and share the mathematical dream with us. Thank you. (Applause) |
Every piece of art you've ever wanted to see -- up close and searchable | {0: "As the director of Google's Cultural Institute and Art Project, Amit Sood leads the effort to bring cultural artifacts from museums, archives and foundations onto the web in extraordinary detail."} | TED2016 | The world is filled with incredible objects and rich cultural heritage. And when we get access to them, we are blown away, we fall in love. But most of the time, the world's population is living without real access to arts and culture. What might the connections be when we start exploring our heritage, the beautiful locations and the art in this world? Before we get started in this presentation, I just want to take care of a few housekeeping points. First, I am no expert in art or culture. I fell into this by mistake, but I'm loving it. Secondly, all of what I'm going to show you belongs to the amazing museums, archives and foundations that we partner with. None of this belongs to Google. And finally, what you see behind me is available right now on your mobile phones, on your laptops. This is our current platform, where you can explore thousands of museums and objects at your fingertips, in extremely high-definition detail. The diversity of the content is what's amazing. If we just had European paintings, if we just had modern art, I think it gets a bit boring. For example, this month, we launched the "Black History" channel with 82 curated exhibitions, which talk about arts and culture in that community. We also have some amazing objects from Japan, centered around craftsmanship, called "Made in Japan." And one of my favorite exhibitions, which actually is the idea of my talk, is — I didn't expect to become a fan of Japanese dolls. But I am, thanks to this exhibition, that has really taught me about the craftsmanship behind the soul of a Japanese doll. Trust me, it's very exciting. Take my word for it. So, moving on swiftly. One quick thing I wanted to showcase in this platform, which you can share with your kids and your friends right now, is you can travel to all these amazing institutions virtually, as well. One of our recent ideas was with The Guggenheim Museum in New York, where you can get a taste of what it might feel like to actually be there. You can go to the ground floor and obviously, most of you, I assume, have been there. And you can see the architectural masterpiece that it is. But imagine this accessibility for a kid in Bombay who's studying architecture, who hasn't had a chance to go to The Guggenheim as yet. You can obviously look at objects in the Guggenheim Museum, you can obviously get into them and so on and so forth. There's a lot of information here. But this is not the purpose of my talk today. This exists right now. What we now have are the building blocks to a very exciting future, when it comes to arts and culture and accessibility to arts and culture. So I am joined today onstage by my good friend and artist in residence at our office in Paris, Cyril Diagne, who is the professor of interactive design at ECAL University in Lausanne, Switzerland. What Cyril and our team of engineers have been doing is trying to find these connections and visualize a few of these. So I'm going to go quite quick now. This object you see behind me — oh, just clarification: Always, seeing the real thing is better. In case people think I'm trying to replicate the real thing. So, moving on. This object you see behind me is the Venus of Berekhat Ram. It's one of the oldest objects in the world, found in the Golan Heights around 233,000 years ago, and currently residing at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. It is also one of the oldest objects on our platform. So let's zoom. We start from this one object. What if we zoomed out and actually tried to experience our own cultural big bang? What might that look like? This is what we deal with on a daily basis at the Cultural Institute — over six million cultural artifacts curated and given to us by institutions, to actually make these connections. You can travel through time, you can understand more about our society through these. You can look at it from the perspective of our planet, and try to see how it might look without borders, if we just organized art and culture. We can also then plot it by time, which obviously, for the data geek in me, is very fascinating. You can spend hours looking at every decade and the contributions in that decade and in those years for art, history and cultures. We would love to spend hours showing you each and every decade, but we don't have the time right now. So you can go on your phone and actually do it yourself. (Applause) But if you don't mind and can hold your applause till later, I don't want to run out of time, because I want to show you a lot of cool stuff. So, just very quickly: you can move on from here to another very interesting idea. Beyond the pretty picture, beyond the nice visualization, what is the purpose, how is this useful? This next idea comes from discussions with curators that we've been having at museums, who, by the way, I've fallen in love with, because they dedicate their whole life to try to tell these stories. One of the curators told me, "Amit, what would it be like if you could create a virtual curator's table where all these six million objects are displayed in a way for us to look at the connections between them?" You can spend a lot of time, trust me, looking at different objects and understanding where they come from. It's a crazy Matrix experience. (Laughter) Just moving on, let's take the world-famous Vincent Van Gogh, who is very well-represented on this platform. Thanks to the diversity of the institutions we have, we have over 211 high-definition, amazing artworks by this artist, now organized in one beautiful view. And as it resolves, and as Cyril goes deeper, you can see all the self-portraits, you can see still life. But I just wanted to highlight one very quick example, which is very timely: "The Bedroom." This is an artwork where three copies exist — one at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, one at the Orsay in Paris and one at the Art Institute of Chicago, which, actually, currently is hosting a reunion of all three artworks physically, I think only for the second time ever. But, it is united digitally and virtually for anybody to look at in a very different way, and you won't get pushed in the line in the crowd. So let's take you and let's travel through "The Bedroom" very quickly, so you can experience what we are doing for every single object. We want the image to speak as much as it can on a digital platform. And all you need is an internet connection and a computer (Applause) And, Cyril, if you can go deeper, quickly. I'm sorry, this is all live, so you have to give Cyril a little bit of — and this is available for every object: modern art, contemporary art, Renaissance — you name it, even sculpture. Sometimes, you don't know what can attract you to an artwork or to a museum or to a cultural discovery. So for me, personally, it was quite a challenge because when I decided to make this my full-time job at Google, my mother was not very supportive. I love my mother, but she thought I was wasting my life with this museum stuff. And for her, a museum is what you do when you go on vacation and you tick-mark and it's over, right? And it took around four and a half years for me to convince my lovely Indian mother that actually, this is worthwhile. And the way I did it was, I realized one day that she loves gold. So I started showing her all objects that have the material gold in them. And the first thing my mom asks me is, "How can we buy these?" (Laughter) And obviously, my salary is not that high, so I was like, "We can't actually do that, mom. But you can explore them virtually." And so now my mom — every time I meet her, she asks me, "Any more gold, any more silver in your project? Can you show me?" And that's the idea I'm trying to illustrate. It does not matter how you get in, as long as you get in. Once you get in, you're hooked. Moving on from here very quickly, there is kind of a playful idea, actually, to illustrate the point of access, and I'm going to go quite quickly on this one. We all know that seeing the artwork in person is amazing. But we also know that most of us can't do it, and the ones that can afford to do it, it's complicated. So — Cyril, can we load up our art trip, what do we call it? We don't have a good name for this. But essentially, we have around 1,000 amazing institutions, 68 countries. But let's start with Rembrandt. We might have time for only one example. But thanks to the diversity, we've got around 500 amazing Rembrandt object artworks from 46 institutions and 17 countries. Let's say that on your next vacation, you want to go see every single one of them. That is your itinerary, you will probably travel 53,000 kilometers, visit around, I think, 46 institutions, and just FYI, you might release 10 tons of CO2 emissions. (Laughter) But remember, it's art, so you can justify it, perhaps, in some way. Moving on swiftly from here, is something a little bit more technical and more interesting. All that we've shown you so far uses metadata to make the connections. But obviously we have something cool nowadays that everyone likes to talk about, which is machine learning. So what we thought is, let's strip out all the metadata, let's look at what machine learning can do based purely on visual recognition of this entire collection. What we ended up with is this very interesting map, these clusters that have no reference point information, but has just used visuals to cluster things together. Each cluster is an art to us by itself of discovery. But one of the clusters we want to show you very quickly is this amazing cluster of portraits that we found from museums around the world. If you could zoom in a little bit more, Cyril. Just to show you, you can just travel through portraits. And essentially, you can do nature, you can do horses and clusters galore. When we saw all these portraits, we were like, "Hey, can we do something fun for kids, or can we do something playful to get people interested in portraits?" Because I haven't really seen young kids really excited to go to a portrait gallery. I wanted to try to figure something out. So we created something called the portrait matcher. It's quite self-explanatory, so I'm just going to let Cyril show his beautiful face. And essentially what's happening is, with the movement of his head, we are matching different portraits around the world from museums. (Applause) And I don't know about you, but I've shown it to my nephew and sister, and the reaction is just phenomenal. All they ask me is, "When can we go see this?" And by the way, if we're nice, maybe, Cyril, you can smile and find a happy one? Oh, perfect. By the way, this is not rehearsed. Congrats, Cyril. Great stuff. Oh wow. OK, let's move on; otherwise, this will just take the whole time. (Applause) So, art and culture can be fun also, right? For our last quick experiment — we call all of these "experiments" — our last quick experiment comes back to machine learning. We show you clusters, visual clusters, but what if we could ask the machine to also name these clusters? What if it could automatically tag them, using no actual metadata? So what we have is this kind of explorer, where we have managed to match, I think, around 4,000 labels. And we haven't really done anything special here, just fed the collection. And we found interesting categories. We can start with horses, a very straightforward category. You would expect to see that the machine has put images of horses, right? And it has, but you also notice, right over there, that it has a very abstract image that it has still managed to recognize and cluster as horses. We also have an amazing head in terms of a horse. And each one has the tags as to why it got categorized in this. So let's move to another one which I found very funny and interesting, because I don't understand how this category came up. It's called "Lady in Waiting." If, Cyril, you do it very quickly, you will see that we have these amazing images of ladies, I guess, in waiting or posing. I don't really understand it. But I've been trying to ask my museum contacts, you know, "What is this? What's going on here?" And it's fascinating. Coming back to gold very quickly, I wanted to search for gold and see how the machine tagged all the gold. But, actually, it doesn't tag it as gold. We are living in popular times. It tags it as "bling-bling." (Laughter) I'm being hard on Cyril, because I'm moving too fast. Essentially, here you have all the bling-bling of the world's museums organized for you. And finally, to end this talk and these experiments, what I hope you feel after this talk is happiness and emotion. And what would we see when we see happiness? If we actually look at all the objects that have been tagged under "happiness," you would expect happiness, I guess. But there was one that came up that was very fascinating and interesting, which was this artwork by Douglas Coupland, our friend and artist in residence as well, called, "I Miss My Pre-Internet Brain." I don't know why the machine feels like it misses its pre-Internet brain and it's been tagged here, but it's a very interesting thought. I sometimes do miss my pre-Internet brain, but not when it comes to exploring arts and culture online. So take out your phones, take out your computers, go visit museums. And just a quick call-out to all the amazing archivists, historians, curators, who are sitting in museums, preserving all this culture. And the least we can do is get our daily dose of art and culture for ourselves and our kids. Thank you. (Applause) |
The Chinese zodiac, explained | {0: "ShaoLan want to help people understand China's culture and language, and to bridge the gap between East and West."} | TED2016 | Have you ever been asked by your Chinese friend, "What is your zodiac sign?" Don't think they are making small talk. If you say, "I'm a Monkey," they immediately know you are either 24, 36, 48 or 60 years old. (Laughter) Asking a zodiac sign is a polite way of asking your age. By revealing your zodiac sign, you are also being evaluated. Judgments are being made about your fortune or misfortune, your personality, career prospects and how you will do in a given year. If you share you and your partner's animal signs, they will paint a picture in their mind about your private life. Maybe you don't believe in the Chinese zodiac. As a quarter of the world population is influenced by it, you'd be wise to do something about that. So what is the Chinese zodiac, exactly? Most Westerners think of Greco-Roman zodiac, the signs divided into 12 months. The Chinese zodiac is different. It's a 12-year cycle labeled with animals, starting with a Rat and ending with a Pig, and has no association with constellations. For example, if you were born in 1975, you are a Rabbit. Can you see your zodiac sign there? Our Chinese ancestors constructed a very complicated theoretical framework based on yin and yang, the five elements and the 12 zodiac animals. Over thousands of years, this popular culture has affected people's major decisions, such as naming, marriage, giving birth and attitude towards each other. And some of the implications are quite amazing. The Chinese believe certain animals get on better than the others. So parents choose specific years to give birth to babies, because they believe the team effort by the right combination of animals can give prosperity to families. We even refer to the zodiac when entering into romantic relations. I'm a Pig; I should have perfect romance with Tigers, Goats and Rabbits. Chinese people believe some animals are natural enemies. As a Pig, I need to be careful with a Snake. Raise your hand if you are a Snake. Let's have a chat later. (Laughter) We believe some animals are luckier than the others, such as the Dragon. Unlike the Western tradition, the Chinese Dragon is a symbol for power, strength and wealth. It's everyone's dream to have a Dragon baby. Jack Ma's parents must have been very proud. And they are not the only ones. In 2012, the Year of the Dragon, the birthrate in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan increased by five percent. That means another one million more babies. With a traditional preference to baby boys, the boy-girl ratio that year was 120 to 100. When those Dragon boys grow up, they will face much more severe competition in love and job markets. According to the BBC and the Chinese government's press release, January 2015 saw a peak of Cesarean sections. Why? That was the last month for the Year of the Horse. It's not because they like horses so much, it's because they try to avoid having unlucky Goat babies. (Laughter) If you are a Goat, please don't feel bad. Those are Goat babies. They don't look like losers to me. (Laughter) Tiger is another undesirable animal, due to its volatile temperament. Many Chinese regions saw a sharp decline of birthrate during those years. Perhaps one should consider zodiac in reverse, as those Tiger and Goat babies will face much less competition. Maybe they are the lucky ones. I went through the Forbes top 300 richest people in the world, and it's interesting to see the most undesirable two animals, the Goat and Tiger, are at the top of the chart, even higher than the Dragon. So maybe we should consider, maybe it's much better to have less competition. One last but interesting point: many Chinese people make their investment decisions based on the zodiac sign index. Although the belief and tradition of the zodiac sign has been over thousands of years, the trend of using it in making major decisions did not really happen until the past few decades. Our ancestors were very busy surviving poverty, drought, famine, riot, disease and civil war. And finally, Chinese people have the time, wealth and technology to create an ideal life they've always wanted. The collective decision made by 1.3 billion people has caused the fluctuation in economics and demand on everything, from health care and education to property and consumer goods. As China plays such an important role in the global economy and geopolitics, the decisions made based on the zodiac and other Chinese traditions end up impacting everyone around the world. Are there any Monkeys here? 2016 is the Year of the Monkey. Monkeys are clever, curious, creative and mischievous. Thank you. (Applause) |
How college loans exploit students for profit | {0: "Professor Sajay Samuel's proposal to reduce the burden of student loans is part of his larger preoccupation with thinking beyond the conventional categories of economics and ecology."} | TEDxPSU | Today 40 million Americans are indebted for their passage to the new economy. Too poor to pay their way through college, they now owe lenders more than one trillion US dollars. They do find what jobs they can get to pay off a debt that is secured on their person. In America, even a bankrupt gambler gets a second chance. But it is nearly impossible for an American to get discharged their student loan debts. Once upon a time in America, going to college did not mean graduating with debt. My friend Paul's father graduated from Colorado State University on the GI Bill. For his generation, higher education was free or almost free, because it was thought of as a public good. Not anymore. When Paul also graduated from Colorado State University, he paid for his English degree by working part-time. 30 years ago, higher education tuition was affordable, reasonable, and what debts you accumulated, you paid off by graduation date. Not anymore. Paul's daughter followed in his footsteps, but with one difference: when she graduated five years ago, it was with a whopping debt. Students like Kate have to take on a loan because the cost of higher education has become unaffordable for many if not most American families. But so what? Getting into debt to buy an expensive education is not all bad if you could pay it off with the increased income that you earned from it. But that's where the rubber meets the road. Even a college grad earned 10 percent more in 2001 than she did in 2013. So ... tuition costs up, public funding down, family incomes diminished, personal incomes weak. Is it any wonder that more than a quarter of those who must cannot make their student loan payments? The worst of times can be the best of times, because certain truths flash up in ways that you can't ignore. I want to speak of three of them today. 1.2 trillion dollars of debts for diplomas make it abundantly obvious that higher education is a consumer product you can buy. All of us talk about education just as the economists do now, as an investment that you make to improve the human stock by training them for work. As an investment you make to sort and classify people so that employers can hire them more easily. The U.S. News & World Report ranks colleges just as the consumer report rates washing machines. The language is peppered with barbarisms. Teachers are called "service providers," students are called "consumers." Sociology and Shakespeare and soccer and science, all of these are "content." Student debt is profitable. Only not on you. Your debt fattens the profit of the student loan industry. The two 800-pound gorillas of which — Sallie Mae and Navient — posted last year a combined profit of 1.2 billion dollars. And just like home mortgages, student loans can be bundled and packaged and sliced and diced, and sold on Wall Street. And colleges and universities that invest in these securitized loans profit twice. Once from your tuition, and then again from the interest on debt. With all that money to be made, are we surprised that some in the higher education business have begun to engage in false advertising, in bait and switch ... in exploiting the very ignorance that they pretend to educate? Third: diplomas are a brand. Many years ago my teacher wrote, "When students are treated as consumers, they're made prisoners of addiction and envy." Just as consumers can be sold and resold upgraded versions of an iPhone, so also people can be sold more and more education. College is the new high school, we already say that. But why stop there? People can be upsold on certifications and recertifications, master's degrees, doctoral degrees. Higher education is also marketed as a status object. Buy a degree, much like you do a Lexus of a Louis Vuitton bag, to distinguish yourself from others. So you can be the object of envy of others. Diplomas are a brand. But these truths are often times hidden by a very noisy sales pitch. There is not a day that goes by without some policy guy on television telling us, "A college degree is absolutely essential to get on that up escalator to a middle-class life." And the usual evidence offered is the college premium: a college grad who makes on average 56 percent more than a high school grad. Let's look at that number more carefully, because on the face of it, it seems to belie the stories we all hear about college grads working as baristas and cashiers. Of 100 people who enroll in any form of post-secondary education, 45 do not complete it in a timely fashion, for a number of reasons, including financial. Of the 55 that do graduate, two will remain unemployed, and another 18 are underemployed. So, college grads earn more than high school grads, but does it pay for the exorbitant tuition and the lost wages while at college? Now even economists admit going to college pays off for only those who complete it. But that's only because high school wages have been cut to the bone, for decades now. For decades, workers with a high school degree have been denied a fair share of what they have produced. And had they received as they should have, then going to college would have been a bad investment for many. College premium? I think it's a high school discount. Two out of three people who enroll are not going to find an adequate job. And the future, for them, doesn't look particularly promising — in fact, it's downright bleak. And it is they who are going to suffer the most punishing forms of student debt. And it is they, curiously and sadly, who are marketed most loudly about this college premium thing. That's not just cynical marketing, that's cruel. So what do we do? What if students and parents treated higher education as a consumer product? Everybody else seems to. Then, like any other consumer product, you would demand to know what you're paying for. When you buy medicines, you get a list of side effects. When you buy a higher educational product, you should have a warning label that allows consumers to choose, make informed choices. When you buy a car, it tells you how many miles per gallon to expect. Who knows what to expect from a degree say, in Canadian Studies. There is such a thing, by the way. What if there was an app for that? One that linked up the cost of a major to the expected income. Let's call it Income-Based Tuition or IBT. One of you make this. (Laughter) Discover your reality. (Laughter) There are three advantages, three benefits to Income-Based Tuition. Any user can figure out how much money he or she will make from a given college and major. Such informed users are unlikely to fall victim to the huckster's ploy, to the sales pitch. But also to choose wisely. Why would anybody pay more for college than let's say, 15 percent of the additional income they earn? There's a second benefit to Income-Based Tuition. By tying the cost to the income, college administrators would be forced to manage costs better, to find innovative ways to do so. For instance, all of you students here pay roughly the same tuition for every major. That is manifestly unfair, and should change. An engineering student uses more resources and facilities and labs and faculty than a philosophy student. But the philosophy student, as a consequence, is subsidizing the engineering student. Who then, by the way, goes on and earns more money. Why should two people buy the same product, pay the same, but one person receive half or a third of the service. In fact, college grads, some majors, pay 25 percent of their income servicing their student debt, while others pay five percent. That kind if inequity would end when majors are priced more correctly. Now of course, all this data — and one of you is going to do this, right? All this data has to be well designed, maybe audited by public accounting firms to avoid statistical lies. We know about statistics, right? But be that as it may, the third and biggest benefit of Income-Based Tuition, is it would free Americans from the fear and the fact of financial ruin because they bought a defective product. Perhaps, in time, young and old Americans may rediscover, as the gentleman said earlier, their curiosity, their love of learning — begin to study what they love, love what they study, follow their passion ... getting stimulated by their intelligence, follow paths of inquiry that they really want to. After all, it was Eric and Kevin, two years ago, just exactly these kinds of young men, who prompted me and worked with me, and still do, in the study of indebted students in America. Thank you for your attention. (Applause) |
A highly scientific taxonomy of haters | {0: 'Stand-up comedian Negin Farsad counters Islamophobia in funny and clever ways.'} | TED2016 | I'm an Iranian-American Muslim female, like all of you. And I'm also a social justice comedian, something that I insist is an actual job. To explain what that is, let me tell you how I got here. I've performed all over the country. And let me tell you, America is majestic, right? It's got breathtaking nature, waffle houses and diabetes as far as the eye can see. It is really something. Now, the American population can be broken up into three main categories: there's mostly wonderful people, haters and Florida. (Laughter) Besides Florida, the most troubling category here are the Haters. They are a minority, but they overcompensate by being extra loud. They have the Napoleon complex of demographics, and yes, some of the men do wear heels. As a social justice comedian, it's my goal to convert these haters, because they hate a lot of things, which leads to negative outcomes, like racism, violence and Ted Nugent. This is not an exhaustive list; I'm probably missing 3-7 items. But the point is, we have to reckon with the haters. But there's variance within this group and it's not efficient to go after all of them, right? So what I've done is created a highly scientific Taxonomy of Haters. I basically took all of the haters, I put them in a petri dish, like a scientist, and this is what I found. (Laughter) First off, we have the trolls. These are your garden-variety digital haters. They're the people who quit their jobs so they can post on YouTube videos all day long. There's also the drive-by haters. Now, these people will be at a stoplight, they'll wait for the light to turn green and when it does, they yell, "Go back to your own country!" Now back in the day, they would've actually gotten out of their cars and hated you to your face. But they just don't make them like they used to — which is another sign of the decline in America. (Laughter) The next category is the mission-oriented-bigot- whose-group-affiliation- gives-them-cover-for-hating hater. These guys like to hate via a seemingly nice organization, like a church or a nonprofit, and they oftentimes like to speak in an old-timey voice. But the group I'm most interested in is the swing hater. The swing hater is sister to the swing voter — they just can't decide! They're like ideological sluts who move from hating to not hating. And they do it because they don't have enough information. This is the group I like to target with social justice comedy. Why comedy? Because on a scale of comedy to brochure, the average American prefers comedy, as you can see from this graph. (Laughter) Comedy is very popular. And by the way, this is a mathematically accurate graph, generated from fake numbers. (Laughter) Now, the question is: Why does social justice comedy work? Because, first off, it makes you laugh. And when you're laughing, you enter into a state of openness. And in that moment of openness, a good social justice comedian can stick in a whole bunch of information, and if they're really skilled, a rectal exam. (Laughter) Here are some ground rules for social justice comedy: first off, it's not partisan. This isn't political comedy, this is about justice, and no one is against justice. Two, it's inviting and warm, it makes you feel like you're sitting inside of a burrito. Three, it's funny but sneaky, like you could be hearing an interesting treatise on income inequality, that's encased in a really sophisticated poop joke. (Laughter) Here's how I see social justice comedy working. A few years ago, I rounded up a bunch of Muslim-American comedians — in a non-violent way — (Laughter) And we went around the country to places like Alabama, Arizona, Tennessee, Georgia — places where they love the Muzzies — and we did stand-up shows. We called the tour "The Muslims Are Coming!" (Laughter) We turned this into a movie, and then after the movie came out, a known hate group spent 300,000 dollars on an anti-Muslim poster campaign with the MTA — that's the New York City subway system. Now, the posters were truly offensive, not to mentioned poorly designed — I mean, if you're going to be bigoted, you might as well use a better font. (Laughter) But we decided, why not launch our own poster campaign that says nice things about Muslims, while promoting the movie. So myself and fellow comedian Dean Obeidallah decided to launch the fighting-bigotry- with-delightful-posters campaign. We raised the money, worked with the MTA for over 5 months, got the posters approved, and two days after they were supposed to go up, the MTA decided to ban the posters, citing political content. Let's take a look at a couple of those posters. Here's one. Facts about Muslims: Muslims invented the concept of a hospital. OK. Fact: Grown-up Muslims can do more push-ups than baby Muslims. (Laughter) Fact: Muslims invented Justin Timberlake. (Laughter) Let's take a look at another one. The ugly truth about Muslims: they have great frittata recipes. Now clearly, frittatas are considered political by the MTA. Either that, or the mere mention of Muslims in a positive light was considered political — but it isn't. It's about justice. So we decided to change our fighting-bigortry- with-delightful-posters campaign and turn it into the fighting-bigotry- with-a-delightful-lawsuit campaign. (Laughter) So basically, what I'm saying is a couple of dirt-bag comedians took on a major New York City agency and the comedians won. (Applause and cheers) Thank you. Victory was a very weird feeling. I was like, "Is this what blonde girls feel like all the time? 'Cause this is amazing!" (Laughter) Here's another example. I'm asked everywhere I go: "Why don't Muslims denounce terrorism?" We do. But OK, I'll take the bait. So I decided to launch thedailydenouncer.com. It's a website that denounces terrorism every day of the week, while taking the weekends off. Let's take a look at an example. They generally appear as single-panel cartoons, "I denounce terrorism! I also denounce people who never fill the paper tray!" The point of the website is that it denounces terrorism while recognizing that it's ridiculous that we have to constantly denounce terrorism. But if bigotry isn't your thing, social justice comedy is useful for all sorts of issues. For example, myself and fellow comedian Lee Camp went to the Cayman Islands to investigate offshore banking. Now, the United States loses something like 300 billion dollars a year in these offshore tax havens. Not to brag, but at the end of every month, I have something like 5-15 dollars in disposable income. So we walked into these banks in the Cayman Islands and asked if we could open up a bank account with eight dollars and 27 cents. (Laughter) The bank managers would indulge us for 30-45 seconds before calling security. Security would come out, brandish their weapons, and then we would squeal with fear and run away, because — and this is the last rule of social justice comedy — sometimes it makes you want to take a dump in your pants. Most of my work is meant to be fun. It's meant to generate a connection and laughter. But yes, sometimes I get run off the grounds by security. Sometimes I get mean tweets and hate mail. Sometimes I get voice mails saying that if I continue telling my jokes, they'll kill me and they'll kill my family. And those death threats are definitely not funny. But despite the occasional danger, I still think that social justice comedy is one of our best weapons. I mean, we've tried a lot of approaches to social justice, like war and competitive ice dancing. But still, a lot of things are still kind of awful. So I think it's time we try and tell a really good poop joke. Thank you. (Applause) |
3 reasons why we can win the fight against poverty | {0: 'With One Acre Fund, Andrew Youn fights poverty in rural Sub-Saharan Africa.'} | TED2016 | I've been living in rural East Africa for about 10 years, and I want to share a field perspective with you on global poverty. I believe that the greatest failure of the human race is the fact that we've left more than one billion of our members behind. Hungry, extreme poverty: these often seem like gigantic, insurmountable problems, too big to solve. But as a field practitioner, I believe these are actually very solvable problems if we just take the right strategies. Archimedes was an ancient Greek thinker, and he taught us that if we lean on the right levers, we can move the world. In the fight against extreme poverty, I believe there are three powerful levers that we can lean on. This talk is all about those levers, and why they make poverty a winnable fight in our lifetimes. What is extreme poverty? When I first moved to rural East Africa, I stayed overnight with a farm family. They were wonderful people. They invited me into their home. We sang songs together and ate a simple dinner. They gave me a blanket to sleep on the floor. In the morning, however, there was nothing to eat. And then at lunchtime, I watched with an increasingly sick feeling as the eldest girl in the family cooked porridge as a substitute for lunch. For that meal, every child drank one cup to survive. And I cannot tell you how ashamed I felt when they handed one of those cups to me, and I knew I had to accept their hospitality. Children need food not only to survive but also to grow physically and mentally. Every day they fail to eat, they lose a little bit of their future. Amongst the extreme poor, one in three children are permanently stunted from a lifetime of not eating enough. When that's combined with poor access to health care, one in 10 extremely poor children die before they reach age five. And only one quarter of children complete high school because they lack school fees. Hunger and extreme poverty curb human potential in every possible way. We see ourselves as a thinking, feeling and moral human race, but until we solve these problems for all of our members, we fail that standard, because every person on this planet matters. This child matters. These children matter. This girl matters. You know, we see things like this, and we're upset by them, but they seem like such big problems. We don't know how to take effective action. But remember our friend Archimedes. Global poverty has powerful levers. It's a problem like any other. I live and work in the field, and as a practitioner, I believe these are very solvable problems. So for the next 10 minutes, let's not be sad about the state of the world. Let's engage our brains. Let's engage our collective passion for problem-solving and figure out what those levers are. Lever number one: most of the world's poor are farmers. Think about how extraordinary this is. If this picture represents the world's poor, then more than half engage in farming as a major source of income. This gets me really excited. All of these people, one profession. Think how powerful this is. When farmers become more productive, then more than half the world's poor earn more money and climb out of poverty. And it gets better. The product of farming is, of course, food. So when farmers become more productive, they earn more food, and they don't just help themselves, but they help to feed healthy communities and thriving economies. And when farmers become more productive, they reduce environmental pressure. We only have two ways we can feed the world: we can either make our existing farmland a lot more productive, or we can clear cut forest and savannah to make more farmland, which would be environmentally disastrous. Farmers are basically a really important leverage point. When farmers become more productive, they earn more income, they climb out of poverty, they feed their communities and they reduce environmental land pressure. Farmers stand at the center of the world. And not a farmer like this one, but rather this lady. Most of the farmers I know are actually women. Look at the strength and the will radiating from this woman. She is physically strong, mentally tough, and she will do whatever it takes to earn a better life for her children. If we're going to put the future of humanity in one person's hands, then I'm really glad it's her. (Applause) There's just one problem: many smallholder farmers lack access to basic tools and knowledge. Currently, they take a little bit of saved food grain from the prior year, they plant it in the ground and they till it with a manual hand hoe. These are tools and techniques that date to the Bronze Age, and it's why many farmers are still very poor. But good news, again. Lever number two: humanity actually solved the problem of agricultural poverty a century ago. Let me walk you through the three most basic factors in farming. First, hybrid seed is created when you cross two seeds together. If you naturally pollinate a high-yielding variety together with a drought-resistant variety, you get a hybrid that inherits positive traits from both of its parents. Next, conventional fertilizer, if used responsibly, is environmentally sustainable. If you micro-dose just a pinch of fertilizer to a plant that's taller than I am, you unlock enormous yield gain. These are known as farm inputs. Farm inputs need to be combined with good practice. When you space your seeds and plant with massive amounts of compost, farmers multiply their harvests. These proven tools and practices have more than tripled agricultural productivity in every major region of the world, moving mass numbers of people out of poverty. We just haven't finished delivering these things to everybody just yet, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. So overall, this is amazing news. Humanity actually solved agricultural poverty a century ago, in theory. We just haven't delivered these things to everybody just yet. In this century, the reason that people remain poor is because maybe they live in remote places. They lack access to these things. Therefore, ending poverty is simply a matter of delivering proven goods and services to people. We don't need more genius types right now. The humble delivery guy is going to end global poverty in our lifetime. So these are the three levers, and the most powerful lever is simply delivery. Wherever the world's companies, governments and nonprofits set up delivery networks for life-improving goods, we eliminate poverty. OK, so that sounds really nice in theory, but what about in practice? What do these delivery networks look like? I want to share the concrete example that I know best, my organization, One Acre Fund. We only serve the farmer, and our job is to provide her with the tools that she needs to succeed. We start off by delivering farm inputs to really rural places. Now, this may appear initially very challenging, but it's pretty possible. Let me show you. We buy farm inputs with the combined power of our farmer network, and store it in 20 warehouses like this. Then, during input delivery, we rent hundreds of 10-ton trucks and send them out to where farmers are waiting in the field. They then get their individual orders and walk it home to their farms. It's kind of like Amazon for rural farmers. Importantly, realistic delivery also includes finance, a way to pay. Farmers pay us little by little over time, covering most of our expenses. And then we surround all that with training. Our rural field officers deliver practical, hands-on training to farmers in the field every two weeks. Wherever we deliver our services, farmers use these tools to climb out of poverty. This is a farmer in our program, Consolata. Look at the pride on her face. She has achieved a modest prosperity that I believe is the human right of every hardworking person on the planet. Today, I'm proud to say that we're serving about 400,000 farmers like Consolata. (Applause) The key to doing this is scalable delivery. In any given area, we hire a rural field officer who delivers our services to 200 farmers, on average, with more than 1,000 people living in those families. Today, we have 2,000 of these rural field officers growing very quickly. This is our delivery army, and we're just one organization. There are many companies, governments and nonprofits that have delivery armies just like this. And I believe we stand at a moment in time where collectively, we are capable of delivering farm services to all farmers. Let me show you how possible this is. This is a map of Sub-Saharan Africa, with a map of the United States for scale. I chose Sub-Saharan Africa because this is a huge delivery territory. It's very challenging. But we analyzed every 50-mile by 50-mile block on the continent, and we found that half of farmers live in just these shaded regions. That's a remarkably small area overall. If you were to lay these boxes next to each other within a map of the United States, they would only cover the Eastern United States. You can order pizza anywhere in this territory and it'll arrive to your house hot, fresh and delicious. If America can deliver pizza to an area of this size, then Africa's companies, governments and non-profits can deliver farm services to all of her farmers. This is possible. I'm going to wrap up by generalizing beyond just farming. In every field of human development, humanity has already invented effective tools to end poverty. We just need to deliver them. So again, in every area of human development, super-smart people a long time ago invented inexpensive, highly effective tools. Humanity is armed to the teeth with simple, effective solutions to poverty. We just need to deliver these to a pretty small area. Again using the map of Sub-Saharan Africa as an example, remember that rural poverty is concentrated in these blue shaded areas. Urban poverty is even more concentrated, in these green little dots. Again, using a map of the United States for scale, this is what I would call a highly achievable delivery zone. In fact, for the first time in human history, we have a vast amount of delivery infrastructure available to us. The world's companies, governments and non-profits have delivery armies that are fully capable of covering this relatively small area. We just lack the will. If we are willing, every one of us has a role to play. We first need more people to pursue careers in human development, especially if you live in a developing nation. We need more front line health workers, teachers, farmer trainers, sales agents for life-improving goods. These are the delivery people that dedicate their careers to improving the lives of others. But we also need a lot of support roles. These are roles available at just my organization alone, and we're just one out of many. This may surprise you, but no matter what your technical specialty, there is a role for you in this fight. And no matter how logistically possible it is to end poverty, we need a lot more resources. This is our number one constraint. For private investors, we need a big expansion of venture capital, private equity, working capital, available in emerging markets. But there are also limits to what private business can accomplish. Private businesses often struggle to profitably serve the extreme poor, so philanthropy still has a major role to play. Anybody can give, but we need more leadership. We need more visionary philanthropists and global leaders who will take problems in human development and lead humanity to wipe them off the face of the planet. If you're interested in these ideas, check out this website. We need more leaders. Humanity has put people on the moon. We've invented supercomputers that fit into our pockets and connect us with anybody on the planet. We've run marathons at a five-minute mile pace. We are an exceptional people. But we've left more than one billion of our members behind. Until every girl like this one has an opportunity to earn her full human potential, we have failed to become a truly moral and just human race. Logistically speaking, it's incredibly possible to end extreme poverty. We just need to deliver proven goods and services to everybody. If we have the will, every one of us has a role to play. Let's deploy our time, our careers, our collective wealth. Let us deliver an end to extreme poverty in this lifetime. Thank you. (Applause) |
The secret to effective nonviolent resistance | {0: 'Jamila Raqib works on pragmatic approaches to nonviolent action for activists, human rights organizations, academics and governments globally.'} | TED Talks Live | War has been a part of my life since I can remember. I was born in Afghanistan, just six months after the Soviets invaded, and even though I was too young to understand what was happening, I had a deep sense of the suffering and the fear around me. Those early experiences had a major impact on how I now think about war and conflict. I learned that when people have a fundamental issue at stake, for most of them, giving in is not an option. For these types conflicts — when people's rights are violated, when their countries are occupied, when they're oppressed and humiliated — they need a powerful way to resist and to fight back. Which means that no matter how destructive and terrible violence is, if people see it as their only choice, they will use it. Most of us are concerned with the level of violence in the world. But we're not going to end war by telling people that violence is morally wrong. Instead, we must offer them a tool that's at least as powerful and as effective as violence. This is the work I do. For the past 13 years, I've been teaching people in some of the most difficult situations around the world how they can use nonviolent struggle to conduct conflict. Most people associate this type of action with Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But people have been using nonviolent action for thousands of years. In fact, most of the rights that we have today in this country — as women, as minorities, as workers, as people of different sexual orientations and citizens concerned with the environment — these rights weren't handed to us. They were won by people who fought for them and who sacrificed for them. But because we haven't learned from this history, nonviolent struggle as a technique is widely misunderstood. I met recently with a group of Ethiopian activists, and they told me something that I hear a lot. They said they'd already tried nonviolent action, and it hadn't worked. Years ago they held a protest. The government arrested everyone, and that was the end of that. The idea that nonviolent struggle is equivalent to street protests is a real problem. Because although protests can be a great way to show that people want change, on their own, they don't actually create change — at least change that is fundamental. (Laughter) Powerful opponents are not going to give people what they want just because they asked nicely ... or even not so nicely. (Laughter) Nonviolent struggle works by destroying an opponent, not physically, but by identifying the institutions that an opponent needs to survive, and then denying them those sources of power. Nonviolent activists can neutralize the military by causing soldiers to defect. They can disrupt the economy through strikes and boycotts. And they can challenge government propaganda by creating alternative media. There are a variety of methods that can be used to do this. My colleague and mentor, Gene Sharp, has identified 198 methods of nonviolent action. And protest is only one. Let me give you a recent example. Until a few months ago, Guatemala was ruled by corrupt former military officials with ties to organized crime. People were generally aware of this, but most of them felt powerless to do anything about it — until one group of citizens, just 12 regular people, put out a call on Facebook to their friends to meet in the central plaza, holding signs with a message: "Renuncia YA" — resign already. To their surprise, 30,000 people showed up. They stayed there for months as protests spread throughout the country. At one point, the organizers delivered hundreds of eggs to various government buildings with a message: "If you don't have the huevos" — the balls — "to stop corrupt candidates from running for office, you can borrow ours." (Laughter) (Applause) President Molina responded by vowing that he would never step down. And the activists realized that they couldn't just keep protesting and ask the president to resign. They needed to leave him no choice. So they organized a general strike, in which people throughout the country refused to work. In Guatemala City alone, over 400 businesses and schools shut their doors. Meanwhile, farmers throughout the country blocked major roads. Within five days, the president, along with dozens of other government officials, resigned already. (Applause) I've been greatly inspired by the creativity and bravery of people using nonviolent action in nearly every country in the world. For example, recently a group of activists in Uganda released a crate of pigs in the streets. You can see here that the police are confused about what to do with them. (Laughter) The pigs were painted the color of the ruling party. One pig was even wearing a hat, a hat that people recognized. (Laughter) Activists around the world are getting better at grabbing headlines, but these isolated actions do very little if they're not part of a larger strategy. A general wouldn't march his troops into battle unless he had a plan to win the war. Yet this is how most of the world's nonviolent movements operate. Nonviolent struggle is just as complex as military warfare, if not more. Its participants must be well-trained and have clear objectives, and its leaders must have a strategy of how to achieve those objectives. The technique of war has been developed over thousands of years with massive resources and some of our best minds dedicated to understanding and improving how it works. Meanwhile, nonviolent struggle is rarely systematically studied, and even though the number is growing, there are still only a few dozen people in the world who are teaching it. This is dangerous, because we now know that our old approaches of dealing with conflict are not adequate for the new challenges that we're facing. The US government recently admitted that it's in a stalemate in its war against ISIS. But what most people don't know is that people have stood up to ISIS using nonviolent action. When ISIS captured Mosul in June 2014, they announced that they were putting in place a new public school curriculum, based on their own extremist ideology. But on the first day of school, not a single child showed up. Parents simply refused to send them. They told journalists they would rather homeschool their children than to have them brainwashed. This is an example of just one act of defiance in just one city. But what if it was coordinated with the dozens of other acts of nonviolent resistance that have taken place against ISIS? What if the parents' boycott was part of a larger strategy to identify and cut off the resources that ISIS needs to function; the skilled labor needed to produce food; the engineers needed to extract and refine oil; the media infrastructure and communications networks and transportation systems, and the local businesses that ISIS relies on? It may be difficult to imagine defeating ISIS with action that is nonviolent. But it's time we challenge the way we think about conflict and the choices we have in facing it. Here's an idea worth spreading: let's learn more about where nonviolent action has worked and how we can make it more powerful, just like we do with other systems and technologies that are constantly being refined to better meet human needs. It may be that we can improve nonviolent action to a point where it is increasingly used in place of war. Violence as a tool of conflict could then be abandoned in the same way that bows and arrows were, because we have replaced them with weapons that are more effective. With human innovation, we can make nonviolent struggle more powerful than the newest and latest technologies of war. The greatest hope for humanity lies not in condemning violence but in making violence obsolete. Thank you. (Applause) |
This scientist makes ears out of apples | {0: "Andrew Pelling's unconventional and creative scientific process is founded on play."} | TED2016 | I've got a confession. I love looking through people's garbage. Now, it's not some creepy thing. I'm usually just looking for old electronics, stuff I can take to my workshop and hack. I do have a fetish for CD-ROM drives. Each one's got three different motors, so now you can build things that move. There's switches so you can turn things on and off. There's even a freaking laser, so you can make a cool robot into an awesome robot. Now, I've built a lot of stuff out of garbage, and some of these things have even been kind of useful. But here's the thing, for me, garbage is just a chance to play, to be creative and build things to amuse myself. This is what I love doing, so I just made it part of my day job. I lead a university-based biological research lab, where we value curiosity and exploration above all else. We aren't focused on any particular problem, and we're not trying to solve any particular disease. This is just a place where people can come and ask fascinating questions and find answers. And I realized a long time ago that if I challenge people to build the equipment they need out of the garbage I find, it's a great way to foster creativity. And what happened was that artists and scientists from around the world started coming to my lab. And it's not just because we value unconventional ideas, it's because we test and validate them with scientific rigor. So one day I was hacking something, I was taking it apart, and I had this sudden idea: Could I treat biology like hardware? Could I dismantle a biological system, mix and match the parts and then put it back together in some new and creative way? My lab started working on this, and I want to show you the result. Can any of you guys tell me what fruit this is? Audience: Apple! Andrew Pelling: That's right — it's an apple. Now, I actually want you to notice as well that this is a lot redder than most apples. And that's because we grew human cells into it. We took a totally innocent Macintosh apple, removed all the apple cells and DNA and then implanted human cells. And what we're left with after removing all the apple cells is this cellulose scaffold. This is the stuff that gives plants their shape and texture. And these little holes that you can see, this is where all the apple cells used to be. So then we come along, we implant some mammalian cells that you can see in blue. What happens is, these guys start multiplying and they fill up this entire scaffold. As weird as this is, it's actually really reminiscent of how our own tissues are organized. And we found in our pre-clinical work that you can implant these scaffolds into the body, and the body will send in cells and a blood supply and actually keep these things alive. This is the point when people started asking me, "Andrew, can you make body parts out of apples?" And I'm like, "You've come to the right place." (Laughter) I actually brought this up with my wife. She's a musical instrument maker, and she does a lot of wood carving for a living. So I asked her, "Could you, like, literally carve some ears out of an apple for us?" And she did. So I took her ears to the lab. We then started preparing them. Yeah, I know. (Laughter) It's a good lab, man. (Laughter) And then we grew cells on them. And this is the result. Listen, my lab is not in the ear-manufacturing business. People have actually been working on this for decades. Here's the issue: commercial scaffolds can be really expensive and problematic, because they're sourced from proprietary products, animals or cadavers. We used an apple and it cost pennies. What's also really cool here is it's not that hard to make these things. The equipment you need can be built from garbage, and the key processing step only requires soap and water. So what we did was put all the instructions online as open source. And then we founded a mission-driven company, and we're developing kits to make it easier for anyone with a sink and a soldering iron to make these things at home. What I'm really curious about is if one day, it will be possible to repair, rebuild and augment our own bodies with stuff we make in the kitchen. Speaking of kitchens, here's some asparagus. They're tasty, and they make your pee smell funny. (Laughter) Now, I was in my kitchen, and I was noticing that when you look down the stalks of these asparagus, what you can see are all these tiny little vessels. And when we image them in the lab, you can see how the cellulose forms these structures. This image reminds me of two things: our blood vessels and the structure and organization of our nerves and spinal cord. So here's the question: Can we grow axons and neurons down these channels? Because if we can, then maybe we can use asparagus to form new connections between the ends of damaged and severed nerves. Or maybe even a spinal cord. Don't get me wrong — this is exceptionally challenging and really hard work to do, and we are not the only ones working on this. But we are the only ones using asparagus. (Laughter) Right now, we've got really promising pilot data. And we're working with tissue engineers and neurosurgeons to find out what's actually possible. So listen, all of the work I've shown you, the stuff that I've built that's all around me on this stage and the other projects my lab is involved in are all a direct result of me playing with your garbage. Play — play is a key part of my scientific practice. It's how I train my mind to be unconventional and to be creative and to decide to make human apple ears. So, the next time any of you are looking at some old, broken-down, malfunctioning, piece-of-crap technology, I want you to think of me. Because I want it. (Laughter) Seriously, please find any way to get in touch with me, and let's see what we can build. Thank you. (Applause) |
The birth of virtual reality as an art form | {0: 'Working at the frontiers of interactive technology, Chris Milk stretches virtual reality into a new canvas for storytelling.'} | TED2016 | When I was a kid, I experienced something so powerful, I spent the rest of my life searching for it, and in all the wrong places. What I experienced wasn't virtual reality. It was music. And this is where the story begins. That's me, listening to the Beatles' "White Album." And the look on my face is the feeling that I've been searching for ever since. Music goes straight to the emotional vein, into your bloodstream and right into your heart. It deepens every experience. Fellas? (Music) This is the amazing McKenzie Stubbert and Joshua Roman. Music — (Applause) Yeah. Music makes everything have more emotional resonance. Let's see how it does for this talk. The right piece of music at the right time fuses with us on a cellular level. When I hear that one song from that one summer with that one girl, I'm instantly transported back there again. Hey, Stacey. Here's a part of the story, though, where I got a little greedy. I thought if I added more layers on top of the music, I could make the feelings even more powerful. So I got into directing music videos. This is what they looked like. That's my brother, Jeff. Sorry about this, Jeff. (Laughter) Here's me, just so we're even. Incredible moves. Should've been a dancer. (Laughter) These experiments grew, and in time, started to look more like this. In both, I'm searching for the same thing, though, to capture that lightning in a bottle. Except, I'm not. Adding moving pictures over the music added narrative dimension, yes, but never quite equated the power that just raw music had for me on its own. This is not a great thing to realize when you've devoted your life and professional career to becoming a music video director. I kept asking myself, did I take the wrong path? So I started thinking: if I could involve you, the audience, more, I might be able to make you feel something more as well. So Aaron Koblin and I began auditioning new technologies that could put more of you inside of the work, like your childhood home in "The Wilderness Downtown," your hand-drawn portraits, in "The Johnny Cash Project," and your interactive dreams in "3 Dreams of Black." We were pushing beyond the screen, trying to connect more deeply to people's hearts and imaginations. But it wasn't quite enough. It still didn't have the raw experiential power of pure music for me. So I started chasing a new technology that I only had read about in science fiction. And after years of searching, I found a prototype. It was a project from Nonny de la Peña in Mark Bolas's lab in USC. And when I tried it, I knew I'd found it. I could taste the lightning. It was called virtual reality. This was it five years ago when I ran into it. This is what it looks like now. I quickly started building things in this new medium, and through that process we realized something: that VR is going to play an incredibly important role in the history of mediums. In fact, it's going to be the last one. I mean this because it's the first medium that actually makes the jump from our internalization of an author's expression of an experience, to our experiencing it firsthand. You look confused. I'll explain. Don't worry. (Laughter) If we go back to the origins of mediums, by all best guesses, it starts around a fire, with a good story. Our clan leader is telling us about how he hunted the woolly mammoth on the tundra that day. We hear his words and translate them into our own internal truths. The same thing happens when we look at the cave painting version of the story, the book about the mammoth hunt, the play, the radio broadcast, the television show or the movie. All of these mediums require what we call "suspension of disbelief," because there's a translation gap between the reality of the story and our consciousness interpreting the story into our reality. I'm using the word "consciousness" as a feeling of reality that we get from our senses experiencing the world around us. Virtual reality bridges that gap. Now, you are on the tundra hunting with the clan leader. Or you are the clan leader. Or maybe you're even the woolly mammoth. (Laughter) So here's what special about VR. In all other mediums, your consciousness interprets the medium. In VR, your consciousness is the medium. So the potential for VR is enormous. But where are we now? What is the current state of the art? Well, we are here. We are the equivalent of year one of cinema. This is the Lumière Brothers film that allegedly sent a theater full of people running for their lives as they thought a train was coming toward them. Similar to this early stage of this medium, in VR, we also have to move past the spectacle and into the storytelling. It took this medium decades to figure out its preferred language of storytelling, in the form of a feature film. In VR today, we're more learning grammar than writing language. We've made 15 films in the last year at our VR company, Vrse, and we've learned a few things. We found that we have a unique, direct path into your senses, your emotions, even your body. So let me show you some things. For the purpose of this demo, we're going to take every direction that you could possibly look, and stretch it into this giant rectangle. OK, here we go. So, first: camera movement is tricky in VR. Done wrong, it can actually make you sick. We found if you move the camera at a constant speed in a straight line, you can actually get away with it, though. The first day in film school, they told me you have to learn every single rule before you can break one. We have not learned every single rule. We've barely learned any at all, but we're already trying to break them to see what kind of creative things we can accomplish. In this shot here, where we're moving up off the ground, I added acceleration. I did that because I wanted to give you a physical sensation of moving up off the ground. In VR, I can give that to you. (Music) Not surprisingly, music matters a lot in this medium as well. It guides us how to feel. In this project we made with the New York Times, Zach Richter and our friend, JR, we take you up in a helicopter, and even though you're flying 2,000 feet above Manhattan, you don't feel afraid. You feel triumphant for JR's character. The music guides you there. (Music) Contrary to popular belief, there is composition in virtual reality, but it's completely different than in film, where you have a rectangular frame. Composition is now where your consciousness exists and how the world moves around you. In this film, "Waves of Grace," which was a collaboration between Vrse, the United Nations, Gabo Arora, and Imraan Ismail, we also see the changing role of the close-up in virtual reality. A close-up in VR means you're actually close up to someone. It brings that character inside of your personal space, a space that we'd usually reserve for the people that we love. And you feel an emotional closeness to the character because of what you feel to be a physical closeness. Directing VR is not like directing for the rectangle. It's more of a choreography of the viewer's attention. One tool we can use to guide your attention is called "spatialized sound." I can put a sound anywhere in front of you, to left or right, even behind you, and when you turn your head, the sound will rotate accordingly. So I can use that to direct your attention to where I want you to see. Next time you hear someone singing over your shoulder, it might be Bono. (Laughter) VR makes us feel like we are part of something. For most of human history, we lived in small family units. We started in caves, then moved to clans and tribes, then villages and towns, and now we're all global citizens. But I believe that we are still hardwired to care the most about the things that are local to us. And VR makes anywhere and anyone feel local. That's why it works as an empathy machine. Our film "Clouds Over Sidra" takes you to a Syrian refugee camp, and instead of watching a story about people over there, it's now a story about us here. But where do we go from here? The tricky thing is that with all previous mediums, the format is fixed at its birth. Film has been a sequence of rectangles, from Muybridge and his horses to now. The format has never changed. But VR as a format, as a medium, isn't complete yet. It's not using physical celluloid or paper or TV signals. It actually employs what we use to make sense of the world. We're using your senses as the paints on the canvas, but only two right now. Eventually, we can see if we will have all of our human senses employed, and we will have agency to live the story in any path we choose. And we call it virtual reality right now, but what happens when we move past simulated realities? What do we call it then? What if instead of verbally telling you about a dream, I could let you live inside that dream? What if instead of just experiencing visiting some reality on Earth, you could surf gravitational waves on the edge of a black hole, or create galaxies from scratch, or communicate with each other not using words but using our raw thoughts? That's not a virtual reality anymore. And honestly I don't know what that's called. But I hope you see where we're going. But here I am, intellectualizing a medium I'm saying is experiential. So let's experience it. In your hands, you hopefully hold a piece of cardboard. Let's open the flap. Tap on the power button to unlock the phone. For the people watching at home, we're going to put up a card right now to show you how to download this experience on your phone yourself, and even get a Google cardboard of your own to try it with. We played in cardboard boxes as kids, and as adults, I'm hoping we can all find a little bit of that lightning by sticking our head in one again. You're about to participate in the largest collective VR viewing in history. And in that classic old-timey style of yesteryear, we're all going to watch something at the exact same time, together. Let's hope it works. What's the countdown look like? I can't see. Audience: ...15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 (Birds singing) (Train engine) Audience: (Shreiks) (Video) JR: Let me tell you how I shot the cover of the New York Times Magazine, "Walking New York." I just got strapped on outside the helicopter, and I had to be perfectly vertical so I could grab it. And when I was perfectly above — you know, with the wind, we had to redo it a few times — then I kept shooting. (Video) Woman's voice: Dear Lord, protect us from evil, for you are the Lord, the light. You who gave us life took it away. Let your will be done. Please bring peace to the many who have lost loved ones. Help us to live again. (Music) (Video) (Children's voices) Child's voice: There are more kids in Zaatari than adults right now. Sometimes I think we are the ones in charge. Chris Milk: How was it? (Applause) That was a cheap way of getting you to do a standing ovation. I just made you all stand. I knew you'd applaud at the end. (Applause) I believe that everyone on Earth needs to experience what you just experienced. That way we can collectively start to shape this, not as a tech platform but as a humanity platform. And to that end, in November of last year, the New York Times and Vrse made a VR project called "The Displaced." It launched with one million Google Cardboards sent out to every Sunday subscriber with their newspaper. But a funny thing happened that Sunday morning. A lot of people got them that were not the intended recipients on the mailing label. And we started seeing this all over Instagram. Look familiar? Music led me on a path of searching for what seemed like the unattainable for a very long time. Now, millions of kids just had the same formative experience in their childhood that I had in mine. Only I think this one surpasses it. Let's see where this leads them. Thank you. (Applause) |
How better tech could protect us from distraction | {0: 'Tristan Harris helps the technology industry more consciously and ethically shape the human spirit and human potential.'} | TEDxBrussels | What does it mean to spend our time well? I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to spend my time. Probably too much — I probably obsess over it. My friends think I do. But I feel like I kind of have to, because these days, it feels like little bits of my time kind of slip away from me, and when that happens, it feels like parts of my life are slipping away. Specifically, it feels like little bits of my time get slipped away to various things like this, like technology — I check things. I'll give you an example. If this email shows up — how many of you have gotten an email like this, right? I've been tagged in a photo. When this appears, I can't help but click on it right now. Right? Because, like, what if it's a bad photo? So I have to click it right now. But I'm not just going to click "See photo," what I'm actually going to do is spend the next 20 minutes. (Laughter) But the worst part is that I know this is what's going to happen, and even knowing that's what's going to happen doesn't stop me from doing it again the next time. Or I find myself in a situation like this, where I check my email and I pull down to refresh, But the thing is that 60 seconds later, I'll pull down to refresh again. Why am I doing this? This doesn't make any sense. But I'll give you a hint why this is happening. What do you think makes more money in the United States than movies, game parks and baseball combined? Slot machines. How can slot machines make all this money when we play with such small amounts of money? We play with coins. How is this possible? Well, the thing is ... my phone is a slot machine. Every time I check my phone, I'm playing the slot machine to see, what am I going to get? What am I going to get? Every time I check my email, I'm playing the slot machine, saying, "What am I going to get?" Every time I scroll a news feed, I'm playing the slot machine to see, what am I going to get next? And the thing is that, again, knowing exactly how this works — and I'm a designer, I know exactly how the psychology of this works, I know exactly what's going on — but it doesn't leave me with any choice, I still just get sucked into it. So what are we going to do? Because it leaves us with this all-or-nothing relationship with technology, right? You're either on, and you're connected and distracted all the time, or you're off, but then you're wondering, am I missing something important? In other words, you're either distracted or you have fear of missing out. Right? So we need to restore choice. We want to have a relationship with technology that gives us back choice about how we spend time with it, and we're going to need help from designers, because knowing this stuff doesn't help. We're going to need design help. So what would that look like? So let's take an example that we all face: chat — text messaging. So let's say there's two people. Nancy's on the left and she's working on a document, and John's on the right. And John suddenly remembers, "I need to ask Nancy for that document before I forget." So when he sends her that message, it blows away her attention. That's what we're doing all the time, bulldozing each other's attention, left and right. And there's serious cost to this, because every time we interrupt each other, it takes us about 23 minutes, on average, to refocus our attention. We actually cycle through two different projects before we come back to the original thing we were doing. This is Gloria Mark's research combined with Microsoft research, that showed this. And her research also shows that it actually trains bad habits. The more interruptions we get externally, it's conditioning and training us to interrupt ourselves. We actually self-interrupt every three-and-a-half minutes. This is crazy. So how do we fix this? Because Nancy and John are in this all-or-nothing relationship. Nancy might want to disconnect, but then she'd be worried: What if I'm missing something important? Design can fix this problem. Let's say you have Nancy again on the left, John on the right. And John remembers, "I need to send Nancy that document." Except this time, Nancy can mark that she's focused. Let's say she drags a slider and says, "I want to be focused for 30 minutes," so — bam — she's focused. Now when John wants to message her, he can get the thought off of his mind — because he has a need, he has this thought, and he needs to dump it out before he forgets. Except this time, it holds the messages so that Nancy can still focus, but John can get the thought off of his mind. But this only works if one last thing is true, which is that Nancy needs to know that if something is truly important, John can still interrupt. But instead of having constant accidental or mindless interruptions, we're now only creating conscious interruptions, So we're doing two things here. We're creating a new choice for both Nancy and John, But there's a second, subtle thing we're doing here, too. And it's that we're changing the question we're answering. Instead of the goal of chat being: "Let's design it so it's easy to send a message" — that's the goal of chat, it should be really easy to send a message to someone — we change the goal to something deeper and a human value, which is: "Let's create the highest possible quality communication in a relationship between two people. So we upgraded the goal. Now, do designers actually care about this? Do we want to have conversations about what these deeper human goals are? Well, I'll tell you one story. A little over a year ago, I got to help organize a meeting between some of technology's leading designers and Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Nhat Hanh is an international spokesperson for mindfulness meditation. And it was the most amazing meeting. You have to imagine — picture a room — on one side of the room, you have a bunch of tech geeks; on the other side of the room, you have a bunch of long brown robes, shaved heads, Buddhist monks. And the questions were about the deepest human values, like what does the future of technology look like when you're designing for the deepest questions and the deepest human values? And our conversation centered on listening more deeply to what those values might be. He joked in our conversation that what if, instead of a spell check, you had a compassion check, meaning, you might highlight a word that might be accidentally abrasive — perceived as abrasive by someone else. So does this kind of conversation happen in the real world, not just in these design meetings? Well, the answer is yes, and one of my favorites is Couchsurfing. If you didn't know, Couchsurfing is a website that matches people who are looking for a place to stay with a free couch, from someone who's trying to offer it. So, great service — what would their design goal be? What are you designing for if you work at Couchsurfing? Well, you would think it's to match guests with hosts. Right? That's a pretty good goal. But that would kind of be like our goal with messaging before, where we're just trying to deliver a message. So what's the deeper, human goal? Well, they set their goal as the need to create lasting, positive experiences and relationships between people who've never met before. And the most amazing thing about this was in 2007, they introduced a way to measure this, which is incredible. I'll tell you how it works. For every design goal you have, you have to have a corresponding measurement to know how you're doing — a way of measuring success. So what they do is, let's say you take two people who meet up, and they take the number of days those two people spent together, and then they estimate how many hours were in those days — how many hours did those two people spend together? And then after they spend that time together, they ask both of them: How positive was your experience? Did you have a good experience with this person that you met? And they subtract from those positive hours the amount of time people spent on the website, because that's a cost to people's lives. Why should we value that as success? And what you were left with is something they refer to as "net orchestrated conviviality," or, really, just a net "Good Times" created. The net hours that would have never existed, had Couchsurfing not existed. Can you imagine how inspiring it would be to come to work every day and measure your success in the actual net new contribution of hours in people's lives that are positive, that would have never existed if you didn't do what you were about to do at work today? Can you imagine a whole world that worked this way? Can you imagine a social network that — let's say you care about cooking, and it measured its success in terms of cooking nights organized and the cooking articles that you were glad you read, and subtracted from that the articles you weren't glad you read or the time you spent scrolling that you didn't like? Imagine a professional social network that, instead of measuring its success in terms of connections created or messages sent, instead measured its success in terms of the job offers that people got that they were excited to get. And subtracted the amount of time people spent on the website. Or imagine dating services, like maybe Tinder or something, where instead of measuring the number of swipes left and right people did, which is how they measure success today, instead measured the deep, romantic, fulfilling connections people created. Whatever that was for them, by the way. But can you imagine a whole world that worked this way, that was helping you spend your time well? Now to do this you also need a new system, because you're probably thinking, today's Internet economy — today's economy in general — is measured in time spent. The more users you have, the more usage you have, the more time people spend, that's how we measure success. But we've solved this problem before. We solved it with organic, when we said we need to value things a different way. We said this is a different kind of food. So we can't compare it just based on price; this is a different category of food. We solved it with Leed Certification, where we said this is a different kind of building that stood for different values of environmental sustainability. What if we had something like that for technology? What if we had something whose entire purpose and goal was to help create net new positive contributions to human life? And what if we could value it a different way, so it would actually work? Imagine you gave this different premium shelf space on app stores. Imagine you had web browsers that helped route you to these kinds of design products. Can you imagine how exciting it would be to live and create that world? We can create this world today. Company leaders, all you have to do — only you can prioritize a new metric, which is your metric for net positive contribution to human life. And have an honest conversation about that. Maybe you're not doing so well to start with, but let's start that conversation. Designers, you can redefine success; you can redefine design. Arguably, you have more power than many people in your organization to create the choices that all of us live by. Maybe like in medicine, where we have a Hippocratic oath to recognize the responsibility and this higher value that we have to treat patients. What if designers had something like that, in terms of this new kind of design? And users, for all of us — we can demand technology that works this way. Now it may seem hard, but McDonald's didn't have salads until the consumer demand was there. Walmart didn't have organic food until the consumer demand was there. We have to demand this new kind of technology. And we can do that. And doing that would amount to shifting from a world that's driven and run entirely on time spent, to world that's driven by time well spent. I want to live in this world, and I want this conversation to happen. Let's start that conversation now. Thank you. (Applause) |
I survived a terrorist attack. Here's what I learned | {0: 'Gill Hicks has dedicated her life to being an advocate for peace.'} | TEDxSydney | I could never have imagined that a 19-year-old suicide bomber would actually teach me a valuable lesson. But he did. He taught me to never presume anything about anyone you don't know. On a Thursday morning in July 2005, the bomber and I, unknowingly, boarded the same train carriage at the same time, standing, apparently, just feet apart. I didn't see him. Actually, I didn't see anyone. You know not to look at anyone on the Tube, but I guess he saw me. I guess he looked at all of us, as his hand hovered over the detonation switch. I've often wondered: What was he thinking? Especially in those final seconds. I know it wasn't personal. He didn't set out to kill or maim me, Gill Hicks. I mean — he didn't know me. No. Instead, he gave me an unwarranted and an unwanted label. I had become the enemy. To him, I was the "other," the "them," as opposed to "us." The label "enemy" allowed him to dehumanize us. It allowed him to push that button. And he wasn't selective. Twenty-six precious lives were taken in my carriage alone, and I was almost one of them. In the time it takes to draw a breath, we were plunged into a darkness so immense that it was almost tangible; what I imagine wading through tar might be like. We didn't know we were the enemy. We were just a bunch of commuters who, minutes earlier, had followed the Tube etiquette: no direct eye contact, no talking and absolutely no conversation. But in the lifting of the darkness, we were reaching out. We were helping each other. We were calling out our names, a little bit like a roll call, waiting for responses. "I'm Gill. I'm here. I'm alive. OK." "I'm Gill. Here. Alive. OK." I didn't know Alison. But I listened for her check-ins every few minutes. I didn't know Richard. But it mattered to me that he survived. All I shared with them was my first name. They didn't know that I was a head of a department at the Design Council. And here is my beloved briefcase, also rescued from that morning. They didn't know that I published architecture and design journals, that I was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, that I wore black — still do — that I smoked cigarillos. I don't smoke cigarillos anymore. I drank gin and I watched TED Talks, of course, never dreaming that one day I would be standing, balancing on prosthetic legs, giving a talk. I was a young Australian woman doing extraordinary things in London. And I wasn't ready for that all to end. I was so determined to survive that I used my scarf to tie tourniquets around the tops of my legs, and I just shut everything and everyone out, to focus, to listen to myself, to be guided by instinct alone. I lowered my breathing rate. I elevated my thighs. I held myself upright and I fought the urge to close my eyes. I held on for almost an hour, an hour to contemplate the whole of my life up until this point. Perhaps I should have done more. Perhaps I could have lived more, seen more. Maybe I should have gone running, dancing, taken up yoga. But my priority and my focus was always my work. I lived to work. Who I was on my business card mattered to me. But it didn't matter down in that tunnel. By the time I felt that first touch from one of my rescuers, I was unable to speak, unable to say even a small word, like "Gill." I surrendered my body to them. I had done all I possibly could, and now I was in their hands. I understood just who and what humanity really is, when I first saw the ID tag that was given to me when I was admitted to hospital. And it read: "One unknown estimated female." One unknown estimated female. Those four words were my gift. What they told me very clearly was that my life was saved, purely because I was a human being. Difference of any kind made no difference to the extraordinary lengths that the rescuers were prepared to go to save my life, to save as many unknowns as they could, and putting their own lives at risk. To them, it didn't matter if I was rich or poor, the color of my skin, whether I was male or female, my sexual orientation, who I voted for, whether I was educated, if I had a faith or no faith at all. Nothing mattered other than I was a precious human life. I see myself as a living fact. I am proof that unconditional love and respect can not only save, but it can transform lives. Here is a wonderful image of one of my rescuers, Andy, and I taken just last year. Ten years after the event, and here we are, arm in arm. Throughout all the chaos, my hand was held tightly. My face was stroked gently. What did I feel? I felt loved. What's shielded me from hatred and wanting retribution, what's given me the courage to say: this ends with me is love. I was loved. I believe the potential for widespread positive change is absolutely enormous because I know what we're capable of. I know the brilliance of humanity. So this leaves me with some pretty big things to ponder and some questions for us all to consider: Is what unites us not far greater than what can ever divide? Does it have to take a tragedy or a disaster for us to feel deeply connected as one species, as human beings? And when will we embrace the wisdom of our era to rise above mere tolerance and move to an acceptance for all who are only a label until we know them? Thank you. (Applause) |
Why genetic research must be more diverse | {0: 'Keolu Fox explores the links between human genetic variation and disease in underrepresented populations.'} | TED2016 | As a little Hawaiian, my mom and auntie always told me stories about Kalaupapa — the Hawaiian leper colony surrounded by the highest sea cliffs in the world — and Father Damien, the Belgian missionary who gave his life for the Hawaiian community. As a young nurse, my aunt trained the nuns caring for the remaining lepers almost a 100 years after Father Damien died of leprosy. I remember stories she told about traveling down switchback cliff paths on a mule, while my uncle played her favorite hula songs on the ukulele all the way down to Kalaupapa. You see, as a youngster, I was always curious about a few things. First was why a Belgian missionary chose to live in complete isolation in Kalaupapa, knowing he would inevitably contract leprosy from the community of people he sought to help. And secondly, where did the leprosy bacteria come from? And why were Kānaka Maoli, the indigenous people of Hawaii, so susceptible to developing leprosy, or "mai Pake?" This got my curious about what makes us unique as Hawaiians — namely, our genetic makeup. But it wasn't until high school, through the Human Genome Project, that I realized I wasn't alone in trying to connect our unique genetic ancestry to our potential health, wellness and illness. You see, the 2.7 billion-dollar project promised an era of predictive and preventative medicine based on our unique genetic makeup. So to me it always seemed obvious that in order to achieve this dream, we would need to sequence a diverse cohort of people to obtain the full spectrum of human genetic variation on the planet. That's why 10 years later, it continues to shock me, knowing that 96 percent of genome studies associating common genetic variation with specific diseases have focused exclusively on individuals of European ancestry. Now you don't need a PhD to see that that leaves four percent for the rest of diversity. And in my own searching, I've discovered that far less than one percent have actually focused on indigenous communities, like myself. So that begs the question: Who is the Human Genome Project actually for? Just like we have different colored eyes and hair, we metabolize drugs differently based on the variation in our genomes. So how many of you would be shocked to learn that 95 percent of clinical trials have also exclusively featured individuals of European ancestry? This bias and systematic lack of engagement of indigenous people in both clinical trials and genome studies is partially the result of a history of distrust. For example, in 1989, researchers from Arizona State University obtained blood samples from Arizona's Havasupai tribe, promising to alleviate the burden of type 2 diabetes that was plaguing their community, only to turn around and use those exact same samples — without the Havasupai's consent — to study rates of schizophrenia, inbreeding, and challenge the Havasupai's origin story. When the Havasupai found out, they sued successfully for $700,000, and they banned ASU from conducting research on their reservation. This culminated in a sort of domino effect with local tribes in the Southwest — including the Navajo Nation, one of the largest tribes in the country — putting a moratorium on genetic research. Now despite this history of distrust, I still believe that indigenous people can benefit from genetic research. And if we don't do something soon, the gap in health disparities is going to continue to widen. Hawaii, for example, has the longest life expectancy on average of any state in the US, yet native Hawaiians like myself die a full decade before our non-native counterparts, because we have some of the highest rates of type 2 diabetes, obesity, and the number one and number two killers in the US: cardiovascular disease and cancer. So how do we ensure the populations of people that need genome sequencing the most are not the last to benefit? My vision is to make genetic research more native, to indigenize genome sequencing technology. Traditionally, genomes are sequenced in laboratories. Here's an image of your classic genome sequencer. It's huge. It's the size of a refrigerator. There's this obvious physical limitation. But what if you could sequence genomes on the fly? What if you could fit a genome sequencer in your pocket? This nanopore-based sequencer is one 10,000th the size of your traditional genome sequencer. It doesn't have the same physical limitations, in that it's not tethered to a lab bench with extraneous cords, large vats of chemicals or computer monitors. It allows us to de-black box genome sequencing technology development in a way that's immersive and collaborative, activating and empowering indigenous communities ... as citizen scientists. 100 years later in Kalaupapa, we now have the technology to sequence leprosy bacteria in real time, using mobile genome sequencers, remote access to the Internet and cloud computation. But only if that's what Hawaiian people want. In our space, on our terms. IndiGenomics is about science for the people by the people. We'll be starting with a tribal consultation resource, focused on educating indigenous communities on the potential use and misuse of genetic information. Eventually we'd like to have our own IndiGenomics research institute to conduct our own experiments and educate the next generation of indigenous scientists. In the end, indigenous people need to be partners in and not subjects of genetic research. And for those on the outside, just as Father Damien did, the research community needs to immerse itself in indigenous culture or die trying. Mahalo. (Applause) |
How to fix a broken education system ... without any more money | {0: "BCG's Seema Bansal asks: Can governments actually make a meaningful difference in education? And rapidly? Yes, it turns out."} | TED@BCG Paris | So we all have our own biases. For example, some of us tend to think that it's very difficult to transform failing government systems. When we think of government systems, we tend to think that they're archaic, set in their ways, and perhaps, the leadership is just too bureaucratic to be able to change things. Well, today, I want to challenge that theory. I want to tell you a story of a very large government system that has not only put itself on the path of reform but has also shown fairly spectacular results in less than three years. This is what a classroom in a public school in India looks like. There are 1 million such schools in India. And even for me, who's lived in India all her life, walking into one of these schools is fairly heartbreaking. By the time kids are 11, 50 percent of them have fallen so far behind in their education that they have no hope to recover. 11-year-olds cannot do simple addition, they cannot construct a grammatically correct sentence. These are things that you and I would expect an 8-year-old to be able to do. By the time kids are 13 or 14, they tend to drop out of schools. In India, public schools not only offer free education — they offer free textbooks, free workbooks, free meals, sometimes even cash scholarships. And yet, 40 percent of the parents today are choosing to pull their children out of public schools and pay out of their pockets to put them in private schools. As a comparison, in a far richer country, the US, that number is only 10 percent. That's a huge statement on how broken the Indian public education system is. So it was with that background that I got a call in the summer of 2013 from an absolutely brilliant lady called Surina Rajan. She was, at that time, the head of the Department of School Education in a state called Haryana in India. So she said to us, "Look, I've been heading this department for the last two years. I've tried a number of things, and nothing seems to work. Can you possibly help?" Let me describe Haryana a little bit to you. Haryana is a state which has 30 million people. It has 15,000 public schools and 2 million plus children in those public schools. So basically, with that phone call, I promised to help a state and system which was as large as that of Peru or Canada transform itself. As I started this project, I was very painfully aware of two things. One, that I had never done anything like this before. And two, many others had, perhaps without too much success. As my colleagues and I looked across the country and across the world, we couldn't find another example that we could just pick up and replicate in Haryana. We knew that we had to craft our own journey. But anyway, we jumped right in and as we jumped in, all sorts of ideas started flying at us. People said, "Let's change the way we recruit teachers, let's hire new principals and train them and send them on international learning tours, let's put technology inside classrooms." By the end of week one, we had 50 ideas on the table, all amazing, all sounded right. There was no way we were going to be able to implement 50 things. So I said, "Hang on, stop. Let's first at least decide what is it we're trying to achieve." So with a lot of push and pull and debate, Haryana set itself a goal which said: by 2020, we want 80 percent of our children to be at grade-level knowledge. Now the specifics of the goal don't matter here, but what matters is how specific the goal is. Because it really allowed us to take all those ideas which were being thrown at us and say which ones we were going to implement. Does this idea support this goal? If yes, let's keep it. But if it doesn't or we're not sure, then let's put it aside. As simple as it sounds, having a very specific goal right up front has really allowed us to be very sharp and focused in our transformation journey. And looking back over the last two and a half years, that has been a huge positive for us. So we had the goal, and now we needed to figure out what are the issues, what is broken. Before we went into schools, a lot of people told us that education quality is poor because either the teachers are lazy, they don't come into schools, or they're incapable, they actually don't know how to teach. Well, when we went inside schools, we found something completely different. On most days, most teachers were actually inside schools. And when you spoke with them, you realized they were perfectly capable of teaching elementary classes. But they were not teaching. I went to a school where the teachers were getting the construction of a classroom and a toilet supervised. I went to another school where two of the teachers had gone to a nearby bank branch to deposit scholarship money into kids' accounts. At lunchtime, most teachers were spending all of their time getting the midday meal cooking, supervised and served to the students. So we asked the teachers, "What's going on, why are you not teaching?" And they said, "This is what's expected of us. When a supervisor comes to visit us, these are exactly the things that he checks. Has the toilet been made, has the meal been served. When my principal goes to a meeting at headquarters, these are exactly the things which are discussed." You see, what had happened was, over the last two decades, India had been fighting the challenge of access, having enough schools, and enrollment, bringing children into the schools. So the government launched a whole host of programs to address these challenges, and the teachers became the implicit executors of these programs. Not explicitly, but implicitly. And now, what was actually needed was not to actually train teachers further or to monitor their attendance but to tell them that what is most important is for them to go back inside classrooms and teach. They needed to be monitored and measured and awarded on the quality of teaching and not on all sorts of other things. So as we went through the education system, as we delved into it deeper, we found a few such core root causes which were determining, which were shaping how people behaved in the system. And we realized that unless we change those specific things, we could do a number of other things. We could train, we could put technology into schools, but the system wouldn't change. And addressing these non-obvious core issues became a key part of the program. So, we had the goal and we had the issues, and now we needed to figure out what the solutions were. We obviously did not want to recreate the wheel, so we said, "Let's look around and see what we can find." And we found these beautiful, small pilot experiments all over the country and all over the world. Small things being done by NGOs, being done by foundations. But what was also interesting was that none of them actually scaled. All of them were limited to 50, 100 or 500 schools. And here, we were looking for a solution for 15,000 schools. So we looked into why, if these things actually work, why don't they actually scale? What happens is that when a typical NGO comes in, they not only bring in their expertise but they also bring in additional resources. So they might bring in money, they might bring in people, they might bring in technology. And in the 50 or 100 schools that they actually operate in, those additional resources actually create a difference. But now imagine that the head of this NGO goes to the head of the School Education Department and says, "Hey, now let's do this for 15,000 schools." Where is that guy or girl going to find the money to actually scale this up to 15,000 schools? He doesn't have the additional money, he doesn't have the resources. And hence, innovations don't scale. So right at the beginning of the project, what we said was, "Whatever we have to do has to be scalable, it has to work in all 15,000 schools." And hence, it has to work within the existing budgets and resources that the state actually has. Much easier said than done. (Laughter) I think this was definitely the point in time when my team hated me. We spent a lot of long hours in office, in cafés, sometimes even in bars, scratching out heads and saying, "Where are the solutions, how are we going to solve this problem?" In the end, I think we did find solutions to many of the issues. I'll give you an example. In the context of effective learning, one of the things people talk about is hands-on learning. Children shouldn't memorize things from books, they should do activities, and that's a more effective way to learn. Which basically means giving students things like beads, learning rods, abacuses. But we did not have the budgets to give that to 15,000 schools, 2 million children. We needed another solution. We couldn't think of anything. One day, one of our team members went to a school and saw a teacher pick up sticks and stones from the garden outside and take them into the classroom and give them to the students. That was a huge eureka moment for us. So what happens now in the textbooks in Haryana is that after every concept, we have a little box which are instructions for the teachers which say, "To teach this concept, here's an activity that you can do. And by the way, in order to actually do this activity, here are things that you can use from your immediate environment, whether it be the garden outside or the classroom inside, which can be used as learning aids for kids." And we see teachers all over Haryana using lots of innovative things to be able to teach students. So in this way, whatever we designed, we were actually able to implement it across all 15,000 schools from day one. Now, this brings me to my last point. How do you implement something across 15,000 schools and 100,000 teachers? The department used to have a process which is very interesting. I like to call it "The Chain of Hope." They would write a letter from the headquarters and send it to the next level, which was the district offices. They would hope that in each of these district offices, an officer would get the letter, would open it, read it and then forward it to the next level, which was the block offices. And then you would hope that at the block office, somebody else got the letter, opened it, read it and forwarded it eventually to the 15,000 principals. And then one would hope that the principals got the letter, received it, understood it and started implementing it. It was a little bit ridiculous. Now, we knew technology was the answer, but we also knew that most of these schools don't have a computer or email. However, what the teachers do have are smartphones. They're constantly on SMS, on Facebook and on WhatsApp. So what now happens in Haryana is, all principals and teachers are divided into hundreds of WhatsApp groups and anytime something needs to be communicated, it's just posted across all WhatsApp groups. It spreads like wildfire. You can immediately check who has received it, who has read it. Teachers can ask clarification questions instantaneously. And what's interesting is, it's not just the headquarters who are answering these questions. Another teacher from a completely different part of the state will stand up and answer the question. Everybody's acting as everybody's peer group, and things are getting implemented. So today, when you go to a school in Haryana, things look different. The teachers are back inside classrooms, they're teaching. Often with innovative techniques. When a supervisor comes to visit the classroom, he or she not only checks the construction of the toilet but also what is the quality of teaching. Once a quarter, all students across the state are assessed on their learning outcomes and schools which are doing well are rewarded. And schools which are not doing so well find themselves having difficult conversations. Of course, they also get additional support to be able to do better in the future. In the context of education, it's very difficult to see results quickly. When people talk about systemic, large-scale change, they talk about periods of 7 years and 10 years. But not in Haryana. In the last one year, there have been three independent studies, all measuring student learning outcomes, which indicate that something fundamental, something unique is happening in Haryana. Learning levels of children have stopped declining, and they have started going up. Haryana is one of the few states in the country which is showing an improvement, and certainly the one that is showing the fastest rate of improvement. These are still early signs, there's a long way to go, but this gives us a lot of hope for the future. I recently went to a school, and as I was leaving, I ran into a lady, her name was Parvati, she was the mother of a child, and she was smiling. And I said, "Why are you smiling, what's going on?" And she said, "I don't know what's going on, but what I do know is that my children are learning, they're having fun, and for the time being, I'll stop my search for a private school to send them to." So I go back to where I started: Can government systems transform? I certainly believe so. I think if you give them the right levers, they can move mountains. Thank you. (Applause) |
Who are you, really? The puzzle of personality | {0: 'Cambridge research professor Brian Little analyzes and redefines the threads of our personalities -- and suggests ways we can transform ourselves.'} | TED2016 | What an intriguing group of individuals you are ... to a psychologist. (Laughter) I've had the opportunity over the last couple of days of listening in on some of your conversations and watching you interact with each other. And I think it's fair to say, already, that there are 47 people in this audience, at this moment, displaying psychological symptoms I would like to discuss today. (Laughter) And I thought you might like to know who you are. (Laughter) But instead of pointing at you, which would be gratuitous and intrusive, I thought I would tell you a few facts and stories, in which you may catch a glimpse of yourself. I'm in the field of research known as personality psychology, which is part of a larger personality science which spans the full spectrum, from neurons to narratives. And what we try to do, in our own way, is to make sense of how each of us — each of you — is, in certain respects, like all other people, like some other people and like no other person. Now, already you may be saying of yourself, "I'm not intriguing. I am the 46th most boring person in the Western Hemisphere." Or you may say of yourself, "I am intriguing, even if I am regarded by most people as a great, thundering twit." (Laughter) But it is your self-diagnosed boringness and your inherent "twitiness" that makes me, as a psychologist, really fascinated by you. So let me explain why this is so. One of the most influential approaches in personality science is known as trait psychology, and it aligns you along five dimensions which are normally distributed, and that describe universally held aspects of difference between people. They spell out the acronym OCEAN. So, "O" stands for "open to experience," versus those who are more closed. "C" stands for "conscientiousness," in contrast to those with a more lackadaisical approach to life. "E" — "extroversion," in contrast to more introverted people. "A" — "agreeable individuals," in contrast to those decidedly not agreeable. And "N" — "neurotic individuals," in contrast to those who are more stable. All of these dimensions have implications for our well-being, for how our life goes. And so we know that, for example, openness and conscientiousness are very good predictors of life success, but the open people achieve that success through being audacious and, occasionally, odd. The conscientious people achieve it through sticking to deadlines, to persevering, as well as having some passion. Extroversion and agreeableness are both conducive to working well with people. Extroverts, for example, I find intriguing. With my classes, I sometimes give them a basic fact that might be revealing with respect to their personality: I tell them that it is virtually impossible for adults to lick the outside of their own elbow. (Laughter) Did you know that? Already, some of you have tried to lick the outside of your own elbow. But extroverts amongst you are probably those who have not only tried, but they have successfully licked the elbow of the person sitting next to them. (Laughter) Those are the extroverts. Let me deal in a bit more detail with extroversion, because it's consequential and it's intriguing, and it helps us understand what I call our three natures. First, our biogenic nature — our neurophysiology. Second, our sociogenic or second nature, which has to do with the cultural and social aspects of our lives. And third, what makes you individually you — idiosyncratic — what I call your "idiogenic" nature. Let me explain. One of the things that characterizes extroverts is they need stimulation. And that stimulation can be achieved by finding things that are exciting: loud noises, parties and social events here at TED — you see the extroverts forming a magnetic core. They all gather together. And I've seen you. The introverts are more likely to spend time in the quiet spaces up on the second floor, where they are able to reduce stimulation — and may be misconstrued as being antisocial, but you're not necessarily antisocial. It may be that you simply realize that you do better when you have a chance to lower that level of stimulation. Sometimes it's an internal stimulant, from your body. Caffeine, for example, works much better with extroverts than it does introverts. When extroverts come into the office at nine o'clock in the morning and say, "I really need a cup of coffee," they're not kidding — they really do. Introverts do not do as well, particularly if the tasks they're engaged in — and they've had some coffee — if those tasks are speeded, and if they're quantitative, introverts may give the appearance of not being particularly quantitative. But it's a misconstrual. So here are the consequences that are really quite intriguing: we're not always what seem to be, and that takes me to my next point. I should say, before getting to this, something about sexual intercourse, although I may not have time. And so, if you would like me to — yes, you would? OK. (Laughter) There are studies done on the frequency with which individuals engage in the conjugal act, as broken down by male, female; introvert, extrovert. So I ask you: How many times per minute — oh, I'm sorry, that was a rat study — (Laughter) How many times per month do introverted men engage in the act? 3.0. Extroverted men? More or less? Yes, more. 5.5 — almost twice as much. Introverted women: 3.1. Extroverted women? Frankly, speaking as an introverted male, which I will explain later — they are heroic. 7.5. They not only handle all the male extroverts, they pick up a few introverts as well. (Laughter) (Applause) We communicate differently, extroverts and introverts. Extroverts, when they interact, want to have lots of social encounter punctuated by closeness. They'd like to stand close for comfortable communication. They like to have a lot of eye contact, or mutual gaze. We found in some research that they use more diminutive terms when they meet somebody. So when an extrovert meets a Charles, it rapidly becomes "Charlie," and then "Chuck," and then "Chuckles Baby." (Laughter) Whereas for introverts, it remains "Charles," until he's given a pass to be more intimate by the person he's talking to. We speak differently. Extroverts prefer black-and-white, concrete, simple language. Introverts prefer — and I must again tell you that I am as extreme an introvert as you could possibly imagine — we speak differently. We prefer contextually complex, contingent, weasel-word sentences — (Laughter) More or less. (Laughter) As it were. (Laughter) Not to put too fine a point upon it — like that. When we talk, we sometimes talk past each other. I had a consulting contract I shared with a colleague who's as different from me as two people can possibly be. First, his name is Tom. Mine isn't. (Laughter) Secondly, he's six foot five. I have a tendency not to be. (Laughter) And thirdly, he's as extroverted a person as you could find. I am seriously introverted. I overload so much, I can't even have a cup of coffee after three in the afternoon and expect to sleep in the evening. We had seconded to this project a fellow called Michael. And Michael almost brought the project to a crashing halt. So the person who seconded him asked Tom and me, "What do you make of Michael?" Well, I'll tell you what Tom said in a minute. He spoke in classic "extrovert-ese." And here is how extroverted ears heard what I said, which is actually pretty accurate. I said, "Well Michael does have a tendency at times of behaving in a way that some of us might see as perhaps more assertive than is normally called for." (Laughter) Tom rolled his eyes and he said, "Brian, that's what I said: he's an asshole!" (Laughter) (Applause) Now, as an introvert, I might gently allude to certain "assholic" qualities in this man's behavior, but I'm not going to lunge for the a-word. (Laughter) But the extrovert says, "If he walks like one, if he talks like one, I call him one." And we go past each other. Now is this something that we should be heedful of? Of course. It's important that we know this. Is that all we are? Are we just a bunch of traits? No, we're not. Remember, you're like some other people and like no other person. How about that idiosyncratic you? As Elizabeth or as George, you may share your extroversion or your neuroticism. But are there some distinctively Elizabethan features of your behavior, or Georgian of yours, that make us understand you better than just a bunch of traits? That make us love you? Not just because you're a certain type of person. I'm uncomfortable putting people in pigeonholes. I don't even think pigeons belong in pigeonholes. So what is it that makes us different? It's the doings that we have in our life — the personal projects. You have a personal project right now, but nobody may know it here. It relates to your kid — you've been back three times to the hospital, and they still don't know what's wrong. Or it could be your mom. And you'd been acting out of character. These are free traits. You're very agreeable, but you act disagreeably in order to break down those barriers of administrative torpor in the hospital, to get something for your mom or your child. What are these free traits? They're where we enact a script in order to advance a core project in our lives. And they are what matters. Don't ask people what type you are; ask them, "What are your core projects in your life?" And we enact those free traits. I'm an introvert, but I have a core project, which is to profess. I'm a professor. And I adore my students, and I adore my field. And I can't wait to tell them about what's new, what's exciting, what I can't wait to tell them about. And so I act in an extroverted way, because at eight in the morning, the students need a little bit of humor, a little bit of engagement to keep them going in arduous days of study. But we need to be very careful when we act protractedly out of character. Sometimes we may find that we don't take care of ourselves. I find, for example, after a period of pseudo-extroverted behavior, I need to repair somewhere on my own. As Susan Cain said in her "Quiet" book, in a chapter that featured the strange Canadian professor who was teaching at the time at Harvard, I sometimes go to the men's room to escape the slings and arrows of outrageous extroverts. (Laughter) I remember one particular day when I was retired to a cubicle, trying to avoid overstimulation. And a real extrovert came in beside me — not right in my cubicle, but in the next cubicle over — and I could hear various evacuatory noises, which we hate — even our own, that's why we flush during as well as after. (Laughter) And then I heard this gravelly voice saying, "Hey, is that Dr. Little?" (Laughter) If anything is guaranteed to constipate an introvert for six months, it's talking on the john. (Laughter) That's where I'm going now. Don't follow me. Thank you. (Applause) |
What can we learn from shortcuts? | {0: "Tom Hulme's enthusiasm spans physics, design, entrepreneurship and investment."} | TED2016 | When we're designing new products, services or businesses, the only time you'll know if they're any good, if the designs are good, is to see how they're used in the real world, in context. I'm reminded of that every time I walk past Highbury Fields in north London. It's absolutely beautiful. There's a big open green space. There's Georgian buildings around the side. But then there's this mud trap that cuts across the middle. People clearly don't want to walk all the way around the edge. Instead, they want to take the shortcut, and that shortcut is self-reinforcing. Now, this shortcut is called a desire path, and it's often the path of least resistance. I find them fascinating, because they're often the point where design and user experience diverge. Now at this point, I should apologize, because you guys are going to start seeing these everywhere. But today, I'm going to pick three I find interesting and share what actually it reminds me about launching new products and services. The first is in the capital city of Brazil — Brasilia. And it reminds me that sometimes, you have to just focus on designing for a real need at low friction. Now, Brasilia is fascinating. It was designed by Niemeyer in the '50s. It was the golden age of flying, so he laid it out like a plane, as you can see there. Slightly worryingly, he put most of the important government buildings in the cockpit. But if you zoom in, in the very center of Brasilia, just where the point is there, you see it's littered with desire paths. They're absolutely everywhere. Now, they thought that they had future-proofed this design. They thought in the future we wouldn't need to walk anywhere — we'd be able to drive — so there was little need for walkways or pavements. But as you can see, there's a real need. These are very dangerous desire paths. If we just pick one, in the middle, you can see it crosses 15 lanes of traffic. It won't surprise you guys that Brasilia has five times the pedestrian accident rate of your average US city. People are resourceful. They'll always find the low-friction route to save money, save time. Not all these desire paths are dangerous, I was reminded flying here when I was in Heathrow. Many of us get frustrated when we're confronted with the obligatory walk through duty-free. It was amazing to me how many people refused to take the long, meandering path to the left, and just cut through to the right, cut through the desire path. The question that's interesting is: What do designers think when they see our behavior here? Do they think we're stupid? Do they think we're lazy? Or do they accept that this is the only truth? This is their product. We're effectively co-designing their product. So our job is to design for real needs at low friction, because if you don't, the customer will, anyway. The second desire path I wanted to share is at the University of California. And it reminds me that sometimes the best way to come up with a great design is just to launch it. Now, university campuses are fantastic for spotting desire paths. I think it's because students are always late and they're pretty smart. So they're dashing to lectures. They'll always find the shortcut. And the designers here knew that. So they built the buildings and then they waited a few months for the paths to form. They then paved them. (Laughter) Incredibly smart approach. In fact, often, just launching the straw man of a service can teach you what people really want. For example, Ayr Muir in Boston knew he wanted to open a restaurant. But where should it be? What should the menu be? He launched a service, in this case a food truck, and he changed the location each day. He'd write a different menu on the side in a whiteboard marker to figure out what people wanted. He now has a chain of restaurants. So it can be incredibly efficient to launch something to spot the desire paths. The third and final desire path I wanted to share with you is the UNIH. It reminds me that the world's in flux, and we have to respond to those changes. So as you'll guess, this is a hospital. I've marked for you on the left the Oncology Department. The patients would usually stay in the hotels down on the bottom right. This was a patient-centered organization, so they laid on cars for their patients. But what they realized when they started offering chemotherapy is the patients rarely wanted to get in cars. They were too nauseous, so they'd walk back to their hotels. This desire path that you see diagonally, formed. The patients even called it "The Chemo Trail." Now, when the hospital saw this originally, they tried to lay turf back over it, ignore it. But after a while, they realized it was an important need they were meeting for their patients, so they paved it. And I think our job is often to pave these emerging desire paths. If we look back at the one in North London again, that desire path hasn't always been there. The reason it sprung up is people were traveling to the mighty Arsenal Football Club stadium on game days, from the Underground station you see on the bottom right. So you see the desire path. If we just wind the clock back a few years, when the stadium was being constructed, there is no desire path. So our job is to watch for these desire paths emerging, and, where appropriate, pave them, as someone did here. Someone installed a barrier, people started walking across and round the bottom as you see, and they paved it. (Laughter) But I think this is a wonderful reminder as well, that, actually, the world is in flux. It's constantly changing, because if you look at the top of this image, there's another desire path forming. So these three desire paths remind me we need to design for real human needs. I think empathy for what your customers want is probably the biggest leading indicator of business success. Design for real needs and design them in low friction, because if you don't offer them in low friction, someone else will, often the customer. Secondly, often the best way to learn what people really want is to launch your service. The answer is rarely inside the building. Get out there and see what people really want. And finally, in part because of technology, the world is incredibly flux at the moment. It's changing constantly. These desire paths are going to spring up faster than ever. Our job is to pick the appropriate ones and pave over them. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How a blind astronomer found a way to hear the stars | {0: 'While searching for ways to study stellar radiation without relying on sight, Wanda Diaz Merced has developed a way to represent complex data about our universe as sound.'} | TED2016 | Once there was a star. Like everything else, she was born; grew to be around 30 times the mass of our sun and lived for a very long time. Exactly how long, people cannot really tell. Just like everything in life, she reached the end of her regular star days when her heart, the core of her life, exhausted its fuel. But that was no end. She transformed into a supernova, and in the process releasing a tremendous amount of energy, outshining the rest of the galaxy and emitting, in one second, the same amount of energy our sun will release in 10 days. And she evolved into another role in our galaxy. Supernova explosions are very extreme. But the ones that emit gamma rays are even more extreme. In the process of becoming a supernova, the interior of the star collapses under its own weight and it starts rotating ever faster, like an ice skater when pulling their arms in close to their body. In that way, it starts rotating very fast and it increases, powerfully, its magnetic field. The matter around the star is dragged around, and some energy from that rotation is transferred to that matter and the magnetic field is increased even further. In that way, our star had extra energy to outshine the rest of the galaxy in brightness and gamma ray emission. My star, the one in my story, became what is known as a magnetar. And just for your information, the magnetic field of a magnetar is 1,000 trillion times the magnetic field of Earth. The most energetic events ever measured by astronomers carry the name gamma-ray bursts because we observe them as bursts most or explosions, most strongly measured as gamma-ray light. Our star, like the one in our story that became a magnetar, is detected as a gamma-ray burst during the most energetic portion of the explosion. Yet, even though gamma-ray bursts are the strongest events ever measured by astronomers, we cannot see them with our naked eye. We depend, we rely on other methods in order to study this gamma-ray light. We cannot see them with our naked eye. We can only see an itty bitty, tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we call visible light. And beyond that, we rely on other methods. Yet as astronomers, we study a wider range of light and we depend on other methods to do that. On the screen, it may look like this. You're seeing a plot. That is a light curve. It's a plot of intensity of light over time. It is a gamma-ray light curve. Sighted astronomers depend on this kind of plot in order to interpret how this light intensity changes over time. On the left, you will be seeing the light intensity without a burst, and on the right, you will be seeing the light intensity with the burst. Early during my career, I could also see this kind of plot. But then, I lost my sight. I completely lost my sight because of extended illness, and with it, I lost the opportunity to see this plot and the opportunity to do my physics. It was a very strong transition for me in many ways. And professionally, it left me without a way to do my science. I longed to access and scrutinize this energetic light and figure out the astrophysical cause. I wanted to experience the spacious wonder, the excitement, the joy produced by the detection of such a titanic celestial event. I thought long and hard about it, when I suddenly realized that all a light curve is, is a table of numbers converted into a visual plot. So along with my collaborators, we worked really hard and we translated the numbers into sound. I achieved access to the data, and today I'm able to do physics at the level of the best astronomer, using sound. And what people have been able to do, mainly visually, for hundreds of years, now I do it using sound. (Applause) Listening to this gamma-ray burst that you're seeing on the — (Applause continues) Thank you. Listening to this burst that you're seeing on the screen brought something to the ear beyond the obvious burst. Now I'm going to play the burst for you. It's not music, it's sound. (Digital beeping sounds) This is scientific data converted into sound, and it's mapped in pitch. The process is called sonification. So listening to this brought something to the ear besides the obvious burst. When I examine the very strong low-frequency regions, or bass line — I'm zooming into the bass line now. We noted resonances characteristic of electrically charged gasses like the solar wind. And I want you to hear what I heard. You will hear it as a very fast decrease in volume. And because you're sighted, I'm giving you a red line indicating what intensity of light is being converted into sound. (Digital hum and whistling sound) The (Whistles) is frogs at home, don't pay attention to that. (Laughter) (Digital hum and whistling sound) I think you heard it, right? So what we found is that the bursts last long enough in order to support wave resonances, which are things caused by exchanges of energy between particles that may have been excited, that depend on the volume. You may remember that I said that the matter around the star is dragged around? It transmits power with frequency and field distribution determined by the dimensions. You may remember that we were talking about a super-massive star that became a very strong magnetic field magnetar. If this is the case, then outflows from the exploding star may be associated with this gamma-ray burst. What does that mean? That star formation may be a very important part of these supernova explosions. Listening to this very gamma-ray burst brought us to the notion that the use of sound as an adjunctive visual display may also support sighted astronomers in the search for more information in the data. Simultaneously, I worked on analyzing measurements from other telescopes, and my experiments demonstrated that when you use sound as an adjunctive visual display, astronomers can find more information in this now more accessible data set. This ability to transform data into sound gives astronomy a tremendous power of transformation. And the fact that a field that is so visual may be improved in order to include anyone with interest in understanding what lies in the heavens is a spirit-lifter. When I lost my sight, I noticed that I didn't have access to the same amount and quality of information a sighted astronomer had. It was not until we innovated with the sonification process that I regained the hope to be a productive member of the field that I had worked so hard to be part of. Yet, information access is not the only area in astronomy where this is important. The situation is systemic and scientific fields are not keeping up. The body is something changeable — anyone may develop a disability at any point. Let's think about, for example, scientists that are already at the top of their careers. What happens to them if they develop a disability? Will they feel excommunicated as I did? Information access empowers us to flourish. It gives us equal opportunities to display our talents and choose what we want to do with our lives, based on interest and not based on potential barriers. When we give people the opportunity to succeed without limits, that will lead to personal fulfillment and prospering life. And I think that the use of sound in astronomy is helping us to achieve that and to contribute to science. While other countries told me that the study of perception techniques in order to study astronomy data is not relevant to astronomy because there are no blind astronomers in the field, South Africa said, "We want people with disabilities to contribute to the field." Right now, I'm working at the South African Astronomical Observatory, at the Office of Astronomy for Development. There, we are working on sonification techniques and analysis methods to impact the students of the Athlone School for the Blind. These students will be learning radio astronomy, and they will be learning the sonification methods in order to study astronomical events like huge ejections of energy from the sun, known as coronal mass ejections. What we learn with these students — these students have multiple disabilities and coping strategies that will be accommodated — what we learn with these students will directly impact the way things are being done at the professional level. I humbly call this development. And this is happening right now. I think that science is for everyone. It belongs to the people, and it has to be available to everyone, because we are all natural explorers. I think that if we limit people with disabilities from participating in science, we'll sever our links with history and with society. I dream of a level scientific playing field, where people encourage respect and respect each other, where people exchange strategies and discover together. If people with disabilities are allowed into the scientific field, an explosion, a huge titanic burst of knowledge will take place, I am sure. (Digital beeping sounds) That is the titanic burst. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
How computers are learning to be creative | {0: 'Blaise Agüera y Arcas works on machine learning at Google. Previously a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, he has worked on augmented reality, mapping, wearable computing and natural user interfaces.'} | TED@BCG Paris | So, I lead a team at Google that works on machine intelligence; in other words, the engineering discipline of making computers and devices able to do some of the things that brains do. And this makes us interested in real brains and neuroscience as well, and especially interested in the things that our brains do that are still far superior to the performance of computers. Historically, one of those areas has been perception, the process by which things out there in the world — sounds and images — can turn into concepts in the mind. This is essential for our own brains, and it's also pretty useful on a computer. The machine perception algorithms, for example, that our team makes, are what enable your pictures on Google Photos to become searchable, based on what's in them. The flip side of perception is creativity: turning a concept into something out there into the world. So over the past year, our work on machine perception has also unexpectedly connected with the world of machine creativity and machine art. I think Michelangelo had a penetrating insight into to this dual relationship between perception and creativity. This is a famous quote of his: "Every block of stone has a statue inside of it, and the job of the sculptor is to discover it." So I think that what Michelangelo was getting at is that we create by perceiving, and that perception itself is an act of imagination and is the stuff of creativity. The organ that does all the thinking and perceiving and imagining, of course, is the brain. And I'd like to begin with a brief bit of history about what we know about brains. Because unlike, say, the heart or the intestines, you really can't say very much about a brain by just looking at it, at least with the naked eye. The early anatomists who looked at brains gave the superficial structures of this thing all kinds of fanciful names, like hippocampus, meaning "little shrimp." But of course that sort of thing doesn't tell us very much about what's actually going on inside. The first person who, I think, really developed some kind of insight into what was going on in the brain was the great Spanish neuroanatomist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, in the 19th century, who used microscopy and special stains that could selectively fill in or render in very high contrast the individual cells in the brain, in order to start to understand their morphologies. And these are the kinds of drawings that he made of neurons in the 19th century. This is from a bird brain. And you see this incredible variety of different sorts of cells, even the cellular theory itself was quite new at this point. And these structures, these cells that have these arborizations, these branches that can go very, very long distances — this was very novel at the time. They're reminiscent, of course, of wires. That might have been obvious to some people in the 19th century; the revolutions of wiring and electricity were just getting underway. But in many ways, these microanatomical drawings of Ramón y Cajal's, like this one, they're still in some ways unsurpassed. We're still more than a century later, trying to finish the job that Ramón y Cajal started. These are raw data from our collaborators at the Max Planck Institute of Neuroscience. And what our collaborators have done is to image little pieces of brain tissue. The entire sample here is about one cubic millimeter in size, and I'm showing you a very, very small piece of it here. That bar on the left is about one micron. The structures you see are mitochondria that are the size of bacteria. And these are consecutive slices through this very, very tiny block of tissue. Just for comparison's sake, the diameter of an average strand of hair is about 100 microns. So we're looking at something much, much smaller than a single strand of hair. And from these kinds of serial electron microscopy slices, one can start to make reconstructions in 3D of neurons that look like these. So these are sort of in the same style as Ramón y Cajal. Only a few neurons lit up, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to see anything here. It would be so crowded, so full of structure, of wiring all connecting one neuron to another. So Ramón y Cajal was a little bit ahead of his time, and progress on understanding the brain proceeded slowly over the next few decades. But we knew that neurons used electricity, and by World War II, our technology was advanced enough to start doing real electrical experiments on live neurons to better understand how they worked. This was the very same time when computers were being invented, very much based on the idea of modeling the brain — of "intelligent machinery," as Alan Turing called it, one of the fathers of computer science. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts looked at Ramón y Cajal's drawing of visual cortex, which I'm showing here. This is the cortex that processes imagery that comes from the eye. And for them, this looked like a circuit diagram. So there are a lot of details in McCulloch and Pitts's circuit diagram that are not quite right. But this basic idea that visual cortex works like a series of computational elements that pass information one to the next in a cascade, is essentially correct. Let's talk for a moment about what a model for processing visual information would need to do. The basic task of perception is to take an image like this one and say, "That's a bird," which is a very simple thing for us to do with our brains. But you should all understand that for a computer, this was pretty much impossible just a few years ago. The classical computing paradigm is not one in which this task is easy to do. So what's going on between the pixels, between the image of the bird and the word "bird," is essentially a set of neurons connected to each other in a neural network, as I'm diagramming here. This neural network could be biological, inside our visual cortices, or, nowadays, we start to have the capability to model such neural networks on the computer. And I'll show you what that actually looks like. So the pixels you can think about as a first layer of neurons, and that's, in fact, how it works in the eye — that's the neurons in the retina. And those feed forward into one layer after another layer, after another layer of neurons, all connected by synapses of different weights. The behavior of this network is characterized by the strengths of all of those synapses. Those characterize the computational properties of this network. And at the end of the day, you have a neuron or a small group of neurons that light up, saying, "bird." Now I'm going to represent those three things — the input pixels and the synapses in the neural network, and bird, the output — by three variables: x, w and y. There are maybe a million or so x's — a million pixels in that image. There are billions or trillions of w's, which represent the weights of all these synapses in the neural network. And there's a very small number of y's, of outputs that that network has. "Bird" is only four letters, right? So let's pretend that this is just a simple formula, x "x" w = y. I'm putting the times in scare quotes because what's really going on there, of course, is a very complicated series of mathematical operations. That's one equation. There are three variables. And we all know that if you have one equation, you can solve one variable by knowing the other two things. So the problem of inference, that is, figuring out that the picture of a bird is a bird, is this one: it's where y is the unknown and w and x are known. You know the neural network, you know the pixels. As you can see, that's actually a relatively straightforward problem. You multiply two times three and you're done. I'll show you an artificial neural network that we've built recently, doing exactly that. This is running in real time on a mobile phone, and that's, of course, amazing in its own right, that mobile phones can do so many billions and trillions of operations per second. What you're looking at is a phone looking at one after another picture of a bird, and actually not only saying, "Yes, it's a bird," but identifying the species of bird with a network of this sort. So in that picture, the x and the w are known, and the y is the unknown. I'm glossing over the very difficult part, of course, which is how on earth do we figure out the w, the brain that can do such a thing? How would we ever learn such a model? So this process of learning, of solving for w, if we were doing this with the simple equation in which we think about these as numbers, we know exactly how to do that: 6 = 2 x w, well, we divide by two and we're done. The problem is with this operator. So, division — we've used division because it's the inverse to multiplication, but as I've just said, the multiplication is a bit of a lie here. This is a very, very complicated, very non-linear operation; it has no inverse. So we have to figure out a way to solve the equation without a division operator. And the way to do that is fairly straightforward. You just say, let's play a little algebra trick, and move the six over to the right-hand side of the equation. Now, we're still using multiplication. And that zero — let's think about it as an error. In other words, if we've solved for w the right way, then the error will be zero. And if we haven't gotten it quite right, the error will be greater than zero. So now we can just take guesses to minimize the error, and that's the sort of thing computers are very good at. So you've taken an initial guess: what if w = 0? Well, then the error is 6. What if w = 1? The error is 4. And then the computer can sort of play Marco Polo, and drive down the error close to zero. As it does that, it's getting successive approximations to w. Typically, it never quite gets there, but after about a dozen steps, we're up to w = 2.999, which is close enough. And this is the learning process. So remember that what's been going on here is that we've been taking a lot of known x's and known y's and solving for the w in the middle through an iterative process. It's exactly the same way that we do our own learning. We have many, many images as babies and we get told, "This is a bird; this is not a bird." And over time, through iteration, we solve for w, we solve for those neural connections. So now, we've held x and w fixed to solve for y; that's everyday, fast perception. We figure out how we can solve for w, that's learning, which is a lot harder, because we need to do error minimization, using a lot of training examples. And about a year ago, Alex Mordvintsev, on our team, decided to experiment with what happens if we try solving for x, given a known w and a known y. In other words, you know that it's a bird, and you already have your neural network that you've trained on birds, but what is the picture of a bird? It turns out that by using exactly the same error-minimization procedure, one can do that with the network trained to recognize birds, and the result turns out to be ... a picture of birds. So this is a picture of birds generated entirely by a neural network that was trained to recognize birds, just by solving for x rather than solving for y, and doing that iteratively. Here's another fun example. This was a work made by Mike Tyka in our group, which he calls "Animal Parade." It reminds me a little bit of William Kentridge's artworks, in which he makes sketches, rubs them out, makes sketches, rubs them out, and creates a movie this way. In this case, what Mike is doing is varying y over the space of different animals, in a network designed to recognize and distinguish different animals from each other. And you get this strange, Escher-like morph from one animal to another. Here he and Alex together have tried reducing the y's to a space of only two dimensions, thereby making a map out of the space of all things recognized by this network. Doing this kind of synthesis or generation of imagery over that entire surface, varying y over the surface, you make a kind of map — a visual map of all the things the network knows how to recognize. The animals are all here; "armadillo" is right in that spot. You can do this with other kinds of networks as well. This is a network designed to recognize faces, to distinguish one face from another. And here, we're putting in a y that says, "me," my own face parameters. And when this thing solves for x, it generates this rather crazy, kind of cubist, surreal, psychedelic picture of me from multiple points of view at once. The reason it looks like multiple points of view at once is because that network is designed to get rid of the ambiguity of a face being in one pose or another pose, being looked at with one kind of lighting, another kind of lighting. So when you do this sort of reconstruction, if you don't use some sort of guide image or guide statistics, then you'll get a sort of confusion of different points of view, because it's ambiguous. This is what happens if Alex uses his own face as a guide image during that optimization process to reconstruct my own face. So you can see it's not perfect. There's still quite a lot of work to do on how we optimize that optimization process. But you start to get something more like a coherent face, rendered using my own face as a guide. You don't have to start with a blank canvas or with white noise. When you're solving for x, you can begin with an x, that is itself already some other image. That's what this little demonstration is. This is a network that is designed to categorize all sorts of different objects — man-made structures, animals ... Here we're starting with just a picture of clouds, and as we optimize, basically, this network is figuring out what it sees in the clouds. And the more time you spend looking at this, the more things you also will see in the clouds. You could also use the face network to hallucinate into this, and you get some pretty crazy stuff. (Laughter) Or, Mike has done some other experiments in which he takes that cloud image, hallucinates, zooms, hallucinates, zooms hallucinates, zooms. And in this way, you can get a sort of fugue state of the network, I suppose, or a sort of free association, in which the network is eating its own tail. So every image is now the basis for, "What do I think I see next? What do I think I see next? What do I think I see next?" I showed this for the first time in public to a group at a lecture in Seattle called "Higher Education" — this was right after marijuana was legalized. (Laughter) So I'd like to finish up quickly by just noting that this technology is not constrained. I've shown you purely visual examples because they're really fun to look at. It's not a purely visual technology. Our artist collaborator, Ross Goodwin, has done experiments involving a camera that takes a picture, and then a computer in his backpack writes a poem using neural networks, based on the contents of the image. And that poetry neural network has been trained on a large corpus of 20th-century poetry. And the poetry is, you know, I think, kind of not bad, actually. (Laughter) In closing, I think that per Michelangelo, I think he was right; perception and creativity are very intimately connected. What we've just seen are neural networks that are entirely trained to discriminate, or to recognize different things in the world, able to be run in reverse, to generate. One of the things that suggests to me is not only that Michelangelo really did see the sculpture in the blocks of stone, but that any creature, any being, any alien that is able to do perceptual acts of that sort is also able to create because it's exactly the same machinery that's used in both cases. Also, I think that perception and creativity are by no means uniquely human. We start to have computer models that can do exactly these sorts of things. And that ought to be unsurprising; the brain is computational. And finally, computing began as an exercise in designing intelligent machinery. It was very much modeled after the idea of how could we make machines intelligent. And we finally are starting to fulfill now some of the promises of those early pioneers, of Turing and von Neumann and McCulloch and Pitts. And I think that computing is not just about accounting or playing Candy Crush or something. From the beginning, we modeled them after our minds. And they give us both the ability to understand our own minds better and to extend them. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Why you think you're right -- even if you're wrong | {0: 'Julia Galef investigates how and why people change their minds.'} | TEDxPSU | So I'd like you to imagine for a moment that you're a soldier in the heat of battle. Maybe you're a Roman foot soldier or a medieval archer or maybe you're a Zulu warrior. Regardless of your time and place, there are some things that are constant. Your adrenaline is elevated, and your actions are stemming from these deeply ingrained reflexes, reflexes rooted in a need to protect yourself and your side and to defeat the enemy. So now, I'd like you to imagine playing a very different role, that of the scout. The scout's job is not to attack or defend. The scout's job is to understand. The scout is the one going out, mapping the terrain, identifying potential obstacles. And the scout may hope to learn that, say, there's a bridge in a convenient location across a river. But above all, the scout wants to know what's really there, as accurately as possible. And in a real, actual army, both the soldier and the scout are essential. But you can also think of each of these roles as a mindset — a metaphor for how all of us process information and ideas in our daily lives. What I'm going to argue today is that having good judgment, making accurate predictions, making good decisions, is mostly about which mindset you're in. To illustrate these mindsets in action, I'm going to take you back to 19th-century France, where this innocuous-looking piece of paper launched one of the biggest political scandals in history. It was discovered in 1894 by officers in the French general staff. It was torn up in a wastepaper basket, but when they pieced it back together, they discovered that someone in their ranks had been selling military secrets to Germany. So they launched a big investigation, and their suspicions quickly converged on this man, Alfred Dreyfus. He had a sterling record, no past history of wrongdoing, no motive as far as they could tell. But Dreyfus was the only Jewish officer at that rank in the army, and unfortunately at this time, the French Army was highly anti-Semitic. They compared Dreyfus's handwriting to that on the memo and concluded that it was a match, even though outside professional handwriting experts were much less confident in the similarity, but never mind that. They went and searched Dreyfus's apartment, looking for any signs of espionage. They went through his files, and they didn't find anything. This just convinced them more that Dreyfus was not only guilty, but sneaky as well, because clearly he had hidden all of the evidence before they had managed to get to it. Next, they went and looked through his personal history for any incriminating details. They talked to his teachers, they found that he had studied foreign languages in school, which clearly showed a desire to conspire with foreign governments later in life. His teachers also said that Dreyfus was known for having a good memory, which was highly suspicious, right? You know, because a spy has to remember a lot of things. So the case went to trial, and Dreyfus was found guilty. Afterwards, they took him out into this public square and ritualistically tore his insignia from his uniform and broke his sword in two. This was called the Degradation of Dreyfus. And they sentenced him to life imprisonment on the aptly named Devil's Island, which is this barren rock off the coast of South America. So there he went, and there he spent his days alone, writing letters and letters to the French government begging them to reopen his case so they could discover his innocence. But for the most part, France considered the matter closed. One thing that's really interesting to me about the Dreyfus Affair is this question of why the officers were so convinced that Dreyfus was guilty. I mean, you might even assume that they were setting him up, that they were intentionally framing him. But historians don't think that's what happened. As far as we can tell, the officers genuinely believed that the case against Dreyfus was strong. Which makes you wonder: What does it say about the human mind that we can find such paltry evidence to be compelling enough to convict a man? Well, this is a case of what scientists call "motivated reasoning." It's this phenomenon in which our unconscious motivations, our desires and fears, shape the way we interpret information. Some information, some ideas, feel like our allies. We want them to win. We want to defend them. And other information or ideas are the enemy, and we want to shoot them down. So this is why I call motivated reasoning, "soldier mindset." Probably most of you have never persecuted a French-Jewish officer for high treason, I assume, but maybe you've followed sports or politics, so you might have noticed that when the referee judges that your team committed a foul, for example, you're highly motivated to find reasons why he's wrong. But if he judges that the other team committed a foul — awesome! That's a good call, let's not examine it too closely. Or, maybe you've read an article or a study that examined some controversial policy, like capital punishment. And, as researchers have demonstrated, if you support capital punishment and the study shows that it's not effective, then you're highly motivated to find all the reasons why the study was poorly designed. But if it shows that capital punishment works, it's a good study. And vice versa: if you don't support capital punishment, same thing. Our judgment is strongly influenced, unconsciously, by which side we want to win. And this is ubiquitous. This shapes how we think about our health, our relationships, how we decide how to vote, what we consider fair or ethical. What's most scary to me about motivated reasoning or soldier mindset, is how unconscious it is. We can think we're being objective and fair-minded and still wind up ruining the life of an innocent man. However, fortunately for Dreyfus, his story is not over. This is Colonel Picquart. He's another high-ranking officer in the French Army, and like most people, he assumed Dreyfus was guilty. Also like most people in the army, he was at least casually anti-Semitic. But at a certain point, Picquart began to suspect: "What if we're all wrong about Dreyfus?" What happened was, he had discovered evidence that the spying for Germany had continued, even after Dreyfus was in prison. And he had also discovered that another officer in the army had handwriting that perfectly matched the memo, much closer than Dreyfus's handwriting. So he brought these discoveries to his superiors, but to his dismay, they either didn't care or came up with elaborate rationalizations to explain his findings, like, "Well, all you've really shown, Picquart, is that there's another spy who learned how to mimic Dreyfus's handwriting, and he picked up the torch of spying after Dreyfus left. But Dreyfus is still guilty." Eventually, Picquart managed to get Dreyfus exonerated. But it took him 10 years, and for part of that time, he himself was in prison for the crime of disloyalty to the army. A lot of people feel like Picquart can't really be the hero of this story because he was an anti-Semite and that's bad, which I agree with. But personally, for me, the fact that Picquart was anti-Semitic actually makes his actions more admirable, because he had the same prejudices, the same reasons to be biased as his fellow officers, but his motivation to find the truth and uphold it trumped all of that. So to me, Picquart is a poster child for what I call "scout mindset." It's the drive not to make one idea win or another lose, but just to see what's really there as honestly and accurately as you can, even if it's not pretty or convenient or pleasant. This mindset is what I'm personally passionate about. And I've spent the last few years examining and trying to figure out what causes scout mindset. Why are some people, sometimes at least, able to cut through their own prejudices and biases and motivations and just try to see the facts and the evidence as objectively as they can? And the answer is emotional. So, just as soldier mindset is rooted in emotions like defensiveness or tribalism, scout mindset is, too. It's just rooted in different emotions. For example, scouts are curious. They're more likely to say they feel pleasure when they learn new information or an itch to solve a puzzle. They're more likely to feel intrigued when they encounter something that contradicts their expectations. Scouts also have different values. They're more likely to say they think it's virtuous to test your own beliefs, and they're less likely to say that someone who changes his mind seems weak. And above all, scouts are grounded, which means their self-worth as a person isn't tied to how right or wrong they are about any particular topic. So they can believe that capital punishment works. If studies come out showing that it doesn't, they can say, "Huh. Looks like I might be wrong. Doesn't mean I'm bad or stupid." This cluster of traits is what researchers have found — and I've also found anecdotally — predicts good judgment. And the key takeaway I want to leave you with about those traits is that they're primarily not about how smart you are or about how much you know. In fact, they don't correlate very much with IQ at all. They're about how you feel. There's a quote that I keep coming back to, by Saint-Exupéry. He's the author of "The Little Prince." He said, "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up your men to collect wood and give orders and distribute the work. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." In other words, I claim, if we really want to improve our judgment as individuals and as societies, what we need most is not more instruction in logic or rhetoric or probability or economics, even though those things are quite valuable. But what we most need to use those principles well is scout mindset. We need to change the way we feel. We need to learn how to feel proud instead of ashamed when we notice we might have been wrong about something. We need to learn how to feel intrigued instead of defensive when we encounter some information that contradicts our beliefs. So the question I want to leave you with is: What do you most yearn for? Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs? Or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can? Thank you. (Applause) |
Clues to prehistoric times, found in blind cavefish | {0: 'Prosanta Chakrabarty studies fish to help explain the evolution of human beings and our planet. '} | TED2016 | Ichthyology, the study of fishes. It looks like a big, boring word, but it's actually quite exciting, because ichthyology is the only "ology" with "YOLO" in it. (Laughter) Now, to the cool kids in the audience, you already know, YOLO stands for "you only live once," and because I only have one life, I'm going to spend it doing what I always dreamt of doing: seeing the hidden wonders of the world and discovering new species. And that's what I get to do. Now, in recent years, I really focused on caves for finding new species. And it turns out, there's lots of new cavefish species out there. You just have to know where to look, and to maybe be a little thin. (Laughter) Now, cavefishes can tell me a lot about biology and geology. They can tell me how the landmasses around them have changed and moved by being stuck in these little holes, and they can tell me about the evolution of sight, by being blind. Now, fish have eyes that are essentially the same as ours. All vertebrates do, and each time a fish species starts to adapt to this dark, cold, cave environment, over many, many generations, they lose their eyes and their eyesight until the end up like an eyeless cavefish like this one here. Now, each cavefish species has evolved in a slightly different way, and each one has a unique geological and biological story to tell us, and that's why it's so exciting when we find a new species. So this is a new species we described, from southern Indiana. We named it Amblyopsis hoosieri, the Hoosier cavefish. (Laughter) Its closest relatives are cavefishes in Kentucky, in the Mammoth Cave system. And they start to diverge when the Ohio River split them a few million years ago. And in that time they developed these subtle differences in the genetic architecture behind their blindness. There's this gene called rhodopsin that's super-critical for sight. We have it, and these species have it too, except one species has lost all function in that gene, and the other one maintains it. So this sets up this beautiful natural experiment where we can look at the genes behind our vision, and at the very roots of how we can see. But the genes in these cavefishes can also tell us about deep geological time, maybe no more so than in this species here. This is a new species we described from Madagascar that we named Typhleotris mararybe. That means "big sickness" in Malagasy, for how sick we got trying to collect this species. Now, believe it or not, swimming around sinkholes full of dead things and cave full of bat poop isn't the smartest thing you could be doing with your life, but YOLO. (Laughter) Now, I love this species despite the fact that it tried to kill us, and that's because this species in Madagascar, its closest relatives are 6,000 kilometers away, cavefishes in Australia. Now, there's no way a three-inch-long freshwater cavefish can swim across the Indian Ocean, so what we found when we compared the DNA of these species is that they've been separated for more than 100 million years, or about the time that the southern continents were last together. So in fact, these species didn't move at all. It's the continents that moved them. And so they give us, through their DNA, this precise model and measure of how to date and time these ancient geological events. Now, this species here is so new I'm not even allowed to tell you its name yet, but I can tell you it's a new species from Mexico, and it's probably already extinct. It's probably extinct because the only known cave system it's from was destroyed when a dam was built nearby. Unfortunately for cavefishes, their groundwater habitat is also our main source of drinking water. Now, we actually don't know this species' closest relative, yet. It doesn't appear to be anything else in Mexico, so maybe it's something in Cuba, or Florida, or India. But whatever it is, it might tell us something new about the geology of the Caribbean, or the biology of how to better diagnose certain types of blindness. But I hope we discover this species before it goes extinct too. And I'm going to spend my one life as an ichthyologist trying to discover and save these humble little blind cavefishes that can tell us so much about the geology of the planet and the biology of how we see. Thank you. (Applause) |
"Redemption Song" | {0: 'With his philanthropic work, John Legend is leveraging his stardom to raise social consciousness and make a positive impact on a global scale. '} | TED2016 | At Free America, we've done a listening and learning tour. We visited not only with prosecutors but with legislators, with inmates in our state and local prisons. We've gone to immigration detention centers. We've met a lot of people. And we've seen that redemption and transformation can happen in our prisons, our jails and our immigration detention centers, giving hope to those who want to create a better life after serving their time. Imagine if we also considered the front end of this prison pipeline. What would it look like if we intervened, with rehabilitation as a core value — with love and compassion as core values? We would have a society that is safer, healthier and worthy of raising our children in. I want to introduce you to James Cavitt. James served 12 years in the San Quentin State Prison and is being released in 18 months. Now James, like you and me, is more than the worst thing he's done. He is a father, a husband, a son, a poet. He committed a crime; he's paying his debt, and working hard to build the skills to make the transition back to a productive life when he enters the civilian population again. Now James, like millions of people behind bars, is an example of what happens if we believe that our failings don't define who we are, that we are all worthy of redemption and if we support those impacted by mass incarceration, we can all heal together. I'd like to introduce you to James right now, and he's going to share his journey of redemption through spoken word. James Cavitt: Thanks, John. TED, welcome to San Quentin. The talent is abundant behind prison walls. Future software engineers, entrepreneurs, craftsmen, musicians and artists. This piece is inspired by all of the hard work that men and women are doing on the inside to create better lives and futures for themselves after they serve their time. This piece is entitled, "Where I Live." I live in a world where most people are too afraid to go. Surrounded by tall, concrete walls, steel bars, where razor wire have a way of cutting away at the hopes for a brighter tomorrow. I live in a world that kill people who kill people in order to teach people that killing people is wrong. Imagine that. Better yet, imagine a world where healed people helped hurt people heal and become strong. Maybe then we would all be singin' "Redemption Song." I live in a world that has been called "hell on Earth" by those trapped inside. But I've come to the stark realization that prison — it really is what you make it. You see, in spite of the harshness of my reality, there is a silver lining. I knew that my freedom was gonna come, it was just a matter of time. And so I treated my first steps as if they were my last mile, and I realized that you don't have to be free in order to experience freedom. And just because you're free, doesn't mean that you have freedom. Many of us, for years, have been battling our inner demons. We walk around smiling when inside we're really screamin': freedom! Don't you get it? We're all serving time; we're just in different places. As for me, I choose to be free from the prisons I've created. The key: forgiveness. Action's my witness. If we want freedom, then we gotta think different. Because freedom ... it isn't a place. It's a mind setting. Thank you. (Applause) (Piano) John Legend: Old pirates, yes, they rob I. Sold I to the merchant ships. Minutes after they took I from the bottomless pit. My hands were made strong by the hand of the almighty. We forward in this generation triumphantly. Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom? 'Cause all I ever had — redemption songs. Redemption songs. Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds. Have no fear for atomic energy 'cause none of them can stop the time. How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look? Some say it's just a part of it, we've got to fulfill the book. Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom? 'Cause all I ever had — redemption songs. Redemption songs. (Piano) Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds. Have no fear for atomic energy 'cause none of them can stop the time. How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look? Some say it's just a part of it, we've got to fulfill the book. Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom? 'Cause all I ever had — redemption songs. Redemption songs. These songs of freedom. 'Cause all I ever had — redemption songs. Redemption songs. Redemption songs. (Piano) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
How Syria's architecture laid the foundation for brutal war | {0: "Marwa Al-Sabouni suggests that architecture played a crucial role in the slow unraveling of Syrian cities' social fabric, preparing the way for once-friendly groups to become enemies instead of neighbors."} | TEDSummit | Hi. My name is Marwa, and I'm an architect. I was born and raised in Homs, a city in the central western part of Syria, and I've always lived here. After six years of war, Homs is now a half-destroyed city. My family and I were lucky; our place is still standing. Although for two years, we were like prisoners at home. Outside there were demonstrations and battles and bombings and snipers. My husband and I used to run an architecture studio in the old town main square. It's gone, as is most of the old town itself. Half of the city's other neighborhoods are now rubble. Since the ceasefire in late 2015, large parts of Homs have been more or less quiet. The economy is completely broken, and people are still fighting. The merchants who had stalls in the old city market now trade out of sheds on the streets. Under our apartment, there is a carpenter, sweetshops, a butcher, a printing house, workshops, among many more. I have started teaching part-time, and with my husband, who juggles several jobs, we've opened a small bookshop. Other people do all sorts of jobs to get by. When I look at my destroyed city, of course, I ask myself: What has led to this senseless war? Syria was largely a place of tolerance, historically accustomed to variety, accommodating a wide range of beliefs, origins, customs, goods, food. How did my country — a country with communities living harmoniously together and comfortable in discussing their differences — how did it degenerate into civil war, violence, displacement and unprecedented sectarian hatred? There were many reasons that had led to the war — social, political and economic. They all have played their role. But I believe there is one key reason that has been overlooked and which is important to analyze, because from it will largely depend whether we can make sure that this doesn't happen again. And that reason is architecture. Architecture in my country has played an important role in creating, directing and amplifying conflict between warring factions, and this is probably true for other countries as well. There is a sure correspondence between the architecture of a place and the character of the community that has settled there. Architecture plays a key role in whether a community crumbles or comes together. Syrian society has long lived the coexistence of different traditions and backgrounds. Syrians have experienced the prosperity of open trade and sustainable communities. They have enjoyed the true meaning of belonging to a place, and that was reflected in their built environment, in the mosques and churches built back-to-back, in the interwoven souks and public venues, and the proportions and sizes based on principles of humanity and harmony. This architecture of mixity can still be read in the remains. The old Islamic city in Syria was built over a multilayered past, integrating with it and embracing its spirit. So did its communities. People lived and worked with each other in a place that gave them a sense of belonging and made them feel at home. They shared a remarkably unified existence. But over the last century, gradually this delicate balance of these places has been interfered with; first, by the urban planners of the colonial period, when the French went enthusiastically about, transforming what they saw as the un-modern Syrian cities. They blew up city streets and relocated monuments. They called them improvements, and they were the beginning of a long, slow unraveling. The traditional urbanism and architecture of our cities assured identity and belonging not by separation, but by intertwining. But over time, the ancient became worthless, and the new, coveted. The harmony of the built environment and social environment got trampled over by elements of modernity — brutal, unfinished concrete blocks, neglect, aesthetic devastation, divisive urbanism that zoned communities by class, creed or affluence. And the same was happening to the community. As the shape of the built environment changed, so the lifestyles and sense of belonging of the communities also started changing. From a register of togetherness, of belonging, architecture became a way of differentiation, and communities started drifting apart from the very fabric that used to unite them, and from the soul of the place that used to represent their common existence. While many reasons had led to the Syrian war, we shouldn't underestimate the way in which, by contributing to the loss of identity and self-respect, urban zoning and misguided, inhumane architecture have nurtured sectarian divisions and hatred. Over time, the united city has morphed into a city center with ghettos along its circumference. And in turn, the coherent communities became distinct social groups, alienated from each other and alienated from the place. From my point of view, losing the sense of belonging to a place and a sense of sharing it with someone else has made it a lot easier to destroy. The clear example can be seen in the informal housing system, which used to host, before the war, over 40 percent of the population. Yes, prior to the war, almost half of the Syrian population lived in slums, peripheral areas without proper infrastructure, made of endless rows of bare block boxes containing people, people who mostly belonged to the same group, whether based on religion, class, origin or all of the above. This ghettoized urbanism proved to be a tangible precursor of war. Conflict is much easier between pre-categorized areas — where the "others" live. The ties that used to bind the city together — whether they were social, through coherent building, or economic, through trade in the souk, or religious, through the coexistent presence — were all lost in the misguided and visionless modernization of the built environment. Allow me an aside. When I read about heterogeneous urbanism in other parts of the world, involving ethnic neighborhoods in British cities or around Paris or Brussels, I recognize the beginning of the kind of instability we have witnessed so disastrously here in Syria. We have severely destroyed cities, such as Homs, Aleppo, Daraa and many others, and almost half of the population of the country is now displaced. Hopefully, the war will end, and the question that, as an architect, I have to ask, is: How do we rebuild? What are the principles that we should adopt in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes? From my point of view, the main focus should be on creating places that make their people feel they belong. Architecture and planning need to recapture some of the traditional values that did just that, creating the conditions for coexistence and peace, values of beauty that don't exhibit ostentation, but rather, approachability and ease, moral values that promote generosity and acceptance, architecture that is for everyone to enjoy, not just for the elite, just as used to be in the shadowed alleys of the old Islamic city, mixed designs that encourage a sense of community. There is a neighborhood here in Homs that's called Baba Amr that has been fully destroyed. Almost two years ago, I introduced this design into a UN-Habitat competition for rebuilding it. The idea was to create an urban fabric inspired by a tree, capable of growing and spreading organically, echoing the traditional bridge hanging over the old alleys, and incorporating apartments, private courtyards, shops, workshops, places for parking and playing and leisure, trees and shaded areas. It's far from perfect, obviously. I drew it during the few hours of electricity we get. And there are many possible ways to express belonging and community through architecture. But compare it with the freestanding, disconnected blocks proposed by the official project for rebuilding Baba Amr. Architecture is not the axis around which all human life rotates, but it has the power to suggest and even direct human activity. In that sense, settlement, identity and social integration are all the producer and product of effective urbanism. The coherent urbanism of the old Islamic city and of many old European towns, for instance, promote integration, while rows of soulless housing or tower blocks, even when they are luxurious, tend to promote isolation and "otherness." Even simple things like shaded places or fruit plants or drinking water inside the city can make a difference in how people feel towards the place, and whether they consider it a generous place that gives, a place that's worth keeping, contributing to, or whether they see it as an alienating place, full of seeds of anger. In order for a place to give, its architecture should be giving, too. Our built environment matters. The fabric of our cities is reflected in the fabric of our souls. And whether in the shape of informal concrete slums or broken social housing or trampled old towns or forests of skyscrapers, the contemporary urban archetypes that have emerged all across the Middle East have been one cause of the alienation and fragmentation of our communities. We can learn from this. We can learn how to rebuild in another way, how to create an architecture that doesn't contribute only to the practical and economic aspects of people's lives, but also to their social, spiritual and psychological needs. Those needs were totally overlooked in the Syrian cities before the war. We need to create again cities that are shared by the communities that inhabit them. If we do so, people will not feel the need to seek identities opposed to the other identities all around, because they will all feel at home. Thank you for listening. |
Why Brexit happened -- and what to do next | {0: 'Alexander Betts explores ways societies might empower refugees rather than pushing them to the margins.'} | TEDSummit | I am British. (Laughter) (Applause) Never before has the phrase "I am British" elicited so much pity. (Laughter) I come from an island where many of us like to believe there's been a lot of continuity over the last thousand years. We tend to have historically imposed change on others but done much less of it ourselves. So it came as an immense shock to me when I woke up on the morning of June 24 to discover that my country had voted to leave the European Union, my Prime Minister had resigned, and Scotland was considering a referendum that could bring to an end the very existence of the United Kingdom. So that was an immense shock for me, and it was an immense shock for many people, but it was also something that, over the following several days, created a complete political meltdown in my country. There were calls for a second referendum, almost as if, following a sports match, we could ask the opposition for a replay. Everybody was blaming everybody else. People blamed the Prime Minister for calling the referendum in the first place. They blamed the leader of the opposition for not fighting it hard enough. The young accused the old. The educated blamed the less well-educated. That complete meltdown was made even worse by the most tragic element of it: levels of xenophobia and racist abuse in the streets of Britain at a level that I have never seen before in my lifetime. People are now talking about whether my country is becoming a Little England, or, as one of my colleagues put it, whether we're about to become a 1950s nostalgia theme park floating in the Atlantic Ocean. (Laughter) But my question is really, should we have the degree of shock that we've experienced since? Was it something that took place overnight? Or are there deeper structural factors that have led us to where we are today? So I want to take a step back and ask two very basic questions. First, what does Brexit represent, not just for my country, but for all of us around the world? And second, what can we do about it? How should we all respond? So first, what does Brexit represent? Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Brexit teaches us many things about our society and about societies around the world. It highlights in ways that we seem embarrassingly unaware of how divided our societies are. The vote split along lines of age, education, class and geography. Young people didn't turn out to vote in great numbers, but those that did wanted to remain. Older people really wanted to leave the European Union. Geographically, it was London and Scotland that most strongly committed to being part of the European Union, while in other parts of the country there was very strong ambivalence. Those divisions are things we really need to recognize and take seriously. But more profoundly, the vote teaches us something about the nature of politics today. Contemporary politics is no longer just about right and left. It's no longer just about tax and spend. It's about globalization. The fault line of contemporary politics is between those that embrace globalization and those that fear globalization. (Applause) If we look at why those who wanted to leave — we call them "Leavers," as opposed to "Remainers" — we see two factors in the opinion polls that really mattered. The first was immigration, and the second sovereignty, and these represent a desire for people to take back control of their own lives and the feeling that they are unrepresented by politicians. But those ideas are ones that signify fear and alienation. They represent a retreat back towards nationalism and borders in ways that many of us would reject. What I want to suggest is the picture is more complicated than that, that liberal internationalists, like myself, and I firmly include myself in that picture, need to write ourselves back into the picture in order to understand how we've got to where we are today. When we look at the voting patterns across the United Kingdom, we can visibly see the divisions. The blue areas show Remain and the red areas Leave. When I looked at this, what personally struck me was the very little time in my life I've actually spent in many of the red areas. I suddenly realized that, looking at the top 50 areas in the UK that have the strongest Leave vote, I've spent a combined total of four days of my life in those areas. In some of those places, I didn't even know the names of the voting districts. It was a real shock to me, and it suggested that people like me who think of ourselves as inclusive, open and tolerant, perhaps don't know our own countries and societies nearly as well as we like to believe. (Applause) And the challenge that comes from that is we need to find a new way to narrate globalization to those people, to recognize that for those people who have not necessarily been to university, who haven't necessarily grown up with the Internet, that don't get opportunities to travel, they may be unpersuaded by the narrative that we find persuasive in our often liberal bubbles. (Applause) It means that we need to reach out more broadly and understand. In the Leave vote, a minority have peddled the politics of fear and hatred, creating lies and mistrust around, for instance, the idea that the vote on Europe could reduce the number of refugees and asylum-seekers coming to Europe, when the vote on leaving had nothing to do with immigration from outside the European Union. But for a significant majority of the Leave voters the concern was disillusionment with the political establishment. This was a protest vote for many, a sense that nobody represented them, that they couldn't find a political party that spoke for them, and so they rejected that political establishment. This replicates around Europe and much of the liberal democratic world. We see it with the rise in popularity of Donald Trump in the United States, with the growing nationalism of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, with the increase in popularity of Marine Le Pen in France. The specter of Brexit is in all of our societies. So the question I think we need to ask is my second question, which is how should we collectively respond? For all of us who care about creating liberal, open, tolerant societies, we urgently need a new vision, a vision of a more tolerant, inclusive globalization, one that brings people with us rather than leaving them behind. That vision of globalization is one that has to start by a recognition of the positive benefits of globalization. The consensus amongst economists is that free trade, the movement of capital, the movement of people across borders benefit everyone on aggregate. The consensus amongst international relations scholars is that globalization brings interdependence, which brings cooperation and peace. But globalization also has redistributive effects. It creates winners and losers. To take the example of migration, we know that immigration is a net positive for the economy as a whole under almost all circumstances. But we also have to be very aware that there are redistributive consequences, that importantly, low-skilled immigration can lead to a reduction in wages for the most impoverished in our societies and also put pressure on house prices. That doesn't detract from the fact that it's positive, but it means more people have to share in those benefits and recognize them. In 2002, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, gave a speech at Yale University, and that speech was on the topic of inclusive globalization. That was the speech in which he coined that term. And he said, and I paraphrase, "The glass house of globalization has to be open to all if it is to remain secure. Bigotry and ignorance are the ugly face of exclusionary and antagonistic globalization." That idea of inclusive globalization was briefly revived in 2008 in a conference on progressive governance involving many of the leaders of European countries. But amid austerity and the financial crisis of 2008, the concept disappeared almost without a trace. Globalization has been taken to support a neoliberal agenda. It's perceived to be part of an elite agenda rather than something that benefits all. And it needs to be reclaimed on a far more inclusive basis than it is today. So the question is, how can we achieve that goal? How can we balance on the one hand addressing fear and alienation while on the other hand refusing vehemently to give in to xenophobia and nationalism? That is the question for all of us. And I think, as a social scientist, that social science offers some places to start. Our transformation has to be about both ideas and about material change, and I want to give you four ideas as a starting point. The first relates to the idea of civic education. What stands out from Brexit is the gap between public perception and empirical reality. It's been suggested that we've moved to a postfactual society, where evidence and truth no longer matter, and lies have equal status to the clarity of evidence. So how can we — (Applause) How can we rebuild respect for truth and evidence into our liberal democracies? It has to begin with education, but it has to start with the recognition that there are huge gaps. In 2014, the pollster Ipsos MORI published a survey on attitudes to immigration, and it showed that as numbers of immigrants increase, so public concern with immigration also increases, although it obviously didn't unpack causality, because this could equally be to do not so much with numbers but the political and media narrative around it. But the same survey also revealed huge public misinformation and misunderstanding about the nature of immigration. For example, in these attitudes in the United Kingdom, the public believed that levels of asylum were a greater proportion of immigration than they were, but they also believed the levels of educational migration were far lower as a proportion of overall migration than they actually are. So we have to address this misinformation, the gap between perception and reality on key aspects of globalization. And that can't just be something that's left to our schools, although that's important to begin at an early age. It has to be about lifelong civic participation and public engagement that we all encourage as societies. The second thing that I think is an opportunity is the idea to encourage more interaction across diverse communities. (Applause) One of the things that stands out for me very strikingly, looking at immigration attitudes in the United Kingdom, is that ironically, the regions of my country that are the most tolerant of immigrants have the highest numbers of immigrants. So for instance, London and the Southeast have the highest numbers of immigrants, and they are also by far the most tolerant areas. It's those areas of the country that have the lowest levels of immigration that actually are the most exclusionary and intolerant towards migrants. So we need to encourage exchange programs. We need to ensure that older generations who maybe can't travel get access to the Internet. We need to encourage, even on a local and national level, more movement, more participation, more interaction with people who we don't know and whose views we might not necessarily agree with. The third thing that I think is crucial, though, and this is really fundamental, is we have to ensure that everybody shares in the benefits of globalization. This illustration from the Financial Times post-Brexit is really striking. It shows tragically that those people who voted to leave the European Union were those who actually benefited the most materially from trade with the European Union. But the problem is that those people in those areas didn't perceive themselves to be beneficiaries. They didn't believe that they were actually getting access to material benefits of increased trade and increased mobility around the world. I work on questions predominantly to do with refugees, and one of the ideas I spent a lot of my time preaching, mainly to developing countries around the world, is that in order to encourage the integration of refugees, we can't just benefit the refugee populations, we also have to address the concerns of the host communities in local areas. But in looking at that, one of the policy prescriptions is that we have to provide disproportionately better education facilities, health facilities, access to social services in those regions of high immigration to address the concerns of those local populations. But while we encourage that around the developing world, we don't take those lessons home and incorporate them in our own societies. Furthermore, if we're going to really take seriously the need to ensure people share in the economic benefits, our businesses and corporations need a model of globalization that recognizes that they, too, have to take people with them. The fourth and final idea I want to put forward is an idea that we need more responsible politics. There's very little social science evidence that compares attitudes on globalization. But from the surveys that do exist, what we can see is there's huge variation across different countries and time periods in those countries for attitudes and tolerance of questions like migration and mobility on the one hand and free trade on the other. But one hypothesis that I think emerges from a cursory look at that data is the idea that polarized societies are far less tolerant of globalization. It's the societies like Sweden in the past, like Canada today, where there is a centrist politics, where right and left work together, that we encourage supportive attitudes towards globalization. And what we see around the world today is a tragic polarization, a failure to have dialogue between the extremes in politics, and a gap in terms of that liberal center ground that can encourage communication and a shared understanding. We might not achieve that today, but at the very least we have to call upon our politicians and our media to drop a language of fear and be far more tolerant of one another. (Applause) These ideas are very tentative, and that's in part because this needs to be an inclusive and shared project. I am still British. I am still European. I am still a global citizen. For those of us who believe that our identities are not mutually exclusive, we have to all work together to ensure that globalization takes everyone with us and doesn't leave people behind. Only then will we truly reconcile democracy and globalization. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why I keep speaking up, even when people mock my accent | {0: 'Safwat Saleem uses satire and art to bring to light stories of adversity.'} | TED2016 | I used to have this recurring dream where I'd walk into a roomful of people, and I'd try not to make eye contact with anyone. Until someone notices me, and I just panic. And the person walks up to me, and says, "Hi, my name is So-and-so. And what is your name?" And I'm just quiet, unable to respond. After some awkward silence, he goes, "Have you forgotten your name?" And I'm still quiet. And then, slowly, all the other people in the room begin to turn toward me and ask, almost in unison, (Voice-over, several voices) "Have you forgotten your name?" As the chant gets louder, I want to respond, but I don't. I'm a visual artist. Some of my work is humorous, and some is a bit funny but in a sad way. And one thing that I really enjoy doing is making these little animations where I get to do the voice-over for all kinds of characters. I've been a bear. (Video) Bear (Safwat Saleem's voice): Hi. (Laughter) Safwat Saleem: I've been a whale. (Video) Whale (SS's voice): Hi. (Laughter) SS: I've been a greeting card. (Video) Greeting card (SS's voice): Hi. (Laughter) SS: And my personal favorite is Frankenstein's monster. (Video) Frankenstein's monster (SS's voice): (Grunts) (Laughter) SS: I just had to grunt a lot for that one. A few years ago, I made this educational video about the history of video games. And for that one, I got to do the voice of Space Invader. (Video) Space Invader (SS's voice): Hi. SS: A dream come true, really, (Laughter) And when that video was posted online, I just sat there on the computer, hitting "refresh," excited to see the response. The first comment comes in. (Video) Comment: Great job. SS: Yes! I hit "refresh." (Video) Comment: Excellent video. I look forward to the next one. SS: This was just the first of a two-part video. I was going to work on the second one next. I hit "refresh." (Video) Comment: Where is part TWO? WHEREEEEE? I need it NOWWWWW!: P (Laughter) SS: People other than my mom were saying nice things about me, on the Internet! It felt like I had finally arrived. I hit "refresh." (Video) Comment: His voice is annoying. No offense. SS: OK, no offense taken. Refresh. (Video) Comment: Could you remake this without peanut butter in your mouth? SS: OK, at least the feedback is somewhat constructive. Hit "refresh." (Video) Comment: Please don't use this narrator again u can barely understand him. SS: Refresh. (Video) Comment: Couldn't follow because of the Indian accent. SS: OK, OK, OK, two things. Number one, I don't have an Indian accent, I have a Pakistani accent, OK? And number two, I clearly have a Pakistani accent. (Laughter) But comments like that kept coming in, so I figured I should just ignore them and start working on the second part of the video. I recorded my audio, but every time I sat down to edit, I just could not do it. Every single time, it would take me back to my childhood, when I had a much harder time speaking. I've stuttered for as long as I can remember. I was the kid in class who would never raise his hand when he had a question — or knew the answer. Every time the phone rang, I would run to the bathroom so I would not have to answer it. If it was for me, my parents would say I'm not around. I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. And I hated introducing myself, especially in groups. I'd always stutter on my name, and there was usually someone who'd go, "Have you forgotten your name?" And then everybody would laugh. That joke never got old. (Laughter) I spent my childhood feeling that if I spoke, it would become obvious that there was something wrong with me, that I was not normal. So I mostly stayed quiet. And so you see, eventually for me to even be able to use my voice in my work was a huge step for me. Every time I record audio, I fumble my way through saying each sentence many, many times, and then I go back in and pick the ones where I think I suck the least. (Voice-over) SS: Audio editing is like Photoshop for your voice. I can slow it down, speed it up, make it deeper, add an echo. And if I stutter along the way, and if I stutter along the way, I just go back in and fix it. It's magic. SS: Using my highly edited voice in my work was a way for me to finally sound normal to myself. But after the comments on the video, it no longer made me feel normal. And so I stopped using my voice in my work. Since then, I've thought a lot about what it means to be normal. And I've come to understand that "normal" has a lot to do with expectations. Let me give you an example. I came across this story about the Ancient Greek writer, Homer. Now, Homer mentions very few colors in his writing. And even when he does, he seems to get them quite a bit wrong. For example, the sea is described as wine red, people's faces are sometimes green and sheep are purple. But it's not just Homer. If you look at all of the ancient literature — Ancient Chinese, Icelandic, Greek, Indian and even the original Hebrew Bible — they all mention very few colors. And the most popular theory for why that might be the case is that cultures begin to recognize a color only once they have the ability to make that color. So basically, if you can make a color, only then can you see it. A color like red, which was fairly easy for many cultures to make — they began to see that color fairly early on. But a color like blue, which was much harder to make — many cultures didn't begin to learn how to make that color until much later. They didn't begin to see it until much later as well. So until then, even though a color might be all around them, they simply did not have the ability to see it. It was invisIble. It was not a part of their normal. And that story has helped put my own experience into context. So when I first read the comments on the video, my initial reaction was to take it all very personally. But the people commenting did not know how self-conscious I am about my voice. They were mostly reacting to my accent, that it is not normal for a narrator to have an accent. But what is normal, anyway? We know that reviewers will find more spelling errors in your writing if they think you're black. We know that professors are less likely to help female or minority students. And we know that resumes with white-sounding names get more callbacks than resumes with black-sounding names. Why is that? Because of our expectations of what is normal. We think it is normal when a black student has spelling errors. We think it is normal when a female or minority student does not succeed. And we think it is normal that a white employee is a better hire than a black employee. But studies also show that discrimination of this kind, in most cases, is simply favoritism, and it results more from wanting to help people that you can relate to than the desire to harm people that you can't relate to. And not relating to people starts at a very early age. Let me give you an example. One library that keeps track of characters in the children's book collection every year, found that in 2014, only about 11 percent of the books had a character of color. And just the year before, that number was about eight percent, even though half of American children today come from a minority background. Half. So there are two big issues here. Number one, children are told that they can be anything, they can do anything, and yet, most stories that children of color consume are about people who are not like them. Number two is that majority groups don't get to realize the great extent to which they are similar to minorities — our everyday experiences, our hopes, our dreams, our fears and our mutual love for hummus. It's delicious! (Laughter) Just like the color blue for Ancient Greeks, minorities are not a part of what we consider normal, because normal is simply a construction of what we've been exposed to, and how visible it is around us. And this is where things get a bit difficult. I can accept the preexisting notion of normal — that normal is good, and anything outside of that very narrow definition of normal is bad. Or I can challenge that preexisting notion of normal with my work and with my voice and with my accent and by standing here onstage, even though I'm scared shitless and would rather be in the bathroom. (Laughter) (Applause) (Video) Sheep (SS's voice): I'm now slowly starting to use my voice in my work again. And it feels good. It does not mean I won't have a breakdown the next time a couple dozen people say that I talk (Mumbling) like I have peanut butter in my mouth. (Laughter) SS: It just means I now have a much better understanding of what's at stake, and how giving up is not an option. The Ancient Greeks didn't just wake up one day and realize that the sky was blue. It took centuries, even, for humans to realize what we had been ignoring for so long. And so we must continuously challenge our notion of normal, because doing so is going to allow us as a society to finally see the sky for what it is. (Video) Characters: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Frankenstein's monster: (Grunts) (Laughter) SS: Thank you. (Applause) |
When we design for disability, we all benefit | {0: 'Elise Roy thinks that designers have the capacity and responsibility to address and resolve human problems on micro and macro scales and contribute to social well-being.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | I'll never forget the sound of laughing with my friends. I'll never forget the sound of my mother's voice right before I fell asleep. And I'll never forget the comforting sound of water trickling down a stream. Imagine my fear, pure fear, when, at the age of 10, I was told I was going to lose my hearing. And over the next five years, it progressed until I was classified as profoundly deaf. But I believe that losing my hearing was one of the greatest gifts I've ever received. You see, I get to experience the world in a unique way. And I believe that these unique experiences that people with disabilities have is what's going to help us make and design a better world for everyone — both for people with and without disabilities. I used to be a disability rights lawyer, and I spent a lot of my time focused on enforcing the law, ensuring that accommodations were made. And then I had to quickly learn international policy, because I was asked to work on the UN Convention that protects people with disabilities. As the leader of the NGO there, I spent most of my energy trying to convince people about the capabilities of people with disabilities. But somewhere along the way, and after many career transitions that my parents weren't so happy about — (Laughter) I stumbled upon a solution that I believe may be an even more powerful tool to solve some of the world's greatest problems, disability or not. And that tool is called design thinking. Design thinking is a process for innovation and problem solving. There are five steps. The first is defining the problem and understanding its constraints. The second is observing people in real-life situations and empathizing with them. Third, throwing out hundreds of ideas — the more the better, the wilder the better. Fourth, prototyping: gathering whatever you can, whatever you can find, to mimic your solution, to test it and to refine it. And finally, implementation: ensuring that the solution you came up with is sustainable. Warren Berger says that design thinking teaches us to look sideways, to reframe, to refine, to experiment and, probably most importantly, ask those stupid questions. Design thinkers believe that everyone is creative. They believe in bringing people from multiple disciplines together, because they want to share multiple perspectives and bring them together and ultimately merge them to form something new. Design thinking is such a successful and versatile tool that it has been applied in almost every industry. I saw the potential that it had for the issues I faced, so I decided to go back to school and get my master's in social design. This looks at how to use design to create positive change in the world. While I was there, I fell in love with woodworking. But what I quickly realized was that I was missing out on something. As you're working with a tool, right before it's about to kick back at you — which means the piece or the tool jumps back at you — it makes a sound. And I couldn't hear this sound. So I decided, why not try and solve it? My solution was a pair of safety glasses that were engineered to visually alert the user to pitch changes in the tool, before the human ear could pick it up. Why hadn't tool designers thought of this before? (Laughter) Two reasons: one, I was a beginner. I wasn't weighed down by expertise or conventional wisdom. The second is: I was Deaf. My unique experience of the world helped inform my solution. And as I went on, I kept running into more and more solutions that were originally made for people with disabilities, and that ended up being picked up, embraced and loved by the mainstream, disability or not. This is an OXO potato peeler. It was originally designed for people with arthritis, but it was so comfortable, everybody loved it. Text messaging: that was originally designed for people who are Deaf. And as you know, everybody loves that, too. (Laughter) I started thinking: What if we changed our mindset? What if we started designing for disability first — not the norm? As you see, when we design for disability first, we often stumble upon solutions that are not only inclusive, but also are often better than when we design for the norm. And this excites me, because this means that the energy it takes to accommodate someone with a disability can be leveraged, molded and played with as a force for creativity and innovation. This moves us from the mindset of trying to change the hearts and the deficiency mindset of tolerance, to becoming an alchemist, the type of magician that this world so desperately needs to solve some of its greatest problems. Now, I also believe that people with disabilities have great potential to be designers within this design-thinking process. Without knowing it, from a very early age, I've been a design thinker, fine-tuning my skills. Design thinkers are, by nature, problem solvers. So imagine listening to a conversation and only understanding 50 percent of what is said. You can't ask them to repeat every single word. They would just get frustrated with you. So without even realizing it, my solution was to take the muffled sound I heard, that was the beat, and turn it into a rhythm and place it with the lips I read. Years later, someone commented that my writing had a rhythm to it. Well, this is because I experience conversations as rhythms. I also became really, really good at failing. (Laughter) Quite literally. My first semester in Spanish, I got a D. But what I learned was that when I picked myself up and changed a few things around, eventually, I succeeded. Similarly, design thinking encourages people to fail and fail often, because eventually, you will succeed. Very few great innovations in this world have come from someone succeeding on the first try. I also experienced this lesson in sports. I'll never forget my coach saying to my mom, "If she just didn't have her hearing loss, she would be on the national team." But what my coach, and what I didn't even know at the time, was that my hearing loss actually helped me excel at sports. You see, when you lose your hearing, not only do you adapt your behavior, but you also adapt your physical senses. One example of this is that my visual attention span increased. Imagine a soccer player, coming down the left flank. Imagine being goalkeeper, like I was, and the ball is coming down the left flank. A person with normal hearing would have the visual perspective of this. I had the benefit of a spectrum this wide. So I picked up the players over here, that were moving about and coming down the field. And I picked them up quicker, so that if the ball was passed, I could reposition myself and be ready for that shot. So as you can see, I've been a design thinker for nearly all my life. My observation skills have been honed so that I pick up on things that others would never pick up on. My constant need to adapt has made me a great ideator and problem solver. And I've often had to do this within limitations and constraints. This is something that designers also have to deal with frequently. My work most recently took me to Haiti. Design thinkers often seek out extreme situations, because that often informs some of their best designs. And Haiti — it was like a perfect storm. I lived and worked with 300 Deaf individuals that were relocated after the 2010 earthquake. But five and a half years later, there still was no electricity; there still was no safe drinking water; there were still no job opportunities; there was still rampant crime, and it went unpunished. International aid organizations came one by one. But they came with pre-determined solutions. They didn't come ready to observe and to adapt based on the community's needs. One organization gave them goats and chickens. But they didn't realize that there was so much hunger in that community, that when the Deaf went to sleep at night and couldn't hear, people broke into their yards and their homes and stole these chickens and goats, and eventually they were all gone. Now, if that organization had taken the time to observe Deaf people, to observe the community, they would have realized their problem and perhaps they would have come up with a solution, something like a solar light, lighting up a secure pen to put them in at night to ensure their safety. You don't have to be a design thinker to insert the ideas I've shared with you today. You are creative. You are a designer — everyone is. Let people like me help you. Let people with disabilities help you look sideways, and in the process, solve some of the greatest problems. That's it. Thank you. (Applause) |
3 lessons on success from an Arab businesswoman | {0: "BCG's Leila Hoteit specializes in human capital and education throughout the Middle East."} | TED@BCG Paris | "Mom, who are these people?" It was an innocent question from my young daughter Alia around the time when she was three. We were walking along with my husband in one of Abu Dhabi's big fancy malls. Alia was peering at a huge poster standing tall in the middle of the mall. It featured the three rulers of the United Arab Emirates. As she tucked in my side, I bent down and explained that these were the rulers of the UAE who had worked hard to develop their nation and preserve its unity. She asked, "Mom, why is it that here where we live, and back in Lebanon, where grandma and grandpa live, we never see the pictures of powerful women on the walls? Is it because women are not important?" This is probably the hardest question I've had to answer in my years as a parent and in my 16-plus years of professional life, for that matter. I had grown up in my hometown in Lebanon, the younger of two daughters to a very hard-working pilot and director of operations for the Lebanese Airlines and a super-supportive stay-at-home mom and grandma. My father had encouraged my sister and I to pursue our education even though our culture emphasized at the time that it was sons and not daughters who should be professionally motivated. I was one of very few girls of my generation who left home at 18 to study abroad. My father didn't have a son, and so I, in a sense, became his. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and I hope I didn't do too badly in making my father proud of his would-be son. As I got my Bachelor's and PhD in electrical engineering, did R and D in the UK, then consulting in the Middle East, I have always been in male-dominated environments. Truth be told, I have never found a role model I could truly identify with. My mother's generation wasn't into professional leadership. There were some encouraging men along the way, but none knew the demands and pressures I was facing, pressures that got particularly acute when I had my own two beautiful children. And although Western women love to give us poor, oppressed Arab women advice, they live different lives with different constraints. So Arab women of my generation have had to become our own role models. We have had to juggle more than Arab men, and we have had to face more cultural rigidity than Western women. As a result, I would like to think that we poor, oppressed women actually have some useful, certainly hard-earned lessons to share, lessons that might turn out useful for anyone wishing to thrive in the modern world. Here are three of mine. ["Convert their sh*t into your fuel."] (Laughter) (Applause) There is this word that everybody is touting as the key to success: resilience. Well, what exactly is resilience, and how do you develop it? I believe resilience is simply the ability to transform shit into fuel. In my previous job, well before my current firm, I was working with a man we will call John. I had teamed up with John and was working hard, hoping he would notice how great I was and that he would come to support my case to make partner at the firm. I was, in addition to delivering on my consulting projects, writing passionately on the topic of women economic empowerment. One day, I got to present my research to a roomful of MBA students. John was part of the audience listening for the first time to the details of my study. As I proceeded with my presentation, I could see John in the corner of my eye. He had turned a dark shade of pink and had slid under his chair in apparent shame. I finished my presentation to an applauding audience and we rushed out and jumped into the car. There he exploded. "What you did up there was unacceptable! You are a consultant, not an activist!" I said, "John, I don't understand. I presented a couple of gender parity indices, and some conclusions about the Arab world. Yes, we do happen to be today at the bottom of the index, but what is it that I said or presented that was not factual?" To which he replied, "The whole premise of your study is wrong. What you are doing is dangerous and will break the social fabric of our society." He paused, then added, "When women have children, their place is in the home." Time stood still for a long while, and all I could think and repeat in the chaos of my brain was: "You can forget about that partnership, Leila. It's just never going to happen." It took me a couple of days to fully absorb this incident and its implications, but once I did, I reached three conclusions. One, that these were his issues, his complexes. There may be many like him in our society, but I would never let their issues become mine. Two, that I needed another sponsor, and fast. (Laughter) I got one, by the way, and boy, was he great. And three, that I would get to show John what women with children can do. I apply this lesson equally well to my personal life. As I have progressed in my career, I have received many words of encouragement, but I have also often been met by women, men and couples who have clearly had an issue with my husband and I having chosen the path of a dual-career couple. So you get this well-meaning couple who tells you straight out at a family gathering or at a friends gathering, that, come on, you must know you're not a great mom, given how much you're investing in your career, right? I would lie if I said these words didn't hurt. My children are the most precious thing to me, and the thought that I could be failing them in any way is intolerable. But just like I did with John, I quickly reminded myself that these were their issues, their complexes. So instead of replying, I gave back one of my largest smiles as I saw, in flashing light, the following sign in my mind's eye. [Be happy, it drives people crazy.] (Applause) You see, as a young woman in these situations, you have two options. You can either decide to internalize these negative messages that are being thrown at you, to let them make you feel like a failure, like success is way too hard to ever achieve, or you can choose to see that others' negativity is their own issue, and instead transform it into your own personal fuel. I have learned to always go for option two, and I have found that it has taken me from strength to strength. And it's true what they say: success is the best revenge. Some women in the Middle East are lucky enough to be married to someone supportive of their career. Correction: I should say "smart enough," because who you marry is your own choice, and you'd better marry someone supportive if you plan to have a long career. Still today, the Arab man is not an equal contributor in the home. It's simply not expected by our society, and even frowned upon as not very manly. As for the Arab woman, our society still assumes that her primary source of happiness should be the happiness and prosperity of her children and husband. She mostly exists for her family. Things are changing, but it will take time. For now, it means that the professional Arab woman has to somehow maintain the perfect home, make sure that her children's every need is being taken care of and manage her demanding career. To achieve this, I have found the hard way that you need to apply your hard-earned professional skills to your personal life. You need to work your life. Here is how I do this in my personal life. One thing to know about the Middle East is that nearly every family has access to affordable domestic help. The challenge therefore becomes how to recruit effectively. Just like I would in my business life, I have based the selection of who would support me with my children while I'm at work on a strong referral. Cristina had worked for four years with my sister and the quality of her work was well-established. She is now an integral member of our family, having been with us since Alia was six months old. She makes sure that the house is running smoothly while I'm at work, and I make sure to empower her in the most optimal conditions for her and my children, just like I would my best talent at work. This lesson applies whatever your childcare situation, whether an au pair, nursery, part-time nanny that you share with someone else. Choose very carefully, and empower. If you look at my calendar, you will see every working day one and a half hours from 7pm to 8:30pm UAE time blocked and called "family time." This is sacred time. I have done this ever since Alia was a baby. I do everything in my power to protect this time so that I can be home by then to spend quality time with my children, asking them about their day, checking up on homework, reading them a bedtime story and giving them lots of kisses and cuddles. If I'm traveling, in whatever the time zone, I use Skype to connect with my children even if I am miles away. Our son Burhan is five years old, and he's learning to read and do basic maths. Here's another confession: I have found that our daughter is actually more successful at teaching him these skills than I am. (Laughter) It started as a game, but Alia loves playing teacher to her little brother, and I have found that these sessions actually improve Burhan's literacy, increase Alia's sense of responsibility, and strengthen the bonding between them, a win-win all around. The successful Arab women I know have each found their unique approach to working their life as they continue to shoulder the lion's share of responsibility in the home. But this is not just about surviving in your dual role as a career woman and mother. This is also about being in the present. When I am with my children, I try to leave work out of our lives. Instead of worrying about how many minutes I can spend with them every day, I focus on turning these minutes into memorable moments, moments where I'm seeing my kids, hearing them, connecting with them. ["Join forces, don't compete."] Arab women of my generation have not been very visible in the public eye as they grew up. This explains, I think, to some extent, why you find so few women in politics in the Arab world. The upside of this, however, is that we have spent a lot of time developing a social skill behind the scenes, in coffee shops, in living rooms, on the phone, a social skill that is very important to success: networking. I would say the average Arab woman has a large network of friends and acquaintances. The majority of those are also women. In the West, it seems like ambitious women often compare themselves to other women hoping to be noticed as the most successful woman in the room. This leads to the much-spoken-about competitive behavior between professional women. If there's only room for one woman at the top, then you can't make room for others, much less lift them up. Arab women, generally speaking, have not fallen for this psychological trap. Faced with a patriarchal society, they have found that by helping each other out, all benefit. In my previous job, I was the most senior woman in the Middle East, so one could think that investing in my network of female colleagues couldn't bring many benefits and that I should instead invest my time developing my relationships with male seniors and peers. Yet two of my biggest breaks came through the support of other women. It was the head of marketing who initially suggested I be considered as a young global leader to the World Economic Forum. She was familiar with my media engagements and my publications, and when she was asked to voice her opinion, she highlighted my name. It was a young consultant, a Saudi lady and friend, who helped me sell my first project in Saudi Arabia, a market I was finding hard to gain traction in as a woman. She introduced me to a client, and that introduction led to the first of very many projects for me in Saudi. Today, I have two senior women on my team, and I see making them successful as key to my own success. Women continue to advance in the world, not fast enough, but we're moving. The Arab world, too, is making progress, despite many recent setbacks. Just this year, the UAE appointed five new female ministers to its cabinet, for a total of eight female ministers. That's nearly 28 percent of the cabinet, and more than many developed countries can claim. This is today my daughter Alia's favorite picture. This is the result, no doubt, of great leadership, but it is also the result of strong Arab women not giving up and continuously pushing the boundaries. It is the result of Arab women deciding every day like me to convert shit into fuel, to work their life to keep work out of their life, and to join forces and not compete. As I look to the future, my hopes for my daughter when she stands on this stage some 20, 30 years from now are that she be as proud to call herself her mother's daughter as her father's daughter. My hopes for my son are that by then, the expression "her mother's son" or "mama's boy" would have taken on a completely different meaning. Thank you. (Applause) |
Nature is everywhere -- we just need to learn to see it | {0: 'Emma Marris is a writer focusing on environmental science, policy and culture, with an approach that she paints as being "more interested in finding and describing solutions than delineating problems, and more interested in joy than despair."'} | TEDSummit | We are stealing nature from our children. Now, when I say this, I don't mean that we are destroying nature that they will have wanted us to preserve, although that is unfortunately also the case. What I mean here is that we've started to define nature in a way that's so purist and so strict that under the definition we're creating for ourselves, there won't be any nature left for our children when they're adults. But there's a fix for this. So let me explain. Right now, humans use half of the world to live, to grow their crops and their timber, to pasture their animals. If you added up all the human beings, we would weigh 10 times as much as all the wild mammals put together. We cut roads through the forest. We have added little plastic particles to the sand on ocean beaches. We've changed the chemistry of the soil with our artificial fertilizers. And of course, we've changed the chemistry of the air. So when you take your next breath, you'll be breathing in 42 percent more carbon dioxide than if you were breathing in 1750. So all of these changes, and many others, have come to be kind of lumped together under this rubric of the "Anthropocene." And this is a term that some geologists are suggesting we should give to our current epoch, given how pervasive human influence has been over it. Now, it's still just a proposed epoch, but I think it's a helpful way to think about the magnitude of human influence on the planet. So where does this put nature? What counts as nature in a world where everything is influenced by humans? So 25 years ago, environmental writer Bill McKibben said that because nature was a thing apart from man and because climate change meant that every centimeter of the Earth was altered by man, then nature was over. In fact, he called his book "The End of Nature." I disagree with this. I just disagree with this. I disagree with this definition of nature, because, fundamentally, we are animals. Right? Like, we evolved on this planet in the context of all the other animals with which we share a planet, and all the other plants, and all the other microbes. And so I think that nature is not that which is untouched by humanity, man or woman. I think that nature is anywhere where life thrives, anywhere where there are multiple species together, anywhere that's green and blue and thriving and filled with life and growing. And under that definition, things look a little bit different. Now, I understand that there are certain parts of this nature that speak to us in a special way. Places like Yellowstone, or the Mongolian steppe, or the Great Barrier Reef or the Serengeti. Places that we think of as kind of Edenic representations of a nature before we screwed everything up. And in a way, they are less impacted by our day to day activities. Many of these places have no roads or few roads, so on, like such. But ultimately, even these Edens are deeply influenced by humans. Now, let's just take North America, for example, since that's where we're meeting. So between about 15,000 years ago when people first came here, they started a process of interacting with the nature that led to the extinction of a big slew of large-bodied animals, from the mastodon to the giant ground sloth, saber-toothed cats, all of these cool animals that unfortunately are no longer with us. And when those animals went extinct, you know, the ecosystems didn't stand still. Massive ripple effects changed grasslands into forests, changed the composition of forest from one tree to another. So even in these Edens, even in these perfect-looking places that seem to remind us of a past before humans, we're essentially looking at a humanized landscape. Not just these prehistoric humans, but historical humans, indigenous people all the way up until the moment when the first colonizers showed up. And the case is the same for the other continents as well. Humans have just been involved in nature in a very influential way for a very long time. Now, just recently, someone told me, "Oh, but there are still wild places." And I said, "Where? Where? I want to go." And he said, "The Amazon." And I was like, "Oh, the Amazon. I was just there. It's awesome. National Geographic sent me to Manú National Park, which is in the Peruvian Amazon, but it's a big chunk of rainforest, uncleared, no roads, protected as a national park, one of the most, in fact, biodiverse parks in the world. And when I got in there with my canoe, what did I find, but people. People have been living there for hundreds and thousands of years. People live there, and they don't just float over the jungle. They have a meaningful relationship with the landscape. They hunt. They grow crops. They domesticate crops. They use the natural resources to build their houses, to thatch their houses. They even make pets out of animals that we consider to be wild animals. These people are there and they're interacting with the environment in a way that's really meaningful and that you can see in the environment. Now, I was with an anthropologist on this trip, and he told me, as we were floating down the river, he said, "There are no demographic voids in the Amazon." This statement has really stuck with me, because what it means is that the whole Amazon is like this. There's people everywhere. And many other tropical forests are the same, and not just tropical forests. People have influenced ecosystems in the past, and they continue to influence them in the present, even in places where they're harder to notice. So, if all of the definitions of nature that we might want to use that involve it being untouched by humanity or not having people in it, if all of those actually give us a result where we don't have any nature, then maybe they're the wrong definitions. Maybe we should define it by the presence of multiple species, by the presence of a thriving life. Now, if we do it that way, what do we get? Well, it's this kind of miracle. All of a sudden, there's nature all around us. All of a sudden, we see this Monarch caterpillar munching on this plant, and we realize that there it is, and it's in this empty lot in Chattanooga. And look at this empty lot. I mean, there's, like, probably, a dozen, minimum, plant species growing there, supporting all kinds of insect life, and this is a completely unmanaged space, a completely wild space. This is a kind of wild nature right under our nose, that we don't even notice. And there's an interesting little paradox, too. So this nature, this kind of wild, untended part of our urban, peri-urban, suburban agricultural existence that flies under the radar, it's arguably more wild than a national park, because national parks are very carefully managed in the 21st century. Crater Lake in southern Oregon, which is my closest national park, is a beautiful example of a landscape that seems to be coming out of the past. But they're managing it carefully. One of the issues they have now is white bark pine die-off. White bark pine is a beautiful, charismatic — I'll say it's a charismatic megaflora that grows up at high altitude — and it's got all these problems right now with disease. There's a blister rust that was introduced, bark beetle. So to deal with this, the park service has been planting rust-resistant white bark pine seedlings in the park, even in areas that they are otherwise managing as wilderness. And they're also putting out beetle repellent in key areas as I saw last time I went hiking there. And this kind of thing is really much more common than you would think. National parks are heavily managed. The wildlife is kept to a certain population size and structure. Fires are suppressed. Fires are started. Non-native species are removed. Native species are reintroduced. And in fact, I took a look, and Banff National Park is doing all of the things I just listed: suppressing fire, having fire, radio-collaring wolves, reintroducing bison. It takes a lot of work to make these places look untouched. (Laughter) (Applause) And in a further irony, these places that we love the most are the places that we love a little too hard, sometimes. A lot of us like to go there, and because we're managing them to be stable in the face of a changing planet, they often are becoming more fragile over time. Which means that they're the absolute worst places to take your children on vacation, because you can't do anything there. You can't climb the trees. You can't fish the fish. You can't make a campfire out in the middle of nowhere. You can't take home the pinecones. There are so many rules and restrictions that from a child's point of view, this is, like, the worst nature ever. Because children don't want to hike through a beautiful landscape for five hours and then look at a beautiful view. That's maybe what we want to do as adults, but what kids want to do is hunker down in one spot and just tinker with it, just work with it, just pick it up, build a house, build a fort, do something like that. Additionally, these sort of Edenic places are often distant from where people live. And they're expensive to get to. They're hard to visit. So this means that they're only available to the elites, and that's a real problem. The Nature Conservancy did a survey of young people, and they asked them, how often do you spend time outdoors? And only two out of five spent time outdoors at least once a week. The other three out of five were just staying inside. And when they asked them why, what are the barriers to going outside, the response of 61 percent was, "There are no natural areas near my home." And this is crazy. This is just patently false. I mean, 71 percent of people in the US live within a 10-minute walk of a city park. And I'm sure the figures are similar in other countries. And that doesn't even count your back garden, the urban creek, the empty lot. Everybody lives near nature. Every kid lives near nature. We've just somehow forgotten how to see it. We've spent too much time watching David Attenborough documentaries where the nature is really sexy — (Laughter) and we've forgotten how to see the nature that is literally right outside our door, the nature of the street tree. So here's an example: Philadelphia. There's this cool elevated railway that you can see from the ground, that's been abandoned. Now, this may sound like the beginning of the High Line story in Manhattan, and it's very similar, except they haven't developed this into a park yet, although they're working on it. So for now, it's still this little sort of secret wilderness in the heart of Philadelphia, and if you know where the hole is in the chain-link fence, you can scramble up to the top and you can find this completely wild meadow just floating above the city of Philadelphia. Every single one of these plants grew from a seed that planted itself there. This is completely autonomous, self-willed nature. And it's right in the middle of the city. And they've sent people up there to do sort of biosurveys, and there are over 50 plant species up there. And it's not just plants. This is an ecosystem, a functioning ecosystem. It's creating soil. It's sequestering carbon. There's pollination going on. I mean, this is really an ecosystem. So scientists have started calling ecosystems like these "novel ecosystems," because they're often dominated by non-native species, and because they're just super weird. They're just unlike anything we've ever seen before. For so long, we dismissed all these novel ecosystems as trash. We're talking about regrown agricultural fields, timber plantations that are not being managed on a day-to-day basis, second-growth forests generally, the entire East Coast, where after agriculture moved west, the forest sprung up. And of course, pretty much all of Hawaii, where novel ecosystems are the norm, where exotic species totally dominate. This forest here has Queensland maple, it has sword ferns from Southeast Asia. You can make your own novel ecosystem, too. It's really simple. You just stop mowing your lawn. (Laughter) Ilkka Hanski was an ecologist in Finland, and he did this experiment himself. He just stopped mowing his lawn, and after a few years, he had some grad students come, and they did sort of a bio-blitz of his backyard, and they found 375 plant species, including two endangered species. So when you're up there on that future High Line of Philadelphia, surrounded by this wildness, surrounded by this diversity, this abundance, this vibrance, you can look over the side and you can see a local playground for a local school, and that's what it looks like. These children have, that — You know, under my definition, there's a lot of the planet that counts as nature, but this would be one of the few places that wouldn't count as nature. There's nothing there except humans, no other plants, no other animals. And what I really wanted to do was just, like, throw a ladder over the side and get all these kids to come up with me into this cool meadow. In a way, I feel like this is the choice that faces us. If we dismiss these new natures as not acceptable or trashy or no good, we might as well just pave them over. And in a world where everything is changing, we need to be very careful about how we define nature. In order not to steal it from our children, we have to do two things. First, we cannot define nature as that which is untouched. This never made any sense anyway. Nature has not been untouched for thousands of years. And it excludes most of the nature that most people can visit and have a relationship with, including only nature that children cannot touch. Which brings me to the second thing that we have to do, which is that we have to let children touch nature, because that which is untouched is unloved. (Applause) We face some pretty grim environmental challenges on this planet. Climate change is among them. There's others too: habitat loss is my favorite thing to freak out about in the middle of the night. But in order to solve them, we need people — smart, dedicated people — who care about nature. And the only way we're going to raise up a generation of people who care about nature is by letting them touch nature. I have a Fort Theory of Ecology, Fort Theory of Conservation. Every ecologist I know, every conservation biologist I know, every conservation professional I know, built forts when they were kids. If we have a generation that doesn't know how to build a fort, we'll have a generation that doesn't know how to care about nature. And I don't want to be the one to tell this kid, who is on a special program that takes Philadelphia kids from poor neighborhoods and takes them to city parks, I don't want to be the one to tell him that the flower he's holding is a non-native invasive weed that he should throw away as trash. I think I would much rather learn from this boy that no matter where this plant comes from, it is beautiful, and it deserves to be touched and appreciated. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to grow a forest in your backyard | {0: 'Shubhendu Sharma creates afforestation methods that make it easy to plant maintenance-free, wild and biodiverse forests.'} | TED@BCG Paris | This is a man-made forest. It can spread over acres and acres of area, or it could fit in a small space — as small as your house garden. Age of this forest is just two years old. I have a forest in the backyard of my own house. It attracts a lot of biodiversity. (Bird call) I wake up to this every morning, like a Disney princess. (Laughter) I am an entrepreneur who facilitates the making of these forests professionally. We have helped factories, farms, schools, homes, resorts, apartment buildings, public parks and even a zoo to have one of such forests. A forest is not an isolated piece of land where animals live together. A forest can be an integral part of our urban existence. A forest, for me, is a place so dense with trees that you just can't walk into it. It doesn't matter how big or small they are. Most of the world we live in today was forest. This was before human intervention. Then we built up our cities on those forests, like São Paulo, forgetting that we belong to nature as well, as much as 8.4 million other species on the planet. Our habitat stopped being our natural habitat. But not anymore for some of us. A few others and I today make these forests professionally — anywhere and everywhere. I'm an industrial engineer. I specialize in making cars. In my previous job at Toyota, I learned how to convert natural resources into products. To give you an example, we would drip the sap out of a rubber tree, convert it into raw rubber and make a tire out of it — the product. But these products can never become a natural resource again. We separate the elements from nature and convert them into an irreversible state. That's industrial production. Nature, on the other hand, works in a totally opposite way. The natural system produces by bringing elements together, atom by atom. All the natural products become a natural resource again. This is something which I learned when I made a forest in the backyard of my own house. And this was the first time I worked with nature, rather than against it. Since then, we have made 75 such forests in 25 cities across the world. Every time we work at a new place, we find that every single element needed to make a forest is available right around us. All we have to do is to bring these elements together and let nature take over. To make a forest we start with soil. We touch, feel and even taste it to identify what properties it lacks. If the soil is made up of small particles it becomes compact — so compact, that water cannot seep in. We mix some local biomass available around, which can help soil become more porous. Water can now seep in. If the soil doesn't have the capacity to hold water, we will mix some more biomass — some water-absorbent material like peat or bagasse, so soil can hold this water and it stays moist. To grow, plants need water, sunlight and nutrition. What if the soil doesn't have any nutrition in it? We don't just add nutrition directly to the soil. That would be the industrial way. It goes against nature. We instead add microorganisms to the soil. They produce the nutrients in the soil naturally. They feed on the biomass we have mixed in the soil, so all they have to do is eat and multiply. And as their number grows, the soil starts breathing again. It becomes alive. We survey the native tree species of the place. How do we decide what's native or not? Well, whatever existed before human intervention is native. That's the simple rule. We survey a national park to find the last remains of a natural forest. We survey the sacred groves, or sacred forests around old temples. And if we don't find anything at all, we go to museums to see the seeds or wood of trees existing there a long time ago. We research old paintings, poems and literature from the place, to identify the tree species belonging there. Once we know our trees, we divide them in four different layers: shrub layer, sub-tree layer, tree layer and canopy layer. We fix the ratios of each layer, and then we decide the percentage of each tree species in the mix. If we are making a fruit forest, we increase the percentage of fruit-bearing trees. It could be a flowering forest, a forest that attracts a lot of birds or bees, or it could simply be a native, wild evergreen forest. We collect the seeds and germinate saplings out of them. We make sure that trees belonging to the same layer are not planted next to each other, or they will fight for the same vertical space when they grow tall. We plant the saplings close to each other. On the surface, we spread a thick layer of mulch, so when it's hot outside the soil stays moist. When it's cold, frost formation happens only on the mulch, so soil can still breathe while it's freezing outside. The soil is very soft — so soft, that roots can penetrate into it easily, rapidly. Initially, the forest doesn't seem like it's growing, but it's growing under the surface. In the first three months, roots reach a depth of one meter. These roots form a mesh, tightly holding the soil. Microbes and fungi live throughout this network of roots. So if some nutrition is not available in the vicinity of a tree, these microbes are going to get the nutrition to the tree. Whenever it rains, magically, mushrooms appear overnight. And this means the soil below has a healthy fungal network. Once these roots are established, forest starts growing on the surface. As the forest grows we keep watering it — for the next two to three years, we water the forest. We want to keep all the water and soil nutrition only for our trees, so we remove the weeds growing on the ground. As this forest grows, it blocks the sunlight. Eventually, the forest becomes so dense that sunlight can't reach the ground anymore. Weeds cannot grow now, because they need sunlight as well. At this stage, every single drop of water that falls into the forest doesn't evaporate back into the atmosphere. This dense forest condenses the moist air and retains its moisture. We gradually reduce and eventually stop watering the forest. And even without watering, the forest floor stays moist and sometimes even dark. Now, when a single leaf falls on this forest floor, it immediately starts decaying. This decayed biomass forms humus, which is food for the forest. As the forest grows, more leaves fall on the surface — it means more humus is produced, it means more food so the forest can grow still bigger. And this forest keeps growing exponentially. Once established, these forests are going to regenerate themselves again and again — probably forever. In a natural forest like this, no management is the best management. It's a tiny jungle party. (Laughter) This forest grows as a collective. If the same trees — same species — would have been planted independently, it wouldn't grow so fast. And this is how we create a 100-year-old forest in just 10 years. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
My love letter to cosplay | {0: 'Adam Savage is an internationally renowned television producer, host and public speaker.'} | TED2016 | There's this fact that I love that I read somewhere once, that one of the things that's contributed to homo sapiens' success as a species is our lack of body hair — that our hairlessness, our nakedness combined with our invention of clothing, gives us the ability to modulate our body temperature and thus be able to survive in any climate we choose. And now we've evolved to the point where we can't survive without clothing. And it's more than just utility, now it's a communication. Everything that we choose to put on is a narrative, a story about where we've been, what we're doing, who we want to be. I was a lonely kid. I didn't have an easy time finding friends to play with, and I ended up making a lot of my own play. I made a lot of my own toys. It began with ice cream. There was a Baskin-Robbins in my hometown, and they served ice cream from behind the counter in these giant, five-gallon, cardboard tubs. And someone told me — I was eight years old — someone told me that when they were done with those tubs, they washed them out and kept them in the back, and if you asked they would give you one. It took me a couple of weeks to work up the courage, but I did, and they did. They gave me one — I went home with this beautiful cardboard tub. I was trying to figure out what I could do with this exotic material — metal ring, top and bottom. I started turning it over in my head, and I realized, "Wait a minute — my head actually fits inside this thing." (Laughter) Yeah, I cut a hole out, I put some acetate in there and I made myself a space helmet. (Laughter) I needed a place to wear the space helmet, so I found a refrigerator box a couple blocks from home. I pushed it home, and in my parents' guest room closet, I turned it into a spaceship. I started with a control panel out of cardboard. I cut a hole for a radar screen and put a flashlight underneath it to light it. I put a view screen up, which I offset off the back wall — and this is where I thought I was being really clever — without permission, I painted the back wall of the closet black and put a star field, which I lit up with some Christmas lights I found in the attic, and I went on some space missions. A couple years later, the movie "Jaws" came out. I was way too young to see it, but I was caught up in "Jaws" fever, like everyone else in America at the time. There was a store in my town that had a "Jaws" costume in their window, and my mom must have overheard me talking to someone about how awesome I thought this costume was, because a couple days before Halloween, she blew my freaking mind by giving me this "Jaws" costume. Now, I recognize it's a bit of a trope for people of a certain age to complain that kids these days have no idea how good they have it, but let me just show you a random sampling of entry-level kids' costumes you can buy online right now ... ... and this is the "Jaws" costume my mom bought for me. (Laughter) This is a paper-thin shark face and a vinyl bib with the poster of "Jaws" on it. (Laughter) And I loved it. A couple years later, my dad took me to a film called "Excalibur." I actually got him to take me to it twice, which is no small thing, because it is a hard, R-rated film. But it wasn't the blood and guts or the boobs that made me want to go see it again. They helped — (Laughter) It was the armor. The armor in "Excalibur" was intoxicatingly beautiful to me. These were literally knights in shining, mirror-polished armor. And moreover, the knights in "Excalibur" wear their armor everywhere. All the time — they wear it at dinner, they wear it to bed. (Laughter) I was like, "Are they reading my mind? I want to wear armor all the time!" (Laughter) So I went back to my favorite material, the gateway drug for making, corrugated cardboard, and I made myself a suit of armor, replete with the neck shields and a white horse. Now that I've oversold it, here's a picture of the armor that I made. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, this is only the first suit of armor I made inspired by "Excalibur." A couple of years later, I convinced my dad to embark on making me a proper suit of armor. Over about a month, he graduated me from cardboard to roofing aluminum called flashing and still, one of my all-time favorite attachment materials, POP rivets. We carefully, over that month, constructed an articulated suit of aluminum armor with compound curves. We drilled holes in the helmet so that I could breathe, and I finished just in time for Halloween and wore it to school. Now, this is the one thing in this talk that I don't have a slide to show you, because no photo exists of this armor. I did wear it to school, there was a yearbook photographer patrolling the halls, but he never found me, for reasons that are about to become clear. There were things I didn't anticipate about wearing a complete suit of aluminum armor to school. In third period math, I was standing in the back of class, and I'm standing in the back of class because the armor did not allow me to sit down. (Laughter) This is the first thing I didn't anticipate. And then my teacher looks at me sort of concerned about halfway through the class and says, "Are you feeling OK?" I'm thinking, "Are you kidding? Am I feeling OK? I'm wearing a suit of armor! I am having the time of my —" And I'm just about to tell her how great I feel, when the classroom starts to list to the left and disappear down this long tunnel, and then I woke up in the nurse's office. I had passed out from heat exhaustion, wearing the armor. And when I woke up, I wasn't embarrassed about having passed out in front of my class, I was wondering, "Who took my armor? Where's my armor?" OK, fast-forward a whole bunch of years, some colleagues and I get hired to make a show for Discovery Channel, called "MythBusters." And over 14 years, I learn on the job how to build experimental methodologies and how to tell stories about them for television. I also learn early on that costuming can play a key role in this storytelling. I use costumes to add humor, comedy, color and narrative clarity to the stories we're telling. And then we do an episode called "Dumpster Diving," and I learn a little bit more about the deeper implications of what costuming means to me. In the episode "Dumpster Diving," the question we were trying to answer is: Is jumping into a dumpster as safe as the movies would lead you to believe? (Laughter) The episode was going to have two distinct parts to it. One was where we get trained to jump off buildings by a stuntman into an air bag. And the second was the graduation to the experiment: we'd fill a dumpster full of material and we'd jump into it. I wanted to visually separate these two elements, and I thought, "Well, for the first part we're training, so we should wear sweatsuits — Oh! Let's put 'Stunt Trainee' on the back of the sweatsuits. That's for the training." But for the second part, I wanted something really visually striking — "I know! I'll dress as Neo from 'The Matrix.'" (Laughter) So I went to Haight Street. I bought some beautiful knee-high, buckle boots. I found a long, flowing coat on eBay. I got sunglasses, which I had to wear contact lenses in order to wear. The day of the experiment shoot comes up, and I step out of my car in this costume, and my crew takes a look at me ... and start suppressing their church giggles. They're like, "(Laugh sound)." And I feel two distinct things at this moment. I feel total embarrassment over the fact that it's so nakedly clear to my crew that I'm completely into wearing this costume. (Laughter) But the producer in my mind reminds myself that in the high-speed shot in slow-mo, that flowing coat is going to look beautiful behind me. (Laughter) Five years into the "MythBusters" run, we got invited to appear at San Diego Comic-Con. I'd known about Comic-Con for years and never had time to go. This was the big leagues — this was costuming mecca. People fly in from all over the world to show their amazing creations on the floor in San Diego. And I wanted to participate. I decided that I would put together an elaborate costume that covered me completely, and I would walk the floor of San Diego Comic-Con anonymously. The costume I chose? Hellboy. That's not my costume, that's actually Hellboy. (Laughter) But I spent months assembling the most screen-accurate Hellboy costume I could, from the boots to the belt to the pants to the right hand of doom. I found a guy who made a prosthetic Hellboy head and chest and I put them on. I even had contact lenses made in my prescription. I wore it onto the floor at Comic-Con and I can't even tell you how balls hot it was in that costume. (Laughter) Sweating! I should've remembered this. I'm sweating buckets and the contact lenses hurt my eyes, and none of it matters because I'm totally in love. (Laughter) Not just with the process of putting on this costume and walking the floor, but also with the community of other costumers. It's not called costuming at Cons, it's called "cosplay." Now ostensibly, cosplay means people who dress up as their favorite characters from film and television and especially anime, but it is so much more than that. These aren't just people who find a costume and put it on — they mash them up. They bend them to their will. They change them to be the characters they want to be in those productions. They're super clever and genius. They let their freak flag fly and it's beautiful. (Laughter) But more than that, they rehearse their costumes. At Comic-Con or any other Con, you don't just take pictures of people walking around. You go up and say, "Hey, I like your costume, can I take your picture?" And then you give them time to get into their pose. They've worked hard on their pose to make their costume look great for your camera. And it's so beautiful to watch. And I take this to heart. At subsequent Cons, I learn Heath Ledger's shambling walk as the Joker from "The Dark Knight." I learn how to be a scary Ringwraith from "Lord of the Rings," and I actually frighten some children. I learned that "hrr hrr hrr" — that head laugh that Chewbacca does. And then I dressed up as No-Face from "Spirited Away." If you don't know about "Spirited Away" and its director, Hayao Miyazaki, first of all, you're welcome. (Laughter) This is a masterpiece, and one of my all-time favorite films. It's about a young girl named Chihiro who gets lost in the spirit world in an abandoned Japanese theme park. And she finds her way back out again with the help of a couple of friends she makes — a captured dragon named Haku and a lonely demon named No-Face. No-Face is lonely and he wants to make friends, and he thinks the way to do it is by luring them to him and producing gold in his hand. But this doesn't go very well, and so he ends up going on kind of a rampage until Chihiro saves him, rescues him. So I put together a No-Face costume, and I wore it on the floor at Comic-Con. And I very carefully practiced No-Face's gestures. I resolved I would not speak in this costume at all. When people asked to take my picture, I would nod and I would shyly stand next to them. They would take the picture and then I would secret out from behind my robe a chocolate gold coin. And at the end of the photo process, I'd make it appear for them. Ah, ah ah! — like that. And people were freaking out. "Holy crap! Gold from No-Face! Oh my god, this is so cool!" And I'm feeling and I'm walking the floor and it's fantastic. And about 15 minutes in something happens. Somebody grabs my hand, and they put a coin back into it. And I think maybe they're giving me a coin as a return gift, but no, this is one of the coins that I'd given away. I don't know why. And I keep on going, I take some more pictures. And then it happens again. Understand, I can't see anything inside this costume. I can see through the mouth — I can see people's shoes. I can hear what they're saying and I can see their feet. But the third time someone gives me back a coin, I want to know what's going on. So I sort of tilt my head back to get a better view, and what I see is someone walking away from me going like this. And then it hits me: it's bad luck to take gold from No-Face. In the film "Spirited Away," bad luck befalls those who take gold from No-Face. This isn't a performer-audience relationship; this is cosplay. We are, all of us on that floor, injecting ourselves into a narrative that meant something to us. And we're making it our own. We're connecting with something important inside of us. And the costumes are how we reveal ourselves to each other. Thank you. (Applause) |
A forgotten Space Age technology could change how we grow food | {0: 'Lisa Dyson thinks a new class of crops might help us reinvent agriculture -- and feed the world.'} | TED@BCG Paris | Imagine you are a part of a crew of astronauts traveling to Mars or some distant planet. The travel time could take a year or even longer. The space on board and the resources would be limited. So you and the crew would have to figure out how to produce food with minimal inputs. What if you could bring with you just a few packets of seeds, and grow crops in a matter of hours? And what if those crops would then make more seeds, enabling you to feed the entire crew with just those few packets of seeds for the duration of the trip? Well, the scientists at NASA actually figured out a way to do this. What they came up with was actually quite interesting. It involved microorganisms, which are single-celled organisms. And they also used hydrogen from water. The types of microbes that they used were called hydrogenotrophs, and with these hydrogenotrophs, you can create a virtuous carbon cycle that would sustain life onboard a spacecraft. Astronauts would breathe out carbon dioxide, that carbon dioxide would then be captured by the microbes and converted into a nutritious, carbon-rich crop. The astronauts would then eat that carbon-rich crop and exhale the carbon out in the form of carbon dioxide, which would then be captured by the microbes, to create a nutritious crop, which then would be exhaled in the form of carbon dioxide by the astronauts. So in this way, a closed-loop carbon cycle is created. So why is this important? We need carbon to survive as humans, and we get our carbon from food. On a long space journey, you simply wouldn't be able to pick up any carbon along the way, so you'd have to figure out how to recycle it on board. This is a clever solution, right? But the thing is, that research didn't really go anywhere. We haven't yet gone to Mars. We haven't yet gone to another planet. And this was actually done in the '60s and '70s. So a colleague of mine, Dr. John Reed, and I, were interested, actually, in carbon recycling here on Earth. We wanted to come up with technical solutions to address climate change. And we discovered this research by reading some papers published in the '60s — 1967 and later — articles about this work. And we thought it was a really good idea. So we said, well, Earth is actually like a spaceship. We have limited space and limited resources, and on Earth, we really do need to figure out how to recycle our carbon better. So we had the idea, can we take some of these NASA-type ideas and apply them to our carbon problem here on Earth? Could we cultivate these NASA-type microbes in order to make valuable products here on Earth? We started a company to do it. And in that company, we discovered that these hydrogenotrophs — which I'll actually call nature's supercharged carbon recyclers — we found that they are a powerful class of microbes that had been largely overlooked and understudied, and that they could make some really valuable products. So we began cultivating these products, these microbes, in our lab. We found that we can make essential amino acids from carbon dioxide using these microbes. And we even made a protein-rich meal that has an amino acid profile similar to what you might find in some animal proteins. We began cultivating them even further, and we found that we can make oil. Oils are used to manufacture many products. We made an oil that was similar to a citrus oil, which can be used for flavoring and for fragrances, but it also can be used as a biodegradable cleaner or even as a jet fuel. And we made an oil that's similar to palm oil. Palm oil is used to manufacture a wide range of consumer and industrial goods. We began working with manufacturers to scale up this technology, and we're currently working with them to bring some of these products to market. We believe this type of technology can indeed help us profitably recycle carbon dioxide into valuable products — something that's beneficial for the planet but also beneficial for business. That's what we're doing today. But tomorrow, this type of technology and using these types of microbes actually could help us do something even greater if we take it to the next level. We believe that this type of technology can actually help us address an issue with agriculture and allow us to create a type of agriculture that's sustainable, that will allow us to scale to meet the demands of tomorrow. And why might we need a sustainable agriculture? Well, actually, it is estimated that the population will reach about 10 billion by 2050, and we're projecting that we will need to increase food production by 70 percent. In addition, we will need many more resources and raw materials to make consumer goods and industrial goods. So how will we scale to meet that demand? Well, modern agriculture simply cannot sustainably scale to meet that demand. There are a number of reasons why. One of them is that modern agriculture is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. In fact, it emits more greenhouse gases than our cars, our trucks, our planes and our trains combined. Another reason is that modern ag simply takes up a whole lot of land. We have cleared 19.4 million square miles for crops and livestock. What does that look like? Well, that's roughly the size of South America and Africa combined. Let me give you a specific example. In Indonesia, an amount of virgin rainforest was cleared totaling the size of approximately Ireland, between 2000 and 2012. Just think of all of the species, the diversity, that was removed in the process, whether plant life, insects or animal life. And a natural carbon sink was also removed. So let me make this real for you. This clearing happened primarily to make room for palm plantations. And as I mentioned before, palm oil is used to manufacture many products. In fact, it is estimated that over 50 percent of consumer products are manufactured using palm oil. And that includes things like ice cream, cookies ... It includes cooking oils. It also includes detergents, lotions, soaps. You and I both probably have numerous items in our kitchens and our bathrooms that were manufactured using palm oil. So you and I are direct beneficiaries of removed rainforests. Modern ag has some problems, and we need solutions if we want to scale sustainably. I believe that microbes can be a part of the answer — specifically, these supercharged carbon recyclers. These supercharged carbon recyclers, like plants, serve as the natural recyclers in their ecosystems where they thrive. And they thrive in exotic places on Earth, like hydrothermal vents and hot springs. In those ecosystems, they take carbon and recycle it into the nutrients needed for those ecosystems. And they're rich in nutrients, such as oils and proteins, minerals and carbohydrates. And actually, microbes are already an integral part of our everyday lives. If you enjoy a glass of pinot noir on a Friday night, after a long, hard work week, then you are enjoying a product of microbes. If you enjoy a beer from your local microbrewery — a product of microbes. Or bread, or cheese, or yogurt. These are all products of microbes. But the beauty and power associated with these supercharged carbon recyclers lies in the fact that they can actually produce in a matter of hours versus months. That means we can make crops much faster than we're making them today. They grow in the dark, so they can grow in any season and in any geography and any location. They can grow in containers that require minimal space. And we can get to a type of vertical agriculture. Instead of our traditional horizontal agriculture that requires so much land, we can scale vertically, and as a result produce much more product per area. If we implement this type of approach and use these carbon recyclers, then we wouldn't have to remove any more rainforests to make the food and the goods that we consume. Because, at a large scale, you can actually make 10,000 times more output per land area than you could — for instance, if you used soybeans — if you planted soybeans on that same area of land over a period of a year. Ten thousand times over a period of a year. So this is what I mean by a new type of agriculture. And this is what I mean by developing a system that allows us to sustainably scale to meet the demands of 10 billion. And what would be the products of this new type of agriculture? Well, we've already made a protein meal, so you can imagine something similar to a soybean meal, or even cornmeal, or wheat flour. We've already made oils, so you can imagine something similar to coconut oil or olive oil or soybean oil. So this type of crop can actually produce the nutrients that would give us pasta and bread, cakes, nutritional items of many sorts. Furthermore, since oil is used to manufacture multiple other goods, industrial products and consumer products, you can imagine being able to make detergents, soaps, lotions, etc., using these types of crops. Not only are we running out of space, but if we continue to operate under the status quo with modern agriculture, we run the risk of robbing our progeny of a beautiful planet. But it doesn't have to be this way. We can imagine a future of abundance. Let us create systems that keep planet Earth, our spaceship, not only from not crashing, but let us also develop systems and ways of living that will be beneficial to the lives of ourselves and the 10 billion that will be on this planet by 2050. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A project of peace, painted across 50 buildings | {0: 'French-Tunisian artist eL Seed blends the historic art of Arabic calligraphy with graffti to portray messages of beauty, poetry and peace across all continents.'} | TEDSummit | So when I decided to create an art piece in Manshiyat Naser, the neighborhood of the Cairo garbage collectors in Egypt, I never thought this project would be the most amazing human experience that I would ever live. As an artist, I had this humanist intention of beautifying a poor and neglected neighborhood by bringing art to it and hopefully shining light on this isolated community. The first time I heard about this Christian Coptic community was in 2009 when the Egyptian authorities under the regime of Hosni Mubarak decided to slaughter 300,000 pigs using the pretext of H1N1 virus. Originally, they are pig breeders. Their pigs and other animals are fed with the organic waste that they collect on a daily basis. This event killed their livelihood. The first time I entered Manshiyat Naser, it felt like a maze. I was looking for the St. Simon Monastery on the top of the Muqattam Mountain. So you go right, then straight, then right again, then left to reach all the way to the top. But to reach there, you must dodge between the trucks overpacked with garbage and slalom between the tuk-tuks, the fastest vehicle to move around in the neighborhood. The smell of the garbage unloaded from those trucks was intense, and the noise of the traffic was loud and overbearing. Add to it the din created by the crushers in those warehouses along the way. From outside it looks chaotic, but everything is perfectly organized. The Zaraeeb, that’s how they call themselves, which means the pig breeders, have been collecting the garbage of Cairo and sorting it in their own neighborhood for decades. They have developed one of the most efficient and highly profitable systems on a global level. Still, the place is perceived as dirty, marginalized and segregated because of their association with the trash. So my initial idea was to create an anamorphic piece, a piece that you can only see from one vantage point. I wanted to challenge myself artistically by painting over several buildings and having it only fully visible from one point on the Muqattam Mountain. The Muqattam Mountain is the pride of the community. This is where they built the St. Simon Monastery, a 10,000-seat cave church that they carved into the mountain itself. So, the first time I stood on top of the mountain and I looked at the neighborhood, I asked myself, how on earth will I convince all those owners to let me paint on their buildings? And then Magd came. Magd is a guide from the Church. He told me the only person I needed to convince was Father Samaan, who is the leader of the community. But to convince Father Samaan, I needed to convince Mario, who is a Polish artist who moved to Cairo 20 years ago and who created all the artwork of the Cave Church. I am really grateful to Mario. He was the key of the project. He managed to get me a meeting with Father Samaan, and surprisingly, he loved the idea. He asked me about where I painted before and how I will make it happen. And he was mainly concerned by what I was going to write. In every work that I create, I write messages with my style of Arabic calligraphy. I make sure those messages are relevant to the place where I am painting but have this universal dimension, so anybody around the world can relate to it. So for Manshiyat Naser, I decided to write in Arabic the words of St. Athanasius of Alexandria, a Coptic bishop from the third century, who said: (Arabic), which means in English, "Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eyes first." It was really important for me that the community felt connected to the words. And for me this quote was perfectly reflecting the spirit of the project. So Father Samaan blessed the project, and his approval brought all the residents on board. Hundreds of liters of paint, a dozen blue manual lifts, several trips back and forth to Cairo, a strong and solid team from France, North Africa, Middle East and the US, and after a year of planning and logistics, there we are, my team and some members from the local community creating a piece that will spread over 50 buildings, some filling up the space of the calligraphy that I trace with colors. Here some blue, there some yellow, there some orange. Some others carrying some sand bags and putting them on the top of the buildings to hold those manual lifts, and some others assembling and disassembling those same lifts and moving them around the different buildings. At the beginning of the project, I numbered all those buildings on my sketch, and there was no real interaction with the community. People didn’t get the point of all this. But fast enough, those building numbers became family names. The first building was the house of Uncle Ibrahim. Uncle Ibrahim is such an enthusiastic person. He was always singing and making jokes, and his daughters and sons saved me from his bull who wanted to attack me on the fourth floor. (Laughter) Actually, the bull saw me from the window and came out on the balcony. (Laughter) Yeah. Uncle Ibrahim was always hanging out on the balcony and talking to me while I was painting. I remember him saying that he didn’t go to the mountain for 10 years, and that he never takes a day off. He said that if he stopped working, who will stop the garbage? But surprisingly, at the end of the project, he came all the way to the mountain to look at the piece. He was really proud to see his house painted, and he said that this project was a project of peace and — sorry — (Applause) Thank you. He said that it was a project of peace and unity and that it brought people together. So his perception towards the project changed, and my perception towards the community changed also, and towards what they do. All the garbage that everybody is disgusted by is not theirs. They just work out of it. Actually, they don’t live in the garbage. They live from the garbage. So I started doubting myself and wondering what was the real purpose of this whole project? It was not about beautifying a place by bringing art to it. It was about switching perception and opening a dialogue on the connection that we have with communities that we don’t know. So day after day, the calligraphy circle was taking shape, and we were always excited to go back on the mountain to look at the piece. And standing exactly at this point every day made my realize the symbolism behind this anamorphic piece. If you want to see the real image of somebody, maybe you should change your angle. There was doubts and difficulties, like fears and stress. It wasn't simple to work in such environments, sometimes having pigs under you while you paint or climbing a stack of garbage to reach a lift. But we all got over the fear of the heights, the swinging lifts, the strength of the smell and also the stress of not finishing on time. But the kindness of all those people made us forget everything. The building number 3 was the house of Uncle Bakheet and Aunty Fareeda. In Egyptian, they have this expression that says, "Ahsen Nas," which means "the best people." They were the best people. We used to take our break in front of their houses, and all the kids of the neighborhood used to join us. I was impressed and amazed by the kids of Manshiyat Naser. For the first few days, they were always refusing anything we were offering them, even a snack or a drink. So I asked Aunty Fareeda, "Why is that?" And she told me they teach their kids to refuse anything from somebody that they don't know because maybe this person needs it more than they do. So at this exact point I realized actually the Zaraeeb community was the ideal context to raise the topic of perception. We need to question our level of misconception and judgment we can have as a society upon communities based on their differences. I remember how we got delayed on Uncle Ibrahim's house when his pigs that are bred on the rooftop were eating the sand bags that hold the lifts. (Laughter) The house of Uncle Bakheet and Aunty Fareeda was this kind of meeting point. Everybody used to gather there. I think this is what Uncle Ibrahim meant when he said that was a project of peace and unity, because I really felt that people were coming together. Everyone was greeting us with a smile, offering us a drink or inviting us into their own house for lunch. Sometime, you are at the first level of a building, and somebody opens his window and offers you some tea. And then the same thing happens on the second floor. And you keep going all the way to the top. (Laughter) (Applause) I think I never drink as much tea as I did in Egypt. (Laughter) And to be honest with you, we could have finished earlier, but I think it took us three weeks because of all those tea breaks. (Laughter) In Egypt, they have another expression, which is "Nawartouna," which means, "You brought light to us." In Manshiyat Naser they were always telling us this. The calligraphy, actually — I used a white glow-in-the-dark paint for the calligraphy so at the end of the project, we rented some black light projectors and lit up the whole neighborhood, surprising everybody around. We wanted to tell them that they are the ones who brought light to us. (Applause) The Zaraeeb community are strong, honest, hard workers, and they know their value. The people of Cairo call them "the Zabaleen," which means "the people of the garbage," but ironically, the people of Manshiyat Naser call the people of Cairo the Zabaleen. They say, they are the ones who produce the garbage, not them. (Laughter) (Applause) The goal was to leave something to this community, but I feel that they are the ones who left something in our lives. You know, the art project was just a pretext for this amazing human experience. The art piece at some point will disappear, vanish, and actually there is somebody who is building a second floor in front of Uncle Ibrahim's house, so it's covering part of the painting, so I might need to go back and paint over it. (Laughter) It was about the experience, about the story, about the moment. From the streets of the neighborhood, the painting appears in fragments, isolated from one another, standing alone. But connected with the sign of calligraphy that today reveals the powerful message that we should all think about before we want to judge somebody. Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eyes first. Thank you. (Applause) |
How the Panama Papers journalists broke the biggest leak in history | {0: 'As director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Gerard Ryle is one of the key figures behind the Panama Papers.'} | TEDSummit | What do you do if you had to figure out the information behind 11.5 million documents, verify it and make sense of it? That was a challenge that a group of journalists had to face late last year. An anonymous person calling himself John Doe had somehow managed to copy nearly 40 years of records of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. This is one of many firms around the world that specialize in setting up accounts in offshore tax havens like the British Virgin Islands, for rich and powerful people who like to keep secrets. John Doe had managed to copy every spreadsheet from this firm, every client file, every email, from 1977 to the present day. It represented the biggest cache of inside information into the tax haven system that anyone had ever seen. But it also presented a gigantic challenge to investigative journalism. Think about it: 11.5 million documents, containing the secrets of people from more than 200 different countries. Where do you start with such a vast resource? Where do you even begin to tell a story that can trail off into every corner of the globe, and that can affect almost any person in any language, sometimes in ways they don't even know yet. John Doe had given the information to two journalists at the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. He said he was motivated by — and I quote — "The scale of the injustice that the documents would reveal." But one user alone can never make sense of such a vast amount of information. So the Süddeutsche Zeitung reached out to my organization in Washington, DC, The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. We decided to do something that was the very opposite of everything we'd been taught to do as journalists: share. (Laughter) By nature, investigative reporters are lone wolves. We fiercely guard our secrets, at times even from our editors, because we know that the moment we tell them what we have, they'll want that story right away. And to be frank, when you get a good story, you like to keep the glory to yourself. But there's no doubt that we live in a shrinking world, and that the media has largely been slow to wake up to this. The issues we report on are more and more transnational. Giant corporations operate on a global level. Environmental and health crises are global. So, too, are financial flows and financial crises. So it seems staggering that journalism has been so late to cover stories in a truly global way. And it also seems staggering that journalism has been so slow to wake up to the possibilities that technology brings, rather than being frightened of it. The reason journalists are scared of technology is this: the profession's largest institutions are going through tough times because of the changing way that people are consuming news. The advertising business models that have sustained reporting are broken. And this has plunged journalism into crisis, forcing those institutions to reexamine how they function. But where there is crisis, there is also opportunity. The first challenge presented by what would eventually become known as the Panama Papers was to make the documents searchable and readable. There were nearly five million emails, two million PDFs that needed to be scanned and indexed, and millions more files and other kinds of documents. They all needed to be housed in a safe and secure location in the cloud. We next invited reporters to have a look at the documents. In all, reporters from more than 100 media organizations in 76 countries — from the BBC in Britain to Le Monde newspaper in France to the Asahi Shimbun in Japan. "Native eyes on native names," we called it, the idea being, who best to tell you who was important to Nigeria than a Nigerian journalist? Who best in Canada than a Canadian? There were only two rules for everyone who was invited: we all agreed to share everything that we found with everybody else, and we all agreed to publish together on the same day. We chose our media partners based on trust that had been built up through previous smaller collaborations and also from leads that jumped out from the documents. Over the next few months, my small nonprofit organization of less than 20 people was joined by more than 350 other reporters from 25 language groups. The biggest information leak in history had now spawned the biggest journalism collaboration in history: 376 sets of native eyes doing what journalists normally never do, working shoulder to shoulder, sharing information, but telling no one. For it became clear at this point that in order to make the biggest kind of noise, we first needed the biggest kind of silence. To manage the project over the many months it would take, we built a secure virtual newsroom. We used encrypted communication systems, and we built a specially designed search engine. Inside the virtual newsroom, the reporters could gather around the themes that were emerging from the documents. Those interested in blood diamonds or exotic art, for instance, could share information about how the offshore world was being used to hide the trade in both of those commodities. Those interested in sport could share information about how famous sports stars were putting their image rights into offshore companies, thereby likely avoiding taxes in the countries where they plied their trade. But perhaps most exciting of all were the number of world leaders and elect politicians that were emerging from the documents — figures like Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine, close associates of Vladimir Putin in Russia and the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, who is linked through his late father, Ian Cameron. Buried in the documents were secret offshore entities, such as Wintris Inc., a company in the British Virgin Islands that had actually belonged to the sitting Icelandic prime minister. I like to refer to Johannes Kristjansson, the Icelandic reporter we invited to join the project, as the loneliest man in the world. For nine months, he refused paid work and lived off the earnings of his wife. He pasted tarps over the windows of his home to prevent prying eyes during the long Icelandic winter. And he soon ran out of excuses to explain his many absences, as he worked red-eyed, night after night, month after month. In all that time, he sat on information that would eventually bring down the leader of his country. Now, when you're an investigative reporter and you make an amazing discovery, such as your prime minster can be linked to a secret offshore company, that that company has a financial interest in Icelandic banks — the very issue he's been elected on — well, your instinct is to scream out very loud. Instead, as one of the few people that he could speak to, Johannes and I shared a kind of gallows humor. "Wintris is coming," he used to say. (Laughter) (Applause) We were big fans of "Game of Thrones." When reporters like Johannes wanted to scream, they did so inside the virtual newsroom, and then they turned those screams into stories by going outside the documents to court records, official company registers, and by eventually putting questions to those that we intended to name. Panama Papers actually allowed the reporters to look at the world through a different lens from everybody else. As we were researching the story, unconnected to us, a major political bribery scandal happened in Brazil. A new leader was elected in Argentina. The FBI began to indict officials at FIFA, the organization that controls the world of professional soccer. The Panama Papers actually had unique insights into each one of these unfolding events. So you can imagine the pressure and the ego dramas that could have ruined what we were trying to do. Any of one of these journalists, they could have broken the pact. But they didn't. And on April 3 this year, at exactly 8pm German time, we published simultaneously in 76 countries. (Applause) The Panama Papers quickly became one of the biggest stories of the year. This is the scene in Iceland the day after we published. It was the first of many protests. The Icelandic prime minister had to resign. It was a first of many resignations. We spotlighted many famous people such as Lionel Messi, the most famous soccer player in the world. And there were some unintended consequences. These alleged members of a Mexican drug cartel were arrested after we published details about their hideout. They'd been using the address to register their offshore company. (Laughter) There's a kind of irony in what we've been able to do. The technology — the Internet — that has broken the business model is allowing us to reinvent journalism itself. And this dynamic is producing unprecedented levels of transparency and impact. We showed how a group of journalists can effect change across the world by applying new methods and old-fashioned journalism techniques to vast amounts of leaked information. We put all-important context around what was given to us by John Doe. And by sharing resources, we were able to dig deep — much deeper and longer than most media organizations allow these days, because of financial concerns. Now, it was a big risk, and it wouldn't work for every story, but we showed with the Panama Papers that you can write about any country from just about anywhere, and then choose your preferred battleground to defend your work. Try obtaining a court injunction that would prevent the telling of a story in 76 different countries. Try stopping the inevitable. Shortly after we published, I got a three-word text from Johannes: "Wintris has arrived." (Laughter) It had arrived and so, too, perhaps has a new era for journalism. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Gerard, thank you. I guess you're going to send that applause to the 350 journalists who worked with you, right? Now, a couple of questions I would like to ask. The first one is, you'd been working in secrecy for over a year with 350-something colleagues from all over the world — was there ever a moment when you thought that the leak may be leaked, that the collaboration may just be broken by somebody publishing a story? Or somebody not in the group releasing some information that they got to know? Gerard Ryle: We had a series of crises along the way, including when something major was happening in the world, the journalists from that country wanted to publish right away. We had to calm them down. Probably the biggest crisis we had was a week before publication. We'd sent a series of questions to the associates of Vladimir Putin, but instead of responding, the Kremlin actually held a press conference and denounced us, and denounced the whole thing as being, I guess, a plot from the West. At that point, Putin thought it was just about him. And, of course, a lot of editors around the world were very nervous about this. They thought the story was going to get out. You can imagine the amount of time they'd spent, the amount of resources, money spent on this. So I had to basically spend the last week calming everyone down, a bit like a general, where you're holding your troops back: "Calm, remain calm." And then eventually, of course, they all did. BG: And then a couple weeks ago or so, you released a lot of the documents as an open database for everybody to search via keyword, essentially. GR: We very much believe that the basic information about the offshore world should be made public. Now, we didn't publish the underlying documents of the journalists we're working with. But the basic information such as the name of a person, what their offshore company was and the name of that company, is now all available online. In fact, the biggest resource of its kind basically is out there now BG: Gerard, thank you for the work you do. GR: Thank you. (Applause) |
A new way to study the brain's invisible secrets | {0: 'Ed Boyden is a professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT McGovern Institute.'} | TEDSummit | Hello, everybody. I brought with me today a baby diaper. You'll see why in a second. Baby diapers have interesting properties. They can swell enormously when you add water to them, an experiment done by millions of kids every day. (Laughter) But the reason why is that they're designed in a very clever way. They're made out of a thing called a swellable material. It's a special kind of material that, when you add water, it will swell up enormously, maybe a thousand times in volume. And this is a very useful, industrial kind of polymer. But what we're trying to do in my group at MIT is to figure out if we can do something similar to the brain. Can we make it bigger, big enough that you can peer inside and see all the tiny building blocks, the biomolecules, how they're organized in three dimensions, the structure, the ground truth structure of the brain, if you will? If we could get that, maybe we could have a better understanding of how the brain is organized to yield thoughts and emotions and actions and sensations. Maybe we could try to pinpoint the exact changes in the brain that result in diseases, diseases like Alzheimer's and epilepsy and Parkinson's, for which there are few treatments, much less cures, and for which, very often, we don't know the cause or the origins and what's really causing them to occur. Now, our group at MIT is trying to take a different point of view from the way neuroscience has been done over the last hundred years. We're designers. We're inventors. We're trying to figure out how to build technologies that let us look at and repair the brain. And the reason is, the brain is incredibly, incredibly complicated. So what we've learned over the first century of neuroscience is that the brain is a very complicated network, made out of very specialized cells called neurons with very complex geometries, and electrical currents will flow through these complexly shaped neurons. Furthermore, neurons are connected in networks. They're connected by little junctions called synapses that exchange chemicals and allow the neurons to talk to each other. The density of the brain is incredible. In a cubic millimeter of your brain, there are about 100,000 of these neurons and maybe a billion of those connections. But it's worse. So, if you could zoom in to a neuron, and, of course, this is just our artist's rendition of it. What you would see are thousands and thousands of kinds of biomolecules, little nanoscale machines organized in complex, 3D patterns, and together they mediate those electrical pulses, those chemical exchanges that allow neurons to work together to generate things like thoughts and feelings and so forth. Now, we don't know how the neurons in the brain are organized to form networks, and we don't know how the biomolecules are organized within neurons to form these complex, organized machines. If we really want to understand this, we're going to need new technologies. But if we could get such maps, if we could look at the organization of molecules and neurons and neurons and networks, maybe we could really understand how the brain conducts information from sensory regions, mixes it with emotion and feeling, and generates our decisions and actions. Maybe we could pinpoint the exact set of molecular changes that occur in a brain disorder. And once we know how those molecules have changed, whether they've increased in number or changed in pattern, we could use those as targets for new drugs, for new ways of delivering energy into the brain in order to repair the brain computations that are afflicted in patients who suffer from brain disorders. We've all seen lots of different technologies over the last century to try to confront this. I think we've all seen brain scans taken using MRI machines. These, of course, have the great power that they are noninvasive, they can be used on living human subjects. But also, they're spatially crude. Each of these blobs that you see, or voxels, as they're called, can contain millions and millions of neurons. So it's not at the level of resolution where it can pinpoint the molecular changes that occur or the changes in the wiring of these networks that contributes to our ability to be conscious and powerful beings. At the other extreme, you have microscopes. Microscopes, of course, will use light to look at little tiny things. For centuries, they've been used to look at things like bacteria. For neuroscience, microscopes are actually how neurons were discovered in the first place, about 130 years ago. But light is fundamentally limited. You can't see individual molecules with a regular old microscope. You can't look at these tiny connections. So if we want to make our ability to see the brain more powerful, to get down to the ground truth structure, we're going to need to have even better technologies. My group, a couple years ago, started thinking: Why don't we do the opposite? If it's so darn complicated to zoom in to the brain, why can't we make the brain bigger? It initially started with two grad students in my group, Fei Chen and Paul Tillberg. Now many others in my group are helping with this process. We decided to try to figure out if we could take polymers, like the stuff in the baby diaper, and install it physically within the brain. If we could do it just right, and you add water, you can potentially blow the brain up to where you could distinguish those tiny biomolecules from each other. You would see those connections and get maps of the brain. This could potentially be quite dramatic. We brought a little demo here. We got some purified baby diaper material. It's much easier just to buy it off the Internet than to extract the few grains that actually occur in these diapers. I'm going to put just one teaspoon here of this purified polymer. And here we have some water. What we're going to do is see if this teaspoon of the baby diaper material can increase in size. You're going to see it increase in volume by about a thousandfold before your very eyes. I could pour much more of this in there, but I think you've got the idea that this is a very, very interesting molecule, and if can use it in the right way, we might be able to really zoom in on the brain in a way that you can't do with past technologies. OK. So a little bit of chemistry now. What's going on in the baby diaper polymer? If you could zoom in, it might look something like what you see on the screen. Polymers are chains of atoms arranged in long, thin lines. The chains are very tiny, about the width of a biomolecule, and these polymers are really dense. They're separated by distances that are around the size of a biomolecule. This is very good because we could potentially move everything apart in the brain. If we add water, what will happen is, this swellable material is going to absorb the water, the polymer chains will move apart from each other, and the entire material is going to become bigger. And because these chains are so tiny and spaced by biomolecular distances, we could potentially blow up the brain and make it big enough to see. Here's the mystery, then: How do we actually make these polymer chains inside the brain so we can move all the biomolecules apart? If we could do that, maybe we could get ground truth maps of the brain. We could look at the wiring. We can peer inside and see the molecules within. To explain this, we made some animations where we actually look at, in these artist renderings, what biomolecules might look like and how we might separate them. Step one: what we'd have to do, first of all, is attach every biomolecule, shown in brown here, to a little anchor, a little handle. We need to pull the molecules of the brain apart from each other, and to do that, we need to have a little handle that allows those polymers to bind to them and to exert their force. Now, if you just take baby diaper polymer and dump it on the brain, obviously, it's going to sit there on top. So we need to find a way to make the polymers inside. And this is where we're really lucky. It turns out, you can get the building blocks, monomers, as they're called, and if you let them go into the brain and then trigger the chemical reactions, you can get them to form those long chains, right there inside the brain tissue. They're going to wind their way around biomolecules and between biomolecules, forming those complex webs that will allow you, eventually, to pull apart the molecules from each other. And every time one of those little handles is around, the polymer will bind to the handle, and that's exactly what we need in order to pull the molecules apart from each other. All right, the moment of truth. We have to treat this specimen with a chemical to kind of loosen up all the molecules from each other, and then, when we add water, that swellable material is going to start absorbing the water, the polymer chains will move apart, but now, the biomolecules will come along for the ride. And much like drawing a picture on a balloon, and then you blow up the balloon, the image is the same, but the ink particles have moved away from each other. And that's what we've been able to do now, but in three dimensions. There's one last trick. As you can see here, we've color-coded all the biomolecules brown. That's because they all kind of look the same. Biomolecules are made out of the same atoms, but just in different orders. So we need one last thing in order to make them visible. We have to bring in little tags, with glowing dyes that will distinguish them. So one kind of biomolecule might get a blue color. Another kind of biomolecule might get a red color. And so forth. And that's the final step. Now we can look at something like a brain and look at the individual molecules, because we've moved them far apart enough from each other that we can tell them apart. So the hope here is that we can make the invisible visible. We can turn things that might seem small and obscure and blow them up until they're like constellations of information about life. Here's an actual video of what it might look like. We have here a little brain in a dish — a little piece of a brain, actually. We've infused the polymer in, and now we're adding water. What you'll see is that, right before your eyes — this video is sped up about sixtyfold — this little piece of brain tissue is going to grow. It can increase by a hundredfold or even more in volume. And the cool part is, because those polymers are so tiny, we're separating biomolecules evenly from each other. It's a smooth expansion. We're not losing the configuration of the information. We're just making it easier to see. So now we can take actual brain circuitry — here's a piece of the brain involved with, for example, memory — and we can zoom in. We can start to actually look at how circuits are configured. Maybe someday we could read out a memory. Maybe we could actually look at how circuits are configured to process emotions, how the actual wiring of our brain is organized in order to make us who we are. And of course, we can pinpoint, hopefully, the actual problems in the brain at a molecular level. What if we could actually look into cells in the brain and figure out, wow, here are the 17 molecules that have altered in this brain tissue that has been undergoing epilepsy or changing in Parkinson's disease or otherwise being altered? If we get that systematic list of things that are going wrong, those become our therapeutic targets. We can build drugs that bind those. We can maybe aim energy at different parts of the brain in order to help people with Parkinson's or epilepsy or other conditions that affect over a billion people around the world. Now, something interesting has been happening. It turns out that throughout biomedicine, there are other problems that expansion might help with. This is an actual biopsy from a human breast cancer patient. It turns out that if you look at cancers, if you look at the immune system, if you look at aging, if you look at development — all these processes are involving large-scale biological systems. But of course, the problems begin with those little nanoscale molecules, the machines that make the cells and the organs in our body tick. So what we're trying to do now is to figure out if we can actually use this technology to map the building blocks of life in a wide variety of diseases. Can we actually pinpoint the molecular changes in a tumor so that we can actually go after it in a smart way and deliver drugs that might wipe out exactly the cells that we want to? You know, a lot of medicine is very high risk. Sometimes, it's even guesswork. My hope is we can actually turn what might be a high-risk moon shot into something that's more reliable. If you think about the original moon shot, where they actually landed on the moon, it was based on solid science. We understood gravity; we understood aerodynamics. We knew how to build rockets. The science risk was under control. It was still a great, great feat of engineering. But in medicine, we don't necessarily have all the laws. Do we have all the laws that are analogous to gravity, that are analogous to aerodynamics? I would argue that with technologies like the kinds I'm talking about today, maybe we can actually derive those. We can map the patterns that occur in living systems, and figure out how to overcome the diseases that plague us. You know, my wife and I have two young kids, and one of my hopes as a bioengineer is to make life better for them than it currently is for us. And my hope is, if we can turn biology and medicine from these high-risk endeavors that are governed by chance and luck, and make them things that we win by skill and hard work, then that would be a great advance. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
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