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How trees talk to each other | {0: 'Suzanne Simard studies the complex, symbiotic networks in our forests.'} | TEDSummit | Imagine you're walking through a forest. I'm guessing you're thinking of a collection of trees, what we foresters call a stand, with their rugged stems and their beautiful crowns. Yes, trees are the foundation of forests, but a forest is much more than what you see, and today I want to change the way you think about forests. You see, underground there is this other world, a world of infinite biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate and allow the forest to behave as though it's a single organism. It might remind you of a sort of intelligence. How do I know this? Here's my story. I grew up in the forests of British Columbia. I used to lay on the forest floor and stare up at the tree crowns. They were giants. My grandfather was a giant, too. He was a horse logger, and he used to selectively cut cedar poles from the inland rainforest. Grandpa taught me about the quiet and cohesive ways of the woods, and how my family was knit into it. So I followed in grandpa's footsteps. He and I had this curiosity about forests, and my first big "aha" moment was at the outhouse by our lake. Our poor dog Jigs had slipped and fallen into the pit. So grandpa ran up with his shovel to rescue the poor dog. He was down there, swimming in the muck. But as grandpa dug through that forest floor, I became fascinated with the roots, and under that, what I learned later was the white mycelium and under that the red and yellow mineral horizons. Eventually, grandpa and I rescued the poor dog, but it was at that moment that I realized that that palette of roots and soil was really the foundation of the forest. And I wanted to know more. So I studied forestry. But soon I found myself working alongside the powerful people in charge of the commercial harvest. The extent of the clear-cutting was alarming, and I soon found myself conflicted by my part in it. Not only that, the spraying and hacking of the aspens and birches to make way for the more commercially valuable planted pines and firs was astounding. It seemed that nothing could stop this relentless industrial machine. So I went back to school, and I studied my other world. You see, scientists had just discovered in the laboratory in vitro that one pine seedling root could transmit carbon to another pine seedling root. But this was in the laboratory, and I wondered, could this happen in real forests? I thought yes. Trees in real forests might also share information below ground. But this was really controversial, and some people thought I was crazy, and I had a really hard time getting research funding. But I persevered, and I eventually conducted some experiments deep in the forest, 25 years ago. I grew 80 replicates of three species: paper birch, Douglas fir, and western red cedar. I figured the birch and the fir would be connected in a belowground web, but not the cedar. It was in its own other world. And I gathered my apparatus, and I had no money, so I had to do it on the cheap. So I went to Canadian Tire — (Laughter) and I bought some plastic bags and duct tape and shade cloth, a timer, a paper suit, a respirator. And then I borrowed some high-tech stuff from my university: a Geiger counter, a scintillation counter, a mass spectrometer, microscopes. And then I got some really dangerous stuff: syringes full of radioactive carbon-14 carbon dioxide gas and some high pressure bottles of the stable isotope carbon-13 carbon dioxide gas. But I was legally permitted. (Laughter) Oh, and I forgot some stuff, important stuff: the bug spray, the bear spray, the filters for my respirator. Oh well. The first day of the experiment, we got out to our plot and a grizzly bear and her cub chased us off. And I had no bear spray. But you know, this is how forest research in Canada goes. (Laughter) So I came back the next day, and mama grizzly and her cub were gone. So this time, we really got started, and I pulled on my white paper suit, I put on my respirator, and then I put the plastic bags over my trees. I got my giant syringes, and I injected the bags with my tracer isotope carbon dioxide gases, first the birch. I injected carbon-14, the radioactive gas, into the bag of birch. And then for fir, I injected the stable isotope carbon-13 carbon dioxide gas. I used two isotopes, because I was wondering whether there was two-way communication going on between these species. I got to the final bag, the 80th replicate, and all of a sudden mama grizzly showed up again. And she started to chase me, and I had my syringes above my head, and I was swatting the mosquitos, and I jumped into the truck, and I thought, "This is why people do lab studies." (Laughter) I waited an hour. I figured it would take this long for the trees to suck up the CO2 through photosynthesis, turn it into sugars, send it down into their roots, and maybe, I hypothesized, shuttle that carbon belowground to their neighbors. After the hour was up, I rolled down my window, and I checked for mama grizzly. Oh good, she's over there eating her huckleberries. So I got out of the truck and I got to work. I went to my first bag with the birch. I pulled the bag off. I ran my Geiger counter over its leaves. Kkhh! Perfect. The birch had taken up the radioactive gas. Then the moment of truth. I went over to the fir tree. I pulled off its bag. I ran the Geiger counter up its needles, and I heard the most beautiful sound. Kkhh! It was the sound of birch talking to fir, and birch was saying, "Hey, can I help you?" And fir was saying, "Yeah, can you send me some of your carbon? Because somebody threw a shade cloth over me." I went up to cedar, and I ran the Geiger counter over its leaves, and as I suspected, silence. Cedar was in its own world. It was not connected into the web interlinking birch and fir. I was so excited, I ran from plot to plot and I checked all 80 replicates. The evidence was clear. The C-13 and C-14 was showing me that paper birch and Douglas fir were in a lively two-way conversation. It turns out at that time of the year, in the summer, that birch was sending more carbon to fir than fir was sending back to birch, especially when the fir was shaded. And then in later experiments, we found the opposite, that fir was sending more carbon to birch than birch was sending to fir, and this was because the fir was still growing while the birch was leafless. So it turns out the two species were interdependent, like yin and yang. And at that moment, everything came into focus for me. I knew I had found something big, something that would change the way we look at how trees interact in forests, from not just competitors but to cooperators. And I had found solid evidence of this massive belowground communications network, the other world. Now, I truly hoped and believed that my discovery would change how we practice forestry, from clear-cutting and herbiciding to more holistic and sustainable methods, methods that were less expensive and more practical. What was I thinking? I'll come back to that. So how do we do science in complex systems like forests? Well, as forest scientists, we have to do our research in the forests, and that's really tough, as I've shown you. And we have to be really good at running from bears. But mostly, we have to persevere in spite of all the stuff stacked against us. And we have to follow our intuition and our experiences and ask really good questions. And then we've got to gather our data and then go verify. For me, I've conducted and published hundreds of experiments in the forest. Some of my oldest experimental plantations are now over 30 years old. You can check them out. That's how forest science works. So now I want to talk about the science. How were paper birch and Douglas fir communicating? Well, it turns out they were conversing not only in the language of carbon but also nitrogen and phosphorus and water and defense signals and allele chemicals and hormones — information. And you know, I have to tell you, before me, scientists had thought that this belowground mutualistic symbiosis called a mycorrhiza was involved. Mycorrhiza literally means "fungus root." You see their reproductive organs when you walk through the forest. They're the mushrooms. The mushrooms, though, are just the tip of the iceberg, because coming out of those stems are fungal threads that form a mycelium, and that mycelium infects and colonizes the roots of all the trees and plants. And where the fungal cells interact with the root cells, there's a trade of carbon for nutrients, and that fungus gets those nutrients by growing through the soil and coating every soil particle. The web is so dense that there can be hundreds of kilometers of mycelium under a single footstep. And not only that, that mycelium connects different individuals in the forest, individuals not only of the same species but between species, like birch and fir, and it works kind of like the Internet. You see, like all networks, mycorrhizal networks have nodes and links. We made this map by examining the short sequences of DNA of every tree and every fungal individual in a patch of Douglas fir forest. In this picture, the circles represent the Douglas fir, or the nodes, and the lines represent the interlinking fungal highways, or the links. The biggest, darkest nodes are the busiest nodes. We call those hub trees, or more fondly, mother trees, because it turns out that those hub trees nurture their young, the ones growing in the understory. And if you can see those yellow dots, those are the young seedlings that have established within the network of the old mother trees. In a single forest, a mother tree can be connected to hundreds of other trees. And using our isotope tracers, we have found that mother trees will send their excess carbon through the mycorrhizal network to the understory seedlings, and we've associated this with increased seedling survival by four times. Now, we know we all favor our own children, and I wondered, could Douglas fir recognize its own kin, like mama grizzly and her cub? So we set about an experiment, and we grew mother trees with kin and stranger's seedlings. And it turns out they do recognize their kin. Mother trees colonize their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks. They send them more carbon below ground. They even reduce their own root competition to make elbow room for their kids. When mother trees are injured or dying, they also send messages of wisdom on to the next generation of seedlings. So we've used isotope tracing to trace carbon moving from an injured mother tree down her trunk into the mycorrhizal network and into her neighboring seedlings, not only carbon but also defense signals. And these two compounds have increased the resistance of those seedlings to future stresses. So trees talk. (Applause) Thank you. Through back and forth conversations, they increase the resilience of the whole community. It probably reminds you of our own social communities, and our families, well, at least some families. (Laughter) So let's come back to the initial point. Forests aren't simply collections of trees, they're complex systems with hubs and networks that overlap and connect trees and allow them to communicate, and they provide avenues for feedbacks and adaptation, and this makes the forest resilient. That's because there are many hub trees and many overlapping networks. But they're also vulnerable, vulnerable not only to natural disturbances like bark beetles that preferentially attack big old trees but high-grade logging and clear-cut logging. You see, you can take out one or two hub trees, but there comes a tipping point, because hub trees are not unlike rivets in an airplane. You can take out one or two and the plane still flies, but you take out one too many, or maybe that one holding on the wings, and the whole system collapses. So now how are you thinking about forests? Differently? (Audience) Yes. Cool. I'm glad. So, remember I said earlier that I hoped that my research, my discoveries would change the way we practice forestry. Well, I want to take a check on that 30 years later here in western Canada. This is about 100 kilometers to the west of us, just on the border of Banff National Park. That's a lot of clear-cuts. It's not so pristine. In 2014, the World Resources Institute reported that Canada in the past decade has had the highest forest disturbance rate of any country worldwide, and I bet you thought it was Brazil. In Canada, it's 3.6 percent per year. Now, by my estimation, that's about four times the rate that is sustainable. Now, massive disturbance at this scale is known to affect hydrological cycles, degrade wildlife habitat, and emit greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere, which creates more disturbance and more tree diebacks. Not only that, we're continuing to plant one or two species and weed out the aspens and birches. These simplified forests lack complexity, and they're really vulnerable to infections and bugs. And as climate changes, this is creating a perfect storm for extreme events, like the massive mountain pine beetle outbreak that just swept across North America, or that megafire in the last couple months in Alberta. So I want to come back to my final question: instead of weakening our forests, how can we reinforce them and help them deal with climate change? Well, you know, the great thing about forests as complex systems is they have enormous capacity to self-heal. In our recent experiments, we found with patch-cutting and retention of hub trees and regeneration to a diversity of species and genes and genotypes that these mycorrhizal networks, they recover really rapidly. So with this in mind, I want to leave you with four simple solutions. And we can't kid ourselves that these are too complicated to act on. First, we all need to get out in the forest. We need to reestablish local involvement in our own forests. You see, most of our forests now are managed using a one-size-fits-all approach, but good forest stewardship requires knowledge of local conditions. Second, we need to save our old-growth forests. These are the repositories of genes and mother trees and mycorrhizal networks. So this means less cutting. I don't mean no cutting, but less cutting. And third, when we do cut, we need to save the legacies, the mother trees and networks, and the wood, the genes, so they can pass their wisdom onto the next generation of trees so they can withstand the future stresses coming down the road. We need to be conservationists. And finally, fourthly and finally, we need to regenerate our forests with a diversity of species and genotypes and structures by planting and allowing natural regeneration. We have to give Mother Nature the tools she needs to use her intelligence to self-heal. And we need to remember that forests aren't just a bunch of trees competing with each other, they're supercooperators. So back to Jigs. Jigs's fall into the outhouse showed me this other world, and it changed my view of forests. I hope today to have changed how you think about forests. Thank you. (Applause) |
The jobs we'll lose to machines -- and the ones we won't | {0: 'Anthony Goldbloom crowdsources solutions to difficult problems using machine learning.'} | TED2016 | So this is my niece. Her name is Yahli. She is nine months old. Her mum is a doctor, and her dad is a lawyer. By the time Yahli goes to college, the jobs her parents do are going to look dramatically different. In 2013, researchers at Oxford University did a study on the future of work. They concluded that almost one in every two jobs have a high risk of being automated by machines. Machine learning is the technology that's responsible for most of this disruption. It's the most powerful branch of artificial intelligence. It allows machines to learn from data and mimic some of the things that humans can do. My company, Kaggle, operates on the cutting edge of machine learning. We bring together hundreds of thousands of experts to solve important problems for industry and academia. This gives us a unique perspective on what machines can do, what they can't do and what jobs they might automate or threaten. Machine learning started making its way into industry in the early '90s. It started with relatively simple tasks. It started with things like assessing credit risk from loan applications, sorting the mail by reading handwritten characters from zip codes. Over the past few years, we have made dramatic breakthroughs. Machine learning is now capable of far, far more complex tasks. In 2012, Kaggle challenged its community to build an algorithm that could grade high-school essays. The winning algorithms were able to match the grades given by human teachers. Last year, we issued an even more difficult challenge. Can you take images of the eye and diagnose an eye disease called diabetic retinopathy? Again, the winning algorithms were able to match the diagnoses given by human ophthalmologists. Now, given the right data, machines are going to outperform humans at tasks like this. A teacher might read 10,000 essays over a 40-year career. An ophthalmologist might see 50,000 eyes. A machine can read millions of essays or see millions of eyes within minutes. We have no chance of competing against machines on frequent, high-volume tasks. But there are things we can do that machines can't do. Where machines have made very little progress is in tackling novel situations. They can't handle things they haven't seen many times before. The fundamental limitations of machine learning is that it needs to learn from large volumes of past data. Now, humans don't. We have the ability to connect seemingly disparate threads to solve problems we've never seen before. Percy Spencer was a physicist working on radar during World War II, when he noticed the magnetron was melting his chocolate bar. He was able to connect his understanding of electromagnetic radiation with his knowledge of cooking in order to invent — any guesses? — the microwave oven. Now, this is a particularly remarkable example of creativity. But this sort of cross-pollination happens for each of us in small ways thousands of times per day. Machines cannot compete with us when it comes to tackling novel situations, and this puts a fundamental limit on the human tasks that machines will automate. So what does this mean for the future of work? The future state of any single job lies in the answer to a single question: To what extent is that job reducible to frequent, high-volume tasks, and to what extent does it involve tackling novel situations? On frequent, high-volume tasks, machines are getting smarter and smarter. Today they grade essays. They diagnose certain diseases. Over coming years, they're going to conduct our audits, and they're going to read boilerplate from legal contracts. Accountants and lawyers are still needed. They're going to be needed for complex tax structuring, for pathbreaking litigation. But machines will shrink their ranks and make these jobs harder to come by. Now, as mentioned, machines are not making progress on novel situations. The copy behind a marketing campaign needs to grab consumers' attention. It has to stand out from the crowd. Business strategy means finding gaps in the market, things that nobody else is doing. It will be humans that are creating the copy behind our marketing campaigns, and it will be humans that are developing our business strategy. So Yahli, whatever you decide to do, let every day bring you a new challenge. If it does, then you will stay ahead of the machines. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to build a business that lasts 100 years | {0: "BCG's Martin Reeves consults on strategy to global enterprises across a range of industries. "} | TED@BCG Paris | Imagine that you are a product designer. And you've designed a product, a new type of product, called the human immune system. You're pitching this product to a skeptical, strictly no-nonsense manager. Let's call him Bob. I think we all know at least one Bob, right? How would that go? Bob, I've got this incredible idea for a completely new type of personal health product. It's called the human immune system. I can see from your face that you're having some problems with this. Don't worry. I know it's very complicated. I don't want to take you through the gory details, I just want to tell you about some of the amazing features of this product. First of all, it cleverly uses redundancy by having millions of copies of each component — leukocytes, white blood cells — before they're actually needed, to create a massive buffer against the unexpected. And it cleverly leverages diversity by having not just leukocytes but B cells, T cells, natural killer cells, antibodies. The components don't really matter. The point is that together, this diversity of different approaches can cope with more or less anything that evolution has been able to throw up. And the design is completely modular. You have the surface barrier of the human skin, you have the very rapidly reacting innate immune system and then you have the highly targeted adaptive immune system. The point is, that if one system fails, another can take over, creating a virtually foolproof system. I can see I'm losing you, Bob, but stay with me, because here is the really killer feature. The product is completely adaptive. It's able to actually develop targeted antibodies to threats that it's never even met before. It actually also does this with incredible prudence, detecting and reacting to every tiny threat, and furthermore, remembering every previous threat, in case they are ever encountered again. What I'm pitching you today is actually not a stand-alone product. The product is embedded in the larger system of the human body, and it works in complete harmony with that system, to create this unprecedented level of biological protection. So Bob, just tell me honestly, what do you think of my product? And Bob may say something like, I sincerely appreciate the effort and passion that have gone into your presentation, blah blah blah — (Laughter) But honestly, it's total nonsense. You seem to be saying that the key selling points of your product are that it is inefficient and complex. Didn't they teach you 80-20? And furthermore, you're saying that this product is siloed. It overreacts, makes things up as it goes along and is actually designed for somebody else's benefit. I'm sorry to break it to you, but I don't think this one is a winner. If we went with Bob's philosophy, I think we'd actually end up with a more efficient immune system. And efficiency is always important in the short term. Less complex, more efficient, more bang for the buck. Who could say no to that? Unfortunately, there's one very tiny problem, and that is that the user of this product, you or I, would probably die within one week of the next winter, when we encountered a new strain of the influenza virus. I first became interested in biology and business, and longevity and resilience, when I was asked a very unusual question by the CEO of a global tech company. And the question was: What do we have to do to make sure that our company lasts 100 years? A seemingly innocent question, but actually, it's a little trickier than you might think, considering that the average US public company now can expect a life span of only 30 years. That is less than half of the life span that its employees can expect to enjoy. Now, if you were the CEO of such a company, badgered by investors and buffeted by change, we might forgive you for not even worrying too much about what happens 30 years out. But here's something that should keep you awake at night: the probability that your company will not be around in five year's time, on average, is now a staggering 32 percent. That's a one in three chance that your company will be taken over or will fail within just five years. Let's come back to our tech CEO's question. Where better to turn for advice than nature, that's been in the business of life and death for longer than any company? As a lapsed biologist, I decided to immediately call a real biologist, my friend Simon Levin, Professor of Biology and Mathematics at Princeton University. Together, we looked at a variety of biological systems, ranging from natural tropical rainforests through to managed forests and fisheries. And we asked ourselves the question: What makes these systems resilient and enduring? And what we found was that the same six principles that we saw underpinning the miracle of the human immune system actually cropped up again and again, from redundancy through to embeddedness. In fact, we saw these principles not only in biologically enduring systems, we also found them being very characteristic of long-lived social systems, like the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, believe it or not. We also went on to look at business, and found that these very same properties also characterized businesses that were resilient and long-lived, and we noted their absence from ones which were short-lived. Let's first take a look at what happens when the corporate immune system collapses. This beautiful building is part of the Shitennoji Temple Complex in Osaka, Japan. In fact, it's one of the oldest temples in Japan. It was built by a Korean artisan, because at the time, Japan was not yet building temples. And this Korean artisan went on to found a temple-building company. Amazingly, his company, Kongō Gumi, was still around 1,428 years later. In fact, it became the oldest continuously operating company in the world. So how is Kongō Gumi doing today? Not too well, I'm afraid. It borrowed very heavily during the bubble period of the Japanese economy, to invest in real estate. And when the bubble burst, it couldn't refinance its loans. The company failed, and it was taken over by a major construction company. Tragically, after 40 generations of very careful stewardship by the Kongō family, Kongō Gumi succumbed to a spectacular lapse in the ability to apply a principle of prudence. Speaking of company failures: we're all familiar with the failure of Kodak, the company that declared bankruptcy in January 2012. Much more interesting, however, is the question: Why did Fujifilm — same product, same pressures from digital technology, same time — why was Fujifilm able to survive and flourish? Fujifilm used its capabilities in chemistry, material science and optics to diversify into a number of areas, ranging from cosmetics to pharmaceuticals, to medical systems to biomaterials. Some of these diversification attempts failed. But in aggregate, it was able to adapt its portfolio sufficiently to survive and flourish. As the CEO, Mr. Komori, put it, the strategy succeeded because it had "more pockets and drawers" than the rivals. He meant, of course, that they were able to create more options than the rivals. Fujifilm survived because it applied the principles of prudence, diversity and adaptation. A catastrophic factory fire, like the one we see here, completely wiped out, in one evening, the only plant which supplied Toyota with valves for car-braking systems. The ultimate test of resilience. Car production ground to a screeching halt. How was it, then, that Toyota was able to recover car production? Can you imagine how long it took? Just five days. From having no braking valves to complete recovery in five days. How was this possible? Toyota managed its network of suppliers in such a collaborative manner that it could work very quickly and smoothly with suppliers to repurpose production, fill the missing braking valve capacity and have car production come online again. Toyota applied the principles of modularity of its supply network, embeddedness in an integrated system and the functional redundancy to be able to repurpose, smoothly, existing capacity. Now fortunately, few companies succumb to catastrophic fires. But we do read in the newspaper every day about companies succumbing to the disruption of technology. How is it, then, that the consumer optics giant Essilor is able to avoid technology disruption, and even profit from it? And yes, technology disruption is not only a big deal in software and electronics. Essilor carefully scans the competitive environment for potentially disruptive technologies. It acquires those technologies very early, before they've become expensive or competitors have mobilized around them, and it then develops those technologies itself, even at the risk of failure or the risk of self-disruption. Essilor stays ahead of its game, and has delivered spectacular performance for over 40 years, by using the principles of prudence and adaptation. OK, if these principles are so powerful, you might be thinking, why are they not commonplace in business? Why do we not use these words every day? Well, change has to first start in the mind. If we think back to our pitch to Bob, in order to apply the principles that underpin the miracle of the human immune system, we first need to think differently about business. Now typically, when we think about business, we use what I call "mechanical thinking." We set goals, we analyze problems, we construct and we adhere to plans, and more than anything else, we stress efficiency and short-term performance. Now, don't get me wrong — this is a splendidly practical and effective way of addressing relatively simple challenges in relatively stable environments. It's the way that Bob — and probably many of us, myself included — process most business problems we're faced with every day. In fact, it was a pretty good mental model for business — overall — until about the mid-1980s, when the conjunction of globalization and a revolution in technology and telecommunications made business far more dynamic and unpredictable. But what about those more dynamic and unpredictable situations that we now increasingly face? I think in addition to the mechanical thinking, we now need to master the art of biological thinking, as embodied by our six principles. In other words, we need to think more modestly and subtly about when and how we can shape, rather than control, unpredictable and complex situations. It's a little like the difference between throwing a ball and releasing a bird. The ball would head in a straight line, probably towards the intended target, and the bird certainly would not. So what do you think? Sounds a little impractical, a little theoretical, perhaps? Not at all. Every small entrepreneurial company naturally thinks and acts biologically. Why? Because it lacks the resources to shape its environment through brute force. It lacks the scale to buffer change, and it's constantly thinking about the tough odds for a start-up to survive. Now, the irony is, of course, that every large company started off as a small, entrepreneurial company. But along the way somewhere, many have lost this ability to think and act biologically. They need to rejuvenate their ability to think biologically in order to survive and thrive in today's environment. So let's not just think about short-term performance. Every company I know spends plenty of time thinking about the central question of strategy: How good is our competitive game? In addition, let's also consider the second, more biological and equally important question: How long will that game last? Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The taboo secret to better health | {0: 'Molly Winter works on legalizing sustainable building practices.'} | TEDxBend | Whenever I get to travel for work, I try to find out where my drinking water comes from, and where my poop and pee go. (Laughter) This has earned me the nickname "The Poo Princess" in my family, and it's ruined many family vacations, because this is not normal. But thinking about where it all goes is the first step in activating what are actually superpowers in our poop and pee. (Laughter) Yeah. And if we use them well, we can live healthier and more beautifully. Check out this landscape in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Just notice what kinds of words and feelings come to mind. This landscape was watered with treated sewage water. Does that change anything for you? I imagine it might. And that's OK. How we feel about this is going to determine exactly how innovative we can be. And I want to explain how it works, but what words do I use? I mean, I can use profane words like "shit" and "piss," and then my grandma won't watch the video. Or I can use childish words like "poo" and "pee." Eh. Or I can use scientific words like "excrement" and "feces." Humph. I'll use a mix. (Laughter) It's all I got. (Laughs) So, in this suburb, the poo and the pee and the wash water are going to this treatment plant right in the middle of the community. It looks more like a park than a treatment plant. The poo at the very bottom of all those layers of gravel — not touching anyone — is providing solid food for those marsh plants. And the clean, clear water that comes out the other end is traveling underground to water each person's yard. So even though they're in a desert, they get their own personal oasis. This approach is called Integrated Water Management, or holistic or closed-loop. Whatever you want to call it, it's in conflict with the status quo of how we think about sanitation, which is contain, treat, push it away. But in this approach, we're doing one step better. We're designing for reuse from the very beginning, because everything does get reused, only now we're planning for it. And often, that makes for really beautiful spaces. But the most important thing about this system isn't the technicals of how it works. It's how you feel about it. Do you want this in your yard? Why not? I got really curious about this question. Why don't we see more innovation in sanitation? Why isn't that kind of thing the new normal? And I care so much about this question, that I work for a nonprofit called Recode. We want to accelerate adoption of sustainable building and development practices. We want more innovation. But a lot of times, whole categories of innovation — ones that can help us live more beautifully — turn out to be illegal. Today's regulations and codes were written under the assumption that best practices would remain best practices, with incremental updates forever and ever. But innovation isn't always incremental. It turns out, how we feel about any particular new technique gets into everything we do: how we talk about it, how we encourage people to study, our jokes, our codes ... And it ultimately determines how innovative we can be. So, that's the first reason we don't innovate in sanitation. We're kind of uncomfortable talking about sanitation, that's why I've gotten called "The Poo Princess" so much. The second reason is: we think the problem is solved here in the US. But not so. Here in the US we still get sick from drinking shit in our sewage water. Seven million people get sick every year, 900 die annually. And we're not taking a holistic approach to making it better. So we're not solving it. Where I live in Portland, Oregon, I can't take Echo for a swim during the rainy season, because we dump raw sewage sometimes into our river. Our rainwater and our sewage go to the same treatment plant. Too much rain overflows into the river. And Portland is not alone here. Forty percent of municipalities self-report dumping raw or partially treated sewage into our waterways. The other bummer going on here with our status quo is that half of all of your poop and pee is going to fertilize farmland. The other half is being incinerated or land-filled. And that's a bummer to me, because there are amazing nutrients in your daily doody. It is comparable to pig manure; we're omnivores, they're omnivores. Think of your poo and pee as a health smoothie for a tree. (Laughter) The other bummer going on here is that we're quickly moving all the drugs we take into our waterways. The average wastewater treatment plant can remove maybe half of the drugs that come in. The other half goes right out the other side. Consider what a cocktail of pharmaceuticals — hormones, steroids, Vicodin — does to a fish, to a dog, to a child. But this isn't just some problem that we need to contain. If we flip this around, we can create a resource that can solve so many of our other problems. And I want to get you comfortable with this idea, so imagine the things I'm going to show you, these technologies, and this attitude that says, "We're going to reuse this. Let's design to make it beautiful" — as advanced potty training. (Laughter) I think you're ready for it. I think we as a culture are ready for advanced potty training. And there are three great reasons to enroll today. Number one: we can fertilize our food. Each one of us is pooping and peeing something that could fertilize half or maybe all of our food, depending on our diet. That dark brown poo in the toilet is dark brown because of what? Dead stuff, bacteria. That's carbon. And carbon, if we're getting that into the soil, is going to bind to the other minerals and nutrients in there. Boom! Healthier food. Voilà! Healthier people. Chemical fertilizers by definition don't have carbon in them. Imagine if we could move our animal manure and our human manure to our soil, we might not need to rely on fossil fuel-based fertilizers, mine minerals from far away. Imagine how much energy we could save. Now, some of us are concerned about industrial pollutants contaminating this reuse cycle. That can be addressed. But we need to separate our discomfort about talking about poo and pee so we can calmly talk about how we want to reuse it and what things we don't want to reuse. And get this: if we change our approach to sanitation, we can start to slow down climate change. Remember that carbon in the poop? If we can get that into our soil bank, it's going to start to absorb carbon dioxide that we put into the air. And that could help slow down global warming. I want to show you some brave souls who've had the courage to embrace this advanced potty training approach. So those folks in New Mexico — why did they do it? 'Cause they're in a desert? 'Cause they save money? Yeah. But more importantly, they felt comfortable seeing what was going down the toilet as a resource. Here's an average house in Portland, Oregon. This house is special because they have a composting toilet turning all their poo and pee, over time, into a soil amendment. Their wash water, their shower water, is going underground to a series of mulch basins, and then watering that orchard downhill. When they went to get this permitted, it wasn't allowed in Oregon. But it was allowed in five other states nearby. That was Recode's — my organization's — first code-change campaign. Here's a great example where the Integrated Water Management approach was the cheapest. This is three high-rise residential buildings in downtown Portland, and they're not flushing to the sewer system. How? Well, their wash water is getting reused to flush toilets, cool mechanical systems, water the landscape. And then once the building has thoroughly used everything — aka, shat in it — it's treated to highest standard right on-site by plants and bacteria, and then infiltrated into the groundwater right below. And all that was cheaper than updating the surrounding sewer infrastructure. So that's the last reason we should get really excited about doing things differently: we can save a lot of money. This was the first permit of its kind in Oregon. Brave and open-minded people sat down and felt comfortable saying, "Yeah, that shit makes sense." (Laughter) "Let's do it." (Applause) You know? I keep showing examples where everyone's reusing everything on-site. Why? Well, when we look at our aging infrastructure — and it is old — and we look at the cost of updating it, three-quarters of that cost is just the pipes snaking through our city. So as we build anew, as we renovate, it might make more sense to treat and reuse everything on-site. San Francisco realized that it made sense to invest in rebates for every household to reuse their wash water and their rainwater to water the backyard, because the amount of water they would save as a community would be so big. But why were all these projects so innovative? The money piece, yeah. But more importantly, they felt comfortable with this idea of advanced potty training. Imagine if we embraced innovation for sanitation the way we have for, say, solar power. Think about it — solar power used to be uncommon and unaffordable. Now it's more a part of our web of power than ever before. And it's creating resiliency. We now have sources of power like the sun that don't vary with our earthly dramas. What's driving all that innovation? It's us. We're talking about energy. It's cool to talk about energy. Some folks are even talking about the problems with the limited resources where our current energy is coming from. We encourage our best and brightest to work on this issue — better solar panels, better batteries, everything. So let's talk about where our drinking water is coming from, where our poo and pee are actually going. If we can get over this discomfort with this entire topic, we could create something that creates our future goldmine. Every time you flush the toilet, I want you to think, "Where is my poop and pee going? Will they be gainfully employed?" (Laughter) "Or are they going to be wreaking havoc in some waterway?" If you don't know, find out. And if you don't like the answer, figure out how you can communicate to those who can drive this change that you have advanced potty training, that you are ready for reuse. How all of you feel is going to determine exactly how innovative we can be. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
How Africa can keep rising | {0: 'Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a respected global economist.'} | TEDSummit | The narrative of a rising Africa is being challenged. About 10 years ago, I spoke about an Africa, an Africa of hope and opportunity, an Africa of entrepreneurs, an Africa very different from the Africa that you normally hear about of death, poverty and disease. And that what I spoke about, became part of what is known now as the narrative of the rising Africa. I want to tell you two stories about this rising Africa. The first has to do with Rwanda, a country that has gone through many trials and tribulations. And Rwanda has decided to become the technology hub, or a technology hub on the continent. It's a country with mountainous and hilly terrain, a little bit like here, so it's very difficult to deliver services to people. So what has Rwanda said? In order to save lives, it's going to try using drones to deliver lifesaving drugs, vaccines and blood to people in hard-to-reach places in partnership with a company called Zipline, with UPS, and also with the Gavi, a global vaccine alliance. In doing this, it will save lives. This is part of the type of innovation we want to see in the rising Africa. The second story has to do with something that I'm sure most of you have seen or will remember. Very often, countries in Africa suffer drought and floods, and it's getting more frequent because of climate change effects. When this happens, they normally wait for international appeals to raise money. You see pictures of children with flies on their faces, carcasses of dead animals and so on. Now these countries, 32 countries, came together under the auspices of the African Union and decided to form an organization called the African Risk Capacity. What does it do? It's a weather-based insurance agency, and what these countries do is to pay insurance each year, about 3 million dollars a year of their own resources, so that in the event they have a difficult drought situation or flood, this money will be paid out to them, which they can then use to take care of their populations, instead of waiting for aid to come. The African Risk Capacity last year paid 26 million dollars to Mauritania, Senegal and Niger. This enabled them to take care of 1.3 million people affected by drought. They were able to restore livelihoods, buy fodder for cattle, feed children in school and in short keep the populations home instead of migrating out of the area. So these are the kinds of stories of an Africa ready to take responsibility for itself, and to look for solutions for its own problems. But that narrative is being challenged now because the continent has not been doing well in the last two years. It had been growing at five percent per annum for the last one and a half decades, but this year's forecast was three percent. Why? In an uncertain global environment, commodity prices have fallen. Many of the economies are still commodity driven, and therefore their performance has slipped. And now the issue of Brexit doesn't make it any easier. I never knew that the Brexit could happen and that it could be one of the things that would cause global uncertainty such as we have. So now we've got this situation, and I think it's time to take stock and to say what were the things that the African countries did right? What did they do wrong? How do we build on all of this and learn lessons so that we can keep Africa rising? So let me talk about six things that I think we did right. The first is managing our economies better. The '80s and '90s were the lost decades, when Africa was not doing well, and some of you will remember an "Economist" cover that said, "The Lost Continent." But in the 2000s, policymakers learned that they needed to manage the macroeconomic environment better, to ensure stability, keep inflation low in single digits, keep their fiscal deficits low, below three percent of GDP, give investors, both domestic and foreign, some stability so they'll have confidence to invest in these economies. So that was number one. Two, debt. In 1994, the debt-to-GDP ratio of African countries was 130 percent, and they didn't have fiscal space. They couldn't use their resources to invest in their development because they were paying debt. There may be some of you in this room who worked to support African countries to get debt relief. So private creditors, multilaterals and bilaterals came together and decided to do the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative and give debt relief. So this debt relief in 2005 made the debt-to-GDP ratio fall down to about 30 percent, and there was enough resources to try and reinvest. The third thing was loss-making enterprises. Governments were involved in business which they had no business being in. And they were running businesses, they were making losses. So some of these enterprises were restructured, commercialized, privatized or closed, and they became less of a burden on government. The fourth thing was a very interesting thing. The telecoms revolution came, and African countries jumped on it. In 2000, we had 11 million phone lines. Today, we have about 687 million mobile lines on the continent. And this has enabled us to go, move forward with some mobile technology where Africa is actually leading. In Kenya, the development of mobile money — M-Pesa, which all of you have heard about — it took some time for the world to notice that Africa was ahead in this particular technology. And this mobile money is also providing a platform for access to alternative energy. You know, people who can now pay for solar the same way they pay for cards for their telephone. So this was a very good development, something that went right. We also invested more in education and health, not enough, but there were some improvements. 250 million children were immunized in the last one and a half decades. The other thing was that conflicts decreased. There were many conflicts on the continent. Many of you are aware of that. But they came down, and our leaders even managed to dampen some coups. New types of conflicts have emerged, and I'll refer to those later. So based on all this, there's also some differentiation on the continent that I want you to know about, because even as the doom and gloom is here, there are some countries — Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Senegal are performing relatively well at the moment. But what did we do wrong? Let me mention eight things. You have to have more things wrong than right. (Laughter) So there are eight things we did wrong. The first was that even though we grew, we didn't create enough jobs. We didn't create jobs for our youth. Youth unemployment on the continent is about 15 percent, and underemployment is a serious problem. The second thing that we did is that the quality of growth was not good enough. Even those jobs we created were low-productivity jobs, so we moved people from low-productivity agriculture to low-productivity commerce and working in the informal sector in the urban areas. The third thing is that inequality increased. So we created more billionaires. 50 billionaires worth 96 billion dollars own more wealth than the bottom 75 million people on the continent. Poverty, the proportion of people in poverty — that's the fourth thing — did decrease, but the absolute numbers did not because of population growth. And population growth is something that we don't have enough of a dialogue about on the continent. And I think we will need to get a handle on it, particularly how we educate girls. That is the road to really working on this particular issue. The fifth thing is that we didn't invest enough in infrastructure. We had investment from the Chinese. That helped some countries, but it's not enough. The consumption of electricity in Africa on the continent in Sub-Saharan Africa is equivalent to Spain. The total consumption is equivalent to that of Spain. So many people are living in the dark, and as the President of the African Development Bank said recently, Africa cannot develop in the dark. The other thing we have not done is that our economies retain the same structure that we've had for decades. So even though we've been growing, the structure of the economies has not changed very much. We are still exporting commodities, and exporting commodities is what? It's exporting jobs. Our manufacturing value-added is only 11 percent. We are not creating enough decent manufacturing jobs for our youth, and trade among ourselves is low. Only about 12 percent of our trade is among ourselves. So that's another serious problem. Then governance. Governance is a serious issue. We have weak institutions, and sometimes nonexistent institutions, and I think this gives way for corruption. Corruption is an issue that we have not yet gotten a good enough handle on, and we have to fight tooth and nail, that and increased transparency in the way we manage our economies and the way we manage our finances. We also need to be wary of new conflicts, new types of conflicts, such as we have with Boko Haram in my country, Nigeria, and with Al-Shabaab in Kenya. We need to partner with international partners, developed countries, to fight this together. Otherwise, we create a new reality which is not the type we want for a rising Africa. And finally, the issue of education. Our education systems in many countries are broken. We are not creating the types of skills needed for the future. So we have to find a way to educate better. So those are the things that we are not doing right. Now, where do we go from there? I believe that the way forward is to learn to manage success. Very often, when people succeed or countries succeed, they forget what made them succeed. Learning what you're successful at, managing it and keeping it is vital for us. So all those things I said we did right, we have to learn to do it right again, keep doing it right. Managing the economy while creating stability is vital, getting prices right, and policy consistency. Very often, we are not consistent. One regime goes out, another comes in and they throw away even the functioning policies that were there before. What does this do? It creates uncertainty for people, for households, uncertainties for business. They don't know whether and how to invest. Debt: we must manage the success we had in reducing our debt, but now countries are back to borrowing again, and we see our debt-to-GDP ratio beginning to creep up, and in certain countries, debt is becoming a problem, so we have to avoid that. So managing success. The next thing is focusing with a laser beam on those things we did not do well. First and foremost is infrastructure. Yes, most countries now recognize they have to invest in this, and they are trying to do the best they can to do that. We must. The most important thing is power. You cannot develop in the dark. And then governance and corruption: we have to fight. We have to make our countries transparent. And above all, we have to engage our young people. We have genius in our young people. I see it every day. It's what makes me wake up in the morning and feel ready to go. We have to unleash the genius of our young people, get out of their way, support them to create and innovate and lead the way. And I know that they will lead us in the right direction. And our women, and our girls: we have to recognize that girls and women are a gift. They have strength, and we have to unleash that strength so that they can contribute to the continent. I strongly believe that when we do all of these things, we find that the rising Africa narrative is not a fluke. It's a trend. It's a trend, and if we continue, if we unleash our youth, if we unleash our women, we may step backwards sometimes, we may even step sideways, but the trend is clear. Africa will continue to rise. And I tell you businesspeople in the audience, investment in Africa is not for today, is not for tomorrow, it's not a short-term thing, it's a longer term thing. But if you are not invested in Africa, then you will be missing one of the most important emerging opportunities in the world. Thank you. (Applause) Kelly Stoetzel: So you mentioned corruption in your talk, and you're known, well-known as a strong anticorruption fighter. But that's had consequences. People have fought back, and your mother was kidnapped. How have you been handling this? Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: It's been very difficult. Thank you for mentioning the issue of the kidnap of my mother. It's a very difficult subject. But what it means is that when you fight corruption, when you touch the pockets of people who are stealing money, they don't just keep quiet. They fight back, and the issue for you is when they try to intimidate you, do you give up, or do you fight on? Do you find a way to stay on and fight back? And the answer that I had with the teams I worked with is we have to fight on. We have to create those institutions. We have to find ways to stop these people from taking away the heritage of the future. And so that's what we did. And even out of government, we continued to make that point. In our countries, nobody, nobody is going to fight corruption for us but us. And therefore, that comes with consequences, and we just have to do the best we can. But I thank you and thank TED for giving us a voice to say to those people, you will not win, and we will not be intimidated. Thank you. (Applause) Kelly Stoetzel: Thank you so much for your great talk and important work. (Applause) |
What a planet needs to sustain life | {0: 'Dave Brain studies the plasma environments and atmospheres of unmagnetized planets.'} | TEDxBoulder | I'm really glad to be here. I'm glad you're here, because that would be a little weird. I'm glad we're all here. And by "here," I don't mean here. Or here. But here. I mean Earth. And by "we," I don't mean those of us in this auditorium, but life, all life on Earth — (Laughter) from complex to single-celled, from mold to mushrooms to flying bears. (Laughter) The interesting thing is, Earth is the only place we know of that has life — 8.7 million species. We've looked other places, maybe not as hard as we should or we could, but we've looked and haven't found any; Earth is the only place we know of with life. Is Earth special? This is a question I've wanted to know the answer to since I was a small child, and I suspect 80 percent of this auditorium has thought the same thing and also wanted to know the answer. To understand whether there are any planets — out there in our solar system or beyond — that can support life, the first step is to understand what life here requires. It turns out, of all of those 8.7 million species, life only needs three things. On one side, all life on Earth needs energy. Complex life like us derives our energy from the sun, but life deep underground can get its energy from things like chemical reactions. There are a number of different energy sources available on all planets. On the other side, all life needs food or nourishment. And this seems like a tall order, especially if you want a succulent tomato. (Laughter) However, all life on Earth derives its nourishment from only six chemical elements, and these elements can be found on any planetary body in our solar system. So that leaves the thing in the middle as the tall pole, the thing that's hardest to achieve. Not moose, but water. (Laughter) Although moose would be pretty cool. (Laughter) And not frozen water, and not water in a gaseous state, but liquid water. This is what life needs to survive, all life. And many solar system bodies don't have liquid water, and so we don't look there. Other solar system bodies might have abundant liquid water, even more than Earth, but it's trapped beneath an icy shell, and so it's hard to access, it's hard to get to, it's hard to even find out if there's any life there. So that leaves a few bodies that we should think about. So let's make the problem simpler for ourselves. Let's think only about liquid water on the surface of a planet. There are only three bodies to think about in our solar system, with regard to liquid water on the surface of a planet, and in order of distance from the sun, it's: Venus, Earth and Mars. You want to have an atmosphere for water to be liquid. You have to be very careful with that atmosphere. You can't have too much atmosphere, too thick or too warm an atmosphere, because then you end up too hot like Venus, and you can't have liquid water. But if you have too little atmosphere and it's too thin and too cold, you end up like Mars, too cold. So Venus is too hot, Mars is too cold, and Earth is just right. You can look at these images behind me and you can see automatically where life can survive in our solar system. It's a Goldilocks-type problem, and it's so simple that a child could understand it. However, I'd like to remind you of two things from the Goldilocks story that we may not think about so often but that I think are really relevant here. Number one: if Mama Bear's bowl is too cold when Goldilocks walks into the room, does that mean it's always been too cold? Or could it have been just right at some other time? When Goldilocks walks into the room determines the answer that we get in the story. And the same is true with planets. They're not static things. They change. They vary. They evolve. And atmospheres do the same. So let me give you an example. Here's one of my favorite pictures of Mars. It's not the highest resolution image, it's not the sexiest image, it's not the most recent image, but it's an image that shows riverbeds cut into the surface of the planet; riverbeds carved by flowing, liquid water; riverbeds that take hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of years to form. This can't happen on Mars today. The atmosphere of Mars today is too thin and too cold for water to be stable as a liquid. This one image tells you that the atmosphere of Mars changed, and it changed in big ways. And it changed from a state that we would define as habitable, because the three requirements for life were present long ago. Where did that atmosphere go that allowed water to be liquid at the surface? Well, one idea is it escaped away to space. Atmospheric particles got enough energy to break free from the gravity of the planet, escaping away to space, never to return. And this happens with all bodies with atmospheres. Comets have tails that are incredibly visible reminders of atmospheric escape. But Venus also has an atmosphere that escapes with time, and Mars and Earth as well. It's just a matter of degree and a matter of scale. So we'd like to figure out how much escaped over time so we can explain this transition. How do atmospheres get their energy for escape? How do particles get enough energy to escape? There are two ways, if we're going to reduce things a little bit. Number one, sunlight. Light emitted from the sun can be absorbed by atmospheric particles and warm the particles. Yes, I'm dancing, but they — (Laughter) Oh my God, not even at my wedding. (Laughter) They get enough energy to escape and break free from the gravity of the planet just by warming. A second way they can get energy is from the solar wind. These are particles, mass, material, spit out from the surface of the sun, and they go screaming through the solar system at 400 kilometers per second, sometimes faster during solar storms, and they go hurtling through interplanetary space towards planets and their atmospheres, and they may provide energy for atmospheric particles to escape as well. This is something that I'm interested in, because it relates to habitability. I mentioned that there were two things about the Goldilocks story that I wanted to bring to your attention and remind you about, and the second one is a little bit more subtle. If Papa Bear's bowl is too hot, and Mama Bear's bowl is too cold, shouldn't Baby Bear's bowl be even colder if we're following the trend? This thing that you've accepted your entire life, when you think about it a little bit more, may not be so simple. And of course, distance of a planet from the sun determines its temperature. This has to play into habitability. But maybe there are other things we should be thinking about. Maybe it's the bowls themselves that are also helping to determine the outcome in the story, what is just right. I could talk to you about a lot of different characteristics of these three planets that may influence habitability, but for selfish reasons related to my own research and the fact that I'm standing up here holding the clicker and you're not — (Laughter) I would like to talk for just a minute or two about magnetic fields. Earth has one; Venus and Mars do not. Magnetic fields are generated in the deep interior of a planet by electrically conducting churning fluid material that creates this big old magnetic field that surrounds Earth. If you have a compass, you know which way north is. Venus and Mars don't have that. If you have a compass on Venus and Mars, congratulations, you're lost. (Laughter) Does this influence habitability? Well, how might it? Many scientists think that a magnetic field of a planet serves as a shield for the atmosphere, deflecting solar wind particles around the planet in a bit of a force field-type effect having to do with electric charge of those particles. I like to think of it instead as a salad bar sneeze guard for planets. (Laughter) And yes, my colleagues who watch this later will realize this is the first time in the history of our community that the solar wind has been equated with mucus. (Laughter) OK, so the effect, then, is that Earth may have been protected for billions of years, because we've had a magnetic field. Atmosphere hasn't been able to escape. Mars, on the other hand, has been unprotected because of its lack of magnetic field, and over billions of years, maybe enough atmosphere has been stripped away to account for a transition from a habitable planet to the planet that we see today. Other scientists think that magnetic fields may act more like the sails on a ship, enabling the planet to interact with more energy from the solar wind than the planet would have been able to interact with by itself. The sails may gather energy from the solar wind. The magnetic field may gather energy from the solar wind that allows even more atmospheric escape to happen. It's an idea that has to be tested, but the effect and how it works seems apparent. That's because we know energy from the solar wind is being deposited into our atmosphere here on Earth. That energy is conducted along magnetic field lines down into the polar regions, resulting in incredibly beautiful aurora. If you've ever experienced them, it's magnificent. We know the energy is getting in. We're trying to measure how many particles are getting out and if the magnetic field is influencing this in any way. So I've posed a problem for you here, but I don't have a solution yet. We don't have a solution. But we're working on it. How are we working on it? Well, we've sent spacecraft to all three planets. Some of them are orbiting now, including the MAVEN spacecraft which is currently orbiting Mars, which I'm involved with and which is led here, out of the University of Colorado. It's designed to measure atmospheric escape. We have similar measurements from Venus and Earth. Once we have all our measurements, we can combine all these together, and we can understand how all three planets interact with their space environment, with the surroundings. And we can decide whether magnetic fields are important for habitability or not. Once we have that answer, why should you care? I mean, I care deeply ... And financially as well, but deeply. (Laughter) First of all, an answer to this question will teach us more about these three planets, Venus, Earth and Mars, not only about how they interact with their environment today, but how they were billions of years ago, whether they were habitable long ago or not. It will teach us about atmospheres that surround us and that are close. But moreover, what we learn from these planets can be applied to atmospheres everywhere, including planets that we're now observing around other stars. For example, the Kepler spacecraft, which is built and controlled here in Boulder, has been observing a postage stamp-sized region of the sky for a couple years now, and it's found thousands of planets — in one postage stamp-sized region of the sky that we don't think is any different from any other part of the sky. We've gone, in 20 years, from knowing of zero planets outside of our solar system, to now having so many, that we don't know which ones to investigate first. Any lever will help. In fact, based on observations that Kepler's taken and other similar observations, we now believe that, of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, on average, every star has at least one planet. In addition to that, estimates suggest there are somewhere between 40 billion and 100 billion of those planets that we would define as habitable in just our galaxy. We have the observations of those planets, but we just don't know which ones are habitable yet. It's a little bit like being trapped on a red spot — (Laughter) on a stage and knowing that there are other worlds out there and desperately wanting to know more about them, wanting to interrogate them and find out if maybe just one or two of them are a little bit like you. You can't do that. You can't go there, not yet. And so you have to use the tools that you've developed around you for Venus, Earth and Mars, and you have to apply them to these other situations, and hope that you're making reasonable inferences from the data, and that you're going to be able to determine the best candidates for habitable planets, and those that are not. In the end, and for now, at least, this is our red spot, right here. This is the only planet that we know of that's habitable, although very soon we may come to know of more. But for now, this is the only habitable planet, and this is our red spot. I'm really glad we're here. Thanks. (Applause) |
A small country with big ideas to get rid of fossil fuels | {0: "In 2015 Monica Araya's native Costa Rica produced almost all of its electricity from renewable sources. She advocates for the next step: a fossil-fuel-free world."} | TEDSummit | How do we build a society without fossil fuels? This is a very complex challenge, and I believe developing countries could take the lead in this transition. And I'm aware that this is a contentious statement, but the reality is that so much is at stake in our countries if we let fossil fuels stay at the center of our development. We can do it differently. And it's time, it really is time, to debunk the myth that a country has to choose between development on the one hand and environmental protection, renewables, quality of life, on the other. I come from Costa Rica, a developing country. We are nearly five million people, and we live right in the middle of the Americas, so it's very easy to remember where we live. Nearly 100 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources, five of them. (Applause) Hydropower, geothermal, wind, solar, biomass. Did you know that last year, for 299 days, we did not use any fossil fuels in order to generate all our electricity? It's a fantastic achievement, and yet, it hides a paradox, which is that nearly 70 percent of all our energy consumption is oil. Why? Because of our transportation system, which is totally dependent on fossil fuels, like it is in most countries. So if we think of the energy transition as a marathon, the question is, how do we get to the finish line, how do we decarbonize the rest of the economy? And it's fair to say that if we don't succeed, it's difficult to see who will. So that is why I want to talk to you about Costa Rica, because I believe we are a great candidate in pioneering a vision for development without fossil fuels. If you know one thing about our country, it's that we don't have an army. So I'm going to take you back to 1948. That year, the country was coming out of civil war. Thousands of Costa Ricans had died, and families were bitterly split. And yet, a surprising idea won the hearts and minds: we would reboot the country, and that Second Republic would have no army. So we abolished it. And the president at the time, José Figueres, found a powerful way by smashing the walls of an army base. The following year, 1949, we made that decision permanent in the new constitution, and that is why I can tell you that story nearly 70 years later. And I'm grateful. I'm grateful they made that decision before I was born, because it allowed me and millions of others to live in a very stable country. And you might be thinking that it was good luck, but it wasn't. There was a pattern of deliberate choices. In the '40s, Costa Ricans were given free education and free health care. We called that social guarantees. By abolishing the army, we were able to turn military spending into social spending, and that was a driver of stability. In the '50s — (Applause) In the '50s, we started investing in hydropower, and that kept us away from the trap of using fossil fuels for electricity generation, which is what the world is struggling with today. In the '70s we invested in national parks, and that kept us away from the deeply flawed logic of growth, growth, growth at any cost that you see others embracing, especially in the developing world. In the '90s, we pioneered payments for ecosystem services, and that helped us reverse deforestation and boosted ecotourism, which today is a key engine of growth. So investing in environmental protection did not hurt our economy. Quite the opposite. And it doesn't mean we are perfect, and it doesn't mean we don't have contradictions. That's not the point. The point is that, by making our own choices, we were able to develop resilience in dealing with development problems. Also, if you take a country like ours, the GDP per capita is around 11,000 dollars, depending on how you measure it. But according to the Social Progress Index, we are an absolute outlier when it comes to turning GDP into social progress. Abolishing the army, investing in nature and people, did something very powerful, too. It shaped the narrative, the narrative of a small country with big ideas, and it was very empowering to grow up with that narrative. So the question is, what is the next big idea for this generation? And I believe what comes next is for this generation to let go of fossil fuels for good, just as we did with the army. Fossil fuels create climate change. We know that, and we know how vulnerable we are to the impacts of climate change. So as a developing country, it is in our best interest to build development without fossil fuels that harm people in the first place. Because why would we continue importing oil for transportation if we can use electricity instead? Remember, this is the country where electricity comes from water in our rivers, heat from volcanoes, wind turbines, solar panels, biowaste. Abolishing fossil fuels means disrupting our transportation system so that we can power our cars, buses and trains with electricity instead of dirty energy. And transportation, let me tell you, has become an existential issue for us Costa Ricans, because the model we have is not working for us. It's hurting people, it's hurting companies, and it's hurting our health. Because when policies and infrastructure fail, this is what happens on a daily basis. Two hours in the morning, two hours in the evening. I don't understand why we have to accept this as normal. It's offensive to have to waste our time like this every single day. And this highway is actually quite good compared to what you see in other countries where traffic is exploding. You know, Costa Ricans call this "presa." Presa means "imprisoned." And people are turning violent in a country that is otherwise happy in pura vida. It's happening. So a lot is at stake. The good news is that when we talk about clean transportation and different mobility, we're not talking about some distant utopia out there. We're talking about electric mobility that is happening today. By 2022, electric cars and conventional cars are expected to cost the same, and cities are already trying electric buses. And these really cool creatures are saving money, and they reduce pollution. So if we want to get rid of oil-based transportation, we can, because we have options now that we didn't have before. It's really exciting. But of course, some get very uncomfortable with this idea, and they will come and they will tell you that the world is stuck with oil, and so is Costa Rica, so get real. That's what they tell you. And you know what the answer to that argument is? That in 1948, we didn't say the world is stuck with armies, so let's keep our army, too. No, we made a very brave choice, and that choice made the whole difference. So it's time for this generation to be brave again and abolish fossil fuels for good. And I'll give you three reasons why we have to do this. First, our model of transportation and urbanization is broken, so this is the best moment to redefine our urban and mobility future. We don't want cities that are built for cars. We want cities for people where we can walk and we can use bikes. And we want public transportation, lots of it, public transportation that is clean and dignifying. Because if we continue adding fleets of conventional cars, our cities will become unbearable. Second, we have to change, but incremental change is not going to be sufficient. We need transformational change. And there are some incremental projects in my country, and I am the first one to celebrate them. But let's not kid ourselves. We're not talking about ending up with really beautiful electric cars here and a few electric buses there while we keep investing in the same kind of infrastructure, more cars, more roads, more oil. We're talking about breaking free from oil, and you cannot get there through incrementalism. Third, and you know this one, the world is hungry for inspiration. It craves stories of success in dealing with complex issues, especially in developing countries. So I believe Costa Rica can be an inspiration to others, as we did last year when we disclosed that for so many days we were not using any fossil fuels in order to generate all our electricity. The news went viral around the world. Also, and this makes me extremely proud, a Costa Rican woman, Christiana Figueres, played a decisive role in the negotiations of the Paris climate agreement. So we have to protect that legacy and be an example. So what comes next? The people. How do we get people to own this? How do we get people to believe that it's possible to build a society without fossil fuels? A lot of work from the ground up is needed. That is why, in 2014, we created Costa Rica Limpia. "Limpia" means "clean," because we want to empower and we want to inspire citizens. If citizens don't get engaged, clean transportation decisions will be bogged down by endless, and I mean endless, technical discussions, and by avalanches of lobbying by various established interests. Wanting to be a green country powered by renewables is already part of our story. We should not let anybody take that away from us. Last year, we brought people from our seven provinces to talk about climate change in terms that matter to them, and we also brought this year another group of Costa Ricans to talk about renewable energy. And you know what? These people disagree on almost everything except on renewable energy and clean transportation and clean air. It brings people together. And the key to real participation is to help people not to feel small. People feel powerless, and they are tired of not being heard. So what we do is concrete things, and we translate technical issues into citizen language to show that citizens have a role to play and can play it together. For the first time, we're tracking the promises that were made on clean transportation, and politicos know that they have to deliver it, but the tipping point will come when we form coalitions — citizens, companies, champions of public transportation — that will make electric mobility the new normal, especially in a developing country. By the time the next election comes, I believe every candidate will have to disclose where they stand on the abolition of fossil fuels. Because this question has to enter our mainstream politics. And I'm telling you, this is not a question of climate policy or environmental agenda. It's about the country that we want and the cities that we have and the cities that we want and who makes that choice. Because at the end of the day, what we have to show is that development with renewable energy is good for the people, for Costa Ricans that are alive today and especially for those who haven't been born. This is our National Museum today. It's bright and peaceful, and when you stand up in front of it, it's really hard to believe these were military barracks at the end of the '40s. We started a new life without an army in this place, and here is where our abolition of fossil fuels will be announced one day. And we will make history again. Thank you. (Applause) |
3 moons and a planet that could have alien life | {0: "James Green leads NASA's solar system exploration and astrobiology research."} | TED Talks Live | Is there life beyond Earth in our solar system? Wow, what a powerful question. You know, as a scientist — planetary scientist — we really didn't take that very seriously until recently. Carl Sagan always said, "It takes extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims." And the claims of having life beyond Earth need to be definitive, they need to be loud and they need to be everywhere for us to be able to believe it. So how do we make this journey? What we decided to do is first look for those ingredients for life. The ingredients of life are: liquid water — we have to have a solvent, can't be ice, has to be liquid. We also have to have energy. We also have to have organic material — things that make us up, but also things that we need to consume. So we have to have these elements in environments for long periods of time for us to be able to be confident that life, in that moment when it starts, can spark and then grow and evolve. Well, I have to tell you that early in my career, when we looked at those three elements, I didn't believe that they were beyond Earth in any length of time and for any real quantity. Why? We look at the inner planets. Venus is way too hot — it's got no water. Mars — dry and arid. It's got no water. And beyond Mars, the water in the solar system is all frozen. But recent observations have changed all that. It's now turning our attention to the right places for us to take a deeper look and really start to answer our life question. So when we look out into the solar system, where are the possibilities? We're concentrating our attention on four locations. The planet Mars and then three moons of the outer planets: Titan, Europa and small Enceladus. So what about Mars? Let's go through the evidence. Well, Mars we thought was initially moon-like: full of craters, arid and a dead world. And so about 15 years ago, we started a series of missions to go to Mars and see if water existed on Mars in its past that changed its geology. We ought to be able to notice that. And indeed we started to be surprised right away. Our higher resolution images show deltas and river valleys and gulleys that were there in the past. And in fact, Curiosity — which has been roving on the surface now for about three years — has really shown us that it's sitting in an ancient river bed, where water flowed rapidly. And not for a little while, perhaps hundreds of millions of years. And if everything was there, including organics, perhaps life had started. Curiosity has also drilled in that red soil and brought up other material. And we were really excited when we saw that. Because it wasn't red Mars, it was gray material, it's gray Mars. We brought it into the rover, we tasted it, and guess what? We tasted organics — carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur — they were all there. So Mars in its past, with a lot of water, perhaps plenty of time, could have had life, could have had that spark, could have grown. And is that life still there? We don't know that. But a few years ago we started to look at a number of craters. During the summer, dark lines would appear down the sides of these craters. The more we looked, the more craters we saw, the more of these features. We now know more than a dozen of them. A few months ago the fairy tale came true. We announced to the world that we know what these streaks are. It's liquid water. These craters are weeping during the summer. Liquid water is flowing down these craters. So what are we going to do now — now that we see the water? Well, it tells us that Mars has all the ingredients necessary for life. In its past it had perhaps two-thirds of its northern hemisphere — there was an ocean. It has weeping water right now. Liquid water on its surface. It has organics. It has all the right conditions. So what are we going to do next? We're going to launch a series of missions to begin that search for life on Mars. And now it's more appealing than ever before. As we move out into the solar system, here's the tiny moon Enceladus. This is not in what we call the traditional habitable zone, this area around the sun. This is much further out. This object should be ice over a silicate core. But what did we find? Cassini was there since 2006, and after a couple years looked back after it flew by Enceladus and surprised us all. Enceladus is blasting sheets of water out into the solar system and sloshing back down onto the moon. What a fabulous environment. Cassini just a few months ago also flew through the plume, and it measured silicate particles. Where does the silica come from? It must come from the ocean floor. The tidal energy is generated by Saturn, pulling and squeezing this moon — is melting that ice, creating an ocean. But it's also doing that to the core. Now, the only thing that we can think of that does that here on Earth as an analogy ... are hydrothermal vents. Hydrothermal vents deep in our ocean were discovered in 1977. Oceanographers were completely surprised. And now there are thousands of these below the ocean. What do we find? The oceanographers, when they go and look at these hydrothermal vents, they're teeming with life, regardless of whether the water is acidic or alkaline — doesn't matter. So hydrothermal vents are a fabulous abode for life here on Earth. So what about Enceladus? Well, we believe because it has water and has had it for a significant period of time, and we believe it has hydrothermal vents with perhaps the right organic material, it is a place where life could exist. And not just microbial — maybe more complex because it's had time to evolve. Another moon, very similar, is Europa. Galileo visited Jupiter's system in 1996 and made fabulous observations of Europa. Europa, we also know, has an under-the-ice crust ocean. Galileo mission told us that, but we never saw any plumes. But we didn't look for them. Hubble, just a couple years ago, observing Europa, saw plumes of water spraying from the cracks in the southern hemisphere, just exactly like Enceladus. These moons, which are not in what we call a traditional habitable zone, that are out in the solar system, have liquid water. And if there are organics there, there may be life. This is a fabulous set of discoveries because these moons have been in this environment like that for billions of years. Life started here on Earth, we believe, after about the first 500 million, and look where we are. These moons are fabulous moons. Another moon that we're looking at is Titan. Titan is a huge moon of Saturn. It perhaps is much larger than the planet Mercury. It has an extensive atmosphere. It's so extensive — and it's mostly nitrogen with a little methane and ethane — that you have to peer through it with radar. And on the surface, Cassini has found liquid. We see lakes ... actually almost the size of our Black Sea in some places. And this area is not liquid water; it's methane. If there's any place in the solar system where life is not like us, where the substitute of water is another solvent — and it could be methane — it could be Titan. Well, is there life beyond Earth in the solar system? We don't know yet, but we're hot on the pursuit. The data that we're receiving is really exciting and telling us — forcing us to think about this in new and exciting ways. I believe we're on the right track. That in the next 10 years, we will answer that question. And if we answer it, and it's positive, then life is everywhere in the solar system. Just think about that. We may not be alone. Thank you. (Applause) |
Hunting for Peru's lost civilizations -- with satellites | {0: 'Like a modern-day Indiana Jones, Sarah Parcak uses satellite images to locate lost ancient sites. The winner of the 2016 TED Prize, her wish is to protect the world’s shared cultural heritage.'} | TEDSummit | In July of 1911, a 35-year-old Yale graduate and professor set out from his rainforest camp with his team. After climbing a steep hill and wiping the sweat from his brow, he described what he saw beneath him. He saw rising from the dense rainforest foliage this incredible interlocking maze of structures built of granite, beautifully put together. What's amazing about this project is that it was the first funded by National Geographic, and it graced the front cover of its magazine in 1912. This professor used state-of-the-art photography equipment to record the site, forever changing the face of exploration. The site was Machu Picchu, discovered and explored by Hiram Bingham. When he saw the site, he asked, "This is an impossible dream. What could it be?" So today, 100 years later, I invite you all on an incredible journey with me, a 37-year-old Yale graduate and professor. (Cheers) We will do nothing less than use state-of-the-art technology to map an entire country. This is a dream started by Hiram Bingham, but we are expanding it to the world, making archaeological exploration more open, inclusive, and at a scale simply not previously possible. This is why I am so excited to share with you all today that we will begin the 2016 TED Prize platform in Latin America, more specifically Peru. (Applause) Thank you. We will be taking Hiram Bingham's impossible dream and turning it into an amazing future that we can all share in together. So Peru doesn't just have Machu Picchu. It has absolutely stunning jewelry, like what you can see here. It has amazing Moche pottery of human figures. It has the Nazca Lines and amazing textiles. So as part of the TED Prize platform, we are going to partnering with some incredible organizations, first of all with DigitalGlobe, the world's largest provider of high-resolution commercial satellite imagery. They're going to be helping us build out this amazing crowdsourcing platform they have. Maybe some of you used it with the MH370 crash and search for the airplane. Of course, they'll also be providing us with the satellite imagery. National Geographic will be helping us with education and of course exploration. As well, they'll be providing us with rich content for the platform, including some of the archival imagery like you saw at the beginning of this talk and some of their documentary footage. We've already begun to build and plan the platform, and I'm just so excited. So here's the cool part. My team, headed up by Chase Childs, is already beginning to look at some of the satellite imagery. Of course, what you can see here is 0.3-meter data. This is site called Chan Chan in northern Peru. It dates to 850 AD. It's a really amazing city, but let's zoom in. This is the type and quality of data that you all will get to see. You can see individual structures, individual buildings. And we've already begun to find previously unknown sites. What we can say already is that as part of the platform, you will all help discover thousands of previously unknown sites, like this one here, and this potentially large one here. Unfortunately, we've also begun to uncover large-scale looting at sites, like what you see here. So many sites in Peru are threatened, but the great part is that all of this data is going to be shared with archaeologists on the front lines of protecting these sites. So I was just in Peru, meeting with their Minister of Culture as well as UNESCO. We'll be collaborating closely with them. Just so you all know, the site is going to be in both English and Spanish, which is absolutely essential to make sure that people in Peru and across Latin America can participate. Our main project coprincipal investigator is the gentleman you see here, Dr. Luis Jaime Castillo, professor at Catholic University. As a respected Peruvian archaeologist and former vice-minister, Dr. Castillo will be helping us coordinate and share the data with archaeologists so they can explore these sites on the ground. He also runs this amazing drone mapping program, some of the images of which you can see behind me here and here. And this data will be incorporated into the platform, and also he'll be helping to image some of the new sites you help find. Our on-the-ground partner who will be helping us with education, outreach, as well as site preservation components, is the Sustainable Preservation Initiative, led by Dr. Larry Coben. Some of you may not be aware that some of the world's poorest communities coexist with some of the world's most well-known archaeological sites. What SPI does is it helps to empower these communities, in particular women, with new economic approaches and business training. So it helps to teach them to create beautiful handicrafts which are then sold on to tourists. This empowers the women to treasure their cultural heritage and take ownership of it. I had the opportunity to spend some time with 24 of these women at a well-known archaeological site called Pachacamac, just outside Lima. These women were unbelievably inspiring, and what's great is that SPI will help us transform communities near some of the sites that you help to discover. Peru is just the beginning. We're going to be expanding this platform to the world, but already I've gotten thousands of emails from people all across the world — professors, educators, students, and other archaeologists — who are so excited to help participate. In fact, they're already suggesting amazing places for us to help discover, including Atlantis. I don't know if we're going to be looking for Atlantis, but you never know. So I'm just so excited to launch this platform. It's going to be launched formally by the end of the year. And I have to say, if what my team has already discovered in the past few weeks are any indication, what the world discovers is just going to be beyond imagination. Make sure to hold on to your alpacas. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
A letter to all who have lost in this era | {0: 'Anand Giridharadas writes about people and cultures caught amid the great forces of our time.'} | TEDSummit | June 29, 2016. My dear fellow citizen: I write to you today, to you who have lost in this era. At this moment in our common life, when the world is full of breaking and spite and fear, I address this letter simply to you, even though we both know there are many of you behind this "you," and many of me behind this "I." I write to you because at present, this quaking world we share scares me. I gather it scares you, too. Some of what we fear, I suspect, we fear in common. But much of what we fear seems to be each other. You fear the world I want to live in, and I fear your visions in turn. Do you know that feeling you get when you know it's going to storm before it storms? Do you also feel that now, fellow citizen? That malaise and worry that some who know feel reminds them of the 1930s? Perhaps you don't, because our fears of each other are not in sync. In this round, I sense that your fears of me, of the world that I have insisted is right for us both, has gathered over a generation. It took time for your fears to trigger my fears, not least because at first, I never thought I needed to fear you. I heard you but did not listen, all these years when you said that this amazing new world wasn't amazing for you, for many of you, across the industrialized world; that the open, liquid world I relished, of people and goods and technologies flowing freely, going where they pleased, globally, was not, for you, an emancipation. I have walked through your towns and, while looking, failed to see. I did notice in Stephenville, Texas, that the town square was dominated by one lawyer's office after another, because of all the people rotating in and out of the prison. I did notice the barren shops in Wagner, South Dakota, and the VFW gathering hall that stood in mockery of a community's dream to endure. I did notice at the Lancaster, Pennsylvania Wal-Mart, that far too many people in their 20s and 30s looked a decade or two from death, with patchy, flared-up skin and thinning, stringy hair and browning, ground-down teeth and a lostness in their eyes. I did notice that the young people I encountered in Paris, in Florence, in Barcelona, had degrees but no place to take them, living on internships well into their 30s, their lives prevented from launching, because of an economy that creates wealth — just not jobs. I did notice the news about those parts of London becoming ghost quarters, where the global super-rich turn fishy money into empty apartments and price lifelong residents of a city, young couples starting out, out of their own home. And I heard that the fabric of your life was tearing. You used to be able to count on work, and now you couldn't. You used to be able to nourish your children, and guarantee that they would climb a little bit further in life than you had, and now you couldn't. You used to be made to feel dignity in your work, and now you didn't. It used to be normal for people like you to own a home, and now it wasn't. I cannot say I didn't know these things, but I was distracted creating a future in which we could live on Mars, even as you struggled down here on Earth. I was distracted innovating immortality, even as many of you began to live shorter lives than your parents had. I heard all of these things, but I didn't listen. I looked but didn't see. I read, didn't understand. I paid attention only when you began to vote and shout, and when your voting and shouting, when the substance of it, began to threaten me. I listened only when you moved toward shattering continental unions and electing vulgar demagogues. Only then did your pain become of interest to me. I know that feeling hurt is often prologue to dealing hurt. I wonder now if you would be less eager to deal it if I had stood with you when you merely felt it. I ask myself why I didn't stand with you then. One reason is that I became entranced by the gurus of change, became a worshiper of the religion of the new for novelty's sake, and of globalization and open borders and kaleidoscopic diversity. Once change became my totalizing faith, I could be blind. I could fail to see change's consequences. I could overlook the importance of roots, traditions, rituals, stability — and belonging. And the more fundamentalist I became in my worship of change and openness, the more I drove you towards the other polarity, to cling, to freeze, to close, to belong. I now see as I didn't before that not having the right skin or right organ is not the only varietal of disadvantage. There is a subtler, quieter disadvantage in having those privileged traits and yet feeling history to be moving away from you; that while the past was hospitable to people like you, the future will be more hospitable to others; that the world is growing less familiar, less yours day by day. I will not concede for a moment that old privileges should not dwindle. They cannot dwindle fast enough. It is for you to learn to live in a new century in which there are no bonuses for showing up with the right skin and right organs. If and when your anger turns to hate, please know that there is no space for that in our shared home. But I will admit, fellow citizen, that I have discounted the burden of coping with the loss of status. I have forgotten that what is socially necessary can also be personally gruelling. A similar thing happened with the economy that you and I share. Just as I cannot and don't wish to turn back to the clock on equality and diversity, and yet must understand the sense of loss they can inspire, so, too, I refuse and could not if I wished turn back the clock on an ever more closely knit, interdependent world, and on inventions that won't stop being invented. And yet I must understand your experience of these things. You have for years been telling me that your experience of these things is not as good as my theories forecast. Yet before you could finish a complaining sentence about the difficulty of living with erratic hours, volatile pay, vanishing opportunities, about the pain of dropping your children off at 24-hour day care to make your 3am shift, I shot back at you — before you could finish your sentence — my dogma, about how what you are actually experiencing was flexibility and freedom. Language is one of the only things that we truly share, and I sometimes used this joint inheritance to obfuscate and deflect and justify myself; to re-brand what was good for me as something appearing good for us both, when I threw around terms like "the sharing economy," and "disruption" and "global resourcing." I see now that what I was really doing, at times, was buying your pain on the cheap, sprucing it up and trying to sell it back to you as freedom. I have wanted to believe and wanted you to believe that the system that has been good to me, that has made my life ever more seamless, is also the best system for you. I have condescended to you with the idea that you are voting against your economic interests — voting against your interests, as if I know your interests. That is just my dogmatic economism talking. I have a weakness for treating people's economic interests as their only interest, ignoring things like belonging and pride and the desire to send a message to those who ignore you. So here we are, in a scary but not inexplicable moment of demagoguery, fracture, xenophobia, resentment and fear. And I worry for us both if we continue down this road, me not listening, you feeling unheard, you shouting to get me to listen. I worry when each of us is seduced by visions of the future that have no place for the other. If this goes on, if this goes on, there may be blood. There are already hints of this blood in newspapers every day. There may be roundups, raids, deportations, camps, secessions. And no, I do not think that I exaggerate. There may be even talk of war in places that were certain they were done with it. There is always the hope of redemption. But it will not be a cheap, shallow redemption that comes through blather about us all being in it together. This will take more. It will take accepting that we both made choices to be here. We create our "others." As parents, as neighbors, as citizens, we witness and sometimes ignore each other into being. You were not born vengeful. I have some role in whatever thirst you now feel for revenge, and that thirst now tempts me to plot ever more elaborate escapes from our common life, from the schools and neighborhoods and airports and amusement parks that we used to share. We face, then, a problem not of these large, impersonal forces. We face a problem of your and my relations. We chose ways of relating to each other that got us here. We can choose ways of relating that get us out. But there are things we might have to let go of, fellow citizen, starting with our own cherished versions of reality. Imagine if you let go of fantasies of a society purged of these or those people. Imagine if I let go of my habit of saving the world behind your back, of deliberating on the future of your work, your food, your schools, in places where you couldn't get past security. We can do this only if we first accept that we have neglected each other. If there is hope to summon in this ominous hour, it is this. We have, for too long, chased various shimmering dreams at the cost of attention to the foundational dream of each other, the dream of tending to each other, of unleashing each other's wonders, of moving through history together. We could dare to commit to the dream of each other as the thing that matters before every neon thing. Let us dare. Sincerely yours, a fellow citizen. (Applause) |
How Argentina's blind soccer team became champions | {0: 'Gonzalo Vilariño uses sport to change the rules of the game for the disabled.'} | TEDxRiodelaPlata | I opened a blind man's head. I didn't make him think or reflect — I cracked his head open, literally. We were walking with him holding onto my shoulder, I miscalculated how much space there was between us, and I knocked him into a gate. (Laughter) Five stitches in his forehead. At that moment, I felt like the worst teacher in the world. I really didn't know how to apologize. Luckily, El Pulga is one of those people who takes things quite well. And to this day, he says that I was the coach who left the most important mark on his career. (Laughter) The truth is, when I started working at the institute for the blind, I was surprised by a lot of things. A lot of the things they did, I never imagined they could: they swam, did exercise, played cards. They drank mate, and could pour it without burning themselves in the process. But when I saw them playing soccer — that was amazing. They had a dirt field, rusty goalposts and broken nets. The blind who attended the institute would play their games there, just like I did at a field near my house. But they played without being able to see. The ball made a sound so they could locate it. They had a guide behind the rival team's goal to know where to kick the ball. And they used eye masks. There were guys who could still see a little, and they wore eye masks so everyone was equal. When I was more at ease with them, I asked for a mask myself. I put it on and tried to play. I had played soccer all my life. This is where it got even more amazing: within two seconds, I didn't know where I was standing. I had studied physical education because I loved high performance. I started working at the institute by chance. My other job was with the Argentinian National Rowing Team, and I felt that was my thing. Here, everything was twice as hard. I'll never forget the first day I did the warm-up with the team. I lined them up in front of me — I used to do that with the rowing team — and I said, "OK, everyone bend down," going like this. When I looked up, two guys were seated, three were lying down and others were squatting. (Laughter) How could I do here the same things I was doing there? It took me a while. I started looking for tools to learn from them, from the teachers who worked with them. I learned I couldn't explain a play on a chalkboard like a coach does, but I could use a plastic tray and some bottle caps so they could follow me by way of touch. I also learned they could run on a track if I ran with them, holding a rope. So we started looking for volunteers to help us run with them. I was enjoying it, and finding purpose and meaning in what we were doing. It was hard at first, it was uncomfortable, but I decided to overcome the discomfort. And there came a time when it became the most fascinating job I'd ever had. I think that's when I wondered: Why couldn't we be a high-performance team as well? Of course, one thing was missing: I needed to find out what they wanted, the real protagonists of this story. Three hours of training, playing soccer on that field, were not going to be enough. We would have to train differently. We started to train harder, and the results were great; they asked for more. I came to understand that they, too, wondered why they couldn't do high-performance. When we felt ready, we knocked at CENARD's door. CENARD is the National Center for High-Performance Sports here in Argentina. It was hard to get them to hear what we had to say. But it was considerably more difficult to get the other athletes training there to consider us their equals. In fact, they would let us use the field only when no other teams were using it. And we were known as "the blind ones." Not everyone knew exactly what we were doing there. The 2006 World Championship was a turning point in the team's history. It was held in Buenos Aires for the first time. It was our chance to show everyone what we had been doing all that time. We made it to the finals. We were growing as a team. It was us against Brazil in the finals. They were the best team in the tournament. They won every game by a landslide. Hardly anyone believed we could win that game. Hardly anyone — except for us. During pre-game meetings, in the locker room, during each warm-up, it smelled of victory. I swear that smell exists. I smelled it several times with the team, but I remember it in particular, the day before we played that final. The Argentine Football Association had opened their doors to us. We were training at AFA, where Verón, Higuain and Messi trained. For the first time ever, we felt like a true national team. At 7:30pm, the day before the game, we were in the lounge discussing strategy, and a waiter knocks on the door, interrupting our conversation. He suggested we go to church. He came to invite us to church. I tried to get rid of him, saying it wasn't a good time, that we better leave it for another day. He kept insisting, asking me to please let him take the guys to church, because that day, a pastor who performed miracles would be there. I was slightly afraid to ask what type of miracles he meant, and he replied nonchalantly, "Coach, let me take the team to the church, and when we return, I guarantee that half of them will be able to see." (Laughter) Some of the guys laughed, but imagine being a blind person and someone says that to you. I didn't know what to say. I said nothing; it was an awkward silence. I didn't want to make him feel bad, because he truly believed this could happen. One of the players saved me, when he stood up and confidently said, "Juan," — that was the kid's name — Gonza already told you it's not the best time to go to church. Besides, let me make this clear: if we go to that church, and I end up being able to see when we return, I will beat you so hard if I can't play tomorrow." (Laughter) (Applause) Juan left, laughing in resignation, and we continued with our pregame talk. That night when I went to sleep, I began to dream about the next day's game, imagining what could happen, how we would play. And that's when I noticed that smell of victory I mentioned a while ago. And it's because at that moment, I thought: if the other players had the same desire as Diego going into the game, it was impossible for us not to win. The next day was going to be wonderful. We got up at 9am, the game was at 7pm, and we were already eager to play. We left AFA, and the bus was full of flags that people had given to us. We were talking about the game, and we could hear people honking and cheering, "Go Murciélagos! Today's the day! The final challenge!" The guys asked me, "Do they know us? Do they know we're playing?" Some people followed the bus to CENARD. We arrived and found an amazing scene. In the corridor leading from the locker room to the game field, I was walking with Silvio, who was holding onto my shoulder, so I could guide him. Fortunately, there were no gates along the way. (Laughter) When we reached the field, he asked me about everything. He didn't want to miss a single detail. He said, "Tell me what you see, tell me who's playing the drums." I tried to explain what was happening with as much detail as possible. I told him, "The stands are packed, a lot of people couldn't get in, there are blue and white balloons all over the field, they're opening a giant Argentine flag that covers the entire grandstand." Suddenly, he cuts me off and says, "Do you see a flag that says 'San Pedro'?" That's the city where he lives. I started looking into the stands and I spotted a little white flag with lettering done in black spray paint, that read: "Silvio, your family and all of San Pedro are here." I told him that and he replied, "That's my mom, tell me where she is, I want to I wave at her." I pointed him toward the flag and showed him with his arm where they were sitting, and he waved his arms in that direction. About 20 or 30 people stood up and gave him an ovation. When that happened, I saw how his face changed, how moved he was. It was moving for me, too; two seconds later, I had a lump in my throat. It was strange — I felt both the excitement of what was happening, and the anger and the anguish that he could not see it. A few days later when I told him what I had experienced, he tried to reassure me, saying, "Gonza, don't feel bad, I could see them. Differently, but I swear to you that I saw them all." The game started. We could not fail; it was the final. The audience was quiet, like here, because in soccer for the blind, the public has to be quiet so the players can hear the ball. They're only allowed to cheer when the game is over. And when there were eight minutes to go, the crowd did all the cheering they hadn't done in the first 32 minutes. When pigeon-toed Silvio nailed the ball at an angle, they cheered with all their heart, in an incredible way. Today, if you go to CENARD, you'll see a huge poster on the door, with a photo of our team, Los Murciélagos. They're a model national team, everyone in CENARD knows who they are, and after having won two World Championships and two Paralympic medals, no one doubts they are high-performance athletes. (Applause) (Applause ends) I was lucky to train this team for 10 years, first as a trainer and later as their coach. I feel that they've given me much more than what I've given them. Last year, they asked me to coach another national team, Power Soccer. It's a national team of young men who play soccer in wheelchairs. They use motorized wheelchairs that they drive with a joystick, because they don't have enough strength in their arms to use conventional chairs. They added a bumper to the chair, a safeguard that protects their feet, while allowing them to kick the ball. It's the first time that, instead of being the spectators, they're now the main characters. It's the first time their parents, friends and siblings can see them play. For me, it's a new challenge, with the same discomfort, insecurity, and fear I had when I started working with the blind. But I approach it all from a more experienced position. That's why from day one, I treat them as athletes on the field, and off the field, I try to put myself in their shoes and behave without prejudice, because treating them naturally feels best to them. Both teams play soccer; something once unthinkable for them. They had to adapt the rules to do so. And both teams broke the same rule — the one that said they couldn't play soccer. When you see them play, you see competition, not disability. The problem starts when the game is over, and they leave the field. Then they step in to play our game, in a society whose rules don't really take them into account or care for them. I learned from sports that disability greatly depends on the rules of the game. I believe that if we change some of the rules of our game, we can make life a little easier for them. We all know there are people with disabilities; we see them daily. But by having no direct contact with them, we're not aware of the problems they face every day, like how hard it is for them to get on a bus, find a job, take the subway or cross the street. It's true that there is an increasing social responsibility regarding the inclusion of people with disabilities. But I think it's still not enough. I think change needs to come from every one of us. First, by leaving behind our indifference toward the disabled, and then by respecting the rules that do take them into account. They are few, but they do exist. I cracked a blind man's head open — El Pulga's head. I can assure you these two teams opened mine as well. They taught me that above all, you have to get out there and play every game in this beautiful tournament that we call life. Thank you. (Applause) |
The next manufacturing revolution is here | {0: "BCG's Olivier Scalabre analyzes the evolution of large industrial companies' manufacturing footprint and operations. "} | TED@BCG Paris | Guys, we have an issue. (Laughter) Growth is fading away, and it's a big deal. Our global economy stops growing. And it's not new. Growth has actually declined for the last 50 years. If we continue like this, we need to learn how to live in a world with no growth in the next decade. This is scary because when the economy doesn't grow, our children don't get better lives. What's even scarier is that when the pie does not grow, each of us get a smaller piece. We're then ready to fight for a bigger one. This creates tensions and serious conflicts. Growth matters a lot. If we look at the history of growth, times of big growth have always been fueled by big manufacturing revolutions. It happened three times, every 50-60 years. The steam engine in the middle of the 19th century, the mass-production model in the beginning of the 20th century — thanks, Mr. Ford. And the first automation wave in the 1970s. Why did these manufacturing revolutions create huge growth in our economies? Because they have injected huge productivity improvement. It's rather simple: in order to grow, you need to be producing more, putting more into our economy. This means either more labor or more capital or more productivity. Each time, productivity has been the growth lever. I'm here today to tell you that we are on the verge of another huge change, and that this change, surprisingly enough, is going to come from manufacturing, again. It will get us out of our growth slump and it will change radically the way globalization has been shaped over the last decade. I'm here to tell you about the amazing fourth manufacturing revolution that is currently underway. It's not as if we've done nothing with manufacturing since the last revolution. Actually, we've made some pretty lame attempts to try to revitalize it. But none of them have been the big overhaul we really need to get us growing again. For example, we've tried to relocate our factories offshore in order to reduce cost and take advantage of cheap labor. Not only did this not inspire productivity, but it only saved money for a short period of time, because cheap labor didn't stay cheap for long. Then, we've tried to make our factories larger and we specialized them by product. The idea was that we can make a lot of one product and stockpile it to be sold with demand. This did help productivity for a while. But it introduced a lot of rigidities in our supply chain. Let's take fashion retail. Traditional clothing companies have built offshore, global, rigid supply chains. When fast-fashion competitors like Zara started replenishing their stocks faster from two collections a year to one collection a month, none of them have been able to keep up with the pace. Most of them are in great difficulties today. Yet, with all of their shortcomings, those are the factories we know today. When you open the doors, they look the same as they did 50 years ago. We've just changed the location, the size, the way they operate. Can you name anything else that looks the same as it did 50 years ago? It's crazy. We've made all the tweaks to the model that we could, and now we hit its limits. After all of our attempts to fix the manufacturing model failed, we thought growth could come from elsewhere. We turned to the tech sector — there's been quite a lot of innovations there. Just to name one: the Internet. We hoped it could produce growth. And indeed, it changed our lives. It made big waves in the media, the service, the entertainment spaces. But it hasn't done much for productivity. Actually, what's surprising is that productivity is on the decline despite all of those innovation efforts. Imagine that — sitting at work, scrolling through Facebook, watching videos on YouTube has made us less productive. Weird. (Laughter) This is why we are not growing. We failed at reinventing the manufacturing space, and large technological innovations have played away from it. But what if we could combine those forces? What if the existing manufacturing and large technological innovation came together to create the next big manufacturing reinvention. Bingo! This is the fourth manufacturing revolution, and it's happening right now. Major technologies are entering the manufacturing space, big time. They will boost industrial productivity by more than a third. This is massive, and it will do a lot in creating growth. Let me tell you about some of them. Have you already met advanced manufacturing robots? They are the size of humans, they actually collaborate with them, and they can be programmed in order to perform complex, non-repetitive tasks. Today in our factories, only 8 percent of the tasks are automated. The less complex, the more repetitive ones. It will be 25 percent in 10 years. It means that by 2025, advanced robots will complement workers to be, together, 20 percent more productive, to manufacture 20 percent more outputs, to achieve 20 percent additional growth. This isn't some fancy, futuristic idea. These robots are working for us right now. Last year in the US, they helped Amazon prepare and ship all the products required for Cyber Monday, the annual peak of online retail. Last year in the US, it was the biggest online shopping day of the year and of history. Consumers spent 3 billion dollars on electronics that day. That's real economic growth. Then there's additive manufacturing, 3D printing. 3D printing has already improved plastic manufacturing and it's now making its way through metal. Those are not small industries. Plastic and metals represent 25 percent of global manufacturing production. Let's take a real example. In the aerospace industry, fuel nozzles are some of the most complex parts to manufacture, for one reason: they are made up of 20 different parts that need to be separately produced and then painstakingly assembled. Aerospace companies are now using 3D printing, which allows them to turn those 20 different parts into just one. The results? 40 percent more productivity, 40 percent more output produced, 40 percent more growth for this specific industry. But actually, the most exciting part of this new manufacturing revolution goes much beyond productivity. It's about producing better, smarter products. It's about scale customization. Imagine a world where you can buy the exact products you want with the functionalities you need, with the design you want, with the same cost and lead time as a product that's been mass produced, like your car, or your clothes or your cell phone. The new manufacturing revolution makes it possible. Advanced robots can be programmed in order to perform any product configuration without any setup time or ramp up. 3D printers instantaneously produce any customized design. We are now able to produce a batch of one product, your product, at the same cost and lead time as a batch of many. Those are only a few examples of the manufacturing revolution at play. Not only will manufacturing become more productive, it will also become more flexible, and those were exactly the elements of growth that we are missing. But actually, there are even some bigger implications for all of us when manufacturing will find its way back into the limelight. It will create a huge macroeconomic shift. First, our factories will be relocated into our home markets. In the world of scale customization, consumer proximity is the new norm. Then, our factories will be smaller, agile. Scale does not matter anymore, flexibility does. They will be operating on a multi-product, made-to-order basis. The change will be drastic. Globalization will enter a new era. The East-to-West trade flows will be replaced by regional trade flows. East for East, West for West. When you think about that, the old model was pretty much insane. Piling up stocks, making products travel the whole world before they reach their end consumers. The new model, producing just next to the consumer market, will be much cleaner, much better for our environment. In mature economies, manufacturing will be back home, creating more employment, more productivity and more growth. Good news, isn't it? But here's the thing with growth — it does not come automatically. Mature economies will have to seize it. We'll have to massively re-train our workforce. In most countries, like in my country, France, we've told our children that manufacturing had no future. That it was something happening far away. We need to reverse that and teach manufacturing again at university. Only the countries that will boldly transform will be able to seize this growth. It's also a chance for developing economies. Of course China and other emerging economies won't be the factory of the world anymore. Actually, it was not a sustainable model in the long term, as those countries are becoming richer. Last year, it was already as expensive to produce in Brazil as to produce in France. By 2018, manufacturing costs in China will be on par with the US. The new manufacturing revolution will accelerate the transition of those emerging economies towards a model driven by domestic consumption. And this is good, because this is where growth will be created. In the next five years, the next billion consumers in China will inject more growth in our economies than the top five European markets together. This fourth manufacturing revolution is a chance for all of us. If we play it right, we'll see sustainable growth in all of our economies. This means more wealth distributed to all of us and a better future for our children. Thank you. (Applause) |
What we can do to die well | {0: "Timothy Ihrig advocates for an approach to healthcare that prioritizes a patient's personal values."} | TEDxDesMoines | I am a palliative care physician and I would like to talk to you today about health care. I'd like to talk to you about the health and care of the most vulnerable population in our country — those people dealing with the most complex serious health issues. I'd like to talk to you about economics as well. And the intersection of these two should scare the hell out of you — it scares the hell out of me. I'd also like to talk to you about palliative medicine: a paradigm of care for this population, grounded in what they value. Patient-centric care based on their values that helps this population live better and longer. It's a care model that tells the truth and engages one-on-one and meets people where they're at. I'd like to start by telling the story of my very first patient. It was my first day as a physician, with the long white coat ... I stumbled into the hospital and right away there's a gentleman, Harold, 68 years old, came to the emergency department. He had had headaches for about six weeks that got worse and worse and worse and worse. Evaluation revealed he had cancer that had spread to his brain. The attending physician directed me to go share with Harold and his family the diagnosis, the prognosis and options of care. Five hours into my new career, I did the only thing I knew how. I walked in, sat down, took Harold's hand, took his wife's hand and just breathed. He said, "It's not good news is it, sonny?" I said, "No." And so we talked and we listened and we shared. And after a while I said, "Harold, what is it that has meaning to you? What is it that you hold sacred?" And he said, "My family." I said, "What do you want to do?" He slapped me on the knee and said, "I want to go fishing." I said, "That, I know how to do." Harold went fishing the next day. He died a week later. As I've gone through my training in my career, I think back to Harold. And I think that this is a conversation that happens far too infrequently. And it's a conversation that had led us to crisis, to the biggest threat to the American way of life today, which is health care expenditures. So what do we know? We know that this population, the most ill, takes up 15 percent of the gross domestic product — nearly 2.3 trillion dollars. So the sickest 15 percent take up 15 percent of the GDP. If we extrapolate this out over the next two decades with the growth of baby boomers, at this rate it is 60 percent of the GDP. Sixty percent of the gross domestic product of the United States of America — it has very little to do with health care at that point. It has to do with a gallon of milk, with college tuition. It has to do with every thing that we value and every thing that we know presently. It has at stake the free-market economy and capitalism of the United States of America. Let's forget all the statistics for a minute, forget the numbers. Let's talk about the value we get for all these dollars we spend. Well, the Dartmouth Atlas, about six years ago, looked at every dollar spent by Medicare — generally this population. We found that those patients who have the highest per capita expenditures had the highest suffering, pain, depression. And, more often than not, they die sooner. How can this be? We live in the United States, it has the greatest health care system on the planet. We spend 10 times more on these patients than the second-leading country in the world. That doesn't make sense. But what we know is, out of the top 50 countries on the planet with organized health care systems, we rank 37th. Former Eastern Bloc countries and sub-Saharan African countries rank higher than us as far as quality and value. Something I experience every day in my practice, and I'm sure, something many of you on your own journeys have experienced: more is not more. Those individuals who had more tests, more bells, more whistles, more chemotherapy, more surgery, more whatever — the more that we do to someone, it decreases the quality of their life. And it shortens it, most often. So what are we going to do about this? What are we doing about this? And why is this so? The grim reality, ladies and gentlemen, is that we, the health care industry — long white-coat physicians — are stealing from you. Stealing from you the opportunity to choose how you want to live your lives in the context of whatever disease it is. We focus on disease and pathology and surgery and pharmacology. We miss the human being. How can we treat this without understanding this? We do things to this; we need to do things for this. The triple aim of healthcare: one, improve patient experience. Two, improve the population health. Three, decrease per capita expenditure across a continuum. Our group, palliative care, in 2012, working with the sickest of the sick — cancer, heart disease, lung disease, renal disease, dementia — how did we improve patient experience? "I want to be at home, Doc." "OK, we'll bring the care to you." Quality of life, enhanced. Think about the human being. Two: population health. How did we look at this population differently, and engage with them at a different level, a deeper level, and connect to a broader sense of the human condition than my own? How do we manage this group, so that of our outpatient population, 94 percent, in 2012, never had to go to the hospital? Not because they couldn't. But they didn't have to. We brought the care to them. We maintained their value, their quality. Number three: per capita expenditures. For this population, that today is 2.3 trillion dollars and in 20 years is 60 percent of the GDP, we reduced health care expenditures by nearly 70 percent. They got more of what they wanted based on their values, lived better and are living longer, for two-thirds less money. While Harold's time was limited, palliative care's is not. Palliative care is a paradigm from diagnosis through the end of life. The hours, weeks, months, years, across a continuum — with treatment, without treatment. Meet Christine. Stage III cervical cancer, so, metastatic cancer that started in her cervix, spread throughout her body. She's in her 50s and she is living. This is not about end of life, this is about life. This is not just about the elderly, this is about people. This is Richard. End-stage lung disease. "Richard, what is it that you hold sacred?" "My kids, my wife and my Harley." (Laughter) "Alright! I can't drive you around on it because I can barely pedal a bicycle, but let's see what we can do." Richard came to me, and he was in rough shape. He had this little voice telling him that maybe his time was weeks to months. And then we just talked. And I listened and tried to hear — big difference. Use these in proportion to this. I said, "Alright, let's take it one day at a time," like we do in every other chapter of our life. And we have met Richard where Richard's at day-to-day. And it's a phone call or two a week, but he's thriving in the context of end-stage lung disease. Now, palliative medicine is not just for the elderly, it is not just for the middle-aged. It is for everyone. Meet my friend Jonathan. We have the honor and pleasure of Jonathan and his father joining us here today. Jonathan is in his 20s, and I met him several years ago. He was dealing with metastatic testicular cancer, spread to his brain. He had a stroke, he had brain surgery, radiation, chemotherapy. Upon meeting him and his family, he was a couple of weeks away from a bone marrow transplant, and in listening and engaging, they said, "Help us understand — what is cancer?" How did we get this far without understanding what we're dealing with? How did we get this far without empowering somebody to know what it is they're dealing with, and then taking the next step and engaging in who they are as human beings to know if that is what we should do? Lord knows we can do any kind of thing to you. But should we? And don't take my word for it. All the evidence that is related to palliative care these days demonstrates with absolute certainty people live better and live longer. There was a seminal article out of the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010. A study done at Harvard by friends of mine, colleagues. End-stage lung cancer: one group with palliative care, a similar group without. The group with palliative care reported less pain, less depression. They needed fewer hospitalizations. And, ladies and gentlemen, they lived three to six months longer. If palliative care were a cancer drug, every cancer doctor on the planet would write a prescription for it. Why don't they? Again, because we goofy, long white-coat physicians are trained and of the mantra of dealing with this, not with this. This is a space that we will all come to at some point. But this conversation today is not about dying, it is about living. Living based on our values, what we find sacred and how we want to write the chapters of our lives, whether it's the last or the last five. What we know, what we have proven, is that this conversation needs to happen today — not next week, not next year. What is at stake is our lives today and the lives of us as we get older and the lives of our children and our grandchildren. Not just in that hospital room or on the couch at home, but everywhere we go and everything we see. Palliative medicine is the answer to engage with human beings, to change the journey that we will all face, and change it for the better. To my colleagues, to my patients, to my government, to all human beings, I ask that we stand and we shout and we demand the best care possible, so that we can live better today and ensure a better life tomorrow. We need to shift today so that we can live tomorrow. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The deadly legacy of cluster bombs | {0: 'Laura Boushnak is a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian photographer whose work focuses on women, literacy and education reform in the Arab world. '} | TEDSummit | I once had this nightmare: I'm standing in the middle of a deserted field full of land mines. In real life, I love to hike, but every time I want to go on a hike, it makes me nervous. I have this thought in the back of my mind that I might lose a limb. This underlying fear started 10 years ago, after I met Mohammed, a cluster bomb survivor of the summer 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War in Lebanon. Mohammed, like so many other survivors all around the world, had to live through the horrifying repercussions of cluster munitions on a daily basis. When the one-month conflict started in Lebanon, I was still working at Agence France-Presse in Paris. I remember how I was glued to the screens, anxiously following the news. I wanted to reassure myself that the falling bombs missed my parents' home. When I arrived in Beirut on assignment to cover that war, I was relieved to be united with my family, after they had finally managed to escape southern Lebanon. The day the war was over, I remember seeing this image — one of blocked roads, of displaced people eagerly rushing south, back to their homes, regardless of what they would find. An estimated four million cluster submunitions were spread in Lebanon during the 34-day conflict. Mohammed lost both legs during the last week of the conflict. The fact that he lives a five-minute drive from my parents' home made it easier to follow him through the years. It was now almost 10 years since we first met. I saw the young boy who had to endure physical and emotional trauma. I saw the teenager who tried to offer his friends tattoos, in return for a set fee of five dollars. And I know the young, jobless man who spends hours surfing the Internet trying to meet a girl who might become his girlfriend. His fate and the effects of losing his legs are now his daily reality. Survivors of bomb trauma like Mohammed have to deal with so many details that never occur to us. Who would have imagined that so many daily tasks we do or take for granted, such as going to the beach or even picking up something from the floor, would become sources of stress and anxiety? Well, that's what eventually became of Mohammed, due to his inflexible prosthetic legs. Ten years ago, I had no clue what a cluster bomb was, nor its horrifying implications. I learned that this indiscriminate weapon was used in so many parts of the world and continues to kill on a regular basis, without distinguishing between a military target or a child. I naively asked myself, "But seriously, who made those weapons? And what for?" Let me explain to you what a cluster bomb is. It's a large canister filled with bomblets. When it's dropped from the air, it opens up in midair to release hundreds of bomblets. They scatter around wide areas and on impact, many fail to explode. Those unexploded ones end up just like landmines — sitting on the ground, waiting for their next target. If someone steps on them by accident or picks them up, they can explode. These weapons are extremely unpredictable, which makes the threat even bigger. One day, a farmer can work his land without a problem. The next day, he can make fire and burn some branches, and the submunitions close by could be set off because of the heat. The problem is children mistake those bomblets for toys, because they can look like bouncy balls or soda cans. Being a documentary photographer, I decided to go back to Lebanon a few months after the conflict ended to meet cluster bomb survivors. And I met a few — Hussein and Rasha, who both lost a leg to submunitions. Their stories are similar to so many other kids' stories across the world and are a testimony to the horrifying implications of the continuous use of such weapons. That's when I met Mohammed, in January 2007. He was 11 years old, and I met him exactly four months after his accident. When I first saw him, he was going through painful physiotherapy to recover from his fresh wounds. Still in shock at such a young age, Mohammed was struggling to get used to his new body. He would even wake up sometimes at night wanting to scratch his lost feet. What drew me closer to his story was my instant realization of the difficulties Mohammed was likely to face in the future — that what he has been suffering while adjusting to his injury at the age of 11, would increase manyfold. Even before his disability, Mohammed's life wasn't easy. He was born in the Rashidieh Camp for Palestinian refugees, and this is where he still lives. Lebanon holds some 400,000 Palestinian refugees, and they suffer from discriminatory laws. They're not allowed to work in the public sector or practice certain professions and are denied the right to own property. This is one of the reasons why Mohammed doesn't really regret dropping out of school right after his injury. He said, "What's the point of a university degree when I can't find a job to start with?" Cluster bomb use creates a vicious circle of impact on communities, and not only the lives of their victims. Many who get injured by this weapon drop out of school, can't find jobs or even lose their jobs, therefore losing the ability to provide for their families. This is not to mention the continuous physical pain and the experience of feeling isolated. These weapons affect the poorest of the poor. The high medical cost is a burden to the families. They end up relying on humanitarian agencies, which is insufficient and unsustainable, especially when injuries require lifelong support to the injured. Ten years after Mohammed's injury, he is still unable to afford proper prosthetic legs. He's very cautious with his steps, as a couple of falls over the years brought him embarrassment among his friends. He joked that since he doesn't have legs, some days he tries to walk on his hands. One of the worst yet invisible impacts of the weapon is the psychological scars it leaves. In one of Mohammed's early medical reports, he was diagnosed with signs of PTSD. He suffered from anxiety, poor appetite, sleep disturbance and showed signs of anger. The reality is Mohammed never received proper help to fully recover. His current obsession is to leave Lebanon at any cost — even if it meant embarking on a hazardous journey along with refugees drifting towards Europe today through the Mediterranean. Knowing how risky such a journey would be, he said, "If I were to die on the way, it doesn't matter." To Mohammed, he is dead here, anyway. Cluster bombs are a world problem, as this munition keeps destroying and hurting whole communities for generations to come. In an online interview with the director of the Mines Advisory Group, Jamie Franklin, he said, "The US forces dropped over two million tons of munitions over Laos. If they couldn't find their targets in Vietnam, there were free-drop areas in Laos where planes would drop their loads before going back to base, because it's dangerous to land with loaded planes." According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, in Laos alone — one of the poorest countries in the world — nine to 27 million unexploded submunitions remain. Some 11,000 people have been killed or injured since 1973. This lethal weapon has been used by over 20 states during armed conflicts in over 35 countries, such as Ukraine, Iraq and Sudan. So far, 119 states have joined an international treaty banning cluster bombs, which is officially called the Convention on Cluster Munitions. But some of the biggest producers of cluster munitions — namely, the United States, Russia and China — remain outside of this lifesaving treaty and continue to produce them, reserve the right to produce them in the future, keep those harmful weapons in their stockpiles and even possibly use them in the future. Cluster bombs have reportedly been used most recently in the ongoing conflicts in Yemen and Syria. According to research on the worldwide investments in cluster munitions producers by Pax, a Dutch-based NGO, financial institutions invested billions of US dollars into companies that make cluster munitions. The majority of these institutions are based in countries that have not yet signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions. Getting back to Mohammed, one of the few jobs he was able to find was picking lemons. When I ask him if it's safe to work in the field he said, "I'm not sure." Research shows that cluster munitions often contaminate areas where agriculture is the main source of income. According to Handicap International's research, 98 percent of those killed or injured by cluster munitions are civilians. Eighty-four percent of casualties are males. In countries where these people have no choice but to work in those fields, they simply do it and risk it. Mohammed is the only male to three sisters. Culturally, he's expected to provide for his family, but he simply can't. He tried to have so many different jobs, but he couldn't keep any due to his physical disability and the less-than-friendly environment to people with disabilities, to say the least. It hurts him a lot when he goes out looking for a job, and he's turned away with a small amount of money paid to him out of pity. He said, "I'm not here to beg for money, I just want to earn it." Mohammed today is 21 years old. He's illiterate, and he communicates with voice messages. Here is one of his messages. (Audio) Mohammed: (Speaking in Arabic) Laura Boushnak: He said, "My dream is to run, and I'm pretty sure once I start running, I would never stop." Thank you. (Applause) |
How the blockchain is changing money and business | {0: 'Don Tapscott, Executive Chairman of the Blockchain Research Institute, is one of the world’s leading authorities on the impact of technology in business and society. He has authored 16 books, including "Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything," which has been translated into over 25 languages'} | TEDSummit | The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the next few decades has arrived. And it's not social media. It's not big data. It's not robotics. It's not even AI. You'll be surprised to learn that it's the underlying technology of digital currencies like Bitcoin. It's called the blockchain. Blockchain. Now, it's not the most sonorous word in the world, but I believe that this is now the next generation of the internet, and that it holds vast promise for every business, every society and for all of you, individually. You know, for the past few decades, we've had the internet of information. And when I send you an email or a PowerPoint file or something, I'm actually not sending you the original, I'm sending you a copy. And that's great. This is democratized information. But when it comes to assets — things like money, financial assets like stocks and bonds, loyalty points, intellectual property, music, art, a vote, carbon credit and other assets — sending you a copy is a really bad idea. If I send you 100 dollars, it's really important that I don't still have the money — (Laughter) and that I can't send it to you. This has been called the "double-spend" problem by cryptographers for a long time. So today, we rely entirely on big intermediaries — middlemen like banks, government, big social media companies, credit card companies and so on — to establish trust in our economy. And these intermediaries perform all the business and transaction logic of every kind of commerce, from authentication, identification of people, through to clearing, settling and record keeping. And overall, they do a pretty good job. But there are growing problems. To begin, they're centralized. That means they can be hacked, and increasingly are — JP Morgan, the US Federal Government, LinkedIn, Home Depot and others found that out the hard way. They exclude billions of people from the global economy, for example, people who don't have enough money to have a bank account. They slow things down. It can take a second for an email to go around the world, but it can take days or weeks for money to move through the banking system across a city. And they take a big piece of the action — 10 to 20 percent just to send money to another country. They capture our data, and that means we can't monetize it or use it to better manage our lives. Our privacy is being undermined. And the biggest problem is that overall, they've appropriated the largesse of the digital age asymmetrically: we have wealth creation, but we have growing social inequality. So what if there were not only an internet of information, what if there were an internet of value — some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger running on millions of computers and available to everybody. And where every kind of asset, from money to music, could be stored, moved, transacted, exchanged and managed, all without powerful intermediaries? What if there were a native medium for value? Well, in 2008, the financial industry crashed and, perhaps propitiously, an anonymous person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto created a paper where he developed a protocol for a digital cash that used an underlying cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. And this cryptocurrency enabled people to establish trust and do transactions without a third party. And this seemingly simple act set off a spark that ignited the world, that has everyone excited or terrified or otherwise interested in many places. Now, don't be confused about Bitcoin — Bitcoin is an asset; it goes up and down, and that should be of interest to you if you're a speculator. More broadly, it's a cryptocurrency. It's not a fiat currency controlled by a nation-state. And that's of greater interest. But the real pony here is the underlying technology. It's called blockchain. So for the first time now in human history, people everywhere can trust each other and transact peer to peer. And trust is established, not by some big institution, but by collaboration, by cryptography and by some clever code. And because trust is native to the technology, I call this, "The Trust Protocol." Now, you're probably wondering: How does this thing work? Fair enough. Assets — digital assets like money to music and everything in between — are not stored in a central place, but they're distributed across a global ledger, using the highest level of cryptography. And when a transaction is conducted, it's posted globally, across millions and millions of computers. And out there, around the world, is a group of people called "miners." These are not young people, they're Bitcoin miners. They have massive computing power at their fingertips — 10 to 100 times bigger than all of Google worldwide. These miners do a lot of work. And every 10 minutes, kind of like the heartbeat of a network, a block gets created that has all the transactions from the previous 10 minutes. Then the miners get to work, trying to solve some tough problems. And they compete: the first miner to find out the truth and to validate the block, is rewarded in digital currency, in the case of the Bitcoin blockchain, with Bitcoin. And then — this is the key part — that block is linked to the previous block and the previous block to create a chain of blocks. And every one is time-stamped, kind of like with a digital waxed seal. So if I wanted to go and hack a block and, say, pay you and you with the same money, I'd have to hack that block, plus all the preceding blocks, the entire history of commerce on that blockchain, not just on one computer but across millions of computers, simultaneously, all using the highest levels of encryption, in the light of the most powerful computing resource in the world that's watching me. Tough to do. This is infinitely more secure than the computer systems that we have today. Blockchain. That's how it works. So the Bitcoin blockchain is just one. There are many. The Ethereum blockchain was developed by a Canadian named Vitalik Buterin. He's [22] years old, and this blockchain has some extraordinary capabilities. One of them is that you can build smart contracts. It's kind of what it sounds like. It's a contract that self-executes, and the contract handles the enforcement, the management, performance and payment — the contract kind of has a bank account, too, in a sense — of agreements between people. And today, on the Ethereum blockchain, there are projects underway to do everything from create a new replacement for the stock market to create a new model of democracy, where politicians are accountable to citizens. (Applause) So to understand what a radical change this is going to bring, let's look at one industry, financial services. Recognize this? Rube Goldberg machine. It's a ridiculously complicated machine that does something really simple, like crack an egg or shut a door. Well, it kind of reminds me of the financial services industry, honestly. I mean, you tap your card in the corner store, and a bitstream goes through a dozen companies, each with their own computer system, some of them being 1970s mainframes older than many of the people in this room, and three days later, a settlement occurs. Well, with a blockchain financial industry, there would be no settlement, because the payment and the settlement is the same activity, it's just a change in the ledger. So Wall Street and all around the world, the financial industry is in a big upheaval about this, wondering, can we be replaced, or how do we embrace this technology for success? Now, why should you care? Well, let me describe some applications. Prosperity. The first era of the internet, the internet of information, brought us wealth but not shared prosperity, because social inequality is growing. And this is at the heart of all of the anger and extremism and protectionism and xenophobia and worse that we're seeing growing in the world today, Brexit being the most recent case. So could we develop some new approaches to this problem of inequality? Because the only approach today is to redistribute wealth, tax people and spread it around more. Could we pre-distribute wealth? Could we change the way that wealth gets created in the first place by democratizing wealth creation, engaging more people in the economy, and then ensuring that they got fair compensation? Let me describe five ways that this can be done. Number one: Did you know that 70 percent of the people in the world who have land have a tenuous title to it? So, you've got a little farm in Honduras, some dictator comes to power, he says, "I know you've got a piece of paper that says you own your farm, but the government computer says my friend owns your farm." This happened on a mass scale in Honduras, and this problem exists everywhere. Hernando de Soto, the great Latin American economist, says this is the number one issue in the world in terms of economic mobility, more important than having a bank account, because if you don't have a valid title to your land, you can't borrow against it, and you can't plan for the future. So today, companies are working with governments to put land titles on a blockchain. And once it's there, this is immutable. You can't hack it. This creates the conditions for prosperity for potentially billions of people. Secondly: a lot of writers talk about Uber and Airbnb and TaskRabbit and Lyft and so on as part of the sharing economy. This is a very powerful idea, that peers can come together and create and share wealth. My view is that ... these companies are not really sharing. In fact, they're successful precisely because they don't share. They aggregate services together, and they sell them. What if, rather than Airbnb being a $25 billion corporation, there was a distributed application on a blockchain, we'll call it B-Airbnb, and it was essentially owned by all of the people who have a room to rent. And when someone wants to rent a room, they go onto the blockchain database and all the criteria, they sift through, it helps them find the right room, and then the blockchain helps with the contracting, it identifies the party, it handles the payments just through digital payments — they're built into the system. And it even handles reputation, because if she rates a room as a five-star room, that room is there, and it's rated, and it's immutable. So, the big sharing-economy disruptors in Silicon Valley could be disrupted, and this would be good for prosperity. Number three: the biggest flow of funds from the developed world to the developing world is not corporate investment, and it's not even foreign aid. It's remittances. This is the global diaspora; people have left their ancestral lands, and they're sending money back to their families at home. This is 600 billion dollars a year, and it's growing, and these people are getting ripped off. Analie Domingo is a housekeeper. She lives in Toronto, and every month she goes to the Western Union office with some cash to send her remittances to her mom in Manila. It costs her around 10 percent; the money takes four to seven days to get there; her mom never knows when it's going to arrive. It takes five hours out of her week to do this. Six months ago, Analie Domingo used a blockchain application called Abra. And from her mobile device, she sent 300 bucks. It went directly to her mom's mobile device without going through an intermediary. And then her mom looked at her mobile device — it's kind of like an Uber interface, there's Abra "tellers" moving around. She clicks on a teller that's a five-star teller, who's seven minutes away. The guy shows up at the door, gives her Filipino pesos, she puts them in her wallet. The whole thing took minutes, and it cost her two percent. This is a big opportunity for prosperity. Number four: the most powerful asset of the digital age is data. And data is really a new asset class, maybe bigger than previous asset classes, like land under the agrarian economy, or an industrial plant, or even money. And all of you — we — create this data. We create this asset, and we leave this trail of digital crumbs behind us as we go throughout life. And these crumbs are collected into a mirror image of you, the virtual you. And the virtual you may know more about you than you do, because you can't remember what you bought a year ago, or said a year ago, or your exact location a year ago. And the virtual you is not owned by you — that's the big problem. So today, there are companies working to create an identity in a black box, the virtual you owned by you. And this black box moves around with you as you travel throughout the world, and it's very, very stingy. It only gives away the shred of information that's required to do something. A lot of transactions, the seller doesn't even need to know who you are. They just need to know that they got paid. And then this avatar is sweeping up all of this data and enabling you to monetize it. And this is a wonderful thing, because it can also help us protect our privacy, and privacy is the foundation of a free society. Let's get this asset that we create back under our control, where we can own our own identity and manage it responsibly. Finally — (Applause) Finally, number five: there are a whole number of creators of content who don't receive fair compensation, because the system for intellectual property is broken. It was broken by the first era of the internet. Take music. Musicians are left with crumbs at the end of the whole food chain. You know, if you were a songwriter, 25 years ago, you wrote a hit song, it got a million singles, you could get royalties of around 45,000 dollars. Today, you're a songwriter, you write a hit song, it gets a million streams, you don't get 45k, you get 36 dollars, enough to buy a nice pizza. So Imogen Heap, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, is now putting music on a blockchain ecosystem. She calls it "Mycelia." And the music has a smart contract surrounding it. And the music protects her intellectual property rights. You want to listen to the song? It's free, or maybe a few micro-cents that flow into a digital account. You want to put the song in your movie, that's different, and the IP rights are all specified. You want to make a ringtone? That's different. She describes that the song becomes a business. It's out there on this platform marketing itself, protecting the rights of the author, and because the song has a payment system in the sense of bank account, all the money flows back to the artist, and they control the industry, rather than these powerful intermediaries. Now, this is — (Applause) This is not just songwriters, it's any creator of content, like art, like inventions, scientific discoveries, journalists. There are all kinds of people who don't get fair compensation, and with blockchains, they're going to be able to make it rain on the blockchain. And that's a wonderful thing. So, these are five opportunities out of a dozen to solve one problem, prosperity, which is one of countless problems that blockchains are applicable to. Now, technology doesn't create prosperity, of course — people do. But my case to you is that, once again, the technology genie has escaped from the bottle, and it was summoned by an unknown person or persons at this uncertain time in human history, and it's giving us another kick at the can, another opportunity to rewrite the economic power grid and the old order of things, and solve some of the world's most difficult problems, if we will it. Thank you. (Applause) |
The spellbinding art of human anatomy | {0: 'Vanessa Ruiz documents the intersection of medical illustration and contemporary art.'} | TEDMED 2015 | As a lover of human anatomy, I'm so excited that we're finally putting our bodies at the center of focus. Through practices such as preventive medicine, patient empowerment and self-monitoring — down to now obsessing over every single step we take in a day. All of this works to promote a healthy connection between ourselves and our bodies. Despite all this focus on the healthy self, general public knowledge of the anatomical self is lacking. Many people don't know the location of their vital organs, or even how they function. And that's because human anatomy is a difficult and time-intensive subject to learn. How many of you here made it through anatomy? Wow, good — most of you are in medicine. I, like you, spent countless hours memorizing hundreds of structures. Something no student of anatomy could do without the help of visuals. Because at the end of the day, whether you remember every little structure or not, these medical illustrations are what makes studying anatomy so intriguing. In looking at them, we're actually viewing a manual of our very selves. But what happens when we're done studying? These beautiful illustrations are then shut back into the pages of a medical textbook, or an app, referenced only when needed. And for the public, medical illustrations may only be encountered passively on the walls of a doctor's office. From the beginnings of modern medicine, medical illustration, and therefore anatomy, have existed primarily within the realm of medical education. Yet there's something fascinating happening right now. Artists are breaking anatomy out of the confines of the medical world and are thrusting it into the public space. For the past nine years, I have been cataloguing and sharing this rise in anatomical art with the public — all from my perspective as a medical illustrator. But before I get into showing you how artists are reclaiming anatomy today, it's important to understand how art influenced anatomy in the past. Now, anatomy is by its very nature a visual science, and the first anatomists to understand this lived during the Renaissance. They relied on artists to help advertise their discoveries to their peers in the public. And this drive to not only teach but also to entertain resulted in some of the strangest anatomical illustrations. Anatomy was caught in a struggle between science, art and culture that lasted for over 500 years. Artists rendered dissected cadavers as alive, posed in these humorous anatomical stripteases. Imagine seeing that in your textbooks today. They also showed them as very much dead — unwillingly stripped of their skin. Disembodied limbs were often posed in literal still lives. And some illustrations even included pop culture references. This is Clara, a famous rhinoceros that was traveling Europe in the mid-1700s, at a time when seeing a rhino was an exciting rarity. Including her in this illustration was akin to celebrity sponsorship today. The introduction of color then brought a whole new depth and clarity to anatomy that made it stunning. By the early 20th century, the perfect balance of science and art had finally been struck with the emergence of medical illustrators. They created a universal representation of anatomy — something that was neither alive nor dead, that was free from those influences of artistic culture. And this focus on no-frills accuracy was precisely for the benefit of medical education. And this is what we get to study from today. But why is it that medical illustration — both past and present — captures our imaginations? Now, we are innately tuned into the beauty of the human body. And medical illustration is still art. Nothing can elicit an emotional response — from joy to complete disgust — more than the human body. And today, artists armed with that emotion, are grasping anatomy from the medical world, and are reinvigorating it through art in the most imaginative ways. A perfect example of this is Spanish contemporary artist Fernando Vicente. He takes 19th century anatomical illustrations of the male body and envelops them in a female sensuality. The women in his paintings taunt us to view beyond their surface anatomy, thereby introducing a strong femininity that was previously lacking in the history of anatomical representation. Artistry can also be seen in the repair and recovery of the human body. This is an X-ray of a woman who fractured and dislocated her ankle in a roller-skating accident. As a tribute to her trauma, she commissioned Montreal-based architect Federico Carbajal to construct a wire sculpture of her damaged lower leg. Now, notice those bright red screws magnified in the sculpture. These are the actual surgical screws used in reconstructing her ankle. It's medical hardware that's been repurposed as art. People often ask me how I choose the art that I showcase online or feature in gallery shows. And for me it's a balance between the technique and a concept that pushes the boundaries of anatomy as a way to know thyself, which is why the work of Michael Reedy struck me. His serious figure drawings are often layered in elements of humor. For instance, take a look at her face. Notice those red marks. Michael manifests the consuming insecurity of a skin condition as these maniacal cartoon monsters annoying and out of control in the background. On the mirrored figure, he renders the full anatomy and covers it in glitter, making it look like candy. By doing this, Michael downplays the common perception of anatomy so closely tied to just disease and death. Now, this next concept might not make much sense, but human anatomy is no longer limited to humans. When you were a child, did you ever wish that your toys could come to life? Well, Jason Freeny makes those dreams come true with his magical toy dissections. (Laughter) One might think that this would bring a morbid edge to one's innocent childhood characters, but Jason says of his dissections, "One thing I've never seen in a child's reaction to my work is fear." It's always wonder, amazement and wanting to explore. Fear of anatomy and guts is a learned reaction. This anatomization also extends to politically and socially charged objects. In Noah Scalin's "Anatomy of War," we see a gun dissected to reveal human organs. But if you look closely, you'll notice that it lacks a brain. And if you keep looking, you might also notice that Noah has so thoughtfully placed the rectum at the business end of that gun barrel. Now, this next artist I've been following for many years, watching him excite the public about anatomy. Danny Quirk is a young artist who paints his subjects in the process of self-dissection. He bends the rules of medical illustration by inserting a very dramatic light and shadow. And this creates a 3-D illusion that lends itself very well to painting directly on the human skin. Danny makes it look as if a person's skin has actually been removed. And this effect — also cool and tattoo-like — easily transitions into a medical illustration. Now Danny is currently traveling the world, teaching anatomy to the public via his body paintings, which is why it was so shocking to find out that he was rejected from medical illustration programs. But he's doing just fine. Then there are artists who are extracting anatomy from both the medical world and the art world and are placing it directly on the streets. London-based SHOK-1 paints giant X-rays of pop culture icons. His X-rays show how culture can come to have an anatomy of its own, and conversely how culture can become part of the anatomy of a person. You come to admire his work because reproducing X-rays by hand, let alone with spray paint, is extremely difficult. But then again this is a street artist, who also happens to hold a degree in applied chemistry. Nychos, an Austrian street artist, takes the term "exploded view" to a whole new level, splattering human and animal dissections on walls all over the world. Influenced by comics and heavy metal, Nychos inserts a very youthful and enticing energy into anatomy that I just love. Street artists believe that art belongs to the public. And this street anatomy is so captivating because it is the furthest removed from the medical world. It forces you to look at it, and confront your own perceptions about anatomy, whether you find it beautiful, gross, morbid or awe-inspiring, like I do. That it elicits these responses at all is due to our intimate and often changing relationship with it. All of the artists that I showed you here today referenced medical illustrations for their art. But for them, anatomy isn't just something to memorize, but a base from which to understand the human body on a meaningful level; to depict it in ways that we can relate, whether it be through cartoons, body painting or street art. Anatomical art has the power to reach far beyond the pages of a medical textbook, to ignite an excitement in the public, and reinvigorate an enthusiasm in the medical world, ultimately connecting our innermost selves with our bodies through art. Thank you. (Applause) |
How women wage conflict without violence | {0: 'Julia Bacha is the creative director at Just Vision, an organization that uses film and multimedia storytelling to foster constructive conversations on some of the most divisive issues of our times.'} | TEDSummit | Twelve years ago, I picked up a camera for the first time to film the olive harvest in a Palestinian village in the West Bank. I thought I was there to make a single documentary and would then move on to some other part of the world. But something kept bringing me back. Now, usually, when international audiences hear about that part of the world, they often just want that conflict to go away. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is bad, and we wish it could just disappear. We feel much the same way about other conflicts around the world. But every time we turn our attention to the news, it seems like one more country has gone up in flames. So I've been wondering whether we should not start looking at conflict in a different way — whether instead of simply wishing to end conflict, we focus instead on how to wage conflict. This has been a big question for me, one I've pursued together with my team at the nonprofit Just Vision. After witnessing several different kinds of struggles in the Middle East, I started noticing some patterns on the more successful ones. I wondered whether these variables held across cases, and if they did, what lessons we could glean for waging constructive conflict, in Palestine, Israel and elsewhere. There is some science about this. In a study of 323 major political conflicts from 1900 to 2006, Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns were almost 100 percent more likely to lead to success than violent campaigns. Nonviolent campaigns are also less likely to cause physical harm to those waging the campaign, as well as their opponents. And, critically, they typically lead to more peaceful and democratic societies. In other words, nonviolent resistance is a more effective and constructive way of waging conflict. But if that's such an easy choice, why don't more groups use it? Political scientist Victor Asal and colleagues have looked at several factors that shape a political group's choice of tactics. And it turns out that the greatest predictor of a movement's decision to adopt nonviolence or violence is not whether that group is more left-wing or right-wing, not whether the group is more or less influenced by religious beliefs, not whether it's up against a democracy or a dictatorship, and not even the levels of repression that that group is facing. The greatest predictor of a movement's decision to adopt nonviolence is its ideology regarding the role of women in public life. (Applause) When a movement includes in its discourse language around gender equality, it increases dramatically the chances it will adopt nonviolence, and thus, the likelihood it will succeed. The research squared up with my own documentation of political organizing in Israel and Palestine. I've noticed that movements which welcome women into leadership positions, such as the one I documented in a village called Budrus, were much more likely to achieve their goals. This village was under a real threat of being wiped off the map when Israel started building the separation barrier. The proposed route would require the destruction of this community's olive groves, their cemeteries and would ultimately enclose the village from all sides. Through inspired local leadership, they launched a nonviolent resistance campaign to stop that from happening. The odds were massively stacked against them. But they had a secret weapon: a 15-year-old girl who courageously jumped in front of a bulldozer which was about to uproot an olive tree, stopping it. In that moment, the community of Budrus realized what was possible if they welcomed and encouraged women to participate in public life. And so it was that the women of Budrus went to the front lines day after day, using their creativity and acumen to overcome multiple obstacles they faced in a 10-month unarmed struggle. And as you can probably tell at this point, they win at the end. The separation barrier was changed completely to the internationally recognized green line, and the women of Budrus came to be known across the West Bank for their indomitable energy. (Applause) Thank you. I want to pause for a second, which you helped me do, because I do want to tackle two very serious misunderstandings that could happen at this point. The first one is that I don't believe women are inherently or essentially more peaceful than men. But I do believe that in today's world, women experience power differently. Having had to navigate being in the less powerful position in multiple aspects of their lives, women are often more adept at how to surreptitiously pressure for change against large, powerful actors. The term "manipulative," often charged against women in a derogatory way, reflects a reality in which women have often had to find ways other than direct confrontation to achieve their goals. And finding alternatives to direct confrontation is at the core of nonviolent resistance. Now to the second potential misunderstanding. I've been talking a lot about my experiences in the Middle East, and some of you might be thinking now that the solution then is for us to educate Muslim and Arab societies to be more inclusive of their women. If we were to do that, they would be more successful. They do not need this kind of help. Women have been part of the most influential movements coming out of the Middle East, but they tend to be invisible to the international community. Our cameras are largely focused on the men who often end up involved in the more confrontational scenes that we find so irresistible in our news cycle. And we end up with a narrative that not only erases women from the struggles in the region but often misrepresents the struggles themselves. In the late 1980s, an uprising started in Gaza, and quickly spread to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It came to be known as the First Intifada, and people who have any visual memory of it generally conjure up something like this: Palestinian men throwing rocks at Israeli tanks. The news coverage at the time made it seem like stones, Molotov cocktails and burning tires were the only activities taking place in the Intifada. This period, though, was also marked by widespread nonviolent organizing in the forms of strikes, sit-ins and the creation of parallel institutions. During the First Intifada, whole sectors of the Palestinian civilian population mobilized, cutting across generations, factions and class lines. They did this through networks of popular committees, and their use of direct action and communal self-help projects challenged Israel's very ability to continue ruling the West Bank and Gaza. According to the Israeli Army itself, 97 percent of activities during the First Intifada were unarmed. And here's another thing that is not part of our narrative about that time. For 18 months in the Intifada, women were the ones calling the shots behind the scenes: Palestinian women from all walks of life in charge of mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people in a concerted effort to withdraw consent from the occupation. Naela Ayesh, who strived to build a self-sufficient Palestinian economy by encouraging women in Gaza to grow vegetables in their backyards, an activity deemed illegal by the Israeli authorities at that time; Rabeha Diab, who took over decision-making authority for the entire uprising when the men who had been running it were deported; Fatima Al Jaafari, who swallowed leaflets containing the uprising's directives in order to spread them across the territories without getting caught; and Zahira Kamal, who ensured the longevity of the uprising by leading an organization that went from 25 women to 3,000 in a single year. Despite their extraordinary achievements, none of these women have made it into our narrative of the First Intifada. We do this in other parts of the globe, too. In our history books, for instance, and in our collective consciousness, men are the public faces and spokespersons for the 1960s struggle for racial justice in the United States. But women were also a critical driving force, mobilizing, organizing, taking to the streets. How many of us think of Septima Clark when we think of the United States Civil Rights era? Remarkably few. But she played a crucial role in every phase of the struggle, particularly by emphasizing literacy and education. She's been omitted, ignored, like so many other women who played critical roles in the United States Civil Rights Movement. This is not about getting credit. It's more profound than that. The stories we tell matter deeply to how we see ourselves, and to how we believe movements are run and how movements are won. The stories we tell about a movement like the First Intifada or the United States Civil Rights era matter deeply and have a critical influence in the choices Palestinians, Americans and people around the world will make next time they encounter an injustice and develop the courage to confront it. If we do not lift up the women who played critical roles in these struggles, we fail to offer up role models to future generations. Without role models, it becomes harder for women to take up their rightful space in public life. And as we saw earlier, one of the most critical variables in determining whether a movement will be successful or not is a movement's ideology regarding the role of women in public life. This is a question of whether we're moving towards more democratic and peaceful societies. In a world where so much change is happening, and where change is bound to continue at an increasingly faster pace, it is not a question of whether we will face conflict, but rather a question of which stories will shape how we choose to wage conflict. Thank you. (Applause) |
Bring on the female superheroes! | {0: 'Dr. Christopher Bell specializes in the study of popular culture, focusing on the ways in which race, class and gender intersect in different forms of media.'} | TEDxColoradoSprings | I spend most of my time thinking about little girls, which is kind of a weird thing for a grown man in our society to say. But I do. I spend most of my time thinking about little girls, and I think it's primarily because I have one. This one's mine, and I think you would really like her. She is smart and funny and kind to people and a good friend. But when I talk about my daughter, the word I find myself saying most is "athlete." My kid's athletic. She is strong and fast and has great balance and good body control. She is a three-time, back-to-back-to-back state champion in Shaolin Kempo. At nine years old, she is already halfway to a black belt. My daughter is athletic. Now, when a man who is six feet two and 265 pounds stands in front of you and says his daughter is athletic, you might think that's a reflection of him. It is not. (Laughter) My wife in high school was a two-time all-state soccer player and a two-time all-state volleyball player, and I played "Dungeons and Dragons." And that is why, although my daughter is an athlete, she's also a huge nerd, which I love. She walks around our house in a cloak of flames that she made herself. She sits on the Iron Throne — (Laughter) even though she has never seen "Game of Thrones," primarily because we are not the worst parents who ever lived. But she knows there's someone called the Mother of Dragons, and she calls herself that and she loves it. She's a huge comic book fan. Right now, her favorite character is Groot. She loves Groot. She adores The Incredible Hulk. But my daughter really at heart, her thing is Star Wars. My kid is a Jedi. Although some days she's also a Sith, which is a choice that I can respect. (Laughter) But here's the question that I have to ask. Why is it that when my daughter dresses up, whether it's Groot or The Incredible Hulk, whether it's Obi-Wan Kenobi or Darth Maul, why is every character she dresses up as a boy? And where are all the female superheroes? And that is not actually the question, because there's plenty of female superheroes. My question really is, where is all the female superhero stuff? Where are the costumes? Where are the toys? Because every day when my daughter plays when she dresses up, she's learning stuff through a process that, in my own line of work, as a professor of media studies, we refer to as public pedagogy. That is, it is how societies are taught ideologies. It's how you learned what it meant to be a man or a woman, what it meant to behave yourself in public, what it meant to be a patriot and have good manners. It's all the constituent social relations that make us up as a people. It's, in short, how we learn what we know about other people and about the world. But we live in a 100-percent media-saturated society. What that means is that every single aspect of your human existence outside of your basic bodily functions is in some way touched by media. From the car that you drive to the food that you eat to the clothes that you wear to the way you construct your relationships to the very language you use to formulate thought — all of that is in some way mediated. So the answer in our society to how do we learn what we know about other people and about the world is largely through media. Well, there's a wrinkle in that, in that our society, media don't simply exist as information distribution technologies and devices. They also exist as corporate entities. And when the distribution of information is tied to financial gain, there's a problem. How big of a problem? Well think about this: in 1983, 90 percent of American media were owned by 50 companies. In any market, 50 companies doing something is a lot of companies. It's a lot of different worldviews. In 2015, that number has shrunk to six, six companies. They are NBCUniversal Comcast, AOL Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company, News Corp, Viacom and the CBS Corporation. These six companies produce nine out of every 10 movies you watch, nine out of every 10 television shows, nine out of every 10 songs, nine out of every 10 books. So my question to you is, if six companies control 90 percent of American media, how much influence do you think they have over what you're allowed to see every day? Because in media studies, we spend a lot of time saying that media can't tell us what to think, and they can't; they're terrible at that. But that's not their job. Media don't tell us what to think. Media tell us what to think about. They control the conversation, and in controlling the conversation, they don't have to get you to think what they want you to think. They'll just get you thinking about the things they want you to think about, and more importantly, not thinking about things they don't want you to think about. They control the conversation. How does this work in practice? Let's just take one of those companies. We'll do an easy one. Let's talk about the Walt Disney Company for a second. The reason why I always pick the Walt Disney Company is this. Is there a single person in this room who has never seen a Disney movie? Look around. Exactly. I picked Disney because they have what we call 100 percent penetration in our society. Every single person has been exposed to Disney, so it's an easy one for me to use. Since 1937, Disney has made most of its money selling princesses to girls. It's made a huge chunk of its money. Unless, of course, the princess your daughter is interested in, as my daughter is, is this one. See, in 2012, Disney purchased LucasFilm for the sum of four billion dollars, and immediately they flooded the Disney stores with Han Solo and Obi-Wan Kenobi, with Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and Yoda and not Princess Leia. Why? Because this princess messes up the public pedagogy for these princesses. So Disney did not put Princess Leia merchandise in the store, and when people went to Disney and said, "Hey, where's all the Princess Leia stuff?" Disney said, "We have no intention of putting Princess Leia merchandise in the store." And fans were angry and they took to Twitter with the hashtag #WeWantLeia. And Disney said, "Wait, that's not what we meant. What we meant was, we don't have any Princess Leia merchandise yet, but we will." And that was in 2012, and it is 2015, and if you go to the Disney Store, as I recently have, and look for Princess Leia merchandise, do you know how many Princess Leia items there are in the Disney Store? Zero, because Disney has no intention of putting Princess Leia in the store. And we shouldn't be surprised because we found out that was their policy when they bought Marvel in 2009 for the sum of 4.5 billion dollars. Because when you make a lot of money selling princesses to girls, you also kind of want to make money from boys. And so what better to sell boys than superheroes? So now Disney had access to Captain America and to Thor, The Incredible Hulk, and they had access even to a group of superheroes no one had ever even heard of. That's how good Marvel was at selling superheroes. Last year, they released a film called "Guardians of the Galaxy." It's a film that absolutely should not work. Nobody knew who they were except for comic book nerds like me. One of the characters is a talking tree. One of the characters is an anthropomorphic raccoon. It should not work. And they made a killing off of "Guardians of the Galaxy." This character here in the middle, her name is Gamora. She's played by Zoe Saldana, and she is strong and smart and fast and fights like a ninja, and she is played by a beautiful black woman, and my daughter fell in love with her. So like any good nerd dad, I went to buy my daughter Gamora stuff, and when I got to the store, I learned a very interesting thing. If I wanted to buy her a Gamora backpack, well, Gamora's not on it. They probably should have marketed this as "some" of the Guardians of the Galaxy. (Laughter) And if I wanted to buy her a lunchbox, she wasn't on it, and if I wanted to buy her a t-shirt, she wasn't on it. And as a matter of fact, if I went to the store, as I did, and looked at the display, you would find a small picture of Gamora right here, but if you look at any of the actual merchandise on that shelf, Gamora is not on any of it. Now, I could have taken to Twitter with the hashtag #WheresGamora, like millions of fans did across the world, but the truth was I wasn't even really that surprised, because I was there when Disney had released "The Avengers." And just this year, we got a new Avengers movie, the "Age of Ultron," and we were very excited, because there was not one but two female superheroes, Scarlet Witch and Black Widow. And we were very excited. But here's the real thing about this. Even though Scarlett Johansson, who is one of the most popular actresses in America, plays Black Widow, and Black Widow is the star of not one, not two, but five different Marvel movies, there is not a single piece of Black Widow merchandise available. Not one. And if you go to the Disney store and look for a Black Widow costume, what you will find, is you will find Captain America and The Incredible Hulk. You will find Iron Man and Thor. You will even find War Machine, who isn't even really in the movie that long. Who you will not find is Black Widow. And I could have gone to Twitter with the hashtag, as many people did, # WheresNatasha. But I'm tired of doing that. I'm tired of having to do that. All over the country right now, there are kids playing with the Cycle Blast Quinjet play set, where Captain America rides a motorcycle out of a moving jet and it's really awesome. You know how awesome it is? So awesome that when it happened in the movie, it was Black Widow that did it. Not only has she been erased, but she has been replaced with a male figure. And so what is this teaching us? I mean, over the next five years, Disney and Warner Bros. and a bunch of movie studios are going to release over 30 feature-length films with comic book characters, and of those 30 feature-length films, exactly two of them will have female solo leads. Two. Now, there will be females in the rest of these movies, but they will be sidekicks, they will be love interests, they will be members of teams. They will not be the main character. And if what we learn, what we know about other people and about the world we learn through media, then these companies are teaching my daughter that even if she is strong and smart and fast and fights like a ninja, all four of which are true of her, it doesn't matter. She will either be ignored like Gamora or erased and replaced with a boy like Black Widow. And it's not fair. It's not fair to her and it's not fair to your sons and daughters either. But here's the thing: I'm raising a little girl, and she has a little tomboy in her, which by the way is a terrible thing to call a girl. What that basically is saying is, those traits that define you, they're not really yours, they're just on loan to you for a little while from boys. But do you know how much grief she's going to take in her life for having a little tomboy in her? Zero. None. People will think it's cute. They'll call her feisty, because in our society, adding so-called male traits to girls is seen as an upgrade, seen as a bonus. I'm not raising a little boy, like Mike. Mike is a little boy in Florida. He's 11 years old, and the thing that he loves most in the world is a show called "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic," like millions of other children across America. Now, the show is marketed to girls ages five to nine, but there are millions of boys and grown men who enjoy "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic." They have a club. They call themselves Bronies, pony bros, guys who like ponies. I happen to be one of them. And what are Mike and myself and millions of other boys and men learning in this feminine, sissified world of "My Little Pony?" Well, they're learning to study hard and to work hard and to party hard and to look good and to feel good and to do good, and heaven preserve us from teaching these wussified concepts to boys. So the other kids in his neighborhood pick on Mike and they beat him up and they make fun of him, and at 11 years old, Mike goes home, finds a belt, wraps it around his neck, and hangs himself from the top bunk of his bed. Because we have developed a society in which you would rather be dead as a boy than thought of as liking stuff for girls. And that is not Mike's fault. That is our fault. We have failed him. We have failed our children. And we have to do better for them. We have to stop making it so that the only female superheroes appear on shirts that are pink and cut for girls. We have to stop. And when I was putting this together, people said to me, "Well, that's never going to happen." And I said, "Oh really?" Because just this year, Target announced that they were going to stop gendering their toy aisles. They were going to mix it up. Now, before we break our shoulders patting Target on the back, just this week they released a shirt in which one of the most iconic scenes in "Star Wars: A New Hope" where Princess Leia stands up to the Dark Lord of the Sith, was released on a t-shirt in which she's mysteriously replaced by Luke. So let's don't pat ourselves on the back too much. Just this week also, Disney announced it was no longer going to gender its Halloween costumes, which I say, "Thank you, Disney, except the only costumes you make are of male superheroes, so does it matter who you have wearing them?" Just this week, Mattel, who makes Barbie, announced they're going to release a line of DC superhero girls. And the funny thing is, they met with girls and asked them what they wanted to see in dolls, and you can see, they have calves and elbows that bend so they can do superhero stuff. And please buy them. And don't just buy them for your daughters, buy them for your sons. Because it's important that boys play with and as female superheroes just as my daughter plays with and as male superheroes. As a matter of fact, what I would love is a world in which every person who goes to the store goes with a little flowchart in their head of whether or not they should buy this toy for a boy or a girl, and it's a real simple flowchart because it only has one question on it. It says, "Is this toy operated with your genitals?" (Laughter) If the answer is yes, then that is not a toy for children. (Laughter) And if the answer is no, then it's for boys and girls. It's really simple. Because today is about the future of the future, and in my future, boys and girls are equally respected, equally valued, and most importantly, equally represented. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why you should talk to strangers | {0: 'Kio Stark explores the myriad ways encounters with strangers impact our lives.'} | TED2016 | There are things we say when we catch the eye of a stranger or a neighbor walking by. We say, "Hello, how are you? It's a beautiful day. How do you feel?" These sound kind of meaningless, right? And, in some ways, they are. They have no semantic meaning. It doesn't matter how you are or what the day is like. They have something else. They have social meaning. What we mean when we say those things is: I see you there. I'm obsessed with talking to strangers. I make eye contact, say hello, I offer help, I listen. I get all kinds of stories. About seven years ago, I started documenting my experiences to try to figure out why. What I found was that something really beautiful was going on. This is almost poetic. These were really profound experiences. They were unexpected pleasures. They were genuine emotional connections. They were liberating moments. So one day, I was standing on a corner waiting for the light to change, which, I'm a New Yorker, so that means I was actually standing in the street on the storm drain, as if that could get me across faster. And there's an old man standing next to me. So he's wearing, like, a long overcoat and sort of an old-man hat, and he looked like somebody from a movie. And he says to me, "Don't stand there. You might disappear." So this is absurd, right? But I did what he said. I stepped back onto the sidewalk. And he smiled, and he said, "Good. You never know. I might have turned around, and zoop, you're gone." This was weird, and also really wonderful. He was so warm, and he was so happy that he'd saved me. We had this little bond. For a minute, I felt like my existence as a person had been noticed, and I was worth saving. The really sad thing is, in many parts of the world, we're raised to believe that strangers are dangerous by default, that we can't trust them, that they might hurt us. But most strangers aren't dangerous. We're uneasy around them because we have no context. We don't know what their intentions are. So instead of using our perceptions and making choices, we rely on this category of "stranger." I have a four-year-old. When I say hello to people on the street, she asks me why. She says, "Do we know them?" I say, "No, they're our neighbor." "Are they our friend?" "No, it's just good to be friendly." I think twice every time I say that to her, because I mean it, but as a woman, particularly, I know that not every stranger on the street has the best intentions. It is good to be friendly, and it's good to learn when not to be, but none of that means we have to be afraid. There are two huge benefits to using our senses instead of our fears. The first one is that it liberates us. When you think about it, using perception instead of categories is much easier said than done. Categories are something our brains use. When it comes to people, it's sort of a shortcut for learning about them. We see male, female, young, old, black, brown, white, stranger, friend, and we use the information in that box. It's quick, it's easy and it's a road to bias. And it means we're not thinking about people as individuals. I know an American researcher who travels frequently in Central Asia and Africa, alone. She's entering into towns and cities as a complete stranger. She has no bonds, no connections. She's a foreigner. Her survival strategy is this: get one stranger to see you as a real, individual person. If you can do that, it'll help other people see you that way, too. The second benefit of using our senses has to do with intimacy. I know it sounds a little counterintuitive, intimacy and strangers, but these quick interactions can lead to a feeling that sociologists call "fleeting intimacy." So, it's a brief experience that has emotional resonance and meaning. It's the good feeling I got from being saved from the death trap of the storm drain by the old man, or how I feel like part of a community when I talk to somebody on my train on the way to work. Sometimes it goes further. Researchers have found that people often feel more comfortable being honest and open about their inner selves with strangers than they do with their friends and their families — that they often feel more understood by strangers. This gets reported in the media with great lament. "Strangers communicate better than spouses!" It's a good headline, right? I think it entirely misses the point. The important thing about these studies is just how significant these interactions can be; how this special form of closeness gives us something we need as much as we need our friends and our families. So how is it possible that we communicate so well with strangers? There are two reasons. The first one is that it's a quick interaction. It has no consequences. It's easy to be honest with someone you're never going to see again, right? That makes sense. The second reason is where it gets more interesting. We have a bias when it comes to people we're close to. We expect them to understand us. We assume they do, and we expect them to read our minds. So imagine you're at a party, and you can't believe that your friend or your spouse isn't picking up on it that you want to leave early. And you're thinking, "I gave you the look." With a stranger, we have to start from scratch. We tell the whole story, we explain who the people are, how we feel about them; we spell out all the inside jokes. And guess what? Sometimes they do understand us a little better. OK. So now that we know that talking to strangers matters, how does it work? There are unwritten rules we tend to follow. The rules are very different depending on what country you're in, what culture you're in. In most parts of the US, the baseline expectation in public is that we maintain a balance between civility and privacy. This is known as civil inattention. So, imagine two people are walking towards each other on the street. They'll glance at each other from a distance. That's the civility, the acknowledgment. And then as they get closer, they'll look away, to give each other some space. In other cultures, people go to extraordinary lengths not to interact at all. People from Denmark tell me that many Danes are so averse to talking to strangers, that they would rather miss their stop on the bus than say "excuse me" to someone that they need to get around. Instead, there's this elaborate shuffling of bags and using your body to say that you need to get past, instead of using two words. In Egypt, I'm told, it's rude to ignore a stranger, and there's a remarkable culture of hospitality. Strangers might ask each other for a sip of water. Or, if you ask someone for directions, they're very likely to invite you home for coffee. We see these unwritten rules most clearly when they're broken, or when you're in a new place and you're trying to figure out what the right thing to do is. Sometimes breaking the rules a little bit is where the action is. In case it's not clear, I really want you to do this. OK? So here's how it's going to go. Find somebody who is making eye contact. That's a good signal. The first thing is a simple smile. If you're passing somebody on the street or in the hallway here, smile. See what happens. Another is triangulation. There's you, there's a stranger, there's some third thing that you both might see and comment on, like a piece of public art or somebody preaching in the street or somebody wearing funny clothes. Give it a try. Make a comment about that third thing, and see if starts a conversation. Another is what I call noticing. This is usually giving a compliment. I'm a big fan of noticing people's shoes. I'm actually not wearing fabulous shoes right now, but shoes are fabulous in general. And they're pretty neutral as far as giving compliments goes. People always want to tell you things about their awesome shoes. You may have already experienced the dogs and babies principle. It can be awkward to talk to someone on the street; you don't know how they're going to respond. But you can always talk to their dog or their baby. The dog or the baby is a social conduit to the person, and you can tell by how they respond whether they're open to talking more. The last one I want to challenge you to is disclosure. This is a very vulnerable thing to do, and it can be very rewarding. So next time you're talking to a stranger and you feel comfortable, tell them something true about yourself, something really personal. You might have that experience I talked about of feeling understood. Sometimes in conversation, it comes up, people ask me, "What does your dad do?" or, "Where does he live?" And sometimes I tell them the whole truth, which is that he died when I was a kid. Always in those moments, they share their own experiences of loss. We tend to meet disclosure with disclosure, even with strangers. So, here it is. When you talk to strangers, you're making beautiful interruptions into the expected narrative of your daily life and theirs. You're making unexpected connections. If you don't talk to strangers, you're missing out on all of that. We spend a lot of time teaching our children about strangers. What would happen if we spent more time teaching ourselves? We could reject all the ideas that make us so suspicious of each other. We could make a space for change. Thank you. (Applause) |
The risky politics of progress | {0: "Jonathan Tepperman writes on the world's most pervasive and seemingly intractable challenges."} | TEDSummit | The conventional wisdom about our world today is that this is a time of terrible decline. And that's not surprising, given the bad news all around us, from ISIS to inequality, political dysfunction, climate change, Brexit, and on and on. But here's the thing, and this may sound a little weird. I actually don't buy this gloomy narrative, and I don't think you should either. Look, it's not that I don't see the problems. I read the same headlines that you do. What I dispute is the conclusion that so many people draw from them, namely that we're all screwed because the problems are unsolvable and our governments are useless. Now, why do I say this? It's not like I'm particularly optimistic by nature. But something about the media's constant doom-mongering with its fixation on problems and not on answers has always really bugged me. So a few years ago I decided, well, I'm a journalist, I should see if I can do any better by going around the world and actually asking folks if and how they've tackled their big economic and political challenges. And what I found astonished me. It turns out that there are remarkable signs of progress out there, often in the most unexpected places, and they've convinced me that our great global challenges may not be so unsolvable after all. Not only are there theoretical fixes; those fixes have been tried. They've worked. And they offer hope for the rest of us. I'm going to show you what I mean by telling you about how three of the countries I visited — Canada, Indonesia and Mexico — overcame three supposedly impossible problems. Their stories matter because they contain tools the rest of us can use, and not just for those particular problems, but for many others, too. When most people think about my homeland, Canada, today, if they think about Canada at all, they think cold, they think boring, they think polite. They think we say "sorry" too much in our funny accents. And that's all true. (Laughter) Sorry. (Laughter) But Canada's also important because of its triumph over a problem currently tearing many other countries apart: immigration. Consider, Canada today is among the world's most welcoming nations, even compared to other immigration-friendly countries. Its per capita immigration rate is four times higher than France's, and its percentage of foreign-born residents is double that of Sweden. Meanwhile, Canada admitted 10 times more Syrian refugees in the last year than did the United States. (Applause) And now Canada is taking even more. And yet, if you ask Canadians what makes them proudest of their country, they rank "multiculturalism," a dirty word in most places, second, ahead of hockey. Hockey. (Laughter) In other words, at a time when other countries are now frantically building new barriers to keep foreigners out, Canadians want even more of them in. Now, here's the really interesting part. Canada wasn't always like this. Until the mid-1960s, Canada followed an explicitly racist immigration policy. They called it "White Canada," and as you can see, they were not just talking about the snow. So how did that Canada become today's Canada? Well, despite what my mom in Ontario will tell you, the answer had nothing to do with virtue. Canadians are not inherently better than anyone else. The real explanation involves the man who became Canada's leader in 1968, Pierre Trudeau, who is also the father of the current prime minister. (Applause) The thing to know about that first Trudeau is that he was very different from Canada's previous leaders. He was a French speaker in a country long-dominated by its English elite. He was an intellectual. He was even kind of groovy. I mean, seriously, the guy did yoga. He hung out with the Beatles. (Laughter) And like all hipsters, he could be infuriating at times. But he nevertheless pulled off one of the most progressive transformations any country has ever seen. His formula, I've learned, involved two parts. First, Canada threw out its old race-based immigration rules, and it replaced them with new color-blind ones that emphasized education, experience and language skills instead. And what that did was greatly increase the odds that newcomers would contribute to the economy. Then part two, Trudeau created the world's first policy of official multiculturalism to promote integration and the idea that diversity was the key to Canada's identity. Now, in the years that followed, Ottawa kept pushing this message, but at the same time, ordinary Canadians soon started to see the economic, the material benefits of multiculturalism all around them. And these two influences soon combined to create the passionately open-minded Canada of today. Let's now turn to another country and an even tougher problem, Islamic extremism. In 1998, the people of Indonesia took to the streets and overthrew their longtime dictator, Suharto. It was an amazing moment, but it was also a scary one. With 250 million people, Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country on Earth. It's also hot, huge and unruly, made up of 17,000 islands, where people speak close to a thousand languages. Now, Suharto had been a dictator, and a nasty one. But he'd also been a pretty effective tyrant, and he'd always been careful to keep religion out of politics. So experts feared that without him keeping a lid on things, the country would explode, or religious extremists would take over and turn Indonesia into a tropical version of Iran. And that's just what seemed to happen at first. In the country's first free elections, in 1999, Islamist parties scored 36 percent of the vote, and the islands burned as riots and terror attacks killed thousands. Since then, however, Indonesia has taken a surprising turn. While ordinary folks have grown more pious on a personal level — I saw a lot more headscarves on a recent visit than I would have a decade ago — the country's politics have moved in the opposite direction. Indonesia is now a pretty decent democracy. And yet, its Islamist parties have steadily lost support, from a high of about 38 percent in 2004 down to 25 percent in 2014. As for terrorism, it's now extremely rare. And while a few Indonesians have recently joined ISIS, their number is tiny, far fewer in per capita terms than the number of Belgians. Try to think of one other Muslim-majority country that can say all those same things. In 2014, I went to Indonesia to ask its current president, a soft-spoken technocrat named Joko Widodo, "Why is Indonesia thriving when so many other Muslim states are dying?" "Well, what we realized," he told me, "is that to deal with extremism, we needed to deal with inequality first." See, Indonesia's religious parties, like similar parties elsewhere, had tended to focus on things like reducing poverty and cutting corruption. So that's what Joko and his predecessors did too, thereby stealing the Islamists' thunder. They also cracked down hard on terrorism, but Indonesia's democrats have learned a key lesson from the dark years of dictatorship, namely that repression only creates more extremism. So they waged their war with extraordinary delicacy. They used the police instead of the army. They only detained suspects if they had enough evidence. They held public trials. They even sent liberal imams into the jails to persuade the jihadists that terror is un-Islamic. And all of this paid off in spectacular fashion, creating the kind of country that was unimaginable 20 years ago. So at this point, my optimism should, I hope, be starting to make a bit more sense. Neither immigration nor Islamic extremism are impossible to deal with. Join me now on one last trip, this time to Mexico. Now, of our three stories, this one probably surprised me the most, since as you all know, the country is still struggling with so many problems. And yet, a few years ago, Mexico did something that many other countries from France to India to the United States can still only dream of. It shattered the political paralysis that had gripped it for years. To understand how, we need to rewind to the year 2000, when Mexico finally became a democracy. Rather than use their new freedoms to fight for reform, Mexico's politicians used them to fight one another. Congress deadlocked, and the country's problems — drugs, poverty, crime, corruption — spun out of control. Things got so bad that in 2008, the Pentagon warned that Mexico risked collapse. Then in 2012, this guy named Enrique Peña Nieto somehow got himself elected president. Now, this Peña hardly inspired much confidence at first. Sure, he was handsome, but he came from Mexico's corrupt old ruling party, the PRI, and he was a notorious womanizer. In fact, he seemed like such a pretty boy lightweight that women called him "bombón," sweetie, at campaign rallies. And yet this same bombón soon surprised everyone by hammering out a truce between the country's three warring political parties. And over the next 18 months, they together passed an incredibly comprehensive set of reforms. They busted open Mexico's smothering monopolies. They liberalized its rusting energy sector. They restructured its failing schools, and much more. To appreciate the scale of this accomplishment, try to imagine the US Congress passing immigration reform, campaign finance reform and banking reform. Now, try to imagine Congress doing it all at the same time. That's what Mexico did. Not long ago, I met with Peña and asked how he managed it all. The President flashed me his famous twinkly smile — (Laughter) and told me that the short answer was "compromiso," compromise. Of course, I pushed him for details, and the long answer that came out was essentially "compromise, compromise and more compromise." See, Peña knew that he needed to build trust early, so he started talking to the opposition just days after his election. To ward off pressure from special interests, he kept their meetings small and secret, and many of the participants later told me that it was this intimacy, plus a lot of shared tequila, that helped build confidence. So did the fact that all decisions had to be unanimous, and that Peña even agreed to pass some of the other party's priorities before his own. As Santiago Creel, an opposition senator, put it to me, "Look, I'm not saying that I'm special or that anyone is special, but that group, that was special." The proof? When Peña was sworn in, the pact held, and Mexico moved forward for the first time in years. Bueno. So now we've seen how these three countries overcame three of their great challenges. And that's very nice for them, right? But what good does it do the rest of us? Well, in the course of studying these and a bunch of other success stories, like the way Rwanda pulled itself back together after civil war or Brazil has reduced inequality, or South Korea has kept its economy growing faster and for longer than any other country on Earth, I've noticed a few common threads. Now, before describing them, I need to add a caveat. I realize, of course, that all countries are unique. So you can't simply take what worked in one, port it to another and expect it to work there too. Nor do specific solutions work forever. You've got to adapt them as circumstances change. That said, by stripping these stories to their essence, you absolutely can distill a few common tools for problem-solving that will work in other countries and in boardrooms and in all sorts of other contexts, too. Number one, embrace the extreme. In all the stories we've just looked at, salvation came at a moment of existential peril. And that was no coincidence. Take Canada: when Trudeau took office, he faced two looming dangers. First, though his vast, underpopulated country badly needed more bodies, its preferred source for white workers, Europe, had just stopped exporting them as it finally recovered from World War II. The other problem was that Canada's long cold war between its French and its English communities had just become a hot one. Quebec was threatening to secede, and Canadians were actually killing other Canadians over politics. Now, countries face crises all the time. Right? That's nothing special. But Trudeau's genius was to realize that Canada's crisis had swept away all the hurdles that usually block reform. Canada had to open up. It had no choice. And it had to rethink its identity. Again, it had no choice. And that gave Trudeau a once-in-a-generation opportunity to break the old rules and write new ones. And like all our other heroes, he was smart enough to seize it. Number two, there's power in promiscuous thinking. Another striking similarity among good problem-solvers is that they're all pragmatists. They'll steal the best answers from wherever they find them, and they don't let details like party or ideology or sentimentality get in their way. As I mentioned earlier, Indonesia's democrats were clever enough to steal many of the Islamists' best campaign promises for themselves. They even invited some of the radicals into their governing coalition. Now, that horrified a lot of secular Indonesians. But by forcing the radicals to actually help govern, it quickly exposed the fact that they weren't any good at the job, and it got them mixed up in all of the grubby compromises and petty humiliations that are part of everyday politics. And that hurt their image so badly that they've never recovered. Number three, please all of the people some of the time. I know I just mentioned how crises can grant leaders extraordinary freedoms. And that's true, but problem-solving often requires more than just boldness. It takes showing restraint, too, just when that's the last thing you want to do. Take Trudeau: when he took office, he could easily have put his core constituency, that is Canada's French community, first. He could have pleased some of the people all of the time. And Peña could have used his power to keep attacking the opposition, as was traditional in Mexico. Yet he chose to embrace his enemies instead, while forcing his own party to compromise. And Trudeau pushed everyone to stop thinking in tribal terms and to see multiculturalism, not language and not skin color, as what made them quintessentially Canadian. Nobody got everything they wanted, but everyone got just enough that the bargains held. So at this point you may be thinking, "OK, Tepperman, if the fixes really are out there like you keep insisting, then why aren't more countries already using them?" It's not like they require special powers to pull off. I mean, none of the leaders we've just looked at were superheroes. They didn't accomplish anything on their own, and they all had plenty of flaws. Take Indonesia's first democratic president, Abdurrahman Wahid. This man was so powerfully uncharismatic that he once fell asleep in the middle of his own speech. (Laughter) True story. So what this tells us is that the real obstacle is not ability, and it's not circumstances. It's something much simpler. Making big changes involves taking big risks, and taking big risks is scary. Overcoming that fear requires guts, and as you all know, gutsy politicians are painfully rare. But that doesn't mean we voters can't demand courage from our political leaders. I mean, that's why we put them in office in the first place. And given the state of the world today, there's really no other option. The answers are out there, but now it's up to us to elect more women and men brave enough to find them, to steal them and to make them work. Thank you. (Applause) |
The agony of trying to unsubscribe | {0: 'For James Veitch, a British writer and comedian with a mischievous side, spam emails proved the perfect opening to have some fun, playing the scammers at their own game.'} | TEDSummit | It's funny the things you forget. I went to see my mother the other day, and she told me this story that I'd completely forgotten about how, when we were driving together, she would pull the car over, and by the time she had gotten out of the car, and gone around the car to let me out of the car, I would have already gotten out of the car and pretended to have died. (Laughter) (Applause) Because that's how you die. (Laughter) And I remember, that was a game I used to play with myself to entertain myself whenever I was bored or frustrated. (Laughter) Settle down. (Laughter) People say we live in an age of information overload. Right? I don't know about that, but I just know that I get too many marketing emails. I got a marketing email from a supermarket firm, which will remain nameless for predominantly legal reasons, but which I'm going to call "SafeMart." (Laughter) I got an email from them, and it went like this, it said: "Just three weeks until SafeMart at King's Cross opens!!!" And I resented this, because not only do I not remember signing up to that, but I resent the fact that they appear to think that I should be excited about a shop opening. So what I did was I scrolled down to the bottom of the email, and I pressed, "Unsubscribe." And I thought that'd be the end of it. But a week later, I got another one that said, "Just two weeks until SafeMart at King's Cross opens!!!" And I thought, obviously, I haven't clicked hard enough. So I tried it again. Right? Lo and behold, a week passes, you guessed it, "Just one week until SafeMart at King's Cross opens!!!" And here's the problem: The internet gave us access to everything; but it also gave everything access to us. It's hard enough to discriminate between the things that genuinely matter in this world and the minutiae of life, without having emails about supermarket chains and Candy Crush Saga. And I was really annoyed with them, and I thought, OK, I was about to write a strongly worded email, which I can do quite well. (Laughter) And I thought, no — I'm going to find the game. So I replied to it, and I said, "I literally cannot wait!!!!" (Laughter) "What do you need from me?" They got back to me; a guy called Dan said, "Hi James. I've asked a colleague to help me with your query." (Laughter) Like it needs help. And I said, "What's the plan, Dan? I'm thinking fireworks, bouncy castle ..." (Laughter) "I'm not sure what you mean." (Laughter) I said, "I'm just tremendously excited about the opening!" (Laughter) "Do you want to book the bouncy castle or shall I?" He said, "I think you have misunderstood." (Laughter) "A new store is opening, but there is no celebration planned." I said, "But what was all the 'Three weeks until,' 'Two weeks until' emails? I was getting excited." (Laughter) "I'm sorry you're disappointed." (Laughter) I said, "Not to worry. Let's do something anyway! Besides, the deposit on the bouncy castle was non-refundable." (Laughter) "If we don't use it, we're out a few hundred quid, Dan." (Laughter) He said, "Mr. Veitch, I'm not responsible for anything you have ordered." I said, "Let's not get into who did what. Bottom line: you and I are in this together." (Laughter) (Applause) "Question: Will you be there to make sure people take their shoes off?" (Laughter) I'll be honest, then my relationship with Dan deteriorated somewhat, because the next email I got was this: "Thanks for your email - your Case Number is ..." (Laughter) That's outrageous. I said, "Dan?" (Laughter) And I got — and I was just like, this is ... — and I, I .... And I said, "Danny?" And I thought, this is terrible. All I'm doing is collecting case numbers. I said, "D-Dog?" (Laughter) "The store is now open." (Laughter) I said, "But Dan, they must have wondered why there was no bouncy castle." And then we were back to this. And that might have been the end of the story, but I remembered that anything — everything — even something as mundane as getting out of a car, can be fun if you find the right game. So, this is what I replied: [Thanks for your email - your Case Number is #0000001.] (Laughter) (Applause) And we just, uh ... (Laughter) It was like we were dancing. It was just a beautiful relationship. We just kept going. It was lovely. But to be honest, guys, it was quite labor-intensive, and I had other stuff to do, believe it or not. So what I did is I have a little email auto-replier program. And I set it up so every time it receives an email from SafeMart, it just pings one back. So I set it up, and it says, "Thanks for your email - your Case Number is ..." Then it has a little formula that I wrote to up the case number every time. And I put it on the server and set it running. (Laughter) I'll be honest, guys — then I forgot about it. (Laughter) I checked back on it the other day, and it appears there have been a number of emails going back and forth. We're on 21,439. (Applause) It gives me an immense sense of satisfaction to know that these computer programs are just going to be pinging one another for eternity. And as legacies go, I don't think that's bad. So guys, just remember: if ever you feel weighed down by the bureaucracy and often mundanity of modern life, don't fight the frustration. Let it be the catalyst for whimsy. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
Let's teach for mastery -- not test scores | {0: 'In 2004, Sal Khan, a hedge fund analyst, began making math tutorials for his cousins. Twelve years later, Khan Academy has more than 42 million registered users from 190 countries, with tutorials on subjects from basic math through economics, art history, computer science, health, medicine and more.'} | TED Talks Live | I'm here today to talk about the two ideas that, at least based on my observations at Khan Academy, are kind of the core, or the key leverage points for learning. And it's the idea of mastery and the idea of mindset. I saw this in the early days working with my cousins. A lot of them were having trouble with math at first, because they had all of these gaps accumulated in their learning. And because of that, at some point they got to an algebra class and they might have been a little bit shaky on some of the pre-algebra, and because of that, they thought they didn't have the math gene. Or they'd get to a calculus class, and they'd be a little bit shaky on the algebra. I saw it in the early days when I was uploading some of those videos on YouTube, and I realized that people who were not my cousins were watching. (Laughter) And at first, those comments were just simple thank-yous. I thought that was a pretty big deal. I don't know how much time you all spend on YouTube. Most of the comments are not "Thank you." (Laughter) They're a little edgier than that. But then the comments got a little more intense, student after student saying that they had grown up not liking math. It was getting difficult as they got into more advanced math topics. By the time they got to algebra, they had so many gaps in their knowledge they couldn't engage with it. They thought they didn't have the math gene. But when they were a bit older, they took a little agency and decided to engage. They found resources like Khan Academy and they were able to fill in those gaps and master those concepts, and that reinforced their mindset that it wasn't fixed; that they actually were capable of learning mathematics. And in a lot of ways, this is how you would master a lot of things in life. It's the way you would learn a martial art. In a martial art, you would practice the white belt skills as long as necessary, and only when you've mastered it you would move on to become a yellow belt. It's the way you learn a musical instrument: you practice the basic piece over and over again, and only when you've mastered it, you go on to the more advanced one. But what we point out — this is not the way a traditional academic model is structured, the type of academic model that most of us grew up in. In a traditional academic model, we group students together, usually by age, and around middle school, by age and perceived ability, and we shepherd them all together at the same pace. And what typically happens, let's say we're in a middle school pre-algebra class, and the current unit is on exponents, the teacher will give a lecture on exponents, then we'll go home, do some homework. The next morning, we'll review the homework, then another lecture, homework, lecture, homework. That will continue for about two or three weeks, and then we get a test. On that test, maybe I get a 75 percent, maybe you get a 90 percent, maybe you get a 95 percent. And even though the test identified gaps in our knowledge, I didn't know 25 percent of the material. Even the A student, what was the five percent they didn't know? Even though we've identified the gaps, the whole class will then move on to the next subject, probably a more advanced subject that's going to build on those gaps. It might be logarithms or negative exponents. And that process continues, and you immediately start to realize how strange this is. I didn't know 25 percent of the more foundational thing, and now I'm being pushed to the more advanced thing. And this will continue for months, years, all the way until at some point, I might be in an algebra class or trigonometry class and I hit a wall. And it's not because algebra is fundamentally difficult or because the student isn't bright. It's because I'm seeing an equation and they're dealing with exponents and that 30 percent that I didn't know is showing up. And then I start to disengage. To appreciate how absurd that is, imagine if we did other things in our life that way. Say, home-building. (Laughter) So we bring in the contractor and say, "We were told we have two weeks to build a foundation. Do what you can." (Laughter) So they do what they can. Maybe it rains. Maybe some of the supplies don't show up. And two weeks later, the inspector comes, looks around, says, "OK, the concrete is still wet right over there, that part's not quite up to code ... I'll give it an 80 percent." (Laughter) You say, "Great! That's a C. Let's build the first floor." (Laughter) Same thing. We have two weeks, do what you can, inspector shows up, it's a 75 percent. Great, that's a D-plus. Second floor, third floor, and all of a sudden, while you're building the third floor, the whole structure collapses. And if your reaction is the reaction you typically have in education, or that a lot of folks have, you might say, maybe we had a bad contractor, or maybe we needed better inspection or more frequent inspection. But what was really broken was the process. We were artificially constraining how long we had to something, pretty much ensuring a variable outcome, and we took the trouble of inspecting and identifying those gaps, but then we built right on top of it. So the idea of mastery learning is to do the exact opposite. Instead of artificially constraining, fixing when and how long you work on something, pretty much ensuring that variable outcome, the A, B, C, D, F — do it the other way around. What's variable is when and how long a student actually has to work on something, and what's fixed is that they actually master the material. And it's important to realize that not only will this make the student learn their exponents better, but it'll reinforce the right mindset muscles. It makes them realize that if you got 20 percent wrong on something, it doesn't mean that you have a C branded in your DNA somehow. It means that you should just keep working on it. You should have grit; you should have perseverance; you should take agency over your learning. Now, a lot of skeptics might say, well, hey, this is all great, philosophically, this whole idea of mastery-based learning and its connection to mindset, students taking agency over their learning. It makes a lot of sense, but it seems impractical. To actually do it, every student would be on their own track. It would have to be personalized, you'd have to have private tutors and worksheets for every student. And these aren't new ideas — there were experiments in Winnetka, Illinois, 100 years ago, where they did mastery-based learning and saw great results, but they said it wouldn't scale because it was logistically difficult. The teacher had to give different worksheets to every student, give on-demand assessments. But now today, it's no longer impractical. We have the tools to do it. Students see an explanation at their own time and pace? There's on-demand video for that. They need practice? They need feedback? There's adaptive exercises readily available for students. And when that happens, all sorts of neat things happen. One, the students can actually master the concepts, but they're also building their growth mindset, they're building grit, perseverance, they're taking agency over their learning. And all sorts of beautiful things can start to happen in the actual classroom. Instead of it being focused on the lecture, students can interact with each other. They can get deeper mastery over the material. They can go into simulations, Socratic dialogue. To appreciate what we're talking about and the tragedy of lost potential here, I'd like to give a little bit of a thought experiment. If we were to go 400 years into the past to Western Europe, which even then, was one of the more literate parts of the planet, you would see that about 15 percent of the population knew how to read. And I suspect that if you asked someone who did know how to read, say a member of the clergy, "What percentage of the population do you think is even capable of reading?" They might say, "Well, with a great education system, maybe 20 or 30 percent." But if you fast forward to today, we know that that prediction would have been wildly pessimistic, that pretty close to 100 percent of the population is capable of reading. But if I were to ask you a similar question: "What percentage of the population do you think is capable of truly mastering calculus, or understanding organic chemistry, or being able to contribute to cancer research?" A lot of you might say, "Well, with a great education system, maybe 20, 30 percent." But what if that estimate is just based on your own experience in a non-mastery framework, your own experience with yourself or observing your peers, where you're being pushed at this set pace through classes, accumulating all these gaps? Even when you got that 95 percent, what was that five percent you missed? And it keeps accumulating — you get to an advanced class, all of a sudden you hit a wall and say, "I'm not meant to be a cancer researcher; not meant to be a physicist; not meant to be a mathematician." I suspect that that actually is the case, but if you were allowed to be operating in a mastery framework, if you were allowed to really take agency over your learning, and when you get something wrong, embrace it — view that failure as a moment of learning — that number, the percent that could really master calculus or understand organic chemistry, is actually a lot closer to 100 percent. And this isn't even just a "nice to have." I think it's a social imperative. We're exiting what you could call the industrial age and we're going into this information revolution. And it's clear that some things are happening. In the industrial age, society was a pyramid. At the base of the pyramid, you needed human labor. In the middle of the pyramid, you had an information processing, a bureaucracy class, and at the top of the pyramid, you had your owners of capital and your entrepreneurs and your creative class. But we know what's happening already, as we go into this information revolution. The bottom of that pyramid, automation, is going to take over. Even that middle tier, information processing, that's what computers are good at. So as a society, we have a question: All this new productivity is happening because of this technology, but who participates in it? Is it just going to be that very top of the pyramid, in which case, what does everyone else do? How do they operate? Or do we do something that's more aspirational? Do we actually attempt to invert the pyramid, where you have a large creative class, where almost everyone can participate as an entrepreneur, an artist, as a researcher? And I don't think that this is utopian. I really think that this is all based on the idea that if we let people tap into their potential by mastering concepts, by being able to exercise agency over their learning, that they can get there. And when you think of it as just a citizen of the world, it's pretty exciting. I mean, think about the type of equity we can we have, and the rate at which civilization could even progress. And so, I'm pretty optimistic about it. I think it's going to be a pretty exciting time to be alive. Thank you. (Applause) |
The new American Dream | {0: 'Courtney E. Martin’s work has two obsessions at its core: storytelling and solutions. '} | TED2016 | I'm a journalist, so I like to look for the untold stories, the lives that quietly play out under the scream of headlines. I've also been going about the business of putting down roots, choosing a partner, making babies. So for the last few years, I've been trying to understand what constitutes the 21st-century good life, both because I'm fascinated by the moral and philosophical implications, but also because I'm in desperate need of answers myself. We live in tenuous times. In fact, for the first time in American history, the majority of parents do not think that their kids will be better off than they were. This is true of rich and poor, men and women. Now, some of you might hear this and feel sad. After all, America is deeply invested in this idea of economic transcendence, that every generation kind of leapfrogs the one before it, earning more, buying more, being more. We've exported this dream all over the world, so kids in Brazil and China and even Kenya inherit our insatiable expectation for more. But when I read this historic poll for the first time, it didn't actually make me feel sad. It felt like a provocation. "Better off" — based on whose standards? Is "better off" finding a secure job that you can count on for the rest of your life? Those are nearly extinct. People move jobs, on average, every 4.7 years, and it's estimated that by 2020, nearly half of Americans will be freelancers. OK, so is better off just a number? Is it about earning as much as you possibly can? By that singular measurement, we are failing. Median per capita income has been flat since about 2000, adjusted for inflation. All right, so is better off getting a big house with a white picket fence? Less of us are doing that. Nearly five million people lost their homes in the Great Recession, and even more of us sobered up about the lengths we were willing to go — or be tricked into going, in many predatory cases — to hold that deed. Home-ownership rates are at their lowest since 1995. All right, so we're not finding steady employment, we're not earning as much money, and we're not living in big fancy houses. Toll the funeral bells for everything that made America great. But, are those the best measurements of a country's greatness, of a life well lived? What I think makes America great is its spirit of reinvention. In the wake of the Great Recession, more and more Americans are redefining what "better off" really means. Turns out, it has more to do with community and creativity than dollars and cents. Now, let me be very clear: the 14.8 percent of Americans living in poverty need money, plain and simple. And all of us need policies that protect us from exploitation by employers and financial institutions. Nothing that follows is meant to suggest that the gap between rich and poor is anything but profoundly immoral. But, too often we let the conversation stop there. We talk about poverty as if it were a monolithic experience; about the poor as if they were solely victims. Part of what I've learned in my research and reporting is that the art of living well is often practiced most masterfully by the most vulnerable. Now, if necessity is the mother of invention, I've come to believe that recession can be the father of consciousness. It confronts us with profound questions, questions we might be too lazy or distracted to ask in times of relative comfort. How should we work? How should we live? All of us, whether we realize it or not, seek answers to these questions, with our ancestors kind of whispering in our ears. My great-grandfather was a drunk in Detroit, who sometimes managed to hold down a factory job. He had, as unbelievable as it might sound, 21 children, with one woman, my great-grandmother, who died at 47 years old of ovarian cancer. Now, I'm pregnant with my second child, and I cannot even fathom what she must have gone through. And if you're trying to do the math — there were six sets of twins. So my grandfather, their son, became a traveling salesman, and he lived boom and bust. So my dad grew up answering the door for debt collectors and pretending his parents weren't home. He actually took his braces off himself with pliers in the garage, when his father admitted he didn't have money to go back to the orthodontist. So my dad, unsurprisingly, became a bankruptcy lawyer. Couldn't write this in a novel, right? He was obsessed with providing a secure foundation for my brother and I. So I ask these questions by way of a few generations of struggle. My parents made sure that I grew up on a kind of steady ground that allows one to question and risk and leap. And ironically, and probably sometimes to their frustration, it is their steadfast commitment to security that allows me to question its value, or at least its value as we've historically defined it in the 21st century. So let's dig into this first question: How should we work? We should work like our mothers. That's right — we've spent decades trying to fit women into a work world built for company men. And many have done backbends to fit in, but others have carved a more unconventional path, creating a patchwork of meaning and money with enough flexibility to do what they need to do for those that they love. My mom called it "just making it work." Today I hear life coaches call it "a portfolio career." Whatever you call it, more and more men are craving these whole, if not harried, lives. They're waking up to their desire and duty to be present fathers and sons. Now, artist Ann Hamilton has said, "Labor is a way of knowing." Labor is a way of knowing. In other words, what we work on is what we understand about the world. If this is true, and I think it is, then women who have disproportionately cared for the little ones and the sick ones and the aging ones, have disproportionately benefited from the most profound kind of knowing there is: knowing the human condition. By prioritizing care, men are, in a sense, staking their claim to the full range of human existence. Now, this means the nine-to-five no longer works for anyone. Punch clocks are becoming obsolete, as are career ladders. Whole industries are being born and dying every day. It's all nonlinear from here. So we need to stop asking kids, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and start asking them, "How do you want to be when you grow up?" Their work will constantly change. The common denominator is them. So the more they understand their gifts and create crews of ideal collaborators, the better off they will be. The challenge ahead is to reinvent the social safety net to fit this increasingly fragmented economy. We need portable health benefits. We need policies that reflect that everyone deserves to be vulnerable or care for vulnerable others, without becoming destitute. We need to seriously consider a universal basic income. We need to reinvent labor organizing. The promise of a work world that is structured to actually fit our 21st century values, not some archaic idea about bringing home the bacon, is long overdue — just ask your mother. Now, how about the second question: How should we live? We should live like our immigrant ancestors. When they came to America, they often shared apartments, survival tactics, child care — always knew how to fill one more belly, no matter how small the food available. But they were told that success meant leaving the village behind and pursuing that iconic symbol of the American Dream, the white picket fence. And even today, we see a white picket fence and we think success, self-possession. But when you strip away the sentimentality, what it really does is divides us. Many Americans are rejecting the white picket fence and the kind of highly privatized life that happened within it, and reclaiming village life, reclaiming interdependence instead. Fifty million of us, for example, live in intergenerational households. This number exploded with the Great Recession, but it turns out people actually like living this way. Two-thirds of those who are living with multiple generations under one roof say it's improved their relationships. Some people are choosing to share homes not with family, but with other people who understand the health and economic benefits of daily community. CoAbode, an online platform for single moms looking to share homes with other single moms, has 50,000 users. And people over 65 are especially prone to be looking for these alternative living arrangements. They understand that their quality of life depends on a mix of solitude and solidarity. Which is true of all of us when you think about it, young and old alike. For too long, we've pretended that happiness is a king in his castle. But all the research proves otherwise. It shows that the healthiest, happiest and even safest — in terms of both climate change disaster, in terms of crime, all of that — are Americans who live lives intertwined with their neighbors. Now, I've experienced this firsthand. For the last few years, I've been living in a cohousing community. It's 1.5 acres of persimmon trees, this prolific blackberry bush that snakes around a community garden, all smack-dab, by the way, in the middle of urban Oakland. The nine units are all built to be different, different sizes, different shapes, but they're meant to be as green as possible. So big, shiny black solar cells on our roof mean our electricity bill rarely exceeds more than five bucks in a month. The 25 of us who live there are all different ages and political persuasions and professions, and we live in homes that have everything a typical home would have. But additionally, we share an industrial-sized kitchen and eating area, where we have common meals twice a week. Now, people, when I tell them I live like this, often have one of two extreme reactions. Either they say, "Why doesn't everyone live like this?" Or they say, "That sounds totally horrifying. I would never want to do that." So let me reassure you: there is a sacred respect for privacy among us, but also a commitment to what we call "radical hospitality" — not the kind advertised by the Four Seasons, but the kind that says that every single person is worthy of kindness, full stop, end of sentence. The biggest surprise for me of living in a community like this? You share all the domestic labor — the repairing, the cooking, the weeding — but you also share the emotional labor. Rather than depending only on the idealized family unit to get all of your emotional needs met, you have two dozen other people that you can go to to talk about a hard day at work or troubleshoot how to handle an abusive teacher. Teenagers in our community will often go to an adult that is not their parent to ask for advice. It's what bell hooks called "revolutionary parenting," this humble acknowledgment that kids are healthier when they have a wider range of adults to emulate and count on. Turns out, adults are healthier, too. It's a lot of pressure, trying to be that perfect family behind that white picket fence. The "new better off," as I've come to call it, is less about investing in the perfect family and more about investing in the imperfect village, whether that's relatives living under one roof, a cohousing community like mine, or just a bunch of neighbors who pledge to really know and look out for one another. It's good common sense, right? And yet, money has often made us dumb about reaching out. The most reliable wealth is found in relationship. The new better off is not an individual prospect at all. In fact, if you're a failure or you think you're a failure, I've got some good news for you: you might be a success by standards you have not yet honored. Maybe you're a mediocre earner but a masterful father. Maybe you can't afford your dream home, but you throw legendary neighborhood parties. If you're a textbook success, the implications of what I'm saying could be more grim for you. You might be a failure by standards you hold dear but that the world doesn't reward. Only you can know. I know that I am not a tribute to my great-grandmother, who lived such a short and brutish life, if I earn enough money to afford every creature comfort. You can't buy your way out of suffering or into meaning. There is no home big enough to erase the pain that she must have endured. I am a tribute to her if I live a life as connected and courageous as possible. In the midst of such widespread uncertainty, we may, in fact, be insecure. But we can let that insecurity make us brittle or supple. We can turn inward, lose faith in the power of institutions to change — even lose faith in ourselves. Or we can turn outward, cultivate faith in our ability to reach out, to connect, to create. Turns out, the biggest danger is not failing to achieve the American Dream. The biggest danger is achieving a dream that you don't actually believe in. So don't do that. Do the harder, more interesting thing, which is to compose a life where what you do every single day, the people you give your best love and ingenuity and energy to, aligns as closely as possible with what you believe. That, not something as mundane as making money, is a tribute to your ancestors. That is the beautiful struggle. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why helmets don't prevent concussions -- and what might | {0: "David Camarillo's research focuses on understanding and preventing traumatic brain injury."} | TEDxStanford | The word concussion evokes a fear these days more so than it ever has, and I know this personally. I played 10 years of football, was struck in the head thousands of times. And I have to tell you, though, what was much worse than that was a pair of bike accidents I had where I suffered concussions, and I'm still dealing with the effects of the most recent one today as I stand in front of you. There is a fear around concussion that does have some evidence behind it. There is information that a repeated history of concussion can lead to early dementia, such as Alzheimer's, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That was the subject of the Will Smith movie "Concussion." And so everybody is caught up in football and what they see in the military, but you may not know that bike riding is the leading cause of concussion for kids, sports-related concussion, that is. And so another thing that I should tell you that you may not know is that the helmets that are worn in bicycling and football and many activities, they're not designed or tested for how well they can protect your children against concussion. They're in fact designed and tested for their ability to protect against skull fracture. And so I get this question all the time from parents, and they ask me, "Would you let your own child play football?" Or, "Should I let my child play soccer?" And I think that as a field, we're a long way from giving an answer with any kind of confidence there. So I look at that question from a bit of a different lens, and I want to know, how can we prevent concussion? Is that even possible? And most experts think that it's not, but the work that we're doing in my lab is starting to reveal more of the details around concussion so that we can have a better understanding. The reason we're able to prevent skull fracture with helmets is because it's pretty simple. We know how it works. Concussion has been much more of a mystery. So to give you a sense of what might be happening in a concussion, I want to show you the video here that you see when you type into Google, "What is a concussion?" The CDC website comes up, and this video essentially tells the whole story. What you see is the head moves forward, the brain lags behind, then the brain catches up and smashes into the skull. It rebounds off the skull and then proceeds to run into the other side of the skull. And what you'll notice is highlighted in this video from the CDC, which I'll note was funded by the NFL, is that the outer surface of the brain, where it was to have smashed into the skull, looks like it's been damaged or injured, so it's on the outer surface of the brain. And what I'd like to do with this video is to tell you that there are some aspects that are probably right, indicative of what the scientists think happens with concussion, but there's probably more that's wrong with this video. So one thing that I do agree with, and I think most experts would, is that the brain does have these dynamics. It does lag behind the skull and then catch up and move back and forth and oscillate. That we think is true. However, the amount of motion you see in the brain in this video is probably not right at all. There's very little room in the cranial vault, only a few millimeters, and it's filled entirely with cerebral spinal fluid, which acts as a protective layer. And so the brain as a whole probably moves very little inside the skull. The other problem with this video is that the brain is shown as a kind of rigid whole as it moves around, and that's not true either. Your brain is one of the softest substances in your body, and you can think of it kind of like jello. So as your head is moving back and forth, your brain is twisting and turning and contorting, and the tissue is getting stretched. And so most experts, I think, would agree that concussion is not likely to be something that's happening on this outer surface of the brain, but rather it's something that's much deeper towards the center of the brain. Now, the way that we're approaching this problem to try to understand the mechanisms of concussion and to figure out if we can prevent it is we are using a device like this. It's a mouthguard. It has sensors in it that are essentially the same that are in your cell phone: accelerometers, gyroscopes, and when someone is struck in the head, it can tell you how their head moved at a thousand samples per second. The principle behind the mouthguard is this: it fits onto your teeth. Your teeth are one of the hardest substances in your body. So it rigidly couples to your skull and gives you the most precise possible measurement of how the skull moves. People have tried other approaches, with helmets. We've looked at other sensors that go on your skin, and they all simply move around too much, and so we found that this is the only reliable way to take a good measurement. So now that we've got this device, we can go beyond studying cadavers, because you can only learn so much about concussion from studying a cadaver, and we want to learn and study live humans. So where can we find a group of willing volunteers to go out and smash their heads into each other on a regular basis and sustain concussion? Well, I was one of them, and it's your local friendly Stanford football team. So this is our laboratory, and I want to show you the first concussion we measured with this device. One of the things that I should point out is the device has this gyroscope in it, and that allows you to measure the rotation of the head. Most experts think that that's the critical factor that might start to tell us what is happening in concussion. So please watch this video. Announcer: Cougars bring extra people late, but Luck has time, and Winslow is crushed. I hope he's all right. (Audience roars) Top of your screen, you'll see him come on just this little post route, get separation, safety. Here it comes at you in real speed. You'll hear this. The hit delivered by — David Camarillo: Sorry, three times is probably a little excessive there. But you get the idea. So when you look at just the film here, pretty much the only thing you can see is he got hit really hard and he was hurt. But when we extract the data out of the mouthguard that he was wearing, we can see much more detail, much richer information. And one of the things that we noticed here is that he was struck in the lower left side of his face mask. And so that did something first that was a little counterintuitive. His head did not move to the right. In fact, it rotated first to the left. Then as the neck began to compress, the force of the blow caused it to whip back to the right. So this left-right motion was sort of a whiplash-type phenomenon, and we think that is probably what led to the brain injury. Now, this device is only limited in such that it can measure the skull motion, but what we really want to know is what's happening inside of the brain. So we collaborate with Svein Kleiven's group in Sweden. They've developed a finite element model of the brain. And so this is a simulation using the data from our mouthguard from the injury I just showed you, and what you see is the brain — this is a cross-section right in the front of the brain twisting and contorting as I mentioned. So you can see this doesn't look a lot like the CDC video. Now, the colors that you're looking at are how much the brain tissue is being stretched. And so the red is 50 percent. That means the brain has been stretched to 50 percent of its original length, the tissue in that particular area. And the main thing I want to draw your attention to is this red spot. So the red spot is very close to the center of the brain, and relatively speaking, you don't see a lot of colors like that on the exterior surface as the CDC video showed. Now, to explain a little more detail about how we think concussion might be happening, one thing I should mention is that we and others have observed that a concussion is more likely when you're struck and your head rotates in this direction. This is more common in sports like football, but this seems to be more dangerous. So what might be happening there? Well, one thing that you'll notice in the human brain that is different than other animals is we have these two very large lobes. We have the right brain and the left brain. And the key thing to notice in this figure here is that right down the center of the right brain and the left brain there's a large fissure that goes deep into the brain. And in that fissure, what you can't see in this image, you'll have to trust me, there is a fibrous sheet of tissue. It's called the falx, and it runs from the front of your head all the way to the back of your head, and it's quite stiff. And so what that allows for is when you're struck and your head rotates in this left-right direction, forces can rapidly transmit right down to the center of your brain. Now, what's there at the bottom of this fissure? It's the wiring of your brain, and in fact this red bundle here at the bottom of that fissure is the single largest fiber bundle that is the wiring that connects the right and left sides of your brain. It's called the corpus callosum. And we think that this might be one of the most common mechanisms of concussion, and as the forces move down, they strike the corpus callosum, it causes a dissociation between your right and your left brain and could explain some of the symptoms of concussion. This finding is also consistent of what we've seen in this brain disease that I mentioned, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. So this is an image of a middle-aged ex-professional football player, and the thing that I want to point out is if you look at the corpus callosum, and I'll page back here so you can see the size of a normal corpus callosum and the size of the person here who has chronic traumatic encephalopathy, it is greatly atrophied. And the same goes for all of the space in the ventricles. These ventricles are much larger. And so all of this tissue near the center of the brain has died off over time. So what we're learning is indeed consistent. Now, there is some good news here, and I hope to give you a sense of hope by the end of this talk. One of the things that we've noticed, specifically about this mechanism of injury, is although there's a rapid transmission of the forces down this fissure, it still takes a defined amount of time. And what we think is that if we can slow the head down just enough so that the brain does not lag behind the skull but instead it moves in synchrony with the skull, then we might be able to prevent this mechanism of concussion. So how can we slow the head down? (Laughter) A gigantic helmet. So with more space, you have more time, and this is a bit of a joke, but some of you may have seen this. This is bubble soccer, and it's a real sport. In fact, I saw some young adults playing this sport down the street from my house the other day, and as far as I know there have been no reported concussions. (Laughter) But in all seriousness, this principle does work, but this has gone too far. This isn't something that's practical for bike riding or playing football. And so we are collaborating with a company in Sweden called Hövding. Some of you may have seen their work, and they're using the same principle of air to give you some extra space to prevent concussion. Kids, don't try this at home please. This stuntman does not have a helmet. He instead has a neck collar, and this neck collar has sensors in it, the same type of sensors that are in our mouthguard, and it detects when he's likely to have a fall, and there's an airbag that explodes and triggers, the same way that an airbag works in your car, essentially. And in the experiments we've done in my lab with their device, we found that it can greatly reduce the risk of concussion in some scenarios compared to a normal bicycle helmet. So it's a pretty exciting development. But in order for us to actually realize the benefits of technology that can prevent concussion, it needs to meet regulations. That's a reality. And this device is for sale in Europe but is not for sale in the US, and probably won't be any time soon. So I wanted to tell you why. There are some good reasons and then there are some not so good reasons. Bike helmets are federally regulated. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been given jurisdiction to approve any bike helmet for sale, and this is the test they use. This is back to what I was telling you at the beginning about skull fracture. That's what this test is for. And that's an important thing to do. It can save your life, but it's not sufficient, I would say. So for example, one thing this test doesn't evaluate is it doesn't tell you is that airbag going to trigger at the right time and place, and not trigger when it doesn't need to? Similarly, it's not going to tell you is this helmet likely to prevent concussion or not? And if you look at football helmets, which aren't regulated, they still have a very similar test. They're not regulated by the government, anyway. They have an industry body, which is the way most industries work. But this industry body, I can tell you, has been quite resistant to updating their standards. So in my lab, we are working on not only the mechanism of concussion, but we want to understand how can we have better test standards? And we hope that the government can use this type of information to encourage innovation by letting consumers know how protected are you with a given helmet. And I want to bring this back finally to the original question I asked, which is, would I feel comfortable letting my child play football or ride a bicycle? And this might be just a result of my own traumatic experience. I'm much more nervous about my daughter, Rose, riding a bicycle. So she's a year and a half old, and she's already, well, wants to anyway, race down the streets of San Francisco. This is the bottom of one of these streets. And so my personal goal is to — and I believe this is possible — is to further develop these technologies, and in fact, we're working on something in my lab in particular that really makes optimal use of the given space of a helmet. And I am confident that we will be able to, before she's ready to ride a two-wheeler, have something available that can in fact really reduce the risk of concussion and comply with regulatory bodies. And so what I'd like to do — and I know that this is for some of you of more immediate nature, I've got a couple years here — is to be able to tell parents and grandparents when I'm asked, it is safe and healthy for your children to engage in these activities. And I'm very fortunate to have a wonderful team at Stanford that's working hard on this. So I hope to come back in a few years with the final story, but for now I will tell you, please don't just be afraid when you hear the word concussion. There is hope. Thank you. (Applause) |
A new way to heal hearts without surgery | {0: 'With his unique inventions (including a device knitted from threads of high-tech alloy by indigenous craftswomen), Franz Freudenthal saves children from congenital heart defects.'} | TED2016 | The most complex problems in our time can be solved with simple techniques, if we are able to dream. As a child, I discovered that creativity is the key to cross from dreams to reality. I learned this from my grandmother, Dr. Ruth Tichauer, a Jewish refugee that settled in the heart of the Andes. That is how I grew up: encouraged to see beyond any limitation. So part of my education included helping her in remote, indigenous communities. I cherish those memories, because they helped me to understand life outside the city, a life with a lot of possibilities, without barriers, as language or culture. During those trips, my grandmother used to recite a Kipling poem: "Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Mountains. Something lost behind the mountains. Lost and waiting for you. Go!" In the coming years, I became a medical student. One of every hundred children born worldwide has some kind of heart disease. There's a part of this problem I think I can solve — the part of this problem I have spent my life working on. The problem starts during pregnancy. The fetus needs to survive inside the mother. Survival depends on communication between the systemic and the pulmonary blood. At the moment of birth, this communication needs to stop. If it doesn't close, the baby has a hole in the heart. It is caused by prematurity and genetic conditions. But what we know today is that a lack of oxygen is also one of the causes. As you can see in the chart, the frequency of this kind of hole dramatically increases with altitude. Video: (Baby crying) When you look at patients with this condition, they seem desperate to breathe. To close the hole, major surgery used to be the only solution. One night, my friend Malte, were camping in the Amazon region. The only thing that would not burn in the fire was a green avocado branch. Then came a moment of inspiration. So we used the branch as a mold for our first invention. The holes in children's hearts can be closed with it. A coil is a piece of wire wrapped onto itself. It maybe doesn't look so fancy to you now, but that was our first successful attempt to create a device for this major problem. In this video, we can see how a very tiny catheter takes the coil to the heart. The coil then closes the hole. After that moment of inspiration, there came a very long time of effort developing a prototype. In vitro and in vivo studies took thousands of hours of work in the lab. The coil, if it works, can save lives. I returned from Germany to Bolivia, thinking that wherever we go, we have the opportunity to make a difference. With my wife and partner, Dr. Alexandra Heath, we started to see patients. After successfully treating patients with our coil, we felt really enthusiastic. But we live in a place that is 12,000 feet high. And, the patients there need a special device to solve their heart condition. The hole in altitude patients is different, because the orifice between the arteries is larger. Most patients cannot afford to be treated on time, and they die. The first coil could successfully treat only half of the patients in Bolivia. The search started again. We went back to the drawing board. After many trials, and with the help of my grandmother's indigenous friends in the mountains, we obtained a new device. For centuries, indigenous women told stories by weaving complex patterns on looms, and an unexpected skill helped us for the new device. We take this traditional method of weaving and make a design made by a smart material that records shape. It seems this time, the weaving allows us to create a seamless device that doesn't rust because it's made of only one piece. It can change by itself into very complex structures by a procedure that took decades to develop. As you can see, the device enters the body through the natural channels. Doctors have only to close the catheter through the hole. Our device expands, places itself and closes the hole. We have this beautiful delivery system that is so simple to use because it works by itself. No open surgery was necessary. (Applause) As doctors, we fight with diseases that take a long time and effort to heal — if they do. This is the child from before, after the procedure. As you can see — (Applause) As you can see, once the device is in place, the patient is 100 percent healed. From start to finish, the whole procedure takes only 30 minutes. That's very rewarding from the medical and human point of view. We are so proud that some of our former patients are part of our team — a team, thanks to added close interaction with patients that work with us. Together, we have only one idea: the best solutions need to be simple. We lost the fear of creating something new. The path, it's not easy. Many obstacles arise all the time. But we receive strength from our patients. Their resilience and courage inspire our creativity. Our goal is to make sure that no child is left behind, not because of cost or access. So we have to start a foundation with a one-to-one model. We will give one device for free to make sure that every child is treated. We are in many countries now, but we need to be everywhere. This whole thing began with one impossible idea as will continue it, really: No child is left behind. Muchas gracias. (Applause) |
The future of money | {0: 'Neha Narula is helping redefine the future of money by researching cryptocurrencies and providing clarity on how digital currencies will transform our world.'} | TED@BCG Paris | I want to tell you about the future of money. Let's start with a story about this culture that lived in Micronesia in the early 1900s, called the Yap. Now, I want to tell you about the Yap because their form of money is really interesting. They use these limestone discs called Rai stones. Now, the Yap don't actually move these Rai stones around or exchange them the way we do with our coins, because Rai stones can get to be pretty massive. The largest is about four tons and 12 feet across. So the Yap just keep track of who owns part of what stone. There's a story about these sailors that were transporting a stone across the ocean when they ran into some trouble and the stone actually fell in. The sailors got back to the main island and they told everyone what had happened. And everyone decided that, actually, yes, the sailors had the stone and — why not? — it still counted. Even though it was at the bottom of the ocean, it was still part of the Yap economy. You might think that this was just a small culture a hundred years ago. But things like this happen in the Western world as well, and the Yap actually still use a form of these stones. In 1932, the Bank of France asked the United States to convert their holdings from dollars into gold. But it was too inconvenient to think about actually shipping all of that gold over to Europe. So instead, someone went to where that gold was being stored and they just labeled it as belonging to France now. And everyone agreed that France owned the gold. It's just like those Rai stones. The point I want to make with these two examples is that there's nothing inherently valuable about a dollar or a stone or a coin. The only reason these things have any value is because we've all decided they should. And because we've decided that, they do. Money is about the exchanges and the transactions that we have with each other. Money isn't anything objective. It's about a collective story that we tell each other about value. A collective fiction. And that's a really powerful concept. In the past two decades, we've begun to use digital money. So I get paid via direct deposit, I pay my rent via bank transfer, I pay my taxes online. And every month, a small amount of money is deducted from my paycheck and invested in mutual funds in my retirement account. All of these interactions are literally just changing 1's and 0's on computers. There's not even anything physical, like a stone or a coin. Digital money makes it so that I can pay someone around the world in seconds. Now when this works, it's because there are large institutions underwriting every 1 or 0 that changes on a computer. And when it doesn't, it's often the fault of those large institutions. Or at least, it's up to them to fix the problem. And a lot of times, they don't. There's a lot of friction in the system. How long did it take the US credit card companies to implement chip and pin? Half my credit cards still don't work in Europe. That's friction. Transferring money across borders and across currencies is really expensive: friction. An entrepreneur in India can set up an online business in minutes, but it's hard for her to get loans and to get paid: friction. Our access to digital money and our ability to freely transact is being held captive by these gatekeepers. And there's a lot of impediments in the system slowing things down. That's because digital money isn't really mine, it's entries in databases that belong to my bank, my credit card company or my investment firm. And these companies have the right to say "no." If I'm a PayPal merchant and PayPal wrongly flags me for fraud, that's it. My account gets frozen, and I can't get paid. These institutions are standing in the way of innovation. How many of you use Facebook photos, Google Photos, Instagram? My photos are everywhere. They are on my phone, they're on my laptop, they're on my old phone, they're in Dropbox. They're on all these different websites and services. And most of these services don't work together. They don't inter-operate. And as a result, my photo library is a mess. The same thing happens when institutions control the money supply. A lot of these services don't inter-operate, and as a result, this blocks what we can do with payment. And it makes transaction costs go up. So far, we've been through two phases of money. In an analog world, we had to deal with these physical objects, and money moved at a certain speed — the speed of humans. In a digital world, money can reach much farther and is much faster, but we're at the mercy of these gatekeeper institutions. Money only moves at the speed of banks. We're about to enter a new phase of money. The future of money is programmable. When we combine software and currency, money becomes more than just a static unit of value, and we don't have to rely on institutions for security. In a programmable world, we remove humans and institutions from the loop. And when this happens, we won't even feel like we're transacting anymore. Money will be directed by software, and it will just safely and securely flow. Cryptocurrencies are the first step of this evolution. Cryptocurrencies are digital money that isn't run by any government or bank. It's money designed to work in a world without intermediaries. Bitcoin is the most ubiquitous cryptocurrency, but there are hundreds of them. There's Ethereum, Litecoin, Stellar, Dogecoin, and those are just a few of the more popular ones. And these things are real money. The sushi restaurant down my street takes Bitcoin. I have an app on my phone that I can use to buy sashimi. But it's not just for small transactions. In March, there was a transaction that moved around 100,000 bitcoins. That's the equivalent of 40 million US dollars. Cryptocurrencies are based on a special field of mathematics called cryptography. Cryptography is the study of how to secure communication, and it's about two really important things: masking information so it can be hidden in plain sight, and verifying a piece of information's source. Cryptography underpins so many of the systems around us. And it's so powerful that at times the US government has actually classified it as a weapon. During World War II, breaking cryptosystems like Enigma was critical to decoding enemy transmissions and turning the tide of the war. Today, anyone with a modern web browser is running a pretty sophisticated cryptosystem. It's what we use to secure our interactions on the Internet. It's what makes it safe for us to type our passwords in and to send financial information to websites. So what the banks used to give us — trustworthy digital money transfer — we can now get with a clever application of cryptography. And this means that we don't have to rely on the banks anymore to secure our transactions. We can do it ourselves. Bitcoin is based on the very same idea that the Yap used, this collective global knowledge of transfers. In Bitcoin, I spend by transferring Bitcoin, and I get paid when someone transfers Bitcoin to me. Imagine that we had this magic paper. So the way that this paper works is I can give you a sheet of it and if you write something on it, it will magically appear on my piece as well. Let's say we just give everyone this paper and everyone writes down the transfers that they're doing in the Bitcoin system. All of these transfers get copied around to everyone else's pieces of paper. And I can look at mine and I'll have a list of all of the transfers that are happening in the entire Bitcoin economy. This is actually what's happening with the Bitcoin blockchain, which is a list of all of the transactions in Bitcoin. Except, it's not done through paper. It's done through computer code, running on thousands of networked computers around the world. All of these computers are collectively confirming who owns what Bitcoin. So the Bitcoin blockchain is core to how Bitcoin works. But where do bitcoins actually come from? Well, the code is designed to create new Bitcoin according to a schedule. And the way that it works is that to get those Bitcoin, I have to solve a puzzle — a random cryptographic puzzle. Imagine that we had 15 dice, and we were throwing these dice over and over again. Whenever the dice come up all sixes, we say that we win. This is very close to what these computers are all actually doing. They're trying over and over again to land on the right number. And when they do, we say that they've solved the puzzle. The computer that solves the puzzle publishes its solution to the rest of the network and collects its reward: new bitcoins. And in the act of solving this puzzle, these computers are actually helping to secure the Bitcoin blockchain and add to the list of transactions. There are actually people all over the world running this software, and we call them Bitcoin miners. Anyone can become a Bitcoin miner. You can go download the software right now and run it in your computer and try to collect some bitcoins. I can't say that I would recommend it, because right now, the puzzle is so hard and the network is so powerful, that if I tried to mine Bitcoin on my laptop, I probably wouldn't see any for about two million years. The miners, professional miners, use this special hardware that's designed to solve the puzzle really fast. Now, the Bitcoin network and all of this special hardware, there are estimates that the amount of energy it uses is equivalent to that of a small country. So, the first set of cryptocurrencies are a little bit slow and a little bit cumbersome. But the next generation is going to be so much better and so much faster. Cryptocurrencies are the first step to a world with a global programmable money. And in a world with programmable money, I can pay anyone else securely without having to sign up or ask permission, or do a conversion or worry about my money getting stuck. And I can send money around the world. This is a really amazing thing. It's the idea of permission-less innovation. The Internet caused an explosion of innovation, because it was built upon an open architecture. And just like the Internet changed the way we communicate, programmable money is going to change the way we pay, allocate and decide on value. So what kind of world does programmable money create? Imagine a world where I can rent out my healthcare data to a pharmaceutical company. They can run large-scale data analysis and provide me with a cryptographic proof that shows they're only using my data in a way that we agreed. And they can pay me for what they find out. Instead of signing up for streaming services and getting a cable bill, what if my television analyzed my watching habits and recommended well-priced content that fit within my budget that I would enjoy? Imagine an Internet without ads, because instead of paying with our attention when we view content, we just pay. Interestingly, things like micro-payments are actually going to change the way security works in our world, because once we're better able to allocate value, people will use their money and their energies for more constructive things. If it cost a fraction of a cent to send an email, would we still have spam? We're not at this world yet, but it's coming. Right now, it's like we're in a world that is seeing the first automobile. The first cryptocurrency, like the first car, is slow and hard to understand and hard to use. Digital money, like the horse and carriage, works pretty well, and the whole world economy is built on it. If you were the first person on your block to get a car with an internal combustion engine, your neighbors would probably think you were crazy: "Why would you want this large, clunky machine that breaks down all the time, that lights on fire, and is still slower than a horse?" But we all know how that story turns out. We're entering a new era of programmable money. And it's very exciting, but it's also a little bit scary. Cryptocurrencies can be used for illegal transactions, just like cash is used for crime in the world today. When all of our transactions are online, what does that mean for surveillance — who can see what we do? Who's advantaged in this new world and who isn't? Will I have to start to pay for things that I didn't have to pay for before? Will we all become slaves to algorithms and utility functions? All new technology comes with trade-offs. The Internet brought us a lot of ways to waste time. But it also greatly increased productivity. Mobile phones are annoying because they make me feel like I have to stay connected to work all the time. But they also help me stay connected to friends and family. The new sharing economy is going to eliminate some jobs. But it's also going to create new, flexible forms of employment. With programmable money, we decouple the need for large, trusted institutions from the architecture of the network. And this pushes innovation in money out to the edges, where it belongs. Programmable money democratizes money. And because of this, things are going to change and unfold in ways that we can't even predict. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to raise successful kids -- without over-parenting | {0: 'Julie Lythcott-Haims speaks and writes on the phenomenon of helicopter parenting and the dangers of a checklisted childhood -- the subject of her book, "How to Raise an Adult."'} | TED Talks Live | You know, I didn't set out to be a parenting expert. In fact, I'm not very interested in parenting, per Se. It's just that there's a certain style of parenting these days that is kind of messing up kids, impeding their chances to develop into theirselves. There's a certain style of parenting these days that's getting in the way. I guess what I'm saying is, we spend a lot of time being very concerned about parents who aren't involved enough in the lives of their kids and their education or their upbringing, and rightly so. But at the other end of the spectrum, there's a lot of harm going on there as well, where parents feel a kid can't be successful unless the parent is protecting and preventing at every turn and hovering over every happening, and micromanaging every moment, and steering their kid towards some small subset of colleges and careers. When we raise kids this way, and I'll say we, because Lord knows, in raising my two teenagers, I've had these tendencies myself, our kids end up leading a kind of checklisted childhood. And here's what the checklisted childhood looks like. We keep them safe and sound and fed and watered, and then we want to be sure they go to the right schools, that they're in the right classes at the right schools, and that they get the right grades in the right classes in the right schools. But not just the grades, the scores, and not just the grades and scores, but the accolades and the awards and the sports, the activities, the leadership. We tell our kids, don't just join a club, start a club, because colleges want to see that. And check the box for community service. I mean, show the colleges you care about others. (Laughter) And all of this is done to some hoped-for degree of perfection. We expect our kids to perform at a level of perfection we were never asked to perform at ourselves, and so because so much is required, we think, well then, of course we parents have to argue with every teacher and principal and coach and referee and act like our kid's concierge and personal handler and secretary. And then with our kids, our precious kids, we spend so much time nudging, cajoling, hinting, helping, haggling, nagging as the case may be, to be sure they're not screwing up, not closing doors, not ruining their future, some hoped-for admission to a tiny handful of colleges that deny almost every applicant. And here's what it feels like to be a kid in this checklisted childhood. First of all, there's no time for free play. There's no room in the afternoons, because everything has to be enriching, we think. It's as if every piece of homework, every quiz, every activity is a make-or-break moment for this future we have in mind for them, and we absolve them of helping out around the house, and we even absolve them of getting enough sleep as long as they're checking off the items on their checklist. And in the checklisted childhood, we say we just want them to be happy, but when they come home from school, what we ask about all too often first is their homework and their grades. And they see in our faces that our approval, that our love, that their very worth, comes from A's. And then we walk alongside them and offer clucking praise like a trainer at the Westminster Dog Show — (Laughter) coaxing them to just jump a little higher and soar a little farther, day after day after day. And when they get to high school, they don't say, "Well, what might I be interested in studying or doing as an activity?" They go to counselors and they say, "What do I need to do to get into the right college?" And then, when the grades start to roll in in high school, and they're getting some B's, or God forbid some C's, they frantically text their friends and say, "Has anyone ever gotten into the right college with these grades?" And our kids, regardless of where they end up at the end of high school, they're breathless. They're brittle. They're a little burned out. They're a little old before their time, wishing the grown-ups in their lives had said, "What you've done is enough, this effort you've put forth in childhood is enough." And they're withering now under high rates of anxiety and depression and some of them are wondering, will this life ever turn out to have been worth it? Well, we parents, we parents are pretty sure it's all worth it. We seem to behave — it's like we literally think they will have no future if they don't get into one of these tiny set of colleges or careers we have in mind for them. Or maybe, maybe, we're just afraid they won't have a future we can brag about to our friends and with stickers on the backs of our cars. Yeah. (Applause) But if you look at what we've done, if you have the courage to really look at it, you'll see that not only do our kids think their worth comes from grades and scores, but that when we live right up inside their precious developing minds all the time, like our very own version of the movie "Being John Malkovich," we send our children the message: "Hey kid, I don't think you can actually achieve any of this without me." And so with our overhelp, our overprotection and overdirection and hand-holding, we deprive our kids of the chance to build self-efficacy, which is a really fundamental tenet of the human psyche, far more important than that self-esteem they get every time we applaud. Self-efficacy is built when one sees that one's own actions lead to outcomes, not — There you go. (Applause) Not one's parents' actions on one's behalf, but when one's own actions lead to outcomes. So simply put, if our children are to develop self-efficacy, and they must, then they have to do a whole lot more of the thinking, planning, deciding, doing, hoping, coping, trial and error, dreaming and experiencing of life for themselves. Now, am I saying every kid is hard-working and motivated and doesn't need a parent's involvement or interest in their lives, and we should just back off and let go? Hell no. (Laughter) That is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, when we treat grades and scores and accolades and awards as the purpose of childhood, all in furtherance of some hoped-for admission to a tiny number of colleges or entrance to a small number of careers, that that's too narrow a definition of success for our kids. And even though we might help them achieve some short-term wins by overhelping — like they get a better grade if we help them do their homework, they might end up with a longer childhood résumé when we help — what I'm saying is that all of this comes at a long-term cost to their sense of self. What I'm saying is, we should be less concerned with the specific set of colleges they might be able to apply to or might get into and far more concerned that they have the habits, the mindset, the skill set, the wellness, to be successful wherever they go. What I'm saying is, our kids need us to be a little less obsessed with grades and scores and a whole lot more interested in childhood providing a foundation for their success built on things like love and chores. (Laughter) (Applause) Did I just say chores? Did I just say chores? I really did. But really, here's why. The longest longitudinal study of humans ever conducted is called the Harvard Grant Study. It found that professional success in life, which is what we want for our kids, that professional success in life comes from having done chores as a kid, and the earlier you started, the better, that a roll-up-your-sleeves- and-pitch-in mindset, a mindset that says, there's some unpleasant work, someone's got to do it, it might as well be me, a mindset that says, I will contribute my effort to the betterment of the whole, that that's what gets you ahead in the workplace. Now, we all know this. You know this. (Applause) We all know this, and yet, in the checklisted childhood, we absolve our kids of doing the work of chores around the house, and then they end up as young adults in the workplace still waiting for a checklist, but it doesn't exist, and more importantly, lacking the impulse, the instinct to roll up their sleeves and pitch in and look around and wonder, how can I be useful to my colleagues? How can I anticipate a few steps ahead to what my boss might need? A second very important finding from the Harvard Grant Study said that happiness in life comes from love, not love of work, love of humans: our spouse, our partner, our friends, our family. So childhood needs to teach our kids how to love, and they can't love others if they don't first love themselves, and they won't love themselves if we can't offer them unconditional love. (Applause) Right. And so, instead of being obsessed with grades and scores when our precious offspring come home from school, or we come home from work, we need to close our technology, put away our phones, and look them in the eye and let them see the joy that fills our faces when we see our child for the first time in a few hours. And then we have to say, "How was your day? What did you like about today?" And when your teenage daughter says, "Lunch," like mine did, and I want to hear about the math test, not lunch, you have to still take an interest in lunch. You gotta say, "What was great about lunch today?" They need to know they matter to us as humans, not because of their GPA. All right, so you're thinking, chores and love, that sounds all well and good, but give me a break. The colleges want to see top scores and grades and accolades and awards, and I'm going to tell you, sort of. The very biggest brand-name schools are asking that of our young adults, but here's the good news. Contrary to what the college rankings racket would have us believe — (Applause) you don't have to go to one of the biggest brand name schools to be happy and successful in life. Happy and successful people went to state school, went to a small college no one has heard of, went to community college, went to a college over here and flunked out. (Applause) The evidence is in this room, is in our communities, that this is the truth. And if we could widen our blinders and be willing to look at a few more colleges, maybe remove our own egos from the equation, we could accept and embrace this truth and then realize, it is hardly the end of the world if our kids don't go to one of those big brand-name schools. And more importantly, if their childhood has not been lived according to a tyrannical checklist then when they get to college, whichever one it is, well, they'll have gone there on their own volition, fueled by their own desire, capable and ready to thrive there. I have to admit something to you. I've got two kids I mentioned, Sawyer and Avery. They're teenagers. And once upon a time, I think I was treating my Sawyer and Avery like little bonsai trees — (Laughter) that I was going to carefully clip and prune and shape into some perfect form of a human that might just be perfect enough to warrant them admission to one of the most highly selective colleges. But I've come to realize, after working with thousands of other people's kids — (Laughter) and raising two kids of my own, my kids aren't bonsai trees. They're wildflowers of an unknown genus and species — (Laughter) and it's my job to provide a nourishing environment, to strengthen them through chores and to love them so they can love others and receive love and the college, the major, the career, that's up to them. My job is not to make them become what I would have them become, but to support them in becoming their glorious selves. Thank you. (Applause) |
How fear of nuclear power is hurting the environment | {0: 'Michael Shellenberger is a global thinker on energy, technology and the environment.'} | TEDSummit | Have you heard the news? We're in a clean energy revolution. And where I live in Berkeley, California, it seems like every day I see a new roof with new solar panels going up, electric car in the driveway. Germany sometimes gets half its power from solar, and India is now committed to building 10 times more solar than we have in California, by the year 2022. Even nuclear seems to be making a comeback. Bill Gates is in China working with engineers, there's 40 different companies that are working together to try to race to build the first reactor that runs on waste, that can't melt down and is cheaper than coal. And so you might start to ask: Is this whole global warming problem going to be a lot easier to solve than anybody imagined? That was the question we wanted to know, so my colleagues and I decided to take a deep dive into the data. We were a little skeptical of some parts of the clean energy revolution story, but what we found really surprised us. The first thing is that clean energy has been increasing. This is electricity from clean energy sources over the last 20 years. But when you look at the percentage of global electricity from clean energy sources, it's actually been in decline from 36 percent to 31 percent. And if you care about climate change, you've got to go in the opposite direction to 100 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources, as quickly as possible. Now, you might wonder, "Come on, how much could five percentage points of global electricity be?" Well, it turns out to be quite a bit. It's the equivalent of 60 nuclear plants the size of Diablo Canyon, California's last nuclear plant, or 900 solar farms the size of Topaz, which is one of the biggest solar farms in the world, and certainly our biggest in California. A big part of this is simply that fossil fuels are increasing faster than clean energy. And that's understandable. There's just a lot of poor countries that are still using wood and dung and charcoal as their main source of energy, and they need modern fuels. But there's something else going on, which is that one of those clean energy sources in particular has actually been on the decline in absolute terms, not just relatively. And that's nuclear. You can see its generation has declined seven percent over the last 10 years. Now, solar and wind have been making huge strides, so you hear a lot of talk about how it doesn't really matter, because solar and wind is going to make up the difference. But the data says something different. When you combine all the electricity from solar and wind, you see it actually barely makes up half of the decline from nuclear. Let's take a closer look in the United States. Over the last couple of years — really 2013, 2014 — we prematurely retired four nuclear power plants. They were almost entirely replaced with fossil fuels, and so the consequence was that we wiped out almost as much clean energy electricity that we get from solar. And it's not unique to us. People think of California as a clean energy and climate leader, but when we looked at the data, what we found is that, in fact, California reduced emissions more slowly than the national average, between 2000 and 2015. What about Germany? They're doing a lot of clean energy. But when you look at the data, German emissions have actually been going up since 2009, and there's really not anybody who's going to tell you that they're going to meet their climate commitments in 2020. The reason isn't hard to understand. Solar and wind provide power about 10 to 20 percent of the time, which means that when the sun's not shining, the wind's not blowing, you still need power for your hospitals, your homes, your cities, your factories. And while batteries have made some really cool improvements lately, the truth is, they're just never going to be as efficient as the electrical grid. Every time you put electricity into a battery and take it out, you lose about 20 to 40 percent of the power. That's why when, in California, we try to deal with all the solar we've brought online — we now get about 10 percent of electricity from solar — when the sun goes down, and people come home from work and turn on their air conditioners and their TV sets, and every other appliance in the house, we need a lot of natural gas backup. So what we've been doing is stuffing a lot of natural gas into the side of a mountain. And that worked pretty well for a while, but then late last year, it sprung a leak. This is Aliso Canyon. So much methane gas was released, it was the equivalent of putting half a million cars on the road. It basically blew through all of our climate commitments for the year. Well, what about India? Sometimes you have to go places to really get the right data, so we traveled to India a few months ago. We met with all the top officials — solar, nuclear, the rest — and what they told us is, "We're actually having more serious problems than both Germany and California. We don't have backup; we don't have all the natural gas. And that's just the start of it. Say we want to get to 100 gigawatts by 2022. But last year we did just five, and the year before that, we did five." So, let's just take a closer look at nuclear. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has looked at the carbon content of all these different fuels, and nuclear comes out really low — it's actually lower even than solar. And nuclear obviously provides a lot of power — 24 hours a day, seven days a week. During a year, a single plant can provide power 92 percent of the time. What's interesting is that when you look at countries that have deployed different kinds of clean energies, there's only a few that have done so at a pace consistent with dealing with the climate crisis. So nuclear seems like a pretty good option, but there's this big problem with it, which all of you, I'm sure, are aware of, which is that people really don't like it. There was a study, a survey done of people around the world, not just in the United States or Europe, about a year and a half ago. And what they found is that nuclear is actually one of the least popular forms of energy. Even oil is more popular than nuclear. And while nuclear kind of edges out coal, the thing is, people don't really fear coal in the same way they fear nuclear, which really operates on our unconscious. So what is it that we fear? There's really three things. There's the safety of the plants themselves — the fears that they're going to melt down and cause damage; there's the waste from them; and there's the association with weapons. And I think, understandably, engineers look at those concerns and look for technological fixes. That's why Bill Gates is in China developing advanced reactors. That's why 40 different entrepreneurs are working on this problem. And I, myself, have been very excited about it. We did a report: "How to Make Nuclear Cheap." In particular, the thorium reactor shows a lot of promise. So when the climate scientist, James Hansen, asked if I wanted to go to China with him and look at the Chinese advanced nuclear program, I jumped at the chance. We were there with MIT and UC Berkeley engineers. And I had in my mind that the Chinese would be able to do with nuclear what they did with so many other things — start to crank out small nuclear reactors on assembly lines, ship them up like iPhones or MacBooks and send them around the world. I would get one at home in Berkeley. But what I found was somewhat different. The presentations were all very exciting and very promising; they have multiple reactors that they're working on. The time came for the thorium reactor, and a bunch of us were excited. They went through the whole presentation, they got to the timeline, and they said, "We're going to have a thorium molten salt reactor ready for sale to the world by 2040." And I was like, "What?" (Laughter) I looked at my colleagues and I was like, "Excuse me — can you guys speed that up a little bit? Because we're in a little bit of a climate crisis right now. And your cities are really polluted, by the way." And they responded back, they were like, "I'm not sure what you've heard about our thorium program, but we don't have a third of our budget, and your department of energy hasn't been particularly forthcoming with all that data you guys have on testing reactors." And I said, "Well, I've got an idea. You know how you've got 10 years where you're demonstrating that reactor? Let's just skip that part, and let's just go right to commercializing it. That will save money and time." And the engineer just looked at me and said, "Let me ask you a question: Would you buy a car that had never been demonstrated before?" So what about the other reactors? There's a reactor that's coming online now, they're starting to sell it. It's a high-temperature gas reactor. It can't melt down. But it's really big and bulky, that's part of the safety, and nobody thinks it's going to ever get cheaper than the reactors that we have. The ones that use waste as fuel are really cool ideas, but the truth is, we don't actually know how to do that yet. There's some risk that you'll actually make more waste, and most people think that if you're including that waste part of the process, it's just going to make the whole machine a lot more expensive, it's just adding another complicated step. The truth is, there's real questions about how much of that we're going to do. I mean, we went to India and asked about the nuclear program. The government said before the Paris climate talks that they were going to do something like 30 new nuclear plants. But when we got there and interviewed people and even looked at the internal documents, they're now saying they're going to do about five. And in most of the world, especially the rich world, they're not talking about building new reactors. We're actually talking about taking reactors down before their lifetimes are over. Germany's actually pressuring its neighbors to do that. I mentioned the United States — we could lose half of our reactors over the next 15 years, which would wipe out 40 percent of the emissions reductions we're supposed to get under the Clean Power Plan. Of course, in Japan, they took all their nuclear plants offline, replaced them with coal, natural gas, oil burning, and they're only expected to bring online about a third to two-thirds. So when we went through the numbers, and just added that up — how much nuclear do we see China and India bringing online over the next 15 years, how much do we see at risk of being taken offline — this was the most startling finding. What we found is that the world is actually at risk of losing four times more clean energy than we lost over the last 10 years. In other words: we're not in a clean energy revolution; we're in a clean energy crisis. So it's understandable that engineers would look for a technical fix to the fears that people have of nuclear. But when you consider that these are big challenges to do, that they're going to take a long time to solve, there's this other issue, which is: Are those technical fixes really going to solve people's fears? Let's take safety. You know, despite what people think, it's hard to figure out how to make nuclear power much safer. I mean, every medical journal that looks at it — this is the most recent study from the British journal, "Lancet," one of the most respected journals in the world — nuclear is the safest way to make reliable power. Everybody's scared of the accidents. So you go look at the accident data — Fukushima, Chernobyl — the World Health Organization finds the same thing: the vast majority of harm is caused by people panicking, and they're panicking because they're afraid. In other words, the harm that's caused isn't actually caused by the machines or the radiation. It's caused by our fears. And what about the waste? Everyone worries about the waste. Well, the interesting thing about the waste is how little of it there is. This is just from one plant. If you take all the nuclear waste we've ever made in the United States, put it on a football field, stacked it up, it would only reach 20 feet high. And people say it's poisoning people or doing something — it's not, it's just sitting there, it's just being monitored. There's not very much of it. By contrast, the waste that we don't control from energy production — we call it "pollution," and it kills seven million people a year, and it's threatening very serious levels of global warming. And the truth is that even if we get good at using that waste as fuel, there's always going to be some fuel left over. That means there's always going to be people that think it's a big problem for reasons that maybe don't have as much to do with the actual waste as we think. Well, what about the weapons? Maybe the most surprising thing is that we can't find any examples of countries that have nuclear power and then, "Oh!" decide to go get a weapon. In fact, it works the opposite. What we find is the only way we know how to get rid large numbers of nuclear weapons is by using the plutonium in the warheads as fuel in our nuclear power plants. And so, if you are wanting to get the world rid of nuclear weapons, then we're going to need a lot more nuclear power. (Applause) As I was leaving China, the engineer that brought Bill Gates there kind of pulled me aside, and he said, "You know, Michael, I appreciate your interest in all the different nuclear supply technologies, but there's this more basic issue, which is that there's just not enough global demand. I mean, we can crank out these machines on assembly lines, we do know how to make things cheap, but there's just not enough people that want them." And so, let's do solar and wind and efficiency and conservation. Let's accelerate the advanced nuclear programs. I think we should triple the amount of money we're spending on it. But I just think the most important thing, if we're going to overcome the climate crisis, is to keep in mind that the cause of the clean energy crisis isn't from within our machines, it's from within ourselves. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Architecture that's built to heal | {0: 'As co-founder and CEO of MASS Design Group, Michael Murphy envisions and creates community-centric structures with healing built into their core.'} | TED2016 | Every weekend for as long as I can remember, my father would get up on a Saturday, put on a worn sweatshirt and he'd scrape away at the squeaky old wheel of a house that we lived in. I wouldn't even call it restoration; it was a ritual, catharsis. He would spend all year scraping paint with this old heat gun and a spackle knife, and then he would repaint where he scraped, only to begin again the following year. Scraping and re-scraping, painting and repainting: the work of an old house is never meant to be done. The day my father turned 52, I got a phone call. My mother was on the line to tell me that doctors had found a lump in his stomach — terminal cancer, she told me, and he had been given only three weeks to live. I immediately moved home to Poughkeepsie, New York, to sit with my father on death watch, not knowing what the next days would bring us. To keep myself distracted, I rolled up my sleeves, and I went about finishing what he could now no longer complete — the restoration of our old home. When that looming three-week deadline came and then went, he was still alive. And at three months, he joined me. We gutted and repainted the interior. At six months, the old windows were refinished, and at 18 months, the rotted porch was finally replaced. And there was my father, standing with me outside, admiring a day's work, hair on his head, fully in remission, when he turned to me and he said, "You know, Michael, this house saved my life." So the following year, I decided to go to architecture school. (Laughter) But there, I learned something different about buildings. Recognition seemed to come to those who prioritized novel and sculptural forms, like ribbons, or ... pickles? (Laughter) And I think this is supposed to be a snail. Something about this bothered me. Why was it that the best architects, the greatest architecture — all beautiful and visionary and innovative — is also so rare, and seems to serve so very few? And more to the point: With all of this creative talent, what more could we do? Just as I was about to start my final exams, I decided to take a break from an all-nighter and go to a lecture by Dr. Paul Farmer, a leading health activist for the global poor. I was surprised to hear a doctor talking about architecture. Buildings are making people sicker, he said, and for the poorest in the world, this is causing epidemic-level problems. In this hospital in South Africa, patients that came in with, say, a broken leg, to wait in this unventilated hallway, walked out with a multidrug-resistant strand of tuberculosis. Simple designs for infection control had not been thought about, and people had died because of it. "Where are the architects?" Paul said. If hospitals are making people sicker, where are the architects and designers to help us build and design hospitals that allow us to heal? That following summer, I was in the back of a Land Rover with a few classmates, bumping over the mountainous hillside of Rwanda. For the next year, I'd be living in Butaro in this old guesthouse, which was a jail after the genocide. I was there to design and build a new type of hospital with Dr. Farmer and his team. If hallways are making patients sicker, what if we could design a hospital that flips the hallways on the outside, and makes people walk in the exterior? If mechanical systems rarely work, what if we could design a hospital that could breathe through natural ventilation, and meanwhile reduce its environmental footprint? And what about the patients' experience? Evidence shows that a simple view of nature can radically improve health outcomes, So why couldn't we design a hospital where every patient had a window with a view? Simple, site-specific designs can make a hospital that heals. Designing it is one thing; getting it built, we learned, is quite another. We worked with Bruce Nizeye, a brilliant engineer, and he thought about construction differently than I had been taught in school. When we had to excavate this enormous hilltop and a bulldozer was expensive and hard to get to site, Bruce suggested doing it by hand, using a method in Rwanda called "Ubudehe," which means "community works for the community." Hundreds of people came with shovels and hoes, and we excavated that hill in half the time and half the cost of that bulldozer. Instead of importing furniture, Bruce started a guild, and he brought in master carpenters to train others in how to make furniture by hand. And on this job site, 15 years after the Rwandan genocide, Bruce insisted that we bring on labor from all backgrounds, and that half of them be women. Bruce was using the process of building to heal, not just for those who were sick, but for the entire community as a whole. We call this the locally fabricated way of building, or "lo-fab," and it has four pillars: hire locally, source regionally, train where you can and most importantly, think about every design decision as an opportunity to invest in the dignity of the places where you serve. Think of it like the local food movement, but for architecture. And we're convinced that this way of building can be replicated across the world, and change the way we talk about and evaluate architecture. Using the lo-fab way of building, even aesthetic decisions can be designed to impact people's lives. In Butaro, we chose to use a local volcanic stone found in abundance within the area, but often considered a nuisance by farmers, and piled on the side of the road. We worked with these masons to cut these stones and form them into the walls of the hospital. And when they began on this corner and wrapped around the entire hospital, they were so good at putting these stones together, they asked us if they could take down the original wall and rebuild it. And you see what is possible. It's beautiful. And the beauty, to me, comes from the fact that I know that hands cut these stones, and they formed them into this thick wall, made only in this place with rocks from this soil. When you go outside today and you look at your built world, ask not only: "What is the environmental footprint?" — an important question — but what if we also asked, "What is the human handprint of those who made it?" We started a new practice based around these questions, and we tested it around the world. Like in Haiti, where we asked if a new hospital could help end the epidemic of cholera. In this 100-bed hospital, we designed a simple strategy to clean contaminated medical waste before it enters the water table, and our partners at Les Centres GHESKIO are already saving lives because of it. Or Malawi: we asked if a birthing center could radically reduce maternal and infant mortality. Malawi has one of the highest rates of maternal and infant death in the world. Using a simple strategy to be replicated nationally, we designed a birthing center that would attract women and their attendants to come to the hospital earlier and therefore have safer births. Or in the Congo, where we asked if an educational center could also be used to protect endangered wildlife. Poaching for ivory and bushmeat is leading to global epidemic, disease transfer and war. In one of the hardest-to-reach places in the world, we used the mud and the dirt and the wood around us to construct a center that would show us ways to protect and conserve our rich biodiversity. Even here in the US, we were asked to rethink the largest university for the deaf and hard of hearing in the world. The deaf community, through sign language, shows us the power of visual communication. We designed a campus that would awaken the ways in which we as humans all communicate, both verbally and nonverbally. And even in Poughkeepsie, my hometown, we thought about old industrial infrastructure. We wondered: Could we use arts and culture and design to revitalize this city and other Rust Belt cities across our nation, and turn them into centers for innovation and growth? In each of these projects, we asked a simple question: What more can architecture do? And by asking that question, we were forced to consider how we could create jobs, how we could source regionally and how we could invest in the dignity of the communities in which we serve. I have learned that architecture can be a transformative engine for change. About a year ago, I read an article about a tireless and intrepid civil rights leader named Bryan Stevenson. (Applause) And Bryan had a bold architectural vision. He and his team had been documenting the over 4,000 lynchings of African-Americans that have happened in the American South. And they had a plan to mark every county where these lynchings occurred, and build a national memorial to the victims of lynching in Montgomery, Alabama. Countries like Germany and South Africa and, of course, Rwanda, have found it necessary to build memorials to reflect on the atrocities of their past, in order to heal their national psyche. We have yet to do this in the United States. So I sent a cold email to [email protected]: "Dear Bryan," it said, "I think your building project is maybe the most important project we could do in America and could change the way we think about racial injustice. By any chance, do you know who will design it?" (Laughter) Surprisingly, shockingly, Bryan got right back to me, and invited me down to meet with his team and talk to them. Needless to say, I canceled all my meetings and I jumped on a plane to Montgomery, Alabama. When I got there, Bryan and his team picked me up, and we walked around the city. And they took the time to point out the many markers that have been placed all over the city to the history of the Confederacy, and the very few that mark the history of slavery. And then he walked me to a hill. It overlooked the whole city. He pointed out the river and the train tracks where the largest domestic slave-trading port in America had once prospered. And then to the Capitol rotunda, where George Wallace had stood on its steps and proclaimed, "Segregation forever." And then to the very hill below us. He said, "Here we will build a new memorial that will change the identity of this city and of this nation." Our two teams have worked together over the last year to design this memorial. The memorial will take us on a journey through a classical, almost familiar building type, like the Parthenon or the colonnade at the Vatican. But as we enter, the ground drops below us and our perception shifts, where we realize that these columns evoke the lynchings, which happened in the public square. And as we continue, we begin to understand the vast number of those who have yet to be put to rest. Their names will be engraved on the markers that hang above us. And just outside will be a field of identical columns. But these are temporary columns, waiting in purgatory, to be placed in the very counties where these lynchings occurred. Over the next few years, this site will bear witness, as each of these markers is claimed and visibly placed in those counties. Our nation will begin to heal from over a century of silence. When we think about how it should be built, we were reminded of Ubudehe, the building process we learned about in Rwanda. We wondered if we could fill those very columns with the soil from the sites of where these killings occurred. Brian and his team have begun collecting that soil and preserving it in individual jars with family members, community leaders and descendants. The act of collecting soil itself has lead to a type of spiritual healing. It's an act of restorative justice. As one EJI team member noted in the collection of the soil from where Will McBride was lynched, "If Will McBride left one drop of sweat, one drop of blood, one hair follicle — I pray that I dug it up, and that his whole body would be at peace." We plan to break ground on this memorial later this year, and it will be a place to finally speak of the unspeakable acts that have scarred this nation. (Applause) When my father told me that day that this house — our house — had saved his life, what I didn't know was that he was referring to a much deeper relationship between architecture and ourselves. Buildings are not simply expressive sculptures. They make visible our personal and our collective aspirations as a society. Great architecture can give us hope. Great architecture can heal. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Why some people are more altruistic than others | {0: 'Abigail Marsh asks essential questions: If humans are evil, why do we sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to help others even at a cost to ourselves?'} | TEDSummit | There's a man out there, somewhere, who looks a little bit like the actor Idris Elba, or at least he did 20 years ago. I don't know anything else about him, except that he once saved my life by putting his own life in danger. This man ran across four lanes of freeway traffic in the middle of the night to bring me back to safety after a car accident that could have killed me. And the whole thing left me really shaken up, obviously, but it also left me with this kind of burning, gnawing need to understand why he did it, what forces within him caused him to make the choice that I owe my life to, to risk his own life to save the life of a stranger? In other words, what are the causes of his or anybody else's capacity for altruism? But first let me tell you what happened. That night, I was 19 years old and driving back to my home in Tacoma, Washington, down the Interstate 5 freeway, when a little dog darted out in front of my car. And I did exactly what you're not supposed to do, which is swerve to avoid it. And I discovered why you're not supposed to do that. I hit the dog anyways, and that sent the car into a fishtail, and then a spin across the freeway, until finally it wound up in the fast lane of the freeway faced backwards into oncoming traffic and then the engine died. And I was sure in that moment that I was about to die too, but I didn't because of the actions of that one brave man who must have made the decision within a fraction of a second of seeing my stranded car to pull over and run across four lanes of freeway traffic in the dark to save my life. And then after he got my car working again and got me back to safety and made sure I was going to be all right, he drove off again. He never even told me his name, and I'm pretty sure I forgot to say thank you. So before I go any further, I really want to take a moment to stop and say thank you to that stranger. (Applause) I tell you all of this because the events of that night changed the course of my life to some degree. I became a psychology researcher, and I've devoted my work to understanding the human capacity to care for others. Where does it come from, and how does it develop, and what are the extreme forms that it can take? These questions are really important to understanding basic aspects of human social nature. A lot of people, and this includes everybody from philosophers and economists to ordinary people believe that human nature is fundamentally selfish, that we're only ever really motivated by our own welfare. But if that's true, why do some people, like the stranger who rescued me, do selfless things, like helping other people at enormous risk and cost to themselves? Answering this question requires exploring the roots of extraordinary acts of altruism, and what might make people who engage in such acts different than other people. But until recently, very little work on this topic had been done. The actions of the man who rescued me meet the most stringent definition of altruism, which is a voluntary, costly behavior motivated by the desire to help another individual. So it's a selfless act intended to benefit only the other. What could possibly explain an action like that? One answer is compassion, obviously, which is a key driver of altruism. But then the question becomes, why do some people seem to have more of it than others? And the answer may be that the brains of highly altruistic people are different in fundamental ways. But to figure out how, I actually started from the opposite end, with psychopaths. A common approach to understanding basic aspects of human nature, like the desire to help other people, is to study people in whom that desire is missing, and psychopaths are exactly such a group. Psychopathy is a developmental disorder with strongly genetic origins, and it results in a personality that's cold and uncaring and a tendency to engage in antisocial and sometimes very violent behavior. Once my colleagues and I at the National Institute of Mental Health conducted some of the first ever brain imaging research of psychopathic adolescents, and our findings, and the findings of other researchers now, have shown that people who are psychopathic pretty reliably exhibit three characteristics. First, although they're not generally insensitive to other people's emotions, they are insensitive to signs that other people are in distress. And in particular, they have difficulty recognizing fearful facial expressions like this one. And fearful expressions convey urgent need and emotional distress, and they usually elicit compassion and a desire to help in people who see them, so it makes sense that people who tend to lack compassion also tend to be insensitive to these cues. The part of the brain that's the most important for recognizing fearful expressions is called the amygdala. There are very rare cases of people who lack amygdalas completely, and they're profoundly impaired in recognizing fearful expressions. And whereas healthy adults and children usually show big spikes in amygdala activity when they look at fearful expressions, psychopaths' amygdalas are underreactive to these expressions. Sometimes they don't react at all, which may be why they have trouble detecting these cues. Finally, psychopaths' amygdalas are smaller than average by about 18 or 20 percent. So all of these findings are reliable and robust, and they're very interesting. But remember that my main interest is not understanding why people don't care about others. It's understanding why they do. So the real question is, could extraordinary altruism, which is the opposite of psychopathy in terms of compassion and the desire to help other people, emerge from a brain that is also the opposite of psychopathy? A sort of antipsychopathic brain, better able to recognize other people's fear, an amygdala that's more reactive to this expression and maybe larger than average as well? As my research has now shown, all three things are true. And we discovered this by testing a population of truly extraordinary altruists. These are people who have given one of their own kidneys to a complete stranger. So these are people who have volunteered to undergo major surgery so that one of their own healthy kidneys can be removed and transplanted into a very ill stranger that they've never met and may never meet. "Why would anybody do this?" is a very common question. And the answer may be that the brains of these extraordinary altruists have certain special characteristics. They are better at recognizing other people's fear. They're literally better at detecting when somebody else is in distress. This may be in part because their amygdala is more reactive to these expressions. And remember, this is the same part of the brain that we found was underreactive in people who are psychopathic. And finally, their amygdalas are larger than average as well, by about eight percent. So together, what these data suggest is the existence of something like a caring continuum in the world that's anchored at the one end by people who are highly psychopathic, and at the other by people who are very compassionate and driven to acts of extreme altruism. But I should add that what makes extraordinary altruists so different is not just that they're more compassionate than average. They are, but what's even more unusual about them is that they're compassionate and altruistic not just towards people who are in their own innermost circle of friends and family. Right? Because to have compassion for people that you love and identify with is not extraordinary. Truly extraordinary altruists' compassion extends way beyond that circle, even beyond their wider circle of acquaintances to people who are outside their social circle altogether, total strangers, just like the man who rescued me. And I've had the opportunity now to ask a lot of altruistic kidney donors how it is that they manage to generate such a wide circle of compassion that they were willing to give a complete stranger their kidney. And I found it's a really difficult question for them to answer. I say, "How is it that you're willing to do this thing when so many other people don't? You're one of fewer than 2,000 Americans who has ever given a kidney to a stranger. What is it that makes you so special?" And what do they say? They say, "Nothing. There's nothing special about me. I'm just the same as everybody else." And I think that's actually a really telling answer, because it suggests that the circles of these altruists don't look like this, they look more like this. They have no center. These altruists literally don't think of themselves as being at the center of anything, as being better or more inherently important than anybody else. When I asked one altruist why donating her kidney made sense to her, she said, "Because it's not about me." Another said, "I'm not different. I'm not unique. Your study here is going to find out that I'm just the same as you." I think the best description for this amazing lack of self-centeredness is humility, which is that quality that in the words of St. Augustine makes men as angels. And why is that? It's because if there's no center of your circle, there can be no inner rings or outer rings, nobody who is more or less worthy of your care and compassion than anybody else. And I think that this is what really distinguishes extraordinary altruists from the average person. But I also think that this is a view of the world that's attainable by many and maybe even most people. And I think this because at the societal level, expansions of altruism and compassion are already happening everywhere. The psychologist Steven Pinker and others have shown that all around the world people are becoming less and less accepting of suffering in ever-widening circles of others, which has led to declines of all kinds of cruelty and violence, from animal abuse to domestic violence to capital punishment. And it's led to increases in all kinds of altruism. A hundred years ago, people would have thought it was ludicrous how normal and ordinary it is for people to donate their blood and bone marrow to complete strangers today. Is it possible that a hundred years from now people will think that donating a kidney to a stranger is just as normal and ordinary as we think donating blood and bone marrow is today? Maybe. So what's at the root of all these amazing changes? In part it seems to be increases in wealth and standards of living. As societies become wealthier and better off, people seem to turn their focus of attention outward, and as a result, all kinds of altruism towards strangers increases, from volunteering to charitable donations and even altruistic kidney donations. But all of these changes also yield a strange and paradoxical result, which is that even as the world is becoming a better and more humane place, which it is, there's a very common perception that it's becoming worse and more cruel, which it's not. And I don't know exactly why this is, but I think it may be that we now just know so much more about the suffering of strangers in distant places, and so we now care a lot more about the suffering of those distant strangers. But what's clear is the kinds of changes we're seeing show that the roots of altruism and compassion are just as much a part of human nature as cruelty and violence, maybe even more so, and while some people do seem to be inherently more sensitive to the suffering of distant others, I really believe that the ability to remove oneself from the center of the circle and expand the circle of compassion outward to include even strangers is within reach for almost everyone. Thank you. (Applause) |
There's no such thing as not voting | {0: 'As CEO of Citizen University, Eric Liu is working to spark a civic revival in the US and beyond.'} | TEDNYC | Why bother? The game is rigged. My vote won't count. The choices are terrible. Voting is for suckers. Perhaps you've thought some of these things. Perhaps you've even said them. And if so, you wouldn't be alone, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. The game of public policy today is rigged in many ways. How else would more than half of federal tax breaks flow up to the wealthiest five percent of Americans? And our choices indeed are often terrible. For many people across the political spectrum, Exhibit A is the 2016 presidential election. But in any year, you can look up and down the ballot and find plenty to be uninspired about. But in spite of all this, I still believe voting matters. And crazy as it may sound, I believe we can revive the joy of voting. Today, I want to talk about how we can do that, and why. There used to be a time in American history when voting was fun, when it was much more than just a grim duty to show up at the polls. That time is called "most of American history." (Laughter) From the Revolution to the Civil Rights Era, the United States had a vibrant, robustly participatory and raucous culture of voting. It was street theater, open-air debates, fasting and feasting and toasting, parades and bonfires. During the 19th century, immigrants and urban political machines helped fuel this culture of voting. That culture grew with each successive wave of new voters. During Reconstruction, when new African-American voters, new African-American citizens, began to exercise their power, they celebrated in jubilee parades that connected emancipation with their newfound right to vote. A few decades later, the suffragettes brought a spirit of theatricality to their fight, marching together in white dresses as they claimed the franchise. And the Civil Rights Movement, which sought to redeem the promise of equal citizenship that had been betrayed by Jim Crow, put voting right at the center. From Freedom Summer to the march in Selma, that generation of activists knew that voting matters, and they knew that spectacle and the performance of power is key to actually claiming power. But it's been over a half century since Selma and the Voting Rights Act, and in the decades since, this face-to-face culture of voting has just about disappeared. It's been killed by television and then the internet. The couch has replaced the commons. Screens have made citizens into spectators. And while it's nice to share political memes on social media, that's a rather quiet kind of citizenship. It's what the sociologist Sherry Turkle calls "being alone together." What we need today is an electoral culture that is about being together together, in person, in loud and passionate ways, so that instead of being "eat your vegetables" or "do you duty," voting can feel more like "join the club" or, better yet, "join the party." Imagine if we had, across the country right now, in local places but nationwide, a concerted effort to revive a face-to-face set of ways to engage and electioneer: outdoor shows in which candidates and their causes are mocked and praised in broad satirical style; soapbox speeches by citizens; public debates held inside pubs; streets filled with political art and handmade posters and murals; battle of the band concerts in which competing performers rep their candidates. Now, all of this may sound a little bit 18th century to you, but in fact, it doesn't have to be any more 18th century than, say, Broadway's "Hamilton," which is to say vibrantly contemporary. And the fact is that all around the world, today, millions of people are voting like this. In India, elections are colorful, communal affairs. In Brazil, election day is a festive, carnival-type atmosphere. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, there is a spectacle, eye-popping, eye-grabbing spectacle to the street theater of elections. You might ask, well, here in America, who has time for this? And I would tell you that the average American watches five hours of television a day. You might ask, who has the motivation? And I'll tell you, any citizen who wants to be seen and heard not as a prop, not as a talking point, but as a participant, as a creator. Well, how do we make this happen? Simply by making it happen. That's why a group of colleagues and I launched a new project called "The Joy of Voting." In four cities across the United States — Philadelphia, Miami, Akron, Ohio, and Wichita, Kansas — we've gathered together artists and activists, educators, political folks, neighbors, everyday citizens to come together and create projects that can foster this culture of voting in a local way. In Miami, that means all-night parties with hot DJs where the only way to get in is to show that you're registered to vote. In Akron, it means political plays being performed in the bed of a flatbed truck that moves from neighborhood to neighborhood. In Philadelphia, it's a voting-themed scavenger hunt all throughout colonial old town. And in Wichita, it's making mixtapes and live graffiti art in the North End to get out the vote. There are 20 of these projects, and they are remarkable in their beauty and their diversity, and they are changing people. Let me tell you about a couple of them. In Miami, we've commissioned and artist, a young artist named Atomico, to create some vivid and vibrant images for a new series of "I voted" stickers. But the thing is, Atomico had never voted. He wasn't even registered. So as he got to work on creating this artwork for these stickers, he also began to get over his sense of intimidation about politics. He got himself registered, and then he got educated about the upcoming primary election, and on election day he was out there not just passing out stickers, but chatting up voters and encouraging people to vote, and talking about the election with passersby. In Akron, a theater company called the Wandering Aesthetics has been putting on these pickup truck plays. And to do so, they put out an open call to the public asking for speeches, monologues, dialogues, poems, snippets of anything that could be read aloud and woven into a performance. They got dozens of submissions. One of them was a poem written by nine students in an ESL class, all of them Hispanic migrant workers from nearby Hartville, Ohio. I want to read to you from this poem. It's called "The Joy of Voting." "I would like to vote for the first time because things are changing for Hispanics. I used to be afraid of ghosts. Now I am afraid of people. There's more violence and racism. Voting can change this. The border wall is nothing. It's just a wall. The wall of shame is something. It's very important to vote so we can break down this wall of shame. I have passion in my heart. Voting gives me a voice and power. I can stand up and do something." "The Joy of Voting" project isn't just about joy. It's about this passion. It's about feeling and belief, and it isn't just our organization's work. All across this country right now, immigrants, young people, veterans, people of all different backgrounds are coming together to create this kind of passionate, joyful activity around elections, in red and blue states, in urban and rural communities, people of every political background. What they have in common is simply this: their work is rooted in place. Because remember, all citizenship is local. When politics becomes just a presidential election, we yell and we scream at our screens, and then we collapse, exhausted. But when politics is about us and our neighbors and other people in our community coming together to create experiences of collective voice and imagination, then we begin to remember that this stuff matters. We begin to remember that this is the stuff of self-government. Which brings me back to where I began. Why bother? There's one way to answer this question. Voting matters because it is a self-fulfilling act of belief. It feeds the spirit of mutual interest that makes any society thrive. When we vote, even if it is in anger, we are part of a collective, creative leap of faith. Voting helps us generate the very power that we wish we had. It's no accident that democracy and theater emerged around the same time in ancient Athens. Both of them yank the individual out of the enclosure of her private self. Both of them create great public experiences of shared ritual. Both of them bring the imagination to life in ways that remind us that all of our bonds in the end are imagined, and can be reimagined. This moment right now, when we think about the meaning of imagination, is so fundamentally important, and our ability to take that spirit and to take that sense that there is something greater out there, is not just a matter of technical expertise. It's not just a matter of making the time or having the know-how. It is a matter of spirit. But let me give you an answer to this question, "Why bother?" that is maybe a little less spiritual and a bit more pointed. Why bother voting? Because there is no such thing as not voting. Not voting is voting, for everything that you may detest and oppose. Not voting can be dressed up as an act of principled, passive resistance, but in fact not voting is actively handing power over to those whose interests are counter to your own, and those who would be very glad to take advantage of your absence. Not voting is for suckers. Imagine where this country would be if all the folks who in 2010 created the Tea Party had decided that, you know, politics is too messy, voting is too complicated. There is no possibility of our votes adding up to anything. They didn't preemptively silence themselves. They showed up, and in the course of showing up, they changed American politics. Imagine if all of the followers of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders had decided not to upend the political status quo and blow apart the frame of the previously possible in American politics. They did that by voting. We live in a time right now, divided, often very dark, where across the left and the right, there's a lot of talk of revolution and the need for revolution to disrupt everyday democracy. Well, here's the thing: everyday democracy already gives us a playbook for revolution. In the 2012 presidential election, young voters, Latino voters, Asian-American voters, low-income voters, all showed up at less than 50 percent. In the 2014 midterm elections, turnout was 36 percent, which was a 70-year low. And in your average local election, turnout hovers somewhere around 20 percent. I invite you to imagine 100 percent. Picture 100 percent. Mobilize 100 percent, and overnight, we get revolution. Overnight, the policy priorities of this country change dramatically, and every level of government becomes radically more responsive to all the people. What would it take to mobilize 100 percent? Well, we do have to push back against efforts afoot all across the country right now to make voting harder. But at the same time, we have to actively create a positive culture of voting that people want to belong to, be part of, and experience together. We have to make purpose. We have to make joy. So yes, let's have that revolution, a revolution of spirit, of ideas, of policy and participation, a revolution against cynicism, a revolution against the self-fulfilling sense of powerlessness. Let's vote this revolution into existence, and while we're at it, let's have some fun. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Why you should know how much your coworkers get paid | {0: 'David Burkus challenges the traditional and widely accepted principles of business management.'} | TEDxUniversityofNevada | How much do you get paid? Don't answer that out loud. But put a number in your head. Now: How much do you think the person sitting next to you gets paid? Again, don't answer out loud. (Laughter) At work, how much do you think the person sitting in the cubicle or the desk next to you gets paid? Do you know? Should you know? Notice, it's a little uncomfortable for me to even ask you those questions. But admit it — you kind of want to know. Most of us are uncomfortable with the idea of broadcasting our salary. We're not supposed to tell our neighbors, and we're definitely not supposed to tell our office neighbors. The assumed reason is that if everybody knew what everybody got paid, then all hell would break loose. There'd be arguments, there'd be fights, there might even be a few people who quit. But what if secrecy is actually the reason for all that strife? And what would happen if we removed that secrecy? What if openness actually increased the sense of fairness and collaboration inside a company? What would happen if we had total pay transparency? For the past several years, I've been studying the corporate and entrepreneurial leaders who question the conventional wisdom about how to run a company. And the question of pay keeps coming up. And the answers keep surprising. It turns out that pay transparency — sharing salaries openly across a company — makes for a better workplace for both the employee and for the organization. When people don't know how their pay compares to their peers', they're more likely to feel underpaid and maybe even discriminated against. Do you want to work at a place that tolerates the idea that you feel underpaid or discriminated against? But keeping salaries secret does exactly that, and it's a practice as old as it is common, despite the fact that in the United States, the law protects an employee's right to discuss their pay. In one famous example from decades ago, the management of Vanity Fair magazine actually circulated a memo entitled: "Forbidding Discussion Among Employees of Salary Received." "Forbidding" discussion among employees of salary received. Now that memo didn't sit well with everybody. New York literary figures Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood, all writers in the Algonquin Round Table, decided to stand up for transparency and showed up for work the next day with their salary written on signs hanging from their neck. (Laughter) Imagine showing up for work with your salary just written across your chest for all to see. But why would a company even want to discourage salary discussions? Why do some people go along with it, while others revolt against it? It turns out that in addition to the assumed reasons, pay secrecy is actually a way to save a lot of money. You see, keeping salaries secret leads to what economists call "information asymmetry." This is a situation where, in a negotiation, one party has loads more information than the other. And in hiring or promotion or annual raise discussions, an employer can use that secrecy to save a lot of money. Imagine how much better you could negotiate for a raise if you knew everybody's salary. Economists warn that information asymmetry can cause markets to go awry. Someone leaves a pay stub on the copier, and suddenly everybody is shouting at each other. In fact, they even warn that information asymmetry can lead to a total market failure. And I think we're almost there. Here's why: first, most employees have no idea how their pay compares to their peers'. In a 2015 survey of 70,000 employees, two-thirds of everyone who is paid at the market rate said that they felt they were underpaid. And of everybody who felt that they were underpaid, 60 percent said that they intended to quit, regardless of where they were — underpaid, overpaid or right at the market rate. If you were part of this survey, what would you say? Are you underpaid? Well, wait — how do you even know, because you're not allowed to talk about it? Next, information asymmetry, pay secrecy, makes it easier to ignore the discrimination that's already present in the market today. In a 2011 report from the Institute for Women's Policy Research, the gender wage gap between men and women was 23 percent. This is where that 77 cents on the dollar comes from. But in the Federal Government, where salaries are pinned to certain levels and everybody knows what those levels are, the gender wage gap shrinks to 11 percent — and this is before controlling for any of the factors that economists argue over whether or not to control for. If we really want to close the gender wage gap, maybe we should start by opening up the payroll. If this is what total market failure looks like, then openness remains the only way to ensure fairness. Now, I realize that letting people know what you make might feel uncomfortable, but isn't it less uncomfortable than always wondering if you're being discriminated against, or if your wife or your daughter or your sister is being paid unfairly? Openness remains the best way to ensure fairness, and pay transparency does that. That's why entrepreneurial leaders and corporate leaders have been experimenting with sharing salaries for years. Like Dane Atkinson. Dane is a serial entrepreneur who started many companies in a pay secrecy condition and even used that condition to pay two equally qualified people dramatically different salaries, depending on how well they could negotiate. And Dane saw the strife that happened as a result of this. So when he started his newest company, SumAll, he committed to salary transparency from the beginning. And the results have been amazing. And in study after study, when people know how they're being paid and how that pay compares to their peers', they're more likely to work hard to improve their performance, more likely to be engaged, and they're less likely to quit. That's why Dane's not alone. From technology start-ups like Buffer, to the tens of thousands of employees at Whole Foods, where not only is your salary available for everyone to see, but the performance data for the store and for your department is available on the company intranet for all to see. Now, pay transparency takes a lot of forms. It's not one size fits all. Some post their salaries for all to see. Some only keep it inside the company. Some post the formula for calculating pay, and others post the pay levels and affix everybody to that level. So you don't have to make signs for all of your employees to wear around the office. And you don't have to be the only one wearing a sign that you made at home. But we can all take greater steps towards pay transparency. For those of you that have the authority to move forward towards transparency: it's time to move forward. And for those of you that don't have that authority: it's time to stand up for your right to. So how much do you get paid? And how does that compare to the people you work with? You should know. And so should they. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why open a school? To close a prison | {0: 'Nadia Lopez is the founding principal of Mott Hall Bridges Academy, where she is showing the world how underprivileged communities can beat the odds and create positive institutions that have a global impact.'} | TED Talks Live | When I opened Mott Hall Bridges Academy in 2010, my goal was simple: open a school to close a prison. Now to some, this was an audacious goal, because our school is located in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn — one of the most underserved and violent neighborhoods in all of New York City. Like many urban schools with high poverty rates, we face numerous challenges, like finding teachers who can empathize with the complexities of a disadvantaged community, lack of funding for technology, low parental involvement and neighborhood gangs that recruit children as early as fourth grade. So here I was, the founding principal of a middle school that was a district public school, and I only had 45 kids to start. Thirty percent of them had special needs. Eighty-six percent of them were below grade level in English and in math. And 100 percent were living below the poverty level. If our children are not in our classrooms, how will they learn? And if they're not learning, where would they end up? It was evident when I would ask my 13-year-old, "Young man, where do you see yourself in five years?" And his response: "I don't know if I'm gonna live that long." Or to have a young woman say to me that she had a lifelong goal of working in a fast-food restaurant. To me, this was unacceptable. It was also evident that they had no idea that there was a landscape of opportunity that existed beyond their neighborhood. We call our students "scholars," because they're lifelong learners. And the skills that they learn today will prepare them for college and career readiness. I chose the royal colors of purple and black, because I want them to be reminded that they are descendants of greatness, and that through education, they are future engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and even leaders who can and will take over this world. To date, we have had three graduating classes, at a 98 — (Applause) At a 98-percent graduation rate. This is nearly 200 children, who are now going to some of the most competitive high schools in New York City. (Applause) It was a cold day in January when my scholar, Vidal Chastanet, met Brandon Stanton, the founder of the popular blog "Humans of New York." Brandon shared the story of a young man from Brownsville who had witnessed violence firsthand, by witnessing a man being thrown off of a roof. Yet he can still be influenced by a principal who had opened up a school that believes in all children. Vidal embodies the story of so many of our underprivileged children who are struggling to survive, which is why we must make education a priority. Brandon's post created a global sensation that touched the lives of millions. This resulted in 1.4 million dollars being raised for our scholars to attend field trips to colleges and universities, Summer STEAM programs, as well as college scholarships. You need to understand that when 200 young people from Brownsville visited Harvard, they now understood that a college of their choice was a real possibility. And the impossibilities that had been imposed upon them by a disadvantaged community were replaced by hope and purpose. The revolution in education is happening in our schools, with adults who provide love, structure, support and knowledge. These are the things that inspire children. But it is not an easy task. And there are high demands within an education system that is not perfect. But I have a dynamic group of educators who collaborate as a team to determine what is the best curriculum. They take time beyond their school day, and come in on weekends and even use their own money to often provide resources when we do not have it. And as the principal, I have to inspect what I expect. So I show up in classes and I conduct observations to give feedback, because I want my teachers to be just as successful as the name Mott Hall Bridges Academy. And I give them access to me every single day, which is why they all have my personal cell number, including my scholars and those who graduated — which is probably why I get phone calls and text messages at three o'clock in the morning. (Laughter) But we are all connected to succeed, and good leaders do this. Tomorrow's future is sitting in our classrooms. And they are our responsibility. That means everyone in here, and those who are watching the screen. We must believe in their brilliance, and remind them by teaching them that there indeed is power in education. Thank you. (Applause) |
The era of personal DNA testing is here | {0: 'Sebastian Kraves wants to bring DNA science to more people in new places.'} | TED@BCG Paris | Imagine that you're a pig farmer. You live on a small farm in the Philippines. Your animals are your family's sole source of income — as long as they're healthy. You know that any day, one of your pigs can catch the flu, the swine flu. Living in tight quarters, one pig coughing and sneezing may soon lead to the next pig coughing and sneezing, until an outbreak of swine flu has taken over your farm. If it's a bad enough virus, the health of your herd may be gone in the blink of an eye. If you called in a veterinarian, he or she would visit your farm and take samples from your pigs' noses and mouths. But then they would have to drive back into the city to test those samples in their central lab. Two weeks later, you'd hear back the results. Two weeks may be just enough time for infection to spread and take away your way of life. But it doesn't have to be that way. Today, farmers can take those samples themselves. They can jump right into the pen and swab their pigs' noses and mouths with a little filter paper, place that little filter paper in a tiny tube, and mix it with some chemicals that will extract genetic material from their pigs' noses and mouths. And without leaving their farms, they take a drop of that genetic material and put it into a little analyzer smaller than a shoebox, program it to detect DNA or RNA from the swine flu virus, and within one hour get back the results, visualize the results. This reality is possible because today we're living in the era of personal DNA technology. Every one of us can actually test DNA ourselves. DNA is the fundamental molecule the carries genetic instructions that help build the living world. Humans have DNA. Pigs have DNA. Even bacteria and some viruses have DNA too. The genetic instructions encoded in DNA inform how our bodies develop, grow, function. And in many cases, that same information can trigger disease. Your genetic information is strung into a long and twisted molecule, the DNA double helix, that has over three billion letters, beginning to end. But the lines that carry meaningful information are usually very short — a few dozen to several thousand letters long. So when we're looking to answer a question based on DNA, we actually don't need to read all those three billion letters, typically. That would be like getting hungry at night and having to flip through the whole phone book from cover to cover, pausing at every line, just to find the nearest pizza joint. (Laughter) Luckily, three decades ago, humans started to invent tools that can find any specific line of genetic information. These DNA machines are wonderful. They can find any line in DNA. But once they find it, that DNA is still tiny, and surrounded by so much other DNA, that what these machines then do is copy the target gene, and one copy piles on top of another, millions and millions and millions of copies, until that gene stands out against the rest; until we can visualize it, interpret it, read it, understand it, until we can answer: Does my pig have the flu? Or other questions buried in our own DNA: Am I at risk of cancer? Am I of Irish descent? Is that child my son? (Laughter) This ability to make copies of DNA, as simple as it sounds, has transformed our world. Scientists use it every day to detect and address disease, to create innovative medicines, to modify foods, to assess whether our food is safe to eat or whether it's contaminated with deadly bacteria. Even judges use the output of these machines in court to decide whether someone is innocent or guilty based on DNA evidence. The inventor of this DNA-copying technique was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993. But for 30 years, the power of genetic analysis has been confined to the ivory tower, or bigwig PhD scientist work. Well, several companies around the world are working on making this same technology accessible to everyday people like the pig farmer, like you. I cofounded one of these companies. Three years ago, together with a fellow biologist and friend of mine, Zeke Alvarez Saavedra, we decided to make personal DNA machines that anyone could use. Our goal was to bring DNA science to more people in new places. We started working in our basements. We had a simple question: What could the world look like if everyone could analyze DNA? We were curious, as curious as you would have been if I had shown you this picture in 1980. (Laughter) You would have thought, "Wow! I can now call my Aunt Glenda from the car and wish her a happy birthday. I can call anyone, anytime. This is the future!" Little did you know, you would tap on that phone to make dinner reservations for you and Aunt Glenda to celebrate together. With another tap, you'd be ordering her gift. And yet one more tap, and you'd be "liking" Auntie Glenda on Facebook. And all of this, while sitting on the toilet. (Laughter) It is notoriously hard to predict where new technology might take us. And the same is true for personal DNA technology today. For example, I could never have imagined that a truffle farmer, of all people, would use personal DNA machines. Dr. Paul Thomas grows truffles for a living. We see him pictured here, holding the first UK-cultivated truffle in his hands, on one of his farms. Truffles are this delicacy that stems from a fungus growing on the roots of living trees. And it's a rare fungus. Some species may fetch 3,000, 7,000, or more dollars per kilogram. I learned from Paul that the stakes for a truffle farmer can be really high. When he sources new truffles to grow on his farms, he's exposed to the threat of knockoffs — truffles that look and feel like the real thing, but they're of lower quality. But even to a trained eye like Paul's, even when looked at under a microscope, these truffles can pass for authentic. So in order to grow the highest quality truffles, the ones that chefs all over the world will fight over, Paul has to use DNA analysis. Isn't that mind-blowing? I bet you will never look at that black truffle risotto again without thinking of its genes. (Laughter) But personal DNA machines can also save human lives. Professor Ian Goodfellow is a virologist at the University of Cambridge. Last year he traveled to Sierra Leone. When the Ebola outbreak broke out in Western Africa, he quickly realized that doctors there lacked the basic tools to detect and combat disease. Results could take up to a week to come back — that's way too long for the patients and the families who are suffering. Ian decided to move his lab into Makeni, Sierra Leone. Here we see Ian Goodfellow moving over 10 tons of equipment into a pop-up tent that he would equip to detect and diagnose the virus and sequence it within 24 hours. But here's a surprise: the same equipment that Ian could use at his lab in the UK to sequence and diagnose Ebola, just wouldn't work under these conditions. We're talking 35 Celsius heat and over 90 percent humidity here. But instead, Ian could use personal DNA machines small enough to be placed in front of the air-conditioning unit to keep sequencing the virus and keep saving lives. This may seem like an extreme place for DNA analysis, but let's move on to an even more extreme environment: outer space. Let's talk about DNA analysis in space. When astronauts live aboard the International Space Station, they're orbiting the planet 250 miles high. They're traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. Picture that — you're seeing 15 sunsets and sunrises every day. You're also living in microgravity, floating. And under these conditions, our bodies can do funky things. One of these things is that our immune systems get suppressed, making astronauts more prone to infection. A 16-year-old girl, a high school student from New York, Anna-Sophia Boguraev, wondered whether changes to the DNA of astronauts could be related to this immune suppression, and through a science competition called "Genes In Space," Anna-Sophia designed an experiment to test this hypothesis using a personal DNA machine aboard the International Space Station. Here we see Anna-Sophia on April 8, 2016, in Cape Canaveral, watching her experiment launch to the International Space Station. That cloud of smoke is the rocket that brought Anna-Sophia's experiment to the International Space Station, where, three days later, astronaut Tim Peake carried out her experiment — in microgravity. Personal DNA machines are now aboard the International Space Station, where they can help monitor living conditions and protect the lives of astronauts. A 16-year-old designing a DNA experiment to protect the lives of astronauts may seem like a rarity, the mark of a child genius. Well, to me, it signals something bigger: that DNA technology is finally within the reach of every one of you. A few years ago, a college student armed with a personal computer could code an app, an app that is now a social network with more than one billion users. Could we be moving into a world of one personal DNA machine in every home? I know families who are already living in this reality. The Daniels family, for example, set up a DNA lab in the basement of their suburban Chicago home. This is not a family made of PhD scientists. This is a family like any other. They just like to spend time together doing fun, creative things. By day, Brian is an executive at a private equity firm. At night and on weekends, he experiments with DNA alongside his kids, ages seven and nine, as a way to explore the living world. Last time I called them, they were checking out homegrown produce from the backyard garden. They were testing tomatoes that they had picked, taking the flesh of their skin, putting it in a test tube, mixing it with chemicals to extract DNA and then using their home DNA copier to test those tomatoes for genetically engineered traits. For the Daniels family, the personal DNA machine is like the chemistry set for the 21st century. Most of us may not yet be diagnosing genetic conditions in our kitchen sinks or doing at-home paternity testing. (Laughter) But we've definitely reached a point in history where every one of you could actually get hands-on with DNA in your kitchen. You could copy, paste and analyze DNA and extract meaningful information from it. And it's at times like this that profound transformation is bound to happen; moments when a transformative, powerful technology that was before limited to a select few in the ivory tower, finally becomes within the reach of every one of us, from farmers to schoolchildren. Think about the moment when phones stopped being plugged into the wall by cords, or when computers left the mainframe and entered your home or your office. The ripples of the personal DNA revolution may be hard to predict, but one thing is certain: revolutions don't go backwards, and DNA technology is already spreading faster than our imagination. So if you're curious, get up close and personal with DNA — today. It is in our DNA to be curious. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
We can fight terror without sacrificing our rights | {0: 'Rebecca MacKinnon looks at issues of free expression, governance and democracy (or lack of) in the digital networks, platforms and services on which we are all more and more dependent.'} | TEDSummit | There's a big question at the center of life in our democracies today: How do we fight terror without destroying democracies, without trampling human rights? I've spent much of my career working with journalists, with bloggers, with activists, with human rights researchers all around the world, and I've come to the conclusion that if our democratic societies do not double down on protecting and defending human rights, freedom of the press and a free and open internet, radical extremist ideologies are much more likely to persist. (Applause) OK, all done. Thank you very much. No, just joking. (Laughter) I actually want to drill down on this a little bit. So, one of the countries that has been on the frontlines of this issue is Tunisia, which was the only country to come out of the Arab Spring with a successful democratic revolution. Five years later, they're struggling with serious terror attacks and rampant ISIS recruitment. And many Tunisians are calling on their government to do whatever it takes to keep them safe. Tunisian cartoonist Nadia Khiari has summed up the situation with this character who says, "I don't give a damn about human rights. I don't give a damn about the revolution. I don't give a damn about democracy and liberty. I just want to be safe." "Satisfied?" asked his jailer. "You're safe now." If the Tunisian people can figure out how to deal with their terrorism problem without ending up in this place, they will be a model not only for their region, but for all of us. The reality is that civil society, journalists and activists are coming under attack from extremist groups on the one hand, and, in many countries, also from their own governments. We're seeing bloggers and journalists being jailed, charged and intimidated by their own governments, many of which are allies with the West in the war on terror. Just three examples. A friend and former colleague of mine, Hisham Almiraat, has been charged with threatening state security, along with six other activists in Morocco. The Saudi blogger Raif Badawi has been jailed and flogged for insulting Islam and criticizing the Saudi regime on his blog. More recently, the Turkish representative for Reporters Without Borders, Erol Önderoglu, has been detained and charged with spreading terrorist propaganda, because he and some other activists have been supporting Kurdish media. Anti-terror measures quickly turn into state repression without strong protection for minority communities and for peaceful debate; this needs to be supported by a robust, independent local media. But while that's not really happening, Washington is teaming up with Silicon Valley and with Hollywood to pour millions — hundreds of millions of dollars — into what's called "counter-messaging," a fancy word for propaganda. To counter the terrorist propaganda spreading all over the internet, in Europe, Internet Referral Units are being set up, so that people can report on extremist content that they find and get it censored. The problem is, that all of this propaganda, monitoring and censorship completely fails to make up for the fact that the people who are the most credible voices, who can present credible ideas and alternative solutions to real economic, social and political problems in their community that are causing people to turn to extremism in the first place, are being silenced by their own governments. This is all adding up to a decrease in freedom across the world. Freedom House, the human rights organization, reports that 2015 marks the 10th straight year in a row of decline in freedom worldwide. And this is not just because of the actions of authoritarian governments. It's also because democratic governments are increasingly cracking down on dissenters, whistle-blowers and investigative journalists. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has warned that "preventing extremism and promoting human rights go hand-in-hand." It's not to say that governments shouldn't keep us safe — of course they should — but we need public oversight, transparency and accountability to the rule of law. Meanwhile, extremists are literally killing off civil society in some countries. Since 2013 in Bangladesh, over a dozen secular bloggers and community activists have been literally slaughtered by extremists while the government has done very little. From the city of Raqqa in Syria, people like Ruqia Hassan and Naji Jerf have been assassinated for their reporting out of ISIS-controlled territory. The citizen media group called Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently relies on strong encryption to send out their reports and shield themselves from interception and surveillance. Yet authorities in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and many other democracies are seeking to use the law to either weaken or outright ban strong encryption, because the bad guys are using it, too. We have got to fight for the right of citizens to use strong encryption. Otherwise, dissent and investigative journalism are going to become even more difficult in even more places. And the bad guys — the criminals and terrorists — are still going to find ways to communicate. Kudos to the companies that are standing up for their users' right to use encryption. But when it comes to censorship, the picture is much more troubling. Yes, there's a real problem of extremist content spreading all over the internet. And Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are among the many companies who report having taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of content and deactivating accounts that are connected to the extremist's speech. The problem is their enforcement mechanisms are a complete black box, and there is collateral damage. Take, for example, Iyad el-Baghdadi, an activist who makes fun of ISIS on Twitter. He had his account deactivated, because he shares a surname with a prominent ISIS leader. Last December, a number of women named Isis, which also happens to be the name of an Egyptian goddess, had their accounts deactivated. And this woman, who lives in the United States and is a computer programmer, reported on Twitter about her deactivation on Facebook, managed to get enough media attention to have her account reinstated. But that's the thing — she had to get media attention. And journalists aren't immune. David Thomson, an expert on terrorism and reporter for Radio France International, had reports deleted from his Facebook account and had his account deactivated for several days, because they contained pictures of ISIS flags, even though he was just reporting on ISIS, not promoting it. And then we have stories from people like this Egyptian man, Ahmed Abdellahy, who reported recently in an event in Washington DC that some of his arguments with extremists — he now spends his time on social media arguing with ISIS followers, trying to get them to turn away — some of his arguments with these extremists get deleted, which he believes has the effect of shielding them from alternative points of view. It's unclear whether Facebook even knows the extent of the collateral damage, or the other companies as well. But we do know that journalism, activism and public debate are being silenced in the effort to stamp out extremist speech. So with these companies having so much power over the public discourse, they need to be held accountable. They need to carry out impact assessment to identify and fix the problems that we're clearly seeing. They need to be more transparent about their enforcement mechanisms, and they need to have clear appeal and grievance mechanisms, so people can get their content reinstated. Now, I've been talking for the last 10 minutes about how governments and companies are making it more difficult for people like these. This is a picture of members of the citizen media network, Global Voices, that I helped to cofound over 10 years ago with my friend, Ethan Zuckerman. Interestingly, about 5 years ago, right after the Arab Spring, the data scientist Gilad Lotan created a network map of the people in Global Voices who were heavy users of Twitter during the Arab Spring. And he found that many of these people served as key information nodes between activists and journalists throughout the Tunisian and Egyptian revolution. We've got to make sure that these people not only survive, but are able to continue to thrive. Many of them are still active, other than the ones who have gone to jail or have been driven into hiding or exile. All around the world, people who are sick and tired of fear and oppression are linking up in their communities and across borders. We've got to do everything we can to push our governments and companies to do a better job of protecting their rights. We've also got to be more mindful about how our own personal, political, consumer and business choices affect people like these around the world. Also, if you follow the news, it's pretty clear that that alone isn't going to be enough. We've got to take personal responsibility by joining — or at very least, actively supporting — the growing ecosystem of individuals and groups who are fighting for social justice, environmental sustainability, government accountability, human rights, freedom of the press and a free and open internet, all around the world. I believe that, ultimately, we can overcome the digitally empowered networks of extremism, demagoguery and hate. But ... we've got to do this by really beefing up the global networks of citizens around the world, powered by people who are working hard every day, and taking personal risk for a future world that is more peaceful, just, open and free. Thanks very much for listening. (Applause) |
America's forgotten working class | {0: 'Former Marine and Yale Law School graduate J.D. Vance writes about how upward mobility really feels.'} | TEDNYC | I remember the very first time I went to a nice restaurant, a really nice restaurant. It was for a law firm recruitment dinner, and I remember beforehand the waitress walked around and asked whether we wanted some wine, so I said, "Sure, I'll take some white wine." And she immediately said, "Would you like sauvignon blanc or chardonnay?" And I remember thinking, "Come on, lady, stop with the fancy French words and just give me some white wine." But I used my powers of deduction and recognized that chardonnay and sauvignon blanc were two separate types of white wine, and so I told her that I would take the chardonnay, because frankly that was the easiest one to pronounce for me. So I had a lot of experiences like that during my first couple of years as a law student at Yale, because, despite all outward appearances, I'm a cultural outsider. I didn't come from the elites. I didn't come from the Northeast or from San Francisco. I came from a southern Ohio steel town, and it's a town that's really struggling in a lot of ways, ways that are indicative of the broader struggles of America's working class. Heroin has moved in, killing a lot of people, people I know. Family violence, domestic violence, and divorce have torn apart families. And there's a very unique sense of pessimism that's moved in. Think about rising mortality rates in these communities and recognize that for a lot of these folks, the problems that they're seeing are actually causing rising death rates in their own communities, so there's a very real sense of struggle. I had a very front-row seat to that struggle. My family has been part of that struggle for a very long time. I come from a family that doesn't have a whole lot of money. The addiction that plagued my community also plagued my family, and even, sadly, my own mom. There were a lot of problems that I saw in my own family, problems caused sometimes by a lack of money, problems caused sometimes by a lack of access to resources and social capital that really affected my life. If you had looked at my life when I was 14 years old and said, "Well, what's going to happen to this kid?" you would have concluded that I would have struggled with what academics call upward mobility. So upward mobility is an abstract term, but it strikes at something that's very core at the heart of the American Dream. It's the sense, and it measures whether kids like me who grow up in poor communities are going to live a better life, whether they're going to have a chance to live a materially better existence, or whether they're going to stay in the circumstances where they came from. And one of the things we've learned, unfortunately, is that upward mobility isn't as high as we'd like it to be in this country, and interestingly, it's very geographically distributed. So take Utah, for instance. In Utah a poor kid is actually doing OK, very likely to live their share and their part in the American Dream. But if you think of where I'm from, in the South, in Appalachia, in southern Ohio, it's very unlikely that kids like that will rise. The American Dream in those parts of the country is in a very real sense just a dream. So why is that happening? So one reason is obviously economic or structural. So you think of these areas. They're beset by these terrible economic trends, built around industries like coal and steel that make it harder for folks to get ahead. That's certainly one problem. There's also the problem of brain drain, where the really talented people, because they can't find high-skilled work at home, end up moving elsewhere, so they don't build a business or non-profit where they're from, they end up going elsewhere and taking their talents with them. There are failing schools in a lot of these communities, failing to give kids the educational leg up that really makes it possible for kids to have opportunities later in life. These things are all important. I don't mean to discount these structural barriers. But when I look back at my life and my community, something else was going on, something else mattered. It's difficult to quantify, but it was no less real. So for starters, there was a very real sense of hopelessness in the community that I grew up in. There was a sense that kids had that their choices didn't matter. No matter what happened, no matter how hard they worked, no matter how hard they tried to get ahead, nothing good would happen. So that's a tough feeling to grow up around. That's a tough mindset to penetrate, and it leads sometimes to very conspiratorial places. So let's just take one political issue that's pretty hot, affirmative action. So depending on your politics, you might think that affirmative action is either a wise or an unwise way to promote diversity in the workplace or the classroom. But if you grow up in an area like this, you see affirmative action as a tool to hold people like you back. That's especially true if you're a member of the white working class. You see it as something that isn't just about good or bad policy. You see it as something that's actively conspiring, where people with political and financial power are working against you. And there are a lot of ways that you see that conspiracy against you — perceived, real, but it's there, and it warps expectations. So if you think about what do you do when you grow up in that world, you can respond in a couple of ways. One, you can say, "I'm not going to work hard, because no matter how hard I work, it's not going to matter." Another thing you might do is say, "Well, I'm not going to go after the traditional markers of success, like a university education or a prestigious job, because the people who care about those things are unlike me. They're never going to let me in." When I got admitted to Yale, a family member asked me if I had pretended to be a liberal to get by the admissions committee. Seriously. And it's obviously not the case that there was a liberal box to check on the application, but it speaks to a very real insecurity in these places that you have to pretend to be somebody you're not to get past these various social barriers. It's a very significant problem. Even if you don't give in to that hopelessness, even if you think, let's say, that your choices matter and you want to make the good choices, you want to do better for yourself and for your family, it's sometimes hard to even know what those choices are when you grow up in a community like I did. I didn't know, for example, that you had to go to law school to be a lawyer. I didn't know that elite universities, as research consistently tells us, are cheaper for low-income kids because these universities have bigger endowments, can offer more generous financial aid. I remember I learned this when I got the financial aid letter from Yale for myself, tens of thousands of dollars in need-based aid, which is a term I had never heard before. But I turned to my aunt when I got that letter and said, "You know, I think this just means that for the first time in my life, being poor has paid really well." So I didn't have access to that information because the social networks around me didn't have access to that information. I learned from my community how to shoot a gun, how to shoot it well. I learned how to make a damn good biscuit recipe. The trick, by the way, is frozen butter, not warm butter. But I didn't learn how to get ahead. I didn't learn how to make the good decisions about education and opportunity that you need to make to actually have a chance in this 21st century knowledge economy. Economists call the value that we gain from our informal networks, from our friends and colleagues and family "social capital." The social capital that I had wasn't built for 21st century America, and it showed. There's something else that's really important that's going on that our community doesn't like to talk about, but it's very real. Working-class kids are much more likely to face what's called adverse childhood experiences, which is just a fancy word for childhood trauma: getting hit or yelled at, put down by a parent repeatedly, watching someone hit or beat your parent, watching someone do drugs or abuse alcohol. These are all instances of childhood trauma, and they're pretty commonplace in my family. Importantly, they're not just commonplace in my family right now. They're also multigenerational. So my grandparents, the very first time that they had kids, they expected that they were going to raise them in a way that was uniquely good. They were middle class, they were able to earn a good wage in a steel mill. But what ended up happening is that they exposed their kids to a lot of the childhood trauma that had gone back many generations. My mom was 12 when she saw my grandma set my grandfather on fire. His crime was that he came home drunk after she told him, "If you come home drunk, I'm gonna kill you." And she tried to do it. Think about the way that that affects a child's mind. And we think of these things as especially rare, but a study by the Wisconsin Children's Trust Fund found that 40 percent of low-income kids face multiple instances of childhood trauma, compared to only 29 percent for upper-income kids. And think about what that really means. If you're a low-income kid, almost half of you face multiple instances of childhood trauma. This is not an isolated problem. This is a very significant issue. We know what happens to the kids who experience that life. They're more likely to do drugs, more likely to go to jail, more likely to drop out of high school, and most importantly, they're more likely to do to their children what their parents did to them. This trauma, this chaos in the home, is our culture's very worst gift to our children, and it's a gift that keeps on giving. So you combine all that, the hopelessness, the despair, the cynicism about the future, the childhood trauma, the low social capital, and you begin to understand why me, at the age of 14, was ready to become just another statistic, another kid who failed to beat the odds. But something unexpected happened. I did beat the odds. Things turned up for me. I graduated from high school, from college, I went to law school, and I have a pretty good job now. So what happened? Well, one thing that happened is that my grandparents, the same grandparents of setting someone on fire fame, they really shaped up by the time I came around. They provided me a stable home, a stable family. They made sure that when my parents weren't able to do the things that kids need, they stepped in and filled that role. My grandma especially did two things that really matter. One, she provided that peaceful home that allowed me to focus on homework and the things that kids should be focused on. But she was also this incredibly perceptive woman, despite not even having a middle school education. She recognized the message that my community had for me, that my choices didn't matter, that the deck was stacked against me. She once told me, "JD, never be like those losers who think the deck is stacked against them. You can do anything you want to." And yet she recognized that life wasn't fair. It's hard to strike that balance, to tell a kid that life isn't fair, but also recognize and enforce in them the reality that their choices matter. But mamaw was able to strike that balance. The other thing that really helped was the United States Marine Corps. So we think of the Marine Corps as a military outfit, and of course it is, but for me, the US Marine Corps was a four-year crash course in character education. It taught me how to make a bed, how to do laundry, how to wake up early, how to manage my finances. These are things my community didn't teach me. I remember when I went to go buy a car for the very first time, I was offered a dealer's low, low interest rate of 21.9 percent, and I was ready to sign on the dotted line. But I didn't take that deal, because I went and took it to my officer who told me, "Stop being an idiot, go to the local credit union, and get a better deal." And so that's what I did. But without the Marine Corps, I would have never had access to that knowledge. I would have had a financial calamity, frankly. The last thing I want to say is that I had a lot of good fortune in the mentors and people who have played an important role in my life. From the Marines, from Ohio State, from Yale, from other places, people have really stepped in and ensured that they filled that social capital gap that it was pretty obvious, apparently, that I had. That comes from good fortune, but a lot of children aren't going to have that good fortune, and I think that raises really important questions for all of us about how we're going to change that. We need to ask questions about how we're going to give low-income kids who come from a broken home access to a loving home. We need to ask questions about how we're going to teach low-income parents how to better interact with their children, with their partners. We need to ask questions about how we give social capital, mentorship to low-income kids who don't have it. We need to think about how we teach working class children about not just hard skills, like reading, mathematics, but also soft skills, like conflict resolution and financial management. Now, I don't have all of the answers. I don't know all of the solutions to this problem, but I do know this: in southern Ohio right now, there's a kid who is anxiously awaiting their dad, wondering whether, when he comes through the door, he'll walk calmly or stumble drunkly. There's a kid whose mom sticks a needle in her arm and passes out, and he doesn't know why she doesn't cook him dinner, and he goes to bed hungry that night. There's a kid who has no hope for the future but desperately wants to live a better life. They just want somebody to show it to them. I don't have all the answers, but I know that unless our society starts asking better questions about why I was so lucky and about how to get that luck to more of our communities and our country's children, we're going to continue to have a very significant problem. Thank you. (Applause) |
A visual history of social dance in 25 moves | {0: 'Camille A. Brown leads her dance company through excavations of ancestral stories, both timeless and traditional, that connect history with contemporary culture.'} | TED Studio | This is the Bop. The Bop is a type of social dance. Dance is a language, and social dance is an expression that emerges from a community. A social dance isn't choreographed by any one person. It can't be traced to any one moment. Each dance has steps that everyone can agree on, but it's about the individual and their creative identity. Because of that, social dances bubble up, they change and they spread like wildfire. They are as old as our remembered history. In African-American social dances, we see over 200 years of how African and African-American traditions influenced our history. The present always contains the past. And the past shapes who we are and who we will be. (Clapping) The Juba dance was born from enslaved Africans' experience on the plantation. Brought to the Americas, stripped of a common spoken language, this dance was a way for enslaved Africans to remember where they're from. It may have looked something like this. Slapping thighs, shuffling feet and patting hands: this was how they got around the slave owners' ban on drumming, improvising complex rhythms just like ancestors did with drums in Haiti or in the Yoruba communities of West Africa. It was about keeping cultural traditions alive and retaining a sense of inner freedom under captivity. It was the same subversive spirit that created this dance: the Cakewalk, a dance that parodied the mannerisms of Southern high society — a way for the enslaved to throw shade at the masters. The crazy thing about this dance is that the Cakewalk was performed for the masters, who never suspected they were being made fun of. Now you might recognize this one. 1920s — the Charleston. The Charleston was all about improvisation and musicality, making its way into Lindy Hop, swing dancing and even the Kid n Play, originally called the Funky Charleston. Started by a tight-knit Black community near Charleston, South Carolina, the Charleston permeated dance halls where young women suddenly had the freedom to kick their heels and move their legs. Now, social dance is about community and connection; if you knew the steps, it meant you belonged to a group. But what if it becomes a worldwide craze? Enter the Twist. It's no surprise that the Twist can be traced back to the 19th century, brought to America from the Congo during slavery. But in the late '50s, right before the Civil Rights Movement, the Twist is popularized by Chubby Checker and Dick Clark. Suddenly, everybody's doing the Twist: white teenagers, kids in Latin America, making its way into songs and movies. Through social dance, the boundaries between groups become blurred. The story continues in the 1980s and '90s. Along with the emergence of hip-hop, African-American social dance took on even more visibility, borrowing from its long past, shaping culture and being shaped by it. Today, these dances continue to evolve, grow and spread. Why do we dance? To move, to let loose, to express. Why do we dance together? To heal, to remember, to say: "We speak a common language. We exist and we are free." |
How we're harnessing nature's hidden superpowers | {0: 'Oded Shoseyov’s researches plant molecular biology protein engineering and nanobiotechnology, creating super-performing materials that are could change the way we build our future products.'} | TED@BCG Paris | Two hundred years of modern science. We have to admit that our performance is not great. The machines we build continue to suffer from mechanical failures. The houses we build do not survive severe earthquakes. But we shouldn't be so critical of our scientists for a simple reason: they didn't have much time. Two hundred years is not a lot of time, while nature had three billion years to perfect some of the most amazing materials, that we wish we had in our possession. Remember, these materials carry a quality assurance of three billion years. Take, for example, sequoia trees. They carry hundreds of tons for hundreds of years in cold weather, in warm climates, UV light. Yet, if you look at the structure by high-resolution electron microscopy, and you ask yourself, what is it made of, surprisingly, it's made of sugar. Well, not exactly as we drink in our tea. It's actually a nanofiber called nanocrystalline cellulose. And this nanocrystalline cellulose is so strong, on a weight basis, it's about 10 times stronger than steel. Yet it's made of sugar. So scientists all over the world believe that nanocellulose is going to be one of the most important materials for the entire industry. But here's the problem: say you want to buy a half a ton of nanocellulose to build a boat or an airplane. Well, you can Google, you can eBay, you can even Alibaba. You won't find it. Of course, you're going to find thousands of scientific papers — great papers, where scientists are going to say this is a great material, there are lots of things we can do with it. But no commercial source. So we at the Hebrew University, together with our partners in Sweden, decided to focus on the development of an industrial-scale process to produce this nanocellulose. And, of course, we didn't want to cut trees. So we were looking for another source of raw material, and we found one — in fact, the sludge of the paper industry. The reason: there is a lot of it. Europe alone produces 11 million tons of that material annually. It's the equivalent of a mountain three kilometers high, sitting on a soccer field. And we produce this mountain every year. So for everybody, it's an environmental problem, and for us, it's a gold mine. So now, we are actually producing, on an industrial scale in Israel, nanocellulose, and very soon, in Sweden. We can do a lot of things with the material. For example, we have shown that by adding only a small percent of nanocellulose into cotton fibers, the same as my shirt is made of, it increases its strength dramatically. So this can be used for making amazing things, like super-fabrics for industrial and medical applications. But this is not the only thing. For example, self-standing, self-supporting structures, like the shelters that you can see now, actually are now showcasing in the Venice Biennale for Architecture. Nature actually didn't stop its wonders in the plant kingdom. Think about insects. Cat fleas, for example, have the ability to jump about a hundred times their height. That's amazing. It's the equivalent of a person standing in the middle of Liberty Island in New York, and in a single jump, going to the top of the Statue of Liberty. I'm sure everybody would like to do that. So the question is: How do cat fleas do it? It turns out, they make this wonderful material, which is called resilin. In simple words, resilin, which is a protein, is the most elastic rubber on Earth. You can stretch it, you can squish it, and it doesn't lose almost any energy to the environment. When you release it — snap! It brings back all the energy. So I'm sure everybody would like to have that material. But here's the problem: to catch cat fleas is difficult. (Laughter) Why? Because they are jumpy. (Laughter) But now, it's actually enough to catch one. Now we can extract its DNA and read how cat fleas make the resilin, and clone it into a less-jumpy organism like a plant. So that's exactly what we did. Now we have the ability to produce lots of resilin. Well, my team decided to do something really cool at the university. They decided to combine the strongest material produced by the plant kingdom with the most elastic material produced by the insect kingdom — nanocellulose with resilin. And the result is amazing. This material, in fact, is tough, elastic and transparent. So there are lots of things that can be done with this material. For example, next-generation sport shoes, so we can jump higher, run faster. And even touch screens for computers and smartphones, that won't break. Well, the problem is, we continue to implant synthetic implants in our body, which we glue and screw into our body. And I'm going to say that this is not a good idea. Why? Because they fail. This synthetic material fails, just like this plastic fork, that is not strong enough for its performance. But sometimes they are too strong, and therefore their mechanical properties do not really fit their surrounding tissues. But in fact, the reason is much more fundamental. The reason is that in nature, there is no one there that actually takes my head and screws it onto my neck, or takes my skin and glues it onto my body. In nature, everything is self-assembled. So every living cell, whether coming from a plant, insect or human being, has a DNA that encodes for nanobio building blocks. Many times they are proteins. Other times, they are enzymes that make other materials, like polysaccharides, fatty acids. And the common feature about all these materials is that they need no one. They recognize each other and self-assemble into structures — scaffolds on which cells are proliferating to give tissues. They develop into organs, and together bring life. So we at the Hebrew University, about 10 years ago, decided to focus on probably the most important biomaterial for humans, which is collagen. Why collagen? Because collagen accounts for about 25 percent of our dry weight. We have nothing more than collagen, other than water, in our body. So I always like to say, anyone who is in the replacement parts of human beings would like to have collagen. Admittedly, before we started our project, there were already more than 1,000 medical implants made of collagen. You know, simple things like dermal fillers to reduce wrinkles, augment lips, and other, more sophisticated medical implants, like heart valves. So where is the problem? Well, the problem is the source. The source of all that collagen is actually coming from dead bodies: dead pigs, dead cows and even human cadavers. So safety is a big issue. But it's not the only one. Also, the quality. Now here, I have a personal interest. This is my father, Zvi, in our winery in Israel. A heart valve, very similar to the one that I showed you before, seven years ago, was implanted in his body. Now, the scientific literature says that these heart valves start to fail 10 years after the operation. No wonder: they are made from old, used tissues, just like this wall made of bricks that is falling apart. Yeah, of course, I can take those bricks and build a new wall. But it's not going to be the same. So the US Food and Drug Administration made a notice already in 2007, asking the companies to start to look for better alternatives. So that's exactly what we did. We decided to clone all the five human genes responsible for making type I collagen in humans into a transgenic tobacco plant. So now, the plant has the ability to make human collagen brand new, untouched. This is amazing. Actually, it's happening now. Today in Israel, we grow it in 25,000 square meters of greenhouses all over the country. The farmers receive small plantlets of tobacco. It looks exactly like regular tobacco, except that they have five human genes. They're responsible for making type I collagen. We grow them for about 50 to 70 days, we harvest the leaves, and then the leaves are transported by cooling trucks to the factory. There, the process of extracting the collagen starts. Now, if you ever made a pesto — essentially, the same thing. (Laughter) You crush the leaves, you get the juice that contains the collagen. We concentrate the protein, transfer the protein to clean rooms for the final purification, and the end result is a collagen identical to what we have in our body — untouched, brand new and from which we make different medical implants: bone void fillers, for example, for severe bone fractures, spinal fusion. And more recently, even, we've been able to launch into the market here in Europe a flowable gel that is used for diabetic foot ulcers, that is now approved for use in the clinic. This is not science fiction. This is happening now. We are using plants to make medical implants for replacement parts for human beings. In fact, more recently, we've been able to make collagen fibers which are six times stronger than the Achilles tendon. That's amazing. Together with our partners from Ireland, we thought about the next thing: adding resilin to those fibers. By doing that, we've been able to make a superfiber which is about 380 percent tougher, and 300 percent more elastic. So oddly enough, in the future, when a patient is transplanted with artificial tendons or ligaments made from these fibers, we'll have better performance after the surgery than we had before the injury. So what's for the future? In the future, we believe we'll be able to make many nanobio building blocks that nature provided for us — collagen, nanocellulose, resilin and many more. And that will enable us to make better machines perform better, even the heart. Now, this heart is not going to be the same as we can get from a donor. It will be better. It actually will perform better and will last longer. My friend Zion Suliman once told me a smart sentence. He said, "If you want a new idea, you should open an old book." And I'm going to say that the book was written. It was written over three billion years of evolution. And the text is the DNA of life. All we have to do is read this text, embrace nature's gift to us and start our progress from here. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can we build AI without losing control over it? | {0: "Sam Harris's work focuses on how our growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live."} | TEDSummit | I'm going to talk about a failure of intuition that many of us suffer from. It's really a failure to detect a certain kind of danger. I'm going to describe a scenario that I think is both terrifying and likely to occur, and that's not a good combination, as it turns out. And yet rather than be scared, most of you will feel that what I'm talking about is kind of cool. I'm going to describe how the gains we make in artificial intelligence could ultimately destroy us. And in fact, I think it's very difficult to see how they won't destroy us or inspire us to destroy ourselves. And yet if you're anything like me, you'll find that it's fun to think about these things. And that response is part of the problem. OK? That response should worry you. And if I were to convince you in this talk that we were likely to suffer a global famine, either because of climate change or some other catastrophe, and that your grandchildren, or their grandchildren, are very likely to live like this, you wouldn't think, "Interesting. I like this TED Talk." Famine isn't fun. Death by science fiction, on the other hand, is fun, and one of the things that worries me most about the development of AI at this point is that we seem unable to marshal an appropriate emotional response to the dangers that lie ahead. I am unable to marshal this response, and I'm giving this talk. It's as though we stand before two doors. Behind door number one, we stop making progress in building intelligent machines. Our computer hardware and software just stops getting better for some reason. Now take a moment to consider why this might happen. I mean, given how valuable intelligence and automation are, we will continue to improve our technology if we are at all able to. What could stop us from doing this? A full-scale nuclear war? A global pandemic? An asteroid impact? Justin Bieber becoming president of the United States? (Laughter) The point is, something would have to destroy civilization as we know it. You have to imagine how bad it would have to be to prevent us from making improvements in our technology permanently, generation after generation. Almost by definition, this is the worst thing that's ever happened in human history. So the only alternative, and this is what lies behind door number two, is that we continue to improve our intelligent machines year after year after year. At a certain point, we will build machines that are smarter than we are, and once we have machines that are smarter than we are, they will begin to improve themselves. And then we risk what the mathematician IJ Good called an "intelligence explosion," that the process could get away from us. Now, this is often caricatured, as I have here, as a fear that armies of malicious robots will attack us. But that isn't the most likely scenario. It's not that our machines will become spontaneously malevolent. The concern is really that we will build machines that are so much more competent than we are that the slightest divergence between their goals and our own could destroy us. Just think about how we relate to ants. We don't hate them. We don't go out of our way to harm them. In fact, sometimes we take pains not to harm them. We step over them on the sidewalk. But whenever their presence seriously conflicts with one of our goals, let's say when constructing a building like this one, we annihilate them without a qualm. The concern is that we will one day build machines that, whether they're conscious or not, could treat us with similar disregard. Now, I suspect this seems far-fetched to many of you. I bet there are those of you who doubt that superintelligent AI is possible, much less inevitable. But then you must find something wrong with one of the following assumptions. And there are only three of them. Intelligence is a matter of information processing in physical systems. Actually, this is a little bit more than an assumption. We have already built narrow intelligence into our machines, and many of these machines perform at a level of superhuman intelligence already. And we know that mere matter can give rise to what is called "general intelligence," an ability to think flexibly across multiple domains, because our brains have managed it. Right? I mean, there's just atoms in here, and as long as we continue to build systems of atoms that display more and more intelligent behavior, we will eventually, unless we are interrupted, we will eventually build general intelligence into our machines. It's crucial to realize that the rate of progress doesn't matter, because any progress is enough to get us into the end zone. We don't need Moore's law to continue. We don't need exponential progress. We just need to keep going. The second assumption is that we will keep going. We will continue to improve our intelligent machines. And given the value of intelligence — I mean, intelligence is either the source of everything we value or we need it to safeguard everything we value. It is our most valuable resource. So we want to do this. We have problems that we desperately need to solve. We want to cure diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer. We want to understand economic systems. We want to improve our climate science. So we will do this, if we can. The train is already out of the station, and there's no brake to pull. Finally, we don't stand on a peak of intelligence, or anywhere near it, likely. And this really is the crucial insight. This is what makes our situation so precarious, and this is what makes our intuitions about risk so unreliable. Now, just consider the smartest person who has ever lived. On almost everyone's shortlist here is John von Neumann. I mean, the impression that von Neumann made on the people around him, and this included the greatest mathematicians and physicists of his time, is fairly well-documented. If only half the stories about him are half true, there's no question he's one of the smartest people who has ever lived. So consider the spectrum of intelligence. Here we have John von Neumann. And then we have you and me. And then we have a chicken. (Laughter) Sorry, a chicken. (Laughter) There's no reason for me to make this talk more depressing than it needs to be. (Laughter) It seems overwhelmingly likely, however, that the spectrum of intelligence extends much further than we currently conceive, and if we build machines that are more intelligent than we are, they will very likely explore this spectrum in ways that we can't imagine, and exceed us in ways that we can't imagine. And it's important to recognize that this is true by virtue of speed alone. Right? So imagine if we just built a superintelligent AI that was no smarter than your average team of researchers at Stanford or MIT. Well, electronic circuits function about a million times faster than biochemical ones, so this machine should think about a million times faster than the minds that built it. So you set it running for a week, and it will perform 20,000 years of human-level intellectual work, week after week after week. How could we even understand, much less constrain, a mind making this sort of progress? The other thing that's worrying, frankly, is that, imagine the best case scenario. So imagine we hit upon a design of superintelligent AI that has no safety concerns. We have the perfect design the first time around. It's as though we've been handed an oracle that behaves exactly as intended. Well, this machine would be the perfect labor-saving device. It can design the machine that can build the machine that can do any physical work, powered by sunlight, more or less for the cost of raw materials. So we're talking about the end of human drudgery. We're also talking about the end of most intellectual work. So what would apes like ourselves do in this circumstance? Well, we'd be free to play Frisbee and give each other massages. Add some LSD and some questionable wardrobe choices, and the whole world could be like Burning Man. (Laughter) Now, that might sound pretty good, but ask yourself what would happen under our current economic and political order? It seems likely that we would witness a level of wealth inequality and unemployment that we have never seen before. Absent a willingness to immediately put this new wealth to the service of all humanity, a few trillionaires could grace the covers of our business magazines while the rest of the world would be free to starve. And what would the Russians or the Chinese do if they heard that some company in Silicon Valley was about to deploy a superintelligent AI? This machine would be capable of waging war, whether terrestrial or cyber, with unprecedented power. This is a winner-take-all scenario. To be six months ahead of the competition here is to be 500,000 years ahead, at a minimum. So it seems that even mere rumors of this kind of breakthrough could cause our species to go berserk. Now, one of the most frightening things, in my view, at this moment, are the kinds of things that AI researchers say when they want to be reassuring. And the most common reason we're told not to worry is time. This is all a long way off, don't you know. This is probably 50 or 100 years away. One researcher has said, "Worrying about AI safety is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars." This is the Silicon Valley version of "don't worry your pretty little head about it." (Laughter) No one seems to notice that referencing the time horizon is a total non sequitur. If intelligence is just a matter of information processing, and we continue to improve our machines, we will produce some form of superintelligence. And we have no idea how long it will take us to create the conditions to do that safely. Let me say that again. We have no idea how long it will take us to create the conditions to do that safely. And if you haven't noticed, 50 years is not what it used to be. This is 50 years in months. This is how long we've had the iPhone. This is how long "The Simpsons" has been on television. Fifty years is not that much time to meet one of the greatest challenges our species will ever face. Once again, we seem to be failing to have an appropriate emotional response to what we have every reason to believe is coming. The computer scientist Stuart Russell has a nice analogy here. He said, imagine that we received a message from an alien civilization, which read: "People of Earth, we will arrive on your planet in 50 years. Get ready." And now we're just counting down the months until the mothership lands? We would feel a little more urgency than we do. Another reason we're told not to worry is that these machines can't help but share our values because they will be literally extensions of ourselves. They'll be grafted onto our brains, and we'll essentially become their limbic systems. Now take a moment to consider that the safest and only prudent path forward, recommended, is to implant this technology directly into our brains. Now, this may in fact be the safest and only prudent path forward, but usually one's safety concerns about a technology have to be pretty much worked out before you stick it inside your head. (Laughter) The deeper problem is that building superintelligent AI on its own seems likely to be easier than building superintelligent AI and having the completed neuroscience that allows us to seamlessly integrate our minds with it. And given that the companies and governments doing this work are likely to perceive themselves as being in a race against all others, given that to win this race is to win the world, provided you don't destroy it in the next moment, then it seems likely that whatever is easier to do will get done first. Now, unfortunately, I don't have a solution to this problem, apart from recommending that more of us think about it. I think we need something like a Manhattan Project on the topic of artificial intelligence. Not to build it, because I think we'll inevitably do that, but to understand how to avoid an arms race and to build it in a way that is aligned with our interests. When you're talking about superintelligent AI that can make changes to itself, it seems that we only have one chance to get the initial conditions right, and even then we will need to absorb the economic and political consequences of getting them right. But the moment we admit that information processing is the source of intelligence, that some appropriate computational system is what the basis of intelligence is, and we admit that we will improve these systems continuously, and we admit that the horizon of cognition very likely far exceeds what we currently know, then we have to admit that we are in the process of building some sort of god. Now would be a good time to make sure it's a god we can live with. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Technology hasn't changed love. Here's why | {0: 'Anthropologist Helen Fisher studies gender differences and the evolution of human emotions. She’s best known as an expert on romantic love.'} | TEDSummit | I was recently traveling in the Highlands of New Guinea, and I was talking with a man who had three wives. I asked him, "How many wives would you like to have?" And there was this long pause, and I thought to myself, "Is he going to say five? Is he going to say 10? Is he going to say 25?" And he leaned towards me and he whispered, "None." (Laughter) Eighty-six percent of human societies permit a man to have several wives: polygyny. But in the vast majority of these cultures, only about five or ten percent of men actually do have several wives. Having several partners can be a toothache. In fact, co-wives can fight with each other, sometimes they can even poison each other's children. And you've got to have a lot of cows, a lot of goats, a lot of money, a lot of land, in order to build a harem. We are a pair-bonding species. Ninety-seven percent of mammals do not pair up to rear their young; human beings do. I'm not suggesting that we're not — that we're necessarily sexually faithful to our partners. I've looked at adultery in 42 cultures, I understand, actually, some of the genetics of it, and some of the brain circuitry of it. It's very common around the world, but we are built to love. How is technology changing love? I'm going to say almost not at all. I study the brain. I and my colleagues have put over 100 people into a brain scanner — people who had just fallen happily in love, people who had just been rejected in love and people who are in love long-term. And it is possible to remain "in love" long-term. And I've long ago maintained that we've evolved three distinctly different brain systems for mating and reproduction: sex drive, feelings of intense romantic love and feelings of deep cosmic attachment to a long-term partner. And together, these three brain systems — with many other parts of the brain — orchestrate our sexual, our romantic and our family lives. But they lie way below the cortex, way below the limbic system where we feel our emotions, generate our emotions. They lie in the most primitive parts of the brain, linked with energy, focus, craving, motivation, wanting and drive. In this case, the drive to win life's greatest prize: a mating partner. They evolved over 4.4 million years ago among our first ancestors, and they're not going to change if you swipe left or right on Tinder. (Laughter) (Applause) There's no question that technology is changing the way we court: emailing, texting, emojis to express your emotions, sexting, "liking" a photograph, selfies ... We're seeing new rules and taboos for how to court. But, you know — is this actually dramatically changing love? What about the late 1940s, when the automobile became very popular and we suddenly had rolling bedrooms? (Laughter) How about the introduction of the birth control pill? Unchained from the great threat of pregnancy and social ruin, women could finally express their primitive and primal sexuality. Even dating sites are not changing love. I'm Chief Scientific Advisor to Match.com, I've been it for 11 years. I keep telling them and they agree with me, that these are not dating sites, they are introducing sites. When you sit down in a bar, in a coffee house, on a park bench, your ancient brain snaps into action like a sleeping cat awakened, and you smile and laugh and listen and parade the way our ancestors did 100,000 years ago. We can give you various people — all the dating sites can — but the only real algorithm is your own human brain. Technology is not going to change that. Technology is also not going to change who you choose to love. I study the biology of personality, and I've come to believe that we've evolved four very broad styles of thinking and behaving, linked with the dopamine, serotonin, testosterone and estrogen systems. So I created a questionnaire directly from brain science to measure the degree to which you express the traits — the constellation of traits — linked with each of these four brain systems. I then put that questionnaire on various dating sites in 40 countries. Fourteen million or more people have now taken the questionnaire, and I've been able to watch who's naturally drawn to whom. And as it turns out, those who were very expressive of the dopamine system tend to be curious, creative, spontaneous, energetic — I would imagine there's an awful lot of people like that in this room — they're drawn to people like themselves. Curious, creative people need people like themselves. People who are very expressive of the serotonin system tend to be traditional, conventional, they follow the rules, they respect authority, they tend to be religious — religiosity is in the serotonin system — and traditional people go for traditional people. In that way, similarity attracts. In the other two cases, opposites attract. People very expressive of the testosterone system tend to be analytical, logical, direct, decisive, and they go for their opposite: they go for somebody who's high estrogen, somebody who's got very good verbal skills and people skills, who's very intuitive and who's very nurturing and emotionally expressive. We have natural patterns of mate choice. Modern technology is not going to change who we choose to love. But technology is producing one modern trend that I find particularly important. It's associated with the concept of paradox of choice. For millions of years, we lived in little hunting and gathering groups. You didn't have the opportunity to choose between 1,000 people on a dating site. In fact, I've been studying this recently, and I actually think there's some sort of sweet spot in the brain; I don't know what it is, but apparently, from reading a lot of the data, we can embrace about five to nine alternatives, and after that, you get into what academics call "cognitive overload," and you don't choose any. So I've come to think that due to this cognitive overload, we're ushering in a new form of courtship that I call "slow love." I arrived at this during my work with Match.com. Every year for the last six years, we've done a study called "Singles in America." We don't poll the Match population, we poll the American population. We use 5,000-plus people, a representative sample of Americans based on the US census. We've got data now on over 30,000 people, and every single year, I see some of the same patterns. Every single year when I ask the question, over 50 percent of people have had a one-night stand — not necessarily last year, but in their lives — 50 percent have had a friends with benefits during the course of their lives, and over 50 percent have lived with a person long-term before marrying. Americans think that this is reckless. I have doubted that for a long time; the patterns are too strong. There's got to be some Darwinian explanation — Not that many people are crazy. And I stumbled, then, on a statistic that really came home to me. It was a very interesting academic article in which I found that 67 percent of singles in America today who are living long-term with somebody, have not yet married because they are terrified of divorce. They're terrified of the social, legal, emotional, economic consequences of divorce. So I came to realize that I don't think this is recklessness; I think it's caution. Today's singles want to know every single thing about a partner before they wed. You learn a lot between the sheets, not only about how somebody makes love, but whether they're kind, whether they can listen and at my age, whether they've got a sense of humor. (Laughter) And in an age where we have too many choices, we have very little fear of pregnancy and disease and we've got no feeling of shame for sex before marriage, I think people are taking their time to love. And actually, what's happening is, what we're seeing is a real expansion of the precommitment stage before you tie the knot. Where marriage used to be the beginning of a relationship, now it's the finale. But the human brain — (Laughter) The human brain always triumphs, and indeed, in the United States today, 86 percent of Americans will marry by age 49. And even in cultures around the world where they're not marrying as often, they are settling down eventually with a long-term partner. So it began to occur to me: during this long extension of the precommitment stage, if you can get rid of bad relationships before you marry, maybe we're going to see more happy marriages. So I did a study of 1,100 married people in America — not on Match.com, of course — and I asked them a lot of questions. But one of the questions was, "Would you re-marry the person you're currently married to?" And 81 percent said, "Yes." In fact, the greatest change in modern romance and family life is not technology. It's not even slow love. It's actually women piling into the job market in cultures around the world. For millions of years, our ancestors lived in little hunting and gathering groups. Women commuted to work to gather their fruits and vegetables. They came home with 60 to 80 percent of the evening meal. The double-income family was the rule. And women were regarded as just as economically, socially and sexually powerful as men. Then the environment changed some 10,000 years ago, we began to settle down on the farm and both men and women became obliged, really, to marry the right person, from the right background, from the right religion and from the right kin and social and political connections. Men's jobs became more important: they had to move the rocks, fell the trees, plow the land. They brought the produce to local markets, and came home with the equivalent of money. Along with this, we see a rise of a host of beliefs: the belief of virginity at marriage, arranged marriages — strictly arranged marriages — the belief that the man is the head of the household, that the wife's place is in the home and most important, honor thy husband, and 'til death do us part. These are gone. They are going, and in many places, they are gone. We are right now in a marriage revolution. We are shedding 10,000 years of our farming tradition and moving forward towards egalitarian relationships between the sexes — something I regard as highly compatible with the ancient human spirit. I'm not a Pollyanna; there's a great deal to cry about. I've studied divorce in 80 cultures, I've studied, as I say, adultery in many — there's a whole pile of problems. As William Butler Yeats, the poet, once said, "Love is the crooked thing." I would add, "Nobody gets out alive." (Laughter) We all have problems. But in fact, I think the poet Randall Jarrell really sums it up best. He said, "The dark, uneasy world of family life — where the greatest can fail, and the humblest succeed." But I will leave you with this: love and attachment will prevail, technology cannot change it. And I will conclude by saying any understanding of human relationships must take into account one the most powerful determinants of human behavior: the unquenchable, adaptable and primordial human drive to love. Thank you. (Applause) Kelly Stoetzel: Thank you so much for that, Helen. As you know, there's another speaker here with us that works in your same field. She comes at it from a different perspective. Esther Perel is a psychotherapist who works with couples. You study data, Esther studies the stories the couples tell her when they come to her for help. Let's have her join us on the stage. Esther? (Applause) So Esther, when you were watching Helen's talk, was there any part of it that resonated with you through the lens of your own work that you'd like to comment on? Esther Perel: It's interesting, because on the one hand, the need for love is ubiquitous and universal. But the way we love — the meaning we make out of it — the rules that govern our relationships, I think, are changing fundamentally. We come from a model that, until now, was primarily regulated around duty and obligation, the needs of the collective and loyalty. And we have shifted it to a model of free choice and individual rights, and self-fulfillment and happiness. And so, that was the first thing I thought, that the need doesn't change, but the context and the way we regulate these relationships changes a lot. On the paradox of choice — you know, on the one hand we relish the novelty and the playfulness, I think, to be able to have so many options. And at the same time, as you talk about this cognitive overload, I see many, many people who ... who dread the uncertainty and self-doubt that comes with this massa of choice, creating a case of "FOMO" and then leading us — FOMO, fear of missed opportunity, or fear of missing out — it's like, "How do I know I have found 'the one' — the right one?" So we've created what I call this thing of "stable ambiguity." Stable ambiguity is when you are too afraid to be alone but also not really willing to engage in intimacy-building. It's a set of tactics that kind of prolong the uncertainty of a relationship but also the uncertainty of the breakup. So, here on the internet you have three major ones. One is icing and simmering, which are great stalling tactics that offer a kind of holding pattern that emphasizes the undefined nature of a relationship but at the same time gives you enough of a comforting consistency and enough freedom of the undefined boundaries. (Laughter) Yeah? And then comes ghosting. And ghosting is, basically, you disappear from this massa of texts on the spot, and you don't have to deal with the pain that you inflict on another, because you're making it invisible even to yourself. (Laughter) Yeah? So I was thinking — these words came up for me as I was listening to you, like how a vocabulary also creates a reality, and at the same time, that's my question to you: Do you think when the context changes, it still means that the nature of love remains the same? You study the brain and I study people's relationships and stories, so I think it's everything you say, plus. But I don't always know the degree to which a changing context ... Does it at some point begin to change — If the meaning changes, does it change the need, or is the need clear of the entire context? HF: Wow! Well — (Laughter) (Applause) Well, I've got three points here, right? First of all, to your first one: there's no question that we've changed, that we now want a person to love, and for thousands of years, we had to marry the right person from the right background and right kin connection. And in fact, in my studies of 5,000 people every year, I ask them, "What are you looking for?" And every single year, over 97 percent say — EP: The list grows — HF: Well, no. The basic thing is over 97 percent of people want somebody that respects them, somebody they can trust and confide in, somebody who makes them laugh, somebody who makes enough time for them and somebody who they find physically attractive. That never changes. And there's certainly — you know, there's two parts — EP: But you know how I call that? That's not what people used to say — HF: That's exactly right. EP: They said they wanted somebody with whom they have companionship, economic support, children. We went from a production economy to a service economy. (Laughter) We did it in the larger culture, and we're doing it in marriage. HF: Right, no question about it. But it's interesting, the millennials actually want to be very good parents, whereas the generation above them wants to have a very fine marriage but is not as focused on being a good parent. You see all of these nuances. There's two basic parts of personality: there's your culture — everything you grew up to do and believe and say — and there's your temperament. Basically, what I've been talking about is your temperament. And that temperament is certainly going to change with changing times and changing beliefs. And in terms of the paradox of choice, there's no question about it that this is a pickle. There were millions of years where you found that sweet boy at the other side of the water hole, and you went for it. EP: Yes, but you — HF: I do want to say one more thing. The bottom line is, in hunting and gathering societies, they tended to have two or three partners during the course of their lives. They weren't square! And I'm not suggesting that we do, but the bottom line is, we've always had alternatives. Mankind is always — in fact, the brain is well-built to what we call "equilibrate," to try and decide: Do I come, do I stay? Do I go, do I stay? What are the opportunities here? How do I handle this there? And so I think we're seeing another play-out of that now. KS: Well, thank you both so much. I think you're going to have a million dinner partners for tonight! (Applause) Thank you, thank you. |
What you need to know about CRISPR | {0: 'Ellen Jorgensen is at the leading edge of the do-it-yourself biotechnology movement, bringing scientific exploration and understanding to the public.'} | TEDSummit | So, has everybody heard of CRISPR? I would be shocked if you hadn't. This is a technology — it's for genome editing — and it's so versatile and so controversial that it's sparking all sorts of really interesting conversations. Should we bring back the woolly mammoth? Should we edit a human embryo? And my personal favorite: How can we justify wiping out an entire species that we consider harmful to humans off the face of the Earth, using this technology? This type of science is moving much faster than the regulatory mechanisms that govern it. And so, for the past six years, I've made it my personal mission to make sure that as many people as possible understand these types of technologies and their implications. Now, CRISPR has been the subject of a huge media hype, and the words that are used most often are "easy" and "cheap." So what I want to do is drill down a little bit deeper and look into some of the myths and the realities around CRISPR. If you're trying to CRISPR a genome, the first thing that you have to do is damage the DNA. The damage comes in the form of a double-strand break through the double helix. And then the cellular repair processes kick in, and then we convince those repair processes to make the edit that we want, and not a natural edit. That's how it works. It's a two-part system. You've got a Cas9 protein and something called a guide RNA. I like to think of it as a guided missile. So the Cas9 — I love to anthropomorphize — so the Cas9 is kind of this Pac-Man thing that wants to chew DNA, and the guide RNA is the leash that's keeping it out of the genome until it finds the exact spot where it matches. And the combination of those two is called CRISPR. It's a system that we stole from an ancient, ancient bacterial immune system. The part that's amazing about it is that the guide RNA, only 20 letters of it, are what target the system. This is really easy to design, and it's really cheap to buy. So that's the part that is modular in the system; everything else stays the same. This makes it a remarkably easy and powerful system to use. The guide RNA and the Cas9 protein complex together go bouncing along the genome, and when they find a spot where the guide RNA matches, then it inserts between the two strands of the double helix, it rips them apart, that triggers the Cas9 protein to cut, and all of a sudden, you've got a cell that's in total panic because now it's got a piece of DNA that's broken. What does it do? It calls its first responders. There are two major repair pathways. The first just takes the DNA and shoves the two pieces back together. This isn't a very efficient system, because what happens is sometimes a base drops out or a base is added. It's an OK way to maybe, like, knock out a gene, but it's not the way that we really want to do genome editing. The second repair pathway is a lot more interesting. In this repair pathway, it takes a homologous piece of DNA. And now mind you, in a diploid organism like people, we've got one copy of our genome from our mom and one from our dad, so if one gets damaged, it can use the other chromosome to repair it. So that's where this comes from. The repair is made, and now the genome is safe again. The way that we can hijack this is we can feed it a false piece of DNA, a piece that has homology on both ends but is different in the middle. So now, you can put whatever you want in the center and the cell gets fooled. So you can change a letter, you can take letters out, but most importantly, you can stuff new DNA in, kind of like a Trojan horse. CRISPR is going to be amazing, in terms of the number of different scientific advances that it's going to catalyze. The thing that's special about it is this modular targeting system. I mean, we've been shoving DNA into organisms for years, right? But because of the modular targeting system, we can actually put it exactly where we want it. The thing is that there's a lot of talk about it being cheap and it being easy. And I run a community lab. I'm starting to get emails from people that say stuff like, "Hey, can I come to your open night and, like, maybe use CRISPR and engineer my genome?" (Laugher) Like, seriously. I'm, "No, you can't." (Laughter) "But I've heard it's cheap. I've heard it's easy." We're going to explore that a little bit. So, how cheap is it? Yeah, it is cheap in comparison. It's going to take the cost of the average materials for an experiment from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars, and it cuts the time a lot, too. It can cut it from weeks to days. That's great. You still need a professional lab to do the work in; you're not going to do anything meaningful outside of a professional lab. I mean, don't listen to anyone who says you can do this sort of stuff on your kitchen table. It's really not easy to do this kind of work. Not to mention, there's a patent battle going on, so even if you do invent something, the Broad Institute and UC Berkeley are in this incredible patent battle. It's really fascinating to watch it happen, because they're accusing each other of fraudulent claims and then they've got people saying, "Oh, well, I signed my notebook here or there." This isn't going to be settled for years. And when it is, you can bet you're going to pay someone a really hefty licensing fee in order to use this stuff. So, is it really cheap? Well, it's cheap if you're doing basic research and you've got a lab. How about easy? Let's look at that claim. The devil is always in the details. We don't really know that much about cells. They're still kind of black boxes. For example, we don't know why some guide RNAs work really well and some guide RNAs don't. We don't know why some cells want to do one repair pathway and some cells would rather do the other. And besides that, there's the whole problem of getting the system into the cell in the first place. In a petri dish, that's not that hard, but if you're trying to do it on a whole organism, it gets really tricky. It's OK if you use something like blood or bone marrow — those are the targets of a lot of research now. There was a great story of some little girl who they saved from leukemia by taking the blood out, editing it, and putting it back with a precursor of CRISPR. And this is a line of research that people are going to do. But right now, if you want to get into the whole body, you're probably going to have to use a virus. So you take the virus, you put the CRISPR into it, you let the virus infect the cell. But now you've got this virus in there, and we don't know what the long-term effects of that are. Plus, CRISPR has some off-target effects, a very small percentage, but they're still there. What's going to happen over time with that? These are not trivial questions, and there are scientists that are trying to solve them, and they will eventually, hopefully, be solved. But it ain't plug-and-play, not by a long shot. So: Is it really easy? Well, if you spend a few years working it out in your particular system, yes, it is. Now the other thing is, we don't really know that much about how to make a particular thing happen by changing particular spots in the genome. We're a long way away from figuring out how to give a pig wings, for example. Or even an extra leg — I'd settle for an extra leg. That would be kind of cool, right? But what is happening is that CRISPR is being used by thousands and thousands of scientists to do really, really important work, like making better models of diseases in animals, for example, or for taking pathways that produce valuable chemicals and getting them into industrial production in fermentation vats, or even doing really basic research on what genes do. This is the story of CRISPR we should be telling, and I don't like it that the flashier aspects of it are drowning all of this out. Lots of scientists did a lot of work to make CRISPR happen, and what's interesting to me is that these scientists are being supported by our society. Think about it. We've got an infrastructure that allows a certain percentage of people to spend all their time doing research. That makes us all the inventors of CRISPR, and I would say that makes us all the shepherds of CRISPR. We all have a responsibility. So I would urge you to really learn about these types of technologies, because, really, only in that way are we going to be able to guide the development of these technologies, the use of these technologies and make sure that, in the end, it's a positive outcome — for both the planet and for us. Thanks. (Applause) |
Immigrant voices make democracy stronger | {0: 'Sayu Bhojwani recruits and supports first and second generation Americans to run for public office. '} | TEDNYC | Good evening. My journey to this stage began when I came to America at the age of 17. You see, I'm one of the 84 million Americans who are immigrants or children of immigrants. Each of us has a dream when we come here, a dream that usually has to be rewritten and always has to be repurposed. I was one of the lucky ones. My revised dream led me to the work I do today: training immigrants to run for public office and leading a movement for inclusive democracy. But I don't want you to think it was a cakewalk, that America opened its arms wide and welcomed me. It's still not doing that. And I've learned a few lessons along the way that I wanted to share with you, because I think that together we can make American democracy better and stronger. I was born in India, the world's largest democracy, and when I was four, my family moved to Belize, the world's smallest democracy perhaps. And at the age of 17, I moved to the United States, the world's greatest democracy. I came because I wanted to study English literature. You see, as a child, I buried my nose in books, and I thought, why not make a living doing that as an adult? But after I graduated from college and got a graduate degree, I found myself moving from one less ideal job to another. Maybe it was the optimism that I had about America that made me take a while to understand that things were not going to change. The door that I thought was open was actually just slightly ajar — this door of America that would open wide if you had the right name, the right skin color, the right networks, but could just slam in your face if you had the wrong religion, the wrong immigration status, the wrong skin color. And I just couldn't accept that. So I started a career as a social entrepreneur, starting an organization for young people like myself — I was young at the time that I started it — who traced their heritage to the Indian subcontinent. In that work, I became and advocate for South Asians and other immigrants. I lobbied members of Congress on policy issues. I volunteered on election day to do exit polling. But I couldn't vote, and I couldn't run for office. So in 2000, when it was announced that the citizenship application fee was going to more than double from 95 dollars to 225 dollars, I decided it was time to apply before I could no longer afford it. I filled out a long application, answering questions about my current and my past affiliations. And once the application was submitted, there were fingerprints to be taken, a test to study for, endless hours of waiting in line. You might call it extreme vetting. And then in December of 2000, I joined hundreds of other immigrants in a hall in Brooklyn where we pledged our loyalty to a country that we had long considered home. My journey from international student to American citizen took 16 years, a short timeline when you compare it to other immigrant stories. And soon after I had taken that formal step to becoming an American, the attacks of September 11, 2001, changed the immigration landscape for decades to come. My city, New York City, was reeling and healing, and in the midst of it, we were in an election cycle. Two things happened as we coped with loss and recovery in New York City. Voters elected Michael Bloomberg mayor of New York City. We also adopted by ballot referendum the Office of Immigrant Affairs for the City of New York. Five months after that election, the newly elected mayor appointed me the first Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs for this newly established office. I want you to come back to that time. I was a young immigrant woman from Belize. I had basically floundered in various jobs in America before I started a community-based organization in a church basement in Queens. The attacks of September 11 sent shock waves through my community. People who were members of my family, young people I had worked with, were experiencing harassment at schools, at workplaces and in airports. And now I was going to represent their concerns in government. No job felt more perfect for me. And here are two things I learned when I became Commissioner. First, well-meaning New Yorkers who were in city government holding government positions had no idea how scared immigrants were of law enforcement. Most of us don't really know the difference, do we, between a sheriff and local police and the FBI. And most of us, when we see someone in uniform going through our neighborhoods feel curiosity, if not concern. So if you're an undocumented parent, every day when you say goodbye to your child, send them off to school and go to work, you don't know what the chances are that you're going to see them at the end of the day. Because a raid at your workplace, a chance encounter with local police could change the course of your life forever. The second thing I learned is that when people like me, who understood that fear, who had learned a new language, who had navigated new systems, when people like us were sitting at the table, we advocated for our communities' needs in a way that no one else could or would. I understood what that feeling of fear was like. People in my family were experiencing it. Young people I had worked with were being harassed, not just by classmates, but also by their teachers. My husband, then boyfriend, thought twice before he put a backpack on or grew a beard because he traveled so much. What I learned in 2001 was that my vote mattered but that my voice and vantage point also mattered. And it's these three things — immigrants' votes, voices and vantage points — that I think can help make our democracy stronger. We actually have the power to change the outcome of elections, to introduce new issues into the policy debate and to change the face of the pale, male, stale leadership that we have in our country today. So how do we do that? Well, let's talk first about votes. It will come as no surprise to you that the majority of voters in America are white. But it might surprise you to know that one in three voters are black, Latino or Asian. But here's the thing: it doesn't just matter who can vote, it matters who does vote. So in 2012, half of the Latino and Asian-American voters did not vote. And these votes matter not just in presidential elections. They matter in local and state elections. In 2015, Lan Diep, the eldest son of political refugees from Vietnam, ran for a seat in the San Jose City Council. He lost that election by 13 votes. This year, he dusted off those campaign shoes and went back to run for that seat, and this time he won, by 12 votes. Every one of our votes matters. And when people like Lan are sitting at the policy table, they can make a difference. We need those voices. We need those voices in part because American leadership does not look like America's residents. There are over 500,000 local and state offices in America. Fewer than 2 percent of those offices are held by Asian-Americans or Latinos, the two largest immigrant groups in our country. In the city of Yakima, Washington, where 49 percent of the population is Latino, there has never been a Latino on the city council until this year. Three newly elected Latinas joined the Yakima City Council in 2016. One of them is Carmen Méndez. She is a first-generation college student. She grew up partly in Colima, Mexico, and partly in Yakima, Washington. She's a single mother, a community advocate. Her voice on the Yakima City Council is advocating on behalf of the Latino community and of all Yakima residents. And she's a role model for her daughter and other Latinas. But the third most untapped resource in American democracy is the vantage point that immigrants bring. We have fought to be here. We have come for economic and educational opportunity. We have come for political and religious freedom. We have come in the pursuit of love. That dedication, that commitment to America we also bring to public service. People like Athena Salman, who just last week won the primary for a seat in the Arizona State House. Athena's father grew up in the West Bank and moved to Chicago, where he met her mother. Her mother is part Italian, part Mexican and part German. Together they moved to Arizona and built a life. Athena, when she gets to the statehouse, is going to fight for things like education funding that will help give families like hers a leg up so they can achieve the financial stability that we all are looking for. Immigrants' votes, voices and vantage points are what we all need to work to include in American democracy. It's not just my work. It's also yours. And it's not going to be easy. We never know what putting a new factor into an equation will do. And it's a little scary. You're scared that I'm going to take away your place at the table, and I'm scared that I'm never going to get a place at the table. And we're all scared that we're going to lose this country that we know and love. I'm scared you're going to take it away from me, and you're scared I'm going to take it away from you. Look, it's been a rough election year, a reminder that people with my immigration history could be removed at the whim of a leader. But I have fought to be in this country and I continue to do so every day. So my optimism never wavers, because I know that there are millions of immigrants just like me, in front of me, behind me and all around me. It's our country, too. Thank you. (Applause) |
We can start winning the war against cancer | {0: 'Adam de la Zerda develops new medical imaging technologies to detect and destroy cancer.'} | TEDxStanford | "We're declaring war against cancer, and we will win this war by 2015." This is what the US Congress and the National Cancer Institute declared just a few years ago, in 2003. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't buy that. I don't think we quite won this war yet, and I don't think anyone here will question that. Now, I will argue that a primary reason why we're not winning this war against cancer is because we're fighting blindly. I'm going to start by sharing with you a story about a good friend of mine. His name is Ehud, and a few years ago, Ehud was diagnosed with brain cancer. And not just any type of brain cancer: he was diagnosed with one of the most deadly forms of brain cancer. In fact, it was so deadly that the doctors told him that they only have 12 months, and during those 12 months, they have to find a treatment. They have to find a cure, and if they cannot find a cure, he will die. Now, the good news, they said, is that there are tons of different treatments to choose from, but the bad news is that in order for them to tell if a treatment is even working or not, well, that takes them about three months or so. So they cannot try that many things. Well, Ehud is now going into his first treatment, and during that first treatment, just a few days into that treatment, I'm meeting with him, and he tells me, "Adam, I think this is working. I think we really lucked out here. Something is happening." And I ask him, "Really? How do you know that, Ehud?" And he says, "Well, I feel so terrible inside. Something's gotta be working up there. It just has to." Well, unfortunately, three months later, we got the news, it didn't work. And so Ehud goes into his second treatment. And again, the same story. "It feels so bad, something's gotta be working there." And then three months later, again we get bad news. Ehud is going into his third treatment, and then his fourth treatment. And then, as predicted, Ehud dies. Now, when someone really close to you is going through such a huge struggle, you get really swamped with emotions. A lot of things are going through your head. For me, it was mostly outrage. I was just outraged that, how come this is the best that we can offer? And I started looking more and more into this. As it turns out, this is not just the best that doctors could offer Ehud. It's not just the best doctors could offer patients with brain cancer generally. We're actually not doing that well all across the board with cancer. I picked up one of those statistics, and I'm sure some of you have seen those statistics before. This is going to show you here how many patients actually died of cancer, in this case females in the United States, ever since the 1930s. You'll notice that there aren't that many things that have changed. It's still a huge issue. You'll see a few changes, though. You'll see lung cancer, for example, on the rise. Thank you, cigarettes. And you'll also see that, for example, stomach cancer once used to be one of the biggest killers of all cancers, is essentially eliminated. Now, why is that? Anyone knows, by the way? Why is it that humanity is no longer struck by stomach cancer? What was the huge, huge medical technology breakthrough that came to our world that saved humanity from stomach cancer? Was it maybe a new drug, or a better diagnostic? You guys are right, yeah. It's the invention of the refrigerator, and the fact that we're no longer eating spoiled meats. So the best thing that happened to us so far in the medical arena in cancer research is the fact that the refrigerator was invented. (Laughter) And so — yeah, I know. We're not doing so well here. I don't want to miniaturize the progress and everything that's been done in cancer research. Look, there is like 50-plus years of good cancer research that discovered major, major things that taught us about cancer. But all that said, we have a lot of heavy lifting to still do ahead of us. Again, I will argue that the primary reason why this is the case, why we have not done that remarkably well, is really we're fighting blindly here. And this is where medical imaging comes in. This is where my own work comes in. And so to give you a sense of the best medical imaging that's offered today to brain cancer patients, or actually generally to all cancer patients, take a look at this PET scan right here. Let's see. There we go. So this is a PET/CT scan, and what you'll see in this PET/CT scan is the CT scan will show you where the bones are, and the PET scan will show you where tumors are. Now, what you can see here is essentially a sugar molecule that was added a small little tag that is signaling to us outside of the body, "Hey, I'm here." And those sugar molecules are injected into these patients by the billions, and they're going all over the body looking for cells that are hungry for sugar. You'll see that the heart, for example, lights up there. That's because the heart needs a lot of sugar. You'll also see that the bladder lights up there. That's because the bladder is the thing that's clearing the sugar away from our body. And then you'll see a few other hot spots, and these are in fact the tumors. Now, this is a really a wonderful technology. For the first time it allowed us to look into someone's body without picking up each and every one of the cells and putting them under the microscope, but in a noninvasive way allowing us to look into someone's body and ask, "Hey, has the cancer metastasized? Where is it?" And the PET scans here are showing you very clearly where are these hot spots, where is the tumor. So as miraculous as this might seem, unfortunately, well, it's not that great. You see, those small little hot spots there. Can anyone guess how many cancer cells are in any one of these tumors? So it's about 100 million cancer cells, and let me make sure that this number sunk in. In each and every one of these small little blips that you're seeing on the image, there needs to be at least 100 million cancer cells in order for it to be detected. Now, if that seemed to you like a very large number, it is a very large number. This is in fact an incredibly large number, because what we really need in order to pick up something early enough to do something about it, to do something meaningful about it, well, we need to pick up tumors that are a thousand cells in size, and ideally just a handful of cells in size. So we're clearly pretty far away from this. So we're going to play a little experiment here. I'm going to ask each of you to now play and imagine that you are brain surgeons. And you guys are now at an operating room, and there's a patient in front of you, and your task is to make sure that the tumor is out. So you're looking down at the patient, the skin and the skull have already been removed, so you're looking at the brain. And all you know about this patient is that there's a tumor about the size of a golf ball or so in the right frontal lobe of this person's brain. And that's more or less it. So you're looking down, and unfortunately everything looks the same, because brain cancer tissue and healthy brain tissue really just look the same. And so you're going in with your thumb, and you start to press a little bit on the brain, because tumors tend to be a little harder, stiffer, and so you go in and go a little bit like this and say, "It seems like the tumor is right there." Then you take out your knife and start cutting the tumor piece by piece by piece. And as you're taking the tumor out, then you're getting to a stage where you think, "Alright, I'm done. I took out everything." And at this stage, if that's — so far everything sounded, like, pretty crazy — you're now about to face the most challenging decision of your life here. Because now you need to decide, should I stop here and let this patient go, risking that there might be some leftover cancer cells behind that I just couldn't see, or should I take away some extra margins, typically about an inch or so around the tumor just to be sure that I removed everything? So this is not a simple decision to make, and unfortunately this is the decision that brain cancer surgeons have to take every single day as they're seeing their patients. And so I remember talking to a few friends of mine in the lab, and we say, "Boy, there's got to be a better way." But not just like you tell a friend that there's got to be a better way. There's just got to be a better way here. This is just incredible. And so we looked back. Remember those PET scans I told you about, the sugar and so on. We said, hey, how about instead of using sugar molecules, let's maybe take tiny, tiny little particles made of gold, and let's program them with some interesting chemistry around them. Let's program them to look for cancer cells. And then we will inject these gold particles into these patients by the billions again, and we'll have them go all over the body, and just like secret agents, if you will, go and walk by every single cell in our body and knock on the door of that cell, and ask, "Are you a cancer cell or are you a healthy cell? If you're a healthy cell, we're moving on. If you're a cancer cell, we're sticking in and shining out and telling us, "Hey, look at me, I'm here." And they'll do it through some interesting cameras that we developed in the lab. And once we see that, maybe we can guide brain cancer surgeons towards taking only the tumor and leaving the healthy brain alone. And so we've tested that, and boy, this works well. So I'm going to show you an example now. What you're looking at here is an image of a mouse's brain, and we've implanted into this mouse's brain a small little tumor. And so this tumor is now growing in this mouse's brain, and then we've taken a doctor and asked the doctor to please operate on the mouse as if that was a patient, and take out piece by piece out of the tumor. And while he's doing that, we're going to take images to see where the gold particles are. And so we're going to first start by injecting these gold particles into this mouse, and we're going to see right here at the very left there that image at the bottom is the image that shows where the gold particles are. The nice thing is that these gold particles actually made it all the way to the tumor, and then they shine out and tell us, "Hey, we're here. Here's the tumor." So now we can see the tumor, but we're not showing this to the doctor yet. We're asking the doctor, now please start cutting away the tumor, and you'll see here the doctor just took the first quadrant of the tumor and you see that first quadrant is now missing. The doctor then took the second quadrant, the third, and now it appears to be everything. And so at this stage, the doctor came back to us and said, "Alright, I'm done. What do you want me to do? Should I keep things as they are or do you want me to take some extra margins around?" And then we said, "Well, hang on." We told the doctor, "You've missed those two spots, so rather than taking huge margins around, only take out those tiny little areas. Take them out, and then let's take a look." And so the doctor took them away, and lo and behold, the cancer is now completely gone. Now, the important thing is that it's not just that the cancer is completely gone from this person's brain, or from this mouse's brain. The most important thing is that we did not have to take huge amounts of healthy brain in the process. And so now we can actually imagine a world where doctors and surgeons, as they take away a tumor, they actually know what to take out, and they no longer have to guess with their thumb. Now, here's why it's extremely important to take those tiny little leftover tumors. Those leftover tumors, even if it's just a handful of cells, they will grow to recur the tumor, for the tumor to come back. In fact, the reason why 80 to 90 percent of those brain cancer surgeries ultimately fail is because of those small little extra margins that were left positive, those small little leftover tumors that were left there. So this is clearly very nice, but what I really want to share with you is where I think we're heading from here. And so in my lab at Stanford, my students and I are asking, what should we be working on now? And I think where medical imaging is heading to is the ability to look into the human body and actually see each and every one of these cells separately. The ability like this would allow us to actually pick up tumors way, way earlier in the process, way before it's 100 million cells inside, so we can actually do something about it. An ability to see each and every one of the cells might also allow us to ask insightful questions. So in the lab, we are now getting to a point where we can actually start asking these cancer cells real questions, like, for example, are you responding to the treatment we are giving you or not? So if you're not responding, we'll know to stop the treatment right away, days into the treatment, not three months. And so also for patients like Ehud that are going through these nasty, nasty chemotherapy drugs, for them not to suffer through those horrendous side effects of the drugs when the drugs are in fact not even helping them. So to be frank here, we're pretty far away from winning the war against cancer, just to be realistic. But at least I am hopeful that we should be able to fight this war with better medical imaging techniques in the way that is not blind. Thank you. (Applause) |
What reality are you creating for yourself? | {0: 'Isaac Lidsky has a very eclectic resume. '} | TEDSummit | When Dorothy was a little girl, she was fascinated by her goldfish. Her father explained to her that fish swim by quickly wagging their tails to propel themselves through the water. Without hesitation, little Dorothy responded, "Yes, Daddy, and fish swim backwards by wagging their heads." (Laughter) In her mind, it was a fact as true as any other. Fish swim backwards by wagging their heads. She believed it. Our lives are full of fish swimming backwards. We make assumptions and faulty leaps of logic. We harbor bias. We know that we are right, and they are wrong. We fear the worst. We strive for unattainable perfection. We tell ourselves what we can and cannot do. In our minds, fish swim by in reverse frantically wagging their heads and we don't even notice them. I'm going to tell you five facts about myself. One fact is not true. One: I graduated from Harvard at 19 with an honors degree in mathematics. Two: I currently run a construction company in Orlando. Three: I starred on a television sitcom. Four: I lost my sight to a rare genetic eye disease. Five: I served as a law clerk to two US Supreme Court justices. Which fact is not true? Actually, they're all true. Yeah. They're all true. (Applause) At this point, most people really only care about the television show. (Laughter) I know this from experience. OK, so the show was NBC's "Saved by the Bell: The New Class." And I played Weasel Wyzell, who was the sort of dorky, nerdy character on the show, which made it a very major acting challenge for me as a 13-year-old boy. (Laughter) Now, did you struggle with number four, my blindness? Why is that? We make assumptions about so-called disabilities. As a blind man, I confront others' incorrect assumptions about my abilities every day. My point today is not about my blindness, however. It's about my vision. Going blind taught me to live my life eyes wide open. It taught me to spot those backwards-swimming fish that our minds create. Going blind cast them into focus. What does it feel like to see? It's immediate and passive. You open your eyes and there's the world. Seeing is believing. Sight is truth. Right? Well, that's what I thought. Then, from age 12 to 25, my retinas progressively deteriorated. My sight became an increasingly bizarre carnival funhouse hall of mirrors and illusions. The salesperson I was relieved to spot in a store was really a mannequin. Reaching down to wash my hands, I suddenly saw it was a urinal I was touching, not a sink, when my fingers felt its true shape. A friend described the photograph in my hand, and only then I could see the image depicted. Objects appeared, morphed and disappeared in my reality. It was difficult and exhausting to see. I pieced together fragmented, transitory images, consciously analyzed the clues, searched for some logic in my crumbling kaleidoscope, until I saw nothing at all. I learned that what we see is not universal truth. It is not objective reality. What we see is a unique, personal, virtual reality that is masterfully constructed by our brain. Let me explain with a bit of amateur neuroscience. Your visual cortex takes up about 30 percent of your brain. That's compared to approximately eight percent for touch and two to three percent for hearing. Every second, your eyes can send your visual cortex as many as two billion pieces of information. The rest of your body can send your brain only an additional billion. So sight is one third of your brain by volume and can claim about two thirds of your brain's processing resources. It's no surprise then that the illusion of sight is so compelling. But make no mistake about it: sight is an illusion. Here's where it gets interesting. To create the experience of sight, your brain references your conceptual understanding of the world, other knowledge, your memories, opinions, emotions, mental attention. All of these things and far more are linked in your brain to your sight. These linkages work both ways, and usually occur subconsciously. So for example, what you see impacts how you feel, and the way you feel can literally change what you see. Numerous studies demonstrate this. If you are asked to estimate the walking speed of a man in a video, for example, your answer will be different if you're told to think about cheetahs or turtles. A hill appears steeper if you've just exercised, and a landmark appears farther away if you're wearing a heavy backpack. We have arrived at a fundamental contradiction. What you see is a complex mental construction of your own making, but you experience it passively as a direct representation of the world around you. You create your own reality, and you believe it. I believed mine until it broke apart. The deterioration of my eyes shattered the illusion. You see, sight is just one way we shape our reality. We create our own realities in many other ways. Let's take fear as just one example. Your fears distort your reality. Under the warped logic of fear, anything is better than the uncertain. Fear fills the void at all costs, passing off what you dread for what you know, offering up the worst in place of the ambiguous, substituting assumption for reason. Psychologists have a great term for it: awfulizing. (Laughter) Right? Fear replaces the unknown with the awful. Now, fear is self-realizing. When you face the greatest need to look outside yourself and think critically, fear beats a retreat deep inside your mind, shrinking and distorting your view, drowning your capacity for critical thought with a flood of disruptive emotions. When you face a compelling opportunity to take action, fear lulls you into inaction, enticing you to passively watch its prophecies fulfill themselves. When I was diagnosed with my blinding disease, I knew blindness would ruin my life. Blindness was a death sentence for my independence. It was the end of achievement for me. Blindness meant I would live an unremarkable life, small and sad, and likely alone. I knew it. This was a fiction born of my fears, but I believed it. It was a lie, but it was my reality, just like those backwards-swimming fish in little Dorothy's mind. If I had not confronted the reality of my fear, I would have lived it. I am certain of that. So how do you live your life eyes wide open? It is a learned discipline. It can be taught. It can be practiced. I will summarize very briefly. Hold yourself accountable for every moment, every thought, every detail. See beyond your fears. Recognize your assumptions. Harness your internal strength. Silence your internal critic. Correct your misconceptions about luck and about success. Accept your strengths and your weaknesses, and understand the difference. Open your hearts to your bountiful blessings. Your fears, your critics, your heroes, your villains — they are your excuses, rationalizations, shortcuts, justifications, your surrender. They are fictions you perceive as reality. Choose to see through them. Choose to let them go. You are the creator of your reality. With that empowerment comes complete responsibility. I chose to step out of fear's tunnel into terrain uncharted and undefined. I chose to build there a blessed life. Far from alone, I share my beautiful life with Dorothy, my beautiful wife, with our triplets, whom we call the Tripskys, and with the latest addition to the family, sweet baby Clementine. What do you fear? What lies do you tell yourself? How do you embellish your truth and write your own fictions? What reality are you creating for yourself? In your career and personal life, in your relationships, and in your heart and soul, your backwards-swimming fish do you great harm. They exact a toll in missed opportunities and unrealized potential, and they engender insecurity and distrust where you seek fulfillment and connection. I urge you to search them out. Helen Keller said that the only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision. For me, going blind was a profound blessing, because blindness gave me vision. I hope you can see what I see. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Isaac, before you leave the stage, just a question. This is an audience of entrepreneurs, of doers, of innovators. You are a CEO of a company down in Florida, and many are probably wondering, how is it to be a blind CEO? What kind of specific challenges do you have, and how do you overcome them? Isaac Lidsky: Well, the biggest challenge became a blessing. I don't get visual feedback from people. (Laughter) BG: What's that noise there? IL: Yeah. So, for example, in my leadership team meetings, I don't see facial expressions or gestures. I've learned to solicit a lot more verbal feedback. I basically force people to tell me what they think. And in this respect, it's become, like I said, a real blessing for me personally and for my company, because we communicate at a far deeper level, we avoid ambiguities, and most important, my team knows that what they think truly matters. BG: Isaac, thank you for coming to TED. IL: Thank you, Bruno. (Applause) |
Ideas worth dating | {0: 'Rainn Wilson is an actor, writer and co-creator of media and production company SoulPancake.'} | TED Studio | (Music) Rainn Wilson: It takes its toll, being alone. I'm a little bit lost, and it's finally time to make a real connection. Who am I? (Drums) I'm a single white male, 45 years of age. I love animals. Gainfully employed. I'm a people person. I keep fit. Who am I looking for? I'm looking for my idea mate. Are you that idea that matches with who I really am? (Video) Ron Finley: How would you feel if you had no access to healthy food? Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do. RW: Wow, we sure are getting our fingers dirty for a first date, huh? RF: Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do. People in these areas — they're exposed to crappy food. I want people to know that growing your own food is like printing your own money. RW: You're like a food superhero! RF: Food is the problem and food is the solution. (Music) Erin McKean: I'm a lexicographer. My job is to put every word possible into the dictionary. RW: I love words, too — just as much as any lexi-ta-tographer. What if you love a word that you've just made up, like — I don't know — "scuberfinkles"? Beau Lotto: Do you think you see reality? RW: Well, I'm a little nearsighted, but yeah. BL: Well, you can't — I mean, your brain has no access to this world. In fact, even the sensory information that your eyes are receiving, your ears are receiving, is completely meaningless because it could mean anything. That tree could be a large object far away or a small object up close, and your brain has no way of knowing. RW: Once I thought I saw Bigfoot but it was just a German shepherd. Isabel Behncke Izquierdo: Bonobos are, together with chimpanzees, your closest living relatives. Bonobos have frequent and promiscuous sex to manage conflict and solve social issues. RW: I'm just curious: Do we have any conflict that needs managing or social issues to resolve? IBI: Remember — you're on a date with my idea, not me. Jane McGonigal: This is the face of someone who, against all odds, is on the verge of an epic win. RW: An epic win? JM: An epic win is an outcome so extraordinarily positive, you didn't even know it was possible until you achieved it. You're not making the face. You're making the "I'm not good at life" face. RW: Arthur, I want to be really honest with you. I am seeing other ideas. OK? I'm dating around. That's the situation. Arthur Benjamin: I'd say this: Mathematics is not just solving for x, it's also figuring out why. RW: Do you want to get some pie? AB: Pi? 3.14159265358979 — Reggie Watts: If we're going to do something, we've got to just make a decision. Because without a decision we're left powerless. Without power, we have nothing to supply the chain of those who are truly curious to solve all of our current conditions. RW: And, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice" — Rush. JM: Yes! This is the face we need to see on millions of problem solvers worldwide, as we try to tackle the challenges of the next century. RW: So, are we going Dutch? AB: 3846264338327950 28841... 971? RW: One night, want to go to a movie or something? RF: Hell, no! Let's go plant some shit! RW: Let's plant some shit! Good, now what is this that I'm planting? Bonobos! IBI: Bonobos! (Laughs) Bonobos. RWatts: Um, interested much? RW: I want to have your idea baby. RWatts: Well, you know what they say in Russia. RW: Hm? RWatts: "scuberfinckle." (Bottles clink) |
4 reasons to learn a new language | {0: 'Linguist John McWhorter thinks about language in relation to race, politics and our shared cultural history.'} | TED2016 | The language I'm speaking right now is on its way to becoming the world's universal language, for better or for worse. Let's face it, it's the language of the internet, it's the language of finance, it's the language of air traffic control, of popular music, diplomacy — English is everywhere. Now, Mandarin Chinese is spoken by more people, but more Chinese people are learning English than English speakers are learning Chinese. Last I heard, there are two dozen universities in China right now teaching all in English. English is taking over. And in addition to that, it's been predicted that at the end of the century almost all of the languages that exist now — there are about 6,000 — will no longer be spoken. There will only be some hundreds left. And on top of that, it's at the point where instant translation of live speech is not only possible, but it gets better every year. The reason I'm reciting those things to you is because I can tell that we're getting to the point where a question is going to start being asked, which is: Why should we learn foreign languages — other than if English happens to be foreign to one? Why bother to learn another one when it's getting to the point where almost everybody in the world will be able to communicate in one? I think there are a lot of reasons, but I first want to address the one that you're probably most likely to have heard of, because actually it's more dangerous than you might think. And that is the idea that a language channels your thoughts, that the vocabulary and the grammar of different languages gives everybody a different kind of acid trip, so to speak. That is a marvelously enticing idea, but it's kind of fraught. So it's not that it's untrue completely. So for example, in French and Spanish the word for table is, for some reason, marked as feminine. So, "la table," "la mesa," you just have to deal with it. It has been shown that if you are a speaker of one of those languages and you happen to be asked how you would imagine a table talking, then much more often than could possibly be an accident, a French or a Spanish speaker says that the table would talk with a high and feminine voice. So if you're French or Spanish, to you, a table is kind of a girl, as opposed to if you are an English speaker. It's hard not to love data like that, and many people will tell you that that means that there's a worldview that you have if you speak one of those languages. But you have to watch out, because imagine if somebody put us under the microscope, the us being those of us who speak English natively. What is the worldview from English? So for example, let's take an English speaker. Up on the screen, that is Bono. He speaks English. I presume he has a worldview. Now, that is Donald Trump. In his way, he speaks English as well. (Laughter) And here is Ms. Kardashian, and she is an English speaker, too. So here are three speakers of the English language. What worldview do those three people have in common? What worldview is shaped through the English language that unites them? It's a highly fraught concept. And so gradual consensus is becoming that language can shape thought, but it tends to be in rather darling, obscure psychological flutters. It's not a matter of giving you a different pair of glasses on the world. Now, if that's the case, then why learn languages? If it isn't going to change the way you think, what would the other reasons be? There are some. One of them is that if you want to imbibe a culture, if you want to drink it in, if you want to become part of it, then whether or not the language channels the culture — and that seems doubtful — if you want to imbibe the culture, you have to control to some degree the language that the culture happens to be conducted in. There's no other way. There's an interesting illustration of this. I have to go slightly obscure, but really you should seek it out. There's a movie by the Canadian film director Denys Arcand — read out in English on the page, "Dennis Ar-cand," if you want to look him up. He did a film called "Jesus of Montreal." And many of the characters are vibrant, funny, passionate, interesting French-Canadian, French-speaking women. There's one scene closest to the end, where they have to take a friend to an Anglophone hospital. In the hospital, they have to speak English. Now, they speak English but it's not their native language, they'd rather not speak English. And they speak it more slowly, they have accents, they're not idiomatic. Suddenly these characters that you've fallen in love with become husks of themselves, they're shadows of themselves. To go into a culture and to only ever process people through that kind of skrim curtain is to never truly get the culture. And so to the extent that hundreds of languages will be left, one reason to learn them is because they are tickets to being able to participate in the culture of the people who speak them, just by virtue of the fact that it is their code. So that's one reason. Second reason: it's been shown that if you speak two languages, dementia is less likely to set in, and that you are probably a better multitasker. And these are factors that set in early, and so that ought to give you some sense of when to give junior or juniorette lessons in another language. Bilingualism is healthy. And then, third — languages are just an awful lot of fun. Much more fun than we're often told. So for example, Arabic: "kataba," he wrote, "yaktubu," he writes, she writes. "Uktub," write, in the imperative. What do those things have in common? All those things have in common the consonants sitting in the middle like pillars. They stay still, and the vowels dance around the consonants. Who wouldn't want to roll that around in their mouths? You can get that from Hebrew, you can get that from Ethiopia's main language, Amharic. That's fun. Or languages have different word orders. Learning how to speak with different word order is like driving on the different side of a street if you go to certain country, or the feeling that you get when you put Witch Hazel around your eyes and you feel the tingle. A language can do that to you. So for example, "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back," a book that I'm sure we all often return to, like "Moby Dick." One phrase in it is, "Do you know where I found him? Do you know where he was? He was eating cake in the tub, Yes he was!" Fine. Now, if you learn that in Mandarin Chinese, then you have to master, "You can know, I did where him find? He was tub inside gorging cake, No mistake gorging chewing!" That just feels good. Imagine being able to do that for years and years at a time. Or, have you ever learned any Cambodian? Me either, but if I did, I would get to roll around in my mouth not some baker's dozen of vowels like English has, but a good 30 different vowels scooching and oozing around in the Cambodian mouth like bees in a hive. That is what a language can get you. And more to the point, we live in an era when it's never been easier to teach yourself another language. It used to be that you had to go to a classroom, and there would be some diligent teacher — some genius teacher in there — but that person was only in there at certain times and you had to go then, and then was not most times. You had to go to class. If you didn't have that, you had something called a record. I cut my teeth on those. There was only so much data on a record, or a cassette, or even that antique object known as a CD. Other than that you had books that didn't work, that's just the way it was. Today you can lay down — lie on your living room floor, sipping bourbon, and teach yourself any language that you want to with wonderful sets such as Rosetta Stone. I highly recommend the lesser known Glossika as well. You can do it any time, therefore you can do it more and better. You can give yourself your morning pleasures in various languages. I take some "Dilbert" in various languages every single morning; it can increase your skills. Couldn't have done it 20 years ago when the idea of having any language you wanted in your pocket, coming from your phone, would have sounded like science fiction to very sophisticated people. So I highly recommend that you teach yourself languages other than the one that I'm speaking, because there's never been a better time to do it. It's an awful lot of fun. It won't change your mind, but it will most certainly blow your mind. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How we talk about sexual assault online | {0: 'University student Ione Wells is the founder of the international #NotGuilty campaign against sexual violence and misdirected victim blaming.'} | TEDSummit | It was April, last year. I was on an evening out with friends to celebrate one of their birthdays. We hadn't been all together for a couple of weeks; it was a perfect evening, as we were all reunited. At the end of the evening, I caught the last underground train back to the other side of London. The journey was smooth. I got back to my local station and I began the 10-minute walk home. As I turned the corner onto my street, my house in sight up ahead, I heard footsteps behind me that seemed to have approached out of nowhere and were picking up pace. Before I had time to process what was happening, a hand was clapped around my mouth so that I could not breathe, and the young man behind me dragged me to the ground, beat my head repeatedly against the pavement until my face began to bleed, kicking me in the back and neck while he began to assault me, ripping off my clothes and telling me to "shut up," as I struggled to cry for help. With each smack of my head to the concrete ground, a question echoed through my mind that still haunts me today: "Is this going to be how it all ends?" Little could I have realized, I'd been followed the whole way from the moment I left the station. And hours later, I was standing topless and barelegged in front of the police, having the cuts and bruises on my naked body photographed for forensic evidence. Now, there are few words to describe the all-consuming feelings of vulnerability, shame, upset and injustice that I was ridden with in that moment and for the weeks to come. But wanting to find a way to condense these feelings into something ordered that I could work through, I decided to do what felt most natural to me: I wrote about it. It started out as a cathartic exercise. I wrote a letter to my assaulter, humanizing him as "you," to identify him as part of the very community that he had so violently abused that night. Stressing the tidal-wave effect of his actions, I wrote: "Did you ever think of the people in your life? I don't know who the people in your life are. I don't know anything about you. But I do know this: you did not just attack me that night. I'm a daughter, I'm a friend, I'm a sister, I'm a pupil, I'm a cousin, I'm a niece, I'm a neighbor; I'm the employee who served everyone coffee in the café under the railway. And all the people who form these relations to me make up my community. And you assaulted every single one of them. You violated the truth that I will never cease to fight for, and which all of these people represent: that there are infinitely more good people in the world than bad." But, determined not to let this one incident make me lose faith in the solidarity in my community or humanity as a whole, I recalled the 7/7 terrorist bombings in July 2005 on London transport, and how the mayor of London at the time, and indeed my own parents, had insisted that we all get back on the tubes the next day, so we wouldn't be defined or changed by those that had made us feel unsafe. I told my attacker, "You've carried out your attack, but now I'm getting back on my tube. My community will not feel we are unsafe walking home after dark. We will get on the last tubes home, and we will walk up our streets alone, because we will not ingrain or submit to the idea that we are putting ourselves in danger in doing so. We will continue to come together, like an army, when any member of our community is threatened. And this is a fight you will not win." At the time of writing this letter — (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) At the time of writing this letter, I was studying for my exams in Oxford, and I was working on the local student paper there. Despite being lucky enough to have friends and family supporting me, it was an isolating time. I didn't know anyone who'd been through this before; at least I didn't think I did. I'd read news reports, statistics, and knew how common sexual assault was, yet I couldn't actually name a single person that I'd heard speak out about an experience of this kind before. So in a somewhat spontaneous decision, I decided that I would publish my letter in the student paper, hoping to reach out to others in Oxford that might have had a similar experience and be feeling the same way. At the end of the letter, I asked others to write in with their experiences under the hashtag, "#NotGuilty," to emphasize that survivors of assault could express themselves without feeling shame or guilt about what happened to them — to show that we could all stand up to sexual assault. What I never anticipated is that almost overnight, this published letter would go viral. Soon, we were receiving hundreds of stories from men and women across the world, which we began to publish on a website I set up. And the hashtag became a campaign. There was an Australian mother in her 40s who described how on an evening out, she was followed to the bathroom by a man who went to repeatedly grab her crotch. There was a man in the Netherlands who described how he was date-raped on a visit to London and wasn't taken seriously by anyone he reported his case to. I had personal Facebook messages from people in India and South America, saying, how can we bring the message of the campaign there? One of the first contributions we had was from a woman called Nikki, who described growing up, being molested my her own father. And I had friends open up to me about experiences ranging from those that happened last week to those that happened years ago, that I'd had no idea about. And the more we started to receive these messages, the more we also started to receive messages of hope — people feeling empowered by this community of voices standing up to sexual assault and victim-blaming. One woman called Olivia, after describing how she was attacked by someone she had trusted and cared about for a long time, said, "I've read many of the stories posted here, and I feel hopeful that if so many women can move forward, then I can, too. I've been inspired by many, and I hope I can be as strong as them someday. I'm sure I will." People around the world began tweeting under this hashtag, and the letter was republished and covered by the national press, as well as being translated into several other languages worldwide. But something struck me about the media attention that this letter was attracting. For something to be front-page news, given the word "news" itself, we can assume it must be something new or something surprising. And yet sexual assault is not something new. Sexual assault, along with other kinds of injustices, is reported in the media all the time. But through the campaign, these injustices were framed as not just news stories, they were firsthand experiences that had affected real people, who were creating, with the solidarity of others, what they needed and had previously lacked: a platform to speak out, the reassurance they weren't alone or to blame for what happened to them and open discussions that would help to reduce stigma around the issue. The voices of those directly affected were at the forefront of the story — not the voices of journalists or commentators on social media. And that's why the story was news. We live in an incredibly interconnected world with the proliferation of social media, which is of course a fantastic resource for igniting social change. But it's also made us increasingly reactive, from the smallest annoyances of, "Oh, my train's been delayed," to the greatest injustices of war, genocides, terrorist attacks. Our default response has become to leap to react to any kind of grievance by tweeting, Facebooking, hastagging — anything to show others that we, too, have reacted. The problem with reacting in this manner en masse is it can sometimes mean that we don't actually react at all, not in the sense of actually doing anything, anyway. It might make ourselves feel better, like we've contributed to a group mourning or outrage, but it doesn't actually change anything. And what's more, it can sometimes drown out the voices of those directly affected by the injustice, whose needs must be heard. Worrying, too, is the tendency for some reactions to injustice to build even more walls, being quick to point fingers with the hope of providing easy solutions to complex problems. One British tabloid, on the publication of my letter, branded a headline stating, "Oxford Student Launches Online Campaign to Shame Attacker." But the campaign never meant to shame anyone. It meant to let people speak and to make others listen. Divisive Twitter trolls were quick to create even more injustice, commenting on my attacker's ethnicity or class to push their own prejudiced agendas. And some even accused me of feigning the whole thing to push, and I quote, my "feminist agenda of man-hating." (Laughter) I know, right? As if I'm going to be like, "Hey guys! Sorry I can't make it, I'm busy trying to hate the entire male population by the time I'm 30." (Laughter) Now, I'm almost sure that these people wouldn't say the things they say in person. But it's as if because they might be behind a screen, in the comfort in their own home when on social media, people forget that what they're doing is a public act — that other people will be reading it and be affected by it. Returning to my analogy of getting back on our trains, another main concern I have about this noise that escalates from our online responses to injustice is that it can very easily slip into portraying us as the affected party, which can lead to a sense of defeatism, a kind of mental barrier to seeing any opportunity for positivity or change after a negative situation. A couple of months before the campaign started or any of this happened to me, I went to a TEDx event in Oxford, and I saw Zelda la Grange speak, the former private secretary to Nelson Mandela. One of the stories she told really struck me. She spoke of when Mandela was taken to court by the South African Rugby Union after he commissioned an inquiry into sports affairs. In the courtroom, he went up to the South African Rugby Union's lawyers, shook them by the hand and conversed with them, each in their own language. And Zelda wanted to protest, saying they had no right to his respect after this injustice they had caused him. He turned to her and said, "You must never allow the enemy to determine the grounds for battle." At the time of hearing these words, I didn't really know why they were so important, but I felt they were, and I wrote them down in a notebook I had on me. But I've thought about this line a lot ever since. Revenge, or the expression of hatred towards those who have done us injustice may feel like a human instinct in the face of wrong, but we need to break out of these cycles if we are to hope to transform negative events of injustice into positive social change. To do otherwise continues to let the enemy determine the grounds for battle, creates a binary, where we who have suffered become the affected, pitted against them, the perpetrators. And just like we got back on our tubes, we can't let our platforms for interconnectivity and community be the places that we settle for defeat. But I don't want to discourage a social media response, because I owe the development of the #NotGuilty campaign almost entirely to social media. But I do want to encourage a more considered approach to the way we use it to respond to injustice. The start, I think, is to ask ourselves two things. Firstly: Why do I feel this injustice? In my case, there were several answers to this. Someone had hurt me and those who I loved, under the assumption they wouldn't have to be held to account or recognize the damage they had caused. Not only that, but thousands of men and women suffer every day from sexual abuse, often in silence, yet it's still a problem we don't give the same airtime to as other issues. It's still an issue many people blame victims for. Next, ask yourself: How, in recognizing these reasons, could I go about reversing them? With us, this was holding my attacker to account — and many others. It was calling them out on the effect they had caused. It was giving airtime to the issue of sexual assault, opening up discussions amongst friends, amongst families, in the media that had been closed for too long, and stressing that victims shouldn't feel to blame for what happened to them. We might still have a long way to go in solving this problem entirely. But in this way, we can begin to use social media as an active tool for social justice, as a tool to educate, to stimulate dialogues, to make those in positions of authority aware of an issue by listening to those directly affected by it. Because sometimes these questions don't have easy answers. In fact, they rarely do. But this doesn't mean we still can't give them a considered response. In situations where you can't go about thinking how you'd reverse this feeling of injustice, you can still think, maybe not what you can do, but what you can not do. You can not build further walls by fighting injustice with more prejudice, more hatred. You can not speak over those directly affected by an injustice. And you can not react to injustice, only to forget about it the next day, just because the rest of Twitter has moved on. Sometimes not reacting instantly is, ironically, the best immediate course of action we can take. Because we might be angry, upset and energized by injustice, but let's consider our responses. Let us hold people to account, without descending into a culture that thrives off shaming and injustice ourselves. Let us remember that distinction, so often forgotten by internet users, between criticism and insult. Let us not forget to think before we speak, just because we might have a screen in front of us. And when we create noise on social media, let it not drown out the needs of those affected, but instead let it amplify their voices, so the internet becomes a place where you're not the exception if you speak out about something that has actually happened to you. All these considered approaches to injustice evoke the very keystones on which the internet was built: to network, to have signal, to connect — all these terms that imply bringing people together, not pushing people apart. Because if you look up the word "justice" in the dictionary, before punishment, before administration of law or judicial authority, you get: "The maintenance of what is right." And I think there are few things more "right" in this world than bringing people together, than unions. And if we allow social media to deliver that, then it can deliver a very powerful form of justice, indeed. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The beauty of what we'll never know | {0: 'Novelist and nonfiction author Pico Iyer writes on subjects ranging from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism, from Graham Greene to forgotten nations and the 21st-century global order.'} | TEDSummit | One hot October morning, I got off the all-night train in Mandalay, the old royal capital of Burma, now Myanmar. And out on the street, I ran into a group of rough men standing beside their bicycle rickshaws. And one of them came up and offered to show me around. The price he quoted was outrageous. It was less than I would pay for a bar of chocolate at home. So I clambered into his trishaw, and he began pedaling us slowly between palaces and pagodas. And as he did, he told me how he had come to the city from his village. He'd earned a degree in mathematics. His dream was to be a teacher. But of course, life is hard under a military dictatorship, and so for now, this was the only way he could make a living. Many nights, he told me, he actually slept in his trishaw so he could catch the first visitors off the all-night train. And very soon, we found that in certain ways, we had so much in common — we were both in our 20s, we were both fascinated by foreign cultures — that he invited me home. So we turned off the wide, crowded streets, and we began bumping down rough, wild alleyways. There were broken shacks all around. I really lost the sense of where I was, and I realized that anything could happen to me now. I could get mugged or drugged or something worse. Nobody would know. Finally, he stopped and led me into a hut, which consisted of just one tiny room. And then he leaned down, and reached under his bed. And something in me froze. I waited to see what he would pull out. And finally he extracted a box. Inside it was every single letter he had ever received from visitors from abroad, and on some of them he had pasted little black-and-white worn snapshots of his new foreign friends. So when we said goodbye that night, I realized he had also shown me the secret point of travel, which is to take a plunge, to go inwardly as well as outwardly to places you would never go otherwise, to venture into uncertainty, ambiguity, even fear. At home, it's dangerously easy to assume we're on top of things. Out in the world, you are reminded every moment that you're not, and you can't get to the bottom of things, either. Everywhere, "People wish to be settled," Ralph Waldo Emerson reminded us, "but only insofar as we are unsettled is there any hope for us." At this conference, we've been lucky enough to hear some exhilarating new ideas and discoveries and, really, about all the ways in which knowledge is being pushed excitingly forwards. But at some point, knowledge gives out. And that is the moment when your life is truly decided: you fall in love; you lose a friend; the lights go out. And it's then, when you're lost or uneasy or carried out of yourself, that you find out who you are. I don't believe that ignorance is bliss. Science has unquestionably made our lives brighter and longer and healthier. And I am forever grateful to the teachers who showed me the laws of physics and pointed out that three times three makes nine. I can count that out on my fingers any time of night or day. But when a mathematician tells me that minus three times minus three makes nine, that's a kind of logic that almost feels like trust. The opposite of knowledge, in other words, isn't always ignorance. It can be wonder. Or mystery. Possibility. And in my life, I've found it's the things I don't know that have lifted me up and pushed me forwards much more than the things I do know. It's also the things I don't know that have often brought me closer to everybody around me. For eight straight Novembers, recently, I traveled every year across Japan with the Dalai Lama. And the one thing he said every day that most seemed to give people reassurance and confidence was, "I don't know." "What's going to happen to Tibet?" "When are we ever going to get world peace?" "What's the best way to raise children?" "Frankly," says this very wise man, "I don't know." The Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman has spent more than 60 years now researching human behavior, and his conclusion is that we are always much more confident of what we think we know than we should be. We have, as he memorably puts it, an "unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance." We know — quote, unquote — our team is going to win this weekend, and we only remember that knowledge on the rare occasions when we're right. Most of the time, we're in the dark. And that's where real intimacy lies. Do you know what your lover is going to do tomorrow? Do you want to know? The parents of us all, as some people call them, Adam and Eve, could never die, so long as they were eating from the tree of life. But the minute they began nibbling from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they fell from their innocence. They grew embarrassed and fretful, self-conscious. And they learned, a little too late, perhaps, that there are certainly some things that we need to know, but there are many, many more that are better left unexplored. Now, when I was a kid, I knew it all, of course. I had been spending 20 years in classrooms collecting facts, and I was actually in the information business, writing articles for Time Magazine. And I took my first real trip to Japan for two-and-a-half weeks, and I came back with a 40-page essay explaining every last detail about Japan's temples, its fashions, its baseball games, its soul. But underneath all that, something that I couldn't understand so moved me for reasons I couldn't explain to you yet, that I decided to go and live in Japan. And now that I've been there for 28 years, I really couldn't tell you very much at all about my adopted home. Which is wonderful, because it means every day I'm making some new discovery, and in the process, looking around the corner and seeing the hundred thousand things I'll never know. Knowledge is a priceless gift. But the illusion of knowledge can be more dangerous than ignorance. Thinking that you know your lover or your enemy can be more treacherous than acknowledging you'll never know them. Every morning in Japan, as the sun is flooding into our little apartment, I take great pains not to consult the weather forecast, because if I do, my mind will be overclouded, distracted, even when the day is bright. I've been a full-time writer now for 34 years. And the one thing that I have learned is that transformation comes when I'm not in charge, when I don't know what's coming next, when I can't assume I am bigger than everything around me. And the same is true in love or in moments of crisis. Suddenly, we're back in that trishaw again and we're bumping off the broad, well-lit streets; and we're reminded, really, of the first law of travel and, therefore, of life: you're only as strong as your readiness to surrender. In the end, perhaps, being human is much more important than being fully in the know. Thank you. (Applause) |
Art can heal PTSD's invisible wounds | {0: 'Melissa Walker helps military service members recover from traumatic brain injury and mental illness.'} | TEDMED 2015 | You are a high-ranking military service member deployed to Afghanistan. You are responsible for the lives of hundreds of men and women, and your base is under attack. Incoming mortar rounds are exploding all around you. Struggling to see through the dust and the smoke, you do your best to assist the wounded and then crawl to a nearby bunker. Conscious but dazed by the blasts, you lay on your side and attempt to process what has just happened. As you regain your vision, you see a bloody face staring back at you. The image is terrifying, but you quickly come to understand it's not real. This vision continues to visit you multiple times a day and in your sleep. You choose not to tell anyone for fear of losing your job or being seen as weak. You give the vision a name, Bloody Face in Bunker, and call it BFIB for short. You keep BFIB locked away in your mind, secretly haunting you, for the next seven years. Now close your eyes. Can you see BFIB? If you can, you're beginning to see the face of the invisible wounds of war, commonly known as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. While I can't say I have post-traumatic stress disorder, I've never been a stranger to it. When I was a little girl, I would visit my grandparents every summer. It was my grandfather who introduced me to the effects of combat on the psyche. While my grandfather was serving as a Marine in the Korean War, a bullet pierced his neck and rendered him unable to cry out. He watched as a corpsman passed him over, declaring him a goner, and then leaving him to die. Years later, after his physical wounds had healed and he'd returned home, he rarely spoke of his experiences in waking life. But at night I would hear him shouting obscenities from his room down the hall. And during the day I would announce myself as I entered the room, careful not to startle or agitate him. He lived out the remainder of his days isolated and tight-lipped, never finding a way to express himself, and I didn't yet have the tools to guide him. I wouldn't have a name for my grandfather's condition until I was in my 20s. Seeking a graduate degree in art therapy, I naturally gravitated towards the study of trauma. And while sitting in class learning about post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD for short, my mission to help service members who suffered like my grandfather began to take form. We've had various names for post-traumatic stress throughout the history of war: homesickness, soldier's heart, shell shock, thousand-yard stare, for instance. And while I was pursuing my degree, a new war was raging, and thanks to modern body armor and military vehicles, service members were surviving blast injuries they wouldn't have before. But the invisible wounds were reaching new levels, and this pushed military doctors and researchers to try and truly understand the effects that traumatic brain injury, or TBI, and PTSD have on the brain. Due to advances in technology and neuroimaging, we now know there's an actual shutdown in the Broca's, or the speech-language area of the brain, after an individual experiences trauma. This physiological change, or speechless terror as it's often called, coupled with mental health stigma, the fear of being judged or misunderstood, possibly even removed from their current duties, has led to the invisible struggles of our servicemen and women. Generation after generation of veterans have chosen not to talk about their experiences, and suffer in solitude. I had my work cut out for me when I got my first job as an art therapist at the nation's largest military medical center, Walter Reed. After working for a few years on a locked-in patient psychiatric unit, I eventually transferred to the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, NICoE, which leads TBI care for active duty service members. Now, I believed in art therapy, but I was going to have to convince service members, big, tough, strong, manly military men, and some women too, to give art-making as a psychotherapeutic intervention a try. The results have been nothing short of spectacular. Vivid, symbolic artwork is being created by our servicemen and women, and every work of art tells a story. We've observed that the process of art therapy bypasses the speech-language issue with the brain. Art-making accesses the same sensory areas of the brain that encode trauma. Service members can use the art-making to work through their experiences in a nonthreatening way. They can then apply words to their physical creations, reintegrating the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. Now, we've seen this can work with all forms of art — drawing, painting, collage — but what seems to have the most impact is mask-making. Finally, these invisible wounds don't just have a name, they have a face. And when service members create these masks, it allows them to come to grips, literally, with their trauma. And it's amazing how often that enables them to break through the trauma and start to heal. Remember BFIB? That was a real experience for one of my patients, and when he created his mask, he was able to let go of that haunting image. Initially, it was a daunting process for the service member, but eventually he began to think of BFIB as the mask, not his internal wound, and he would go to leave each session, he would hand me the mask, and say, "Melissa, take care of him." Eventually, we placed BFIB in a box to further contain him, and when the service member went to leave the NICoE, he chose to leave BFIB behind. A year later, he had only seen BFIB twice, and both times BFIB was smiling and the service member didn't feel anxious. Now, whenever that service member is haunted by some traumatic memory, he continues to paint. Every time he paints these disturbing images, he sees them less or not at all. Philosophers have told us for thousands of years that the power to create is very closely linked to the power to destroy. Now science is showing us that the part of the brain that registers a traumatic wound can be the part of the brain where healing happens too. And art therapy is showing us how to make that connection. We asked one of our service members to describe how mask-making impacted his treatment, and this is what he had to say. (Video) Service Member: You sort of just zone out into the mask. You zone out into the drawing, and for me, it just released the block, so I was able to do it. And then when I looked at it after two days, I was like, "Holy crap, here's the picture, here's the key, here's the puzzle," and then from there it just soared. I mean, from there my treatment just when out of sight, because they were like, Kurt, explain this, explain this. And for the first time in 23 years, I could actually talk about stuff openly to, like, anybody. I could talk to you about it right now if I wanted to, because it unlocked it. It's just amazing. And it allowed me to put 23 years of PTSD and TBI stuff together in one place that has never happened before. Sorry. Melissa Walker: Over the past five years, we've had over 1,000 masks made. It's pretty amazing, isn't it? Thank you. (Applause) I wish I could have shared this process with my grandfather, but I know that he would be thrilled that we are finding ways to help today's and tomorrow's service members heal, and finding the resources within them that they can call upon to heal themselves. Thank you. (Applause) |
5 ways to lead in an era of constant change | {0: "BCG's Jim Hemerling practices smart ways to deal with, and even grow from, the unavoidable and accelerating transformations taking place at work."} | TED@BCG Paris | Have you ever noticed when you ask someone to talk about a change they're making for the better in their personal lives, they're often really energetic? Whether it's training for a marathon, picking up an old hobby, or learning a new skill, for most people, self-transformation projects occupy a very positive emotional space. Self-transformation is empowering, energizing, even exhilarating. I mean just take a look at some of the titles of self-help books: "Awaken the Giant Within," "Practicing the Power of Now," or here's a great one we can all relate to, "You are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life." (Laughter) When it comes to self-transformation, you can't help but get a sense of the excitement. But there's another type of transformation that occupies a very different emotional space. The transformation of organizations. If you're like most people, when you hear the words "Our organization is going to start a transformation," you're thinking, "Uh-oh." (Laughter) "Layoffs." The blood drains from your face, your mind goes into overdrive, frantically searching for some place to run and hide. Well, you can run, but you really can't hide. Most of us spend the majority of our waking hours involved in organizations. And due to changes in globalization, changes due to advances in technology and other factors, the reality is our organizations are constantly having to adapt. In fact, I call this the era of "always-on" transformation. When I shared this idea with my wife Nicola, she said, "Always-on transformation? That sounds exhausting." And that may be exactly what you're thinking — and you would be right. Particularly if we continue to approach the transformation of organizations the way we always have been. But because we can't hide, we need to sort out two things. First, why is transformation so exhausting? And second, how do we fix it? First of all, let's acknowledge that change is hard. People naturally resist change, especially when it's imposed on them. But there are things that organizations do that make change even harder and more exhausting for people than it needs to be. First of all, leaders often wait too long to act. As a result, everything is happening in crisis mode. Which, of course, tends to be exhausting. Or, given the urgency, what they'll do is they'll just focus on the short-term results, but that doesn't give any hope for the future. Or they'll just take a superficial, one-off approach, hoping that they can return back to business as usual as soon as the crisis is over. This kind of approach is kind of the way some students approach preparing for standardized tests. In order to get test scores to go up, teachers will end up teaching to the test. Now, that approach can work; test results often do go up. But it fails the fundamental goal of education: to prepare students to succeed over the long term. So given these obstacles, what can we do to transform the way we transform organizations so rather than being exhausting, it's actually empowering and energizing? To do that, we need to focus on five strategic imperatives, all of which have one thing in common: putting people first. The first imperative for putting people first is to inspire through purpose. Most transformations have financial and operational goals. These are important and they can be energizing to leaders, but they tend not to be very motivating to most people in the organization. To motivate more broadly, the transformation needs to connect with a deeper sense of purpose. Take LEGO. The LEGO Group has become an extraordinary global company. Under their very capable leadership, they've actually undergone a series of transformations. While each of these has had a very specific focus, the North Star, linking and guiding all of them, has been Lego's powerful purpose: inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow. Expanding globally? It's not about increasing sales, but about giving millions of additional children access to LEGO building bricks. Investment and innovation? It's not about developing new products, but about enabling more children to experience the joy of learning through play. Not surprisingly, that deep sense of purpose tends to be highly motivating to LEGO's people. The second imperative for putting people first is to go all in. Too many transformations are nothing more than head-count cutting exercises; layoffs under the guise of transformation. In the face of relentless competition, it may well be that you will have to take the painful decision to downsize the organization, just as you may have to lose some weight in order to run a marathon. But losing weight alone will not get you across the finish line with a winning time. To win you need to go all in. You need to go all in. Rather than just cutting costs, you need to think about initiatives that will enable you to win in the medium term, initiatives to drive growth, actions that will fundamentally change the way the company operates, and very importantly, investments to develop the leadership and the talent. The third imperative for putting people first is to enable people with the capabilities that they need to succeed during the transformation and beyond. Over the years I've competed in a number of triathlons. You know, frankly, I'm not that good, but I do have one distinct capability; I am remarkably fast at finding my bike. (Laughter) By the time I finish the swim, almost all the bikes are already gone. (Laughter) Real triathletes know that each leg — the swim, the bike, the run — really requires different capabilities, different tools, different skills, different techniques. Likewise when we transform organizations, we need to be sure that we're giving our people the skills and the tools they need along the way. Chronos, a global software company, recognized the need to transfer from building products — software products — to building software as a service. To enable its people to take that transformation, first of all they invested in new tools that would enable their employees to monitor the usage of the features as well as customer satisfaction with the new service. They also invested in skill development, so that their employees would be able to resolve customer service problems on the spot. And very importantly, they also reinforced the collaborative behaviors that would be required to deliver an end-to-end seamless customer experience. Because of these investments, rather than feeling overwhelmed by the transformation, Chronos employees actually felt energized and empowered in their new roles. In the era of "always-on" transformation, change is a constant. My fourth imperative therefore is to instill a culture of continuous learning. When Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft in February 2014, he embarked on an ambitious transformation journey to prepare the company to compete in a mobile-first, cloud-first world. This included changes to strategy, the organization and very importantly, the culture. Microsoft's culture at the time was one of silos and internal competition — not exactly conducive to learning. Nadella took this head-on. He rallied his leadership around his vision for a living, learning culture, shifting from a fixed mindset, where your role was to show up as the smartest person in the room, to a growth mindset, where your role was to listen, to learn and to bring out the best in people. Well, early days, Microsoft employees already noticed this shift in the culture — clear evidence of Microsoft putting people first. My fifth and final imperative is specifically for leaders. In a transformation, a leader needs to have a vision, a clear road map with milestones, and then you need to hold people accountable for results. In other words, you need to be directive. But in order to capture the hearts and minds of people, you also need to be inclusive. Inclusive leadership is critical to putting people first. I live in the San Francisco Bay area. And right now, our basketball team is the best in the league. We won the 2015 championship, and we're favored to win again this year. There are many explanations for this. They have some fabulous players, but one of the key reasons is their head coach, Steve Kerr, is an inclusive leader. When Kerr came to the Warriors in 2014, the Warriors were looking for a major transformation. They hadn't won a national championship since 1975. Kerr came in, and he had a clear vision, and he immediately got to work. From the outset, he reached out and engaged the players and the staff. He created an environment of open debate and solicited suggestions. During games he would often ask, "What are you seeing that I'm missing?" One the best examples of this came in game four of the 2015 finals. The Warriors were down two games to one when Kerr made the decision to change the starting lineup; a bold move by any measure. The Warriors won the game and went on to win the championship. And it is widely viewed that that move was the pivotal move in their victory. Interestingly, it wasn't actually Kerr's idea. It was the idea of his 28-year-old assistant, Nick U'Ren. Because of Kerr's leadership style, U'Ren felt comfortable bringing the idea forward. And Kerr not only listened, but he implemented the idea and then afterwards, gave U'Ren all the credit — actions all consistent with Kerr's highly inclusive approach to leadership. In the era of "always-on" transformation, organizations are always going to be transforming. But doing so does not have to be exhausting. We owe it to ourselves, to our organizations and to society more broadly to boldly transform our approach to transformation. To do that, we need to start putting people first. Thank you. (Applause) |
Ballroom dance that breaks gender roles | {0: 'Trevor Copp is known for innovative social justice theater that blends physicality, image and narrative.', 1: 'Jeff Fox is a professional dancer, competitor, choreographer who has won professional titles in American Smooth, Rhythm, Theatre Arts and Showdance.'} | TEDxMontreal | (Music) (Applause) Trevor Copp: When "Dancing With the Stars" first hit the airwaves, that is not what it looked like. (Laughter) Jeff and I were full-time ballroom dance instructors when the big TV ballroom revival hit, and this was incredible. I mean, one day we would say "foxtrot," and people were like "Foxes trotting." (Laughter) And the next day they were telling us the finer points of a good feather step. And this blew our minds. I mean, all of the ballroom dance geeking out that we had always done on why salsa worked differently than the competitive rumba and why tango traveled unlike the waltz, all of that just hit the public consciousness, and it changed everything. But running parallel to this excitement, the excitement that suddenly, somehow, we were cool — (Laughter) there was also this reservation. Why this and why now? Jeff Fox: When Trevor and I would get together for training seminars or just for fun, we'd toss each other around, mix it up, take a break from having to lead all the time. We even came up with a system for switching lead and follow while we were dancing, as a way of taking turns and playing fair. It wasn't until we used that system as part of a performance in a small festival that we got an important tap on the shoulder. Lisa O'Connell, a dramaturge and director of a playwright center, pulled us aside after the show and said, "Do you have any idea how political that was?" (Laughter) So that began an eight-year collaboration to create a play which not only further developed our system for switching but also explored the impact of being locked into a single role, and what's worse, being defined by that single role. TC: Because, of course, classic Latin and ballroom dancing isn't just a system of dancing; it's a way of thinking, of being, of relating to each other that captured a whole period's values. There's one thing that stayed consistent, though: the man leads and the woman follows. So street salsa, championship tango, it's all the same — he leads, she follows. So this was gender training. You weren't just learning to dance — you were learning to "man" and to "woman." It's a relic. And in the way of relics, you don't throw it out, but you need to know that this is the past. This isn't the present. It's like Shakespeare: respect it, revive it — great! But know that this is history. This doesn't represent how we think today. So we asked ourselves: If you strip it all down, what is at the core of partner dancing? JF: Well, the core principle of partner dancing is that one person leads, the other one follows. The machine works the same, regardless of who's playing which role. The physics of movement doesn't really give a crap about your gender. (Laughter) So if we were to update the existing form, we would need to make it more representative of how we interact here, now, in 2015. When you watch ballroom, don't just watch what's there. Watch what's not. The couple is always only a man and a woman. Together. Only. Ever. So, same-sex and gender nonconformist couples just disappear. In most mainstream international ballroom competitions, same-sex couples are rarely recognized on the floor, and in many cases, the rules prohibit them completely. TC: Try this: Google-image, "professional Latin dancer," and then look for an actual Latino person. (Laughter) You'll be there for days. What you will get is page after page of white, straight Russian couples spray-tanned to the point of mahogany. (Laughter) There are no black people, there are no Asians, no mixed-race couples, so basically, non-white people just disappeared. Even within the white-straight- couple-only paradigm — she can't be taller, he can't be shorter. She can't be bolder, he can't be gentler. If you were to take a ballroom dance and translate that into a conversation and drop that into a movie, we, as a culture, would never stand for this. He dictates, she reacts. No relationship — gay, straight or anything — that we would regard as remotely healthy or functional looks like that, and yet somehow, you put it on prime time, you slap some makeup on it, throw the glitter on, put it out there as movement, not as text, and we, as a culture, tune in and clap. We are applauding our own absence. Too many people have disappeared from partner dancing. (Music) (Applause) JF: Now, you just saw two men dancing together. (Laughter) And you thought it looked ... a little strange. Interesting — appealing, even — but a little bit odd. Even avid followers of the same-sex ballroom circuit can attest that while same-sex partner dancing can be dynamic and strong and exciting, it just doesn't quite seem to fit. Aesthetically speaking, if Alida and I take the classic closed ballroom hold ... this is considered beautiful. (Laughter) But why not this? (Laughter) See, the standard image that the leader must be larger and masculine and the follower smaller and feminine — this is a stumbling point. TC: So we wanted to look at this from a totally different angle. So, what if we could keep the idea of lead and follow but toss the idea that this was connected to gender? Further, what if a couple could lead and follow each other and then switch? And then switch back? What if it could be like a conversation, taking turns listening and speaking, just like we do in life? What if we could dance like that? We call it "Liquid Lead Dancing." JF: Let's try this with a Latin dance, salsa. In salsa, there's a key transitional step, called the cross-body lead. We use it as punctuation to break up the improvisation. It can be a little tricky to spot if you're not used to looking for it, so here it is. One more time for the cheap seats. (Laughter) And here's the action one more time, nice and slow. Now, if we apply liquid-lead thinking to this transitional step, the cross-body lead becomes a point where the lead and the follow can switch. The person following can elect to take over the lead, or the person leading can choose to surrender it, essentially making it a counter-cross-body lead. Here's how that looks in slow motion. And here's how it looked when we danced it in the opening dance. With this simple tweak, the dance moves from being a dictation to a negotiation. Anyone can lead. Anyone can follow. And more importantly, you can change your mind. Now, this is only one example of how this applies, but once the blinkers come off, anything can happen. TC: Let's look at how Liquid Lead thinking could apply to a classic waltz. Because, of course, it isn't just a system of switching leads; it's a way of thinking that can actually make the dance itself more efficient. So: the waltz. The waltz is a turning dance. This means that for the lead, you spend half of the dance traveling backwards, completely blind. And because of the follower's position, basically, no one can see where they're going. (Laughter) So you're out here on the floor, and then imagine that coming right at you. JF: Raaaaaah! (Laughter) TC: There are actually a lot of accidents out there that happen as a result of this blind spot. But what if the partners were to just allow for a switch of posture for a moment? A lot of accidents could be avoided. Even if one person led the whole dance but allowed this switch to happen, it would be a lot safer, while at the same time, offering new aesthetics into the waltz. Because physics doesn't give a damn about your gender. (Laughter) JF: Now, we've danced Liquid Lead in clubs, convention centers and as part of "First Dance," the play we created with Lisa, on stages in North America and in Europe. And it never fails to engage. I mean, beyond the unusual sight of seeing two men dancing together, it always evokes and engages. But why? The secret lies in what made Lisa see our initial demonstration as "political." It wasn't just that we were switching lead and follow; it's that we stayed consistent in our presence, our personality and our power, regardless of which role we were playing. We were still us. And that's where the true freedom lies — not just the freedom to switch roles, but the freedom from being defined by whichever role you're playing, the freedom to always remain true to yourself. Forget what a lead is supposed to look like, or a follow. Be a masculine follow or a feminine lead. Just be yourself. Obviously, this applies off the dance floor as well, but on the floor, it gives us the perfect opportunity to update an old paradigm, reinvigorate an old relic, and make it more representative of our era and our current way of being. TC: Jeff and I dance partner dancing all the time with women and men and we love it. But we dance with a consciousness that this is a historic form that can produce silence and produce invisibility across the spectrum of identity that we enjoy today. We invented Liquid Lead as a way of stripping out all the ideas that don't belong to us and taking partner dancing back to what it really always was: the fine art of taking care of each other. (Music) (Applause) |
We've stopped trusting institutions and started trusting strangers | {0: 'Rachel Botsman is a recognized expert on how collaboration and trust enabled by digital technologies will change the way we live, work, bank and consume.'} | TEDSummit | Let's talk about trust. We all know trust is fundamental, but when it comes to trusting people, something profound is happening. Please raise your hand if you have ever been a host or a guest on Airbnb. Wow. That's a lot of you. Who owns Bitcoin? Still a lot of you. OK. And please raise your hand if you've ever used Tinder to help you find a mate. (Laughter) This one's really hard to count because you're kind of going like this. (Laughter) These are all examples of how technology is creating new mechanisms that are enabling us to trust unknown people, companies and ideas. And yet at the same time, trust in institutions — banks, governments and even churches — is collapsing. So what's happening here, and who do you trust? Let's start in France with a platform — with a company, I should say — with a rather funny-sounding name, BlaBlaCar. It's a platform that matches drivers and passengers who want to share long-distance journeys together. The average ride taken is 320 kilometers. So it's a good idea to choose your fellow travelers wisely. Social profiles and reviews help people make a choice. You can see if someone's a smoker, you can see what kind of music they like, you can see if they're going to bring their dog along for the ride. But it turns out that the key social identifier is how much you're going to talk in the car. (Laughter) Bla, not a lot, bla bla, you want a nice bit of chitchat, and bla bla bla, you're not going to stop talking the entire way from London to Paris. (Laughter) It's remarkable, right, that this idea works at all, because it's counter to the lesson most of us were taught as a child: never get in a car with a stranger. And yet, BlaBlaCar transports more than four million people every single month. To put that in context, that's more passengers than the Eurostar or JetBlue airlines carry. BlaBlaCar is a beautiful illustration of how technology is enabling millions of people across the world to take a trust leap. A trust leap happens when we take the risk to do something new or different to the way that we've always done it. Let's try to visualize this together. OK. I want you to close your eyes. There is a man staring at me with his eyes wide open. I'm on this big red circle. I can see. So close your eyes. (Laughter) (Applause) I'll do it with you. And I want you to imagine there exists a gap between you and something unknown. That unknown can be someone you've just met. It can be a place you've never been to. It can be something you've never tried before. You got it? OK. You can open your eyes now. For you to leap from a place of certainty, to take a chance on that someone or something unknown, you need a force to pull you over the gap, and that remarkable force is trust. Trust is an elusive concept, and yet we depend on it for our lives to function. I trust my children when they say they're going to turn the lights out at night. I trusted the pilot who flew me here to keep me safe. It's a word we use a lot, without always thinking about what it really means and how it works in different contexts of our lives. There are, in fact, hundreds of definitions of trust, and most can be reduced to some kind of risk assessment of how likely it is that things will go right. But I don't like this definition of trust, because it makes trust sound rational and predictable, and it doesn't really get to the human essence of what it enables us to do and how it empowers us to connect with other people. So I define trust a little differently. I define trust as a confident relationship to the unknown. Now, when you view trust through this lens, it starts to explain why it has the unique capacity to enable us to cope with uncertainty, to place our faith in strangers, to keep moving forward. Human beings are remarkable at taking trust leaps. Do you remember the first time you put your credit card details into a website? That's a trust leap. I distinctly remember telling my dad that I wanted to buy a navy blue secondhand Peugeot on eBay, and he rightfully pointed out that the seller's name was "Invisible Wizard" and that this probably was not such a good idea. (Laughter) So my work, my research focuses on how technology is transforming the social glue of society, trust between people, and it's a fascinating area to study, because there's still so much we do not know. For instance, do men and women trust differently in digital environments? Does the way we build trust face-to-face translate online? Does trust transfer? So if you trust finding a mate on Tinder, are you more likely to trust finding a ride on BlaBlaCar? But from studying hundreds of networks and marketplaces, there is a common pattern that people follow, and I call it "climbing the trust stack." Let me use BlaBlaCar as an example to bring it to life. On the first level, you have to trust the idea. So you have to trust the idea of ride-sharing is safe and worth trying. The second level is about having confidence in the platform, that BlaBlaCar will help you if something goes wrong. And the third level is about using little bits of information to decide whether the other person is trustworthy. Now, the first time we climb the trust stack, it feels weird, even risky, but we get to a point where these ideas seem totally normal. Our behaviors transform, often relatively quickly. In other words, trust enables change and innovation. So an idea that intrigued me, and I'd like you to consider, is whether we can better understand major waves of disruption and change in individuals in society through the lens of trust. Well, it turns out that trust has only evolved in three significant chapters throughout the course of human history: local, institutional and what we're now entering, distributed. So for a long time, until the mid-1800s, trust was built around tight-knit relationships. So say I lived in a village with the first five rows of this audience, and we all knew one another, and say I wanted to borrow money. The man who had his eyes wide open, he might lend it to me, and if I didn't pay him back, you'd all know I was dodgy. I would get a bad reputation, and you would refuse to do business with me in the future. Trust was mostly local and accountability-based. In the mid-19th century, society went through a tremendous amount of change. People moved to fast-growing cities such as London and San Francisco, and a local banker here was replaced by large corporations that didn't know us as individuals. We started to place our trust into black box systems of authority, things like legal contracts and regulation and insurance, and less trust directly in other people. Trust became institutional and commission-based. It's widely talked about how trust in institutions and many corporate brands has been steadily declining and continues to do so. I am constantly stunned by major breaches of trust: the News Corp phone hacking, the Volkswagen emissions scandal, the widespread abuse in the Catholic Church, the fact that only one measly banker went to jail after the great financial crisis, or more recently the Panama Papers that revealed how the rich can exploit offshore tax regimes. And the thing that really surprises me is why do leaders find it so hard to apologize, I mean sincerely apologize, when our trust is broken? It would be easy to conclude that institutional trust isn't working because we are fed up with the sheer audacity of dishonest elites, but what's happening now runs deeper than the rampant questioning of the size and structure of institutions. We're starting to realize that institutional trust wasn't designed for the digital age. Conventions of how trust is built, managed, lost and repaired — in brands, leaders and entire systems — is being turned upside down. Now, this is exciting, but it's frightening, because it forces many of us to have to rethink how trust is built and destroyed with our customers, with our employees, even our loved ones. The other day, I was talking to the CEO of a leading international hotel brand, and as is often the case, we got onto the topic of Airbnb. And he admitted to me that he was perplexed by their success. He was perplexed at how a company that depends on the willingness of strangers to trust one another could work so well across 191 countries. So I said to him that I had a confession to make, and he looked at me a bit strangely, and I said — and I'm sure many of you do this as well — I don't always bother to hang my towels up when I'm finished in the hotel, but I would never do this as a guest on Airbnb. And the reason why I would never do this as a guest on Airbnb is because guests know that they'll be rated by hosts, and that those ratings are likely to impact their ability to transact in the future. It's a simple illustration of how online trust will change our behaviors in the real world, make us more accountable in ways we cannot yet even imagine. I am not saying we do not need hotels or traditional forms of authority. But what we cannot deny is that the way trust flows through society is changing, and it's creating this big shift away from the 20th century that was defined by institutional trust towards the 21st century that will be fueled by distributed trust. Trust is no longer top-down. It's being unbundled and inverted. It's no longer opaque and linear. A new recipe for trust is emerging that once again is distributed amongst people and is accountability-based. And this shift is only going to accelerate with the emergence of the blockchain, the innovative ledger technology underpinning Bitcoin. Now let's be honest, getting our heads around the way blockchain works is mind-blowing. And one of the reasons why is it involves processing some pretty complicated concepts with terrible names. I mean, cryptographic algorithms and hash functions, and people called miners, who verify transactions — all that was created by this mysterious person or persons called Satoshi Nakamoto. Now, that is a massive trust leap that hasn't happened yet. (Applause) But let's try to imagine this. So "The Economist" eloquently described the blockchain as the great chain of being sure about things. The easiest way I can describe it is imagine the blocks as spreadsheets, and they are filled with assets. So that could be a property title. It could be a stock trade. It could be a creative asset, such as the rights to a song. Every time something moves from one place on the register to somewhere else, that asset transfer is time-stamped and publicly recorded on the blockchain. It's that simple. Right. So the real implication of the blockchain is that it removes the need for any kind of third party, such as a lawyer, or a trusted intermediary, or maybe not a government intermediary to facilitate the exchange. So if we go back to the trust stack, you still have to trust the idea, you have to trust the platform, but you don't have to trust the other person in the traditional sense. The implications are huge. In the same way the internet blew open the doors to an age of information available to everyone, the blockchain will revolutionize trust on a global scale. Now, I've waited to the end intentionally to mention Uber, because I recognize that it is a contentious and widely overused example, but in the context of a new era of trust, it's a great case study. Now, we will see cases of abuse of distributed trust. We've already seen this, and it can go horribly wrong. I am not surprised that we are seeing protests from taxi associations all around the world trying to get governments to ban Uber based on claims that it is unsafe. I happened to be in London the day that these protests took place, and I happened to notice a tweet from Matt Hancock, who is a British minister for business. And he wrote, "Does anyone have details of this #Uber app everyone's talking about? (Laughter) I'd never heard of it until today." Now, the taxi associations, they legitimized the first layer of the trust stack. They legitimized the idea that they were trying to eliminate, and sign-ups increased by 850 percent in 24 hours. Now, this is a really strong illustration of how once a trust shift has happened around a behavior or an entire sector, you cannot reverse the story. Every day, five million people will take a trust leap and ride with Uber. In China, on Didi, the ride-sharing platform, 11 million rides taken every day. That's 127 rides per second, showing that this is a cross-cultural phenomenon. And the fascinating thing is that both drivers and passengers report that seeing a name and seeing someone's photo and their rating makes them feel safer, and as you may have experienced, even behave a little more nicely in the taxi cab. Uber and Didi are early but powerful examples of how technology is creating trust between people in ways and on a scale never possible before. Today, many of us are comfortable getting into cars driven by strangers. We meet up with someone we swiped right to be matched with. We share our homes with people we do not know. This is just the beginning, because the real disruption happening isn't technological. It's the trust shift it creates, and for my part, I want to help people understand this new era of trust so that we can get it right and we can embrace the opportunities to redesign systems that are more transparent, inclusive and accountable. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
A temporary tattoo that brings hospital care to the home | {0: 'UCSD bioengineering professor Todd Coleman integratively spans the disciplines of medical electronics, machine learning and public health.'} | TEDMED 2015 | Please meet Jane. She has a high-risk pregnancy. Within 24 weeks, she's on bed rest at the hospital, being monitored for her preterm contractions. She doesn't look the happiest. That's in part because it requires technicians and experts to apply these clunky belts on her to monitor her uterine contractions. Another reason Jane is not so happy is because she's worried. In particular, she's worried about what happens after her 10-day stay on bed rest at the hospital. What happens when she's home? If she were to give birth this early it would be devastating. As an African-American woman, she's twice as likely to have a premature birth or to have a stillbirth. So Jane basically has one of two options: stay at the hospital on bed rest, a prisoner to the technology until she gives birth, and then spend the rest of her life paying for the bill; or head home after her 10-day stay and hope for the best. Neither of these two options seems appealing. As I began to think about stories like this and hear about stories like this, I began to ask myself and imagine: Is there an alternative? Is there a way we could have the benefits of high-fidelity monitoring that we get with our trusted partners in the hospital while someone is at home living their daily life? With that in mind, I encouraged people in my research group to partner with some clever material scientists, and all of us came together and brainstormed. And after a long process, we came up with a vision, an idea, of a wearable system that perhaps you could wear like a piece of jewelry or you could apply to yourself like a Band-Aid. And after many trials and tribulations and years of endeavors, we were able to come up with this flexible electronic patch that was manufactured using the same processes that they use to build computer chips, except the electronics are transferred from a semiconductor wafer onto a flexible material that can interface with the human body. These systems are about the thickness of a human hair. They can measure the types of information that we want, things such as: bodily movement, bodily temperature, electrical rhythms of the body and so forth. We can also engineer these systems, so they can integrate energy sources, and can have wireless transmission capabilities. So as we began to build these types of systems, we began to test them on ourselves in our research group. But in addition, we began to reach out to some of our clinical partners in San Diego, and test these on different patients in different clinical conditions, including moms-to-be like Jane. Here is a picture of a pregnant woman in labor at our university hospital being monitored for her uterine contractions with the conventional belt. In addition, our flexible electronic patches are there. This picture demonstrates waveforms pertaining to the fetal heart rate, where the red corresponds to what was acquired with the conventional belts, and the blue corresponds to our estimates using our flexible electronic systems and our algorithms. At this moment, we gave ourselves a big mental high five. Some of the things we had imagined were beginning to come to fruition, and we were actually seeing this in a clinical context. But there was still a problem. The problem was, the way we manufactured these systems was very inefficient, had low yield and was very error-prone. In addition, as we talked to some of the nurses in the hospital, they encouraged us to make sure that our electronics worked with typical medical adhesives that are used in a hospital. We had an epiphany and said, "Wait a minute. Rather than just making them work with adhesives, let's integrate them into adhesives, and that could solve our manufacturing problem." This picture that you see here is our ability to embed these censors inside of a piece of Scotch tape by simply peeling it off of a wafer. Ongoing work in our research group allows us to, in addition, embed integrated circuits into the flexible adhesives to do things like amplifying signals and digitizing them, processing them and encoding for wireless transmission. All of this integrated into the same medical adhesives that are used in the hospital. So when we reached this point, we had some other challenges, from both an engineering as well as a usability perspective, to make sure that we could make it used practically. In many digital health discussions, people believe in and embrace the idea that we can simply digitize the data, wirelessly transmit it, send it to the cloud, and in the cloud, we can extract meaningful information for interpretation. And indeed, you can do all of that, if you're not worried about some of the energy challenges. Think about Jane for a moment. She doesn't live in Palo Alto, nor does she live in Beverly Hills. What that means is, we have to be mindful about her data plan and how much it would cost for her to be sending out a continuous stream of data. There's another challenge that not everyone in the medical profession is comfortable talking about. And that is, that Jane does not have the most trust in the medical establishment. She, people like her, her ancestors, have not had the best experiences at the hands of doctors and the hospital or insurance companies. That means that we have to be mindful of questions of privacy. Jane might not feel that happy about all that data being processed into the cloud. And Jane cannot be fooled; she reads the news. She knows that if the federal government can be hacked, if the Fortune 500 can be hacked, so can her doctor. And so with that in mind, we had an epiphany. We cannot outsmart all the hackers in the world, but perhaps we can present them a smaller target. What if we could actually, rather than have those algorithms that do data interpretation run in the cloud, what if we have those algorithms run on those small integrated circuits embedded into those adhesives? And so when we integrate these things together, what this means is that now we can think about the future where someone like Jane can still go about living her normal daily life, she can be monitored, it can be done in a way where she doesn't have to get another job to pay her data plan, and we can also address some of her concerns about privacy. So at this point, we're feeling very good about ourselves. We've accomplished this, we've begun to address some of these questions about privacy and we feel like, pretty much the chapter is closed now. Everyone lived happily ever after, right? Well, not so fast. (Laughter) One of the things we have to remember, as I mentioned earlier, is that Jane does not have the most trust in the medical establishment. We have to remember that there are increasing and widening health disparities, and there's inequity in terms of proper care management. And so what that means is that this simple picture of Jane and her data — even with her being comfortable being wirelessly transmitted to the cloud, letting a doctor intervene if necessary — is not the whole story. So what we're beginning to do is to think about ways to have trusted parties serve as intermediaries between people like Jane and her health care providers. For example, we've begun to partner with churches and to think about nurses that are church members, that come from that trusted community, as patient advocates and health coaches to people like Jane. Another thing we have going for us is that insurance companies, increasingly, are attracted to some of these ideas. They're increasingly realizing that perhaps it's better to pay one dollar now for a wearable device and a health coach, rather than paying 10 dollars later, when that baby is born prematurely and ends up in the neonatal intensive care unit — one of the most expensive parts of a hospital. This has been a long learning process for us. This iterative process of breaking through and attacking one problem and not feeling totally comfortable, and identifying the next problem, has helped us go along this path of actually trying to not only innovate with this technology but make sure it can be used for people who perhaps need it the most. Another learning lesson we've taken from this process that is very humbling, is that as technology progresses and advances at an accelerating rate, we have to remember that human beings are using this technology, and we have to be mindful that these human beings — they have a face, they have a name and a life. And in the case of Jane, hopefully, two. Thank you. (Applause) |
Machine intelligence makes human morals more important | {0: 'Techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci asks big questions about our societies and our lives, as both algorithms and digital connectivity spread.'} | TEDSummit | So, I started my first job as a computer programmer in my very first year of college — basically, as a teenager. Soon after I started working, writing software in a company, a manager who worked at the company came down to where I was, and he whispered to me, "Can he tell if I'm lying?" There was nobody else in the room. "Can who tell if you're lying? And why are we whispering?" The manager pointed at the computer in the room. "Can he tell if I'm lying?" Well, that manager was having an affair with the receptionist. (Laughter) And I was still a teenager. So I whisper-shouted back to him, "Yes, the computer can tell if you're lying." (Laughter) Well, I laughed, but actually, the laugh's on me. Nowadays, there are computational systems that can suss out emotional states and even lying from processing human faces. Advertisers and even governments are very interested. I had become a computer programmer because I was one of those kids crazy about math and science. But somewhere along the line I'd learned about nuclear weapons, and I'd gotten really concerned with the ethics of science. I was troubled. However, because of family circumstances, I also needed to start working as soon as possible. So I thought to myself, hey, let me pick a technical field where I can get a job easily and where I don't have to deal with any troublesome questions of ethics. So I picked computers. (Laughter) Well, ha, ha, ha! All the laughs are on me. Nowadays, computer scientists are building platforms that control what a billion people see every day. They're developing cars that could decide who to run over. They're even building machines, weapons, that might kill human beings in war. It's ethics all the way down. Machine intelligence is here. We're now using computation to make all sort of decisions, but also new kinds of decisions. We're asking questions to computation that have no single right answers, that are subjective and open-ended and value-laden. We're asking questions like, "Who should the company hire?" "Which update from which friend should you be shown?" "Which convict is more likely to reoffend?" "Which news item or movie should be recommended to people?" Look, yes, we've been using computers for a while, but this is different. This is a historical twist, because we cannot anchor computation for such subjective decisions the way we can anchor computation for flying airplanes, building bridges, going to the moon. Are airplanes safer? Did the bridge sway and fall? There, we have agreed-upon, fairly clear benchmarks, and we have laws of nature to guide us. We have no such anchors and benchmarks for decisions in messy human affairs. To make things more complicated, our software is getting more powerful, but it's also getting less transparent and more complex. Recently, in the past decade, complex algorithms have made great strides. They can recognize human faces. They can decipher handwriting. They can detect credit card fraud and block spam and they can translate between languages. They can detect tumors in medical imaging. They can beat humans in chess and Go. Much of this progress comes from a method called "machine learning." Machine learning is different than traditional programming, where you give the computer detailed, exact, painstaking instructions. It's more like you take the system and you feed it lots of data, including unstructured data, like the kind we generate in our digital lives. And the system learns by churning through this data. And also, crucially, these systems don't operate under a single-answer logic. They don't produce a simple answer; it's more probabilistic: "This one is probably more like what you're looking for." Now, the upside is: this method is really powerful. The head of Google's AI systems called it, "the unreasonable effectiveness of data." The downside is, we don't really understand what the system learned. In fact, that's its power. This is less like giving instructions to a computer; it's more like training a puppy-machine-creature we don't really understand or control. So this is our problem. It's a problem when this artificial intelligence system gets things wrong. It's also a problem when it gets things right, because we don't even know which is which when it's a subjective problem. We don't know what this thing is thinking. So, consider a hiring algorithm — a system used to hire people, using machine-learning systems. Such a system would have been trained on previous employees' data and instructed to find and hire people like the existing high performers in the company. Sounds good. I once attended a conference that brought together human resources managers and executives, high-level people, using such systems in hiring. They were super excited. They thought that this would make hiring more objective, less biased, and give women and minorities a better shot against biased human managers. And look — human hiring is biased. I know. I mean, in one of my early jobs as a programmer, my immediate manager would sometimes come down to where I was really early in the morning or really late in the afternoon, and she'd say, "Zeynep, let's go to lunch!" I'd be puzzled by the weird timing. It's 4pm. Lunch? I was broke, so free lunch. I always went. I later realized what was happening. My immediate managers had not confessed to their higher-ups that the programmer they hired for a serious job was a teen girl who wore jeans and sneakers to work. I was doing a good job, I just looked wrong and was the wrong age and gender. So hiring in a gender- and race-blind way certainly sounds good to me. But with these systems, it is more complicated, and here's why: Currently, computational systems can infer all sorts of things about you from your digital crumbs, even if you have not disclosed those things. They can infer your sexual orientation, your personality traits, your political leanings. They have predictive power with high levels of accuracy. Remember — for things you haven't even disclosed. This is inference. I have a friend who developed such computational systems to predict the likelihood of clinical or postpartum depression from social media data. The results are impressive. Her system can predict the likelihood of depression months before the onset of any symptoms — months before. No symptoms, there's prediction. She hopes it will be used for early intervention. Great! But now put this in the context of hiring. So at this human resources managers conference, I approached a high-level manager in a very large company, and I said to her, "Look, what if, unbeknownst to you, your system is weeding out people with high future likelihood of depression? They're not depressed now, just maybe in the future, more likely. What if it's weeding out women more likely to be pregnant in the next year or two but aren't pregnant now? What if it's hiring aggressive people because that's your workplace culture?" You can't tell this by looking at gender breakdowns. Those may be balanced. And since this is machine learning, not traditional coding, there is no variable there labeled "higher risk of depression," "higher risk of pregnancy," "aggressive guy scale." Not only do you not know what your system is selecting on, you don't even know where to begin to look. It's a black box. It has predictive power, but you don't understand it. "What safeguards," I asked, "do you have to make sure that your black box isn't doing something shady?" She looked at me as if I had just stepped on 10 puppy tails. (Laughter) She stared at me and she said, "I don't want to hear another word about this." And she turned around and walked away. Mind you — she wasn't rude. It was clearly: what I don't know isn't my problem, go away, death stare. (Laughter) Look, such a system may even be less biased than human managers in some ways. And it could make monetary sense. But it could also lead to a steady but stealthy shutting out of the job market of people with higher risk of depression. Is this the kind of society we want to build, without even knowing we've done this, because we turned decision-making to machines we don't totally understand? Another problem is this: these systems are often trained on data generated by our actions, human imprints. Well, they could just be reflecting our biases, and these systems could be picking up on our biases and amplifying them and showing them back to us, while we're telling ourselves, "We're just doing objective, neutral computation." Researchers found that on Google, women are less likely than men to be shown job ads for high-paying jobs. And searching for African-American names is more likely to bring up ads suggesting criminal history, even when there is none. Such hidden biases and black-box algorithms that researchers uncover sometimes but sometimes we don't know, can have life-altering consequences. In Wisconsin, a defendant was sentenced to six years in prison for evading the police. You may not know this, but algorithms are increasingly used in parole and sentencing decisions. He wanted to know: How is this score calculated? It's a commercial black box. The company refused to have its algorithm be challenged in open court. But ProPublica, an investigative nonprofit, audited that very algorithm with what public data they could find, and found that its outcomes were biased and its predictive power was dismal, barely better than chance, and it was wrongly labeling black defendants as future criminals at twice the rate of white defendants. So, consider this case: This woman was late picking up her godsister from a school in Broward County, Florida, running down the street with a friend of hers. They spotted an unlocked kid's bike and a scooter on a porch and foolishly jumped on it. As they were speeding off, a woman came out and said, "Hey! That's my kid's bike!" They dropped it, they walked away, but they were arrested. She was wrong, she was foolish, but she was also just 18. She had a couple of juvenile misdemeanors. Meanwhile, that man had been arrested for shoplifting in Home Depot — 85 dollars' worth of stuff, a similar petty crime. But he had two prior armed robbery convictions. But the algorithm scored her as high risk, and not him. Two years later, ProPublica found that she had not reoffended. It was just hard to get a job for her with her record. He, on the other hand, did reoffend and is now serving an eight-year prison term for a later crime. Clearly, we need to audit our black boxes and not have them have this kind of unchecked power. (Applause) Audits are great and important, but they don't solve all our problems. Take Facebook's powerful news feed algorithm — you know, the one that ranks everything and decides what to show you from all the friends and pages you follow. Should you be shown another baby picture? (Laughter) A sullen note from an acquaintance? An important but difficult news item? There's no right answer. Facebook optimizes for engagement on the site: likes, shares, comments. In August of 2014, protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of an African-American teenager by a white police officer, under murky circumstances. The news of the protests was all over my algorithmically unfiltered Twitter feed, but nowhere on my Facebook. Was it my Facebook friends? I disabled Facebook's algorithm, which is hard because Facebook keeps wanting to make you come under the algorithm's control, and saw that my friends were talking about it. It's just that the algorithm wasn't showing it to me. I researched this and found this was a widespread problem. The story of Ferguson wasn't algorithm-friendly. It's not "likable." Who's going to click on "like?" It's not even easy to comment on. Without likes and comments, the algorithm was likely showing it to even fewer people, so we didn't get to see this. Instead, that week, Facebook's algorithm highlighted this, which is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Worthy cause; dump ice water, donate to charity, fine. But it was super algorithm-friendly. The machine made this decision for us. A very important but difficult conversation might have been smothered, had Facebook been the only channel. Now, finally, these systems can also be wrong in ways that don't resemble human systems. Do you guys remember Watson, IBM's machine-intelligence system that wiped the floor with human contestants on Jeopardy? It was a great player. But then, for Final Jeopardy, Watson was asked this question: "Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero, its second-largest for a World War II battle." (Hums Final Jeopardy music) Chicago. The two humans got it right. Watson, on the other hand, answered "Toronto" — for a US city category! The impressive system also made an error that a human would never make, a second-grader wouldn't make. Our machine intelligence can fail in ways that don't fit error patterns of humans, in ways we won't expect and be prepared for. It'd be lousy not to get a job one is qualified for, but it would triple suck if it was because of stack overflow in some subroutine. (Laughter) In May of 2010, a flash crash on Wall Street fueled by a feedback loop in Wall Street's "sell" algorithm wiped a trillion dollars of value in 36 minutes. I don't even want to think what "error" means in the context of lethal autonomous weapons. So yes, humans have always made biases. Decision makers and gatekeepers, in courts, in news, in war ... they make mistakes; but that's exactly my point. We cannot escape these difficult questions. We cannot outsource our responsibilities to machines. (Applause) Artificial intelligence does not give us a "Get out of ethics free" card. Data scientist Fred Benenson calls this math-washing. We need the opposite. We need to cultivate algorithm suspicion, scrutiny and investigation. We need to make sure we have algorithmic accountability, auditing and meaningful transparency. We need to accept that bringing math and computation to messy, value-laden human affairs does not bring objectivity; rather, the complexity of human affairs invades the algorithms. Yes, we can and we should use computation to help us make better decisions. But we have to own up to our moral responsibility to judgment, and use algorithms within that framework, not as a means to abdicate and outsource our responsibilities to one another as human to human. Machine intelligence is here. That means we must hold on ever tighter to human values and human ethics. Thank you. (Applause) |
Inside the mind of a former radical jihadist | {0: 'A former committed pioneer of violent jihad, Manwar Ali draws on his experience and deepening understanding of Islam to prevent radicalisation and extremism.'} | TEDxExeter | Today I stand before you as a man who lives life to the full in the here and now. But for a long time, I lived for death. I was a young man who believed that jihad is to be understood in the language of force and violence. I tried to right wrongs through power and aggression. I had deep concerns for the suffering of others and a strong desire to help and bring relief to them. I thought violent jihad was noble, chivalrous and the best way to help. At a time when so many of our people — young people especially — are at risk of radicalization through groups like al-Qaeda, Islamic State and others, when these groups are claiming that their horrific brutality and violence are true jihad, I want to say that their idea of jihad is wrong — completely wrong — as was mine, then. Jihad means to strive to one's utmost. It includes exertion and spirituality, self-purification and devotion. It refers to positive transformation through learning, wisdom and remembrance of God. The word jihad stands for all those meanings as a whole. Jihad may at times take the form of fighting, but only sometimes, under strict conditions, within rules and limits. In Islam, the benefit of an act must outweigh the harm or hardship it entails. More importantly, the verses in the Koran that are connected to jihad or fighting do not cancel out the verses that talk about forgiveness, benevolence or patience. But now I believe that there are no circumstances on earth where violent jihad is permissible, because it will lead to greater harm. But now the idea of jihad has been hijacked. It has been perverted to mean violent struggle wherever Muslims are undergoing difficulties, and turned into terrorism by fascistic Islamists like al-Qaeda, Islamic State and others. But I have come to understand that true jihad means striving to the utmost to strengthen and live those qualities which God loves: honesty, trustworthiness, compassion, benevolence, reliability, respect, truthfulness — human values that so many of us share. I was born in Bangladesh, but grew up mostly in England. And I went to school here. My father was an academic, and we were in the UK through his work. In 1971 we were in Bangladesh when everything changed. The War of Independence impacted upon us terribly, pitting family against family, neighbor against neighbor. And at the age of 12 I experienced war, destitution in my family, the deaths of 22 of my relatives in horrible ways, as well as the murder of my elder brother. I witnessed killing ... animals feeding on corpses in the streets, starvation all around me, wanton, horrific violence — senseless violence. I was a young man, teenager, fascinated by ideas. I wanted to learn, but I could not go to school for four years. After the War of Independence, my father was put in prison for two and a half years, and I used to visit him every week in prison, and homeschooled myself. My father was released in 1973 and he fled to England as a refugee, and we soon followed him. I was 17. So these experiences gave me a sharp awareness of the atrocities and injustices in the world. And I had a strong desire — a very keen, deep desire — to right wrongs and help the victims of oppression. While studying at college in the UK, I met others who showed me how I could channel that desire and help through my religion. And I was radicalized — enough to consider violence correct, even a virtue under certain circumstances. So I became involved in the jihad in Afghanistan. I wanted to protect the Muslim Afghan population against the Soviet army. And I thought that was jihad: my sacred duty, which would be rewarded by God. I became a preacher. I was one of the pioneers of violent jihad in the UK. I recruited, I raised funds, I trained. I confused true jihad with this perversion as presented by the fascist Islamists — these people who use the idea of jihad to justify their lust for power, authority and control on earth: a perversion perpetuated today by fascist Islamist groups like al-Qaeda, Islamic State and others. For a period of around 15 years, I fought for short periods of time in Kashmir and Burma, besides Afghanistan. Our aim was to remove the invaders, to bring relief to the oppressed victims and of course to establish an Islamic state, a caliphate for God's rule. And I did this openly. I didn't break any laws. I was proud and grateful to be British — I still am. And I bore no hostility against this, my country, nor enmity towards the non-Muslim citizens, and I still don't. During one battle in Afghanistan, some British men and I formed a special bond with a 15-year-old Afghani boy, Abdullah, an innocent, loving and lovable kid who was always eager to please. He was poor. And boys like him did menial tasks in the camp. And he seemed happy enough, but I couldn't help wonder — his parents must have missed him dearly. And they must have dreamt about a better future for him. A victim of circumstance caught up in a war, cruelly thrust upon him by the cruel circumstances of the time. One day I picked up this unexploded mortar shell in a trench, and I had it deposited in a makeshift mud hut lab. And I went out on a short, pointless skirmish — always pointless, And I came back a few hours later to discover he was dead. He had tried to recover explosives from that shell. It exploded, and he died a violent death, blown to bits by the very same device that had proved harmless to me. So I started to question. How did his death serve any purpose? Why did he die and I lived? I carried on. I fought in Kashmir. I also recruited for the Philippines, Bosnia and Chechnya. And the questions grew. Later in Burma, I came across Rohingya fighters, who were barely teenagers, born and brought up in the jungle, carrying machine guns and grenade launchers. I met two 13-year-olds with soft manners and gentle voices. Looking at me, they begged me to take them away to England. They simply wanted to go to school — that was their dream. My family — my children of the same age — were living at home in the UK, going to school, living a safe life. And I couldn't help wonder how much these young boys must have spoken to one another about their dreams for such a life. Victims of circumstances: these two young boys, sleeping rough on the ground, looking up at the stars, cynically exploited by their leaders for their personal lust for glory and power. I soon witnessed boys like them killing one another in conflicts between rival groups. And it was the same everywhere ... Afghanistan, Kashmir, Burma, Philippines, Chechnya; petty warlords got the young and vulnerable to kill one another in the name of jihad. Muslims against Muslims. Not protecting anyone against invaders or occupiers; not bringing relief to the oppressed. Children being used, cynically exploited; people dying in conflicts which I was supporting in the name of jihad. And it still carries on today. Realizing that the violent jihad I had engaged in abroad was so different — such a chasm between what I had experienced and what I thought was sacred duty — I had to reflect on my activities here in the UK. I had to consider my preaching, recruiting, fund-raising, training, but most importantly, radicalizing — sending young people to fight and die as I was doing — all totally wrong. So I got involved in violent jihad in the mid '80s, starting with Afghanistan. And by the time I finished it was in the year 2000. I was completely immersed in it. All around me people supported, applauded, even celebrated what we were doing in their name. But by the time I learned to get out, completely disillusioned in the year 2000, 15 years had passed. So what goes wrong? We were so busy talking about virtue, and we were blinded by a cause. And we did not give ourselves a chance to develop a virtuous character. We told ourselves we were fighting for the oppressed, but these were unwinnable wars. We became the very instrument through which more deaths occurred, complicit in causing further misery for the selfish benefit of the cruel few. So over time, a very long time, I opened my eyes. I began to dare to face the truth, to think, to face the hard questions. I got in touch with my soul. What have I learned? That people who engage in violent jihadism, that people who are drawn to these types of extremisms, are not that different to everyone else. But I believe such people can change. They can regain their hearts and restore them by filling them with human values that heal. When we ignore the realities, we discover that we accept what we are told without critical reflection. And we ignore the gifts and advantages that many of us would cherish even for a single moment in their lives. I engaged in actions I thought were correct. But now I began to question how I knew what I knew. I endlessly told others to accept the truth, but I failed to give doubt its rightful place. This conviction that people can change is rooted in my experience, my own journey. Through wide reading, reflecting, contemplation, self-knowledge, I discovered, I realized that Islamists' world of us and them is false and unjust. Through considering the uncertainties in all that we had asserted, to the inviolable truths, incontestable truths, I developed a more nuanced understanding. I realized that in a world crowded with variation and contradiction, foolish preachers, only foolish preachers like I used to be, see no paradox in the myths and fictions they use to assert authenticity. So I understood the vital importance of self-knowledge, political awareness and the necessity for a deep and wide understanding of our commitments and our actions, how they affect others. So my plea today to everyone, especially those who sincerely believe in Islamist jihadism ... refuse dogmatic authority; let go of anger, hatred and violence; learn to right wrongs without even attempting to justify cruel, unjust and futile behavior. Instead create a few beautiful and useful things that outlive us. Approach the world, life, with love. Learn to develop or cultivate your hearts to see goodness, beauty and truth in others and in the world. That way we do matter more to ourselves ... to each other, to our communities and, for me, to God. This is jihad — my true jihad. Thank you. (Applause) |
The unexpected challenges of a country's first election | {0: "Philippa Neave is senior advisor on the UN's Lexicon of Electoral Terminology."} | TEDNYC | The great philosopher Aristotle said if something doesn't exist, there's no word for it, and if there's no word for something, that something doesn't exist. So when we talk about elections, we in established democracies, we know what we're talking about. We've got the words. We have the vocabulary. We know what a polling station is. We know what a ballot paper is. But what about countries where democracy doesn't exist, countries where there are no words to describe the concepts that underpin a democratic society? I work in the field of electoral assistance, so that's to say we assist emerging democracies to organize what is often their first elections. When people ask me what I do, quite often I get this answer. "Oh, so you're one of these people who goes around the world imposing Western democracy on countries that can't handle it." Well, the United Nations does not impose anything on anybody. It really doesn't, and also, what we do is firmly anchored in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 21, that says that everybody should have the right to choose who governs them. So that's the basis of the work. I specialize in public outreach. What does that mean? Another jargon. It actually means designing information campaigns so that candidates and voters who have never had the opportunity to participate or to vote understand where, when, how to register; where, when, how to vote; why, why it is important to take part. So I'll probably devise a specific campaign to reach out to women to make sure that they can take part, that they can be part of the process. Young people as well. All sorts of people. Handicapped people. We try to reach everybody. And it's not always easy, because very often in this work, I've noticed now over the years that I've been doing it that words are lacking, and so what do you do? Afghanistan. It's a country with high levels of illiteracy, and the thing about that was, it was in 2005, and we organized two elections on the same day. The reason was because the logistics are so incredibly difficult, it seemed to be more efficient to do that. It was, but on the other hand, explaining two elections instead of one was even more complicated. So we used a lot of images, and when it came to the actual ballot, we had problems, because so many people wanted to take part, we had 300 candidates for 52 seats in the Wolesi Jirga, which is the parliamentary elections. And for the Provincial Council, we had even more candidates. We had 330 for 54 seats. So talking about ballot design, this is what the ballot looked like. It's the size of a newspaper. This was the Wolesi Jirga ballot — (Laughter) Yeah, and — this was the Provincial Council ballot. Even more. So you see, we did use a lot of symbols and things like that. And we had other problems in Southern Sudan. Southern Sudan was a very different story. We had so many people who had never, of course, voted, but we had extremely, extremely high levels of illiteracy, very, very poor infrastructure. For example — I mean, it's a country the size of Texas, more or less. We had seven kilometers of paved roads, seven kilometers in the whole country, and that includes the tarmac where we landed the planes in Juba Airport. So transporting electoral materials, etc., is exceedingly difficult. People had no idea about what a box looked like. It was very complicated, so using verbal communication was obviously the way to go, but there were 132 languages. So that was extremely challenging. Then I arrived in Tunisia in 2011. It was the Arab Spring. A huge amount of hope was generated by that enormous movement that was going on in the region. There was Libya, there was Egypt, there was Yemen. It was an enormous, enormous historical moment. And I was sitting with the election commission, and we were talking about various aspects of the election, and I was hearing them using words that I hadn't actually heard before, and I'd worked with Iraqis, I'd worked with Jordanians, Egyptians, and suddenly they were using these words, and I just thought, "This is strange." And what really gave rise to it was this word "observer." We were discussing election observers, and the election commissioner was talking about "mulahiz" in Arabic. This means "to notice" in a passive sort of sense, as in, "I noticed he was wearing a light blue shirt." Did I go and check whether the shirt was light blue or not? That is the role of an election observer. It's very active, it's governed by all kinds of treaties, and it has got that control function in it. And then I got wind of the fact that in Egypt, they were using this term "mutabi’," which means "to follow." So we were now having followers of an election. So that's not quite right either, because there is a term that's already accepted and in use, which was the word "muraqib" which means "a controller." It's got that notion of control. So I thought, three words for one concept. This is not good. And with our colleagues, we thought perhaps it's our role to actually help make sure that the words are understood and actually create a work of reference that could be used across the Arab region. And that's what we did. So together with these colleagues, we launched the "Arabic Lexicon of Electoral Terminology," and we worked in eight different countries. It meant actually defining 481 terms which formed the basis of everything you need to know if you're going to organize a democratic election. And we defined these terms, and we worked with the Arab colleagues and came to an agreement about what would be the appropriate word to use in Arabic. Because the Arabic language is very rich, and that's part of the problem. But there are 22 countries that speak Arabic, and they use modern standard Arabic, which is the Arabic that is used across the whole region in newspapers and broadcasts, but of course, then from one country to the next in day to day language and use it varies — dialect, colloquialisms, etc. So that was another added layer of complication. So in one sense you had the problem that language wasn't fully ripe, if you like, neologisms were coming up, new expressions. And so we defined all these terms, and then we had eight correspondents in the region. We submitted the draft to them, they responded back to us. "Yes, we understand the definition. We agree with it, but this is what we say in our country." Because we were not going to harmonize or force harmonization. We were trying to facilitate understanding among people. So in yellow, you see the different expressions in use in the various countries. So this, I'm happy to say, it took three years to produce this because we also finalized the draft and took it actually into the field, sat with the election commissions in all these different countries, debated and defined and refined the draft, and finally published it in November 2014 in Cairo. And it's gone a long way. We published 10,000 copies. To date, there's about 3,000 downloads off the internet in PDF form. I heard just recently from a colleague that they've taken it up in Somalia. They're going to produce a version of this in Somalia, because there's nothing in Somalia at all. So that's very good to know. And this newly formed Arab Organization for Electoral Management Bodies, which is trying to professionalize how elections are run in the region, they're using it as well. And the Arab League have now built up a pan-Arab observation unit, and they're using it. So that's all really good. However, this work of reference is quite high-pitched. It's complex, and a lot of the terms are quite technical, so the average person probably doesn't need to know at least a third of it. But the people of the Middle East have been deprived of any form of what we know as civic education. It's part of our curriculum at school. It doesn't really exist in that part of the world, and I feel it's really the right of everybody to know how these things work. And it's a good thing to think about producing a work of reference for the average person, and bearing in mind that now we have a basis to work with, but also we have technology, so we can reach out using telephone apps, video, animation. There's all sorts of tools that can be used now to communicate these ideas to people for the first time in their own language. We hear a lot of misery about the Middle East. We hear the chaos of war. We hear terrorism. We hear about sectarianism and all this horrible negative news that comes to us all the time. What we're not hearing is what are the people, the everyday people, thinking? What are they aspiring to? Let's give them the means, let's give them the words. The silent majority is silent because they don't have the words. The silent majority needs to know. It is time to provide people with the knowledge tools that they can inform themselves with. The silent majority does not need to be silent. Let's help them have a voice. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
What a driverless world could look like | {0: "UPS's Wanis Kabbaj seeks new ways of understanding the growing complexity of our congested cities and globalized world."} | TED@UPS | Some people are obsessed by French wines. Others love playing golf or devouring literature. One of my greatest pleasures in life is, I have to admit, a bit special. I cannot tell you how much I enjoy watching cities from the sky, from an airplane window. Some cities are calmly industrious, like Dusseldorf or Louisville. Others project an energy that they can hardly contain, like New York or Hong Kong. And then you have Paris or Istanbul, and their patina full of history. I see cities as living beings. And when I discover them from far above, I like to find those main streets and highways that structure their space. Especially at night, when commuters make these arteries look dramatically red and golden: the city's vascular system performing its vital function right before your eyes. But when I'm sitting in my car after an hour and a half of commute every day, that reality looks very different. (Laughter) Nothing — not public radio, no podcast — (Laughter) Not even mindfulness meditation makes this time worth living. (Laughter) Isn't it absurd that we created cars that can reach 130 miles per hour and we now drive them at the same speed as 19th-century horse carriages? (Laughter) In the US alone, we spent 29.6 billion hours commuting in 2014. With that amount of time, ancient Egyptians could have built 26 Pyramids of Giza. (Laughter) We do that in one year. A monumental waste of time, energy and human potential. For decades, our remedy for congestion was simple: build new roads or enlarge existing ones. And it worked. It worked admirably for Paris, when the city tore down hundreds of historical buildings to create 85 miles of transportation-friendly boulevards. And it still works today in fast-growing emerging cities. But in more established urban centers, significant network expansions are almost impossible: habitat is just too dense, real estate, too expensive and public finances, too fragile. Our city's vascular system is getting clogged, it's getting sick, and we should pay attention. Our current way of thinking is not working. For our transportation to flow, we need a new source of inspiration. So after 16 years working in transportation, my "aha moment" happened when speaking with a biotech customer. She was telling me how her treatment was leveraging specific properties of our vascular system. "Wow," I thought, "Our vascular system — all the veins and arteries in our body making miracles of logistics every day." This is the moment I realized that biology has been in the transportation business for billions of years. It has been testing countless solutions to move nutrients, gases and proteins. It really is the world's most sophisticated transportation laboratory. So, what if the solution to our traffic challenges was inside us? I wanted to know: Why is it that blood flows in our veins most of our lives, when our big cities get clogged on a daily basis? And the reality is that you're looking at two very different networks. I don't know if you realize, but each of us has 60,000 miles of blood vessels in our bodies — 60,000 miles. That's two-and-a-half times the Earth's circumference, inside you. What it means is that blood vessels are everywhere inside us, not just under the surface of our skin. But if you look at our cities, yes, we have some underground subway systems and some tunnels and bridges, and also some helicopters in the sky. But the vast majority of our traffic is focused on the ground, on the surface. So in other words, while our vascular system uses the three dimensions inside us, our urban transportation is mostly two-dimensional. And so what we need is to embrace that verticality. If our surface grid is saturated, well, let's elevate our traffic. This Chinese concept of a bus that can straddle traffic jams — that was an eye-opener on new ways to think about space and movement inside our cities. And we can go higher, and suspend our transportation like we did with our electrical grid. Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi are talking about testing these futuristic networks of suspended magnetic pods. And we can keep climbing, and fly. The fact that a company like Airbus is now seriously working on flying urban taxis is telling us something. Flying cars are finally moving from science-fiction déjà vu to attractive business-case territory. And that's an exciting moment. So building this 3-D transportation network is one of the ways we can mitigate and solve traffic jams. But it's not the only one. We have to question other fundamental choices that we made, like the vehicles we use. Just imagine a very familiar scene: You've been driving for 42 minutes. The two kids behind you are getting restless. And you're late. Do you see that slow car in front of you? Always comes when you're late, right? (Laughter) That driver is looking for parking. There is no parking spot available in the area, but how would he know? It is estimated that up to 30 percent of urban traffic is generated by drivers looking for parking. Do you see the 100 cars around you? Eighty-five of them only have one passenger. Those 85 drivers could all fit in one Londonian red bus. So the question is: Why are we wasting so much space if it is what we need the most? Why are we doing this to ourselves? Biology would never do this. Space inside our arteries is fully utilized. At every heartbeat, a higher blood pressure literally compacts millions of red blood cells into massive trains of oxygen that quickly flow throughout our body. And the tiny space inside our red blood cells is not wasted, either. In healthy conditions, more than 95 percent of their oxygen capacity is utilized. Can you imagine if the vehicles we used in our cities were 95 percent full, all the additional space you would have to walk, to bike and to enjoy our cities? The reason blood is so incredibly efficient is that our red blood cells are not dedicated to specific organs or tissues; otherwise, we would probably have traffic jams in our veins. No, they're shared. They're shared by all the cells of our body. And because our network is so extensive, each one of our 37 trillion cells gets its own deliveries of oxygen precisely when it needs them. Blood is both a collective and individual form of transportation. But for our cities, we've been stuck. We've been stuck in an endless debate between creating a car-centric society or extensive mass-transit systems. I think we should transcend this. I think we can create vehicles that combine the convenience of cars and the efficiencies of trains and buses. Just imagine. You're comfortably sitting in a fast and smooth urban train, along with 1,200 passengers. The problem with urban trains is that sometimes you have to stop five, ten, fifteen times before your final destination. What if in this train you didn't have to stop? In this train, wagons can detach dynamically while you're moving and become express, driverless buses that move on a secondary road network. And so without a single stop, nor a lengthy transfer, you are now sitting in a bus that is headed toward your suburb. And when you get close, the section you're sitting in detaches and self-drives you right to your doorstep. It is collective and individual at the same time. This could be one of the shared, modular, driverless vehicles of tomorrow. Now ... as if walking in a city buzzing with drones, flying taxis, modular buses and suspended magnetic pods was not exotic enough, I think there is another force in action that will make urban traffic mesmerizing. If you think about it, the current generation of driverless cars is just trying to earn its way into a traffic grid made by and for humans. They're trying to learn traffic rules, which is relatively simple, and coping with human unpredictability, which is more challenging. But what would happen when whole cities become driverless? Would we need traffic lights? Would we need lanes? How about speed limits? Red blood cells are not flowing in lanes. They never stop at red lights. In the first driverless cities, you would have no red lights and no lanes. And when all the cars are driverless and connected, everything is predictable and reaction time, minimum. They can drive much faster and can take any rational initiative that can speed them up or the cars around them. So instead of rigid traffic rules, flow will be regulated by a mesh of dynamic and constantly self-improving algorithms. The result: a strange traffic that mixes the fast and smooth rigor of German autobahns and the creative vitality of the intersections of Mumbai. (Laughter) Traffic will be functionally exuberant. It will be liquid like our blood. And by a strange paradox, the more robotized our traffic grid will be, the more organic and alive its movement will feel. So yes, biology has all the attributes of a transportation genius today. But this process has taken billions of years, and went through all sorts of iterations and mutations. We can't wait billions of years to evolve our transportation system. We now have the dreams, the concepts and the technology to create 3-D transportation networks, invent new vehicles and change the flow in our cities. Let's do it. Thank you. (Applause) |
How the US should use its superpower status | {0: 'Ian Bremmer is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm.'} | TEDxNewYork | When you come to TEDx, you always think about technology, the world changing, becoming more innovative. You think about the driverless. Everyone's talking about driverless cars these days, and I love the concept of a driverless car, but when I go in one, you know, I want it really slow, I want access to the steering wheel and the brake, just in case. I don't know about you, but I am not ready for a driverless bus. I am not ready for a driverless airplane. How about a driverless world? And I ask you that because we are increasingly in one. It's not supposed to be that way. We're number one, the United States is large and in charge. Americanization and globalization for the last several generations have basically been the same thing. Right? Whether it's the World Trade Organization or it's the IMF, the World Bank, the Bretton Woods Accord on currency, these were American institutions, our values, our friends, our allies, our money, our standards. That was the way the world worked. So it's sort of interesting, if you want to look at how the US looks, here it is. This is our view of how the world is run. President Obama has got the red carpet, he goes down Air Force One, and it feels pretty good, it feels pretty comfortable. Well, I don't know how many of you saw the China trip last week and the G20. Oh my God. Right? This is how we landed for the most important meeting of the world's leaders in China. The National Security Advisor was actually spewing expletives on the tarmac — no red carpet, kind of left out the bottom of the plane along with all the media and everybody else. Later on in the G20, well, there's Obama. (Laughter) Hi, George. Hi, Norman. They look like they're about to get into a cage match, right? And they did. It was 90 minutes long, and they talked about Syria. That's what Putin wanted to talk about. He's increasingly calling the shots. He's the one willing to do stuff there. There's not a lot of mutual like or trust, but it's not as if the Americans are telling him what to do. How about when the whole 20 are getting together? Surely, when the leaders are all onstage, then the Americans are pulling their weight. Uh-oh. (Laughter) Xi Jinping seems fine. Angela Merkel has — she always does — that look, she always does that. But Putin is telling Turkish president Erdogan what to do, and Obama is like, what's going on over there? You see. And the problem is it's not a G20, the problem is it's a G-Zero world that we live in, a world order where there is no single country or alliance that can meet the challenges of global leadership. The G20 doesn't work, the G7, all of our friends, that's history. So globalization is continuing. Goods and services and people and capital are moving across borders faster and faster than ever before, but Americanization is not. So if I've convinced you of that, I want to do two things with the rest of this talk. I want to talk about the implications of that for the whole world. I'll go around it. And then I want to talk about what we think right here in the United States and in New York. So why? What are the implications. Why are we here? Well, we're here because the United States, we spent two trillion dollars on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were failed. We don't want to do that anymore. We have large numbers of middle and working classes that feel like they've not benefited from promises of globalization, so they don't want to see it particularly. And we have an energy revolution where we don't need OPEC or the Middle East the way we used to. We produce all that right here in the United States. So the Americans don't want to be the global sheriff for security or the architect of global trade. The Americans don't want to even be the cheerleader of global values. Well, then you look to Europe, and the most important alliance in the world has been the transatlantic relationship. But it is now weaker than it has been at any point since World War II, all of the crises, the Brexit conversations, the hedging going on between the French and the Russians, or the Germans and the Turks, or the Brits and the Chinese. China does want to do more leadership. They do, but only in the economic sphere, and they want their own values, standards, currency, in competition with that of the US. The Russians want to do more leadership. You see that in Ukraine, in the Baltic states, in the Middle East, but not with the Americans. They want their own preferences and order. That's why we are where we are. So what happens going forward? Let's start easy, with the Middle East. (Laughter) You know, I left a little out, but you get the general idea. Look, there are three reasons why the Middle East has had stability such as it is. Right? One is because there was a willingness to provide some level of military security by the US and allies. Number two, it was easy to take a lot of cheap money out of the ground because oil was expensive. And number three was no matter how bad the leaders were, the populations were relatively quiescent. They didn't have the ability, and many didn't have the will to really rise up against. Well, I can tell you, in a G-Zero world, all three of those things are increasingly not true, and so failed states, terrorism, refugees and the rest. Does the entire Middle East fall apart? No, the Kurds will do better, and Iraq, Israel, Iran over time. But generally speaking, it's not a good look. OK, how about this guy? He's playing a poor hand very well. There's no question he's hitting above his weight. But long term — I didn't mean that. But long term, long term, if you think that the Russians were antagonized by the US and Europe expanding NATO right up to their borders when we said they weren't going to, and the EU encroaching them, just wait until the Chinese put hundreds of billions of dollars in every country around Russia they thought they had influence in. The Chinese are going to dominate it. The Russians are picking up the crumbs. In a G-Zero world, this is going to be a very tense 10 years for Mr. Putin. It's not all bad. Right? Asia actually looks a lot better. There are real leaders across Asia, they have a lot of political stability. They're there for a while. Mr. Modi in India, Mr. Abe, who is probably about to get a third term written in in the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, of course Xi Jinping who is consolidating enormous power, the most powerful leader in China since Mao. Those are the three most important economies in Asia. Now look, there are problems in Asia. We see the sparring over the South China Sea. We see that Kim Jong Un, just in the last couple of days, tested yet another nuclear weapon. But the leaders in Asia do not feel the need to wave the flag, to go xenophobic, to actually allow escalation of the geopolitical and cross-border tensions. They want to focus on long-term economic stability and growth. And that's what they're actually doing. Let's turn to Europe. Europe does look a little scared in this environment. So much of what is happening in the Middle East is washing up quite literally onto European shores. You see Brexit and you see the concerns of populism across all of the European states. Let me tell you that over the long term, in a G-Zero world, European expansion will be seen to have gone too far. Europe went right up to Russia, went right down to the Middle East, and if the world were truly becoming more flat and more Americanized, that would be less of a problem, but in a G-Zero world, those countries nearest Russia and nearest the Middle East actually have different economic capabilities, different social stability and different political preferences and systems than core Europe. So Europe was able to truly expand under the G7, but under the G-Zero, Europe will get smaller. Core Europe around Germany and France and others will still work, be functional, stable, wealthy, integrated. But the periphery, countries like Greece and Turkey and others, will not look that good at all. Latin America, a lot of populism, made the economies not go so well. They had been more opposed to the United States for decades. Increasingly, they're coming back. We see that in Argentina. We see it with the openness in Cuba. We will see it in Venezuela when Maduro falls. We will see it in Brazil after the impeachment and when we finally see a new legitimate president elected there. The only place you see that is moving in another direction is the unpopularity of Mexican president Peña Nieto. There you could actually see a slip away from the United States over the coming years. The US election matters a lot on that one, too. (Laughter) Africa, right? A lot of people have said it's going to be Africa's decade, finally. In a G-Zero world, it is absolutely an amazing time for a few African countries, those governed well with a lot of urbanization, a lot of smart people, women really getting into the workforce, entrepreneurship taking off. But for most of the countries in Africa, it's going to be a lot more dicey: extreme climate conditions, radicalism both from Islam and also Christianity, very poor governance, borders you can't defend, lots of forced migration. Those countries can fall off the map. So you're really going to see an extreme segregation going on between the winners and the losers across Africa. Finally, back to the United States. What do I think about us? Because there are a lot of upset people, not here at TEDx, I know, but in the United States, my God, after 15 months of campaigning, we should be upset. I understand that. But a lot of people are upset because they say, "Washington's broken, we don't trust the establishment, we hate the media." Heck, even globalists like me are taking it on the chin. Look, I do think we have to recognize, my fellow campers, that when you are being chased by the bear, in the global context, you need not outrun the bear, you need to only outrun your fellow campers. (Laughter) Now, I just told you about our fellow campers. Right? And from that perspective, we look OK. A lot of people in that context say, "Let's go dollar. Let's go New York real estate. Let's send our kids to American universities." You know, our neighbors are awesome: Canada, Mexico and two big bodies of water. You know how much Turkey would love to have neighbors like that? Those are awesome neighbors. Terrorism is a problem in the United States. God knows we know it here in New York. But it's a much bigger problem in Europe than the US. It's a much bigger problem in the Middle East than it is in Europe. These are factors of large magnitude. We just accepted 10,000 Syrian refugees, and we're complaining bitterly about it. You know why? Because they can't swim here. Right? I mean, the Turks would love to have only 10,000 Syrian refugees. The Jordanians, the Germans, the Brits. Right? That's not the situation. That's the reality of the United States. Now, that sounds pretty good. Here's the challenge. In a G-Zero world, the way you lead is by example. If we know we don't want to be the global cop anymore, if we know we're not going to be the architect of global trade, we're not going to be the cheerleader of global values, we're not going to do it the way we used to, the 21st century is changing, we need to lead by example — be so compelling that all these other people are going to still say, it's not just they're faster campers. Even when the bear is not chasing us, this is a good place to be. We want to emulate them. The election process this year is not proving a good option for leading by example. Hillary Clinton says it's going to be like the '90s. We can still be that cheerleader on values. We can still be the architect of global trade. We can still be the global sheriff. And Donald Trump wants to bring us back to the '30s. He's saying, "Our way or the highway. You don't like it, lump it." Right? Neither are recognizing a fundamental truth of the G-Zero, which is that even though the US is not in decline, it is getting objectively harder for the Americans to impose their will, even have great influence, on the global order. Are we prepared to truly lead by example? What would we have to do to fix this after November, after the next president comes in? Well, either we have to have another crisis that forces us to respond. A depression would do that. Another global financial crisis could do this. God forbid, another 9/11 could do that. Or, absent crisis, we need to see that the hollowing out, the inequality, the challenges that are growing and growing in the United States, are themselves urgent enough to force our leaders to change, and that we have those voices. Through our cell phones, individually, we have those voices to compel them to change. There is, of course, a third choice, perhaps the most likely one, which is that we do neither of those things, and in four years time you invite me back, and I will give this speech yet again. Thank you very, very much. (Applause) |
How loss helped one artist find beauty in imperfection | {0: 'Alyssa Monks transfers the intimacy and vulnerability of human experience onto a painted surface.'} | TEDxIndianaUniversity | I'm a painter. I make large-scale figurative paintings, which means I paint people like this. But I'm here tonight to tell you about something personal that changed my work and my perspective. It's something we all go through, and my hope is that my experience may be helpful to somebody. To give you some background on me, I grew up the youngest of eight. Yes, eight kids in my family. I have six older brothers and a sister. To give you a sense of what that's like, when my family went on vacation, we had a bus. (Laughter) My supermom would drive us all over town to our various after-school activities — not in the bus. We had a regular car, too. She would take me to art classes, and not just one or two. She took me to every available art class from when I was eight to 16, because that's all I wanted to do. She even took a class with me in New York City. Now, being the youngest of eight, I learned a few survival skills. Rule number one: don't let your big brother see you do anything stupid. So I learned to be quiet and neat and careful to follow the rules and stay in line. But painting was where I made the rules. That was my private world. By 14, I knew I really wanted to be an artist. My big plan was to be a waitress to support my painting. So I continued honing my skills. I went to graduate school and I got an MFA, and at my first solo show, my brother asked me, "What do all these red dots mean next to the paintings?" Nobody was more surprised than me. The red dots meant that the paintings were sold and that I'd be able to pay my rent with painting. Now, my apartment had four electrical outlets, and I couldn't use a microwave and a toaster at the same time, but still, I could pay my rent. So I was very happy. Here's a painting from back around that time. I needed it to be as realistic as possible. It had to be specific and believable. This was the place where I was isolated and in total control. Since then, I've made a career of painting people in water. Bathtubs and showers were the perfect enclosed environment. It was intimate and private, and water was this complicated challenge that kept me busy for a decade. I made about 200 of these paintings, some of them six to eight feet, like this one. For this painting, I mixed flour in with the bathwater to make it cloudy and I floated cooking oil on the surface and stuck a girl in it, and when I lit it up, it was so beautiful I couldn't wait to paint it. I was driven by this kind of impulsive curiosity, always looking for something new to add: vinyl, steam, glass. I once put all this Vaseline in my head and hair just to see what that would look like. Don't do that. (Laughter) So it was going well. I was finding my way. I was eager and motivated and surrounded by artists, always going to openings and events. I was having some success and recognition and I moved into an apartment with more than four outlets. My mom and I would stay up very late talking about our latest ideas and inspiring each other. She made beautiful pottery. I have a friend named Bo who made this painting of his wife and I dancing by the ocean, and he called it "The Light Years." I asked him what that meant, and he said, "Well, that's when you've stepped into adulthood, you're no longer a child, but you're not yet weighed down by the responsibilities of life." That was it. It was the light years. On October 8, 2011, the light years came to an end. My mom was diagnosed with lung cancer. It had spread to her bones, and it was in her brain. When she told me this, I fell to my knees. I totally lost it. And when I got myself together and I looked at her, I realized, this isn't about me. This is about figuring out how to help her. My father is a doctor, and so we had a great advantage having him in charge, and he did a beautiful job taking care of her. But I, too, wanted to do everything I could to help, so I wanted to try everything. We all did. I researched alternative medicines, diets, juicing, acupuncture. Finally, I asked her, "Is this what you want me to do?" And she said, "No." She said, "Pace yourself. I'm going to need you later." She knew what was happening, and she knew what the doctors and the experts and the internet didn't know: how she wanted to go through this. I just needed to ask her. I realized that if I tried to fix it, I would miss it. So I just started to be with her, whatever that meant and whatever situation came up, just really listen to her. If before I was resisting, then now I was surrendering, giving up trying to control the uncontrollable and just being there in it with her. Time slowed down, and the date was irrelevant. We developed a routine. Early each morning I would crawl into bed with her and sleep with her. My brother would come for breakfast and we'd be so glad to hear his car coming up the driveway. So I'd help her up and take both her hands and help her walk to the kitchen. She had this huge mug she made she loved to drink her coffee out of, and she loved Irish soda bread for breakfast. Afterwards was the shower, and she loved this part. She loved the warm water, so I made this as indulgent as I could, like a spa. My sister would help sometimes. We had warm towels and slippers ready immediately so she never got cold for a second. I'd blow-dry her hair. My brothers would come in the evenings and bring their kids, and that was the highlight of her day. Over time, we started to use a wheelchair, and she didn't want to eat so much, and she used the tiniest little teacup we could find to drink her coffee. I couldn't support her myself anymore, so we hired an aide to help me with the showers. These simple daily activities became our sacred ritual, and we repeated them day after day as the cancer grew. It was humbling and painful and exactly where I wanted to be. We called this time "the beautiful awful." She died on October 26, 2012. It was a year and three weeks after her diagnosis. She was gone. My brothers, sister, and father and I all came together in this supportive and attentive way. It was as though our whole family dynamic and all our established roles vanished and we were just all together in this unknown, feeling the same thing and taking care of each other. I'm so grateful for them. As someone who spends most of my time alone in a studio working, I had no idea that this kind of connection could be so important, so healing. This was the most important thing. It was what I always wanted. So after the funeral, it was time for me to go back to my studio. So I packed up my car and I drove back to Brooklyn, and painting is what I've always done, so that's what I did. And here's what happened. It's like a release of everything that was unraveling in me. That safe, very, very carefully rendered safe place that I created in all my other paintings, it was a myth. It didn't work. And I was afraid, because I didn't want to paint anymore. So I went into the woods. I thought, I'll try that, going outside. I got my paints, and I wasn't a landscape painter, but I wasn't really much of any kind of painter at all, so I had no attachment, no expectation, which allowed me to be reckless and free. I actually left one of these wet paintings outside overnight next to a light in the woods. By the morning it was lacquered with bugs. But I didn't care. It didn't matter. It didn't matter. I took all these paintings back to my studio, and scraped them, and carved into them, and poured paint thinner on them, put more paint on top, drew on them. I had no plan, but I was watching what was happening. This is the one with all the bugs in it. I wasn't trying to represent a real space. It was the chaos and the imperfections that were fascinating me, and something started to happen. I got curious again. This is another one from the woods. There was a caveat now, though. I couldn't be controlling the paint like I used to. It had to be about implying and suggesting, not explaining or describing. And that imperfect, chaotic, turbulent surface is what told the story. I started to be as curious as I was when I was a student. So the next thing was I wanted to put figures in these paintings, people, and I loved this new environment, so I wanted to have both people and this atmosphere. When the idea hit me of how to do this, I got kind of nauseous and dizzy, which is really just adrenaline, probably, but for me it's a really good sign. And so now I want to show you what I've been working on. It's something I haven't shown yet, and it's like a preview, I guess, of my upcoming show, what I have so far. Expansive space instead of the isolated bathtub. I'm going outside instead of inside. Loosening control, savoring the imperfections, allowing the — allowing the imperfections. And in that imperfection, you can find a vulnerability. I could feel my deepest intention, what matters most to me, that human connection that can happen in a space where there's no resisting or controlling. I want to make paintings about that. So here's what I learned. We're all going to have big losses in our lives, maybe a job or a career, relationships, love, our youth. We're going to lose our health, people we love. These kinds of losses are out of our control. They're unpredictable, and they bring us to our knees. And so I say, let them. Fall to your knees. Be humbled. Let go of trying to change it or even wanting it to be different. It just is. And then there's space, and in that space feel your vulnerability, what matters most to you, your deepest intention. And be curious to connect to what and who is really here, awake and alive. It's what we all want. Let's take the opportunity to find something beautiful in the unknown, in the unpredictable, and even in the awful. Thank you. (Applause) |
Everything you hear on film is a lie | {0: 'Tasos Frantzolas lives and creates at the intersection of audio and technology.'} | TEDxAthens | I want to start by doing an experiment. I'm going to play three videos of a rainy day. But I've replaced the audio of one of the videos, and instead of the sound of rain, I've added the sound of bacon frying. So I want you think carefully which one the clip with the bacon is. (Rain falls) (Rain falls) (Rain falls) All right. Actually, I lied. They're all bacon. (Bacon sizzles) (Applause) My point here isn't really to make you hungry every time you see a rainy scene, but it's to show that our brains are conditioned to embrace the lies. We're not looking for accuracy. So on the subject of deception, I wanted to quote one of my favorite authors. In "The Decay of Lying," Oscar Wilde establishes the idea that all bad art comes from copying nature and being realistic; and all great art comes from lying and deceiving, and telling beautiful, untrue things. So when you're watching a movie and a phone rings, it's not actually ringing. It's been added later in postproduction in a studio. All of the sounds you hear are fake. Everything, apart from the dialogue, is fake. When you watch a movie and you see a bird flapping its wings — (Wings flap) They haven't really recorded the bird. It sounds a lot more realistic if you record a sheet or shaking kitchen gloves. (Flaps) The burning of a cigarette up close — (Cigarette burns) It actually sounds a lot more authentic if you take a small Saran Wrap ball and release it. (A Saran Warp ball being released) Punches? (Punch) Oops, let me play that again. (Punch) That's often done by sticking a knife in vegetables, usually cabbage. (Cabbage stabbed with a knife) The next one — it's breaking bones. (Bones break) Well, no one was really harmed. It's actually ... breaking celery or frozen lettuce. (Breaking frozen lettuce or celery) (Laughter) Making the right sounds is not always as easy as a trip to the supermarket and going to the vegetable section. But it's often a lot more complicated than that. So let's reverse-engineer together the creation of a sound effect. One of my favorite stories comes from Frank Serafine. He's a contributor to our library, and a great sound designer for "Tron" and "Star Trek" and others. He was part of the Paramount team that won the Oscar for best sound for "The Hunt for Red October." In this Cold War classic, in the '90s, they were asked to produce the sound of the propeller of the submarine. So they had a small problem: they couldn't really find a submarine in West Hollywood. So basically, what they did is, they went to a friend's swimming pool, and Frank performed a cannonball, or bomba. They placed an underwater mic and an overhead mic outside the swimming pool. So here's what the underwater mic sounds like. (Underwater plunge) Adding the overhead mic, it sounded a bit like this: (Water splashes) So now they took the sound and pitched it one octave down, sort of like slowing down a record. (Water splashes at lower octave) And then they removed a lot of the high frequencies. (Water splashes) And pitched it down another octave. (Water splashes at lower octave) And then they added a little bit of the splash from the overhead microphone. (Water splashes) And by looping and repeating that sound, they got this: (Propeller churns) So, creativity and technology put together in order to create the illusion that we're inside the submarine. But once you've created your sounds and you've synced them to the image, you want those sounds to live in the world of the story. And one the best ways to do that is to add reverb. So this is the first audio tool I want to talk about. Reverberation, or reverb, is the persistence of the sound after the original sound has ended. So it's sort of like the — all the reflections from the materials, the objects and the walls around the sound. Take, for example, the sound of a gunshot. The original sound is less than half a second long. (Gunshot) By adding reverb, we can make it sound like it was recorded inside a bathroom. (Gunshot reverbs in bathroom) Or like it was recorded inside a chapel or a church. (Gunshot reverbs church) Or in a canyon. (Gunshot reverbs in canyon) So reverb gives us a lot of information about the space between the listener and the original sound source. If the sound is the taste, then reverb is sort of like the smell of the sound. But reverb can do a lot more. Listening to a sound with a lot less reverberation than the on-screen action is going to immediately signify to us that we're listening to a commentator, to an objective narrator that's not participating in the on-screen action. Also, emotionally intimate moments in cinema are often heard with zero reverb, because that's how it would sound if someone was speaking inside our ear. On the completely other side, adding a lot of reverb to a voice is going to make us think that we're listening to a flashback, or perhaps that we're inside the head of a character or that we're listening to the voice of God. Or, even more powerful in film, Morgan Freeman. (Laughter) So — (Applause) But what are some other tools or hacks that sound designers use? Well, here's a really big one. It's silence. A few moments of silence is going to make us pay attention. And in the Western world, we're not really used to verbal silences. They're considered awkward or rude. So silence preceding verbal communication can create a lot of tension. But imagine a really big Hollywood movie, where it's full of explosions and automatic guns. Loud stops being loud anymore, after a while. So in a yin-yang way, silence needs loudness and loudness needs silence for either of them to have any effect. But what does silence mean? Well, it depends how it's used in each film. Silence can place us inside the head of a character or provoke thought. We often relate silences with ... contemplation, meditation, being deep in thought. But apart from having one meaning, silence becomes a blank canvas upon which the viewer is invited to the paint their own thoughts. But I want to make it clear: there is no such thing as silence. And I know this sounds like the most pretentious TED Talk statement ever. But even if you were to enter a room with zero reverberation and zero external sounds, you would still be able to hear the pumping of your own blood. And in cinema, traditionally, there was never a silent moment because of the sound of the projector. And even in today's Dolby world, there's not really any moment of silence if you listen around you. There's always some sort of noise. Now, since there's no such thing as silence, what do filmmakers and sound designers use? Well, as a synonym, they often use ambiences. Ambiences are the unique background sounds that are specific to each location. Each location has a unique sound, and each room has a unique sound, which is called room tone. So here's a recording of a market in Morocco. (Voices, music) And here's a recording of Times Square in New York. (Traffic sounds, car horns, voices) Room tone is the addition of all the noises inside the room: the ventilation, the heating, the fridge. Here's a recording of my apartment in Brooklyn. (You can hear the ventilation, the boiler, the fridge and street traffic) Ambiences work in a most primal way. They can speak directly to our brain subconsciously. So, birds chirping outside your window may indicate normality, perhaps because, as a species, we've been used to that sound every morning for millions of years. (Birds chirp) On the other hand, industrial sounds have been introduced to us a little more recently. Even though I really like them personally — they've been used by one of my heroes, David Lynch, and his sound designer, Alan Splet — industrial sounds often carry negative connotations. (Machine noises) Now, sound effects can tap into our emotional memory. Occasionally, they can be so significant that they become a character in a movie. The sound of thunder may indicate divine intervention or anger. (Thunder) Church bells can remind us of the passing of time, or perhaps our own mortality. (Bells ring) And breaking of glass can indicate the end of a relationship or a friendship. (Glass breaks) Scientists believe that dissonant sounds, for example, brass or wind instruments played very loud, may remind us of animal howls in nature and therefore create a sense of irritation or fear. (Brass and wind instruments play) So now we've spoken about on-screen sounds. But occasionally, the source of a sound cannot be seen. That's what we call offscreen sounds, or "acousmatic." Acousmatic sounds — well, the term "acousmatic" comes from Pythagoras in ancient Greece, who used to teach behind a veil or curtain for years, not revealing himself to his disciples. I think the mathematician and philosopher thought that, in that way, his students might focus more on the voice, and his words and its meaning, rather than the visual of him speaking. So sort of like the Wizard of Oz, or "1984's" Big Brother, separating the voice from its source, separating cause and effect sort of creates a sense of ubiquity or panopticism, and therefore, authority. There's a strong tradition of acousmatic sound. Nuns in monasteries in Rome and Venice used to sing in rooms up in galleries close to the ceiling, creating the illusion that we're listening to angels up in the sky. Richard Wagner famously created the hidden orchestra that was placed in a pit between the stage and the audience. And one of my heroes, Aphex Twin, famously hid in dark corners of clubs. I think what all these masters knew is that by hiding the source, you create a sense of mystery. This has been seen in cinema over and over, with Hitchcock, and Ridley Scott in "Alien." Hearing a sound without knowing its source is going to create some sort of tension. Also, it can minimize certain visual restrictions that directors have and can show something that wasn't there during filming. And if all this sounds a little theoretical, I wanted to play a little video. (Toy squeaks) (Typewriter) (Drums) (Ping-pong) (Knives being sharpened) (Record scratches) (Saw cuts) (Woman screams) What I'm sort of trying to demonstrate with these tools is that sound is a language. It can trick us by transporting us geographically; it can change the mood; it can set the pace; it can make us laugh or it can make us scared. On a personal level, I fell in love with that language a few years ago, and somehow managed to make it into some sort of profession. And I think with our work through the sound library, we're trying to kind of expand the vocabulary of that language. And in that way, we want to offer the right tools to sound designers, filmmakers, and video game and app designers, to keep telling even better stories and creating even more beautiful lies. So thanks for listening. (Applause) |
Enough with the fear of fat | {0: 'Kelli Jean Drinkwater is a multi-disciplinary artist and activist recognized for her creative practice and voice in radical body politics.'} | TEDxSydney | I'm here today to talk to you about a very powerful little word, one that people will do almost anything to avoid becoming. Billion-dollar industries thrive because of the fear of it, and those of us who undeniably are it are left to navigate a relentless storm surrounding it. I'm not sure if any of you have noticed, but I'm fat. Not the lowercase, muttered-behind-my-back kind, or the seemingly harmless chubby or cuddly. I'm not even the more sophisticated voluptuous or curvaceous kind. Let's not sugarcoat it. I am the capital F-A-T kind of fat. I am the elephant in the room. When I walked out on stage, some of you may have been thinking, "Aww, this is going to be hilarious, because everybody knows that fat people are funny." (Laughter) Or you may have been thinking, "Where does she get her confidence from?" Because a confident fat woman is almost unthinkable. The fashion-conscious members of the audience may have been thinking how fabulous I look in this Beth Ditto dress — (Cheers) thank you very much. Whereas some of you might have thought, "Hmm, black would have been so much more slimming." (Laughter) You may have wondered, consciously or not, if I have diabetes, or a partner, or if I eat carbs after 7pm. (Laughter) You may have worried that you ate carbs after 7pm last night, and that you really should renew your gym membership. These judgments are insidious. They can be directed at individuals and groups, and they can also be directed at ourselves. And this way of thinking is known as fatphobia. Like any form of systematic oppression, fatphobia is deeply rooted in complex structures like capitalism, patriarchy and racism, and that can make it really difficult to see, let alone challenge. We live in a culture where being fat is seen as being a bad person — lazy, greedy, unhealthy, irresponsible and morally suspect. And we tend to see thinness as being universally good — responsible, successful, and in control of our appetites, bodies and lives. We see these ideas again and again in the media, in public health policy, doctors' offices, in everyday conversations and in our own attitudes. We may even blame fat people themselves for the discrimination they face because, after all, if we don't like it, we should just lose weight. Easy. This antifat bias has become so integral, so ingrained to how we value ourselves and each other that we rarely question why we have such contempt for people of size and where that disdain comes from. But we must question it, because the enormous value we place on how we look affects every one of us. And do we really want to live in a society where people are denied their basic humanity if they don't subscribe to some arbitrary form of acceptable? So when I was six years old, my sister used to teach ballet to a bunch of little girls in our garage. I was about a foot taller and a foot wider than most of the group. When it came to doing our first performance, I was so excited about wearing a pretty pink tutu. I was going to sparkle. As the other girls slipped easily into their Lycra and tulle creations, not one of the tutus was big enough to fit me. I was determined not to be excluded from the performance, so I turned to my mother and loud enough for everyone to hear said, "Mom, I don't need a tutu. I need a fourfour." (Laughter) Thanks, Mom. (Applause) And although I didn't recognize it at the time, claiming space for myself in that glorious fourfour was the first step towards becoming a radical fat activist. Now, I'm not saying that this whole body-love thing has been an easy skip along a glittering path of self-acceptance since that day in class. Far from it. I soon learned that living outside what the mainstream considers normal can be a frustrating and isolating place. I've spent the last 20 years unpacking and deprogramming these messages, and it's been quite the roller coaster. I've been openly laughed at, abused from passing cars and been told that I'm delusional. I also receive smiles from strangers who recognize what it takes to walk down the street with a spring in your step and your head held high. (Cheer) Thanks. And through it all, that fierce little six-year-old has stayed with me, and she has helped me stand before you today as an unapologetic fat person, a person that simply refuses to subscribe to the dominant narrative about how I should move through the world in this body of mine. (Applause) And I'm not alone. I am part of an international community of people who choose to, rather than passively accepting that our bodies are and probably always will be big, we actively choose to flourish in these bodies as they are today. People who honor our strength and work with, not against, our perceived limitations, people who value health as something much more holistic than a number on an outdated BMI chart. Instead, we value mental health, self-worth and how we feel in our bodies as vital aspects to our overall well-being. People who refuse to believe that living in these fat bodies is a barrier to anything, really. There are doctors, academics and bloggers who have written countless volumes on the many facets of this complex subject. There are fatshionistas who reclaim their bodies and their beauty by wearing fatkinis and crop tops, exposing the flesh that we're all taught to hide. There are fat athletes who run marathons, teach yoga or do kickboxing, all done with a middle finger firmly held up to the status quo. And these people have taught me that radical body politics is the antidote to our body-shaming culture. But to be clear, I'm not saying that people shouldn't change their bodies if that's what they want to do. Reclaiming yourself can be one of the most gorgeous acts of self-love and can look like a million different things, from hairstyles to tattoos to body contouring to hormones to surgery and yes, even weight loss. It's simple: it's your body, and you decide what's best to do with it. My way of engaging in activism is by doing all the things that we fatties aren't supposed to do, and there's a lot of them, inviting other people to join me and then making art about it. The common thread through most of this work has been reclaiming spaces that are often prohibitive to bigger bodies, from the catwalk to club shows, from public swimming pools to prominent dance stages. And reclaiming spaces en masse is not only a powerful artistic statement but a radical community-building approach. This was so true of "AQUAPORKO!" — (Laughter) the fat fem synchronized swim team I started with a group of friends in Sydney. The impact of seeing a bunch of defiant fat women in flowery swimming caps and bathers throwing their legs in the air without a care should not be underestimated. (Laughter) Throughout my career, I have learned that fat bodies are inherently political, and unapologetic fat bodies can blow people's minds. When director Kate Champion, of acclaimed dance theater company Force Majeure, asked me to be the artistic associate on a work featuring all fat dancers, I literally jumped at the opportunity. And I mean literally. "Nothing to Lose" is a work made in collaboration with performers of size who drew from their lived experiences to create a work as varied and authentic as we all are. And it was as far from ballet as you could imagine. The very idea of a fat dance work by such a prestigious company was, to put it mildly, controversial, because nothing like it had ever been done on mainstream dance stages before anywhere in the world. People were skeptical. "What do you mean, 'fat dancers?' Like, size 10, size 12 kind of fat? Where did they do their dance training? Are they going to have the stamina for a full-length production?" But despite the skepticism, "Nothing to Lose" became a sellout hit of Sydney Festival. We received rave reviews, toured, won awards and were written about in over 27 languages. These incredible images of our cast were seen worldwide. I've lost count of how many times people of all sizes have told me that the show has changed their lives, how it helped them shift their relationship to their own and other people's bodies, and how it made them confront their own bias. But of course, work that pushes people's buttons is not without its detractors. I have been told that I'm glorifying obesity. I have received violent death threats and abuse for daring to make work that centers fat people's bodies and lives and treats us as worthwhile human beings with valuable stories to tell. I've even been called "the ISIS of the obesity epidemic" — (Laughter) a comment so absurd that it is funny. But it also speaks to the panic, the literal terror, that the fear of fat can evoke. It is this fear that's feeding the diet industry, which is keeping so many of us from making peace with our own bodies, for waiting to be the after-photo before we truly start to live our lives. Because the real elephant in the room here is fatphobia. Fat activism refuses to indulge this fear. By advocating for self-determination and respect for all of us, we can shift society's reluctance to embrace diversity and start to celebrate the myriad ways there are to have a body. Thank you. (Applause) |
"St. James Infirmary Blues" | {0: 'With a repertoire spanning classical, improvisational and folk traditions from around the globe, the Silk Road Ensemble spins sounds that celebrate cultural solidarity.', 1: 'With a rich voice and an equally rich sense of history, Rhiannon Giddens animates American folk tradition with her electrifying song interpretations.'} | TED2016 | (Music) I went down to St. James Infirmary To see my baby there She was lying on a long wooden table So cold, so still, so fair I went up to see the doctor "She's very low," he said I went back to see my baby Good God she's lying there dead I went down to old Joe's bar room On the corner of the square They were serving drinks as per usual And the usual crowd was there To my left stood Old Joe McKennedy His eyes were bloodshot red He turned to the crowd around him And these are the words he said "Let her go, let her go, God bless her Wherever she may be She can search this whole wide world all over But she'll never find another man like me She can search this whole wide world all over And she'll never find another man like me When I die, please God, bury me In my ten-dollar Stetson hat Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain So my friends know I died standing pat Get six gamblers to carry my coffin And six choir girls to sing me a song Stick a jazz band on my hearse wagon To raise hell as I go along Now that's the end of my story Let's have another round of booze And if anyone should ask you Just tell them I got the St. James Infirmary blues (Applause) |
Your smartphone is a civil rights issue | {0: 'Christopher Soghoian researches and exposes the high-tech surveillance tools that governments use to spy on their own citizens, and he is a champion of digital privacy rights.\r\n'} | TEDSummit | In the spring of 2016, a legal battle between Apple and the Federal Bureau of Investigation captured the world's attention. Apple has built security features into its mobile products which protect data on its devices from everyone but the owner. That means that criminals, hackers and yes, even governments are all locked out. For Apple's customers, this is a great thing. But governments are not so happy. You see, Apple has made a conscious decision to get out of the surveillance business. Apple has tried to make surveillance as difficult as possible for governments and any other actors. There are really two smartphone operating systems in the global smartphone market: iOS and Android. iOS is made by Apple. Android is made by Google. Apple has spent a lot of time and money to make sure that its products are as secure as possible. Apple encrypts all data stored on iPhones by default, and text messages sent from one Apple customer to another Apple customer are encrypted by default without the user having to take any actions. What this means is that, if the police seize an iPhone and it has a password, they'll have a difficult time getting any data off of it, if they can do it at all. In contrast, the security of Android just really isn't as good. Android phones, or at least most of the Android phones that have been sold to consumers, do not encrypt data stored on the device by default, and the built-in text messaging app in Android does not use encryption. So if the police seize an Android phone, chances are, they'll be able to get all the data they want off of that device. Two smartphones from two of the biggest companies in the world; one that protects data by default, and one that doesn't. Apple is a seller of luxury goods. It dominates the high end of the market. And we would expect a manufacturer of luxury goods to have products that include more features. But not everyone can afford an iPhone. That's where Android really, really dominates: at the middle and low end of the market, smartphones for the billion and a half people who cannot or will not spend 600 dollars on a phone. But the dominance of Android has led to what I call the "digital security divide." That is, there is now increasingly a gap between the privacy and security of the rich, who can afford devices that secure their data by default, and of the poor, whose devices do very little to protect them by default. So, think of the average Apple customer: a banker, a lawyer, a doctor, a politician. These individuals now increasingly have smartphones in their pockets that encrypt their calls, their text messages, all the data on the device, without them doing really anything to secure their information. In contrast, the poor and the most vulnerable in our societies are using devices that leave them completely vulnerable to surveillance. In the United States, where I live, African-Americans are more likely to be seen as suspicious or more likely to be profiled, and are more likely to be targeted by the state with surveillance. But African-Americans are also disproportionately likely to use Android devices that do nothing at all to protect them from that surveillance. This is a problem. We must remember that surveillance is a tool. It's a tool used by those in power against those who have no power. And while I think it's absolutely great that companies like Apple are making it easy for people to encrypt, if the only people who can protect themselves from the gaze of the government are the rich and powerful, that's a problem. And it's not just a privacy or a cybersecurity problem. It's a civil rights problem. So the lack of default security in Android is not just a problem for the poor and vulnerable users who are depending on these devices. This is actually a problem for our democracy. I'll explain what I mean. Modern social movements rely on technology — from Black Lives Matter to the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. The organizers of these movements and the members of these movements increasingly communicate and coordinate with smartphones. And so, naturally governments that feel threatened by these movements will also target the organizers and their smartphones. Now, it's quite possible that a future Martin Luther King or a Mandela or a Gandhi will have an iPhone and be protected from government surveillance. But chances are, they'll probably have a cheap, $20 Android phone in their pocket. And so if we do nothing to address the digital security divide, if we do nothing to ensure that everyone in our society gets the same benefits of encryption and is equally able to protect themselves from surveillance by the state, not only will the poor and vulnerable be exposed to surveillance, but future civil rights movements may be crushed before they ever reach their full potential. Thank you. (Applause) Helen Walters: Chris, thank you so much. I have a question for you. We saw recently in the press that Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook covers over his camera and does something with his headphone mic jack. So I wanted to ask you a personal question, which is: Do you do that? And, on behalf of everyone here, particularly myself, Should we be doing that? Should we be covering these things? Christopher Soghoian: Putting a sticker — actually, I like Band-Aids, because you can remove them and put them back on whenever you want to make a call or a Skype call. Putting a sticker over your web cam is probably the best thing you can do for your privacy in terms of bang for buck. There really is malware, malicious software out there that can take over your web cam, even without the light turning on. This is used by criminals. This is used by stalkers. You can buy $19.99 "spy on your ex-girlfriend" software online. It's really terrifying. And then, of course, it's used by governments. And there's obviously a sexual violence component to this, which is that this kind of surveillance can be used most effectively against women and other people who can be shamed in our society. Even if you think you have nothing to hide, at the very least, if you have children, teenagers in your lives, make sure you put a sticker on their camera and protect them. HW: Wow. Thank you so much. CS: Thank you. HW: Thanks, Chris. (Applause) |
How America's public schools keep kids in poverty | {0: 'Kandice Sumner thinks we\'ve been looking at the "achievement gap" in education all wrong.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | I want to talk to you about my kids. Now, I know everyone thinks that their kid is the most fantastic, the most beautiful kid that ever lived. But mine really are. (Laughter) I have 696 kids, and they are the most intelligent, inventive, innovative, brilliant and powerful kids that you'll ever meet. Any student I've had the honor of teaching in my classroom is my kid. However, because their "real" parents aren't rich and, I argue, because they are mostly of color, they will seldom get to see in themselves the awesomeness that I see in them. Because what I see in them is myself — or what would have been myself. I am the daughter of two hardworking, college-educated, African-American parents who chose careers as public servants: my father, a minister; my mother, an educator. Wealth was never the primary ambition in our house. Because of this lack of wealth, we lived in a neighborhood that lacked wealth, and henceforth a school system that lacked wealth. Luckily, however, we struck the educational jackpot in a voluntary desegregation program that buses inner-city kids — black and brown — out to suburban schools — rich and white. At five years old, I had to take an hour-long bus ride to a faraway place to get a better education. At five years old, I thought everyone had a life just like mine. I thought everyone went to school and were the only ones using the brown crayons to color in their family portraits, while everyone else was using the peach-colored ones. At five years old, I thought everyone was just like me. But as I got older, I started noticing things, like: How come my neighborhood friend don't have to wake up at five o'clock in the morning, and go to a school that's an hour away? How come I'm learning to play the violin while my neighborhood friends don't even have a music class? Why were my neighborhood friends learning and reading material that I had done two to three years prior? See, as I got older, I started to have this unlawful feeling in my belly, like I was doing something that I wasn't supposed to be doing; taking something that wasn't mine; receiving a gift, but with someone else's name on it. All these amazing things that I was being exposed to and experiencing, I felt I wasn't really supposed to have. I wasn't supposed to have a library, fully equipped athletic facilities, or safe fields to play in. I wasn't supposed to have theatre departments with seasonal plays and concerts — digital, visual, performing arts. I wasn't supposed to have fully resourced biology or chemistry labs, school buses that brought me door-to-door, freshly prepared school lunches or even air conditioning. These are things my kids don't get. You see, as I got older, while I was grateful for this amazing opportunity that I was being given, there was this ever-present pang of: But what about everyone else? There are thousands of other kids just like me, who deserve this, too. Why doesn't everyone get this? Why is a high-quality education only exclusive to the rich? It was like I had some sort of survivor's remorse. All of my neighborhood friends were experiencing an educational train wreck that I was saved from through a bus ride. I was like an educational Moses screaming, "Let my people go ... to high-quality schools!" (Laughter) I'd seen firsthand how the other half was being treated and educated. I'd seen the educational promised land, and I could not for the life of me justify the disparity. I now teach in the very same school system from which I sought refuge. I know firsthand the tools that were given to me as a student, and now as a teacher, I don't have access to those same tools to give my students. There have been countless nights when I've cried in frustration, anger and sorrow, because I can't teach my kids the way that I was taught, because I don't have access to the same resources or tools that were used to teach me. My kids deserve so much better. We sit and we keep banging our heads against this term: "Achievement gap, achievement gap!" Is it really that hard to understand why these kids perform well and these kids don't? I mean, really. I think we've got it all wrong. I think we, as Gloria Ladson-Billings says, should flip our paradigm and our language and call it what it really is. It's not an achievement gap; it's an education debt, for all of the foregone schooling resources that were never invested in the education of the black and brown child over time. A little-known secret in American history is that the only American institution created specifically for people of color is the American slave trade — and some would argue the prison system, but that's another topic for another TED Talk. (Laughter) The public school system of this country was built, bought and paid for using commerce generated from the slave trade and slave labor. While African-Americans were enslaved and prohibited from schooling, their labor established the very institution from which they were excluded. Ever since then, every court case, educational policy, reform, has been an attempt to retrofit the design, rather than just stopping and acknowledging: we've had it all wrong from the beginning. An oversimplification of American educational history. All right, just bear with me. Blacks were kept out — you know, the whole slavery thing. With the help of philanthropic white people, they built their own schools. Separate but equal was OK. But while we all know things were indeed separate, they were in no ways equal. Enter Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954; legal separation of the races is now illegal. But very few people pay attention to all of the court cases since then, that have undone the educational promised land for every child that Brown v. Board intended. Some argue that today our schools are now more segregated than they ever were before we tried to desegregate them in the first place. Teaching my kids about desegregation, the Little Rock Nine, the Civil Rights Movement, is a real awkward moment in my classroom, when I have to hear the voice of a child ask, "If schools were desegregated in 1954, how come there are no white kids here?" (Laughter) These kids aren't dumb. They know exactly what's happening, and what's not. They know that when it comes to schooling, black lives don't matter and they never have. For years, I tried desperately to cultivate in my kids a love of reading. I'd amassed a modest classroom library of books I'd accumulated from secondhand shops, thrift stores, attics — you know. But whenever I said those dreadful words, "Take out a book and read," you'd think I'd just declared war. It was torture. One day, after I'd heard about this website called DonorsChoose, where classroom teachers create wish lists of items they need for their classroom and anonymous donors fulfill them, I figured I'd go out on a limb and just make a wish list of the teenager's dream library. Over 200 brand-new books were sent to my room piece by piece. Every day there were new deliveries and my kids would exclaim with glee, "This feels like Christmas!" (Laughter) Then they'd say, "Ms. Sumner, where did these books come from?" And then I'd reply, "Strangers from all over the country wanted you to have these." And then they'd say, almost suspiciously, "But they're brand-new." (Laughter) To which I'd reply, "You deserve brand-new books." The whole experience hit home for me when one of my girls, as she peeled open a crisp paperback said, "Ms. Sumner — you know, I figured you bought these books, 'cause you teachers are always buying us stuff. But to know that a stranger, someone I don't even know, cares this much about me is pretty cool." Knowing that strangers will take care of you is a privilege my kids aren't afforded. Ever since the donation, there has been a steady stream of kids signing out books to take home, and then returning them with the exclamation, "This one was good!" (Laughter) Now when I say, "Take out a book and read," kids rush to my library. It wasn't that they didn't want to read, but instead, they'd gladly read if the resources were there. Institutionally speaking, our public school system has never done right by the black and brown child. We keep focusing on the end results or test results, and getting frustrated. We get to a catastrophe and we wonder, "How did it get so bad? How did we get here?" Really? If you neglect a child long enough, you no longer have the right to be surprised when things don't turn out well. Stop being perplexed or confused or befuddled by the achievement gap, the income gap, the incarceration rates, or whatever socioeconomic disparity is the new "it" term for the moment. The problems we have as a country are the problems we created as a country. The quality of your education is directly proportionate to your access to college, your access to jobs, your access to the future. Until we live in a world where every kid can get a high-quality education no matter where they live, or the color of their skin, there are things we can do on a macro level. School funding should not be decided by property taxes or some funky economic equation where rich kids continue to benefit from state aid, while poor kids are continuously having food and resources taken from their mouths. Governors, senators, mayors, city council members — if we're going to call public education public education, then it should be just that. Otherwise, we should call it what it really is: poverty insurance. "Public education: keeping poor kids poor since 1954." (Laughter) If we really, as a country, believe that education is the "great equalizer," then it should be just that: equal and equitable. Until then, there's no democracy in our democratic education. On a mezzo level: historically speaking, the education of the black and brown child has always depended on the philanthropy of others. And unfortunately, today it still does. If your son or daughter or niece or nephew or neighbor or little Timmy down the street goes to an affluent school, challenge your school committee to adopt an impoverished school or an impoverished classroom. Close the divide by engaging in communication and relationships that matter. When resources are shared, they're not divided; they're multiplied. And on a micro level: if you're a human being, donate. Time, money, resources, opportunities — whatever is in your heart. There are websites like DonorsChoose that recognize the disparity and actually want to do something about it. What is a carpenter with no tools? What is an actress with no stage? What is a scientist with no laboratory? What is a doctor with no equipment? I'll tell you: they're my kids. Shouldn't they be your kids, too? Thank you. (Applause) |
Your company's data could help end world hunger | {0: "UPS's advanced analytics manager Mallory Freeman researches how to do the most good with data."} | TED@UPS | June 2010. I landed for the first time in Rome, Italy. I wasn't there to sightsee. I was there to solve world hunger. (Laughter) That's right. I was a 25-year-old PhD student armed with a prototype tool developed back at my university, and I was going to help the World Food Programme fix hunger. So I strode into the headquarters building and my eyes scanned the row of UN flags, and I smiled as I thought to myself, "The engineer is here." (Laughter) Give me your data. I'm going to optimize everything. (Laughter) Tell me the food that you've purchased, tell me where it's going and when it needs to be there, and I'm going to tell you the shortest, fastest, cheapest, best set of routes to take for the food. We're going to save money, we're going to avoid delays and disruptions, and bottom line, we're going to save lives. You're welcome. (Laughter) I thought it was going to take 12 months, OK, maybe even 13. This is not quite how it panned out. Just a couple of months into the project, my French boss, he told me, "You know, Mallory, it's a good idea, but the data you need for your algorithms is not there. It's the right idea but at the wrong time, and the right idea at the wrong time is the wrong idea." (Laughter) Project over. I was crushed. When I look back now on that first summer in Rome and I see how much has changed over the past six years, it is an absolute transformation. It's a coming of age for bringing data into the humanitarian world. It's exciting. It's inspiring. But we're not there yet. And brace yourself, executives, because I'm going to be putting companies on the hot seat to step up and play the role that I know they can. My experiences back in Rome prove using data you can save lives. OK, not that first attempt, but eventually we got there. Let me paint the picture for you. Imagine that you have to plan breakfast, lunch and dinner for 500,000 people, and you only have a certain budget to do it, say 6.5 million dollars per month. Well, what should you do? What's the best way to handle it? Should you buy rice, wheat, chickpea, oil? How much? It sounds simple. It's not. You have 30 possible foods, and you have to pick five of them. That's already over 140,000 different combinations. Then for each food that you pick, you need to decide how much you'll buy, where you're going to get it from, where you're going to store it, how long it's going to take to get there. You need to look at all of the different transportation routes as well. And that's already over 900 million options. If you considered each option for a single second, that would take you over 28 years to get through. 900 million options. So we created a tool that allowed decisionmakers to weed through all 900 million options in just a matter of days. It turned out to be incredibly successful. In an operation in Iraq, we saved 17 percent of the costs, and this meant that you had the ability to feed an additional 80,000 people. It's all thanks to the use of data and modeling complex systems. But we didn't do it alone. The unit that I worked with in Rome, they were unique. They believed in collaboration. They brought in the academic world. They brought in companies. And if we really want to make big changes in big problems like world hunger, we need everybody to the table. We need the data people from humanitarian organizations leading the way, and orchestrating just the right types of engagements with academics, with governments. And there's one group that's not being leveraged in the way that it should be. Did you guess it? Companies. Companies have a major role to play in fixing the big problems in our world. I've been in the private sector for two years now. I've seen what companies can do, and I've seen what companies aren't doing, and I think there's three main ways that we can fill that gap: by donating data, by donating decision scientists and by donating technology to gather new sources of data. This is data philanthropy, and it's the future of corporate social responsibility. Bonus, it also makes good business sense. Companies today, they collect mountains of data, so the first thing they can do is start donating that data. Some companies are already doing it. Take, for example, a major telecom company. They opened up their data in Senegal and the Ivory Coast and researchers discovered that if you look at the patterns in the pings to the cell phone towers, you can see where people are traveling. And that can tell you things like where malaria might spread, and you can make predictions with it. Or take for example an innovative satellite company. They opened up their data and donated it, and with that data you could track how droughts are impacting food production. With that you can actually trigger aid funding before a crisis can happen. This is a great start. There's important insights just locked away in company data. And yes, you need to be very careful. You need to respect privacy concerns, for example by anonymizing the data. But even if the floodgates opened up, and even if all companies donated their data to academics, to NGOs, to humanitarian organizations, it wouldn't be enough to harness that full impact of data for humanitarian goals. Why? To unlock insights in data, you need decision scientists. Decision scientists are people like me. They take the data, they clean it up, transform it and put it into a useful algorithm that's the best choice to address the business need at hand. In the world of humanitarian aid, there are very few decision scientists. Most of them work for companies. So that's the second thing that companies need to do. In addition to donating their data, they need to donate their decision scientists. Now, companies will say, "Ah! Don't take our decision scientists from us. We need every spare second of their time." But there's a way. If a company was going to donate a block of a decision scientist's time, it would actually make more sense to spread out that block of time over a long period, say for example five years. This might only amount to a couple of hours per month, which a company would hardly miss, but what it enables is really important: long-term partnerships. Long-term partnerships allow you to build relationships, to get to know the data, to really understand it and to start to understand the needs and challenges that the humanitarian organization is facing. In Rome, at the World Food Programme, this took us five years to do, five years. That first three years, OK, that was just what we couldn't solve for. Then there was two years after that of refining and implementing the tool, like in the operations in Iraq and other countries. I don't think that's an unrealistic timeline when it comes to using data to make operational changes. It's an investment. It requires patience. But the types of results that can be produced are undeniable. In our case, it was the ability to feed tens of thousands more people. So we have donating data, we have donating decision scientists, and there's actually a third way that companies can help: donating technology to capture new sources of data. You see, there's a lot of things we just don't have data on. Right now, Syrian refugees are flooding into Greece, and the UN refugee agency, they have their hands full. The current system for tracking people is paper and pencil, and what that means is that when a mother and her five children walk into the camp, headquarters is essentially blind to this moment. That's all going to change in the next few weeks, thanks to private sector collaboration. There's going to be a new system based on donated package tracking technology from the logistics company that I work for. With this new system, there will be a data trail, so you know exactly the moment when that mother and her children walk into the camp. And even more, you know if she's going to have supplies this month and the next. Information visibility drives efficiency. For companies, using technology to gather important data, it's like bread and butter. They've been doing it for years, and it's led to major operational efficiency improvements. Just try to imagine your favorite beverage company trying to plan their inventory and not knowing how many bottles were on the shelves. It's absurd. Data drives better decisions. Now, if you're representing a company, and you're pragmatic and not just idealistic, you might be saying to yourself, "OK, this is all great, Mallory, but why should I want to be involved?" Well for one thing, beyond the good PR, humanitarian aid is a 24-billion-dollar sector, and there's over five billion people, maybe your next customers, that live in the developing world. Further, companies that are engaging in data philanthropy, they're finding new insights locked away in their data. Take, for example, a credit card company that's opened up a center that functions as a hub for academics, for NGOs and governments, all working together. They're looking at information in credit card swipes and using that to find insights about how households in India live, work, earn and spend. For the humanitarian world, this provides information about how you might bring people out of poverty. But for companies, it's providing insights about your customers and potential customers in India. It's a win all around. Now, for me, what I find exciting about data philanthropy — donating data, donating decision scientists and donating technology — it's what it means for young professionals like me who are choosing to work at companies. Studies show that the next generation of the workforce care about having their work make a bigger impact. We want to make a difference, and so through data philanthropy, companies can actually help engage and retain their decision scientists. And that's a big deal for a profession that's in high demand. Data philanthropy makes good business sense, and it also can help revolutionize the humanitarian world. If we coordinated the planning and logistics across all of the major facets of a humanitarian operation, we could feed, clothe and shelter hundreds of thousands more people, and companies need to step up and play the role that I know they can in bringing about this revolution. You've probably heard of the saying "food for thought." Well, this is literally thought for food. It finally is the right idea at the right time. (Laughter) Très magnifique. Thank you. (Applause) |
4 ways to build a human company in the age of machines | {0: 'A humanist in Silicon Valley, Tim Leberecht argues that in a time of artificial intelligence, big data and the quantification of everything, we are losing sight of the importance of the emotional and social aspects of our work.'} | TEDSummit | Half of the human workforce is expected to be replaced by software and robots in the next 20 years. And many corporate leaders welcome that as a chance to increase profits. Machines are more efficient; humans are complicated and difficult to manage. Well, I want our organizations to remain human. In fact, I want them to become beautiful. Because as machines take our jobs and do them more efficiently, soon the only work left for us humans will be the kind of work that must be done beautifully rather than efficiently. To maintain our humanity in the this second Machine Age, we may have no other choice than to create beauty. Beauty is an elusive concept. For the writer Stendhal it was the promise of happiness. For me it's a goal by Lionel Messi. (Laughter) So bear with me as I am proposing four admittedly very subjective principles that you can use to build a beautiful organization. First: do the unnecessary. [Do the Unnecessary] A few months ago, Hamdi Ulukaya, the CEO and founder of the yogurt company Chobani, made headlines when he decided to grant stock to all of his 2,000 employees. Some called it a PR stunt, others — a genuine act of giving back. But there is something else that was remarkable about it. It came completely out of the blue. There had been no market or stakeholder pressure, and employees were so surprised that they burst into tears when they heard the news. Actions like Ulukaya's are beautiful because they catch us off guard. They create something out of nothing because they're completely unnecessary. I once worked at a company that was the result of a merger of a large IT outsourcing firm and a small design firm. We were merging 9,000 software engineers with 1,000 creative types. And to unify these immensely different cultures, we were going to launch a third, new brand. And the new brand color was going to be orange. And as we were going through the budget for the rollouts, we decided last minute to cut the purchase of 10,000 orange balloons, which we had meant to distribute to all staff worldwide. They just seemed unnecessary and cute in the end. I didn't know back then that our decision marked the beginning of the end — that these two organizations would never become one. And sure enough, the merger eventually failed. Now, was it because there weren't any orange balloons? No, of course not. But the kill-the-orange-balloons mentality permeated everything else. You might not always realize it, but when you cut the unnecessary, you cut everything. Leading with beauty means rising above what is merely necessary. So do not kill your orange balloons. The second principle: create intimacy. [Create Intimacy] Studies show that how we feel about our workplace very much depends on the relationships with our coworkers. And what are relationships other than a string of microinteractions? There are hundreds of these every day in our organizations that have the potential to distinguish a good life from a beautiful one. The marriage researcher John Gottman says that the secret of a healthy relationship is not the great gesture or the lofty promise, it's small moments of attachment. In other words, intimacy. In our networked organizations, we tout the strength of weak ties but we underestimate the strength of strong ones. We forget the words of the writer Richard Bach who once said, "Intimacy — not connectedness — intimacy is the opposite of loneliness." So how do we design for organizational intimacy? The humanitarian organization CARE wanted to launch a campaign on gender equality in villages in northern India. But it realized quickly that it had to have this conversation first with its own staff. So it invited all 36 team members and their partners to one of the Khajuraho Temples, known for their famous erotic sculptures. And there they openly discussed their personal relationships — their own experiences of gender equality with the coworkers and the partners. It was eye-opening for the participants. Not only did it allow them to relate to the communities they serve, it also broke down invisible barriers and created a lasting bond amongst themselves. Not a single team member quit in the next four years. So this is how you create intimacy. No masks ... or lots of masks. (Laughter) When Danone, the food company, wanted to translate its new company manifesto into product initiatives, it gathered the management team and 100 employees from across different departments, seniority levels and regions for a three-day strategy retreat. And it asked everybody to wear costumes for the entire meeting: wigs, crazy hats, feather boas, huge glasses and so on. And they left with concrete outcomes and full of enthusiasm. And when I asked the woman who had designed this experience why it worked, she simply said, "Never underestimate the power of a ridiculous wig." (Laughter) (Applause) Because wigs erase hierarchy, and hierarchy kills intimacy — both ways, for the CEO and the intern. Wigs allow us to use the disguise of the false to show something true about ourselves. And that's not easy in our everyday work lives, because the relationship with our organizations is often like that of a married couple that has grown apart, suffered betrayals and disappointments, and is now desperate to be beautiful for one another once again. And for either of us the first step towards beauty involves a huge risk. The risk to be ugly. [Be Ugly] So many organizations these days are keen on designing beautiful workplaces that look like anything but work: vacation resorts, coffee shops, playgrounds or college campuses — (Laughter) Based on the promises of positive psychology, we speak of play and gamification, and one start-up even says that when someone gets fired, they have graduated. (Laughter) That kind of beautiful language only goes "skin deep, but ugly cuts clean to the bone," as the writer Dorothy Parker once put it. To be authentic is to be ugly. It doesn't mean that you can't have fun or must give in to the vulgar or cynical, but it does mean that you speak the actual ugly truth. Like this manufacturer that wanted to transform one of its struggling business units. It identified, named and pinned on large boards all the issues — and there were hundreds of them — that had become obstacles to better performance. They put them on boards, moved them all into one room, which they called "the ugly room." The ugly became visible for everyone to see — it was celebrated. And the ugly room served as a mix of mirror exhibition and operating room — a biopsy on the living flesh to cut out all the bureaucracy. The ugliest part of our body is our brain. Literally and neurologically. Our brain renders ugly what is unfamiliar ... modern art, atonal music, jazz, maybe — VR goggles for that matter — strange objects, sounds and people. But we've all been ugly once. We were a weird-looking baby, a new kid on the block, a foreigner. And we will be ugly again when we don't belong. The Center for Political Beauty, an activist collective in Berlin, recently staged an extreme artistic intervention. With the permission of relatives, it exhumed the corpses of refugees who had drowned at Europe's borders, transported them all the way to Berlin, and then reburied them at the heart of the German capital. The idea was to allow them to reach their desired destination, if only after their death. Such acts of beautification may not be pretty, but they are much needed. Because things tend to get ugly when there's only one meaning, one truth, only answers and no questions. Beautiful organizations keep asking questions. They remain incomplete, which is the fourth and the last of the principles. [Remain Incomplete] Recently I was in Paris, and a friend of mine took me to Nuit Debout, which stands for "up all night," the self-organized protest movement that had formed in response to the proposed labor laws in France. Every night, hundreds gathered at the Place de la République. Every night they set up a small, temporary village to deliberate their own vision of the French Republic. And at the core of this adhocracy was a general assembly where anybody could speak using a specially designed sign language. Like Occupy Wall Street and other protest movements, Nuit Debout was born in the face of crisis. It was messy — full of controversies and contradictions. But whether you agreed with the movement's goals or not, every gathering was a beautiful lesson in raw humanity. And how fitting that Paris — the city of ideals, the city of beauty — was it's stage. It reminds us that like great cities, the most beautiful organizations are ideas worth fighting for — even and especially when their outcome is uncertain. They are movements; they are always imperfect, never fully organized, so they avoid ever becoming banal. They have something but we don't know what it is. They remain mysterious; we can't take our eyes off them. We find them beautiful. So to do the unnecessary, to create intimacy, to be ugly, to remain incomplete — these are not only the qualities of beautiful organizations, these are inherently human characteristics. And these are also the qualities of what we call home. And as we disrupt, and are disrupted, the least we can do is to ensure that we still feel at home in our organizations, and that we use our organizations to create that feeling for others. Beauty can save the world when we embrace these principles and design for them. In the face of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we need a new radical humanism. We must acquire and promote a new aesthetic and sentimental education. Because if we don't, we might end up feeling like aliens in organizations and societies that are full of smart machines that have no appreciation whatsoever for the unnecessary, the intimate, the incomplete and definitely not for the ugly. Thank you. (Applause) |
It's time for women to run for office | {0: 'Halla Tómasdóttir is the CEO of The B Team, a group of global leaders working together to transform business for a better world.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | I feel incredibly lucky to be from a country that's generally considered to be the best place in the world to be a woman. In 1975, when I was seven years old, women in Iceland went on a strike. They did no work that day, whether they held professional jobs or had the work of the home. They marched into the center of Reykjavík — 90 percent of women participated — and peacefully and in solidarity asked for equality. Nothing worked in Iceland that day, because nothing works when women are not at work. (Applause) Five years later, Icelanders had the courage to be the first country in the world to democratically elect a woman as their president. I will never forget this day, that President Vigdís, as we know her by her first name, stepped out on the balcony of her own home, a single mom with her daughter by her side as she had won. (Applause) This woman was an incredible role model for me and everyone growing up at that time, including boys. She frequently shares the story of how a young boy approached her after a couple of terms in office and asked, "Can boys really grow up to be president?" (Laughter) Role models really matter, but even with such strong role models who I am so grateful for, when I was encouraged to run for president, my first reaction was, "Who am I to run for president? Who am I to be president?" It turns out that women are less likely to consider running than men. So a study done in the US in 2011 showed that 62 percent of men had considered running for office, but 45 percent of women. That's gap of 16 percentage points, and it's the same gap that existed a decade earlier. And it really is a shame, because I am so convinced that the world is in real need for women leaders and more principle-based leadership in general. So my decision to run ultimately came down to the fact that I felt that I had to do my bit, even if I had no political experience, to step up and try to be part of creating the world that will make sense and be sustainable for our kids, and a world where we truly allow both our boys and girls to be all they can be. And it was the journey of my life. It was amazing. The journey started with potentially as many as 20 candidates. It boiled down to nine candidates qualifying, and ultimately the race came down to four of us, three men and me. (Applause) But that's not all the drama yet. You may think you have drama in the US, but I can — (Laughter) I can assure you we had our own drama in Iceland. So our sitting president of 20 years announced initially that he was not going to run, which is probably what gave rise to so many candidates considering running. Then later he changed his mind when our prime minister resigned following the infamous Panama Papers that implicated him and his family. And there was a popular protest in Iceland, so the sitting president thought they needed a trusted leader. A few days later, relations to his wife and her family's companies were also discovered in the Panama Papers, and so he withdrew from the race again. Before doing so, he said he was doing that because now there were two qualified men who he felt could fill his shoes running for office. So on May 9, 45 days before election day, it was not looking too good for me. I did not even make the graph in the newspaper. The polls had me at 1 percent, but that was still the highest that any woman announcing her candidacy had earned. So it would be an understatement to say that I had to work extremely hard to get my seat at the table and access to television, because the network decided that they would only include those with 2.5 percent or more in the polls in the first TV debate. I found out on the afternoon of the first TV debate that I would participate along with the three men, and I found out on live TV that I came in at exactly 2.5 percent on the day of the first TV debate. (Applause) So, challenges. The foremost challenges I had to face and overcome on this journey had to do with media, muscle and money. Let's start with media. There are those who say gender doesn't matter when it comes to media and politics. I can't say that I agree. It proved harder for me to both get access and airtime in media. As a matter of fact, the leading candidate appeared in broadcast media 87 times in the months leading up to the elections, whereas I appeared 31 times. And I am not saying media is doing this consciously. I think largely this has to do with unconscious bias, because in media, much like everywhere else, we have both conscious and unconscious bias, and we need to have the courage to talk about it if we want to change it. When I finally got access to TV, the first question I got was, "Are you going to quit?" And that was a hard one. But of course, with 1 percent to 2.5 percent in the polls, maybe it's understandable. But media really matters, and every time I appeared on TV, we saw and experienced a rise in the polls, so I know firsthand how much this matters and why we have to talk about it. I was the only one out of the final four candidates that never got a front page interview. I was sometimes left out of the questions asked of all other candidates and out of coverage about the elections. So I did face this, but I will say this to compliment the Icelandic media. I got few if any comments about my hair and pantsuit. (Applause) So kudos to them. But there is another experience that's very important. I ran as an independent candidate, not with any political party or muscle behind me. That lack of experience and lack of access to resources probably came at a cost to our campaign, but it also allowed us to innovate and do politics differently. We ran a positive campaign, and we probably changed the tone of the election for others by doing that. It may be the reason why I had less airtime on TV, because I wanted to show other contenders respect. When access to media proved to be so difficult, we ran our own media. I ran live Facebook sessions where I took questions from voters on anything and responded on the spot. And we put all the questions I got and all the answers on an open Facebook because we thought transparency is important if you want to establish trust. And when reaching young voters proved to be challenging, I became a Snapchatter. I got young people to teach me how to do that, and I used every filter on Snapchat during the last part of the campaign. And I actually had to use a lot of humor and humility, as I was very bad at it. But we grew the following amongst young people by doing that. So it's possible to run a different type of campaign. But unfortunately, one cannot talk about politics without mentioning money. I am sad that it is that way, but it's true, and we had less financial resources than the other candidates. This probably was partly due to the fact that I think I had a harder time asking for financial support. And maybe I also had the ambition to do more with less. Some would call that very womanly of me. But even with one third the media, one third the financial resources, and only an entrepreneurial team, but an amazing team, we managed to surprise everyone on election night, when the first numbers came in. I surprised myself, as you may see in that photo. (Laughter) So the first numbers, I came in neck to neck to the leading candidate. (Cheers) Well, too early, because I didn't quite pull that, but I came in second, and we went a long way from the one percent, with nearly a third of the vote, and we beat the polls by an unprecedented margin, or 10 percentage points above what the last poll came in at. Some people call me the real winner of the election because of this, and there are many people who encouraged me to run again. But what really makes me proud is to know that I earned proportionately higher percentage support from the young people, and a lot of people encouraged my daughter to run in 2040. (Applause) She is 13, and she had never been on TV before. And on election day, I observed her on TV repeatedly, and she was smart, she was self-confident, she was sincere, and she was supportive of her mother. This was probably the highlight of my campaign. (Applause) But there was another one. These are preschool girls out on a walk, and they found a poster of me on a bus stop, and they saw the need to kiss it. Audience: Aw! This picture was really enough of a win for me. What we see, we can be. So screw fear and challenges. (Applause) It matters that women run, and it's time for women to run for office, be it the office of the CEO or the office of the president. I also managed to put an impression on your very own "New Yorker." I earned a new title, "A living emoji of sincerity." (Cheers) It is possibly my proudest title yet, and the reason is that women too often get penalized for using what I call their emotional capital, but I know from experience that we become so good when we do just that. (Applause) And we need more of that. We celebrated as if we had won on election night, because that's how we felt. So you don't necessarily have to reach that office. You just have to go for it, and you, your family, your friends, everyone working with you, if you do it well, you will grow beyond anything you will experience before. So we had a good time, and I learned a lot on this journey, probably more lessons than I can share here in the time we have today. But rest assured, it was hard work. I lost a lot of sleep during those months. It took resilience and perseverance to not quit, but I learned something that I knew before on the one percent day, and that is that you can only be good when you are truly, authentically listening to your own voice and working in alignment with that. As a good sister of mine sometimes says, you may cheat on your intuition, but your intuition never cheats on you. I think it's also very important, and you all know this, that on any journey you go on, it's the team you take along. It's having people around you who share your values, your vision, but are different in every other way. That's the formula for success for me, and I am blessed with an amazing husband, here today, an incredible family — (Applause) and great friends, and we came together as entrepreneurs in the political arena, and pulled something off that everyone said would be impossible. As a matter of fact, the leading PR expert told me before I made my decision that I would do well to get seven percent. I appreciated his perspective, because he was probably right, and he was basing it on valuable experience. But on the one percent day, I decided here to show him that he was wrong. It's very important to mention this, because I did lose a lot of sleep, and I worked hard, and so did the people with me. We can never go the distance if we forget to take care of ourselves. And it's two things that I think are very important in that, in surrounding yourself with people and practices that nourish you, but it's equally important, maybe even more important, to have the courage to get rid of people and practices that take away your energy, including the wonderful bloggers and commentators. I took a lot of support from others in doing this, and I made the decision to go high when others went low, and that's partly how I kept my energy going throughout all of this. And when I lost my energy for a moment — and I did from time to time, it wasn't easy — I went back to why I decided to run, and how I had decided to run my own race. I called it a 4G campaign, the G's representing the Icelandic words. And the first one is called "Gagn." I ran to do good, to be of service, and I wanted servant leadership to be at the center of how I worked and everybody else in the campaign. Second one is "Gleði," or joy. I decided to enjoy the journey. There was a lot to be taken out of the journey, no matter if the destination was reached or not. And I tried my utmost to inspire others to do so as well. Third is "Gagnsæi." I was open to any questions. I kept no secrets, and it was all open, on Facebook and websites. Because I think if you're choosing your president, you deserve answers to your questions. Last but not least, I don't need to explain that in this room, we ran on the principle of Girlpower. (Cheers) I am incredibly glad that I had the courage to run, to risk failure but receive success on so many levels. I can't tell you that it was easy, but I can tell you, and I think my entire team will agree with me, that it was worth it. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Pat Mitchell: I'm not letting you go yet. Halla Tómasdóttir: What a great crowd. PM: I can't let you go without saying that probably everybody in the room is ready to move to Iceland and vote for you. But of course we probably can't vote there, but one thing we can get from Iceland and have always gotten is inspiration. I mean, I'm old enough to remember 1975 when all the Icelandic women walked out, and that really was a very big factor in launching the women's movement. You made a reference to it earlier. I'd love to bring the picture back up and just have us remember what it was like when a country came to a standstill. And then what you may not know because our American media did not report it, the Icelandic women walked out again on Monday. Right? HT: Yes, they did. PM: Can you tell us about that? HT: Yes, so 41 years after the original strike, we may be the best place in the world to be a woman, but our work isn't done. So at 2:38pm on Monday, women in Iceland left work, because that's when they had earned their day's salary. (Applause) What's really cool about this is that young women and men participated in greater numbers than before, because it is time that we close the pay gap. PM: So I'm not going to ask Halla to commit right now to what she's doing next, but I will say that you'd have a very large volunteer army should you decide to do that again. Thank you Halla. HT: Thank you all. (Applause) |
"Space Oddity" | {0: "Alt-rock icon Amanda Fucking Palmer believes we shouldn't fight the fact that digital content is freely shareable -- and suggests that artists can and should be directly supported by fans.", 1: 'Jherek Bischoff is a Los Angeles-based composer, arranger, producer and multi-instrumental performer.', 2: 'TED Senior Fellow Usman Riaz is an artist and composer.'} | TED2016 | (Music) Amanda Palmer (singing): Ground Control to Major Tom, Ground Control to Major Tom, Take your protein pills and put your helmet on. Al Gore: Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six ... AP: Ground Control to Major Tom, AG: Five, Four, Three, Two, One ... AP: Commencing countdown, engines on. Check ignition and may God's love be with you. AG: Liftoff. AP: This is Ground Control to Major Tom, You've really made the grade And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear. Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare. "This is Major Tom to Ground Control, I'm stepping through the door And I'm floating in a most peculiar way And the stars look very different today. For here am I floating round my tin can. Far above the world, Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do." (Music) "Though I'm past 100,000 miles, I'm feeling very still, and I think my spaceship knows which way to go. Tell my wife I love her very much she knows." Ground Control to Major Tom, your circuit's dead, there's something wrong. Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you ... "Here am I floating round my tin can, far above the Moon. Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do. (Music) ["I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man, just a mortal with the potential of a superman ... ... I'm living on." David Bowie, 1947-2016] (Applause) |
Islamophobia killed my brother. Let's end the hate | {0: 'With a voice amplified by unthinkable personal tragedy, Suzanne Barakat speaks out against bigotry and violence against those society deems "different."'} | TEDWomen 2016 | Last year, three of my family members were gruesomely murdered in a hate crime. It goes without saying that it's really difficult for me to be here today, but my brother Deah, his wife Yusor, and her sister Razan don't give me much of a choice. I'm hopeful that by the end of this talk you will make a choice, and join me in standing up against hate. It's December 27, 2014: the morning of my brother's wedding day. He asks me to come over and comb his hair in preparation for his wedding photo shoot. A 23-year-old, six-foot-three basketball, particularly Steph Curry, fanatic — (Laughter) An American kid in dental school ready to take on the world. When Deah and Yusor have their first dance, I see the love in his eyes, her reciprocated joy, and my emotions begin to overwhelm me. I move to the back of the hall and burst into tears. And the second the song finishes playing, he beelines towards me, buries me into his arms and rocks me back and forth. Even in that moment, when everything was so distracting, he was attuned to me. He cups my face and says, "Suzanne, I am who I am because of you. Thank you for everything. I love you." About a month later, I'm back home in North Carolina for a short visit, and on the last evening, I run upstairs to Deah's room, eager to find out how he's feeling being a newly married man. With a big boyish smile he says, "I'm so happy. I love her. She's an amazing girl." And she is. At just 21, she'd recently been accepted to join Deah at UNC dental school. She shared his love for basketball, and at her urging, they started their honeymoon off attending their favorite team of the NBA, the LA Lakers. I mean, check out that form. (Laughter) I'll never forget that moment sitting there with him — how free he was in his happiness. My littler brother, a basketball-obsessed kid, had become and transformed into an accomplished young man. He was at the top of his dental school class, and alongside Yusor and Razan, was involved in local and international community service projects dedicated to the homeless and refugees, including a dental relief trip they were planning for Syrian refugees in Turkey. Razan, at just 19, used her creativity as an architectural engineering student to serve those around her, making care packages for the local homeless, among other projects. That is who they were. Standing there that night, I take a deep breath and look at Deah and tell him, "I have never been more proud of you than I am in this moment." He pulls me into his tall frame, hugs me goodnight, and I leave the next morning without waking him to go back to San Francisco. That is the last time I ever hug him. Ten days later, I'm on call at San Francisco General Hospital when I receive a barrage of vague text messages expressing condolences. Confused, I call my father, who calmly intones, "There's been a shooting in Deah's neighborhood in Chapel Hill. It's on lock-down. That's all we know." I hang up and quickly Google, "shooting in Chapel Hill." One hit comes up. Quote: "Three people were shot in the back of the head and confirmed dead on the scene." Something in me just knows. I fling out of my chair and faint onto the gritty hospital floor, wailing. I take the first red-eye out of San Francisco, numb and disoriented. I walk into my childhood home and faint into my parents' arms, sobbing. I then run up to Deah's room as I did so many times before, just looking for him, only to find a void that will never be filled. Investigation and autopsy reports eventually revealed the sequence of events. Deah had just gotten off the bus from class, Razan was visiting for dinner, already at home with Yusor. As they began to eat, they heard a knock on the door. When Deah opened it, their neighbor proceeded to fire multiple shots at him. According to 911 calls, the girls were heard screaming. The man turned towards the kitchen and fired a single shot into Yusor's hip, immobilizing her. He then approached her from behind, pressed the barrel of his gun against her head, and with a single bullet, lacerated her midbrain. He then turned towards Razan, who was screaming for her life, and, execution-style, with a single bullet to the back of the head, killed her. On his way out, he shot Deah one last time — a bullet in the mouth — for a total of eight bullets: two lodged in the head, two in his chest and the rest in his extremities. Deah, Yusor and Razan were executed in a place that was meant to be safe: their home. For months, this man had been harassing them: knocking on their door, brandishing his gun on a couple of occasions. His Facebook was cluttered with anti-religion posts. Yusor felt particularly threatened by him. As she was moving in, he told Yusor and her mom that he didn't like the way they looked. In response, Yusor's mom told her to be kind to her neighbor, that as he got to know them, he'd see them for who they were. I guess we've all become so numb to the hatred that we couldn't have ever imagined it turning into fatal violence. The man who murdered my brother turned himself in to the police shortly after the murders, saying he killed three kids, execution-style, over a parking dispute. The police issued a premature public statement that morning, echoing his claims without bothering to question it or further investigate. It turns out there was no parking dispute. There was no argument. No violation. But the damage was already done. In a 24-hour media cycle, the words "parking dispute" had already become the go-to sound bite. I sit on my brother's bed and remember his words, the words he gave me so freely and with so much love, "I am who I am because of you." That's what it takes for me to climb through my crippling grief and speak out. I cannot let my family's deaths be diminished to a segment that is barely discussed on local news. They were murdered by their neighbor because of their faith, because of a piece of cloth they chose to don on their heads, because they were visibly Muslim. Some of the rage I felt at the time was that if roles were reversed, and an Arab, Muslim or Muslim-appearing person had killed three white American college students execution-style, in their home, what would we have called it? A terrorist attack. When white men commit acts of violence in the US, they're lone wolves, mentally ill or driven by a parking dispute. I know that I have to give my family voice, and I do the only thing I know how: I send a Facebook message to everyone I know in media. A couple of hours later, in the midst of a chaotic house overflowing with friends and family, our neighbor Neal comes over, sits down next to my parents and asks, "What can I do?" Neal had over two decades of experience in journalism, but he makes it clear that he's not there in his capacity as journalist, but as a neighbor who wants to help. I ask him what he thinks we should do, given the bombardment of local media interview requests. He offers to set up a press conference at a local community center. Even now I don't have the words to thank him. "Just tell me when, and I'll have all the news channels present," he said. He did for us what we could not do for ourselves in a moment of devastation. I delivered the press statement, still wearing scrubs from the previous night. And in under 24 hours from the murders, I'm on CNN being interviewed by Anderson Cooper. The following day, major newspapers — including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune — published stories about Deah, Yusor and Razan, allowing us to reclaim the narrative and call attention the mainstreaming of anti-Muslim hatred. These days, it feels like Islamophobia is a socially acceptable form of bigotry. We just have to put up with it and smile. The nasty stares, the palpable fear when boarding a plane, the random pat downs at airports that happen 99 percent of the time. It doesn't stop there. We have politicians reaping political and financial gains off our backs. Here in the US, we have presidential candidates like Donald Trump, casually calling to register American Muslims, and ban Muslim immigrants and refugees from entering this country. It is no coincidence that hate crimes rise in parallel with election cycles. Just a couple months ago, Khalid Jabara, a Lebanese-American Christian, was murdered in Oklahoma by his neighbor — a man who called him a "filthy Arab." This man was previously jailed for a mere 8 months, after attempting run over Khalid's mother with his car. Chances are you haven't heard Khalid's story, because it didn't make it to national news. The least we can do is call it what it is: a hate crime. The least we can do is talk about it, because violence and hatred doesn't just happen in a vacuum. Not long after coming back to work, I'm the senior on rounds in the hospital, when one of my patients looks over at my colleague, gestures around her face and says, "San Bernardino," referencing a recent terrorist attack. Here I am having just lost three family members to Islamophobia, having been a vocal advocate within my program on how to deal with such microaggressions, and yet — silence. I was disheartened. Humiliated. Days later rounding on the same patient, she looks at me and says, "Your people are killing people in Los Angeles." I look around expectantly. Again: silence. I realize that yet again, I have to speak up for myself. I sit on her bed and gently ask her, "Have I ever done anything but treat you with respect and kindness? Have I done anything but give you compassionate care?" She looks down and realizes what she said was wrong, and in front of the entire team, she apologizes and says, "I should know better. I'm Mexican-American. I receive this kind of treatment all the time." Many of us experience microaggressions on a daily basis. Odds are you may have experienced it, whether for your race, gender, sexuality or religious beliefs. We've all been in situations where we've witnessed something wrong and didn't speak up. Maybe we weren't equipped with the tools to respond in the moment. Maybe we weren't even aware of our own implicit biases. We can all agree that bigotry is unacceptable, but when we see it, we're silent, because it makes us uncomfortable. But stepping right into that discomfort means you are also stepping into the ally zone. There may be over three million Muslims in America. That's still just one percent of the total population. Martin Luther King once said, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." So what made my neighbor Neal's allyship so profound? A couple of things. He was there as a neighbor who cared, but he was also bringing in his professional expertise and resources when the moment called for it. Others have done the same. Larycia Hawkins drew on her platform as the first tenured African-American professor at Wheaton College to wear a hijab in solidarity with Muslim women who face discrimination every day. As a result, she lost her job. Within a month, she joined the faculty at the University of Virginia, where she now works on pluralism, race, faith and culture. Reddit cofounder, Alexis Ohanian, demonstrated that not all active allyship needs to be so serious. He stepped up to support a 15-year-old Muslim girl's mission to introduce a hijab emoji. (Laughter) It's a simple gesture, but it has a significant subconscious impact on normalizing and humanizing Muslims, including the community as a part of an "us" instead of an "other." The editor in chief of Women's Running magazine just put the first hijabi to ever be on the cover of a US fitness magazine. These are all very different examples of people who drew upon their platforms and resources in academia, tech and media, to actively express their allyship. What resources and expertise do you bring to the table? Are you willing to step into your discomfort and speak up when you witness hateful bigotry? Will you be Neal? Many neighbors appeared in this story. And you, in your respective communities, all have a Muslim neighbor, colleague or friend your child plays with at school. Reach out to them. Let them know you stand with them in solidarity. It may feel really small, but I promise you it makes a difference. Nothing will ever bring back Deah, Yusor and Razan. But when we raise our collective voices, that is when we stop the hate. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can a divided America heal? | {0: 'Jonathan Haidt studies how -- and why -- we evolved to be moral and political creatures.', 1: '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.'} | TEDNYC | Chris Anderson: So, Jon, this feels scary. Jonathan Haidt: Yeah. CA: It feels like the world is in a place that we haven't seen for a long time. People don't just disagree in the way that we're familiar with, on the left-right political divide. There are much deeper differences afoot. What on earth is going on, and how did we get here? JH: This is different. There's a much more apocalyptic sort of feeling. Survey research by Pew Research shows that the degree to which we feel that the other side is not just — we don't just dislike them; we strongly dislike them, and we think that they are a threat to the nation. Those numbers have been going up and up, and those are over 50 percent now on both sides. People are scared, because it feels like this is different than before; it's much more intense. Whenever I look at any sort of social puzzle, I always apply the three basic principles of moral psychology, and I think they'll help us here. So the first thing that you have to always keep in mind when you're thinking about politics is that we're tribal. We evolved for tribalism. One of the simplest and greatest insights into human social nature is the Bedouin proverb: "Me against my brother; me and my brother against our cousin; me and my brother and cousins against the stranger." And that tribalism allowed us to create large societies and to come together in order to compete with others. That brought us out of the jungle and out of small groups, but it means that we have eternal conflict. The question you have to look at is: What aspects of our society are making that more bitter, and what are calming them down? CA: That's a very dark proverb. You're saying that that's actually baked into most people's mental wiring at some level? JH: Oh, absolutely. This is just a basic aspect of human social cognition. But we can also live together really peacefully, and we've invented all kinds of fun ways of, like, playing war. I mean, sports, politics — these are all ways that we get to exercise this tribal nature without actually hurting anyone. We're also really good at trade and exploration and meeting new people. So you have to see our tribalism as something that goes up or down — it's not like we're doomed to always be fighting each other, but we'll never have world peace. CA: The size of that tribe can shrink or expand. JH: Right. CA: The size of what we consider "us" and what we consider "other" or "them" can change. And some people believed that process could continue indefinitely. JH: That's right. CA: And we were indeed expanding the sense of tribe for a while. JH: So this is, I think, where we're getting at what's possibly the new left-right distinction. I mean, the left-right as we've all inherited it, comes out of the labor versus capital distinction, and the working class, and Marx. But I think what we're seeing now, increasingly, is a divide in all the Western democracies between the people who want to stop at nation, the people who are more parochial — and I don't mean that in a bad way — people who have much more of a sense of being rooted, they care about their town, their community and their nation. And then those who are anti-parochial and who — whenever I get confused, I just think of the John Lennon song "Imagine." "Imagine there's no countries, nothing to kill or die for." And so these are the people who want more global governance, they don't like nation states, they don't like borders. You see this all over Europe as well. There's a great metaphor guy — actually, his name is Shakespeare — writing ten years ago in Britain. He had a metaphor: "Are we drawbridge-uppers or drawbridge-downers?" And Britain is divided 52-48 on that point. And America is divided on that point, too. CA: And so, those of us who grew up with The Beatles and that sort of hippie philosophy of dreaming of a more connected world — it felt so idealistic and "how could anyone think badly about that?" And what you're saying is that, actually, millions of people today feel that that isn't just silly; it's actually dangerous and wrong, and they're scared of it. JH: I think the big issue, especially in Europe but also here, is the issue of immigration. And I think this is where we have to look very carefully at the social science about diversity and immigration. Once something becomes politicized, once it becomes something that the left loves and the right — then even the social scientists can't think straight about it. Now, diversity is good in a lot of ways. It clearly creates more innovation. The American economy has grown enormously from it. Diversity and immigration do a lot of good things. But what the globalists, I think, don't see, what they don't want to see, is that ethnic diversity cuts social capital and trust. There's a very important study by Robert Putnam, the author of "Bowling Alone," looking at social capital databases. And basically, the more people feel that they are the same, the more they trust each other, the more they can have a redistributionist welfare state. Scandinavian countries are so wonderful because they have this legacy of being small, homogenous countries. And that leads to a progressive welfare state, a set of progressive left-leaning values, which says, "Drawbridge down! The world is a great place. People in Syria are suffering — we must welcome them in." And it's a beautiful thing. But if, and I was in Sweden this summer, if the discourse in Sweden is fairly politically correct and they can't talk about the downsides, you end up bringing a lot of people in. That's going to cut social capital, it makes it hard to have a welfare state and they might end up, as we have in America, with a racially divided, visibly racially divided, society. So this is all very uncomfortable to talk about. But I think this is the thing, especially in Europe and for us, too, we need to be looking at. CA: You're saying that people of reason, people who would consider themselves not racists, but moral, upstanding people, have a rationale that says humans are just too different; that we're in danger of overloading our sense of what humans are capable of, by mixing in people who are too different. JH: Yes, but I can make it much more palatable by saying it's not necessarily about race. It's about culture. There's wonderful work by a political scientist named Karen Stenner, who shows that when people have a sense that we are all united, we're all the same, there are many people who have a predisposition to authoritarianism. Those people aren't particularly racist when they feel as through there's not a threat to our social and moral order. But if you prime them experimentally by thinking we're coming apart, people are getting more different, then they get more racist, homophobic, they want to kick out the deviants. So it's in part that you get an authoritarian reaction. The left, following through the Lennonist line — the John Lennon line — does things that create an authoritarian reaction. We're certainly seeing that in America with the alt-right. We saw it in Britain, we've seen it all over Europe. But the more positive part of that is that I think the localists, or the nationalists, are actually right — that, if you emphasize our cultural similarity, then race doesn't actually matter very much. So an assimilationist approach to immigration removes a lot of these problems. And if you value having a generous welfare state, you've got to emphasize that we're all the same. CA: OK, so rising immigration and fears about that are one of the causes of the current divide. What are other causes? JH: The next principle of moral psychology is that intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. You've probably heard the term "motivated reasoning" or "confirmation bias." There's some really interesting work on how our high intelligence and our verbal abilities might have evolved not to help us find out the truth, but to help us manipulate each other, defend our reputation ... We're really, really good at justifying ourselves. And when you bring group interests into account, so it's not just me, it's my team versus your team, whereas if you're evaluating evidence that your side is wrong, we just can't accept that. So this is why you can't win a political argument. If you're debating something, you can't persuade the person with reasons and evidence, because that's not the way reasoning works. So now, give us the internet, give us Google: "I heard that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Let me Google that — oh my God! 10 million hits! Look, he was!" CA: So this has come as an unpleasant surprise to a lot of people. Social media has often been framed by techno-optimists as this great connecting force that would bring people together. And there have been some unexpected counter-effects to that. JH: That's right. That's why I'm very enamored of yin-yang views of human nature and left-right — that each side is right about certain things, but then it goes blind to other things. And so the left generally believes that human nature is good: bring people together, knock down the walls and all will be well. The right — social conservatives, not libertarians — social conservatives generally believe people can be greedy and sexual and selfish, and we need regulation, and we need restrictions. So, yeah, if you knock down all the walls, allow people to communicate all over the world, you get a lot of porn and a lot of racism. CA: So help us understand. These principles of human nature have been with us forever. What's changed that's deepened this feeling of division? JH: You have to see six to ten different threads all coming together. I'll just list a couple of them. So in America, one of the big — actually, America and Europe — one of the biggest ones is World War II. There's interesting research from Joe Henrich and others that says if your country was at war, especially when you were young, then we test you 30 years later in a commons dilemma or a prisoner's dilemma, you're more cooperative. Because of our tribal nature, if you're — my parents were teenagers during World War II, and they would go out looking for scraps of aluminum to help the war effort. I mean, everybody pulled together. And so then these people go on, they rise up through business and government, they take leadership positions. They're really good at compromise and cooperation. They all retire by the '90s. So we're left with baby boomers by the end of the '90s. And their youth was spent fighting each other within each country, in 1968 and afterwards. The loss of the World War II generation, "The Greatest Generation," is huge. So that's one. Another, in America, is the purification of the two parties. There used to be liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. So America had a mid-20th century that was really bipartisan. But because of a variety of factors that started things moving, by the 90's, we had a purified liberal party and conservative party. So now, the people in either party really are different, and we really don't want our children to marry them, which, in the '60s, didn't matter very much. So, the purification of the parties. Third is the internet and, as I said, it's just the most amazing stimulant for post-hoc reasoning and demonization. CA: The tone of what's happening on the internet now is quite troubling. I just did a quick search on Twitter about the election and saw two tweets next to each other. One, against a picture of racist graffiti: "This is disgusting! Ugliness in this country, brought to us by #Trump." And then the next one is: "Crooked Hillary dedication page. Disgusting!" So this idea of "disgust" is troubling to me. Because you can have an argument or a disagreement about something, you can get angry at someone. Disgust, I've heard you say, takes things to a much deeper level. JH: That's right. Disgust is different. Anger — you know, I have kids. They fight 10 times a day, and they love each other 30 times a day. You just go back and forth: you get angry, you're not angry; you're angry, you're not angry. But disgust is different. Disgust paints the person as subhuman, monstrous, deformed, morally deformed. Disgust is like indelible ink. There's research from John Gottman on marital therapy. If you look at the faces — if one of the couple shows disgust or contempt, that's a predictor that they're going to get divorced soon, whereas if they show anger, that doesn't predict anything, because if you deal with anger well, it actually is good. So this election is different. Donald Trump personally uses the word "disgust" a lot. He's very germ-sensitive, so disgust does matter a lot — more for him, that's something unique to him — but as we demonize each other more, and again, through the Manichaean worldview, the idea that the world is a battle between good and evil as this has been ramping up, we're more likely not just to say they're wrong or I don't like them, but we say they're evil, they're satanic, they're disgusting, they're revolting. And then we want nothing to do with them. And that's why I think we're seeing it, for example, on campus now. We're seeing more the urge to keep people off campus, silence them, keep them away. I'm afraid that this whole generation of young people, if their introduction to politics involves a lot of disgust, they're not going to want to be involved in politics as they get older. CA: So how do we deal with that? Disgust. How do you defuse disgust? JH: You can't do it with reasons. I think ... I studied disgust for many years, and I think about emotions a lot. And I think that the opposite of disgust is actually love. Love is all about, like ... Disgust is closing off, borders. Love is about dissolving walls. So personal relationships, I think, are probably the most powerful means we have. You can be disgusted by a group of people, but then you meet a particular person and you genuinely discover that they're lovely. And then gradually that chips away or changes your category as well. The tragedy is, Americans used to be much more mixed up in the their towns by left-right or politics. And now that it's become this great moral divide, there's a lot of evidence that we're moving to be near people who are like us politically. It's harder to find somebody who's on the other side. So they're over there, they're far away. It's harder to get to know them. CA: What would you say to someone or say to Americans, people generally, about what we should understand about each other that might help us rethink for a minute this "disgust" instinct? JH: Yes. A really important thing to keep in mind — there's research by political scientist Alan Abramowitz, showing that American democracy is increasingly governed by what's called "negative partisanship." That means you think, OK there's a candidate, you like the candidate, you vote for the candidate. But with the rise of negative advertising and social media and all sorts of other trends, increasingly, the way elections are done is that each side tries to make the other side so horrible, so awful, that you'll vote for my guy by default. And so as we more and more vote against the other side and not for our side, you have to keep in mind that if people are on the left, they think, "Well, I used to think that Republicans were bad, but now Donald Trump proves it. And now every Republican, I can paint with all the things that I think about Trump." And that's not necessarily true. They're generally not very happy with their candidate. This is the most negative partisanship election in American history. So you have to first separate your feelings about the candidate from your feelings about the people who are given a choice. And then you have to realize that, because we all live in a separate moral world — the metaphor I use in the book is that we're all trapped in "The Matrix," or each moral community is a matrix, a consensual hallucination. And so if you're within the blue matrix, everything's completely compelling that the other side — they're troglodytes, they're racists, they're the worst people in the world, and you have all the facts to back that up. But somebody in the next house from yours is living in a different moral matrix. They live in a different video game, and they see a completely different set of facts. And each one sees different threats to the country. And what I've found from being in the middle and trying to understand both sides is: both sides are right. There are a lot of threats to this country, and each side is constitutionally incapable of seeing them all. CA: So, are you saying that we almost need a new type of empathy? Empathy is traditionally framed as: "Oh, I feel your pain. I can put myself in your shoes." And we apply it to the poor, the needy, the suffering. We don't usually apply it to people who we feel as other, or we're disgusted by. JH: No. That's right. CA: What would it look like to build that type of empathy? JH: Actually, I think ... Empathy is a very, very hot topic in psychology, and it's a very popular word on the left in particular. Empathy is a good thing, and empathy for the preferred classes of victims. So it's important to empathize with the groups that we on the left think are so important. That's easy to do, because you get points for that. But empathy really should get you points if you do it when it's hard to do. And, I think ... You know, we had a long 50-year period of dealing with our race problems and legal discrimination, and that was our top priority for a long time and it still is important. But I think this year, I'm hoping it will make people see that we have an existential threat on our hands. Our left-right divide, I believe, is by far the most important divide we face. We still have issues about race and gender and LGBT, but this is the urgent need of the next 50 years, and things aren't going to get better on their own. So we're going to need to do a lot of institutional reforms, and we could talk about that, but that's like a whole long, wonky conversation. But I think it starts with people realizing that this is a turning point. And yes, we need a new kind of empathy. We need to realize: this is what our country needs, and this is what you need if you don't want to — Raise your hand if you want to spend the next four years as angry and worried as you've been for the last year — raise your hand. So if you want to escape from this, read Buddha, read Jesus, read Marcus Aurelius. They have all kinds of great advice for how to drop the fear, reframe things, stop seeing other people as your enemy. There's a lot of guidance in ancient wisdom for this kind of empathy. CA: Here's my last question: Personally, what can people do to help heal? JH: Yeah, it's very hard to just decide to overcome your deepest prejudices. And there's research showing that political prejudices are deeper and stronger than race prejudices in the country now. So I think you have to make an effort — that's the main thing. Make an effort to actually meet somebody. Everybody has a cousin, a brother-in-law, somebody who's on the other side. So, after this election — wait a week or two, because it's probably going to feel awful for one of you — but wait a couple weeks, and then reach out and say you want to talk. And before you do it, read Dale Carnegie, "How to Win Friends and Influence People" — (Laughter) I'm totally serious. You'll learn techniques if you start by acknowledging, if you start by saying, "You know, we don't agree on a lot, but one thing I really respect about you, Uncle Bob," or "... about you conservatives, is ... " And you can find something. If you start with some appreciation, it's like magic. This is one of the main things I've learned that I take into my human relationships. I still make lots of stupid mistakes, but I'm incredibly good at apologizing now, and at acknowledging what somebody was right about. And if you do that, then the conversation goes really well, and it's actually really fun. CA: Jon, it's absolutely fascinating speaking with you. It really does feel like the ground that we're on is a ground populated by deep questions of morality and human nature. Your wisdom couldn't be more relevant. Thank you so much for sharing this time with us. JH: Thanks, Chris. JH: Thanks, everyone. (Applause) |
Easy DIY projects for kid engineers | {0: 'Fawn Qiu is a multi-disciplinary technologist who introduces the creative side of engineering through playful projects.'} | TED Residency | I design engineering projects for middle school and high school students, often using materials that are pretty unexpected. My inspiration comes from problems in my daily life. For example, one time I needed a costume to go to a comic convention, but I didn't want to spend too much money, so I made my own ... with a light-up crown and skirt. (Laughter) Another time, I was devastated because my favorite mobile game, Flappy Bird, was being taken off the app store. (Laughter) So I was faced with the dilemma to either never update my phone or never play Flappy Bird again. (Laughter) Unhappy with both options, I did the only thing that made sense to me. I made a physical version of Flappy Bird that could never be taken off the app store. (Laughter) (Music) (Beeping) (Music) (Laughter) So a few of my friends were also pretty addicted to the game, and I invited them to play as well. (Video) Friend: Ah! (Laughter) (Video) Friend: What the heck? (Laughter) And they told me that it was just as infuriating as the original game. (Laughter) So I uploaded a demo of this project online, and to my surprise it went viral. It had over two million views in just a few days. (Laughter) And what's more interesting are people's comments. A lot of people wanted to make it their own, or asked me how it was made. So this kind of confirmed my idea that through a creative project, we can teach people about engineering. With the money made from the viral video, we were able to let students in our classroom all make their own game in a box. Although it was pretty challenging, they learned a lot of new concepts in engineering and programming. And they were all eager to learn so they could finish the game as well. (Laughter) So before Flappy Bird Box, I had the idea of using creative engineering projects to teach students. When I was teaching at a middle school, we asked our students to build a robot from a standard technology kit. And I noticed that a lot of them seemed bored. Then a few of them started taking pieces of paper and decorating their robots. And then more of them got into it, and they became more interested in the project. So I started looking for more creative ways to introduce technology to students. What I found was that most technology kits available in school look a little intimidating. They're all made of plastic parts that you can't customize. On top of that, they're all very expensive, costing hundreds of dollars per kit. So that's certainly not very affordable for most classroom budgets. Since I didn't find anything, I decided to make something on my own. I started with paper and fabric. After all, we all played with those since we were kids, and they are also pretty cheap and can be found anywhere around the house. And I prototyped a project where students can create a light-up creature using fabric and googly eyes. They were all helping each other in classrooms, and were laughing and discussing the project. And most importantly, they were able to insert their own creativity into the project. So because of the success of this project, I continued to create more engineering projects to challenge my students. And I also started to take these workshops outside of school and into the community. And something really interesting happened. I noticed a lot of people from very diverse backgrounds started coming to our workshops. And specifically, there were a lot more women and minorities than I expected, and that you wouldn't usually see at a traditional engineering workshop. Now take a look at this employee report at a major technology company in 2016. Women make up only 19 percent of the technology workforce. And underrepresented minorities make up only four percent. This statistic might look familiar if you walked into a high school robotics club, or a college engineering class. Now, there's a wide variety of problems that contribute to the lack of diversity in the technology force. Perhaps one solution could be to introduce technology to students through creative projects. I'm not saying that this could solve everything, but it could introduce technology to people who originally wouldn't be interested in it because of how it has been portrayed and taught in school. So how do we start to change the perception of technology? Most students think that it's boring or unwelcoming, so I have always designed projects following three principles. First is having a low floor, and that means this project is easy to get started. So take a look at this tutorial. The first project we asked students to learn is to make a circuit on paper. As you can see, it doesn't take very long to learn, and it's pretty easy even for beginners. And having a low floor also means that we're removing the financial barrier that prevents people from completing a project. So with paper, copper tape, lightbulb and a battery, people can complete this project for under a dollar. So second principle is having a high ceiling. This means that there's a lot of room to grow, and students are constantly being challenged. At first it might just be a light-up creature, but then you can add sensors and microcontrollers, and start to program the creature to interact with its environment. (Laughter) And finally, the third principle is customization. This means that we can make this project relevant to anyone. That's the beauty of using everyday materials; it's very easy to customize using paper and fabric. So even if you don't like Flappy Bird, you can still make your own game. (Video) Student: So our game is about Justin Bieber, because he's been speeding, and the object is to prevent him from getting caught by the LAPD — (Laughter) (Video) Student: Yeah, but he's changing so — we're a part of his posse. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
We train soldiers for war. Let's train them to come home, too | {0: 'Hector A. Garcia has spent his career as a frontline psychologist delivering evidence-based psychotherapies to veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).'} | TED Talks Live | Carlos, the Vietnam vet Marine who volunteered for three tours and got shot up in every one. In 1971, he was medically retired because he had so much shrapnel in his body that he was setting off metal detectors. For the next 42 years, he suffered from nightmares, extreme anxiety in public, isolation, depression. He self-medicated with alcohol. He was married and divorced three times. Carlos had post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, I became a psychologist to help mitigate human suffering, and for the past 10 years, my target has been the suffering caused by PTSD, as experienced by veterans like Carlos. Until recently, the science of PTSD just wasn't there. And so, we didn't know what to do. We put some veterans on heavy drugs. Others we hospitalized and gave generic group therapy, and others still we simply said to them, "Just go home and try to forget about your experiences." More recently, we've tried therapy dogs, wilderness retreats — many things which may temporarily relieve stress, but which don't actually eliminate PTSD symptoms over the long term. But things have changed. And I am here to tell you that we can now eliminate PTSD, not just manage the symptoms, and in huge numbers of veterans. Because new scientific research has been able to show, objectively, repeatedly, which treatments actually get rid of symptoms and which do not. Now as it turns out, the best treatments for PTSD use many of the very same training principles that the military uses in preparing its trainees for war. Now, making war — this is something that we are good at. We humans have been making war since before we were even fully human. And since then, we have gone from using stone and sinew to developing the most sophisticated and devastating weapon systems imaginable. And to enable our warriors to use these weapons, we employ the most cutting-edge training methods. We are good at making war. And we are good at training our warriors to fight. Yet, when we consider the experience of the modern-day combat veteran, we begin to see that we have not been as good at preparing them to come home. Why is that? Well, our ancestors lived immersed in conflict, and they fought right where they lived. So until only very recently in our evolutionary history, there was hardly a need to learn how to come home from war, because we never really did. But thankfully, today, most of humanity lives in far more peaceful societies, and when there is conflict, we, especially in the United States, now have the technology to put our warriors through advanced training, drop them in to fight anywhere on the globe and when they're done, jet them back to peacetime suburbia. But just imagine for a moment what this must feel like. I've spoken with veterans who've told me that one day they're in a brutal firefight in Afghanistan where they saw carnage and death, and just three days later, they found themselves toting an ice chest to their kid's soccer game. "Mindfuck" is the most common term. (Laughter) It's the most common term I've heard to describe that experience. And that's exactly what that is. Because while our warriors spend countless hours training for war, we've only recently come to understand that many require training on how to return to civilian life. Now, like any training, the best PTSD treatments require repetition. In the military, we don't simply hand trainees Mark-19 automatic grenade launchers and say, "Here's the trigger, here's some ammo and good luck." No. We train them, on the range and in specific contexts, over and over and over until lifting their weapon and engaging their target is so engrained into muscle memory that it can be performed without even thinking, even under the most stressful conditions you can imagine. Now, the same holds for training-based treatments. The first of these treatments is cognitive therapy, and this is a kind of mental recalibration. When veterans come home from war, their way of mentally framing the world is calibrated to an immensely more dangerous environment. So when you try to overlay that mind frame onto a peacetime environment, you get problems. You begin drowning in worries about dangers that aren't present. You begin not trusting family or friends. Which is not to say there are no dangers in civilian life; there are. It's just that the probability of encountering them compared to combat is astronomically lower. So we never advise veterans to turn off caution completely. We do train them, however, to adjust caution according to where they are. If you find yourself in a bad neighborhood, you turn it up. Out to dinner with family? You turn it way down. We train veterans to be fiercely rational, to systematically gauge the actual statistical probability of encountering, say, an IED here in peacetime America. With enough practice, those recalibrations stick. The next of these treatments is exposure therapy, and this is a kind of field training, and the fastest of the proven effective treatments out there. You remember Carlos? This was the treatment that he chose. And so we started off by giving him exercises, for him, challenging ones: going to a grocery store, going to a shopping mall, going to a restaurant, sitting with his back to the door. And, critically — staying in these environments. Now, at first he was very anxious. He wanted to sit where he could scan the room, where he could plan escape routes, where he could get his hands on a makeshift weapon. And he wanted to leave, but he didn't. He remembered his training in the Marine Corps, and he pushed through his discomfort. And every time he did this, his anxiety ratcheted down a little bit, and then a little bit more and then a little bit more, until in the end, he had effectively relearned how to sit in a public space and just enjoy himself. He also listened to recordings of his combat experiences, over and over and over. He listened until those memories no longer generated any anxiety. He processed his memories so much that his brain no longer needed to return to those experiences in his sleep. And when I spoke with him a year after treatment had finished, he told me, "Doc, this is the first time in 43 years that I haven't had nightmares." Now, this is different than erasing a memory. Veterans will always remember their traumatic experiences, but with enough practice, those memories are no longer as raw or as painful as they once were. They don't feel emotionally like they just happened yesterday, and that is an immensely better place to be. But it's often difficult. And, like any training, it may not work for everybody. And there are trust issues. Sometimes I'm asked, "If you haven't been there, Doc, how can you help me?" Which is understandable. But at the point of returning to civilian life, you do not require somebody who's been there. You don't require training for operations on the battlefield; you require training on how to come home. For the past 10 years of my work, I have been exposed to detailed accounts of the worst experiences that you can imagine, daily. And it hasn't always been easy. There have been times where I have just felt my heart break or that I've absorbed too much. But these training-based treatments work so well, that whatever this work takes out of me, it puts back even more, because I see people get better. I see people's lives transform. Carlos can now enjoy outings with his grandchildren, which is something he couldn't even do with his own children. And what's amazing to me is that after 43 years of suffering, it only took him 10 weeks of intense training to get his life back. And when I spoke with him, he told me, "I know that I can't get those years back. But at least now, whatever days that I have left on this Earth, I can live them in peace." He also said, "I hope that these younger veterans don't wait to get the help they need." And that's my hope, too. Because ... this life is short, and if you are fortunate enough to have survived war or any kind of traumatic experience, you owe it to yourself to live your life well. And you shouldn't wait to get the training you need to make that happen. Now, the best way of ending human suffering caused by war is to never go to war. But we are just not there yet as a species. Until we are, the mental suffering that we create in our sons and in our daughters when we send them off to fight can be alleviated. But we must ensure that the science, the energy level, the value that we place on sending them off to war is at the very least mirrored in how well we prepare them to come back home to us. This much, we owe them. Thank you. (Applause) |
The urgency of intersectionality | {0: 'As a pioneer in critical race theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw helped open the discussion of the double bind faced by victims of simultaneous racial and gender prejudice.', 1: 'Passionate about using music as a tool for empathy cultivation, Abby Dobson creates music to inspire audiences to reflect on the world we live in and engage in action to promote transformative social change. '} | TEDWomen 2016 | I'd like to try something new. Those of you who are able, please stand up. OK, so I'm going to name some names. When you hear a name that you don't recognize, you can't tell me anything about them, I'd like you to take a seat and stay seated. The last person standing, we're going to see what they know. OK? (Laughter) All right. Eric Garner. Mike Brown. Tamir Rice. Freddie Gray. So those of you who are still standing, I'd like you to turn around and take a look. I'd say half to most of the people are still standing. So let's continue. Michelle Cusseaux. Tanisha Anderson. Aura Rosser. Meagan Hockaday. So if we look around again, there are about four people still standing, and actually I'm not going to put you on the spot. I just say that to encourage transparency, so you can be seated. (Laughter) So those of you who recognized the first group of names know that these were African-Americans who have been killed by the police over the last two and a half years. What you may not know is that the other list is also African-Americans who have been killed within the last two years. Only one thing distinguishes the names that you know from the names that you don't know: gender. So let me first let you know that there's nothing at all distinct about this audience that explains the pattern of recognition that we've just seen. I've done this exercise dozens of times around the country. I've done it to women's rights organizations. I've done it with civil rights groups. I've done it with professors. I've done it with students. I've done it with psychologists. I've done it with sociologists. I've done it even with progressive members of Congress. And everywhere, the awareness of the level of police violence that black women experience is exceedingly low. Now, it is surprising, isn't it, that this would be the case. I mean, there are two issues involved here. There's police violence against African-Americans, and there's violence against women, two issues that have been talked about a lot lately. But when we think about who is implicated by these problems, when we think about who is victimized by these problems, the names of these black women never come to mind. Now, communications experts tell us that when facts do not fit with the available frames, people have a difficult time incorporating new facts into their way of thinking about a problem. These women's names have slipped through our consciousness because there are no frames for us to see them, no frames for us to remember them, no frames for us to hold them. As a consequence, reporters don't lead with them, policymakers don't think about them, and politicians aren't encouraged or demanded that they speak to them. Now, you might ask, why does a frame matter? I mean, after all, an issue that affects black people and an issue that affects women, wouldn't that necessarily include black people who are women and women who are black people? Well, the simple answer is that this is a trickle-down approach to social justice, and many times it just doesn't work. Without frames that allow us to see how social problems impact all the members of a targeted group, many will fall through the cracks of our movements, left to suffer in virtual isolation. But it doesn't have to be this way. Many years ago, I began to use the term "intersectionality" to deal with the fact that many of our social justice problems like racism and sexism are often overlapping, creating multiple levels of social injustice. Now, the experience that gave rise to intersectionality was my chance encounter with a woman named Emma DeGraffenreid. Emma DeGraffenreid was an African-American woman, a working wife and a mother. I actually read about Emma's story from the pages of a legal opinion written by a judge who had dismissed Emma's claim of race and gender discrimination against a local car manufacturing plant. Emma, like so many African-American women, sought better employment for her family and for others. She wanted to create a better life for her children and for her family. But she applied for a job, and she was not hired, and she believed that she was not hired because she was a black woman. Now, the judge in question dismissed Emma's suit, and the argument for dismissing the suit was that the employer did hire African-Americans and the employer hired women. The real problem, though, that the judge was not willing to acknowledge was what Emma was actually trying to say, that the African-Americans that were hired, usually for industrial jobs, maintenance jobs, were all men. And the women that were hired, usually for secretarial or front-office work, were all white. Only if the court was able to see how these policies came together would he be able to see the double discrimination that Emma DeGraffenreid was facing. But the court refused to allow Emma to put two causes of action together to tell her story because he believed that, by allowing her to do that, she would be able to have preferential treatment. She would have an advantage by having two swings at the bat, when African-American men and white women only had one swing at the bat. But of course, neither African-American men or white women needed to combine a race and gender discrimination claim to tell the story of the discrimination they were experiencing. Why wasn't the real unfairness law's refusal to protect African-American women simply because their experiences weren't exactly the same as white women and African-American men? Rather than broadening the frame to include African-American women, the court simply tossed their case completely out of court. Now, as a student of antidiscrimination law, as a feminist, as an antiracist, I was struck by this case. It felt to me like injustice squared. So first of all, black women weren't allowed to work at the plant. Second of all, the court doubled down on this exclusion by making it legally inconsequential. And to boot, there was no name for this problem. And we all know that, where there's no name for a problem, you can't see a problem, and when you can't see a problem, you pretty much can't solve it. Many years later, I had come to recognize that the problem that Emma was facing was a framing problem. The frame that the court was using to see gender discrimination or to see race discrimination was partial, and it was distorting. For me, the challenge that I faced was trying to figure out whether there was an alternative narrative, a prism that would allow us to see Emma's dilemma, a prism that would allow us to rescue her from the cracks in the law, that would allow judges to see her story. So it occurred to me, maybe a simple analogy to an intersection might allow judges to better see Emma's dilemma. So if we think about this intersection, the roads to the intersection would be the way that the workforce was structured by race and by gender. And then the traffic in those roads would be the hiring policies and the other practices that ran through those roads. Now, because Emma was both black and female, she was positioned precisely where those roads overlapped, experiencing the simultaneous impact of the company's gender and race traffic. The law — the law is like that ambulance that shows up and is ready to treat Emma only if it can be shown that she was harmed on the race road or on the gender road but not where those roads intersected. So what do you call being impacted by multiple forces and then abandoned to fend for yourself? Intersectionality seemed to do it for me. I would go on to learn that African-American women, like other women of color, like other socially marginalized people all over the world, were facing all kinds of dilemmas and challenges as a consequence of intersectionality, intersections of race and gender, of heterosexism, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, all of these social dynamics come together and create challenges that are sometimes quite unique. But in the same way that intersectionality raised our awareness to the way that black women live their lives, it also exposes the tragic circumstances under which African-American women die. Police violence against black women is very real. The level of violence that black women face is such that it's not surprising that some of them do not survive their encounters with police. Black girls as young as seven, great grandmothers as old as 95 have been killed by the police. They've been killed in their living rooms, in their bedrooms. They've been killed in their cars. They've been killed on the street. They've been killed in front of their parents and they've been killed in front of their children. They have been shot to death. They have been stomped to death. They have been suffocated to death. They have been manhandled to death. They have been tasered to death. They've been killed when they've called for help. They've been killed when they were alone, and they've been killed when they were with others. They've been killed shopping while black, driving while black, having a mental disability while black, having a domestic disturbance while black. They've even been killed being homeless while black. They've been killed talking on the cell phone, laughing with friends, sitting in a car reported as stolen and making a U-turn in front of the White House with an infant strapped in the backseat of the car. Why don't we know these stories? Why is it that their lost lives don't generate the same amount of media attention and communal outcry as the lost lives of their fallen brothers? It's time for a change. So what can we do? In 2014, the African-American Policy Forum began to demand that we "say her name" at rallies, at protests, at conferences, at meetings, anywhere and everywhere that state violence against black bodies is being discussed. But saying her name is not enough. We have to be willing to do more. We have to be willing to bear witness, to bear witness to the often painful realities that we would just rather not confront, the everyday violence and humiliation that many black women have had to face, black women across color, age, gender expression, sexuality and ability. So we have the opportunity right now — bearing in mind that some of the images that I'm about to share with you may be triggering for some — to collectively bear witness to some of this violence. We're going to hear the voice of the phenomenal Abby Dobson. And as we sit with these women, some who have experienced violence and some who have not survived them, we have an opportunity to reverse what happened at the beginning of this talk, when we could not stand for these women because we did not know their names. So at the end of this clip, there's going to be a roll call. Several black women's names will come up. I'd like those of you who are able to join us in saying these names as loud as you can, randomly, disorderly. Let's create a cacophony of sound to represent our intention to hold these women up, to sit with them, to bear witness to them, to bring them into the light. (Singing) Abby Dobson: Say, say her name. Say, say her name. (Audience) Shelly! (Audience) Kayla! AD: Oh, say her name. (Audience shouting names) Say, say, say her name. Say her name. For all the names I'll never know, say her name. KC: Aiyanna Stanley Jones, Janisha Fonville, Kathryn Johnston, Kayla Moore, Michelle Cusseaux, Rekia Boyd, Shelly Frey, Tarika, Yvette Smith. AD: Say her name. KC: So I said at the beginning, if we can't see a problem, we can't fix a problem. Together, we've come together to bear witness to these women's lost lives. But the time now is to move from mourning and grief to action and transformation. This is something that we can do. It's up to us. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. (Applause) |
How the blockchain will radically transform the economy | {0: 'Bettina Warburg is a blockchain researcher, entrepreneur and educator. A political scientist by training, she has a deep passion for the intersection of politics and technology.'} | TEDSummit | Economists have been exploring people's behavior for hundreds of years: how we make decisions, how we act individually and in groups, how we exchange value. They've studied the institutions that facilitate our trade, like legal systems, corporations, marketplaces. But there is a new, technological institution that will fundamentally change how we exchange value, and it's called the blockchain. Now, that's a pretty bold statement, but if you take nothing else away from this talk, I actually want you to remember that while blockchain technology is relatively new, it's also a continuation of a very human story, and the story is this. As humans, we find ways to lower uncertainty about one another so that we can exchange value. Now, one of the first people to really explore the idea of institutions as a tool in economics to lower our uncertainties about one another and be able to do trade was the Nobel economist Douglass North. He passed away at the end of 2015, but North pioneered what's called "new institutional economics." And what he meant by institutions were really just formal rules like a constitution, and informal constraints, like bribery. These institutions are really the grease that allow our economic wheels to function, and we can see this play out over the course of human history. If we think back to when we were hunter-gatherer economies, we really just traded within our village structure. We had some informal constraints in place, but we enforced all of our trade with violence or social repercussions. As our societies grew more complex and our trade routes grew more distant, we built up more formal institutions, institutions like banks for currency, governments, corporations. These institutions helped us manage our trade as the uncertainty and the complexity grew, and our personal control was much lower. Eventually with the internet, we put these same institutions online. We built platform marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, just faster institutions that act as middlemen to facilitate human economic activity. As Douglass North saw it, institutions are a tool to lower uncertainty so that we can connect and exchange all kinds of value in society. And I believe we are now entering a further and radical evolution of how we interact and trade, because for the first time, we can lower uncertainty not just with political and economic institutions, like our banks, our corporations, our governments, but we can do it with technology alone. So what is the blockchain? Blockchain technology is a decentralized database that stores a registry of assets and transactions across a peer-to-peer network. It's basically a public registry of who owns what and who transacts what. The transactions are secured through cryptography, and over time, that transaction history gets locked in blocks of data that are then cryptographically linked together and secured. This creates an immutable, unforgeable record of all of the transactions across this network. This record is replicated on every computer that uses the network. It's not an app. It's not a company. I think it's closest in description to something like Wikipedia. We can see everything on Wikipedia. It's a composite view that's constantly changing and being updated. We can also track those changes over time on Wikipedia, and we can create our own wikis, because at their core, they're just a data infrastructure. On Wikipedia, it's an open platform that stores words and images and the changes to that data over time. On the blockchain, you can think of it as an open infrastructure that stores many kinds of assets. It stores the history of custodianship, ownership and location for assets like the digital currency Bitcoin, other digital assets like a title of ownership of IP. It could be a certificate, a contract, real world objects, even personal identifiable information. There are of course other technical details to the blockchain, but at its core, that's how it works. It's this public registry that stores transactions in a network and is replicated so that it's very secure and hard to tamper with. Which brings me to my point of how blockchains lower uncertainty and how they therefore promise to transform our economic systems in radical ways. So uncertainty is kind of a big term in economics, but I want to go through three forms of it that we face in almost all of our everyday transactions, where blockchains can play a role. We face uncertainties like not knowing who we're dealing with, not having visibility into a transaction and not having recourse if things go wrong. So let's take the first example, not knowing who we're dealing with. Say I want to buy a used smartphone on eBay. The first thing I'm going to do is look up who I'm buying from. Are they a power user? Do they have great reviews and ratings, or do they have no profile at all? Reviews, ratings, checkmarks: these are the attestations about our identities that we cobble together today and use to lower uncertainty about who we're dealing with. But the problem is they're very fragmented. Think about how many profiles you have. Blockchains allow for us to create an open, global platform on which to store any attestation about any individual from any source. This allows us to create a user-controlled portable identity. More than a profile, it means you can selectively reveal the different attributes about you that help facilitate trade or interaction, for instance that a government issued you an ID, or that you're over 21, by revealing the cryptographic proof that these details exist and are signed off on. Having this kind of portable identity around the physical world and the digital world means we can do all kinds of human trade in a totally new way. So I've talked about how blockchains could lower uncertainty in who we're dealing with. The second uncertainty that we often face is just not having transparency into our interactions. Say you're going to send me that smartphone by mail. I want some degree of transparency. I want to know that the product I bought is the same one that arrives in the mail and that there's some record for how it got to me. This is true not just for electronics like smartphones, but for many kinds of goods and data, things like medicine, luxury goods, any kind of data or product that we don't want tampered with. The problem in many companies, especially those that produce something complicated like a smartphone, is they're managing all of these different vendors across a horizontal supply chain. All of these people that go into making a product, they don't have the same database. They don't use the same infrastructure, and so it becomes really hard to see transparently a product evolve over time. Using the blockchain, we can create a shared reality across nontrusting entities. By this I mean all of these nodes in the network do not need to know each other or trust each other, because they each have the ability to monitor and validate the chain for themselves. Think back to Wikipedia. It's a shared database, and even though it has multiple readers and multiple writers at the same time, it has one single truth. So we can create that using blockchains. We can create a decentralized database that has the same efficiency of a monopoly without actually creating that central authority. So all of these vendors, all sorts of companies, can interact using the same database without trusting one another. It means for consumers, we can have a lot more transparency. As a real-world object travels along, we can see its digital certificate or token move on the blockchain, adding value as it goes. This is a whole new world in terms of our visibility. So I've talked about how blockchains can lower our uncertainties about identity and how they change what we mean about transparency in long distances and complex trades, like in a supply chain. The last uncertainty that we often face is one of the most open-ended, and it's reneging. What if you don't send me the smartphone? Can I get my money back? Blockchains allow us to write code, binding contracts, between individuals and then guarantee that those contracts will bear out without a third party enforcer. So if we look at the smartphone example, you could think about escrow. You are financing that phone, but you don't need to release the funds until you can verify that all the conditions have been met. You got the phone. I think this is one of the most exciting ways that blockchains lower our uncertainties, because it means to some degree we can collapse institutions and their enforcement. It means a lot of human economic activity can get collateralized and automated, and push a lot of human intervention to the edges, the places where information moves from the real world to the blockchain. I think what would probably floor Douglass North about this use of technology is the fact that the very thing that makes it work, the very thing that keeps the blockchain secure and verified, is our mutual distrust. So rather than all of our uncertainties slowing us down and requiring institutions like banks, our governments, our corporations, we can actually harness all of that collective uncertainty and use it to collaborate and exchange more and faster and more open. Now, I don't want you to get the impression that the blockchain is the solution to everything, even though the media has said that it's going to end world poverty, it's also going to solve the counterfeit drug problem and potentially save the rainforest. The truth is, this technology is in its infancy, and we're going to need to see a lot of experiments take place and probably fail before we truly understand all of the use cases for our economy. But there are tons of people working on this, from financial institutions to technology companies, start-ups and universities. And one of the reasons is that it's not just an economic evolution. It's also an innovation in computer science. Blockchains give us the technological capability of creating a record of human exchange, of exchange of currency, of all kinds of digital and physical assets, even of our own personal attributes, in a totally new way. So in some ways, they become a technological institution that has a lot of the benefits of the traditional institutions we're used to using in society, but it does this in a decentralized way. It does this by converting a lot of our uncertainties into certainties. So I think we need to start preparing ourselves, because we are about to face a world where distributed, autonomous institutions have quite a significant role. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Bettina. I think I understood that it's coming, it offers a lot of potential, and it's complex. What is your estimate for the rate of adoption? Bettina Warburg: I think that's a really good question. My lab is pretty much focused on going the enterprise and government route first, because in reality, blockchain is a complex technology. How many of you actually understand how the internet works? But you use it every day, so I think we're sort of facing the same John Sculley idea of technology should either be invisible or beautiful, and blockchain is kind of neither of those things right now, so it's better suited for either really early adopters who kind of get it and can tinker around or for finding those best use cases like identity or asset tracking or smart contracts that can be used at that level of an enterprise or government. BG: Thank you. Thanks for coming to TED. BW: Thanks. (Applause) |
The playful wonderland behind great inventions | {0: 'Steven Berlin Johnson examines the intersection of science, technology and personal experience.'} | TED Studio | (Music) Roughly 43,000 years ago, a young cave bear died in the rolling hills on the northwest border of modern day Slovenia. A thousand years later, a mammoth died in southern Germany. A few centuries after that, a griffon vulture also died in the same vicinity. And we know almost nothing about how these animals met their deaths, but these different creatures dispersed across both time and space did share one remarkable fate. After their deaths, a bone from each of their skeletons was crafted by human hands into a flute. Think about that for a second. Imagine you're a caveman, 40,000 years ago. You've mastered fire. You've built simple tools for hunting. You've learned how to craft garments from animal skins to keep yourself warm in the winter. What would you choose to invent next? It seems preposterous that you would invent the flute, a tool that created useless vibrations in air molecules. But that is exactly what our ancestors did. Now this turns out to be surprisingly common in the history of innovation. Sometimes people invent things because they want to stay alive or feed their children or conquer the village next door. But just as often, new ideas come into the world simply because they're fun. And here's the really strange thing: many of those playful but seemingly frivolous inventions ended up sparking momentous transformations in science, in politics and society. Take what may be the most important invention of modern times: programmable computers. Now, the standard story is that computers descend from military technology, since many of the early computers were designed specifically to crack wartime codes or calculate rocket trajectories. But in fact, the origins of the modern computer are much more playful, even musical, than you might imagine. The idea behind the flute, of just pushing air through tubes to make a sound, was eventually modified to create the first organ more than 2,000 years ago. Someone came up with the brilliant idea of triggering sounds by pressing small levers with our fingers, inventing the first musical keyboard. Now, keyboards evolved from organs to clavichords to harpsichords to the piano, until the middle of the 19th century, when a bunch of inventors finally hit on the idea of using a keyboard to trigger not sounds but letters. In fact, the very first typewriter was originally called "the writing harpsichord." Flutes and music led to even more powerful breakthroughs. About a thousand years ago, at the height of the Islamic Renaissance, three brothers in Baghdad designed a device that was an automated organ. They called it "the instrument that plays itself." Now, the instrument was basically a giant music box. The organ could be trained to play various songs by using instructions encoded by placing pins on a rotating cylinder. And if you wanted the machine to play a different song, you just swapped a new cylinder in with a different code on it. This instrument was the first of its kind. It was programmable. Now, conceptually, this was a massive leap forward. The whole idea of hardware and software becomes thinkable for the first time with this invention. And that incredibly powerful concept didn't come to us as an instrument of war or of conquest, or necessity at all. It came from the strange delight of watching a machine play music. In fact, the idea of programmable machines was exclusively kept alive by music for about 700 years. In the 1700s, music-making machines became the playthings of the Parisian elite. Showmen used the same coded cylinders to control the physical movements of what were called automata, an early kind of robot. One of the most famous of those robots was, you guessed it, an automated flute player designed by a brilliant French inventor named Jacques de Vaucanson. And as de Vaucanson was designing his robot musician, he had another idea. If you could program a machine to make pleasing sounds, why not program it to weave delightful patterns of color out of cloth? Instead of using the pins of the cylinder to represent musical notes, they would represent threads with different colors. If you wanted a new pattern for your fabric, you just programmed a new cylinder. This was the first programmable loom. Now, the cylinders were too expensive and time-consuming to make, but a half century later, another French inventor named Jacquard hit upon the brilliant idea of using paper-punched cards instead of metal cylinders. Paper turned out to be much cheaper and more flexible as a way of programming the device. That punch card system inspired Victorian inventor Charles Babbage to create his analytical engine, the first true programmable computer ever designed. And punch cards were used by computer programmers as late as the 1970s. So ask yourself this question: what really made the modern computer possible? Yes, the military involvement is an important part of the story, but inventing a computer also required other building blocks: music boxes, toy robot flute players, harpsichord keyboards, colorful patterns woven into fabric, and that's just a small part of the story. There's a long list of world-changing ideas and technologies that came out of play: public museums, rubber, probability theory, the insurance business and many more. Necessity isn't always the mother of invention. The playful state of mind is fundamentally exploratory, seeking out new possibilities in the world around us. And that seeking is why so many experiences that started with simple delight and amusement eventually led us to profound breakthroughs. Now, I think this has implications for how we teach kids in school and how we encourage innovation in our workspaces, but thinking about play and delight this way also helps us detect what's coming next. Think about it: if you were sitting there in 1750 trying to figure out the big changes coming to society in the 19th, the 20th centuries, automated machines, computers, artificial intelligence, a programmable flute entertaining the Parisian elite would have been as powerful a clue as anything else at the time. It seemed like an amusement at best, not useful in any serious way, but it turned out to be the beginning of a tech revolution that would change the world. You'll find the future wherever people are having the most fun. |
Help for kids the education system ignores | {0: 'Victor Rios seeks to uncover how to best support the lives of young people who experience poverty, stigma and social exclusion. '} | TED Talks Live | For over a decade, I have studied young people that have been pushed out of school, so called "dropouts." As they end up failed by the education system, they're on the streets where they're vulnerable to violence, police harassment, police brutality and incarceration. I follow these young people for years at a time, across institutional settings, to try to understand what some of us call the "school-to-prison pipeline." When you look at a picture like this, of young people who are in my study ... you might see trouble. I mean one of the boys has a bottle of liquor in his hand, he's 14 years old and it's a school day. Other people, when they see this picture, might see gangs, thugs, delinquents — criminals. But I see it different. I see these young people through a perspective that looks at the assets that they bring to the education system. So will you join me in changing the way we label young people from "at-risk" to "at-promise?" (Applause) How do I know that these young people have the potential and the promise to change? I know this because I am one of them. You see, I grew up in dire poverty in the inner city, without a father — he abandoned me before I was even born. We were on welfare, sometimes homeless, many times hungry. By the time I was 15 years old, I had been incarcerated in juvy three times for three felonies. My best friend had already been killed. And soon after, while I'm standing next to my uncle, he gets shot. And as I'm waiting for the ambulance to arrive for over an hour ... he bleeds to death on the street. I had lost faith and hope in the world, and I had given up on the system because the system had failed me. I had nothing to offer and no one had anything to offer me. I was fatalistic. I didn't even think I could make it to my 18th birthday. The reason I'm here today is because a teacher that cared reached out and managed to tap into my soul. This teacher, Ms. Russ ... she was the kind of teacher that was always in your business. (Laughter) She was the kind of teacher that was like, "Victor, I'm here for you whenever you're ready." (Laughter) I wasn't ready. But she understood one basic principle about young people like me. We're like oysters. We're only going to open up when we're ready, and if you're not there when we're ready, we're going to clam back up. Ms. Russ was there for me. She was culturally relevant, she respected my community, my people, my family. I told her a story about my Uncle Ruben. He would take me to work with him because I was broke, and he knew I needed some money. He collected glass bottles for a living. Four in the morning on a school day, we'd throw the glass bottles in the back of his van, and the bottles would break. And my hands and arms would start to bleed and my tennis shoes and pants would get all bloody. And I was terrified and in pain, and I would stop working. And my uncle, he would look me in the eyes and he would say to me, "Mijo, estamos buscando vida." "We're searching for a better life, we're trying to make something out of nothing." Ms. Russ listened to my story, welcomed it into the classroom and said, "Victor, this is your power. This is your potential. Your family, your culture, your community have taught you a hard-work ethic and you will use it to empower yourself in the academic world so you can come back and empower your community." With Ms. Russ's help, I ended up returning to school. I even finished my credits on time and graduated with my class. (Applause) But Ms. Russ said to me right before graduation, "Victor, I'm so proud of you. I knew you could do it. Now it's time to go to college." (Laughter) College, me? Man, what is this teacher smoking thinking I'm going to college? I applied with the mentors and support she provided, got a letter of acceptance, and one of the paragraphs read, "You've been admitted under probationary status." I said, "Probation? I'm already on probation, that don't matter?" (Laughter) It was academic probation, not criminal probation. But what do teachers like Ms. Russ do to succeed with young people like the ones I study? I propose three strategies. The first: let's get rid of our deficit perspective in education. "These people come from a culture of violence, a culture of poverty. These people are at-risk; these people are truant. These people are empty containers for us to fill with knowledge. They have the problems, we have the solutions." Number two. Let's value the stories that young people bring to the schoolhouse. Their stories of overcoming insurmountable odds are so powerful. And I know you know some of these stories. These very same stories and experiences already have grit, character and resilience in them. So let's help young people refine those stories. Let's help them be proud of who they are, because our education system welcomes their families, their cultures, their communities and the skill set they've learned to survive. And of course the third strategy being the most important: resources. We have to provide adequate resources to young people. Grit alone isn't going to cut it. You can sit there and tell me all you want, "Hey man, pick yourself up by the bootstraps." But if I was born without any straps on my boots — (Laughter) How am I supposed to pick myself up? (Applause) Job training, mentoring, counseling ... Teaching young people to learn from their mistakes instead of criminalizing them, and dragging them out of their classrooms like animals. How about this? I propose that we implement restorative justice in every high school in America. (Applause) So we went out to test these ideas in the community of Watts in LA with 40 young people that had been pushed out of school. William was one of them. William was the kind of kid that had been given every label. He had dropped out, he was a gang member, a criminal. And when we met him he was very resistant. But I remember what Ms. Russ used to say. "Hey, I'm here for you whenever you're ready." (Laughter) So over time — over time he began to open up. And I remember the day that he made the switch. We were in a large group and a young lady in our program was crying because she told us her powerful story of her dad being killed and then his body being shown in the newspaper the next day. And as she's crying, I don't know what to do, so I give her her space, and William had enough. He slammed his hands on the desk and he said, "Hey, everybody! Group hug! Group hug!" (Applause) This young lady's tears and pain turned into joy and laughter knowing that her community had her back, and William had now learned that he did have a purpose in life: to help to heal the souls of people in his own community. He told us his story. We refined his story to go from being the story of a victim to being the story of a survivor that has overcome adversity. We placed high value on it. William went on to finish high school, get his security guard certificate to become a security guard, and is now working at a local school district. (Applause) Ms. Russ's mantra — her mantra was always, "when you teach to the heart, the mind will follow." The great writer Khalil Gibran says, "Out of suffering have emerged the greatest souls. The massive characters are seared with scars." I believe that in this education revolution that we're talking about we need to invite the souls of the young people that we work with, and once they're able to refine — identify their grit, resilience and character that they've already developed — their academic performance will improve. Let's believe in young people. Let's provide them the right kinds of resources. I'll tell you what my teacher did for me. She believed in me so much that she tricked me into believing in myself. Thank you. (Applause) |
Math is the hidden secret to understanding the world | {0: 'Roger Antonsen combines science, mathematics and computer science with entertainment, philosophy and visualizations.'} | TEDxOslo | Hi. I want to talk about understanding, and the nature of understanding, and what the essence of understanding is, because understanding is something we aim for, everyone. We want to understand things. My claim is that understanding has to do with the ability to change your perspective. If you don't have that, you don't have understanding. So that is my claim. And I want to focus on mathematics. Many of us think of mathematics as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, percent, geometry, algebra — all that stuff. But actually, I want to talk about the essence of mathematics as well. And my claim is that mathematics has to do with patterns. Behind me, you see a beautiful pattern, and this pattern actually emerges just from drawing circles in a very particular way. So my day-to-day definition of mathematics that I use every day is the following: First of all, it's about finding patterns. And by "pattern," I mean a connection, a structure, some regularity, some rules that govern what we see. Second of all, I think it is about representing these patterns with a language. We make up language if we don't have it, and in mathematics, this is essential. It's also about making assumptions and playing around with these assumptions and just seeing what happens. We're going to do that very soon. And finally, it's about doing cool stuff. Mathematics enables us to do so many things. So let's have a look at these patterns. If you want to tie a tie knot, there are patterns. Tie knots have names. And you can also do the mathematics of tie knots. This is a left-out, right-in, center-out and tie. This is a left-in, right-out, left-in, center-out and tie. This is a language we made up for the patterns of tie knots, and a half-Windsor is all that. This is a mathematics book about tying shoelaces at the university level, because there are patterns in shoelaces. You can do it in so many different ways. We can analyze it. We can make up languages for it. And representations are all over mathematics. This is Leibniz's notation from 1675. He invented a language for patterns in nature. When we throw something up in the air, it falls down. Why? We're not sure, but we can represent this with mathematics in a pattern. This is also a pattern. This is also an invented language. Can you guess for what? It is actually a notation system for dancing, for tap dancing. That enables him as a choreographer to do cool stuff, to do new things, because he has represented it. I want you to think about how amazing representing something actually is. Here it says the word "mathematics." But actually, they're just dots, right? So how in the world can these dots represent the word? Well, they do. They represent the word "mathematics," and these symbols also represent that word and this we can listen to. It sounds like this. (Beeps) Somehow these sounds represent the word and the concept. How does this happen? There's something amazing going on about representing stuff. So I want to talk about that magic that happens when we actually represent something. Here you see just lines with different widths. They stand for numbers for a particular book. And I can actually recommend this book, it's a very nice book. (Laughter) Just trust me. OK, so let's just do an experiment, just to play around with some straight lines. This is a straight line. Let's make another one. So every time we move, we move one down and one across, and we draw a new straight line, right? We do this over and over and over, and we look for patterns. So this pattern emerges, and it's a rather nice pattern. It looks like a curve, right? Just from drawing simple, straight lines. Now I can change my perspective a little bit. I can rotate it. Have a look at the curve. What does it look like? Is it a part of a circle? It's actually not a part of a circle. So I have to continue my investigation and look for the true pattern. Perhaps if I copy it and make some art? Well, no. Perhaps I should extend the lines like this, and look for the pattern there. Let's make more lines. We do this. And then let's zoom out and change our perspective again. Then we can actually see that what started out as just straight lines is actually a curve called a parabola. This is represented by a simple equation, and it's a beautiful pattern. So this is the stuff that we do. We find patterns, and we represent them. And I think this is a nice day-to-day definition. But today I want to go a little bit deeper, and think about what the nature of this is. What makes it possible? There's one thing that's a little bit deeper, and that has to do with the ability to change your perspective. And I claim that when you change your perspective, and if you take another point of view, you learn something new about what you are watching or looking at or hearing. And I think this is a really important thing that we do all the time. So let's just look at this simple equation, x + x = 2 • x. This is a very nice pattern, and it's true, because 5 + 5 = 2 • 5, etc. We've seen this over and over, and we represent it like this. But think about it: this is an equation. It says that something is equal to something else, and that's two different perspectives. One perspective is, it's a sum. It's something you plus together. On the other hand, it's a multiplication, and those are two different perspectives. And I would go as far as to say that every equation is like this, every mathematical equation where you use that equality sign is actually a metaphor. It's an analogy between two things. You're just viewing something and taking two different points of view, and you're expressing that in a language. Have a look at this equation. This is one of the most beautiful equations. It simply says that, well, two things, they're both -1. This thing on the left-hand side is -1, and the other one is. And that, I think, is one of the essential parts of mathematics — you take different points of view. So let's just play around. Let's take a number. We know four-thirds. We know what four-thirds is. It's 1.333, but we have to have those three dots, otherwise it's not exactly four-thirds. But this is only in base 10. You know, the number system, we use 10 digits. If we change that around and only use two digits, that's called the binary system. It's written like this. So we're now talking about the number. The number is four-thirds. We can write it like this, and we can change the base, change the number of digits, and we can write it differently. So these are all representations of the same number. We can even write it simply, like 1.3 or 1.6. It all depends on how many digits you have. Or perhaps we just simplify and write it like this. I like this one, because this says four divided by three. And this number expresses a relation between two numbers. You have four on the one hand and three on the other. And you can visualize this in many ways. What I'm doing now is viewing that number from different perspectives. I'm playing around. I'm playing around with how we view something, and I'm doing it very deliberately. We can take a grid. If it's four across and three up, this line equals five, always. It has to be like this. This is a beautiful pattern. Four and three and five. And this rectangle, which is 4 x 3, you've seen a lot of times. This is your average computer screen. 800 x 600 or 1,600 x 1,200 is a television or a computer screen. So these are all nice representations, but I want to go a little bit further and just play more with this number. Here you see two circles. I'm going to rotate them like this. Observe the upper-left one. It goes a little bit faster, right? You can see this. It actually goes exactly four-thirds as fast. That means that when it goes around four times, the other one goes around three times. Now let's make two lines, and draw this dot where the lines meet. We get this dot dancing around. (Laughter) And this dot comes from that number. Right? Now we should trace it. Let's trace it and see what happens. This is what mathematics is all about. It's about seeing what happens. And this emerges from four-thirds. I like to say that this is the image of four-thirds. It's much nicer — (Cheers) Thank you! (Applause) This is not new. This has been known for a long time, but — (Laughter) But this is four-thirds. Let's do another experiment. Let's now take a sound, this sound: (Beep) This is a perfect A, 440Hz. Let's multiply it by two. We get this sound. (Beep) When we play them together, it sounds like this. This is an octave, right? We can do this game. We can play a sound, play the same A. We can multiply it by three-halves. (Beep) This is what we call a perfect fifth. (Beep) They sound really nice together. Let's multiply this sound by four-thirds. (Beep) What happens? You get this sound. (Beep) This is the perfect fourth. If the first one is an A, this is a D. They sound like this together. (Beeps) This is the sound of four-thirds. What I'm doing now, I'm changing my perspective. I'm just viewing a number from another perspective. I can even do this with rhythms, right? I can take a rhythm and play three beats at one time (Drumbeats) in a period of time, and I can play another sound four times in that same space. (Clanking sounds) Sounds kind of boring, but listen to them together. (Drumbeats and clanking sounds) (Laughter) Hey! So. (Laughter) I can even make a little hi-hat. (Drumbeats and cymbals) Can you hear this? So, this is the sound of four-thirds. Again, this is as a rhythm. (Drumbeats and cowbell) And I can keep doing this and play games with this number. Four-thirds is a really great number. I love four-thirds! (Laughter) Truly — it's an undervalued number. So if you take a sphere and look at the volume of the sphere, it's actually four-thirds of some particular cylinder. So four-thirds is in the sphere. It's the volume of the sphere. OK, so why am I doing all this? Well, I want to talk about what it means to understand something and what we mean by understanding something. That's my aim here. And my claim is that you understand something if you have the ability to view it from different perspectives. Let's look at this letter. It's a beautiful R, right? How do you know that? Well, as a matter of fact, you've seen a bunch of R's, and you've generalized and abstracted all of these and found a pattern. So you know that this is an R. So what I'm aiming for here is saying something about how understanding and changing your perspective are linked. And I'm a teacher and a lecturer, and I can actually use this to teach something, because when I give someone else another story, a metaphor, an analogy, if I tell a story from a different point of view, I enable understanding. I make understanding possible, because you have to generalize over everything you see and hear, and if I give you another perspective, that will become easier for you. Let's do a simple example again. This is four and three. This is four triangles. So this is also four-thirds, in a way. Let's just join them together. Now we're going to play a game; we're going to fold it up into a three-dimensional structure. I love this. This is a square pyramid. And let's just take two of them and put them together. So this is what is called an octahedron. It's one of the five platonic solids. Now we can quite literally change our perspective, because we can rotate it around all of the axes and view it from different perspectives. And I can change the axis, and then I can view it from another point of view, but it's the same thing, but it looks a little different. I can do it even one more time. Every time I do this, something else appears, so I'm actually learning more about the object when I change my perspective. I can use this as a tool for creating understanding. I can take two of these and put them together like this and see what happens. And it looks a little bit like the octahedron. Have a look at it if I spin it around like this. What happens? Well, if you take two of these, join them together and spin it around, there's your octahedron again, a beautiful structure. If you lay it out flat on the floor, this is the octahedron. This is the graph structure of an octahedron. And I can continue doing this. You can draw three great circles around the octahedron, and you rotate around, so actually three great circles is related to the octahedron. And if I take a bicycle pump and just pump it up, you can see that this is also a little bit like the octahedron. Do you see what I'm doing here? I am changing the perspective every time. So let's now take a step back — and that's actually a metaphor, stepping back — and have a look at what we're doing. I'm playing around with metaphors. I'm playing around with perspectives and analogies. I'm telling one story in different ways. I'm telling stories. I'm making a narrative; I'm making several narratives. And I think all of these things make understanding possible. I think this actually is the essence of understanding something. I truly believe this. So this thing about changing your perspective — it's absolutely fundamental for humans. Let's play around with the Earth. Let's zoom into the ocean, have a look at the ocean. We can do this with anything. We can take the ocean and view it up close. We can look at the waves. We can go to the beach. We can view the ocean from another perspective. Every time we do this, we learn a little bit more about the ocean. If we go to the shore, we can kind of smell it, right? We can hear the sound of the waves. We can feel salt on our tongues. So all of these are different perspectives. And this is the best one. We can go into the water. We can see the water from the inside. And you know what? This is absolutely essential in mathematics and computer science. If you're able to view a structure from the inside, then you really learn something about it. That's somehow the essence of something. So when we do this, and we've taken this journey into the ocean, we use our imagination. And I think this is one level deeper, and it's actually a requirement for changing your perspective. We can do a little game. You can imagine that you're sitting there. You can imagine that you're up here, and that you're sitting here. You can view yourselves from the outside. That's really a strange thing. You're changing your perspective. You're using your imagination, and you're viewing yourself from the outside. That requires imagination. Mathematics and computer science are the most imaginative art forms ever. And this thing about changing perspectives should sound a little bit familiar to you, because we do it every day. And then it's called empathy. When I view the world from your perspective, I have empathy with you. If I really, truly understand what the world looks like from your perspective, I am empathetic. That requires imagination. And that is how we obtain understanding. And this is all over mathematics and this is all over computer science, and there's a really deep connection between empathy and these sciences. So my conclusion is the following: understanding something really deeply has to do with the ability to change your perspective. So my advice to you is: try to change your perspective. You can study mathematics. It's a wonderful way to train your brain. Changing your perspective makes your mind more flexible. It makes you open to new things, and it makes you able to understand things. And to use yet another metaphor: have a mind like water. That's nice. Thank you. (Applause) |
A political party for women's equality | {0: 'Long revered in the UK for her wit and candor, Sandi Toksvig is now lending her familiar voice to a greater cause -- equality for women.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | I am so excited to be here. Everything in America is so much bigger than in Europe. Look at me — I am huge! (Laughter) It's fantastic! And TED Talks — TED Talks are where everybody has great ideas. So the question is: Where do those great ideas come from? Well, it's a little bit of debate, but it's generally reckoned that the average person — that's me — has about 50,000 thoughts a day. Which is a lot, until you realize that 95 percent of them are the same ones you had the day before. (Laughter) And a lot of mine are really boring, OK? I think things like, "Oh! I know — I must clean the floor. Oh! I forgot to walk the dog." My most popular: "Don't eat that cookie." (Laughter) So, 95 percent repetition. That leaves us with just a five percent window of opportunity each day to actually think something new. And some of my new thoughts are useless. The other day I was watching some sports on television, and I was trying to decide why I just don't engage with it. Some of it I find curious. This is odd. (Laughter) Do you think it would be worth being that flexible just to be able to see your heel at that angle? (Laughter) And here's the thing: I'm never going to be able to relate to that, because I'm never going to be able to do it, OK? Well, not twice, anyway. (Laughter) But I'll tell you the truth. The truth is I have never been any good at sport, OK? I've reached that wonderful age when all my friends say, "Oh, I wish I was as fit as I was when I was 18." And I always feel rather smug then. (Laughter) I'm exactly as fit as I was when I — (Laughter) (Applause) I couldn't run then. I'm certainly not going to do it now. (Laughter) So then I had my new idea: Why not engage people like me in sport? I think what the world needs now is the Olympics for people with zero athletic ability. (Laughter) Oh, it would be so much more fun. We'd have three basic rules, OK? Obviously no drugs; no corruption, no skills. (Laughter) It would be — No, it's a terrible idea. And I also know why I don't engage with sport when I watch it on television. It's because probably 97 percent of it is about men running and men kicking things, men trying to look neatly packaged in Lycra. There is — (Laughter) Not always successfully. There is — (Laughter) There is so little female sport on television, that a young woman watching might be forgiven for thinking, and how can I put this nicely, that the male member is the very lever you need to get yourself off the couch and onto a sports ground. (Laughter) The inequalities in sport are breathtaking. So this is what happens to me: I have a brand new idea, and immediately I come back to an old one. The fact is, there is not now, nor has there ever been in the whole of history, a single country in the world where women have equality with men. Not one. 196 countries, it hasn't happened in the whole of evolution. So, here is a picture of evolution. (Laughter) We women are not even in it! (Laughter) It's a wonder men have been able to evolve quite so brilliantly. So — (Laughter) It bugs me, and I know I should do something about it. But I'm busy, OK? I have a full-on career, I've got three kids, I've got an elderly mom. In fact, if I'm honest with you, one of the reasons I came out here is because TED Talks said I could have 15 minutes to myself, and I never have that much time — (Laughter) (Applause) So I'm busy. And anyway, I already had a go at changing the world. Here's the thing, OK? Everybody has inside themselves what I call an "activation button." It's the button that gets pressed when you think, "I must do something about this." It gets pressed for all sorts of reasons. Maybe you face some kind of inequality, or you've come across an injustice of some kind, sometimes an illness strikes, or you're born in some way disadvantaged, or perhaps underprivileged. So I was born gay, OK? I've always known, I don't think my family were the least bit surprised. Here is a picture of me aged four. I look cute, but inside I genuinely believed that I looked like Clint Eastwood. (Laughter) So my activation button was pressed when I had my kids — three wonderful kids, born to my then-partner. Now here's the thing: I work on television in Britain. By the time they were born, I was already hosting my own shows and working in the public eye. I love what I do, but I love my kids more. And I didn't want them to grow up with a secret. 1994, when my son, my youngest was born, there was not, as far as I was aware, a single out, gay woman in British public life. I don't think secrets are a good thing. I think they are a cancer of the soul. So I decided to come out. Everybody warned me that I would never work again, but I decided it was absolutely worth the risk. Well, it was hell. In Britain, we have a particularly vicious section of the right-wing press, and they went nuts. And their hatred stirred up the less stable elements of society, and we got death threats — enough death threats that I had to take the kids into hiding, and we had to have police protection. And I promise you there were many moments in the still of the night when I was terrified by what I had done. Eventually the dust settled. Against all expectation I carried on working, and my kids were and continue to be absolutely fantastic. I remember when my son was six, he had a friend over to play. They were in the next room; I could hear them chatting. The friend said to my son, "What's it like having two mums?" I was a little anxious to hear, so I leant in to hear and my son said, "It's fantastic, because if one of them's sick, you've still got another one to cook for you." (Laughter) So my activation button for gay equality was pressed, and along with many, many others, I campaigned for years for gay rights, and in particular, the right to marry the person that I love. In the end, we succeeded. And in 2014, on the day that the law was changed, I married my wife, who I love very much, indeed. (Applause) We didn't do it in a quiet way — we did it on the stage at the Royal Festival Hall in London. It was a great event. The hall seats two-and-a-half thousand people. We invited 150 family and friends, then I let it be known to the public: anybody who wanted to come and celebrate, please come and join us. It would be free to anybody who wanted to come. Two-and-half thousand people turned up. (Applause) Every kind of person you can imagine: gays, straights, rabbis, nuns, married people, black, white — the whole of humanity was there. And I remember standing on that stage thinking, "How fantastic. Job done. Love triumphs. Law changed." And I — (Applause) And I genuinely thought my activation days were over, OK? So every year in that same hall, I host a fantastic concert to celebrate International Women's Day. We gather the world's only all-female orchestra, we play fantastic music by forgotten or overlooked women composers, we have amazing conductors — it's Marin Alsop there from Baltimore conducting, Petula Clark singing — and I give a lecture on women's history. I love to gather inspirational stories from the past and pass them on. Too often, I think history's what I call the Mount Rushmore model. It looks majestic, but the women have been entirely left out of it. And I was giving a talk in 2015 about the suffragettes — I'm sure you know those magnificent women who fought so hard for the right for women in Britain to vote. And their slogan was: "Deeds, not words." And boy, they succeeded, because women did indeed get the vote in 1928. So I'm giving this talk about this, and as I'm talking, what I realized is: this was not a history lecture I was giving; this was not something where the job was done. This was something where there was so much left to do. Nowhere in the world, for example, do women have equal representation in positions of power. OK, let's take a very quick look at the top 100 companies in the London Stock Exchange in 2016. Top 100 companies: How many women running them? Seven. OK. Seven. That's all right, I suppose. Until you realize that 17 are run by men called "John." (Laughter) There are more men called John running FTSE 100 companies — (Laughter) than there are women. There are 14 run by men called "Dave." (Laughter) Now, I'm sure Dave and John are doing a bang-up job. (Laughter) OK. Why does it matter? Well, it's that pesky business of the gender pay gap. Nowhere in the world do women earn the same as men. And that is never going to change unless we have more women at the top in the boardroom. We have plenty of laws; the Equal Pay Act in Britain was passed in 1975. Nevertheless, there are still many, many women who, from early November until the end of the year, by comparison to their male colleagues, are effectively working for free. In fact, the World Economic Forum estimates that women will finally get equal pay in ... 2133! Yay! (Laughter) That's a terrible figure. And here's the thing: the day before I came out to give my talk, the World Economic Forum revised it. So that's good, because that's a terrible — 2133. Do you know what they revised it to? 2186. (Laughter) Yeah, another 53 years, OK? We are not going to get equal pay in my grandchildren's grandchildren's lives under the current system. And I have waited long enough. I've waited long enough in my own business. In 2016 I became the very first woman on British television to host a prime-time panel show. Isn't that great? Wonderful, I'm thrilled. But — (Applause) But 2016! The first! Television's been around for 80 years! (Laughter) It may be television's not so important, but it's kind of symptomatic, isn't it? 2016, the UN were looking for a brand new ambassador to represent women's empowerment and gender equality, and who did they choose? Wonder Woman. Yes, they chose a cartoon, OK? (Laughter) Because no woman was up to the job. The representation of women in positions of power is shockingly low. It's true in Congress, and it's certainly true in the British Parliament. In 2015, the number of men elected to the Parliament that year was greater than the total number of women who have ever been members of Parliament. And why does it matter? Here's the thing: if they're not at the table — literally, in Britain, at that table helping to make the laws — do not be surprised if the female perspective is overlooked. It's a great role model for young people to see a woman in charge. In 2016, Britain got its second female Prime Minister; Theresa May came to power. The day she came to power she was challenged: just do one thing. Do one thing in the first 100 days that you're in office to try and improve lives for women in Britain. And what did she do? Nothing. Nothing. Because she's much too busy cleaning up the mess the boys made. Even having a female leader, they always find something better to do than to sort out the pesky issue of inequality. So I keep talking about equality like it matters. Does it? Well, let's take a very quick look at the STEM industries, OK? So science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Pretty much important in every single aspect of our daily lives. There is the thickest and most incredibly well-documented glass ceiling in the STEM industries. What if the cure for cancer or the answer the global warming lies in the head of a young female scientist who fails to progress? So I thought all these things, and I knew I had to do "Deeds, not words." And I spoke to my wonderful friend, brilliant journalist Catherine Mayer in Britain, and we rather foolishly — and I suspect there was wine involved — (Laughter) We decided to found a brand new political party. Because here's the critical thing: the one place women and men are absolutely equal is at the ballot box. We had no idea what we were doing, we didn't know how complicated it was to start a political party. I thought, "It can't be that difficult, men have been doing it for years." (Laughter) So we started by calling it "The Women's Equality Party." And straightaway people said to me, "Why did you call it that?" I said, "I don't know, I just thought we'd be clear." (Laughter) I didn't want what we were doing to be a secret, you know? I just — (Laughter) Some people said, "You can't call it that! It's much too feminist!" Ooh! Scary word! Ahh! I can't tell you how many times I've heard somebody say, "I'm not a feminist, but ..." And I always think if there's a "but" in the sentence, it can't all be roses in the garden. And then I started getting asked the hilarious question, "Are you all going to burn your bras?" Yes! Because bras are famously made of flammable material. (Laughter) That's why all women spark when they walk. (Laughter) Here's quick history sidebar for you: no woman ever burnt her bra in the '60s. It's a story made up by a journalist. Thank goodness journalism has improved since then. So — (Laughter) I announced what we were going to do in a broadcast interview, and straightaway, the emails started coming. First hundreds, then thousands and thousands, from every age group: from the very young to women in their '90s, to hundreds of wonderful men. People wrote and said, "Please, can I help? Please, can I visit you at party headquarters?" We didn't have a headquarters — we didn't have a party! We didn't have anything. All we had was a wonderful, tight group of fabulous friends trying to answer emails pretty much 24-7 in our pajamas. We were all busy. Many of us had careers, many of us had children, but we did what women do, and we shared the work. And almost instantly, we agreed on certain fundamental things. First thing: we want to be the only political party in the world whose main aim was to no longer need to exist. That's a fantastic idea. We wanted to be the only political party with no particular political leaning. We wanted people from the left, from the right, from the middle, every age group. Because the whole point was to work with a simple agenda: let's get equality in every aspect of our lives, and when we're finished, let's go home and get the other chores done. (Laughter) And we wanted to change how politics is conducted. I don't know if you have this, but in Britain we have two major political parties. They're the dinosaurs of politics. And how they speak to each other is shameful and poisonous. I'm sure you've never had that kind of name-calling — (Laughter) And lying here. Wouldn't it be great if just one politician said, "Do you know, my opponent has a point. Let's see if we can't work together and get the job done." (Applause) And let's get more women into politics, OK? Let's immediately get more women into politics by being the only political party to offer free childcare to our candidates, so they can get out of the house and start campaigning. (Applause) Within 10 months, we had more than 70 branches of our party across the UK. We stood candidates for election in London, Scotland and Wales in May 2016. One in 20 people voted for our candidate for London Mayor. And when the men in the race saw how many votes we were attracting, wonder of wonders, they began to talk about the need to tackle gender equality. (Applause) You know, I've been promised change since I was a child. It was always coming: women were going to stand shoulder to shoulder with men. All I got were empty promises and disappointment — enough disappointment to found a political party. But here is my new idea for today — this is my five percent, OK? And this one is really good. The fact is, this is not enough. It is not enough to found one political party for equality in a single country. What we need is a seismic change in the global political landscape. And the wonderful thing about the model we have created is that it would work anywhere. It would work in America, it would work in Australia, it would work in India. It's like we've made the perfect recipe: anybody can cook it, and it's good for everybody. And we want to give it away. If you want to know what we did, we're giving it away. Can you imagine if we could mobilize millions of women across the world to say, "That's enough!" to the traditional battles of politics? To say, "Stop the bickering, let's get the work done." We could literally change the world. And I want that. (Applause) I want ... (Applause) I want that for our daughters, and I want it for our sons. Because the fact is: equality is better for everyone. Come on people, let's activate! Let's change the world! I know we can do it, and it wants doing! (Applause) |
What will humans look like in 100 years? | {0: 'Juan Enriquez thinks and writes about the profound changes that genomics and brain research will bring about in business, technology, politics and society.'} | TEDSummit | Here's a question that matters. [Is it ethical to evolve the human body?] Because we're beginning to get all the tools together to evolve ourselves. And we can evolve bacteria and we can evolve plants and we can evolve animals, and we're now reaching a point where we really have to ask, is it really ethical and do we want to evolve human beings? And as you're thinking about that, let me talk about that in the context of prosthetics, prosthetics past, present, future. So this is the iron hand that belonged to one of the German counts. Loved to fight, lost his arm in one of these battles. No problem, he just made a suit of armor, put it on, perfect prosthetic. That's where the concept of ruling with an iron fist comes from. And of course these prosthetics have been getting more and more useful, more and more modern. You can hold soft-boiled eggs. You can have all types of controls, and as you're thinking about that, there are wonderful people like Hugh Herr who have been building absolutely extraordinary prosthetics. So the wonderful Aimee Mullins will go out and say, how tall do I want to be tonight? Or Hugh will say what type of cliff do I want to climb? Or does somebody want to run a marathon, or does somebody want to ballroom dance? And as you adapt these things, the interesting thing about prosthetics is they've been coming inside the body. So these external prosthetics have now become artificial knees. They've become artificial hips. And then they've evolved further to become not just nice to have but essential to have. So when you're talking about a heart pacemaker as a prosthetic, you're talking about something that isn't just, "I'm missing my leg," it's, "if I don't have this, I can die." And at that point, a prosthetic becomes a symbiotic relationship with the human body. And four of the smartest people that I've ever met — Ed Boyden, Hugh Herr, Joe Jacobson, Bob Lander — are working on a Center for Extreme Bionics. And the interesting thing of what you're seeing here is these prosthetics now get integrated into the bone. They get integrated into the skin. They get integrated into the muscle. And one of the other sides of Ed is he's been thinking about how to connect the brain using light or other mechanisms directly to things like these prosthetics. And if you can do that, then you can begin changing fundamental aspects of humanity. So how quickly you react to something depends on the diameter of a nerve. And of course, if you have nerves that are external or prosthetic, say with light or liquid metal, then you can increase that diameter and you could even increase it theoretically to the point where, as long as you could see the muzzle flash, you could step out of the way of a bullet. Those are the order of magnitude of changes you're talking about. This is a fourth sort of level of prosthetics. These are Phonak hearing aids, and the reason why these are so interesting is because they cross the threshold from where prosthetics are something for somebody who is "disabled" and they become something that somebody who is "normal" might want to actually have, because what this prosthetic does, which is really interesting, is not only does it help you hear, you can focus your hearing, so it can hear the conversation going on over there. You can have superhearing. You can have hearing in 360 degrees. You can have white noise. You can record, and oh, by the way, they also put a phone into this. So this functions as your hearing aid and also as your phone. And at that point, somebody might actually want to have a prosthetic voluntarily. All of these thousands of loosely connected little pieces are coming together, and it's about time we ask the question, how do we want to evolve human beings over the next century or two? And for that we turn to a great philosopher who was a very smart man despite being a Yankee fan. (Laughter) And Yogi Berra used to say, of course, that it's very tough to make predictions, especially about the future. (Laughter) So instead of making a prediction about the future to begin with, let's take what's happening in the present with people like Tony Atala, who is redesigning 30-some-odd organs. And maybe the ultimate prosthetic isn't having something external, titanium. Maybe the ultimate prosthetic is take your own gene code, remake your own body parts, because that's a whole lot more effective than any kind of a prosthetic. But while you're at it, then you can take the work of Craig Venter and Ham Smith. And one of the things that we've been doing is trying to figure out how to reprogram cells. And if you can reprogram a cell, then you can change the cells in those organs. So if you can change the cells in those organs, maybe you make those organs more radiation-resistant. Maybe you make them absorb more oxygen. Maybe you make them more efficient to filter out stuff that you don't want in your body. And over the last few weeks, George Church has been in the news a lot because he's been talking about taking one of these programmable cells and inserting an entire human genome into that cell. And once you can insert an entire human genome into a cell, then you begin to ask the question, would you want to enhance any of that genome? Do you want to enhance a human body? How would you want to enhance a human body? Where is it ethical to enhance a human body and where is it not ethical to enhance a human body? And all of a sudden, what we're doing is we've got this multidimensional chess board where we can change human genetics by using viruses to attack things like AIDS, or we can change the gene code through gene therapy to do away with some hereditary diseases, or we can change the environment, and change the expression of those genes in the epigenome and pass that on to the next generations. And all of a sudden, it's not just one little bit, it's all these stacked little bits that allow you to take little portions of it until all the portions coming together lead you to something that's very different. And a lot of people are very scared by this stuff. And it does sound scary, and there are risks to this stuff. So why in the world would you ever want to do this stuff? Why would we really want to alter the human body in a fundamental way? The answer lies in part with Lord Rees, astronomer royal of Great Britain. And one of his favorite sayings is the universe is 100 percent malevolent. So what does that mean? It means if you take any one of your bodies at random, drop it anywhere in the universe, drop it in space, you die. Drop it on the Sun, you die. Drop it on the surface of Mercury, you die. Drop it near a supernova, you die. But fortunately, it's only about 80 percent effective. So as a great physicist once said, there's these little upstream eddies of biology that create order in this rapid torrent of entropy. So as the universe dissipates energy, there's these upstream eddies that create biological order. Now, the problem with eddies is, they tend to disappear. They shift. They move in rivers. And because of that, when an eddy shifts, when the Earth becomes a snowball, when the Earth becomes very hot, when the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, when you have supervolcanoes, when you have solar flares, when you have potentially extinction-level events like the next election — (Laughter) then all of a sudden, you can have periodic extinctions. And by the way, that's happened five times on Earth, and therefore it is very likely that the human species on Earth is going to go extinct someday. Not next week, not next month, maybe in November, but maybe 10,000 years after that. As you're thinking of the consequence of that, if you believe that extinctions are common and natural and normal and occur periodically, it becomes a moral imperative to diversify our species. And it becomes a moral imperative because it's going to be really hard to live on Mars if we don't fundamentally modify the human body. Right? You go from one cell, mom and dad coming together to make one cell, in a cascade to 10 trillion cells. We don't know, if you change the gravity substantially, if the same thing will happen to create your body. We do know that if you expose our bodies as they currently are to a lot of radiation, we will die. So as you're thinking of that, you have to really redesign things just to get to Mars. Forget about the moons of Neptune or Jupiter. And to borrow from Nikolai Kardashev, let's think about life in a series of scales. So Life One civilization is a civilization that begins to alter his or her looks. And we've been doing that for thousands of years. You've got tummy tucks and you've got this and you've got that. You alter your looks, and I'm told that not all of those alterations take place for medical reasons. (Laughter) Seems odd. A Life Two civilization is a different civilization. A Life Two civilization alters fundamental aspects of the body. So you put human growth hormone in, the person grows taller, or you put x in and the person gets fatter or loses metabolism or does a whole series of things, but you're altering the functions in a fundamental way. To become an intrasolar civilization, we're going to have to create a Life Three civilization, and that looks very different from what we've got here. Maybe you splice in Deinococcus radiodurans so that the cells can resplice after a lot of exposure to radiation. Maybe you breathe by having oxygen flow through your blood instead of through your lungs. But you're talking about really radical redesigns, and one of the interesting things that's happened in the last decade is we've discovered a whole lot of planets out there. And some of them may be Earth-like. The problem is, if we ever want to get to these planets, the fastest human objects — Juno and Voyager and the rest of this stuff — take tens of thousands of years to get from here to the nearest solar system. So if you want to start exploring beaches somewhere else, or you want to see two-sun sunsets, then you're talking about something that is very different, because you have to change the timescale and the body of humans in ways which may be absolutely unrecognizable. And that's a Life Four civilization. Now, we can't even begin to imagine what that might look like, but we're beginning to get glimpses of instruments that might take us even that far. And let me give you two examples. So this is the wonderful Floyd Romesberg, and one of the things that Floyd's been doing is he's been playing with the basic chemistry of life. So all life on this planet is made in ATCGs, the four letters of DNA. All bacteria, all plants, all animals, all humans, all cows, everything else. And what Floyd did is he changed out two of those base pairs, so it's ATXY. And that means that you now have a parallel system to make life, to make babies, to reproduce, to evolve, that doesn't mate with most things on Earth or in fact maybe with nothing on Earth. Maybe you make plants that are immune to all bacteria. Maybe you make plants that are immune to all viruses. But why is that so interesting? It means that we are not a unique solution. It means you can create alternate chemistries to us that could be chemistries adaptable to a very different planet that could create life and heredity. The second experiment, or the other implication of this experiment, is that all of you, all life is based on 20 amino acids. If you don't substitute two amino acids, if you don't say ATXY, if you say ATCG + XY, then you go from 20 building blocks to 172, and all of a sudden you've got 172 building blocks of amino acids to build life-forms in very different shapes. The second experiment to think about is a really weird experiment that's been taking place in China. So this guy has been transplanting hundreds of mouse heads. Right? And why is that an interesting experiment? Well, think of the first heart transplants. One of the things they used to do is they used to bring in the wife or the daughter of the donor so the donee could tell the doctors, "Do you recognize this person? Do you love this person? Do you feel anything for this person?" We laugh about that today. We laugh because we know the heart is a muscle, but for hundreds of thousands of years, or tens of thousands of years, "I gave her my heart. She took my heart. She broke my heart." We thought this was emotion and we thought maybe emotions were transplanted with the heart. Nope. So how about the brain? Two possible outcomes to this experiment. If you can get a mouse that is functional, then you can see, is the new brain a blank slate? And boy, does that have implications. Second option: the new mouse recognizes Minnie Mouse. The new mouse remembers what it's afraid of, remembers how to navigate the maze, and if that is true, then you can transplant memory and consciousness. And then the really interesting question is, if you can transplant this, is the only input-output mechanism this down here? Or could you transplant that consciousness into something that would be very different, that would last in space, that would last tens of thousands of years, that would be a completely redesigned body that could hold consciousness for a long, long period of time? And let's come back to the first question: Why would you ever want to do that? Well, I'll tell you why. Because this is the ultimate selfie. (Laughter) This is taken from six billion miles away, and that's Earth. And that's all of us. And if that little thing goes, all of humanity goes. And the reason you want to alter the human body is because you eventually want a picture that says, that's us, and that's us, and that's us, because that's the way humanity survives long-term extinction. And that's the reason why it turns out it's actually unethical not to evolve the human body even though it can be scary, even though it can be challenging, but it's what's going to allow us to explore, live and get to places we can't even dream of today, but which our great-great-great-great- grandchildren might someday. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How to speak up for yourself | {0: 'Adam Galinsky teaches people all over the world how to inspire others, speak up effectively, lead teams and negotiate successfully.'} | TEDxNewYork | Speaking up is hard to do. I understood the true meaning of this phrase exactly one month ago, when my wife and I became new parents. It was an amazing moment. It was exhilarating and elating, but it was also scary and terrifying. And it got particularly terrifying when we got home from the hospital, and we were unsure whether our little baby boy was getting enough nutrients from breastfeeding. And we wanted to call our pediatrician, but we also didn't want to make a bad first impression or come across as a crazy, neurotic parent. So we worried. And we waited. When we got to the doctor's office the next day, she immediately gave him formula because he was pretty dehydrated. Our son is fine now, and our doctor has reassured us we can always contact her. But in that moment, I should've spoken up, but I didn't. But sometimes we speak up when we shouldn't, and I learned that over 10 years ago when I let my twin brother down. My twin brother is a documentary filmmaker, and for one of his first films, he got an offer from a distribution company. He was excited, and he was inclined to accept the offer. But as a negotiations researcher, I insisted he make a counteroffer, and I helped him craft the perfect one. And it was perfect — it was perfectly insulting. The company was so offended, they literally withdrew the offer and my brother was left with nothing. And I've asked people all over the world about this dilemma of speaking up: when they can assert themselves, when they can push their interests, when they can express an opinion, when they can make an ambitious ask. And the range of stories are varied and diverse, but they also make up a universal tapestry. Can I correct my boss when they make a mistake? Can I confront my coworker who keeps stepping on my toes? Can I challenge my friend's insensitive joke? Can I tell the person I love the most my deepest insecurities? And through these experiences, I've come to recognize that each of us have something called a range of acceptable behavior. Now, sometimes we're too strong; we push ourselves too much. That's what happened with my brother. Even making an offer was outside his range of acceptable behavior. But sometimes we're too weak. That's what happened with my wife and I. And this range of acceptable behaviors — when we stay within our range, we're rewarded. When we step outside that range, we get punished in a variety of ways. We get dismissed or demeaned or even ostracized. Or we lose that raise or that promotion or that deal. Now, the first thing we need to know is: What is my range? But the key thing is, our range isn't fixed; it's actually pretty dynamic. It expands and it narrows based on the context. And there's one thing that determines that range more than anything else, and that's your power. Your power determines your range. What is power? Power comes in lots of forms. In negotiations, it comes in the form of alternatives. So my brother had no alternatives; he lacked power. The company had lots of alternatives; they had power. Sometimes it's being new to a country, like an immigrant, or new to an organization or new to an experience, like my wife and I as new parents. Sometimes it's at work, where someone's the boss and someone's the subordinate. Sometimes it's in relationships, where one person's more invested than the other person. And the key thing is that when we have lots of power, our range is very wide. We have a lot of leeway in how to behave. But when we lack power, our range narrows. We have very little leeway. The problem is that when our range narrows, that produces something called the low-power double bind. The low-power double bind happens when, if we don't speak up, we go unnoticed, but if we do speak up, we get punished. Now, many of you have heard the phrase the "double bind" and connected it with one thing, and that's gender. The gender double bind is women who don't speak up go unnoticed, and women who do speak up get punished. And the key thing is that women have the same need as men to speak up, but they have barriers to doing so. But what my research has shown over the last two decades is that what looks like a gender difference is not really a gender double bind, it's a really a low-power double bind. And what looks like a gender difference are really often just power differences in disguise. Oftentimes we see a difference between a man and a woman or men and women, and think, "Biological cause. There's something fundamentally different about the sexes." But in study after study, I've found that a better explanation for many sex differences is really power. And so it's the low-power double bind. And the low-power double bind means that we have a narrow range, and we lack power. We have a narrow range, and our double bind is very large. So we need to find ways to expand our range. And over the last couple decades, my colleagues and I have found two things really matter. The first: you seem powerful in your own eyes. The second: you seem powerful in the eyes of others. When I feel powerful, I feel confident, not fearful; I expand my own range. When other people see me as powerful, they grant me a wider range. So we need tools to expand our range of acceptable behavior. And I'm going to give you a set of tools today. Speaking up is risky, but these tools will lower your risk of speaking up. The first tool I'm going to give you got discovered in negotiations in an important finding. On average, women make less ambitious offers and get worse outcomes than men at the bargaining table. But Hannah Riley Bowles and Emily Amanatullah have discovered there's one situation where women get the same outcomes as men and are just as ambitious. That's when they advocate for others. When they advocate for others, they discover their own range and expand it in their own mind. They become more assertive. This is sometimes called "the mama bear effect." Like a mama bear defending her cubs, when we advocate for others, we can discover our own voice. But sometimes, we have to advocate for ourselves. How do we do that? One of the most important tools we have to advocate for ourselves is something called perspective-taking. And perspective-taking is really simple: it's simply looking at the world through the eyes of another person. It's one of the most important tools we have to expand our range. When I take your perspective, and I think about what you really want, you're more likely to give me what I really want. But here's the problem: perspective-taking is hard to do. So let's do a little experiment. I want you all to hold your hand just like this: your finger — put it up. And I want you to draw a capital letter E on your forehead as quickly as possible. OK, it turns out that we can draw this E in one of two ways, and this was originally designed as a test of perspective-taking. I'm going to show you two pictures of someone with an E on their forehead — my former student, Erika Hall. And you can see over here, that's the correct E. I drew the E so it looks like an E to another person. That's the perspective-taking E because it looks like an E from someone else's vantage point. But this E over here is the self-focused E. We often get self-focused. And we particularly get self-focused in a crisis. I want to tell you about a particular crisis. A man walks into a bank in Watsonville, California. And he says, "Give me $2,000, or I'm blowing the whole bank up with a bomb." Now, the bank manager didn't give him the money. She took a step back. She took his perspective, and she noticed something really important. He asked for a specific amount of money. So she said, "Why did you ask for $2,000?" And he said, "My friend is going to be evicted unless I get him $2,000 immediately." And she said, "Oh! You don't want to rob the bank — you want to take out a loan." (Laughter) "Why don't you come back to my office, and we can have you fill out the paperwork." (Laughter) Now, her quick perspective-taking defused a volatile situation. So when we take someone's perspective, it allows us to be ambitious and assertive, but still be likable. Here's another way to be assertive but still be likable, and that is to signal flexibility. Now, imagine you're a car salesperson, and you want to sell someone a car. You're going to more likely make the sale if you give them two options. Let's say option A: $24,000 for this car and a five-year warranty. Or option B: $23,000 and a three-year warranty. My research shows that when you give people a choice among options, it lowers their defenses, and they're more likely to accept your offer. And this doesn't just work with salespeople; it works with parents. When my niece was four, she resisted getting dressed and rejected everything. But then my sister-in-law had a brilliant idea. What if I gave my daughter a choice? This shirt or that shirt? OK, that shirt. This pant or that pant? OK, that pant. And it worked brilliantly. She got dressed quickly and without resistance. When I've asked the question around the world when people feel comfortable speaking up, the number one answer is: "When I have social support in my audience; when I have allies." So we want to get allies on our side. How do we do that? Well, one of the ways is be a mama bear. When we advocate for others, we expand our range in our own eyes and the eyes of others, but we also earn strong allies. Another way we can earn strong allies, especially in high places, is by asking other people for advice. When we ask others for advice, they like us because we flatter them, and we're expressing humility. And this really works to solve another double bind. And that's the self-promotion double bind. The self-promotion double bind is that if we don't advertise our accomplishments, no one notices. And if we do, we're not likable. But if we ask for advice about one of our accomplishments, we are able to be competent in their eyes but also be likeable. And this is so powerful it even works when you see it coming. There have been multiple times in life when I have been forewarned that a low-power person has been given the advice to come ask me for advice. I want you to notice three things about this: First, I knew they were going to come ask me for advice. Two, I've actually done research on the strategic benefits of asking for advice. And three, it still worked! I took their perspective, I became more invested in their cause, I became more committed to them because they asked for advice. Now, another time we feel more confident speaking up is when we have expertise. Expertise gives us credibility. When we have high power, we already have credibility. We only need good evidence. When we lack power, we don't have the credibility. We need excellent evidence. And one of the ways we can come across as an expert is by tapping into our passion. I want everyone in the next few days to go up to friend of theirs and just say to them, "I want you to describe a passion of yours to me." I've had people do this all over the world and I asked them, "What did you notice about the other person when they described their passion?" And the answers are always the same. "Their eyes lit up and got big." "They smiled a big beaming smile." "They used their hands all over — I had to duck because their hands were coming at me." "They talk quickly with a little higher pitch." (Laughter) "They leaned in as if telling me a secret." And then I said to them, "What happened to you as you listened to their passion?" They said, "My eyes lit up. I smiled. I leaned in." When we tap into our passion, we give ourselves the courage, in our own eyes, to speak up, but we also get the permission from others to speak up. Tapping into our passion even works when we come across as too weak. Both men and women get punished at work when they shed tears. But Lizzie Wolf has shown that when we frame our strong emotions as passion, the condemnation of our crying disappears for both men and women. I want to end with a few words from my late father that he spoke at my twin brother's wedding. Here's a picture of us. My dad was a psychologist like me, but his real love and his real passion was cinema, like my brother. And so he wrote a speech for my brother's wedding about the roles we play in the human comedy. And he said, "The lighter your touch, the better you become at improving and enriching your performance. Those who embrace their roles and work to improve their performance grow, change and expand the self. Play it well, and your days will be mostly joyful." What my dad was saying is that we've all been assigned ranges and roles in this world. But he was also saying the essence of this talk: those roles and ranges are constantly expanding and evolving. So when a scene calls for it, be a ferocious mama bear and a humble advice seeker. Have excellent evidence and strong allies. Be a passionate perspective taker. And if you use those tools — and each and every one of you can use these tools — you will expand your range of acceptable behavior, and your days will be mostly joyful. Thank you. (Applause) |
We need nuclear power to solve climate change | {0: 'Joe Lassiter focuses on one of the world’s most pressing problems: developing clean, secure and carbon-neutral supplies of reliable, low-cost energy all around the world.'} | TEDSummit | It's easy to forget that last night, one billion people went to sleep without access to electricity. One billion people. Two and a half billion people did not have access to clean cooking fuels or clean heating fuels. Those are the problems in the developing world. And it's easy for us not to be empathetic with those people who seem so distanced from us. But even in our own world, the developed world, we see the tension of stagnant economies impacting the lives of people around us. We see it in whole pieces of the economy, where the people involved have lost hope about the future and despair about the present. We see that in the Brexit vote. We see that in the Sanders/Trump campaigns in my own country. But even in countries as recently turning the corner towards being in the developed world, in China, we see the difficulty that President Xi has as he begins to un-employ so many people in his coal and mining industries who see no future for themselves. As we as a society figure out how to manage the problems of the developed world and the problems of the developing world, we have to look at how we move forward and manage the environmental impact of those decisions. We've been working on this problem for 25 years, since Rio, the Kyoto Protocols. Our most recent move is the Paris treaty, and the resulting climate agreements that are being ratified by nations around the world. I think we can be very hopeful that those agreements, which are bottom-up agreements, where nations have said what they think they can do, are genuine and forthcoming for the vast majority of the parties. The unfortunate thing is that now, as we look at the independent analyses of what those climate treaties are liable to yield, the magnitude of the problem before us becomes clear. This is the United States Energy Information Agency's assessment of what will happen if the countries implement the climate commitments that they've made in Paris between now and 2040. It shows basically CO2 emissions around the world over the next 30 years. There are three things that you need to look at and appreciate. One, CO2 emissions are expected to continue to grow for the next 30 years. In order to control climate, CO2 emissions have to literally go to zero because it's the cumulative emissions that drive heating on the planet. This should tell you that we are losing the race to fossil fuels. The second thing you should notice is that the bulk of the growth comes from the developing countries, from China, from India, from the rest of the world, which includes South Africa and Indonesia and Brazil, as most of these countries move their people into the lower range of lifestyles that we literally take for granted in the developed world. The final thing that you should notice is that each year, about 10 gigatons of carbon are getting added to the planet's atmosphere, and then diffusing into the ocean and into the land. That's on top of the 550 gigatons that are in place today. At the end of 30 years, we will have put 850 gigatons of carbon into the air, and that probably goes a long way towards locking in a 2-4 degree C increase in global mean surface temperatures, locking in ocean acidification and locking in sea level rise. Now, this is a projection made by men by the actions of society, and it's ours to change, not to accept. But the magnitude of the problem is something we need to appreciate. Different nations make different energy choices. It's a function of their natural resources. It's a function of their climate. It's a function of the development path that they've followed as a society. It's a function of where on the surface of the planet they are. Are they where it's dark a lot of the time, or are they at the mid-latitudes? Many, many, many things go into the choices of countries, and they each make a different choice. The overwhelming thing that we need to appreciate is the choice that China has made. China has made the choice, and will make the choice, to run on coal. The United States has an alternative. It can run on natural gas as a result of the inventions of fracking and shale gas, which we have here. They provide an alternative. The OECD Europe has a choice. It has renewables that it can afford to deploy in Germany because it's rich enough to afford to do it. The French and the British show interest in nuclear power. Eastern Europe, still very heavily committed to natural gas and to coal, and with natural gas that comes from Russia, with all of its entanglements. China has many fewer choices and a much harder row to hoe. If you look at China, and you ask yourself why has coal been important to it, you have to remember what China's done. China brought people to power, not power to people. It didn't do rural electrification. It urbanized. It urbanized by taking low-cost labor and low-cost energy, creating export industries that could fund a tremendous amount of growth. If we look at China's path, all of us know that prosperity in China has dramatically increased. In 1980, 80 percent of China's population lived below the extreme poverty level, below the level of having $1.90 per person per day. By the year 2000, only 20 percent of China's population lived below the extreme poverty level — a remarkable feat, admittedly, with some costs in civil liberties that would be tough to accept in the Western world. But the impact of all that wealth allowed people to get massively better nutrition. It allowed water pipes to be placed. It allowed sewage pipes to be placed, dramatic decrease in diarrheal diseases, at the cost of some outdoor air pollution. But in 1980, and even today, the number one killer in China is indoor air pollution, because people do not have access to clean cooking and heating fuels. In fact, in 2040, it's still estimated that 200 million people in China will not have access to clean cooking fuels. They have a remarkable path to follow. India also needs to meet the needs of its own people, and it's going to do that by burning coal. When we look at the EIA's projections of coal burning in India, India will supply nearly four times as much of its energy from coal as it will from renewables. It's not because they don't know the alternatives; it's because rich countries can do what they choose, poor countries do what they must. So what can we do to stop coal's emissions in time? What can we do that changes this forecast that's in front of us? Because it's a forecast that we can change if we have the will to do it. First of all, we have to think about the magnitude of the problem. Between now and 2040, 800 to 1,600 new coal plants are going to be built around the world. This week, between one and three one-gigawatt coal plants are being turned on around the world. That's happening regardless of what we want, because the people that rule their countries, assessing the interests of their citizens, have decided it's in the interest of their citizens to do that. And that's going to happen unless they have a better alternative. And every 100 of those plants will use up between one percent and three percent of the Earth's climate budget. So every day that you go home thinking that you should do something about global warming, at the end of that week, remember: somebody fired up a coal plant that's going to run for 50 years and take away your ability to change it. What we've forgotten is something that Vinod Khosla used to talk about, a man of Indian ethnicity but an American venture capitalist. And he said, back in the early 2000s, that if you needed to get China and India off of fossil fuels, you had to create a technology that passed the "Chindia test," "Chindia" being the appending of the two words. It had to be first of all viable, meaning that technically, they could implement it in their country, and that it would be accepted by the people in the country. Two, it had to be a technology that was scalable, that it could deliver the same benefits on the same timetable as fossil fuels, so that they can enjoy the kind of life, again, that we take for granted. And third, it had to be cost-effective without subsidy or without mandate. It had to stand on its own two feet; it could not be maintained for that many people if in fact, those countries had to go begging or had some foreign country say, "I won't trade with you," in order to get the technology shift to occur. If you look at the Chindia test, we simply have not come up with alternatives that meet that test. That's what the EIA forecast tells us. China's building 800 gigawatts of coal, 400 gigawatts of hydro, about 200 gigawatts of nuclear, and on an energy-equivalent basis, adjusting for intermittency, about 100 gigawatts of renewables. 800 gigawatts of coal. They're doing that, knowing the costs better than any other country, knowing the need better than any other country. But that's what they're aiming for in 2040 unless we give them a better choice. To give them a better choice, it's going to have to meet the Chindia test. If you look at all the alternatives that are out there, there are really two that come near to meeting it. First is this area of new nuclear that I'll talk about in just a second. It's a new generation of nuclear plants that are on the drawing boards around the world, and the people who are developing these say we can get them in position to demo by 2025 and to scale by 2030, if you will just let us. The second alternative that could be there in time is utility-scale solar backed up with natural gas, which we can use today, versus the batteries which are still under development. So what's holding new nuclear back? Outdated regulations and yesterday's mindsets. We have not used our latest scientific thinking on radiological health to think how we communicate with the public and govern the testing of new nuclear reactors. We have new scientific knowledge that we need to use in order to improve the way we regulate nuclear industry. The second thing is we've got a mindset that it takes 25 years and 2 to 5 billion dollars to develop a nuclear power plant. That comes from the historical, military mindset of the places nuclear power came from. These new nuclear ventures are saying that they can deliver power for 5 cents a kilowatt hour; they can deliver it for 100 gigawatts a year; they can demo it by 2025; and they can deliver it in scale by 2030, if only we give them a chance. Right now, we're basically waiting for a miracle. What we need is a choice. If they can't make it safe, if they can't make it cheap, it should not be deployed. But what I want you to do is not carry an idea forward, but write your leaders, write the head of the NGOs you support, and tell them to give you the choice, not the past. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
An interview with the founders of Black Lives Matter | {0: 'Alicia Garza launched a global movement with a single Facebook post that ended with the words: “Black lives matter.”', 1: 'Activist Patrisse Cullors created the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter as a tonic against years of injustice by police forces and prisons. ', 2: 'By taking the phrase "Black Lives Matter" onto social media, Opal Tometi helped turn a hashtag into a networked movement. ', 3: 'Mia Birdsong advocates for strong communities and the self-determination of everyday people.\r\n'} | TEDWomen 2016 | Mia Birdsong: Why is Black Lives Matter important for the US right now and in the world? Patrisse Cullors: Black Lives Matter is our call to action. It is a tool to reimagine a world where black people are free to exist, free to live. It is a tool for our allies to show up differently for us. I grew up in a neighborhood that was heavily policed. I witnessed my brothers and my siblings continuously stopped and frisked by law enforcement. I remember my home being raided. And one of my questions as a child was, why? Why us? Black Lives Matter offers answers to the why. It offers a new vision for young black girls around the world that we deserve to be fought for, that we deserve to call on local governments to show up for us. Opal Tometi: And antiblack racism — (Applause) And antiblack racism is not only happening in the United States. It's actually happening all across the globe. And what we need now more than ever is a human rights movement that challenges systemic racism in every single context. (Applause) We need this because the global reality is that black people are subject to all sorts of disparities in most of our most challenging issues of our day. I think about issues like climate change, and how six of the 10 worst impacted nations by climate change are actually on the continent of Africa. People are reeling from all sorts of unnatural disasters, displacing them from their ancestral homes and leaving them without a chance at making a decent living. We also see disasters like Hurricane Matthew, which recently wreaked havoc in many different nations, but caused the most damage to Haiti. Haiti is the poorest country in this hemisphere, and its inhabitants are black people. And what we're seeing in Haiti is that they were actually facing a number of challenges that even preceded this hurricane. They were reeling from the earthquake, they were reeling from cholera that was brought in by UN peacekeepers and still hasn't been eradicated. This is unconscionable. And this would not happen if this nation didn't have a population that was black, and we have to be real about that. But what's most heartening right now is that despite these challenges, what we're seeing is that there's a network of Africans all across the continent who are rising up and fighting back and demanding climate justice. (Applause) MB: So Alicia, you've said that when black people are free, everyone is free. Can you talk about what that means? Alicia Garza: Sure. So I think race and racism is probably the most studied social, economic and political phenomenon in this country, but it's also the least understood. The reality is that race in the United States operates on a spectrum from black to white. Doesn't mean that people who are in between don't experience racism, but it means that the closer you are to white on that spectrum, the better off you are. And the closer to black that you are on that spectrum the worse off your are. When we think about how we address problems in this country, we often start from a place of trickle-down justice. So using white folks as the control we say, well, if we make things better for white folks then everybody else is going to get free. But actually it doesn't work that way. We have to address problems at the root, and when you deal with what's happening in black communities, it creates an effervescence, right? So a bubble up rather than a trickle down. Let me give an example. When we talk about the wage gap, we often say women make 78 cents to every dollar that a man makes. You all have heard that before. But those are the statistics for white women and white men. The reality is that black women make something like 64 cents to every 78 cents that white women make. When we talk about latinas, it goes down to about 58 cents. If we were to talk about indigenous women, if we were to talk about trans women, it would even go further down. So again, if you deal with those who are the most impacted, everybody has an opportunity to benefit from that, rather than dealing with the folks who are not as impacted, and expecting it to trickle down. MB: So I love the effervescence, bubbling up. AG: Effervescence — like champagne. (Laughter) MB: Who doesn't love a glass of champagne, right? Champagne and freedom, right? (Laughter) What more could we want, y'all? So you all have been doing this for a minute, and the last few years have been — well, I can't even imagine, but I'm sure very transformative. And I know that you all have learned a lot about leadership. What do you want to share with these people about what you've learned about leadership? Patrisse, let's start with you. PC: Yeah, we have to invest in black leadership. That's what I've learned the most in the last few years. (Applause) What we've seen is thousands of black people showing up for our lives with very little infrastructure and very little support. I think our work as movement leaders isn't just about our own visibility but rather how do we make the whole visible. How do we not just fight for our individual selves but fight for everybody? And I also think leadership looks like everybody in this audience showing up for black lives. It's not just about coming and watching people on a stage, right? It's about how do you become that leader — whether it's in your workplace, whether it's in your home — and believe that the movement for black lives isn't just for us, but it's for everybody. (Applause) MB: What about you, Opal? OT: So I've been learning a great deal about interdependence. I've been learning about how to trust your team. I've come up with this new mantra after coming back from a three-month sabbatical, which is rare for black women to take who are in leadership, but I felt it was really important for my leadership and for my team to also practice stepping back as well as also sometimes stepping in. And what I learned in this process was that we need to acknowledge that different people contribute different strengths, and that in order for our entire team to flourish, we have to allow them to share and allow them to shine. And so during my sabbatical with the organization that I also work with, I saw our team rise up in my absence. They were able to launch new programs, fundraise. And when I came back, I had to give them a lot of gratitude and praise because they showed me that they truly had my back and that they truly had their own backs. You know, in this process of my sabbatical, I was really reminded of this Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu. I am because you are; you are because I am. And I realized that my own leadership, and the contributions that I'm able to make, is in large part due to the contributions that they make, right? And I have to acknowledge that, and I have to see that, and so my new mantra is, "Keep calm and trust the team." And also, "Keep calm and thank the team." MB: You know, one of the things I feel like I've heard in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement more than anywhere else is about being a leaderful movement, and that's such a beautiful concept, and I think that something that women often bring to the conversation about leadership is really the collective piece. What about you, Alicia? AG: Yeah ... How many of you heard that saying that leadership is lonely? I think that there is an element where leadership is lonely, but I also believe that it doesn't have to be like that. And in order for us to get to that point, I think there's a few things that we need to be doing. So one is we have to stop treating leaders like superheroes. We are ordinary people attempting to do extraordinary things, and so we need to be supported in that way. The other thing that I've learned about leadership is that there's a difference between leadership and celebrities, right? And there's a way in which we've been kind of transformed into celebrities rather than people who are trying to solve a problem. And the way that we treat celebrities is very fickle, right? We like them one day, we don't like what they're wearing the next day, and all of a sudden we have issues, right? So we need to stop deifying leaders so that more people will step into leadership. Lots of people are terrified to step into leadership because of how much scrutiny they receive and how brutal we are with leaders. And then the last thing that I've learned about leadership is that it's really easy to be a leader when everybody likes you. But it's hard to be a leader when you have to make hard choices and when you have to do what's right, even though people are not going to like you for it. And so in that way, I think another way that we can support leaders is to struggle with us, but struggle with us politically, not personally. We can have disagreements without being disagreeable, but it's important for us to sharpen each other, so that we all can rise. MB: That's beautiful, thank you. (Applause) So you all are doing work that forces you to face some brutal, painful realities on a daily basis. What gives you hope and inspires you in that context? PC: I am hopeful for black futures. And I say that because we live in a society that's so obsessed with black death. We have images of our death on the TV screen, on our Twitter timelines, on our Facebook timelines, but what if instead we imagine black life? We imagine black people living and thriving. And that — that inspires me. OT: What inspires me these days are immigrants. Immigrants all over the world who are doing the best that they can to make a living, to survive and also to thrive. Right now there are over 244 million people who aren't living in their country of origin. This is a 40 percent increase since the year 2000. So what this tells me is that the disparities across the globe are only getting worse. Yet there are people who are finding the strength and wherewithal to travel, to move, to eke out a better living for themselves and to provide for their families and their loved ones. And some of these people who are immigrants are also undocumented. They're unauthorized. And they inspire me even more because although our society is telling them, you're not wanted, you're not needed here, and they're highly vulnerable and subject to abuse, to wage theft, to exploitation and xenophobic attacks, many of them are also beginning to organize in their communities. And what I'm seeing is that there's also an emerging network of black, undocumented people who are resisting the framework, and resisting the criminalization of their existence. And that to me is incredibly powerful and inspires me every singe day. MB: Thank you. Alicia? AG: So we know that young people are the present and the future, but what inspires me are older people who are becoming transformed in the service of this movement. We all know that as you get older, you get a little more entrenched in your ways. It's happening to me, I know that's right. But I'm so inspired when I see people who have a way that they do things, have a way that they think about the world, and they're courageous enough to be open to listening to what the experiences are of so many of us who want to live in world that's just and want to live in a world that's equitable. And I'm also inspired by the actions that I'm seeing older people taking in service of this movement. I'm inspired by seeing older people step into their own power and leadership and say, "I'm not passing a torch, I'm helping you light the fire." (Applause) MB: I love that — yes. So in terms of action, I think that it is awesome to sit here and be able to listen to you all, and to have our minds open and shift, but that's not going to get black people free. So if you had one thing you would like this audience and the folks who are watching around the world to actually do, what would that be? AG: OK, two quick ones. One, call the White House. The water protectors are being forcibly removed from the camp that they have set up to defend what keeps us alive. And that is intricately related to black lives. So definitely call the White House and demand that they stop doing that. There are tanks and police officers arresting every single person there as we speak. (Applause) The second thing that you can do is to join something. Be a part of something. There are groups, collectives — doesn't have to be a non-profit, you know what I mean? But there are groups that are doing work in our communities right now to make sure that black lives matter so all lives matter. Get involved; don't sit on your couch and tell people what you think they should be doing. Go do it with us. MB: Do you guys want to add anything? That's good? All right. So — And I think that the joining something, like if you feel like there's not something where you are, start it. AG: Start it. MB: These conversations that we're having, have those conversations with somebody else. And then instead of just letting it be a talk that you had, actually decide to start something. OT: That's right. MB: I mean, that's what you all did. You started something, and look what's happened. Thank you all so much for being here with us today. OT: Thank you. (Applause) |
Maps that show us who we are (not just where we are) | {0: 'Danny Dorling teaches and writes about the geography of our human world.'} | TEDxExeter | I'd like you to imagine the world anew. I'd like to show you some maps, which have been drawn by Ben Hennig, of the planet in a way that most of you will never have seen the planet depicted before. Here's an image that you're very familiar with. I'm old enough that I was actually born before we saw this image. Apparently some of my first words were "moona, moona," but I think that's my mom having a particular fantasy about what her baby boy could see on the flickering black and white TV screen. It's only been a few centuries since we've actually, most of us, thought of our planet as spherical. When we first saw these images in the 1960s, the world was changing at an incredible rate. In my own little discipline of human geography, a cartographer called Waldo Tobler was drawing new maps of the planet, and these maps have now spread, and I'm going to show you one of them now. This map is a map of the world, but it's a map which looks to you a little bit strange. It's a map in which we stretched places, so that those areas which contain many people are drawn larger, and those areas, like the Sahara and the Himalayas, in which there are few people, have been shrunk away. Everybody on the planet is given an equal amount of space. The cities are shown shining bright. The lines are showing you submarine cables and trade routes. And there's one particular line that goes from the Chinese port of Dalian through past Singapore, through the Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean and round to Rotterdam. And it's showing you the route of what was the world's largest ship just a year ago, a ship which was taking so many containers of goods that when they were unloaded, if the lorries had all gone in convoy, they would have been 100 kilometers long. This is how our world is now connected. This is the quantity of stuff we are now moving around the world, just on one ship, on one voyage, in five weeks. We've lived in cities for a very long time, but most of us didn't live in cities. This is Çatalhöyük, one of the world's first cities. At its peak 9,000 years ago, people had to walk over the roofs of others' houses to get to their home. If you look carefully at the map of the city, you'll see it has no streets, because streets are something we invented. The world changes. It changes by trial and error. We work out slowly and gradually how to live in better ways. And the world has changed incredibly quickly most recently. It's only within the last six, seven, or eight generations that we have actually realized that we are a species. It's only within the last few decades that a map like this could be drawn. Again, the underlying map is the map of world population, but over it, you're seeing arrows showing how we spread out of Africa with dates showing you where we think we arrived at particular times. I have to redraw this map every few months, because somebody makes a discovery that a particular date was wrong. We are learning about ourselves at an incredible speed. And we're changing. A lot of change is gradual. It's accretion. We don't notice the change because we only have short lives, 70, 80, if you're lucky 90 years. This graph is showing you the annual rate of population growth in the world. It was very low until around about 1850, and then the rate of population growth began to rise so that around the time I was born, when we first saw those images from the moon of our planet, our global population was growing at two percent a year. If it had carried on growing at two percent a year for just another couple of centuries, the entire planet would be covered with a seething mass of human bodies all touching each other. And people were scared. They were scared of population growth and what they called "the population bomb" in 1968. But then, if you look at the end of the graph, the growth began to slow. The decade — the '70s, the '80s, the '90s, the noughties, and in this decade, even faster — our population growth is slowing. Our planet is stabilizing. We are heading towards nine, 10, or 11 billion people by the end of the century. Within that change, you can see tumult. You can see the Second World War. You can see the pandemic in 1918 from influenza. You can see the great Chinese famine. These are the events we tend to concentrate on. We tend to concentrate on the terrible events in the news. We don't tend to concentrate on the gradual change and the good news stories. We worry about people. We worry about how many people there are. We worry about how you can get away from people. But this is the map of the world changed again to make area large, the further away people are from each area. So if you want to know where to go to get away from everybody, here's the best places to go. And every year, these areas get bigger, because every year, we are coming off the land globally. We are moving into the cities. We are packing in more densely. There are wolves again in Europe, and the wolves are moving west across the continent. Our world is changing. You have worries. This is a map showing where the water falls on our planet. We now know that. And you can look at where Çatalhöyük was, where three continents meet, Africa, Asia, and Europe, and you can see there are a large number of people living there in areas with very little water. And you can see areas in which there is a great deal of rainfall as well. And we can get a bit more sophisticated. Instead of making the map be shaped by people, we can shape the map by water, and then we can change it every month to show the amount of water falling on every small part of the globe. And you see the monsoons moving around the planet, and the planet almost appears to have a heartbeat. And all of this only became possible within my lifetime to see this is where we are living. We have enough water. This is a map of where we grow our food in the world. This is the areas that we will rely on most for rice and maize and corn. People worry that there won't be enough food, but we know, if we just ate less meat and fed less of the crops to animals, there is enough food for everybody as long as we think of ourselves as one group of people. And we also know about what we do so terribly badly nowadays. You will have seen this map of the world before. This is the map produced by taking satellite images, if you remember those satellites around the planet in the very first slide I showed, and producing an image of what the Earth looks like at night. When you normally see that map, on a normal map, the kind of map that most of you will be used to, you think you are seeing a map of where people live. Where the lights are shining up is where people live. But here, on this image of the world, remember we've stretched the map again. Everywhere has the same density of people on this map. If an area doesn't have people, we've shrunk it away to make it disappear. So we're showing everybody with equal prominence. Now, the lights no longer show you where people are, because people are everywhere. Now the lights on the map, the lights in London, the lights in Cairo, the lights in Tokyo, the lights on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, the lights show you where people live who are so profligate with energy that they can afford to spend money powering lights to shine up into the sky, so satellites can draw an image like this. And the areas that are dark on the map are either areas where people do not have access to that much energy, or areas where people do, but they have learned to stop shining the light up into the sky. And if I could show you this map animated over time, you would see that Tokyo has actually become darker, because ever since the tsunami in Japan, Japan has had to rely on a quarter less electricity because it turned the nuclear power stations off. And the world didn't end. You just shone less light up into the sky. There are a huge number of good news stories in the world. Infant mortality is falling and has been falling at an incredible rate. A few years ago, the number of babies dying in their first year of life in the world fell by five percent in just one year. More children are going to school and learning to read and write and getting connected to the Internet and going on to go to university than ever before at an incredible rate, and the highest number of young people going to university in the world are women, not men. I can give you good news story after good news story about what is getting better in the planet, but we tend to concentrate on the bad news that is immediate. Rebecca Solnit, I think, put it brilliantly, when she explained: "The accretion of incremental, imperceptible changes which can constitute progress and which render our era dramatically different from the past" — the past was much more stable — "a contrast obscured by the undramatic nature of gradual transformation, punctuated by occasional tumult." Occasionally, terrible things happen. You are shown those terrible things on the news every night of the week. You are not told about the population slowing down. You are not told about the world becoming more connected. You are not told about the incredible improvements in understanding. You are not told about how we are learning to begin to waste less and consume less. This is my last map. On this map, we have taken the seas and the oceans out. Now you are just looking at about 7.4 billion people with the map drawn in proportion to those people. You're looking at over a billion in China, and you can see the largest city in the world in China, but you do not know its name. You can see that India is in the center of this world. You can see that Europe is on the edge. And we in Exeter today are on the far edge of the planet. We are on a tiny scrap of rock off Europe which contains less than one percent of the world's adults, and less than half a percent of the world's children. We are living in a stabilizing world, an urbanizing world, an aging world, a connecting world. There are many, many things to be frightened about, but there is no need for us to fear each other as much as we do, and we need to see that we are now living in a new world. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How an old loop of railroads is changing the face of a city | {0: 'Ryan Gravel is an architect and urban planner who played a key role in developing the Atlanta BeltLine. '} | TEDNYC | This picture is from my metro card when I spent a year abroad in Paris in college in the mid-'90s. My friend says I look like a French anarchist — (Laughter) But this is still what I see when I look in the mirror in the morning. Within a month of living in Paris, I'd lost 15 pounds and I was in the best shape of my life because I was eating fresh food and I was walking wherever I went. Having grown up in suburban Atlanta, a region built largely by highways and automobiles and with a reputation as a poster child for sprawl, Paris fundamentally changed the way I understood the construction of the world around me, and I got obsessed with the role of infrastructure — that it's not just the way to move people from point A to point B, it's not just the way to convey water or sewage or energy, but it's the foundation for our economy. It's the foundation for our social life and for our culture, and it really matters to the way that we live. When I came home, I was instantly frustrated, stuck in traffic as I crossed the top end of our perimeter highway. Not only was I not moving a muscle, I had no social interaction with the hundreds of thousands of people that were hurtling past me, like me, with their eyes faced forward and their music blaring. I wondered if this was an inevitable outcome, or could we do something about it. Was it possible to transform this condition in Atlanta into the kind of place that I wanted to live in? I went back to grad school in architecture and city planning, developed this interest in infrastructure, and in 1999 came up with an idea for my thesis project: the adaptation of an obsolete loop of old railroad circling downtown as a new infrastructure for urban revitalization. It was just an idea. I never thought we would actually build it. But I went to work at an architecture firm, and eventually talked to my coworkers about it, and they loved the idea. And as we started talking to more people about it, more people wanted to hear about it. In the summer of 2001, we connected with Cathy Woolard, who was soon elected city council president. And we built a citywide vision around this idea: the Atlanta BeltLine, a 22-mile loop of transit and trails and transformation. I was doing two and three meetings a week for two and a half years, and so was Cathy and her staff and a handful of volunteers. Together, we built this amazing movement of people and ideas. It included community advocates who were used to fighting against things, but found the Atlanta BeltLine as something that they could fight for; developers who saw the opportunity to take advantage of a lot of new growth in the city; and dozens of nonprofit partners who saw their mission at least partly accomplished by the shared vision. Now, usually these groups of people aren't at the same table wanting the same outcome. But there we were, and it was kind of weird, but it was really, really powerful. The people of Atlanta fell in love with a vision that was better than what they saw through their car windshields, and the people of Atlanta made it happen, and I guarantee you we would not be building it otherwise. From the beginning, our coalition was diverse. People of all stripes were part of our story. People on the lower end of the economic spectrum loved it, too. They were just afraid they weren't going to be able to be there when it got built, that they'd be priced out. And we've all heard that kind of story before, right? But we promised that the Atlanta BeltLine would be different, and people took ownership of the idea, and they made it better than anything we ever imagined in the beginning, including significant subsidies for housing, new parks, art, an arboretum — a list that continues to grow. And we put in place the organizations and agencies that were required to make it happen. And importantly, it is. Now we're in the early stages of implementation, and it's working. The first mainline section of trail was opened in 2012, and it's already generated over three billion dollars of private-sector investment. But it's not only changing the physical form of the city, it's changing the way we think about the city, and what our expectations are for living there. About a month ago, I had to take my kids with me to the grocery store and they were complaining about it, because they didn't want to get in the car. They were saying, "Dad, if we have to go, can we at least ride our bikes?" And I said, "Of course we can. That's what people in Atlanta do. We ride our bikes to the grocery store." (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you, yeah. Now, they don't know how ridiculous that is, but I do. And I also understand that their expectations for Atlanta are really powerful. This kind of transformation is exactly like sprawl in the last century, the movement where our investment in highways and automobiles fundamentally changed American life. That wasn't some grand conspiracy. There were conspiracies within it, of course. But it was a cultural momentum. It was millions of people making millions of decisions over an extended period of time, that fundamentally changed not only the way that we build cities, but it changed our expectations for our lives. These changes were the foundations for urban sprawl. We didn't call it sprawl at that time. We called it the future. And it was. And we got all the highways and strip malls and cul-de-sacs we wanted. It was a radical transformation, but it was built by a cultural momentum. So it's important to not separate the physical construction of the places we live from other things that are happening at that time. At that time, in the second half of the last century, science was curing disease and lifting us to the moon, and the sexual revolution was breaking down barriers, and the Civil Rights Movement began its march toward the fulfillment of our nation's promise. Television, entertainment, food, travel, business — everything was changing, and both the public and private sectors were colluding to give us the lives we wanted. The Federal Highway Administration, for example, didn't exist before there were highways. Think about it. (Laughter) Of course, today it's important to understand and acknowledge that those benefits accrued to some groups of people and not to others. It was not an equitable cultural momentum. But when we look today in wonder and disgust, maybe, at the metropolis sprawl before us, we wonder if we're stuck. Are we stuck with the legacy of that inequity? Are we stuck with this dystopian traffic hellscape? Are we stuck with rampant urban displacement, with environmental degradation? Are we stuck with social isolation or political polarization? Are these the inevitable and permanent outcomes? Or are they the result of our collective cultural decisions that we've made for ourselves? And if they are, can't we change them? What I have learned from our experience in Atlanta is not an anomaly. Similar stories are playing out everywhere, where people are reclaiming not only old railroads, but also degraded urban waterways and obsolete roadways, reinventing all of the infrastructure in their lives. Whether here in New York or in Houston or Miami, Detroit, Philadelphia, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, Toronto and Paris, cities big and small all over the world are reclaiming and reinventing this infrastructure for themselves, including the mother of all catalyst infrastructure projects, the Los Angeles River, the revitalization effort for which similarly started as a grassroots movement, has developed into a cultural momentum, and is now in the early stages of being transformed into some kind of life-affirming infrastructure again, this one with trails and parks and fishing and boating and community revitalization, and of course, water quality and flood control. It's already improving the lives of people. It's already changing the way the rest of us think about Los Angeles. This is more than just infrastructure. We're building new lives for ourselves. It's a movement that includes local food, urban agriculture, craft beer, the maker movement, tech and design — all of these things, early indicators of a really radical shift in the way we build cities. We're taking places like this and transforming them into this. And soon this. And this is all exciting and good. We're changing the world for the better. Good for us! And it is awesome — I mean that. But our history of sprawl, and from what we can already see with these catalyst projects today, we know and must remember that big changes like this don't usually benefit everyone. The market forces unleashed by this cultural momentum often include the seemingly unstoppable and inevitable cycle of rising taxes, prices and rents. This is urgent. If we care, we have to stand up and speak out. This should be a call to action, because the answer can't be to not improve communities. The answer can't be to not build parks and transit and grocery stores. The answer can't be to hold communities down just to keep them affordable. But we do have to follow through and address the financial realities that we're facing. This is hard, and it won't happen on its own. We can do it, and I'm committed to this goal in Atlanta, to sticking up again for people who made it possible in the first place. We can't call it a success without them. I certainly can't, because the people I made commitments to all those years weren't abstract populations. They're my friends and neighbors. They're people that I love. So even though it started as my graduate thesis and I'm working hard for 16 years with thousands of people to help make this thing come to life, I know and believe that who the BeltLine is being built for is just as important as whether it's built at all. Not just in Atlanta, but locally and globally, we have to understand this accountability to the people whose lives we are changing, because this is us. We are the lives we're talking about. These places aren't inevitable. The places we live aren't inevitable, and if we want something different, we just need to speak up. We have to ensure that change comes on our terms. And to do that, we have to participate actively in the process of shaping change. Thank you. (Applause) |
4 larger-than-life lessons from soap operas | {0: 'Kate Adams spends her days dissecting digital communications to find a better way to tell brand stories and connect with customers.'} | TED@UPS | In 1987, Tina Lord found herself in quite the pickle. See, this gold digger made sure she married sweet Cord Roberts just before he inherited millions. But when Cord found out Tina loved his money as much as she loved him, he dumped her. Cord's mother Maria was thrilled until they hooked up again. So Maria hired Max Holden to romance Tina and then made sure Cord didn't find out Tina was pregnant with his baby. So Tina, still married but thinking Cord didn't love her flew to Argentina with Max. Cord finally figured out what was going on and rushed after them, but he was too late. Tina had already been kidnapped, strapped to a raft and sent over a waterfall. She and her baby were presumed dead. Cord was sad for a bit, but then he bounced right back with a supersmart archaeologist named Kate, and they had a gorgeous wedding until Tina, seemingly back from the dead, ran into the church holding a baby. "Stop!" she screamed. "Am I too late? Cord, I've come so far. This is your son." And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the soap opera "One Life to Live" introduced a love story that lasted 25 years. (Laughter) Now, if you've ever seen a soap opera, you know the stories and the characters can be exaggerated, larger than life, and if you're a fan, you find that exaggeration fun, and if you're not, maybe you find them melodramatic or unsophisticated. Maybe you think watching soap operas is a waste of time, that their bigness means their lessons are small or nonexistent. But I believe the opposite to be true. Soap operas reflect life, just bigger. So there are real life lessons we can learn from soap operas, and those lessons are as big and adventurous as any soap opera storyline. Now, I've been a fan since I ran home from the bus stop in second grade desperate to catch the end of Luke and Laura's wedding, the biggest moment in "General Hospital" history. (Applause) So you can imagine how much I loved my eight years as the assistant casting director on "As the World Turns." My job was watching soap operas, reading soap opera scripts and auditioning actors to be on soap operas. So I know my stuff. (Laughter) And yes, soap operas are larger than life, drama on a grand scale, but our lives can be filled with as much intensity, and the stakes can feel just as dramatic. We cycle through tragedy and joy just like these characters. We cross thresholds, fight demons and find salvation unexpectedly, and we do it again and again and again, but just like soaps, we can flip the script, which means we can learn from these characters that move like bumblebees, looping and swerving through life. And we can use those lessons to craft our own life stories. Soap operas teach us to push away doubt and believe in our capacity for bravery, vulnerability, adaptability and resilience. And most importantly, they show us it's never too late to change your story. So with that, let's start with soap opera lesson one: surrender is not an option. (Laughter) "All My Children"'s Erica Kane was daytime's version of Scarlett O'Hara, a hyperbolically self-important princess who deep down was scrappy and daring. Now, in her 41 years on TV, perhaps Erica's most famous scene is her alone in the woods suddenly face to face with a grizzly bear. She screamed at the bear, "You may not do this! Do you understand me? You may not come near me! I am Erica Kane and you are a filthy beast!" (Laughter) And of course the bear left, so what that teaches us is obstacles are to be expected and we can choose to surrender or we can stand and fight. Pandora's Tim Westergren knows this better than most. You might even call him the Erica Kane of Silicon Valley. Tim and his cofounders launched the company with two million dollars in funding. They were out of cash the next year. Now, lots of companies fold at that point, but Tim chose to fight. He maxed out 11 credit cards and racked up six figures in personal debt and it still wasn't enough. So every two weeks for two years on payday he stood in front of his employees and he asked them to sacrifice their salaries, and it worked. More than 50 people deferred two million dollars, and now, more than a decade later, Pandora is worth billions. When you believe that there is a way around or through whatever is in front of you, that surrender is not an option, you can overcome enormous obstacles. Which brings us to soap opera lesson two: sacrifice your ego and drop the superiority complex. Now, this is scary. It's an acknowledgment of need or fallibility. Maybe it's even an admission that we're not as special as we might like to think. Stephanie Forrester of "The Bold and the Beautiful" thought she was pretty darn special. She thought she was so special, she didn't need to mix with the riffraff from the valley, and she made sure valley girl Brooke knew it. But after nearly 25 years of epic fighting, Stephanie got sick and let Brooke in. They made amends, archenemies became soul mates and Stephanie died in Brooke's arms, and here's our takeaway. Drop your ego. Life is not about you. It's about us, and our ability to experience joy and love and to improve our reality comes only when we make ourselves vulnerable and we accept responsibility for our actions and our inactions, kind of like Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks. Now, after a great run as CEO, Howard stepped down in 2000, and Starbucks quickly overextended itself and stock prices fell. Howard rejoined the team in 2008, and one of the first things he did was apologize to all 180,000 employees. He apologized. And then he asked for help, honesty, and ideas in return. And now, Starbucks has more than doubled its net revenue since Howard came back. So sacrifice your desire to be right or safe all the time. It's not helping anyone, least of all you. Sacrifice your ego. Soap opera lesson three: evolution is real. You're not meant to be static characters. On television, static equals boring and boring equals fired. Characters are supposed to grow and change. Now, on TV, those dynamic changes can make for some rough transitions, particularly when a character is played by one person yesterday and played by someone new today. Recasting happens all the time on soaps. Over the last 20 years, four different actors have played the same key role of Carly Benson on "General Hospital." Each new face triggered a change in the character's life and personality. Now, there was always an essential nugget of Carly in there, but the character and the story adapted to whomever was playing her. And here's what that means for us. While we may not swap faces in our own lives, we can evolve too. We can choose to draw a circle around our feet and stay in that spot, or we can open ourselves to opportunities like Carly, who went from nursing student to hotel owner, or like Julia Child. Julia was a World War II spy, and when the war ended, she got married, moved to France, and decided to give culinary school a shot. Julia, her books and her TV shows revolutionized the way America cooks. We all have the power to initiate change in our lives, to evolve and adapt. We make the choice, but sometimes life chooses for us, and we don't get a heads up. Surprise slams us in the face. You're flat on the ground, the air is gone, and you need resuscitation. So thank goodness for soap opera lesson four: resurrection is possible. (Laughter) (Applause) In 1983, "Days of Our Lives"' Stefano DiMera died of a stroke, but not really, because in 1984 he died when his car plunged into the harbor, and yet he was back in 1985 with a brain tumor. (Laughter) But before the tumor could kill him, Marlena shot him, and he tumbled off a catwalk to his death. And so it went for 30 years. (Laughter) Even when we saw the body, we knew better. He's called the Phoenix for a reason. And here's what that means for us. As long as the show is still on the air, or you're still breathing, nothing is permanent. Resurrection is possible. Now, of course, just like life, soap operas do ultimately meet the big finale. CBS canceled my show, "As The World Turns," in December 2009, and we shot our final episode in June 2010. It was six months of dying and I rode that train right into the mountain. And even though we were in the middle of a huge recession and millions of people were struggling to find work, I somehow thought everything would be OK. So I packed up the kids and the Brooklyn apartment, and we moved in with my in-laws in Alabama. (Laughter) Three months later, nothing was OK. That was when I watched the final episode air, and I realized the show was not the only fatality. I was one too. I was unemployed and living on the second floor of my in-laws' home, and that's enough to make anyone feel dead inside. (Laughter) But I knew my story wasn't over, that it couldn't be over. I just had to tap into everything I had ever learned about soap operas. I had to be brave like Erica and refuse to surrender, so every day, I made a decision to fight. I had to be vulnerable like Stephanie and sacrifice my ego. I had to ask for help a lot of times across many states. I had to be adaptable like Carly and evolve my skills, my mindset, and my circumstances, and then I had to be resilient, like Stefano, and resurrect myself and my career like a phoenix from the ashes. Eventually I got an interview. After 15 years in news and entertainment, nine months of unemployment and this one interview, I had an offer for an entry level job. I was 37 years old and I was back from the dead. We will all experience what looks like an ending, and we can choose to make it a beginning. Kind of like Tina, who miraculously survived that waterfall, and because I hate to leave a cliffhanger hanging, Tina and Cord did get divorced, but they got remarried three times before the show went off the air in 2012. So remember, as long as there is breath in your body, it's never too late to change your story. Thank you. (Applause) |
A queer vision of love and marriage | {0: 'Already a tireless advocate for positive and honest portrayals of LGBTQ people in media, Tiq Milan now evangelizes for the unifying power of love.', 1: 'Through her art and writing, Kim Katrin Milan advocates for queer, trans and feminist issues. Now she’s using her own love story to help bridge communities.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | Tiq Milan: Our first conversation was on Facebook, and it was three days long. (Laughter) We shared over 3,000 messages between us, and it was during those 72 hours that I knew she was going to be my wife. We didn't wait any prerequisite amount of time for our courtship; we told each other the vulnerable truths up front: I am a transgender man, which means the F on my birth certificate should have stood for "False," instead of "Female." (Laughter) Walking around as a woman in the world felt like walking with pebbles in my shoes. It took the rhythm out of my swagger, it threw me off balance, it pained me with every step I took forward. But today I'm a man of my own intention; a man of my own design. Kim Katrin Milan: I am a cisgender queer woman. Cisgender means the gender I was assigned at birth is still and has always been female. This doesn't make me natural or normal, this is just one way of describing the many different ways that we exist in this world. And queer is a cultural term, but in this case, it refers to the way that I'm not restricted by gender when it comes to choosing partners. I've identified in a few different ways — as a bisexual, as a lesbian — but for me, queerness encompasses all of the layers of who I am and how I've loved. I'm layers, and not fractions. And for me, the fact that he was queer meant that I could trust his courtship from the very beginning. As queer and trans people, we're so often excluded from institutions and traditions. We create spaces outside of convention, including the conventions of time. And in those 3,000 messages between us, we collapsed time; we queered it; we laid it all on the table. (Laughter) With no pretense at all. And this meant that we were able to commit to each other in a profoundly different way. So often what we're told is this idea of the "Golden Rule," that we should treat other people the way we want to be treated. But the problem with that is that it assumes that we are the standard for other people, and we're not. We need to treat other people the way they want to be treated, which means we had to ask. I couldn't assume that the kind of love that Tiq needed was the same kind of love that I needed. So I asked him everything — about his fears, his insecurities — and we started from there. TM: I didn't know what kind of love I needed. I had just come out of a year-long fog of being rejected and utterly depleted. I had someone look me in my eyes and tell me that I was unworthy of their love because I was trans. And there's a culture of lovelessness that we've created around transgender people. It's reasoned, justified and often signed into law. And I was a heartbeat away from internalizing that message, that I wasn't worthy. But Kim said that I was her ideal — the heartbroken mess that I was. (Laughter) KKM: He totally was my ideal. (Laughter) In more ways than one. Both poets, writers, creatives with a long history of community work behind us, and big, huge dreams of a family in front of us, we shared a lot of things in common, but we were also incredibly different. I've been a lifelong traveler and a bit of an orphan, whereas he comes from a huge family, and definitely stays grounded. I often kind of sum up the differences in our strengths by saying, "Keep me safe, and I'll keep you wild." (Laughter) TM: We have marginalized identities but we don't live marginalized lives. Being queer and trans is about creating new ways of existing. It's about loving people as they are, not as they're supposed to be. Kim is unapologetically feminine in a world that is often cruel and violent to women who are too proud and too freeing. And I didn't enter into this union under the auspices that she was going to be my helper or my rib, but a fully complex — (Laughter) KKM: Right? That's not right. TM: But a fully complex human being whose femininity wasn't for me to rein in, control or critique. It's her brilliance, the way she leads with compassion, and how she never loses sight of her empathy. She has been my hero since day one. (Applause) KKM: Our relationship has always been about setting each other free. One of the first questions I asked him was what dreams he had left to accomplish, and how would I help him get there. His dreams to live as a poet, to adopt and raise a family together, to live a life that he was proud of, and one that would live up to his mother's incredible legacy. And I really appreciated that we were able to start from that place, and not from a place that was around figuring out how to make each other work together. And I think this really allowed us to grow into the people that we were in a way that was incredibly different. I love him whole; pre-transition, now and in the future. And it's this love that had us committed to each other before we'd even seen each other's faces. TM: My mother's biggest concern when I transitioned was who was going to love me as I am. Had being transgender somehow precluded me from love and monogamy because I was supposedly born in the wrong body? But it's this type of structuring that has to be reframed in order to let love in. My body never betrayed me, and my body was never wrong. It's this restrictive, binary thinking on gender that said that I didn't exist. But when we met, she loved me for exactly how I showed up. She would trace her fingers along the numb keloid scars left by my top surgery. Scars that run from the middle of my chest all the way out to my outer torso. She said that these were reminders of my strength and everything that I went through and nothing for me to be ashamed of. So sprinting towards her hand in marriage was the queerest thing that I could do. (Laughter) It flew in the face of more conventional trajectories of love and relationships, because God was never supposed to bless a union for folks like us, and the law was never supposed to recognize it. KKM: So on May 5, 2014, just about three months after meeting online, we were married on the steps of City Hall in Manhattan, and it was beautiful in every conceivable way. It's safe to say that we reimagined some traditions, but we also kept some old ones that we worked in, and we created something that worked for us. My bouquet and corsage was actually filled with wildflowers from Brooklyn — also added in a little bit of lavender and sage to keep us grounded because we were so nervous. And it was put together by a sweet sister healer friend of ours. I never wanted a diamond ring, because conflict and convention are not my thing, so my ring is the deepest purple, like the color of my crown chakra, and set in place with my birthstones. The gift of queerness is options. I never had to choose his last name, it was never an exception, but I did because I am my father's bastard child, someone who has always been an apology, a secret, an imposition. And it was incredibly freeing to choose the name of a man who chose me first. (Applause) TM: So we told some family and some close friends, many of whom were still in disbelief as we took our vows. Fittingly, we posted all of our wedding photos on Facebook, where we met — and Instagram, of course. And we quickly realized that our coming together was more than just a union of two people, but was a model of possibility for the millions of LGBTQ folks who have been sold this lie that family and matrimony is antithetical to who they are — for those of us who rarely get to see ourselves reflected in love and happiness. KKM: And the thing is, absolutely we are marginalized because of our identities, but it also emboldens us to be the people that we are. Queerness is our major key; blackness is our magic. It's because of these things that we are able to be hopeful, open, receptive and shape-shifting. These are the things that give us, and are such an incredible source of, our strength. Our queerness is a source of that strength. I think of the words of Ottawa-based poet Brandon Wint: "Not queer like gay; queer like escaping definition. Queer like some sort of fluidity and limitlessness all at once. Queer like a freedom too strange to be conquered. Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love can look like, and to pursue it." TM: We are part of a community of folks — Yeah, that's good right? (Laughter) We are part of a community of folks who are living their authentic selves all along the gender spectrum, despite the ubiquitous threat of violence, despite the undercurrent of anxiety that always is present for people who live on their own terms. Globally, a transgender person is murdered every 21 hours. And the United States has had more trans murders on record this year than any year to date. However, our stories are much more than this rigid dichotomy of strength and resilience. We are expanding the human complexity on these margins, and we are creating freedom on these margins. KKM: And we don't have any blueprints. We're creating a world that we have literally never seen before; organizing families based on love and not by blood, guiding by a compassion that so few of us have been shown ourselves. So many of us have not received love from our families — have been betrayed by the people that we trust most. So what we do here is we create entirely new languages of love. Ones that are about creating the space for us to be our authentic selves and not imposing this standard of what masculinity or femininity is supposed to be. TM: We are interested in love and inclusion as a tool of revolutionary change, right? And the idea is simply, if we drop all our preconceived notions about how somebody is supposed to be — in their body, in their gender, in their skin — if we take the intentional steps to unlearn these deep-seated biases and create space for people to be self-determined, and embrace who they are, then we will definitely create a better world than the one we were born into. (Applause) KKM: We want to mark this time in history by leaving evidence of the fact that we were here. We open up little windows into our relationship for our community to bear witness, and we do this because we want to make maps to the future and not monuments to ourselves. Our experience does not invalidate other peoples' experience, but it should and necessarily does complicate this idea of what love and marriage are supposed to be. TM: OK, now for all the talking, and inspiring, and possibility-modeling we've done, we've been nowhere near perfect. And we've had to hold a mirror up to ourselves. And I saw that I wasn't always the best listener, and that my ego got in the way of our progress as a couple. And I've had to really assess these deep-seated, sexist ideas that I've had about the value of a woman's experience in the world. I've had to reevaluate what it means to be in allyship with my wife. KKM: And I had to remind myself of a lot of things, too. What it means to be hard on the issues, but soft on the person. While we were writing this, we got into a massive fight. (Laughter) For so many different reasons, but based on the content about our values and our lived experiences — and we were really hurt, you know? Because what we do and how we love puts ourselves entirely on the line. But even though the fight lasted over the course of two days — (Laughter) We were able to come back together to each other, and recommit to ourselves, to each other and to our marriage. And that really yielded some of the most passionate parts of what we share with you here today. TM: I have had to interrogate masculinity, which I think doesn't happen enough. I've had to interrogate masculinity; the toxic privileges that come with being a man don't define me, but I have to be accountable for how it shows up in my life every day. I have allowed my wife to do all of the emotional labor of prying open the lines of communication when I'd rather clam up and run away. (Laughter) I've stripped away emotional support instead of facing my own vulnerabilities, particularly around the heartbreaking miscarriage we suffered last year, and I'm sorry for that. Sometimes as men, we get to take the easy way out. And so my journey as a trans person is about reimagining masculinity. About creating a manhood that isn't measured by the power it wields, by the entitlements afforded to it, or any simulacrum of control that it can muster, but works in tandem with femininity, and is guided by my spirit. KKM: Y'all ... (Applause) And this has created the space for my femininity to flourish in a way I had never experienced before. He never is threatened by my sexuality, he never polices what I wear or how I act. I cook but he does way more of the cleaning than I do. And when we're rushing to get out of the house and we have so much to handle, he handles everything, so I have time to do my hair and makeup. (Laughter) He understands that this is my armor, and he never treats femininity as though it is frivolous or superficial, and this, and him — he grows my experience of gender every single day. TM: I love to watch her get dressed in the morning. Watching her in the closet, looking for something comfortable and colorful, and tight, and safe — (Laughter) But it's challenging to watch her negotiate her decisions looking for something that's going to get the least amount of attention, but at the same time be an expression of the vibrant and sexy woman she is. And all I want to do is celebrate her for her beauty, and the things that make her beautiful and special and free, from her long acrylic nails, to her uncompromising black feminism. (Applause) KKM: I love you. TM: I love you. (Laughter) KKM: There are so many queer and trans people who have come before us, whose stories we will never get to hear. We constantly experience this retelling of history where we are conspicuously left out. And it's really hard to not see ourselves there. And so living out loud for us is about that representation. It's about having possibility models, and having hope that love is part of our inheritance in this world, too. TM: The possibility that we are practicing is about reinventing time, love and institutions. We are creating a future of multiplicity. We are expanding the spectrum of gender and sexuality, imagining ourselves into existence, imagining a world where gender is self-determined and not imposed, and where who we are is a kaleidoscope of possibility without the narrow-minded limitations masquerading as science or justice. (Applause) KKM: And I can't lie: it is really, really hard. It is hard to stand in the face of bigotry with an open heart and a smile on my face. It is really hard to face the injustice that exists in the world, while still believing in the ability of people to really change. That takes an enormous amount of faith and dedication. And beyond that, marriage is hard work. (Laughter) Piles of dirty socks on the floor, more boring sports shows than I ever thought possible — (Laughter) And fights that bring me to tears when it feels like we're not speaking the same language. But there is not a day that goes by where I am not so grateful to be married to this man; where I'm not so grateful for the possibility of changing minds, and rewarding conversations, and creating a world where love belongs to us all. I think about our acronym: LGBTQ2SIA. A seemingly endless evolution of self and a community, but also this really deep desire not to leave anyone behind. We've learned how to love each other, and we've committed to loving each other throughout changes to gender and changes in spirit. And we learned this love in our chat rooms, in our clubs, in our bars and in our community centers. We've learned how to love each other for the long haul. TM & KKM: Thank you. (Applause) |
Let's clean up the space junk orbiting Earth | {0: "Natalie Panek's work is focused on the idea that accountability for our environments never goes away."} | TEDxToronto | Our lives depend on a world we can't see. Think about your week so far. Have you watched TV, used GPS, checked the weather or even ate a meal? These many things that enable our daily lives rely either directly or indirectly on satellites. And while we often take for granted the services that satellites provide us, the satellites themselves deserve our attention as they are leaving a lasting mark on the space they occupy. People around the world rely on satellite infrastructure every day for information, entertainment and to communicate. There's agricultural and environmental monitoring, Internet connectivity, navigation. Satellites even play a role in the operation of our financial and energy markets. But these satellites that we rely on day in and day out have a finite life. They might run out of propellant, they could malfunction, or they may just naturally reach the end of their mission life. At this point, these satellites effectively become space junk, cluttering the orbital environment. So imagine you're driving down the highway on a beautiful, sunny day out running errands. You've got your music cranked, your windows rolled down, with the cool breeze blowing through your hair. Feels nice, right? Everything is going smoothly until suddenly your car stutters and stalls right in the middle of the highway. So now you have no choice but to abandon your car where it is on the highway. Maybe you were lucky enough to be able to move it out of the way and into a shoulder lane so that it's out of the way of other traffic. A couple of hours ago, your car was a useful machine that you relied on in your everyday life. Now, it's a useless hunk of metal taking up space in a valuable transportation network. And imagine international roadways all cluttered with broken down vehicles that are just getting in the way of other traffic. And imagine the debris that would be strewn everywhere if a collision actually happened, thousands of smaller pieces of debris becoming new obstacles. This is the paradigm of the satellite industry. Satellites that are no longer working are often left to deorbit over many, many years, or only moved out of the way as a temporary solution. And there are no international laws in space to enforce us to clean up after ourselves. So the world's first satellite, Sputnik I, was launched in 1957, and in that year, there were only a total of three launch attempts. Decades later and dozens of countries from all around the world have launched thousands of more satellites into orbit, and the frequency of launches is only going to increase in the future, especially if you consider things like the possibility of 900-plus satellite constellations being launched. Now, we send satellites to different orbits depending on what they're needed for. One of the most common places we send satellites is the low Earth orbit, possibly to image the surface of Earth at up to about 2,000 kilometers altitude. Satellites there are naturally buffeted by Earth's atmosphere, so their orbits naturally decay, and they'll eventually burn up, probably within a couple of decades. Another common place we send satellites is the geostationary orbit at about 35,000 kilometers altitude. Satellites there remain in the same place above Earth as the Earth rotates, which enables things like communications or television broadcast, for example. Satellites in high orbits like these could remain there for centuries. And then there's the orbit coined "the graveyard," the ominous junk or disposal orbits, where some satellites are intentionally placed at the end of their life so that they're out of the way of common operational orbits. Of the nearly 7,000 satellites launched since the late 1950s, only about one in seven is currently operational, and in addition to the satellites that are no longer working, there's also hundreds of thousands of marble-sized debris and millions of paint chip-sized debris that are also orbiting around the Earth. Space debris is a major risk to space missions, but also to the satellites that we rely on each and every day. Now, because space debris and junk has become increasingly worrisome, there have been some national and international efforts to develop technical standards to help us limit the generation of additional debris. So for example, there are recommendations for those low-Earth orbiting spacecraft to be made to deorbit in under 25 years, but that's still a really long time, especially if a satellite hasn't been working for years. There's also mandates for those dead geostationary spacecraft to be moved into a graveyard orbit. But neither of these guidelines is binding under international law, and the understanding is that they will be implemented through national mechanisms. These guidelines are also not long-term, they're not proactive, nor do they address the debris that's already up there. They're only in place to limit the future creation of debris. Space junk is no one's responsibility. Now, Mount Everest is actually an interesting comparison of a new approach to how we interact with our environments, as it's often given the dubious honor of being the world's highest garbage dump. Decades after the first conquest of the world's highest peak, tons of rubbish left behind by climbers has started to raise concern, and you may have read in the news that there's speculation that Nepal will crack down on mountaineers with stricter enforcement of penalties and legal obligations. The goal, of course, is to persuade climbers to clean up after themselves, so maybe local not-for-profits will pay climbers who bring down extra waste, or expeditions might organize voluntary cleanup trips. And yet still many climbers feel that independent groups should police themselves. There's no simple or easy answer, and even well-intentioned efforts at conservation often run into problems. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything in our power to protect the environments that we rely and depend on, and like Everest, the remote location and inadequate infrastructure of the orbital environment make waste disposal a challenging problem. But we simply cannot reach new heights and create an even higher garbage dump, one that's out of this world. The reality of space is that if a component on a satellite breaks down, there really are limited opportunities for repairs, and only at great cost. But what if we were smarter about how we designed satellites? What if all satellites, regardless of what country they were built in, had to be standardized in some way for recycling, servicing or active deorbiting? What if there actually were international laws with teeth that enforced end-of-life disposal of satellites instead of moving them out of the way as a temporary solution? Or maybe satellite manufacturers need to be charged a deposit to even launch a satellite into orbit, and that deposit would only be returned if the satellite was disposed of properly or if they cleaned up some quota of debris. Or maybe a satellite needs to have technology on board to help accelerate deorbit. There are some encouraging signs. The UK's TechDemoSat-1, launched in 2014, for example, was designed for end-of-life disposal via a small drag sail. This works for the satellite because it's small, but satellites that are higher or in larger orbits or are larger altogether, like the size of school buses, will require other disposal options. So maybe you get into things like high-powered lasers or tugging using nets or tethers, as crazy as those sound in the short term. And then one really cool possibility is the idea of orbital tow trucks or space mechanics. Imagine if a robotic arm on some sort of space tow truck could fix the broken components on a satellite, making them usable again. Or what if that very same robotic arm could refuel the propellant tank on a spacecraft that relies on chemical propulsion just like you or I would refuel the fuel tanks on our cars? Robotic repair and maintenance could extend the lives of hundreds of satellites orbiting around the Earth. Whatever the disposal or cleanup options we come up with, it's clearly not just a technical problem. There's also complex space laws and politics that we have to sort out. Simply put, we haven't found a way to use space sustainably yet. Exploring, innovating to change the way we live and work are what we as humans do, and in space exploration, we're literally moving beyond the boundaries of Earth. But as we push thresholds in the name of learning and innovation, we must remember that accountability for our environments never goes away. There is without doubt congestion in the low Earth and geostationary orbits, and we cannot keep launching new satellites to replace the ones that have broken down without doing something about them first, just like we would never leave a broken down car in the middle of the highway. Next time you use your phone, check the weather or use your GPS, think about the satellite technologies that make those activities possible. But also think about the very impact that the satellites have on the environment surrounding Earth, and help spread the message that together we must reduce our impact. Earth orbit is breathtakingly beautiful and our gateway to exploration. It's up to us to keep it that way. Thank you. (Applause) |
What I learned from 100 days of rejection | {0: "Jia Jiang's journey through rejection revealed a world hidden in plain sight, where people are much kinder than we imagine."} | TEDxMtHood | When I was six years old, I received my gifts. My first grade teacher had this brilliant idea. She wanted us to experience receiving gifts but also learning the virtue of complimenting each other. So she had all of us come to the front of the classroom, and she bought all of us gifts and stacked them in the corner. And she said, "Why don't we just stand here and compliment each other? If you hear your name called, go and pick up your gift and sit down." What a wonderful idea, right? What could go wrong? (Laughter) Well, there were 40 of us to start with, and every time I heard someone's name called, I would give out the heartiest cheer. And then there were 20 people left, and 10 people left, and five left ... and three left. And I was one of them. And the compliments stopped. Well, at that moment, I was crying. And the teacher was freaking out. She was like, "Hey, would anyone say anything nice about these people?" (Laughter) "No one? OK, why don't you go get your gift and sit down. So behave next year — someone might say something nice about you." (Laughter) Well, as I'm describing this you, you probably know I remember this really well. (Laughter) But I don't know who felt worse that day. Was it me or the teacher? She must have realized that she turned a team-building event into a public roast for three six-year-olds. And without the humor. You know, when you see people get roasted on TV, it was funny. There was nothing funny about that day. So that was one version of me, and I would die to avoid being in that situation again — to get rejected in public again. That's one version. Then fast-forward eight years. Bill Gates came to my hometown — Beijing, China — to speak, and I saw his message. I fell in love with that guy. I thought, wow, I know what I want to do now. That night I wrote a letter to my family telling them: "By age 25, I will build the biggest company in the world, and that company will buy Microsoft." (Laughter) I totally embraced this idea of conquering the world — domination, right? And I didn't make this up, I did write that letter. And here it is — (Laughter) You don't have to read this through — (Laughter) This is also bad handwriting, but I did highlight some key words. You get the idea. (Laughter) So ... that was another version of me: one who will conquer the world. Well, then two years later, I was presented with the opportunity to come to the United States. I jumped on it, because that was where Bill Gates lived, right? (Laughter) I thought that was the start of my entrepreneur journey. Then, fast-forward another 14 years. I was 30. Nope, I didn't build that company. I didn't even start. I was actually a marketing manager for a Fortune 500 company. And I felt I was stuck; I was stagnant. Why is that? Where is that 14-year-old who wrote that letter? It's not because he didn't try. It's because every time I had a new idea, every time I wanted to try something new, even at work — I wanted to make a proposal, I wanted to speak up in front of people in a group — I felt there was this constant battle between the 14-year-old and the six-year-old. One wanted to conquer the world — make a difference — another was afraid of rejection. And every time that six-year-old won. And this fear even persisted after I started my own company. I mean, I started my own company when I was 30 — if you want to be Bill Gates, you've got to start sooner or later, right? When I was an entrepreneur, I was presented with an investment opportunity, and then I was turned down. And that rejection hurt me. It hurt me so bad that I wanted to quit right there. But then I thought, hey, would Bill Gates quit after a simple investment rejection? Would any successful entrepreneur quit like that? No way. And this is where it clicked for me. OK, I can build a better company. I can build a better team or better product, but one thing for sure: I've got to be a better leader. I've got to be a better person. I cannot let that six-year-old keep dictating my life anymore. I have to put him back in his place. So this is where I went online and looked for help. Google was my friend. (Laughter) I searched, "How do I overcome the fear of rejection?" I came up with a bunch of psychology articles about where the fear and pain are coming from. Then I came up with a bunch of "rah-rah" inspirational articles about "Don't take it personally, just overcome it." Who doesn't know that? (Laughter) But why was I still so scared? Then I found this website by luck. It's called rejectiontherapy.com. (Laughter) "Rejection Therapy" was this game invented by this Canadian entrepreneur. His name is Jason Comely. And basically the idea is for 30 days you go out and look for rejection, and every day get rejected at something, and then by the end, you desensitize yourself from the pain. And I loved that idea. (Laughter) I said, "You know what? I'm going to do this. And I'll feel myself getting rejected 100 days." And I came up with my own rejection ideas, and I made a video blog out of it. And so here's what I did. This is what the blog looked like. Day One ... (Laughter) Borrow 100 dollars from a stranger. So this is where I went to where I was working. I came downstairs and I saw this big guy sitting behind a desk. He looked like a security guard. So I just approached him. And I was just walking and that was the longest walk of my life — hair on the back of my neck standing up, I was sweating and my heart was pounding. And I got there and said, "Hey, sir, can I borrow 100 dollars from you?" (Laughter) And he looked up, he's like, "No." "Why?" And I just said, "No? I'm sorry." Then I turned around, and I just ran. (Laughter) I felt so embarrassed. But because I filmed myself — so that night I was watching myself getting rejected, I just saw how scared I was. I looked like this kid in "The Sixth Sense." I saw dead people. (Laughter) But then I saw this guy. You know, he wasn't that menacing. He was a chubby, loveable guy, and he even asked me, "Why?" In fact, he invited me to explain myself. And I could've said many things. I could've explained, I could've negotiated. I didn't do any of that. All I did was run. I felt, wow, this is like a microcosm of my life. Every time I felt the slightest rejection, I would just run as fast as I could. And you know what? The next day, no matter what happens, I'm not going to run. I'll stay engaged. Day Two: Request a "burger refill." (Laughter) It's when I went to a burger joint, I finished lunch, and I went to the cashier and said, "Hi, can I get a burger refill?" (Laughter) He was all confused, like, "What's a burger refill?" (Laughter) I said, "Well, it's just like a drink refill but with a burger." And he said, "Sorry, we don't do burger refill, man." (Laughter) So this is where rejection happened and I could have run, but I stayed. I said, "Well, I love your burgers, I love your joint, and if you guys do a burger refill, I will love you guys more." (Laughter) And he said, "Well, OK, I'll tell my manager about it, and maybe we'll do it, but sorry, we can't do this today." Then I left. And by the way, I don't think they've ever done burger refill. (Laughter) I think they're still there. But the life and death feeling I was feeling the first time was no longer there, just because I stayed engaged — because I didn't run. I said, "Wow, great, I'm already learning things. Great." And then Day Three: Getting Olympic Doughnuts. This is where my life was turned upside down. I went to a Krispy Kreme. It's a doughnut shop in mainly the Southeastern part of the United States. I'm sure they have some here, too. And I went in, I said, "Can you make me doughnuts that look like Olympic symbols? Basically, you interlink five doughnuts together ... " I mean there's no way they could say yes, right? The doughnut maker took me so seriously. (Laughter) So she put out paper, started jotting down the colors and the rings, and is like, "How can I make this?" And then 15 minutes later, she came out with a box that looked like Olympic rings. And I was so touched. I just couldn't believe it. And that video got over five million views on Youtube. The world couldn't believe that either. (Laughter) You know, because of that I was in newspapers, in talk shows, in everything. And I became famous. A lot of people started writing emails to me and saying, "What you're doing is awesome." But you know, fame and notoriety did not do anything to me. What I really wanted to do was learn, and to change myself. So I turned the rest of my 100 days of rejection into this playground — into this research project. I wanted to see what I could learn. And then I learned a lot of things. I discovered so many secrets. For example, I found if I just don't run, if I got rejected, I could actually turn a "no" into a "yes," and the magic word is, "why." So one day I went to a stranger's house, I had this flower in my hand, knocked on the door and said, "Hey, can I plant this flower in your backyard?" (Laughter) And he said, "No." But before he could leave I said, "Hey, can I know why?" And he said, "Well, I have this dog that would dig up anything I put in the backyard. I don't want to waste your flower. If you want to do this, go across the street and talk to Connie. She loves flowers." So that's what I did. I went across and knocked on Connie's door. And she was so happy to see me. (Laughter) And then half an hour later, there was this flower in Connie's backyard. I'm sure it looks better now. (Laughter) But had I left after the initial rejection, I would've thought, well, it's because the guy didn't trust me, it's because I was crazy, because I didn't dress up well, I didn't look good. It was none of those. It was because what I offered did not fit what he wanted. And he trusted me enough to offer me a referral, using a sales term. I converted a referral. Then one day — and I also learned that I can actually say certain things and maximize my chance to get a yes. So for example, one day I went to a Starbucks, and asked the manager, "Hey, can I be a Starbucks greeter?" He was like, "What's a Starbucks greeter?" I said, "Do you know those Walmart greeters? You know, those people who say 'hi' to you before you walk in the store, and make sure you don't steal stuff, basically? I want to give a Walmart experience to Starbucks customers." (Laughter) Well, I'm not sure that's a good thing, actually — Actually, I'm pretty sure it's a bad thing. And he was like, "Oh" — yeah, this is how he looked, his name is Eric — and he was like, "I'm not sure." This is how he was hearing me. "Not sure." Then I ask him, "Is that weird?" He's like, "Yeah, it's really weird, man." But as soon as he said that, his whole demeanor changed. It's as if he's putting all the doubt on the floor. And he said, "Yeah, you can do this, just don't get too weird." (Laughter) So for the next hour I was the Starbucks greeter. I said "hi" to every customer that walked in, and gave them holiday cheers. By the way, I don't know what your career trajectory is, don't be a greeter. (Laughter) It was really boring. But then I found I could do this because I mentioned, "Is that weird?" I mentioned the doubt that he was having. And because I mentioned, "Is that weird?", that means I wasn't weird. That means I was actually thinking just like him, seeing this as a weird thing. And again, and again, I learned that if I mention some doubt people might have before I ask the question, I gained their trust. People were more likely to say yes to me. And then I learned I could fulfill my life dream ... by asking. You know, I came from four generations of teachers, and my grandma has always told me, "Hey Jia, you can do anything you want, but it'd be great if you became a teacher." (Laughter) But I wanted to be an entrepreneur, so I didn't. But it has always been my dream to actually teach something. So I said, "What if I just ask and teach a college class?" I lived in Austin at the time, so I went to University of Texas at Austin and knocked on professors' doors and said, "Can I teach your class?" I didn't get anywhere the first couple of times. But because I didn't run — I kept doing it — and on the third try the professor was very impressed. He was like, "No one has done this before." And I came in prepared with powerpoints and my lesson. He said, "Wow, I can use this. Why don't you come back in two months? I'll fit you in my curriculum." And two months later I was teaching a class. This is me — you probably can't see, this is a bad picture. You know, sometimes you get rejected by lighting, you know? (Laughter) But wow — when I finished teaching that class, I walked out crying, because I thought I could fulfill my life dream just by simply asking. I used to think I have to accomplish all these things — have to be a great entrepreneur, or get a PhD to teach — but no, I just asked, and I could teach. And in that picture, which you can't see, I quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. Why? Because in my research I found that people who really change the world, who change the way we live and the way we think, are the people who were met with initial and often violent rejections. People like Martin Luther King, Jr., like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, or even Jesus Christ. These people did not let rejection define them. They let their own reaction after rejection define themselves. And they embraced rejection. And we don't have to be those people to learn about rejection, and in my case, rejection was my curse, was my boogeyman. It has bothered me my whole life because I was running away from it. Then I started embracing it. I turned that into the biggest gift in my life. I started teaching people how to turn rejections into opportunities. I use my blog, I use my talk, I use the book I just published, and I'm even building technology to help people overcome their fear of rejection. When you get rejected in life, when you are facing the next obstacle or next failure, consider the possibilities. Don't run. If you just embrace them, they might become your gifts as well. Thank you. (Applause) |
Say your truths and seek them in others | {0: "Elizabeth Lesser helps her readers and students transform their lives after brushes with pain, adversity and life's myriad problems."} | TEDWomen 2016 | Like many of us, I've had several careers in my life, and although they've been varied, my first job set the foundation for all of them. I was a home-birth midwife throughout my 20s. Delivering babies taught me valuable and sometimes surprising things, like how to start a car at 2am. when it's 10 degrees below zero. (Laughter) Or how to revive a father who's fainted at the sight of blood. (Laughter) Or how to cut the umbilical cord just so, to make a beautiful belly button. But those aren't the things that stuck with me or guided me when I stopped being a midwife and started other jobs. What stuck with me was this bedrock belief that each one of us comes into this world with a unique worth. When I looked into the face of a newborn, I caught a glimpse of that worthiness, that sense of unapologetic selfhood, that unique spark. I use the word "soul" to describe that spark, because it's the only word in English that comes close to naming what each baby brought into the room. Every newborn was as singular as a snowflake, a matchless mash-up of biology and ancestry and mystery. And then that baby grows up, and in order to fit into the family, to conform to the culture, to the community, to the gender, that little one begins to cover its soul, layer by layer. We're born this way, but — (Laughter) But as we grow, a lot of things happen to us that make us ... want to hide our soulful eccentricities and authenticity. We've all done this. Everyone in this room is a former baby — (Laughter) with a distinctive birthright. But as adults, we spend so much of our time uncomfortable in our own skin, like we have ADD: authenticity deficit disorder. But not those babies — not yet. Their message to me was: uncover your soul and look for that soul-spark in everyone else. It's still there. And here's what I learned from laboring women. Their message was about staying open, even when things are painful. A woman's cervix normally looks like this. It's a tight little muscle at the base of the uterus. And during labor, it has to stretch from this to this. Ouch! If you fight against that pain, you just create more pain, and you block what wants to be born. I'll never forget the magic that would happen when a woman stopped resisting the pain and opened. It was as if the forces of the universe took notice and sent in a wave of help. I never forgot that message, and now, when difficult or painful things happen to me in my life or my work, of course at first I resist them, but then I remember what I learned from the mothers: stay open. Stay curious. Ask the pain what it's come to deliver. Something new wants to be born. And there was one more big soulful lesson, and that one I learned from Albert Einstein. He wasn't at any of the births, but — (Laughter) It was a lesson about time. At the end of his life, Albert Einstein concluded that our normal, hamster-wheel experience of life is an illusion. We run round and round, faster and faster, trying to get somewhere. And all the while, underneath surface time is this whole other dimension where the past and the present and the future merge and become deep time. And there's nowhere to get to. Albert Einstein called this state, this dimension, "only being." And he said when he experienced it, he knew sacred awe. When I was delivering babies, I was forced off the hamster wheel. Sometimes I had to sit for days, hours and hours, just breathing with the parents; just being. And I got a big dose of sacred awe. So those are the three lessons I took with me from midwifery. One: uncover your soul. Two: when things get difficult or painful, try to stay open. And three: every now and then, step off your hamster wheel into deep time. Those lessons have served me throughout my life, but they really served me recently, when I took on the most important job of my life thus far. Two years ago, my younger sister came out of remission from a rare blood cancer, and the only treatment left for her was a bone marrow transplant. And against the odds, we found a match for her, who turned out to be me. I come from a family of four girls, and when my sisters found out that I was my sister's perfect genetic match, their reaction was, "Really? You?" (Laughter) "A perfect match for her?" Which is pretty typical for siblings. In a sibling society, there's lots of things. There's love and there's friendship and there's protection. But there's also jealousy and competition and rejection and attack. In siblinghood, that's where we start assembling many of those first layers that cover our soul. When I discovered I was my sister's match, I went into research mode. And I discovered that the premise of transplants is pretty straightforward. You destroy all the bone marrow in the cancer patient with massive doses of chemotherapy, and then you replace that marrow with several million healthy marrow cells from a donor. And then you do everything you can to make sure that those new cells engraft in the patient. I also learned that bone marrow transplants are fraught with danger. If my sister made it through the near-lethal chemotherapy, she still would face other challenges. My cells might attack her body. And her body might reject my cells. They call this rejection or attack, and both could kill her. Rejection. Attack. Those words had a familiar ring in the context of being siblings. My sister and I had a long history of love, but we also had a long history of rejection and attack, from minor misunderstandings to bigger betrayals. We didn't have the kind of the relationship where we talked about the deeper stuff; but, like many siblings and like people in all kinds of relationships, we were hesitant to tell our truths, to reveal our wounds, to admit our wrongdoings. But when I learned about the dangers of rejection or attack, I thought, it's time to change this. What if we left the bone marrow transplant up to the doctors, but did something that we later came to call our "soul marrow transplant?" What if we faced any pain we had caused each other, and instead of rejection or attack, could we listen? Could we forgive? Could we merge? Would that teach our cells to do the same? To woo my skeptical sister, I turned to my parents' holy text: the New Yorker Magazine. (Laughter) I sent her a cartoon from its pages as a way of explaining why we should visit a therapist before having my bone marrow harvested and transplanted into her body. Here it is. "I have never forgiven him for that thing I made up in my head." (Laughter) I told my sister we had probably been doing the same thing, carting around made-up stories in our heads that kept us separate. And I told her that after the transplant, all of the blood flowing in her veins would be my blood, made from my marrow cells, and that inside the nucleus of each of those cells is a complete set of my DNA. "I will be swimming around in you for the rest of your life," I told my slightly horrified sister. (Laughter) "I think we better clean up our relationship." A health crisis makes people do all sorts of risky things, like quitting a job or jumping out of an airplane and, in the case of my sister, saying "yes" to several therapy sessions, during which we got down to the marrow. We looked at and released years of stories and assumptions about each other and blame and shame until all that was left was love. People have said I was brave to undergo the bone marrow harvest, but I don't think so. What felt brave to me was that other kind of harvest and transplant, the soul marrow transplant, getting emotionally naked with another human being, putting aside pride and defensiveness, lifting the layers and sharing with each other our vulnerable souls. I called on those midwife lessons: uncover your soul. Open to what's scary and painful. Look for the sacred awe. Here I am with my marrow cells after the harvest. That's they call it — "harvest," like it's some kind of bucolic farm-to-table event — (Laughter) Which I can assure you it is not. And here is my brave, brave sister receiving my cells. After the transplant, we began to spend more and more time together. It was as if we were little girls again. The past and the present merged. We entered deep time. I left the hamster wheel of work and life to join my sister on that lonely island of illness and healing. We spent months together — in the isolation unit, in the hospital and in her home. Our fast-paced society does not support or even value this kind of work. We see it as a disruption of real life and important work. We worry about the emotional drain and the financial cost — and, yes, there is a financial cost. But I was paid in the kind of currency our culture seems to have forgotten all about. I was paid in love. I was paid in soul. I was paid in my sister. My sister said the year after transplant was the best year of her life, which was surprising. She suffered so much. But she said life never tasted as sweet, and that because of the soul-baring and the truth-telling we had done with each other, she became more unapologetically herself with everyone. She said things she'd always needed to say. She did things she always wanted to do. The same happened for me. I became braver about being authentic with the people in my life. I said my truths, but more important than that, I sought the truth of others. It wasn't until the final chapter of this story that I realized just how well midwifery had trained me. After that best year of my sister's life, the cancer came roaring back, and this time there was nothing more the doctors could do. They gave her just a couple of months to live. The night before my sister died, I sat by her bedside. She was so small and thin. I could see the blood pulsing in her neck. It was my blood, her blood, our blood. When she died, part of me would die, too. I tried to make sense of it all, how becoming one with each other had made us more ourselves, our soul selves, and how by facing and opening to the pain of our past, we'd finally been delivered to each other, and how by stepping out of time, we would now be connected forever. My sister left me with so many things, and I'm going to leave you now with just one of them. You don't have to wait for a life-or-death situation to clean up the relationships that matter to you, to offer the marrow of your soul and to seek it in another. We can all do this. We can be like a new kind of first responder, like the one to take the first courageous step toward the other, and to do something or try to do something other than rejection or attack. We can do this with our siblings and our mates and our friends and our colleagues. We can do this with the disconnection and the discord all around us. We can do this for the soul of the world. Thank you. (Applause) |
Do kids think of sperm donors as family? | {0: 'Veerle Provoost studies genetic and social parenthood in the context of donor conception.'} | TEDxGhent | What is a parent? What is a parent? It's not an easy question. Today we have adoption, stepfamilies, surrogate mothers. Many parents face tough questions and tough decisions. Shall we tell our child about the sperm donation? If so, when? What words to use? Sperm donors are often referred to as "biological fathers," but should we really be using the word "father?" As a philosopher and social scientist, I have been studying these questions about the concept of parenthood. But today, I will talk to you about what I learned from talking to parents and children. I will show you that they know what matters most in a family, even though their family looks a little different. I will show you their creative ways of dealing with tough questions. But I will also show you the parents' uncertainties. We interviewed couples who received fertility treatment at Ghent University Hospital, using sperm from a donor. In this treatment timeline, you can see two points at which we conducted interviews. We included heterosexual couples, where the man for some reason did not have good-quality sperm, and lesbian couples who obviously needed to find sperm elsewhere. We also included children. I wanted to know how those children define concepts like parenthood and family. In fact, that is what I asked them, only not in that way. I drew an apple tree instead. This way, I could ask abstract, philosophical questions in a way that did not make them run off. So as you can see, the apple tree is empty. And that illustrates my research approach. By designing techniques like this, I can bring as little meaning and content as possible to the interview, because I want to hear that from them. I asked them: What would your family look like if it were an apple tree? And they could take a paper apple for everyone who, in their view, was a member of the family, write a name on it and hang it wherever they wanted. And I would ask questions. Most children started with a parent or a sibling. One started with "Boxer," the dead dog of his grandparents. At this point, none of the children started mentioning the donor. So, I asked them about their birth story. I said, "Before you were born, it was just your mom and dad, or mom and mommy. Can you tell me how you came into the family?" And they explained. One said, "My parents did not have good seeds, but there are friendly men out there who have spare seeds. They bring them to the hospital, and they put them in a big jar. My mommy went there, and she took two from the jar, one for me and one for my sister. She put the seeds in her belly — somehow — and her belly grew really big, and there I was." Hmm. So only when they started mentioning the donor, I asked questions about him, using their own words. I said, "If this would be an apple for the friendly man with the seeds, what would you do with it?" And one boy was thinking out loud, holding the apple. And he said, "I won't put this one up there with the others. He's not part of my family. But I will not put him on the ground. That's too cold and too hard. I think he should be in the trunk, because he made my family possible. If he would not have done this, that would really be sad because my family would not be here, and I would not be here." So also, parents constructed family tales — tales to tell their children. One couple explained their insemination by taking their children to a farm to watch a vet inseminate cows. And why not? It's their way of explaining; their do-it-yourself with family narratives. DIY. And we had another couple who made books — a book for each child. They were really works of art containing their thoughts and feelings throughout the treatment. They even had the hospital parking tickets in there. So it is DIY: finding ways, words and images to tell your family story to your child. And these stories were highly diverse, but they all had one thing in common: it was a tale of longing for a child and a quest for that child. It was about how special and how deeply loved their child was. And research so far shows that these children are doing fine. They do not have more problems than other kids. Yet, these parents also wanted to justify their decisions through the tales they tell. They hoped that their children would understand their reasons for making the family in this way. Underlying was a fear that their children might disapprove and would reject the non-genetic parent. And that fear is understandable, because we live in a very heteronormative and geneticized society — a world that still believes that true families consist of one mom, one dad and their genetically related children. Well. I want to tell you about a teenage boy. He was donor-conceived but not part of our study. One day, he had an argument with his father, and he yelled, "You're telling me what to do? You're not even my father!" That was exactly what the parents in our study feared. Now, the boy soon felt sorry, and they made up. But it is the reaction of his father that is most interesting. He said, "This outburst had nothing to do with the lack of a genetic link. It was about puberty — being difficult. It's what they do at that age. It will pass." What this man shows us is that when something goes wrong, we should not immediately think it is because the family is a little different. These things happen in all families. And every now and then, all parents may wonder: Am I a good enough parent? These parents, too. They, above all, wanted to do what's best for their child. But they also sometimes wondered: Am I a real parent? And their uncertainties were present long before they even were parents. At the start of treatment, when they first saw the counselor, they paid close attention to the counselor, because they wanted to do it right. Even 10 years later, they still remember the advice they were given. So when they thought about the counselor and the advice they were given, we discussed that. And we saw one lesbian couple who said, "When our son asks us, 'Do I have a dad?' we will say 'No, you do not have a dad.' But we will say nothing more, not unless he asks, because he might not be ready for that. The counselor said so." Well. I don't know; that's quite different from how we respond to children's questions. Like, "Milk — is that made in a factory?" We will say, "No, it comes from cows," and we will talk about the farmer, and the way the milk ends up in the shop. We will not say, "No, milk is not made in a factory." So something strange happened here, and of course these children noticed that. One boy said, "I asked my parents loads of questions, but they acted really weird. So, you know, I have a friend at school, and she's made in the same way. When I have a question, I just go and ask her." Clever guy. Problem solved. But his parents did not notice, and it certainly was not what they had in mind, nor what the counselor had in mind when they were saying how important it is to be an open-communication family. And that's the strange thing about advice. When we offer people pills, we gather evidence first. We do tests, we do follow-up studies. We want to know, and rightly so, what this pill is doing and how it affects people's lives. And advice? It is not enough for advice, or for professionals to give advice that is theoretically sound, or well-meant. It should be advice that there is evidence for — evidence that it actually improves patients' lives. So the philosopher in me would now like to offer you a paradox: I advise you to stop following advice. But, yes. (Applause) I will not end here with what went wrong; I would not be doing justice to the warmth we found in those families. Remember the books and the trip to the farmer? When parents do things that work for them, they do brilliant things. What I want you to remember as members of families, in no matter what form or shape, is that what families need are warm relationships. And we do not need to be professionals to create those. Most of us do just fine, although it may be hard work, and from time to time, we can do with some advice. In that case, bear in mind three things. Work with advice that works for your family. Remember — you're the expert, because you live your family life. And finally, believe in your abilities and your creativity, because you can do it yourself. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why curiosity is the key to science and medicine | {0: 'Kevin B. Jones is a life-long student of human nature, fascinated most by the decision-making capacity intrinsic to each of us.'} | TEDxSaltLakeCity | Science. The very word for many of you conjures unhappy memories of boredom in high school biology or physics class. But let me assure that what you did there had very little to do with science. That was really the "what" of science. It was the history of what other people had discovered. What I'm most interested in as a scientist is the "how" of science. Because science is knowledge in process. We make an observation, guess an explanation for that observation, and then make a prediction that we can test with an experiment or other observation. A couple of examples. First of all, people noticed that the Earth was below, the sky above, and both the Sun and the Moon seemed to go around them. Their guessed explanation was that the Earth must be the center of the universe. The prediction: everything should circle around the Earth. This was first really tested when Galileo got his hands on one of the first telescopes, and as he gazed into the night sky, what he found there was a planet, Jupiter, with four moons circling around it. He then used those moons to follow the path of Jupiter and found that Jupiter also was not going around the Earth but around the Sun. So the prediction test failed. And this led to the discarding of the theory that the Earth was the center of the universe. Another example: Sir Isaac Newton noticed that things fall to the Earth. The guessed explanation was gravity, the prediction that everything should fall to the Earth. But of course, not everything does fall to the Earth. So did we discard gravity? No. We revised the theory and said, gravity pulls things to the Earth unless there is an equal and opposite force in the other direction. This led us to learn something new. We began to pay more attention to the bird and the bird's wings, and just think of all the discoveries that have flown from that line of thinking. So the test failures, the exceptions, the outliers teach us what we don't know and lead us to something new. This is how science moves forward. This is how science learns. Sometimes in the media, and even more rarely, but sometimes even scientists will say that something or other has been scientifically proven. But I hope that you understand that science never proves anything definitively forever. Hopefully science remains curious enough to look for and humble enough to recognize when we have found the next outlier, the next exception, which, like Jupiter's moons, teaches us what we don't actually know. We're going to change gears here for a second. The caduceus, or the symbol of medicine, means a lot of different things to different people, but most of our public discourse on medicine really turns it into an engineering problem. We have the hallways of Congress, and the boardrooms of insurance companies that try to figure out how to pay for it. The ethicists and epidemiologists try to figure out how best to distribute medicine, and the hospitals and physicians are absolutely obsessed with their protocols and checklists, trying to figure out how best to safely apply medicine. These are all good things. However, they also all assume at some level that the textbook of medicine is closed. We start to measure the quality of our health care by how quickly we can access it. It doesn't surprise me that in this climate, many of our institutions for the provision of health care start to look a heck of a lot like Jiffy Lube. (Laughter) The only problem is that when I graduated from medical school, I didn't get one of those little doohickeys that your mechanic has to plug into your car and find out exactly what's wrong with it, because the textbook of medicine is not closed. Medicine is science. Medicine is knowledge in process. We make an observation, we guess an explanation of that observation, and then we make a prediction that we can test. Now, the testing ground of most predictions in medicine is populations. And you may remember from those boring days in biology class that populations tend to distribute around a mean as a Gaussian or a normal curve. Therefore, in medicine, after we make a prediction from a guessed explanation, we test it in a population. That means that what we know in medicine, our knowledge and our know-how, comes from populations but extends only as far as the next outlier, the next exception, which, like Jupiter's moons, will teach us what we don't actually know. Now, I am a surgeon who looks after patients with sarcoma. Sarcoma is a very rare form of cancer. It's the cancer of flesh and bones. And I would tell you that every one of my patients is an outlier, is an exception. There is no surgery I have ever performed for a sarcoma patient that has ever been guided by a randomized controlled clinical trial, what we consider the best kind of population-based evidence in medicine. People talk about thinking outside the box, but we don't even have a box in sarcoma. What we do have as we take a bath in the uncertainty and unknowns and exceptions and outliers that surround us in sarcoma is easy access to what I think are those two most important values for any science: humility and curiosity. Because if I am humble and curious, when a patient asks me a question, and I don't know the answer, I'll ask a colleague who may have a similar albeit distinct patient with sarcoma. We'll even establish international collaborations. Those patients will start to talk to each other through chat rooms and support groups. It's through this kind of humbly curious communication that we begin to try and learn new things. As an example, this is a patient of mine who had a cancer near his knee. Because of humbly curious communication in international collaborations, we have learned that we can repurpose the ankle to serve as the knee when we have to remove the knee with the cancer. He can then wear a prosthetic and run and jump and play. This opportunity was available to him because of international collaborations. It was desirable to him because he had contacted other patients who had experienced it. And so exceptions and outliers in medicine teach us what we don't know, but also lead us to new thinking. Now, very importantly, all the new thinking that outliers and exceptions lead us to in medicine does not only apply to the outliers and exceptions. It is not that we only learn from sarcoma patients ways to manage sarcoma patients. Sometimes, the outliers and the exceptions teach us things that matter quite a lot to the general population. Like a tree standing outside a forest, the outliers and the exceptions draw our attention and lead us into a much greater sense of perhaps what a tree is. We often talk about losing the forests for the trees, but one also loses a tree within a forest. But the tree that stands out by itself makes those relationships that define a tree, the relationships between trunk and roots and branches, much more apparent. Even if that tree is crooked or even if that tree has very unusual relationships between trunk and roots and branches, it nonetheless draws our attention and allows us to make observations that we can then test in the general population. I told you that sarcomas are rare. They make up about one percent of all cancers. You also probably know that cancer is considered a genetic disease. By genetic disease we mean that cancer is caused by oncogenes that are turned on in cancer and tumor suppressor genes that are turned off to cause cancer. You might think that we learned about oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes from common cancers like breast cancer and prostate cancer and lung cancer, but you'd be wrong. We learned about oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes for the first time in that itty-bitty little one percent of cancers called sarcoma. In 1966, Peyton Rous got the Nobel Prize for realizing that chickens had a transmissible form of sarcoma. Thirty years later, Harold Varmus and Mike Bishop discovered what that transmissible element was. It was a virus carrying a gene, the src oncogene. Now, I will not tell you that src is the most important oncogene. I will not tell you that src is the most frequently turned on oncogene in all of cancer. But it was the first oncogene. The exception, the outlier drew our attention and led us to something that taught us very important things about the rest of biology. Now, TP53 is the most important tumor suppressor gene. It is the most frequently turned off tumor suppressor gene in almost every kind of cancer. But we didn't learn about it from common cancers. We learned about it when doctors Li and Fraumeni were looking at families, and they realized that these families had way too many sarcomas. I told you that sarcoma is rare. Remember that a one in a million diagnosis, if it happens twice in one family, is way too common in that family. The very fact that these are rare draws our attention and leads us to new kinds of thinking. Now, many of you may say, and may rightly say, that yeah, Kevin, that's great, but you're not talking about a bird's wing. You're not talking about moons floating around some planet Jupiter. This is a person. This outlier, this exception, may lead to the advancement of science, but this is a person. And all I can say is that I know that all too well. I have conversations with these patients with rare and deadly diseases. I write about these conversations. These conversations are terribly fraught. They're fraught with horrible phrases like "I have bad news" or "There's nothing more we can do." Sometimes these conversations turn on a single word: "terminal." Silence can also be rather uncomfortable. Where the blanks are in medicine can be just as important as the words that we use in these conversations. What are the unknowns? What are the experiments that are being done? Do this little exercise with me. Up there on the screen, you see this phrase, "no where." Notice where the blank is. If we move that blank one space over "no where" becomes "now here," the exact opposite meaning, just by shifting the blank one space over. I'll never forget the night that I walked into one of my patients' rooms. I had been operating long that day but I still wanted to come and see him. He was a boy I had diagnosed with a bone cancer a few days before. He and his mother had been meeting with the chemotherapy doctors earlier that day, and he had been admitted to the hospital to begin chemotherapy. It was almost midnight when I got to his room. He was asleep, but I found his mother reading by flashlight next to his bed. She came out in the hall to chat with me for a few minutes. It turned out that what she had been reading was the protocol that the chemotherapy doctors had given her that day. She had memorized it. She said, "Dr. Jones, you told me that we don't always win with this type of cancer, but I've been studying this protocol, and I think I can do it. I think I can comply with these very difficult treatments. I'm going to quit my job. I'm going to move in with my parents. I'm going to keep my baby safe." I didn't tell her. I didn't stop to correct her thinking. She was trusting in a protocol that even if complied with, wouldn't necessarily save her son. I didn't tell her. I didn't fill in that blank. But a year and a half later her boy nonetheless died of his cancer. Should I have told her? Now, many of you may say, "So what? I don't have sarcoma. No one in my family has sarcoma. And this is all fine and well, but it probably doesn't matter in my life." And you're probably right. Sarcoma may not matter a whole lot in your life. But where the blanks are in medicine does matter in your life. I didn't tell you one dirty little secret. I told you that in medicine, we test predictions in populations, but I didn't tell you, and so often medicine never tells you that every time an individual encounters medicine, even if that individual is firmly embedded in the general population, neither the individual nor the physician knows where in that population the individual will land. Therefore, every encounter with medicine is an experiment. You will be a subject in an experiment. And the outcome will be either a better or a worse result for you. As long as medicine works well, we're fine with fast service, bravado, brimmingly confident conversations. But when things don't work well, sometimes we want something different. A colleague of mine removed a tumor from a patient's limb. He was concerned about this tumor. In our physician conferences, he talked about his concern that this was a type of tumor that had a high risk for coming back in the same limb. But his conversations with the patient were exactly what a patient might want: brimming with confidence. He said, "I got it all and you're good to go." She and her husband were thrilled. They went out, celebrated, fancy dinner, opened a bottle of champagne. The only problem was a few weeks later, she started to notice another nodule in the same area. It turned out he hadn't gotten it all, and she wasn't good to go. But what happened at this juncture absolutely fascinates me. My colleague came to me and said, "Kevin, would you mind looking after this patient for me?" I said, "Why, you know the right thing to do as well as I do. You haven't done anything wrong." He said, "Please, just look after this patient for me." He was embarrassed — not by what he had done, but by the conversation that he had had, by the overconfidence. So I performed a much more invasive surgery and had a very different conversation with the patient afterwards. I said, "Most likely I've gotten it all and you're most likely good to go, but this is the experiment that we're doing. This is what you're going to watch for. This is what I'm going to watch for. And we're going to work together to find out if this surgery will work to get rid of your cancer." I can guarantee you, she and her husband did not crack another bottle of champagne after talking to me. But she was now a scientist, not only a subject in her experiment. And so I encourage you to seek humility and curiosity in your physicians. Almost 20 billion times each year, a person walks into a doctor's office, and that person becomes a patient. You or someone you love will be that patient sometime very soon. How will you talk to your doctors? What will you tell them? What will they tell you? They cannot tell you what they do not know, but they can tell you when they don't know if only you'll ask. So please, join the conversation. Thank you. (Applause) |
How AI can bring on a second Industrial Revolution | {0: 'There may be no one better to contemplate the meaning of cultural change than Kevin Kelly, whose life story reads like a treatise on the value and impacts of technology.'} | TEDSummit | I'm going to talk a little bit about where technology's going. And often technology comes to us, we're surprised by what it brings. But there's actually a large aspect of technology that's much more predictable, and that's because technological systems of all sorts have leanings, they have urgencies, they have tendencies. And those tendencies are derived from the very nature of the physics, chemistry of wires and switches and electrons, and they will make reoccurring patterns again and again. And so those patterns produce these tendencies, these leanings. You can almost think of it as sort of like gravity. Imagine raindrops falling into a valley. The actual path of a raindrop as it goes down the valley is unpredictable. We cannot see where it's going, but the general direction is very inevitable: it's downward. And so these baked-in tendencies and urgencies in technological systems give us a sense of where things are going at the large form. So in a large sense, I would say that telephones were inevitable, but the iPhone was not. The Internet was inevitable, but Twitter was not. So we have many ongoing tendencies right now, and I think one of the chief among them is this tendency to make things smarter and smarter. I call it cognifying — cognification — also known as artificial intelligence, or AI. And I think that's going to be one of the most influential developments and trends and directions and drives in our society in the next 20 years. So, of course, it's already here. We already have AI, and often it works in the background, in the back offices of hospitals, where it's used to diagnose X-rays better than a human doctor. It's in legal offices, where it's used to go through legal evidence better than a human paralawyer. It's used to fly the plane that you came here with. Human pilots only flew it seven to eight minutes, the rest of the time the AI was driving. And of course, in Netflix and Amazon, it's in the background, making those recommendations. That's what we have today. And we have an example, of course, in a more front-facing aspect of it, with the win of the AlphaGo, who beat the world's greatest Go champion. But it's more than that. If you play a video game, you're playing against an AI. But recently, Google taught their AI to actually learn how to play video games. Again, teaching video games was already done, but learning how to play a video game is another step. That's artificial smartness. What we're doing is taking this artificial smartness and we're making it smarter and smarter. There are three aspects to this general trend that I think are underappreciated; I think we would understand AI a lot better if we understood these three things. I think these things also would help us embrace AI, because it's only by embracing it that we actually can steer it. We can actually steer the specifics by embracing the larger trend. So let me talk about those three different aspects. The first one is: our own intelligence has a very poor understanding of what intelligence is. We tend to think of intelligence as a single dimension, that it's kind of like a note that gets louder and louder. It starts like with IQ measurement. It starts with maybe a simple low IQ in a rat or mouse, and maybe there's more in a chimpanzee, and then maybe there's more in a stupid person, and then maybe an average person like myself, and then maybe a genius. And this single IQ intelligence is getting greater and greater. That's completely wrong. That's not what intelligence is — not what human intelligence is, anyway. It's much more like a symphony of different notes, and each of these notes is played on a different instrument of cognition. There are many types of intelligences in our own minds. We have deductive reasoning, we have emotional intelligence, we have spatial intelligence; we have maybe 100 different types that are all grouped together, and they vary in different strengths with different people. And of course, if we go to animals, they also have another basket — another symphony of different kinds of intelligences, and sometimes those same instruments are the same that we have. They can think in the same way, but they may have a different arrangement, and maybe they're higher in some cases than humans, like long-term memory in a squirrel is actually phenomenal, so it can remember where it buried its nuts. But in other cases they may be lower. When we go to make machines, we're going to engineer them in the same way, where we'll make some of those types of smartness much greater than ours, and many of them won't be anywhere near ours, because they're not needed. So we're going to take these things, these artificial clusters, and we'll be adding more varieties of artificial cognition to our AIs. We're going to make them very, very specific. So your calculator is smarter than you are in arithmetic already; your GPS is smarter than you are in spatial navigation; Google, Bing, are smarter than you are in long-term memory. And we're going to take, again, these kinds of different types of thinking and we'll put them into, like, a car. The reason why we want to put them in a car so the car drives, is because it's not driving like a human. It's not thinking like us. That's the whole feature of it. It's not being distracted, it's not worrying about whether it left the stove on, or whether it should have majored in finance. It's just driving. (Laughter) Just driving, OK? And we actually might even come to advertise these as "consciousness-free." They're without consciousness, they're not concerned about those things, they're not distracted. So in general, what we're trying to do is make as many different types of thinking as we can. We're going to populate the space of all the different possible types, or species, of thinking. And there actually may be some problems that are so difficult in business and science that our own type of human thinking may not be able to solve them alone. We may need a two-step program, which is to invent new kinds of thinking that we can work alongside of to solve these really large problems, say, like dark energy or quantum gravity. What we're doing is making alien intelligences. You might even think of this as, sort of, artificial aliens in some senses. And they're going to help us think different, because thinking different is the engine of creation and wealth and new economy. The second aspect of this is that we are going to use AI to basically make a second Industrial Revolution. The first Industrial Revolution was based on the fact that we invented something I would call artificial power. Previous to that, during the Agricultural Revolution, everything that was made had to be made with human muscle or animal power. That was the only way to get anything done. The great innovation during the Industrial Revolution was, we harnessed steam power, fossil fuels, to make this artificial power that we could use to do anything we wanted to do. So today when you drive down the highway, you are, with a flick of the switch, commanding 250 horses — 250 horsepower — which we can use to build skyscrapers, to build cities, to build roads, to make factories that would churn out lines of chairs or refrigerators way beyond our own power. And that artificial power can also be distributed on wires on a grid to every home, factory, farmstead, and anybody could buy that artificial power, just by plugging something in. So this was a source of innovation as well, because a farmer could take a manual hand pump, and they could add this artificial power, this electricity, and he'd have an electric pump. And you multiply that by thousands or tens of thousands of times, and that formula was what brought us the Industrial Revolution. All the things that we see, all this progress that we now enjoy, has come from the fact that we've done that. We're going to do the same thing now with AI. We're going to distribute that on a grid, and now you can take that electric pump. You can add some artificial intelligence, and now you have a smart pump. And that, multiplied by a million times, is going to be this second Industrial Revolution. So now the car is going down the highway, it's 250 horsepower, but in addition, it's 250 minds. That's the auto-driven car. It's like a new commodity; it's a new utility. The AI is going to flow across the grid — the cloud — in the same way electricity did. So everything that we had electrified, we're now going to cognify. And I would suggest, then, that the formula for the next 10,000 start-ups is very, very simple, which is to take x and add AI. That is the formula, that's what we're going to be doing. And that is the way in which we're going to make this second Industrial Revolution. And by the way — right now, this minute, you can log on to Google and you can purchase AI for six cents, 100 hits. That's available right now. So the third aspect of this is that when we take this AI and embody it, we get robots. And robots are going to be bots, they're going to be doing many of the tasks that we have already done. A job is just a bunch of tasks, so they're going to redefine our jobs because they're going to do some of those tasks. But they're also going to create whole new categories, a whole new slew of tasks that we didn't know we wanted to do before. They're going to actually engender new kinds of jobs, new kinds of tasks that we want done, just as automation made up a whole bunch of new things that we didn't know we needed before, and now we can't live without them. So they're going to produce even more jobs than they take away, but it's important that a lot of the tasks that we're going to give them are tasks that can be defined in terms of efficiency or productivity. If you can specify a task, either manual or conceptual, that can be specified in terms of efficiency or productivity, that goes to the bots. Productivity is for robots. What we're really good at is basically wasting time. (Laughter) We're really good at things that are inefficient. Science is inherently inefficient. It runs on that fact that you have one failure after another. It runs on the fact that you make tests and experiments that don't work, otherwise you're not learning. It runs on the fact that there is not a lot of efficiency in it. Innovation by definition is inefficient, because you make prototypes, because you try stuff that fails, that doesn't work. Exploration is inherently inefficiency. Art is not efficient. Human relationships are not efficient. These are all the kinds of things we're going to gravitate to, because they're not efficient. Efficiency is for robots. We're also going to learn that we're going to work with these AIs because they think differently than us. When Deep Blue beat the world's best chess champion, people thought it was the end of chess. But actually, it turns out that today, the best chess champion in the world is not an AI. And it's not a human. It's the team of a human and an AI. The best medical diagnostician is not a doctor, it's not an AI, it's the team. We're going to be working with these AIs, and I think you'll be paid in the future by how well you work with these bots. So that's the third thing, is that they're different, they're utility and they are going to be something we work with rather than against. We're working with these rather than against them. So, the future: Where does that take us? I think that 25 years from now, they'll look back and look at our understanding of AI and say, "You didn't have AI. In fact, you didn't even have the Internet yet, compared to what we're going to have 25 years from now." There are no AI experts right now. There's a lot of money going to it, there are billions of dollars being spent on it; it's a huge business, but there are no experts, compared to what we'll know 20 years from now. So we are just at the beginning of the beginning, we're in the first hour of all this. We're in the first hour of the Internet. We're in the first hour of what's coming. The most popular AI product in 20 years from now, that everybody uses, has not been invented yet. That means that you're not late. Thank you. (Laughter) (Applause) |
Could a drug prevent depression and PTSD? | {0: 'TED Fellow Dr. Rebecca Brachman is a pioneer in the field of preventative psychopharmacology, developing drugs to enhance stress resilience and prevent mental illness.'} | TEDxNewYork | This is a tuberculosis ward, and at the time this picture was taken in the late 1800s, one in seven of all people died from tuberculosis. We had no idea what was causing this disease. The hypothesis was actually it was your constitution that made you susceptible. And it was a highly romanticized disease. It was also called consumption, and it was the disorder of poets and artists and intellectuals. And some people actually thought it gave you heightened sensitivity and conferred creative genius. By the 1950s, we instead knew that tuberculosis was caused by a highly contagious bacterial infection, which is slightly less romantic, but that had the upside of us being able to maybe develop drugs to treat it. So doctors had discovered a new drug, iproniazid, that they were optimistic might cure tuberculosis, and they gave it to patients, and patients were elated. They were more social, more energetic. One medical report actually says they were "dancing in the halls." And unfortunately, this was not necessarily because they were getting better. A lot of them were still dying. Another medical report describes them as being "inappropriately happy." And that is how the first antidepressant was discovered. So accidental discovery is not uncommon in science, but it requires more than just a happy accident. You have to be able to recognize it for discovery to occur. As a neuroscientist, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my firsthand experience with whatever you want to call the opposite of dumb luck — let's call it smart luck. But first, a bit more background. Thankfully, since the 1950s, we've developed some other drugs and we can actually now cure tuberculosis. And at least in the United States, though not necessarily in other countries, we have closed our sanitoriums and probably most of you are not too worried about TB. But a lot of what was true in the early 1900s about infectious disease, we can say now about psychiatric disorders. We are in the middle of an epidemic of mood disorders like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. One in four of all adults in the United States suffers from mental illness, which means that if you haven't experienced it personally or someone in your family hasn't, it's still very likely that someone you know has, though they may not talk about it. Depression has actually now surpassed HIV/AIDS, malaria, diabetes and war as the leading cause of disability worldwide. And also, like tuberculosis in the 1950s, we don't know what causes it. Once it's developed, it's chronic, lasts a lifetime, and there are no known cures. The second antidepressant we discovered, also by accident, in the 1950s, from an antihistamine that was making people manic, imipramine. And in both the case of the tuberculosis ward and the antihistamine, someone had to be able to recognize that a drug that was designed to do one thing — treat tuberculosis or suppress allergies — could be used to do something very different — treat depression. And this sort of repurposing is actually quite challenging. When doctors first saw this mood-enhancing effect of iproniazid, they didn't really recognize what they saw. They were so used to thinking about it from the framework of being a tuberculosis drug that they actually just listed it as a side effect, an adverse side effect. As you can see here, a lot of these patients in 1954 are experiencing severe euphoria. And they were worried that this might somehow interfere with their recovering from tuberculosis. So they recommended that iproniazid only be used in cases of extreme TB and in patients that were highly emotionally stable, which is of course the exact opposite of how we use it as an antidepressant. They were so used to looking at it from the perspective of this one disease, they could not see the larger implications for another disease. And to be fair, it's not entirely their fault. Functional fixedness is a bias that affects all of us. It's a tendency to only be able to think of an object in terms of its traditional use or function. And mental set is another thing. Right? That's sort of this preconceived framework with which we approach problems. And that actually makes repurposing pretty hard for all of us, which is, I guess, why they gave a TV show to the guy who was, like, really great at repurposing. (Laughter) So the effects in both the case of iproniazid and imipramine, they were so strong — there was mania, or people dancing in the halls. It's actually not that surprising they were caught. But it does make you wonder what else we've missed. So iproniazid and imipramine, they're more than just a case study in repurposing. They have two other things in common that are really important. One, they have terrible side effects. That includes liver toxicity, weight gain of over 50 pounds, suicidality. And two, they both increase levels of serotonin, which is a chemical signal in the brain, or a neurotransmitter. And those two things together, right, one or the two, may not have been that important, but the two together meant that we had to develop safer drugs, and that serotonin seemed like a pretty good place to start. So we developed drugs to more specifically focus on serotonin, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, so the SSRIs, the most famous of which is Prozac. And that was 30 years ago, and since then we have mostly just worked on optimizing those drugs. And the SSRIs, they are better than the drugs that came before them, but they still have a lot of side effects, including weight gain, insomnia, suicidality — and they take a really long time to work, something like four to six weeks in a lot of patients. And that's in the patients where they do work. There are a lot of patients where these drugs don't work. And that means now, in 2016, we still have no cures for any mood disorders, just drugs that suppress symptoms, which is kind of the difference between taking a painkiller for an infection versus an antibiotic. A painkiller will make you feel better, but is not going to do anything to treat that underlying disease. And it was this flexibility in our thinking that let us recognize that iproniazid and imipramine could be repurposed in this way, which led us to the serotonin hypothesis, which we then, ironically, fixated on. This is brain signaling, serotonin, from an SSRI commercial. In case you're not clear, this is a dramatization. And in science, we try and remove our bias, right, by running double-blinded experiments or being statistically agnostic as to what our results will be. But bias creeps in more insidiously in what we choose to study and how we choose to study it. So we've focused on serotonin now for the past 30 years, often to the exclusion of other things. We still have no cures, and what if serotonin isn't all there is to depression? What if it's not even the key part of it? That means no matter how much time or money or effort we put into it, it will never lead to a cure. In the past few years, doctors have discovered probably what is the first truly new antidepressant since the SSRIs, Calypsol, and this drug works very quickly, within a few hours or a day, and it doesn't work on serotonin. It works on glutamate, which is another neurotransmitter. And it's also repurposed. It was traditionally used as anesthesia in surgery. But unlike those other drugs, which were recognized pretty quickly, it took us 20 years to realize that Calypsol was an antidepressant, despite the fact that it's actually a better antidepressant, probably, than those other drugs. It's actually probably because of the fact that it's a better antidepressant that it was harder for us to recognize. There was no mania to signal its effects. So in 2013, up at Columbia University, I was working with my colleague, Dr. Christine Ann Denny, and we were studying Calypsol as an antidepressant in mice. And Calypsol has, like, a really short half-life, which means it's out of your body within a few hours. And we were just piloting. So we would give an injection to mice, and then we'd wait a week, and then we'd run another experiment to save money. And one of the experiments I was running, we would stress the mice, and we used that as a model of depression. And at first it kind of just looked like it didn't really work at all. So we could have stopped there. But I have run this model of depression for years, and the data just looked kind of weird. It didn't really look right to me. So I went back, and we reanalyzed it based on whether or not they had gotten that one injection of Calypsol a week beforehand. And it looked kind of like this. So if you look at the far left, if you put a mouse in a new space, this is the box, it's very exciting, a mouse will walk around and explore, and you can see that pink line is actually the measure of them walking. And we also give it another mouse in a pencil cup that it can decide to interact with. This is also a dramatization, in case that's not clear. And a normal mouse will explore. It will be social. Check out what's going on. If you stress a mouse in this depression model, which is the middle box, they aren't social, they don't explore. They mostly just kind of hide in that back corner, behind a cup. Yet the mice that had gotten that one injection of Calypsol, here on your right, they were exploring, they were social. They looked like they had never been stressed at all, which is impossible. So we could have just stopped there, but Christine had also used Calypsol before as anesthesia, and a few years ago she had seen that it seemed to have some weird effects on cells and some other behavior that also seemed to last long after the drug, maybe a few weeks. So we were like, OK, maybe this is not completely impossible, but we were really skeptical. So we did what you do in science when you're not sure, and we ran it again. And I remember being in the animal room, moving mice from box to box to test them, and Christine was actually sitting on the floor with the computer in her lap so the mice couldn't see her, and she was analyzing the data in real time. And I remember us yelling, which you're not supposed to do in an animal room where you're testing, because it had worked. It seemed like these mice were protected against stress, or they were inappropriately happy, however you want to call it. And we were really excited. And then we were really skeptical, because it was too good to be true. So we ran it again. And then we ran it again in a PTSD model, and we ran it again in a physiological model, where all we did was give stress hormones. And we had our undergrads run it. And then we had our collaborators halfway across the world in France run it. And every time someone ran it, they confirmed the same thing. It seemed like this one injection of Calypsol was somehow protecting against stress for weeks. And we only published this a year ago, but since then other labs have independently confirmed this effect. So we don't know what causes depression, but we do know that stress is the initial trigger in 80 percent of cases, and depression and PTSD are different diseases, but this is something they share in common. Right? It is traumatic stress like active combat or natural disasters or community violence or sexual assault that causes post-traumatic stress disorder, and not everyone that is exposed to stress develops a mood disorder. And this ability to experience stress and be resilient and bounce back and not develop depression or PTSD is known as stress resilience, and it varies between people. And we have always thought of it as just sort of this passive property. It's the absence of susceptibility factors and risk factors for these disorders. But what if it were active? Maybe we could enhance it, sort of akin to putting on armor. We had accidentally discovered the first resilience-enhancing drug. And like I said, we only gave a tiny amount of the drug, and it lasted for weeks, and that's not like anything you see with antidepressants. But it is actually kind of similar to what you see in immune vaccines. So in immune vaccines, you'll get your shots, and then weeks, months, years later, when you're actually exposed to bacteria, it's not the vaccine in your body that protects you. It's your own immune system that's developed resistance and resilience to this bacteria that fights it off, and you actually never get the infection, which is very different from, say, our treatments. Right? In that case, you get the infection, you're exposed to the bacteria, you're sick, and then you take, say, an antibiotic which cures it, and those drugs are actually working to kill the bacteria. Or similar to as I said before, with this palliative, you'll take something that will suppress the symptoms, but it won't treat the underlying infection, and you'll only feel better during the time in which you're taking it, which is why you have to keep taking it. And in depression and PTSD — here we have your stress exposure — we only have palliative care. Antidepressants only suppress symptoms, and that is why you basically have to keep taking them for the life of the disease, which is often the length of your own life. So we're calling our resilience-enhancing drugs "paravaccines," which means vaccine-like, because it seems like they might have the potential to protect against stress and prevent mice from developing depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Also, not all antidepressants are also paravaccines. We tried Prozac as well, and that had no effect. So if this were to translate into humans, we might be able to protect people who are predictably at risk against stress-induced disorders like depression and PTSD. So that's first responders and firefighters, refugees, prisoners and prison guards, soldiers, you name it. And to give you a sense of the scale of these diseases, in 2010, the global burden of disease was estimated at 2.5 trillion dollars, and since they are chronic, that cost is compounding and is therefore expected to rise up to six trillion dollars in just the next 15 years. As I mentioned before, repurposing can be challenging because of our prior biases. Calypsol has another name, ketamine, which also goes by another name, Special K, which is a club drug and drug of abuse. It's still used across the world as an anesthetic. It's used in children. We use it on the battlefield. It's actually the drug of choice in a lot of developing nations, because it doesn't affect breathing. It is on the World Health Organization list of most essential medicines. If we had discovered ketamine as a paravaccine first, it'd be pretty easy for us to develop it, but as is, we have to compete with our functional fixedness and mental set that kind of interfere. Fortunately, it's not the only compound we have discovered that has these prophylactic, paravaccine qualities, but all of the other drugs we've discovered, or compounds if you will, they're totally new, they have to go through the entire FDA approval process — if they make it before they can ever be used in humans. And that will be years. So if we wanted something sooner, ketamine is already FDA-approved. It's generic, it's available. We could develop it for a fraction of the price and a fraction of the time. But actually, beyond functional fixedness and mental set, there's a real other challenge to repurposing drugs, which is policy. There are no incentives in place once a drug is generic and off patent and no longer exclusive to encourage pharma companies to develop them, because they don't make money. And that's not true for just ketamine. That is true for all drugs. Regardless, the idea itself is completely novel in psychiatry, to use drugs to prevent mental illness as opposed to just treat it. It is possible that 20, 50, 100 years from now, we will look back now at depression and PTSD the way we look back at tuberculosis sanitoriums as a thing of the past. This could be the beginning of the end of the mental health epidemic. But as a great scientist once said, "Only a fool is sure of anything. A wise man keeps on guessing." Thank you, guys. (Applause) |
How students of color confront impostor syndrome | {0: 'Dena Simmons believes that creating a safe environment for children is an essential component of education.'} | TED Talks Live | So, my journey began in the Bronx, New York, in a one-bedroom apartment, with my two sisters and immigrant mother. I loved our neighborhood. It was lively. There was all this merengue blasting, neighbors socializing on building stoops and animated conversations over domino playing. It was home, and it was sweet. But it wasn't simple. In fact, everyone at school knew the block where we lived, because it was where people came to buy weed and other drugs. And with drug-dealing comes conflict, so we often went to sleep to the sound of gunshots. I spent much of my childhood worried, worried about our safety. And so did our mother. She worried that the violence we witnessed would overtake our lives; that our poverty meant that the neighbors with whom we lived and shared space would harm us. Our entire life was in the Bronx, but my mother's anxiety spurred her into action, and soon we were driving so fast to Connecticut — (Laughter) to boarding school campuses, with full scholarships in tow. Man, don't underestimate the power of a mother determined to keep her children safe. (Cheers) (Applause) At boarding school, for the first time, I was able to sleep without worry. I could leave my dorm room unlocked, walk barefoot in the grass, and look up to see a night sky full of stars. Happy novelties. But there were other novelties as well. Very quickly, I felt like I didn't belong. I learned that I didn't speak the right way, and to demonstrate the proper ways of speaking, my teachers gave me frequent lessons, in public, on the appropriate way to enunciate certain words. A teacher once instructed me in the hallway: "Aaaaaas-king." She said this loudly. "Dena, it's not 'axing,' like you're running around with an axe. That's silly." Now at this point, you can imagine the snickers of my classmates, but she continued: "Think about breaking the word into 'ass' and 'king,' and then put the two together to say it correctly — 'Asking.'" There were some other moments that reminded me that I didn't belong. Once, I walked into a classmate's dorm room, and I watched her watch her valuables around me. Like, why would she do that? I thought to myself. And then there was the time when another classmate walked into my dorm room, and yelled, "Ew!" as I was applying hair grease to my scalp. There is emotional damage done when young people can't be themselves, when they are forced to edit who they are in order to be acceptable. It's a kind of violence. Ultimately, I'm a quintessential success story. I attended boarding school and college in New England, studied abroad in Chile and returned to the Bronx to be a middle school teacher. I received a Truman Scholarship, a Fulbright and a Soros Fellowship. And I could list more. (Laughter) But I won't. (Laughter) I earned my doctorate at Columbia University. (Cheers) (Applause) And then I landed a job at Yale. (Applause) I am proud of everything that I've been able to accomplish on my journey thus far. I have eternal imposter syndrome. Either I've been invited because I'm a token, which really isn't about me, but rather, about a box someone needed to check off. Or, I am exceptional, which means I've had to leave the people I love behind. It's the price that I and so many others pay for learning while black. (Applause) I police myself all the time. Are my pants too tight? Should I wear my hair up or in a fro? Should I speak up for myself, or will the power of my words be reduced to: "She's angry"? Why did I have to leave the Bronx to gain access to a better education? And why, in the process of getting that better education, did I have to endure the trauma of erasing what made me, me — a black girl from the Bronx, raised by an Antiguan mother? So when I think about our current education reform initiatives, I can't help asking: What are our students of color learning about themselves? Three — three decades of research reveal that students of color are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students, and are punished in harsher ways for the same infractions. They also learn this through the absence of their lives and narratives in the curricula. The Cooperative Children's Book Center did a review of nearly 4,000 books and found that only three percent were about African-Americans. And they further learn this through the lack of teachers that look like them. An analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics found that 45 percent of our nation's pre-K to high school students were people of color, while only 17 percent of our teachers are. Our youth of color pay a profound price when their schooling sends them the message that they must be controlled, that they must leave their identities at home in order to be successful. Every child deserves an education that guarantees the safety to learn in the comfort of one's own skin. (Applause) It is possible to create emotionally and physically safe classrooms where students also thrive academically. I know, because I did it in my classroom when I returned to teach in the Bronx. So what did that look like? I centered my instruction on the lives, histories and identities of my students. And I did all of this because I wanted my students to know that everyone around them was supporting them to be their best self. So while I could not control the instability of their homes, the uncertainty of their next meal, or the loud neighbors that kept them from sleep, I provided them with a loving classroom that made them feel proud of who they are, that made them know that they mattered. You know, every time I hear or say the word "asking," I am in high school again. I am thinking about "ass" and "king" and putting the two together so that I speak in a way where someone in power will want to listen. There is a better way, one that doesn't force kids of color into a double bind; a way for them to preserve their ties to their families, homes and communities; a way that teaches them to trust their instincts and to have faith in their own creative genius. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to gain control of your free time | {0: 'Laura Vanderkam shatters the myth that there just isn’t enough time in the week for working professionals to live happy, balanced and productive lives.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | When people find out I write about time management, they assume two things. One is that I'm always on time, and I'm not. I have four small children, and I would like to blame them for my occasional tardiness, but sometimes it's just not their fault. I was once late to my own speech on time management. (Laughter) We all had to just take a moment together and savor that irony. The second thing they assume is that I have lots of tips and tricks for saving bits of time here and there. Sometimes I'll hear from magazines that are doing a story along these lines, generally on how to help their readers find an extra hour in the day. And the idea is that we'll shave bits of time off everyday activities, add it up, and we'll have time for the good stuff. I question the entire premise of this piece, but I'm always interested in hearing what they've come up with before they call me. Some of my favorites: doing errands where you only have to make right-hand turns — (Laughter) Being extremely judicious in microwave usage: it says three to three-and-a-half minutes on the package, we're totally getting in on the bottom side of that. And my personal favorite, which makes sense on some level, is to DVR your favorite shows so you can fast-forward through the commercials. That way, you save eight minutes every half hour, so in the course of two hours of watching TV, you find 32 minutes to exercise. (Laughter) Which is true. You know another way to find 32 minutes to exercise? Don't watch two hours of TV a day, right? (Laughter) Anyway, the idea is we'll save bits of time here and there, add it up, we will finally get to everything we want to do. But after studying how successful people spend their time and looking at their schedules hour by hour, I think this idea has it completely backward. We don't build the lives we want by saving time. We build the lives we want, and then time saves itself. Here's what I mean. I recently did a time diary project looking at 1,001 days in the lives of extremely busy women. They had demanding jobs, sometimes their own businesses, kids to care for, maybe parents to care for, community commitments — busy, busy people. I had them keep track of their time for a week so I could add up how much they worked and slept, and I interviewed them about their strategies, for my book. One of the women whose time log I studied goes out on a Wednesday night for something. She comes home to find that her water heater has broken, and there is now water all over her basement. If you've ever had anything like this happen to you, you know it is a hugely damaging, frightening, sopping mess. So she's dealing with the immediate aftermath that night, next day she's got plumbers coming in, day after that, professional cleaning crew dealing with the ruined carpet. All this is being recorded on her time log. Winds up taking seven hours of her week. Seven hours. That's like finding an extra hour in the day. But I'm sure if you had asked her at the start of the week, "Could you find seven hours to train for a triathlon?" "Could you find seven hours to mentor seven worthy people?" I'm sure she would've said what most of us would've said, which is, "No — can't you see how busy I am?" Yet when she had to find seven hours because there is water all over her basement, she found seven hours. And what this shows us is that time is highly elastic. We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it. And so the key to time management is treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater. To get at this, I like to use language from one of the busiest people I ever interviewed. By busy, I mean she was running a small business with 12 people on the payroll, she had six children in her spare time. I was getting in touch with her to set up an interview on how she "had it all" — that phrase. I remember it was a Thursday morning, and she was not available to speak with me. Of course, right? But the reason she was unavailable to speak with me is that she was out for a hike, because it was a beautiful spring morning, and she wanted to go for a hike. So of course this makes me even more intrigued, and when I finally do catch up with her, she explains it like this. She says, "Listen Laura, everything I do, every minute I spend, is my choice." And rather than say, "I don't have time to do x, y or z," she'd say, "I don't do x, y or z because it's not a priority." "I don't have time," often means "It's not a priority." If you think about it, that's really more accurate language. I could tell you I don't have time to dust my blinds, but that's not true. If you offered to pay me $100,000 to dust my blinds, I would get to it pretty quickly. (Laughter) Since that is not going to happen, I can acknowledge this is not a matter of lacking time; it's that I don't want to do it. Using this language reminds us that time is a choice. And granted, there may be horrible consequences for making different choices, I will give you that. But we are smart people, and certainly over the long run, we have the power to fill our lives with the things that deserve to be there. So how do we do that? How do we treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater? Well, first we need to figure out what they are. I want to give you two strategies for thinking about this. The first, on the professional side: I'm sure many people coming up to the end of the year are giving or getting annual performance reviews. You look back over your successes over the year, your "opportunities for growth." And this serves its purpose, but I find it's more effective to do this looking forward. So I want you to pretend it's the end of next year. You're giving yourself a performance review, and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you professionally. What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing? So you can write next year's performance review now. And you can do this for your personal life, too. I'm sure many of you, like me, come December, get cards that contain these folded up sheets of colored paper, on which is written what is known as the family holiday letter. (Laughter) Bit of a wretched genre of literature, really, going on about how amazing everyone in the household is, or even more scintillating, how busy everyone in the household is. But these letters serve a purpose, which is that they tell your friends and family what you did in your personal life that mattered to you over the year. So this year's kind of done, but I want you to pretend it's the end of next year, and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you and the people you care about. What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing? So you can write next year's family holiday letter now. Don't send it. (Laughter) Please, don't send it. But you can write it. And now, between the performance review and the family holiday letter, we have a list of six to ten goals we can work on in the next year. And now we need to break these down into doable steps. So maybe you want to write a family history. First, you can read some other family histories, get a sense for the style. Then maybe think about the questions you want to ask your relatives, set up appointments to interview them. Or maybe you want to run a 5K. So you need to find a race and sign up, figure out a training plan, and dig those shoes out of the back of the closet. And then — this is key — we treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater, by putting them into our schedules first. We do this by thinking through our weeks before we are in them. I find a really good time to do this is Friday afternoons. Friday afternoon is what an economist might call a "low opportunity cost" time. Most of us are not sitting there on Friday afternoons saying, "I am excited to make progress toward my personal and professional priorities right now." (Laughter) But we are willing to think about what those should be. So take a little bit of time Friday afternoon, make yourself a three-category priority list: career, relationships, self. Making a three-category list reminds us that there should be something in all three categories. Career, we think about; relationships, self — not so much. But anyway, just a short list, two to three items in each. Then look out over the whole of the next week, and see where you can plan them in. Where you plan them in is up to you. I know this is going to be more complicated for some people than others. I mean, some people's lives are just harder than others. It is not going to be easy to find time to take that poetry class if you are caring for multiple children on your own. I get that. And I don't want to minimize anyone's struggle. But I do think that the numbers I am about to tell you are empowering. There are 168 hours in a week. Twenty-four times seven is 168 hours. That is a lot of time. If you are working a full-time job, so 40 hours a week, sleeping eight hours a night, so 56 hours a week — that leaves 72 hours for other things. That is a lot of time. You say you're working 50 hours a week, maybe a main job and a side hustle. Well, that leaves 62 hours for other things. You say you're working 60 hours. Well, that leaves 52 hours for other things. You say you're working more than 60 hours. Well, are you sure? (Laughter) There was once a study comparing people's estimated work weeks with time diaries. They found that people claiming 75-plus-hour work weeks were off by about 25 hours. (Laughter) You can guess in which direction, right? Anyway, in 168 hours a week, I think we can find time for what matters to you. If you want to spend more time with your kids, you want to study more for a test you're taking, you want to exercise for three hours and volunteer for two, you can. And that's even if you're working way more than full-time hours. So we have plenty of time, which is great, because guess what? We don't even need that much time to do amazing things. But when most of us have bits of time, what do we do? Pull out the phone, right? Start deleting emails. Otherwise, we're puttering around the house or watching TV. But small moments can have great power. You can use your bits of time for bits of joy. Maybe it's choosing to read something wonderful on the bus on the way to work. I know when I had a job that required two bus rides and a subway ride every morning, I used to go to the library on weekends to get stuff to read. It made the whole experience almost, almost, enjoyable. Breaks at work can be used for meditating or praying. If family dinner is out because of your crazy work schedule, maybe family breakfast could be a good substitute. It's about looking at the whole of one's time and seeing where the good stuff can go. I truly believe this. There is time. Even if we are busy, we have time for what matters. And when we focus on what matters, we can build the lives we want in the time we've got. Thank you. (Applause) |
Will automation take away all our jobs? | {0: "David Autor's work assesses the labor market consequences of technological change and globalization."} | TEDxCambridge | Here's a startling fact: in the 45 years since the introduction of the automated teller machine, those vending machines that dispense cash, the number of human bank tellers employed in the United States has roughly doubled, from about a quarter of a million to a half a million. A quarter of a million in 1970 to about a half a million today, with 100,000 added since the year 2000. These facts, revealed in a recent book by Boston University economist James Bessen, raise an intriguing question: what are all those tellers doing, and why hasn't automation eliminated their employment by now? If you think about it, many of the great inventions of the last 200 years were designed to replace human labor. Tractors were developed to substitute mechanical power for human physical toil. Assembly lines were engineered to replace inconsistent human handiwork with machine perfection. Computers were programmed to swap out error-prone, inconsistent human calculation with digital perfection. These inventions have worked. We no longer dig ditches by hand, pound tools out of wrought iron or do bookkeeping using actual books. And yet, the fraction of US adults employed in the labor market is higher now in 2016 than it was 125 years ago, in 1890, and it's risen in just about every decade in the intervening 125 years. This poses a paradox. Our machines increasingly do our work for us. Why doesn't this make our labor redundant and our skills obsolete? Why are there still so many jobs? (Laughter) I'm going to try to answer that question tonight, and along the way, I'm going to tell you what this means for the future of work and the challenges that automation does and does not pose for our society. Why are there so many jobs? There are actually two fundamental economic principles at stake. One has to do with human genius and creativity. The other has to do with human insatiability, or greed, if you like. I'm going to call the first of these the O-ring principle, and it determines the type of work that we do. The second principle is the never-get-enough principle, and it determines how many jobs there actually are. Let's start with the O-ring. ATMs, automated teller machines, had two countervailing effects on bank teller employment. As you would expect, they replaced a lot of teller tasks. The number of tellers per branch fell by about a third. But banks quickly discovered that it also was cheaper to open new branches, and the number of bank branches increased by about 40 percent in the same time period. The net result was more branches and more tellers. But those tellers were doing somewhat different work. As their routine, cash-handling tasks receded, they became less like checkout clerks and more like salespeople, forging relationships with customers, solving problems and introducing them to new products like credit cards, loans and investments: more tellers doing a more cognitively demanding job. There's a general principle here. Most of the work that we do requires a multiplicity of skills, and brains and brawn, technical expertise and intuitive mastery, perspiration and inspiration in the words of Thomas Edison. In general, automating some subset of those tasks doesn't make the other ones unnecessary. In fact, it makes them more important. It increases their economic value. Let me give you a stark example. In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded and crashed back down to Earth less than two minutes after takeoff. The cause of that crash, it turned out, was an inexpensive rubber O-ring in the booster rocket that had frozen on the launchpad the night before and failed catastrophically moments after takeoff. In this multibillion dollar enterprise that simple rubber O-ring made the difference between mission success and the calamitous death of seven astronauts. An ingenious metaphor for this tragic setting is the O-ring production function, named by Harvard economist Michael Kremer after the Challenger disaster. The O-ring production function conceives of the work as a series of interlocking steps, links in a chain. Every one of those links must hold for the mission to succeed. If any of them fails, the mission, or the product or the service, comes crashing down. This precarious situation has a surprisingly positive implication, which is that improvements in the reliability of any one link in the chain increases the value of improving any of the other links. Concretely, if most of the links are brittle and prone to breakage, the fact that your link is not that reliable is not that important. Probably something else will break anyway. But as all the other links become robust and reliable, the importance of your link becomes more essential. In the limit, everything depends upon it. The reason the O-ring was critical to space shuttle Challenger is because everything else worked perfectly. If the Challenger were kind of the space era equivalent of Microsoft Windows 2000 — (Laughter) the reliability of the O-ring wouldn't have mattered because the machine would have crashed. (Laughter) Here's the broader point. In much of the work that we do, we are the O-rings. Yes, ATMs could do certain cash-handling tasks faster and better than tellers, but that didn't make tellers superfluous. It increased the importance of their problem-solving skills and their relationships with customers. The same principle applies if we're building a building, if we're diagnosing and caring for a patient, or if we are teaching a class to a roomful of high schoolers. As our tools improve, technology magnifies our leverage and increases the importance of our expertise and our judgment and our creativity. And that brings me to the second principle: never get enough. You may be thinking, OK, O-ring, got it, that says the jobs that people do will be important. They can't be done by machines, but they still need to be done. But that doesn't tell me how many jobs there will need to be. If you think about it, isn't it kind of self-evident that once we get sufficiently productive at something, we've basically worked our way out of a job? In 1900, 40 percent of all US employment was on farms. Today, it's less than two percent. Why are there so few farmers today? It's not because we're eating less. (Laughter) A century of productivity growth in farming means that now, a couple of million farmers can feed a nation of 320 million. That's amazing progress, but it also means there are only so many O-ring jobs left in farming. So clearly, technology can eliminate jobs. Farming is only one example. There are many others like it. But what's true about a single product or service or industry has never been true about the economy as a whole. Many of the industries in which we now work — health and medicine, finance and insurance, electronics and computing — were tiny or barely existent a century ago. Many of the products that we spend a lot of our money on — air conditioners, sport utility vehicles, computers and mobile devices — were unattainably expensive, or just hadn't been invented a century ago. As automation frees our time, increases the scope of what is possible, we invent new products, new ideas, new services that command our attention, occupy our time and spur consumption. You may think some of these things are frivolous — extreme yoga, adventure tourism, Pokémon GO — and I might agree with you. But people desire these things, and they're willing to work hard for them. The average worker in 2015 wanting to attain the average living standard in 1915 could do so by working just 17 weeks a year, one third of the time. But most people don't choose to do that. They are willing to work hard to harvest the technological bounty that is available to them. Material abundance has never eliminated perceived scarcity. In the words of economist Thorstein Veblen, invention is the mother of necessity. Now ... So if you accept these two principles, the O-ring principle and the never-get-enough principle, then you agree with me. There will be jobs. Does that mean there's nothing to worry about? Automation, employment, robots and jobs — it'll all take care of itself? No. That is not my argument. Automation creates wealth by allowing us to do more work in less time. There is no economic law that says that we will use that wealth well, and that is worth worrying about. Consider two countries, Norway and Saudi Arabia. Both oil-rich nations, it's like they have money spurting out of a hole in the ground. (Laughter) But they haven't used that wealth equally well to foster human prosperity, human prospering. Norway is a thriving democracy. By and large, its citizens work and play well together. It's typically numbered between first and fourth in rankings of national happiness. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy in which many citizens lack a path for personal advancement. It's typically ranked 35th among nations in happiness, which is low for such a wealthy nation. Just by way of comparison, the US is typically ranked around 12th or 13th. The difference between these two countries is not their wealth and it's not their technology. It's their institutions. Norway has invested to build a society with opportunity and economic mobility. Saudi Arabia has raised living standards while frustrating many other human strivings. Two countries, both wealthy, not equally well off. And this brings me to the challenge that we face today, the challenge that automation poses for us. The challenge is not that we're running out of work. The US has added 14 million jobs since the depths of the Great Recession. The challenge is that many of those jobs are not good jobs, and many citizens cannot qualify for the good jobs that are being created. Employment growth in the United States and in much of the developed world looks something like a barbell with increasing poundage on either end of the bar. On the one hand, you have high-education, high-wage jobs like doctors and nurses, programmers and engineers, marketing and sales managers. Employment is robust in these jobs, employment growth. Similarly, employment growth is robust in many low-skill, low-education jobs like food service, cleaning, security, home health aids. Simultaneously, employment is shrinking in many middle-education, middle-wage, middle-class jobs, like blue-collar production and operative positions and white-collar clerical and sales positions. The reasons behind this contracting middle are not mysterious. Many of those middle-skill jobs use well-understood rules and procedures that can increasingly be codified in software and executed by computers. The challenge that this phenomenon creates, what economists call employment polarization, is that it knocks out rungs in the economic ladder, shrinks the size of the middle class and threatens to make us a more stratified society. On the one hand, a set of highly paid, highly educated professionals doing interesting work, on the other, a large number of citizens in low-paid jobs whose primary responsibility is to see to the comfort and health of the affluent. That is not my vision of progress, and I doubt that it is yours. But here is some encouraging news. We have faced equally momentous economic transformations in the past, and we have come through them successfully. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when automation was eliminating vast numbers of agricultural jobs — remember that tractor? — the farm states faced a threat of mass unemployment, a generation of youth no longer needed on the farm but not prepared for industry. Rising to this challenge, they took the radical step of requiring that their entire youth population remain in school and continue their education to the ripe old age of 16. This was called the high school movement, and it was a radically expensive thing to do. Not only did they have to invest in the schools, but those kids couldn't work at their jobs. It also turned out to be one of the best investments the US made in the 20th century. It gave us the most skilled, the most flexible and the most productive workforce in the world. To see how well this worked, imagine taking the labor force of 1899 and bringing them into the present. Despite their strong backs and good characters, many of them would lack the basic literacy and numeracy skills to do all but the most mundane jobs. Many of them would be unemployable. What this example highlights is the primacy of our institutions, most especially our schools, in allowing us to reap the harvest of our technological prosperity. It's foolish to say there's nothing to worry about. Clearly we can get this wrong. If the US had not invested in its schools and in its skills a century ago with the high school movement, we would be a less prosperous, a less mobile and probably a lot less happy society. But it's equally foolish to say that our fates are sealed. That's not decided by the machines. It's not even decided by the market. It's decided by us and by our institutions. Now, I started this talk with a paradox. Our machines increasingly do our work for us. Why doesn't that make our labor superfluous, our skills redundant? Isn't it obvious that the road to our economic and social hell is paved with our own great inventions? History has repeatedly offered an answer to that paradox. The first part of the answer is that technology magnifies our leverage, increases the importance, the added value of our expertise, our judgment and our creativity. That's the O-ring. The second part of the answer is our endless inventiveness and bottomless desires means that we never get enough, never get enough. There's always new work to do. Adjusting to the rapid pace of technological change creates real challenges, seen most clearly in our polarized labor market and the threat that it poses to economic mobility. Rising to this challenge is not automatic. It's not costless. It's not easy. But it is feasible. And here is some encouraging news. Because of our amazing productivity, we're rich. Of course we can afford to invest in ourselves and in our children as America did a hundred years ago with the high school movement. Arguably, we can't afford not to. Now, you may be thinking, Professor Autor has told us a heartwarming tale about the distant past, the recent past, maybe the present, but probably not the future. Because everybody knows that this time is different. Right? Is this time different? Of course this time is different. Every time is different. On numerous occasions in the last 200 years, scholars and activists have raised the alarm that we are running out of work and making ourselves obsolete: for example, the Luddites in the early 1800s; US Secretary of Labor James Davis in the mid-1920s; Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief in 1982; and of course, many scholars, pundits, technologists and media figures today. These predictions strike me as arrogant. These self-proclaimed oracles are in effect saying, "If I can't think of what people will do for work in the future, then you, me and our kids aren't going to think of it either." I don't have the guts to take that bet against human ingenuity. Look, I can't tell you what people are going to do for work a hundred years from now. But the future doesn't hinge on my imagination. If I were a farmer in Iowa in the year 1900, and an economist from the 21st century teleported down to my field and said, "Hey, guess what, farmer Autor, in the next hundred years, agricultural employment is going to fall from 40 percent of all jobs to two percent purely due to rising productivity. What do you think the other 38 percent of workers are going to do?" I would not have said, "Oh, we got this. We'll do app development, radiological medicine, yoga instruction, Bitmoji." (Laughter) I wouldn't have had a clue. But I hope I would have had the wisdom to say, "Wow, a 95 percent reduction in farm employment with no shortage of food. That's an amazing amount of progress. I hope that humanity finds something remarkable to do with all of that prosperity." And by and large, I would say that it has. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
What will you tell your daughters about 2016? | {0: 'Poet, playwright, filmmaker and educator Chinaka Hodge uses her own life and experiences as the backbone of wildly creative, powerful works.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | Tell your daughters of this year, how we woke needing coffee but discovered instead cadavers strewn about our morning papers, waterlogged facsimiles of our sisters, spouses, small children. Say to your baby of this year when she asks, as she certainly should, tell her it was too late coming. Admit even in the year we leased freedom, we didn't own it outright. There were still laws for every way we used our privates while they pawed at the soft folds of us, grabbed with no concern for consent, no laws made for the men that enforced them. We were trained to dodge, to wait, to cower and cover, to wait more, still, wait. We were told to be silent. But speak to your girls of this wartime, a year preceded by a score of the same, so as in two decades before, we wiped our eyes, laced caskets with flags, evacuated the crime scene of the club, caterwauled in the street, laid our bodies on the concrete against the outlines of our fallen, cried, "Of course we mattered," chanted for our disappeared. The women wept this year. They did. In the same year, we were ready. The year we lost our inhibition and moved with courageous abandon was also the year we stared down barrels, sang of cranes in skies, ducked and parried, caught gold in hijab, collected death threats, knew ourselves as patriots, said, "We're 35 now, time we settled down and found a running mate," made road maps for infant joy, shamed nothing but fear, called ourselves fat and meant, of course, impeccable. This year, we were women, not brides or trinkets, not an off-brand gender, not a concession, but women. Instruct your babies. Remind them that the year has passed to be docile or small. Some of us said for the first time that we were women, took this oath of solidarity seriously. Some of us bore children and some of us did not, and none of us questioned whether that made us real or appropriate or true. When she asks you of this year, your daughter, whether your offspring or heir to your triumph, from her comforted side of history teetering towards woman, she will wonder and ask voraciously, though she cannot fathom your sacrifice, she will hold your estimation of it holy, curiously probing, "Where were you? Did you fight? Were you fearful or fearsome? What colored the walls of your regret? What did you do for women in the year it was time? This path you made for me, which bones had to break? Did you do enough, and are you OK, momma? And are you a hero?" She will ask the difficult questions. She will not care about the arc of your brow, the weight of your clutch. She will not ask of your mentions. Your daughter, for whom you have already carried so much, wants to know what you brought, what gift, what light did you keep from extinction? When they came for victims in the night, did you sleep through it or were you roused? What was the cost of staying woke? What, in the year we said time's up, what did you do with your privilege? Did you sup on others' squalor? Did you look away or directly into the flame? Did you know your skill or treat it like a liability? Were you fooled by the epithets of "nasty" or "less than"? Did you teach with an open heart or a clenched fist? Where were you? Tell her the truth. Make it your life. Confirm it. Say, "Daughter, I stood there with the moment drawn on my face like a dagger, and flung it back at itself, slicing space for you." Tell her the truth, how you lived in spite of crooked odds. Tell her you were brave, and always, always in the company of courage, mostly the days when you just had yourself. Tell her she was born as you were, as your mothers before, and the sisters beside them, in the age of legends, like always. Tell her she was born just in time, just in time to lead. (Applause) |
Why Earth may someday look like Mars | {0: 'Anjali Tripathi explores planets to uncover the processes that make and destroy them.\r\n'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | So when you look out at the stars at night, it's amazing what you can see. It's beautiful. But what's more amazing is what you can't see, because what we know now is that around every star or almost every star, there's a planet, or probably a few. So what this picture isn't showing you are all the planets that we know about out there in space. But when we think about planets, we tend to think of faraway things that are very different from our own. But here we are on a planet, and there are so many things that are amazing about Earth that we're searching far and wide to find things that are like that. And when we're searching, we're finding amazing things. But I want to tell you about an amazing thing here on Earth. And that is that every minute, 400 pounds of hydrogen and almost seven pounds of helium escape from Earth into space. And this is gas that is going off and never coming back. So hydrogen, helium and many other things make up what's known as the Earth's atmosphere. The atmosphere is just these gases that form a thin blue line that's seen here from the International Space Station, a photograph that some astronauts took. And this tenuous veneer around our planet is what allows life to flourish. It protects our planet from too many impacts, from meteorites and the like. And it's such an amazing phenomenon that the fact that it's disappearing should frighten you, at least a little bit. So this process is something that I study and it's called atmospheric escape. So atmospheric escape is not specific to planet Earth. It's part of what it means to be a planet, if you ask me, because planets, not just here on Earth but throughout the universe, can undergo atmospheric escape. And the way it happens actually tells us about planets themselves. Because when you think about the solar system, you might think about this picture here. And you would say, well, there are eight planets, maybe nine. So for those of you who are stressed by this picture, I will add somebody for you. (Laughter) Courtesy of New Horizons, we're including Pluto. And the thing here is, for the purposes of this talk and atmospheric escape, Pluto is a planet in my mind, in the same way that planets around other stars that we can't see are also planets. So fundamental characteristics of planets include the fact that they are bodies that are bound together by gravity. So it's a lot of material just stuck together with this attractive force. And these bodies are so big and have so much gravity. That's why they're round. So when you look at all of these, including Pluto, they're round. So you can see that gravity is really at play here. But another fundamental characteristic about planets is what you don't see here, and that's the star, the Sun, that all of the planets in the solar system are orbiting around. And that's fundamentally driving atmospheric escape. The reason that fundamentally stars drive atmospheric escape from planets is because stars offer planets particles and light and heat that can cause the atmospheres to go away. So if you think of a hot-air balloon, or you look at this picture of lanterns in Thailand at a festival, you can see that hot air can propel gasses upward. And if you have enough energy and heating, which our Sun does, that gas, which is so light and only bound by gravity, it can escape into space. And so this is what's actually causing atmospheric escape here on Earth and also on other planets — that interplay between heating from the star and overcoming the force of gravity on the planet. So I've told you that it happens at the rate of 400 pounds a minute for hydrogen and almost seven pounds for helium. But what does that look like? Well, even in the '80s, we took pictures of the Earth in the ultraviolet using NASA's Dynamic Explorer spacecraft. So these two images of the Earth show you what that glow of escaping hydrogen looks like, shown in red. And you can also see other features like oxygen and nitrogen in that white glimmer in the circle showing you the auroras and also some wisps around the tropics. So these are pictures that conclusively show us that our atmosphere isn't just tightly bound to us here on Earth but it's actually reaching out far into space, and at an alarming rate, I might add. But the Earth is not alone in undergoing atmospheric escape. Mars, our nearest neighbor, is much smaller than Earth, so it has much less gravity with which to hold on to its atmosphere. And so even though Mars has an atmosphere, we can see it's much thinner than the Earth's. Just look at the surface. You see craters indicating that it didn't have an atmosphere that could stop those impacts. Also, we see that it's the "red planet," and atmospheric escape plays a role in Mars being red. That's because we think Mars used to have a wetter past, and when water had enough energy, it broke up into hydrogen and oxygen, and hydrogen being so light, it escaped into space, and the oxygen that was left oxidized or rusted the ground, making that familiar rusty red color that we see. So it's fine to look at pictures of Mars and say that atmospheric escape probably happened, but NASA has a probe that's currently at Mars called the MAVEN satellite, and its actual job is to study atmospheric escape. It's the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft. And results from it have already shown pictures very similar to what you've seen here on Earth. We've long known that Mars was losing its atmosphere, but we have some stunning pictures. Here, for example, you can see in the red circle is the size of Mars, and in blue you can see the hydrogen escaping away from the planet. So it's reaching out more than 10 times the size of the planet, far enough away that it's no longer bound to that planet. It's escaping off into space. And this helps us confirm ideas, like why Mars is red, from that lost hydrogen. But hydrogen isn't the only gas that's lost. I mentioned helium on Earth and some oxygen and nitrogen, and from MAVEN we can also look at the oxygen being lost from Mars. And you can see that because oxygen is heavier, it can't get as far as the hydrogen, but it's still escaping away from the planet. You don't see it all confined into that red circle. So the fact that we not only see atmospheric escape on our own planet but we can study it elsewhere and send spacecraft allows us to learn about the past of planets but also about planets in general and Earth's future. So one way we actually can learn about the future is by planets so far away that we can't see. And I should just note though, before I go on to that, I'm not going to show you photos like this of Pluto, which might be disappointing, but that's because we don't have them yet. But the New Horizons mission is currently studying atmospheric escape being lost from the planet. So stay tuned and look out for that. But the planets that I did want to talk about are known as transiting exoplanets. So any planet orbiting a star that's not our Sun is called an exoplanet, or extrasolar planet. And these planets that we call transiting have the special feature that if you look at that star in the middle, you'll see that actually it's blinking. And the reason that it's blinking is because there are planets that are going past it all the time, and it's that special orientation where the planets are blocking the light from the star that allows us to see that light blinking. And by surveying the stars in the night sky for this blinking motion, we are able to find planets. This is how we've now been able to detect over 5,000 planets in our own Milky Way, and we know there are many more out there, like I mentioned. So when we look at the light from these stars, what we see, like I said, is not the planet itself, but you actually see a dimming of the light that we can record in time. So the light drops as the planet decreases in front of the star, and that's that blinking that you saw before. So not only do we detect the planets but we can look at this light in different wavelengths. So I mentioned looking at the Earth and Mars in ultraviolet light. If we look at transiting exoplanets with the Hubble Space Telescope, we find that in the ultraviolet, you see much bigger blinking, much less light from the star, when the planet is passing in front. And we think this is because you have an extended atmosphere of hydrogen all around the planet that's making it look puffier and thus blocking more of the light that you see. So using this technique, we've actually been able to discover a few transiting exoplanets that are undergoing atmospheric escape. And these planets can be called hot Jupiters, for some of the ones we've found. And that's because they're gas planets like Jupiter, but they're so close to their star, about a hundred times closer than Jupiter. And because there's all this lightweight gas that's ready to escape, and all this heating from the star, you have completely catastrophic rates of atmospheric escape. So unlike our 400 pounds per minute of hydrogen being lost on Earth, for these planets, you're losing 1.3 billion pounds of hydrogen every minute. So you might think, well, does this make the planet cease to exist? And this is a question that people wondered when they looked at our solar system, because planets closer to the Sun are rocky, and planets further away are bigger and more gaseous. Could you have started with something like Jupiter that was actually close to the Sun, and get rid of all the gas in it? We now think that if you start with something like a hot Jupiter, you actually can't end up with Mercury or the Earth. But if you started with something smaller, it's possible that enough gas would have gotten away that it would have significantly impacted it and left you with something very different than what you started with. So all of this sounds sort of general, and we might think about the solar system, but what does this have to do with us here on Earth? Well, in the far future, the Sun is going to get brighter. And as that happens, the heating that we find from the Sun is going to become very intense. In the same way that you see gas streaming off from a hot Jupiter, gas is going to stream off from the Earth. And so what we can look forward to, or at least prepare for, is the fact that in the far future, the Earth is going to look more like Mars. Our hydrogen, from water that is broken down, is going to escape into space more rapidly, and we're going to be left with this dry, reddish planet. So don't fear, it's not for a few billion years, so there's some time to prepare. (Laughter) But I wanted you to be aware of what's going on, not just in the future, but atmospheric escape is happening as we speak. So there's a lot of amazing science that you hear about happening in space and planets that are far away, and we are studying these planets to learn about these worlds. But as we learn about Mars or exoplanets like hot Jupiters, we find things like atmospheric escape that tell us a lot more about our planet here on Earth. So consider that the next time you think that space is far away. Thank you. (Applause) |
It's time to reclaim religion | {0: 'Rabbi Sharon Brous is a leading voice in reanimating religious life in America, working to develop a spiritual roadmap for soulful, multi-faith justice work.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | I was a new mother and a young rabbi in the spring of 2004 and the world was in shambles. Maybe you remember. Every day, we heard devastating reports from the war in Iraq. There were waves of terror rolling across the globe. It seemed like humanity was spinning out of control. I remember the night that I read about the series of coordinated bombings in the subway system in Madrid, and I got up and I walked over to the crib where my six-month-old baby girl lay sleeping sweetly, and I heard the rhythm of her breath, and I felt this sense of urgency coursing through my body. We were living through a time of tectonic shifts in ideologies, in politics, in religion, in populations. Everything felt so precarious. And I remember thinking, "My God, what kind of world did we bring this child into? And what was I as a mother and a religious leader willing to do about it? Of course, I knew it was clear that religion would be a principle battlefield in this rapidly changing landscape, and it was already clear that religion was a significant part of the problem. The question for me was, could religion also be part of the solution? Now, throughout history, people have committed horrible crimes and atrocities in the name of religion. And as we entered the 21st century, it was very clear that religious extremism was once again on the rise. Our studies now show that over the course of the past 15, 20 years, hostilities and religion-related violence have been on the increase all over the world. But we don't even need the studies to prove it, because I ask you, how many of us are surprised today when we hear the stories of a bombing or a shooting, when we later find out that the last word that was uttered before the trigger is pulled or the bomb is detonated is the name of God? It barely raises an eyebrow today when we learn that yet another person has decided to show his love of God by taking the lives of God's children. In America, religious extremism looks like a white, antiabortion Christian extremist walking into Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs and murdering three people. It also looks like a couple inspired by the Islamic State walking into an office party in San Bernardino and killing 14. And even when religion-related extremism does not lead to violence, it is still used as a political wedge issue, cynically leading people to justify the subordination of women, the stigmatization of LGBT people, racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. This ought to concern deeply those of us who care about the future of religion and the future of faith. We need to call this what it is: a great failure of religion. But the thing is, this isn't even the only challenge that religion faces today. At the very same time that we need religion to be a strong force against extremism, it is suffering from a second pernicious trend, what I call religious routine-ism. This is when our institutions and our leaders are stuck in a paradigm that is rote and perfunctory, devoid of life, devoid of vision and devoid of soul. Let me explain what I mean like this. One of the great blessings of being a rabbi is standing under the chuppah, under the wedding canopy, with a couple, and helping them proclaim publicly and make holy the love that they found for one another. I want to ask you now, though, to think maybe from your own experience or maybe just imagine it about the difference between the intensity of the experience under the wedding canopy, and maybe the experience of the sixth or seventh anniversary. (Laughter) And if you're lucky enough to make it 16 or 17 years, if you're like most people, you probably wake up in the morning realizing that you forgot to make a reservation at your favorite restaurant and you forgot so much as a card, and then you just hope and pray that your partner also forgot. Well, religious ritual and rites were essentially designed to serve the function of the anniversary, to be a container in which we would hold on to the remnants of that sacred, revelatory encounter that birthed the religion in the first place. The problem is that after a few centuries, the date remains on the calendar, but the love affair is long dead. That's when we find ourselves in endless, mindless repetitions of words that don't mean anything to us, rising and being seated because someone has asked us to, holding onto jealously guarded doctrine that's completely and wildly out of step with our contemporary reality, engaging in perfunctory practice simply because that's the way things have always been done. Religion is waning in the United States. Across the board, churches and synagogues and mosques are all complaining about how hard it is to maintain relevance for a generation of young people who seem completely uninterested, not only in the institutions that stand at the heart of our traditions but even in religion itself. And what they need to understand is that there is today a generation of people who are as disgusted by the violence of religious extremism as they are turned off by the lifelessness of religious routine-ism. Of course there is a bright spot to this story. Given the crisis of these two concurrent trends in religious life, about 12 or 13 years ago, I set out to try to determine if there was any way that I could reclaim the heart of my own Jewish tradition, to help make it meaningful and purposeful again in a world on fire. I started to wonder, what if we could harness some of the great minds of our generation and think in a bold and robust and imaginative way again about what the next iteration of religious life would look like? Now, we had no money, no space, no game plan, but we did have email. So my friend Melissa and I sat down and we wrote an email which we sent out to a few friends and colleagues. It basically said this: "Before you bail on religion, why don't we come together this Friday night and see what we might make of our own Jewish inheritance?" We hoped maybe 20 people would show up. It turned out 135 people came. They were cynics and seekers, atheists and rabbis. Many people said that night that it was the first time that they had a meaningful religious experience in their entire lives. And so I set out to do the only rational thing that someone would do in such a circumstance: I quit my job and tried to build this audacious dream, a reinvented, rethought religious life which we called "IKAR," which means "the essence" or "the heart of the matter." Now, IKAR is not alone out there in the religious landscape today. There are Jewish and Christian and Muslim and Catholic religious leaders, many of them women, by the way, who have set out to reclaim the heart of our traditions, who firmly believe that now is the time for religion to be part of the solution. We are going back into our sacred traditions and recognizing that all of our traditions contain the raw material to justify violence and extremism, and also contain the raw material to justify compassion, coexistence and kindness — that when others choose to read our texts as directives for hate and vengeance, we can choose to read those same texts as directives for love and for forgiveness. I have found now in communities as varied as Jewish indie start-ups on the coasts to a woman's mosque, to black churches in New York and in North Carolina, to a holy bus loaded with nuns that traverses this country with a message of justice and peace, that there is a shared religious ethos that is now emerging in the form of revitalized religion in this country. And while the theologies and the practices vary very much between these independent communities, what we can see are some common, consistent threads between them. I'm going to share with you four of those commitments now. The first is wakefulness. We live in a time today in which we have unprecedented access to information about every global tragedy that happens on every corner of this Earth. Within 12 hours, 20 million people saw that image of Aylan Kurdi's little body washed up on the Turkish shore. We all saw this picture. We saw this picture of a five-year-old child pulled out of the rubble of his building in Aleppo. And once we see these images, we are called to a certain kind of action. My tradition tells a story of a traveler who is walking down a road when he sees a beautiful house on fire, and he says, "How can it be that something so beautiful would burn, and nobody seems to even care?" So too we learn that our world is on fire, and it is our job to keep our hearts and our eyes open, and to recognize that it's our responsibility to help put out the flames. This is extremely difficult to do. Psychologists tell us that the more we learn about what's broken in our world, the less likely we are to do anything. It's called psychic numbing. We just shut down at a certain point. Well, somewhere along the way, our religious leaders forgot that it's our job to make people uncomfortable. It's our job to wake people up, to pull them out of their apathy and into the anguish, and to insist that we do what we don't want to do and see what we do not want to see. Because we know that social change only happens — (Applause) when we are awake enough to see that the house is on fire. The second principle is hope, and I want to say this about hope. Hope is not naive, and hope is not an opiate. Hope may be the single greatest act of defiance against a politics of pessimism and against a culture of despair. Because what hope does for us is it lifts us out of the container that holds us and constrains us from the outside, and says, "You can dream and think expansively again. That they cannot control in you." I saw hope made manifest in an African-American church in the South Side of Chicago this summer, where I brought my little girl, who is now 13 and a few inches taller than me, to hear my friend Rev. Otis Moss preach. That summer, there had already been 3,000 people shot between January and July in Chicago. We went into that church and heard Rev. Moss preach, and after he did, this choir of gorgeous women, 100 women strong, stood up and began to sing. "I need you. You need me. I love you. I need you to survive." And I realized in that moment that this is what religion is supposed to be about. It's supposed to be about giving people back a sense of purpose, a sense of hope, a sense that they and their dreams fundamentally matter in this world that tells them that they don't matter at all. The third principle is the principle of mightiness. There's a rabbinic tradition that we are to walk around with two slips of paper in our pockets. One says, "I am but dust and ashes." It's not all about me. I can't control everything, and I cannot do this on my own. The other slip of paper says, "For my sake the world was created." Which is to say it's true that I can't do everything, but I can surely do something. I can forgive. I can love. I can show up. I can protest. I can be a part of this conversation. We even now have a religious ritual, a posture, that holds the paradox between powerlessness and power. In the Jewish community, the only time of year that we prostrate fully to the ground is during the high holy days. It's a sign of total submission. Now in our community, when we get up off the ground, we stand with our hands raised to the heavens, and we say, "I am strong, I am mighty, and I am worthy. I can't do everything, but I can do something." In a world that conspires to make us believe that we are invisible and that we are impotent, religious communities and religious ritual can remind us that for whatever amount of time we have here on this Earth, whatever gifts and blessings we were given, whatever resources we have, we can and we must use them to try to make the world a little bit more just and a little bit more loving. The fourth and final is interconnectedness. A few years ago, there was a man walking on the beach in Alaska, when he came across a soccer ball that had some Japanese letters written on it. He took a picture of it and posted it up on social media, and a Japanese teenager contacted him. He had lost everything in the tsunami that devastated his country, but he was able to retrieve that soccer ball after it had floated all the way across the Pacific. How small our world has become. It's so hard for us to remember how interconnected we all are as human beings. And yet, we know that it is systems of oppression that benefit the most from the lie of radical individualism. Let me tell you how this works. I'm not supposed to care when black youth are harassed by police, because my white-looking Jewish kids probably won't ever get pulled over for the crime of driving while black. Well, not so, because this is also my problem. And guess what? Transphobia and Islamophobia and racism of all forms, those are also all of our problems. And so too is anti-Semitism all of our problems. Because Emma Lazarus was right. (Applause) Emma Lazarus was right when she said until all of us are free, we are none of us free. We are all in this together. And now somewhere at the intersection of these four trends, of wakefulness and hope and mightiness and interconnectedness, there is a burgeoning, multifaith justice movement in this country that is staking a claim on a countertrend, saying that religion can and must be a force for good in the world. Our hearts hurt from the failed religion of extremism, and we deserve more than the failed religion of routine-ism. It is time for religious leaders and religious communities to take the lead in the spiritual and cultural shift that this country and the world so desperately needs — a shift toward love, toward justice, toward equality and toward dignity for all. I believe that our children deserve no less than that. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we explore unanswered questions in physics | {0: "James Beacham is an experimental high-energy particle physicist working with the ATLAS collaboration at CERN's Large Hadron Collider."} | TEDxBerlin | There is something about physics that has been really bothering me since I was a little kid. And it's related to a question that scientists have been asking for almost 100 years, with no answer. How do the smallest things in nature, the particles of the quantum world, match up with the largest things in nature — planets and stars and galaxies held together by gravity? As a kid, I would puzzle over questions just like this. I would fiddle around with microscopes and electromagnets, and I would read about the forces of the small and about quantum mechanics and I would marvel at how well that description matched up to our observation. Then I would look at the stars, and I would read about how well we understand gravity, and I would think surely, there must be some elegant way that these two systems match up. But there's not. And the books would say, yeah, we understand a lot about these two realms separately, but when we try to link them mathematically, everything breaks. And for 100 years, none of our ideas as to how to solve this basically physics disaster, has ever been supported by evidence. And to little old me — little, curious, skeptical James — this was a supremely unsatisfying answer. So, I'm still a skeptical little kid. Flash-forward now to December of 2015, when I found myself smack in the middle of the physics world being flipped on its head. It all started when we at CERN saw something intriguing in our data: a hint of a new particle, an inkling of a possibly extraordinary answer to this question. So I'm still a skeptical little kid, I think, but I'm also now a particle hunter. I am a physicist at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the largest science experiment ever mounted. It's a 27-kilometer tunnel on the border of France and Switzerland buried 100 meters underground. And in this tunnel, we use superconducting magnets colder than outer space to accelerate protons to almost the speed of light and slam them into each other millions of times per second, collecting the debris of these collisions to search for new, undiscovered fundamental particles. Its design and construction took decades of work by thousands of physicists from around the globe, and in the summer of 2015, we had been working tirelessly to switch on the LHC at the highest energy that humans have ever used in a collider experiment. Now, higher energy is important because for particles, there is an equivalence between energy and particle mass, and mass is just a number put there by nature. To discover new particles, we need to reach these bigger numbers. And to do that, we have to build a bigger, higher energy collider, and the biggest, highest energy collider in the world is the Large Hadron Collider. And then, we collide protons quadrillions of times, and we collect this data very slowly, over months and months. And then new particles might show up in our data as bumps — slight deviations from what you expect, little clusters of data points that make a smooth line not so smooth. For example, this bump, after months of data-taking in 2012, led to the discovery of the Higgs particle — the Higgs boson — and to a Nobel Prize for the confirmation of its existence. This jump up in energy in 2015 represented the best chance that we as a species had ever had of discovering new particles — new answers to these long-standing questions, because it was almost twice as much energy as we used when we discovered the Higgs boson. Many of my colleagues had been working their entire careers for this moment, and frankly, to little curious me, this was the moment I'd been waiting for my entire life. So 2015 was go time. So June 2015, the LHC is switched back on. My colleagues and I held our breath and bit our fingernails, and then finally we saw the first proton collisions at this highest energy ever. Applause, champagne, celebration. This was a milestone for science, and we had no idea what we would find in this brand-new data. And then a few weeks later, we found a bump. It wasn't a very big bump, but it was big enough to make you raise your eyebrow. But on a scale of one to 10 for eyebrow raises, if 10 indicates that you've discovered a new particle, this eyebrow raise is about a four. (Laughter) I spent hours, days, weeks in secret meetings, arguing with my colleagues over this little bump, poking and prodding it with our most ruthless experimental sticks to see if it would withstand scrutiny. But even after months of working feverishly — sleeping in our offices and not going home, candy bars for dinner, coffee by the bucketful — physicists are machines for turning coffee into diagrams — (Laughter) This little bump would not go away. So after a few months, we presented our little bump to the world with a very clear message: this little bump is interesting but it's not definitive, so let's keep an eye on it as we take more data. So we were trying to be extremely cool about it. And the world ran with it anyway. The news loved it. People said it reminded them of the little bump that was shown on the way toward the Higgs boson discovery. Better than that, my theorist colleagues — I love my theorist colleagues — my theorist colleagues wrote 500 papers about this little bump. (Laughter) The world of particle physics had been flipped on its head. But what was it about this particular bump that caused thousands of physicists to collectively lose their cool? This little bump was unique. This little bump indicated that we were seeing an unexpectedly large number of collisions whose debris consisted of only two photons, two particles of light. And that's rare. Particle collisions are not like automobile collisions. They have different rules. When two particles collide at almost the speed of light, the quantum world takes over. And in the quantum world, these two particles can briefly create a new particle that lives for a tiny fraction of a second before splitting into other particles that hit our detector. Imagine a car collision where the two cars vanish upon impact, a bicycle appears in their place — (Laughter) And then that bicycle explodes into two skateboards, which hit our detector. (Laughter) Hopefully, not literally. They're very expensive. Events where only two photons hit out detector are very rare. And because of the special quantum properties of photons, there's a very small number of possible new particles — these mythical bicycles — that can give birth to only two photons. But one of these options is huge, and it has to do with that long-standing question that bothered me as a tiny little kid, about gravity. Gravity may seem super strong to you, but it's actually crazily weak compared to the other forces of nature. I can briefly beat gravity when I jump, but I can't pick a proton out of my hand. The strength of gravity compared to the other forces of nature? It's 10 to the minus 39. That's a decimal with 39 zeros after it. Worse than that, all of the other known forces of nature are perfectly described by this thing we call the Standard Model, which is our current best description of nature at its smallest scales, and quite frankly, one of the most successful achievements of humankind — except for gravity, which is absent from the Standard Model. It's crazy. It's almost as though most of gravity has gone missing. We feel a little bit of it, but where's the rest of it? No one knows. But one theoretical explanation proposes a wild solution. You and I — even you in the back — we live in three dimensions of space. I hope that's a non-controversial statement. (Laughter) All of the known particles also live in three dimensions of space. In fact, a particle is just another name for an excitation in a three-dimensional field; a localized wobbling in space. More importantly, all the math that we use to describe all this stuff assumes that there are only three dimensions of space. But math is math, and we can play around with our math however we want. And people have been playing around with extra dimensions of space for a very long time, but it's always been an abstract mathematical concept. I mean, just look around you — you at the back, look around — there's clearly only three dimensions of space. But what if that's not true? What if the missing gravity is leaking into an extra-spatial dimension that's invisible to you and I? What if gravity is just as strong as the other forces if you were to view it in this extra-spatial dimension, and what you and I experience is a tiny slice of gravity make it seem very weak? If this were true, we would have to expand our Standard Model of particles to include an extra particle, a hyperdimensional particle of gravity, a special graviton that lives in extra-spatial dimensions. I see the looks on your faces. You should be asking me the question, "How in the world are we going to test this crazy, science fiction idea, stuck as we are in three dimensions?" The way we always do, by slamming together two protons — (Laughter) Hard enough that the collision reverberates into any extra-spatial dimensions that might be there, momentarily creating this hyperdimensional graviton that then snaps back into the three dimensions of the LHC and spits off two photons, two particles of light. And this hypothetical, extra-dimensional graviton is one of the only possible, hypothetical new particles that has the special quantum properties that could give birth to our little, two-photon bump. So, the possibility of explaining the mysteries of gravity and of discovering extra dimensions of space — perhaps now you get a sense as to why thousands of physics geeks collectively lost their cool over our little, two-photon bump. A discovery of this type would rewrite the textbooks. But remember, the message from us experimentalists that actually were doing this work at the time, was very clear: we need more data. With more data, the little bump will either turn into a nice, crisp Nobel Prize — (Laughter) Or the extra data will fill in the space around the bump and turn it into a nice, smooth line. So we took more data, and with five times the data, several months later, our little bump turned into a smooth line. The news reported on a "huge disappointment," on "faded hopes," and on particle physicists "being sad." Given the tone of the coverage, you'd think that we had decided to shut down the LHC and go home. (Laughter) But that's not what we did. But why not? I mean, if I didn't discover a particle — and I didn't — if I didn't discover a particle, why am I here talking to you? Why didn't I just hang my head in shame and go home? Particle physicists are explorers. And very much of what we do is cartography. Let me put it this way: forget about the LHC for a second. Imagine you are a space explorer arriving at a distant planet, searching for aliens. What is your first task? To immediately orbit the planet, land, take a quick look around for any big, obvious signs of life, and report back to home base. That's the stage we're at now. We took a first look at the LHC for any new, big, obvious-to-spot particles, and we can report that there are none. We saw a weird-looking alien bump on a distant mountain, but once we got closer, we saw it was a rock. But then what do we do? Do we just give up and fly away? Absolutely not; we would be terrible scientists if we did. No, we spend the next couple of decades exploring, mapping out the territory, sifting through the sand with a fine instrument, peeking under every stone, drilling under the surface. New particles can either show up immediately as big, obvious-to-spot bumps, or they can only reveal themselves after years of data taking. Humanity has just begun its exploration at the LHC at this big high energy, and we have much searching to do. But what if, even after 10 or 20 years, we still find no new particles? We build a bigger machine. (Laughter) We search at higher energies. We search at higher energies. Planning is already underway for a 100-kilometer tunnel that will collide particles at 10 times the energy of the LHC. We don't decide where nature places new particles. We only decide to keep exploring. But what if, even after a 100-kilometer tunnel or a 500-kilometer tunnel or a 10,000-kilometer collider floating in space between the Earth and the Moon, we still find no new particles? Then perhaps we're doing particle physics wrong. (Laughter) Perhaps we need to rethink things. Maybe we need more resources, technology, expertise than what we currently have. We already use artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques in parts of the LHC, but imagine designing a particle physics experiment using such sophisticated algorithms that it could teach itself to discover a hyperdimensional graviton. But what if? What if the ultimate question: What if even artificial intelligence can't help us answer our questions? What if these open questions, for centuries, are destined to be unanswered for the foreseeable future? What if the stuff that's bothered me since I was a little kid is destined to be unanswered in my lifetime? Then that ... will be even more fascinating. We will be forced to think in completely new ways. We'll have to go back to our assumptions, and determine if there was a flaw somewhere. And we'll need to encourage more people to join us in studying science since we need fresh eyes on these century-old problems. I don't have the answers, and I'm still searching for them. But someone — maybe she's in school right now, maybe she's not even born yet — could eventually guide us to see physics in a completely new way, and to point out that perhaps we're just asking the wrong questions. Which would not be the end of physics, but a novel beginning. Thank you. (Applause) |
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