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Are you a giver or a taker? | {0: 'After years of studying the dynamics of success and productivity in the workplace, Adam Grant discovered a powerful and often overlooked motivator: helping others.'} | TED@IBM | I want you to look around the room for a minute and try to find the most paranoid person here — (Laughter) And then I want you to point at that person for me. (Laughter) OK, don't actually do it. (Laughter) But, as an organizational psychologist, I spend a lot of time in workplaces, and I find paranoia everywhere. Paranoia is caused by people that I call "takers." Takers are self-serving in their interactions. It's all about what can you do for me. The opposite is a giver. It's somebody who approaches most interactions by asking, "What can I do for you?" I wanted to give you a chance to think about your own style. We all have moments of giving and taking. Your style is how you treat most of the people most of the time, your default. I have a short test you can take to figure out if you're more of a giver or a taker, and you can take it right now. [The Narcissist Test] [Step 1: Take a moment to think about yourself.] (Laughter) [Step 2: If you made it to Step 2, you are not a narcissist.] (Laughter) This is the only thing I will say today that has no data behind it, but I am convinced the longer it takes for you to laugh at this cartoon, the more worried we should be that you're a taker. (Laughter) Of course, not all takers are narcissists. Some are just givers who got burned one too many times. Then there's another kind of taker that we won't be addressing today, and that's called a psychopath. (Laughter) I was curious, though, about how common these extremes are, and so I surveyed over 30,000 people across industries around the world's cultures. And I found that most people are right in the middle between giving and taking. They choose this third style called "matching." If you're a matcher, you try to keep an even balance of give and take: quid pro quo — I'll do something for you if you do something for me. And that seems like a safe way to live your life. But is it the most effective and productive way to live your life? The answer to that question is a very definitive ... maybe. (Laughter) I studied dozens of organizations, thousands of people. I had engineers measuring their productivity. (Laughter) I looked at medical students' grades — even salespeople's revenue. (Laughter) And, unexpectedly, the worst performers in each of these jobs were the givers. The engineers who got the least work done were the ones who did more favors than they got back. They were so busy doing other people's jobs, they literally ran out of time and energy to get their own work completed. In medical school, the lowest grades belong to the students who agree most strongly with statements like, "I love helping others," which suggests the doctor you ought to trust is the one who came to med school with no desire to help anybody. (Laughter) And then in sales, too, the lowest revenue accrued in the most generous salespeople. I actually reached out to one of those salespeople who had a very high giver score. And I asked him, "Why do you suck at your job —" I didn't ask it that way, but — (Laughter) "What's the cost of generosity in sales?" And he said, "Well, I just care so deeply about my customers that I would never sell them one of our crappy products." (Laughter) So just out of curiosity, how many of you self-identify more as givers than takers or matchers? Raise your hands. OK, it would have been more before we talked about these data. But actually, it turns out there's a twist here, because givers are often sacrificing themselves, but they make their organizations better. We have a huge body of evidence — many, many studies looking at the frequency of giving behavior that exists in a team or an organization — and the more often people are helping and sharing their knowledge and providing mentoring, the better organizations do on every metric we can measure: higher profits, customer satisfaction, employee retention — even lower operating expenses. So givers spend a lot of time trying to help other people and improve the team, and then, unfortunately, they suffer along the way. I want to talk about what it takes to build cultures where givers actually get to succeed. So I wondered, then, if givers are the worst performers, who are the best performers? Let me start with the good news: it's not the takers. Takers tend to rise quickly but also fall quickly in most jobs. And they fall at the hands of matchers. If you're a matcher, you believe in "An eye for an eye" — a just world. And so when you meet a taker, you feel like it's your mission in life to just punish the hell out of that person. (Laughter) And that way justice gets served. Well, most people are matchers. And that means if you're a taker, it tends to catch up with you eventually; what goes around will come around. And so the logical conclusion is: it must be the matchers who are the best performers. But they're not. In every job, in every organization I've ever studied, the best results belong to the givers again. Take a look at some data I gathered from hundreds of salespeople, tracking their revenue. What you can see is that the givers go to both extremes. They make up the majority of people who bring in the lowest revenue, but also the highest revenue. The same patterns were true for engineers' productivity and medical students' grades. Givers are overrepresented at the bottom and at the top of every success metric that I can track. Which raises the question: How do we create a world where more of these givers get to excel? I want to talk about how to do that, not just in businesses, but also in nonprofits, schools — even governments. Are you ready? (Cheers) I was going to do it anyway, but I appreciate the enthusiasm. (Laughter) The first thing that's really critical is to recognize that givers are your most valuable people, but if they're not careful, they burn out. So you have to protect the givers in your midst. And I learned a great lesson about this from Fortune's best networker. It's the guy, not the cat. (Laughter) His name is Adam Rifkin. He's a very successful serial entrepreneur who spends a huge amount of his time helping other people. And his secret weapon is the five-minute favor. Adam said, "You don't have to be Mother Teresa or Gandhi to be a giver. You just have to find small ways to add large value to other people's lives." That could be as simple as making an introduction between two people who could benefit from knowing each other. It could be sharing your knowledge or giving a little bit of feedback. Or It might be even something as basic as saying, "You know, I'm going to try and figure out if I can recognize somebody whose work has gone unnoticed." And those five-minute favors are really critical to helping givers set boundaries and protect themselves. The second thing that matters if you want to build a culture where givers succeed, is you actually need a culture where help-seeking is the norm; where people ask a lot. This may hit a little too close to home for some of you. [So in all your relationships, you always have to be the giver?] (Laughter) What you see with successful givers is they recognize that it's OK to be a receiver, too. If you run an organization, we can actually make this easier. We can make it easier for people to ask for help. A couple colleagues and I studied hospitals. We found that on certain floors, nurses did a lot of help-seeking, and on other floors, they did very little of it. The factor that stood out on the floors where help-seeking was common, where it was the norm, was there was just one nurse whose sole job it was to help other nurses on the unit. When that role was available, nurses said, "It's not embarrassing, it's not vulnerable to ask for help — it's actually encouraged." Help-seeking isn't important just for protecting the success and the well-being of givers. It's also critical to getting more people to act like givers, because the data say that somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of all giving in organizations starts with a request. But a lot of people don't ask. They don't want to look incompetent, they don't know where to turn, they don't want to burden others. Yet if nobody ever asks for help, you have a lot of frustrated givers in your organization who would love to step up and contribute, if they only knew who could benefit and how. But I think the most important thing, if you want to build a culture of successful givers, is to be thoughtful about who you let onto your team. I figured, you want a culture of productive generosity, you should hire a bunch of givers. But I was surprised to discover, actually, that that was not right — that the negative impact of a taker on a culture is usually double to triple the positive impact of a giver. Think about it this way: one bad apple can spoil a barrel, but one good egg just does not make a dozen. I don't know what that means — (Laughter) But I hope you do. No — let even one taker into a team, and you will see that the givers will stop helping. They'll say, "I'm surrounded by a bunch of snakes and sharks. Why should I contribute?" Whereas if you let one giver into a team, you don't get an explosion of generosity. More often, people are like, "Great! That person can do all our work." So, effective hiring and screening and team building is not about bringing in the givers; it's about weeding out the takers. If you can do that well, you'll be left with givers and matchers. The givers will be generous because they don't have to worry about the consequences. And the beauty of the matchers is that they follow the norm. So how do you catch a taker before it's too late? We're actually pretty bad at figuring out who's a taker, especially on first impressions. There's a personality trait that throws us off. It's called agreeableness, one the major dimensions of personality across cultures. Agreeable people are warm and friendly, they're nice, they're polite. You find a lot of them in Canada — (Laughter) Where there was actually a national contest to come up with a new Canadian slogan and fill in the blank, "As Canadian as ..." I thought the winning entry was going to be, "As Canadian as maple syrup," or, "... ice hockey." But no, Canadians voted for their new national slogan to be — I kid you not — "As Canadian as possible under the circumstances." (Laughter) Now for those of you who are highly agreeable, or maybe slightly Canadian, you get this right away. How could I ever say I'm any one thing when I'm constantly adapting to try to please other people? Disagreeable people do less of it. They're more critical, skeptical, challenging, and far more likely than their peers to go to law school. (Laughter) That's not a joke, that's actually an empirical fact. (Laughter) So I always assumed that agreeable people were givers and disagreeable people were takers. But then I gathered the data, and I was stunned to find no correlation between those traits, because it turns out that agreeableness-disagreeableness is your outer veneer: How pleasant is it to interact with you? Whereas giving and taking are more of your inner motives: What are your values? What are your intentions toward others? If you really want to judge people accurately, you have to get to the moment every consultant in the room is waiting for, and draw a two-by-two. (Laughter) The agreeable givers are easy to spot: they say yes to everything. The disagreeable takers are also recognized quickly, although you might call them by a slightly different name. (Laughter) We forget about the other two combinations. There are disagreeable givers in our organizations. There are people who are gruff and tough on the surface but underneath have others' best interests at heart. Or as an engineer put it, "Oh, disagreeable givers — like somebody with a bad user interface but a great operating system." (Laughter) If that helps you. (Laughter) Disagreeable givers are the most undervalued people in our organizations, because they're the ones who give the critical feedback that no one wants to hear but everyone needs to hear. We need to do a much better job valuing these people as opposed to writing them off early, and saying, "Eh, kind of prickly, must be a selfish taker." The other combination we forget about is the deadly one — the agreeable taker, also known as the faker. This is the person who's nice to your face, and then will stab you right in the back. (Laughter) And my favorite way to catch these people in the interview process is to ask the question, "Can you give me the names of four people whose careers you have fundamentally improved?" The takers will give you four names, and they will all be more influential than them, because takers are great at kissing up and then kicking down. Givers are more likely to name people who are below them in a hierarchy, who don't have as much power, who can do them no good. And let's face it, you all know you can learn a lot about character by watching how someone treats their restaurant server or their Uber driver. So if we do all this well, if we can weed takers out of organizations, if we can make it safe to ask for help, if we can protect givers from burnout and make it OK for them to be ambitious in pursuing their own goals as well as trying to help other people, we can actually change the way that people define success. Instead of saying it's all about winning a competition, people will realize success is really more about contribution. I believe that the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed. And if we can spread that belief, we can actually turn paranoia upside down. There's a name for that. It's called "pronoia." Pronoia is the delusional belief that other people are plotting your well-being. (Laughter) That they're going around behind your back and saying exceptionally glowing things about you. The great thing about a culture of givers is that's not a delusion — it's reality. I want to live in a world where givers succeed, and I hope you will help me create that world. Thank you. (Applause) |
The world doesn't need more nuclear weapons | {0: 'Bringing cross-disciplinary tactics and innovation to a moribund defense industry, N Square’s Erika Gregory seeks to wean the world from its nuclear stockpiles.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | Let me ask you all a question. How much weapons-grade nuclear material do you think it would take to level a city the size of San Francisco? How many of you think it would be an amount about the size of this suitcase? OK. And how about this minibus? All right. Well actually, under the right circumstances, an amount of highly enriched uranium about the size of your morning latte would be enough to kill 100,000 people instantly. Hundreds of thousands of others would become horribly ill, and parts of the city would be uninhabitable for years, if not for decades. But you can forget that nuclear latte, because today's nuclear weapons are hundreds of times more powerful even than those we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And even a limited nuclear war involving, say, tens of nuclear weapons, could lead to the end of all life on the planet. So it's really important that you know that right now we have over 15,000 nuclear weapons in the hands of nine nations. And if you live in a city or near a military facility, one is likely pointed right at you. In fact, if you live in any of the rural areas where nuclear weapons are stored globally, one is likely pointed at you. About 1,800 of these weapons are on high alert, which means they can be launched within 15 minutes of a presidential command. So I know this is a bummer of an issue, and maybe you have that — what was it? — psychic fatigue that we heard about a little bit earlier. So I'm going to switch gears for just a second, and I'm going to talk about my imaginary friend, who I like to think of as Jasmine, just for a moment. Jasmine, at the age of 25, is part of a generation that is more politically and socially engaged than anything we've seen in 50 years. She and her friends think of themselves as change agents and leaders and activists. I think of them as Generation Possible. They regularly protest about the issues they care about, but nuclear weapons are not one of them, which makes sense, because Jasmine was born in 1991, at the end of the Cold War. So she didn't grow up hearing a lot about nuclear weapons. She never had to duck and cover under her desk at school. For Jasmine, a fallout shelter is an app in the Android store. Nuclear weapons help win games. And that is really a shame, because right now, we need Generation Possible to help us make some really important decisions about nuclear weapons. For instance, will we further reduce our nuclear arsenals globally, or will we spend billions, maybe a trillion dollars, to modernize them so they last throughout the 21st century, so that by the time Jasmine is my age, she's talking to her children and maybe even her grandchildren about the threat of nuclear holocaust? And if you're paying any attention at all to cyberthreats, or, for instance, if you've read about the Stuxnet virus or, for God's sake, if you've ever had an email account or a Yahoo account or a phone hacked, you can imagine the whole new world of hurt that could be triggered by modernization in a period of cyberwarfare. Now, if you're paying attention to the money, a trillion dollars could go a long way to feeding and educating and employing people, all of which could reduce the threat of nuclear war to begin with. So — (Applause) This is really crucial right now, because nuclear weapons — they're vulnerable. We have solid evidence that terrorists are trying to get ahold of them. Just this last spring, when four retirees and two taxi drivers were arrested in the Republic of Georgia for trying to sell nuclear materials for 200 million dollars, they demonstrated that the black market for this stuff is alive and well. And it's really important, because there have been dozens of accidents involving nuclear weapons, and I bet most of us have never heard anything about them. Just here in the United States, we've dropped nuclear weapons on the Carolinas twice. In one case, one of the bombs, which fell out of an Air Force plane, didn't detonate because the nuclear core was stored somewhere else on the plane. In another case, the weapon did arm when it hit the ground, and five of the switches designed to keep it from detonating failed. Luckily, the sixth one didn't. But if that's not enough to get your attention, there was the 1995 Black Brant incident. That's when Russian radar technicians saw what they thought was a US nuclear missile streaking towards Russian airspace. It later turned out to be a Norwegian rocket collecting data about the northern lights. But at that time, Russian President Boris Yeltsin came within five minutes of launching a full-scale retaliatory nuclear attack against the United States. So, most of the world's nuclear nations have committed to getting rid of these weapons of mass destruction. But consider this: the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which is the most widely adopted arms control treaty in history with 190 signatories, sets no specific date by which the world's nuclear-armed nations will get rid of their nuclear weapons. Now, when John F. Kennedy sent a man to the moon and decided to bring him back, or decided to do both those things, he didn't say, "Hey, whenever you guys get to it." He gave us a deadline. He gave us a challenge that would have been incredible just a few years earlier. And with that challenge, he inspired scientists and marketers, astronauts and schoolteachers. He gave us a vision. But along with that vision, he also tried to give us — and most people don't know this, either — he tried to give us a partner in the form of our fiercest Cold War rival, the Soviet Union. Because part of Kennedy's vision for the Apollo program was that it be a cooperation, not a competition, with the Soviets. And apparently, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, agreed. But before that cooperation could be realized, Kennedy was assassinated, and that part of the vision was deferred. But the promise of joint innovation between these two nuclear superpowers wasn't totally extinguished. Because in 1991, which is the year that Jasmine was born and the Soviet Union fell, these two nations engaged in a project that genuinely does seem incredible today in the truest sense of that word, which is that the US sent cash to the Russians when they needed it most, to secure loose nuclear materials and to employ out-of-work nuclear scientists. They worked alongside American scientists to convert weapons-grade uranium into the type of fuel that can be used for nuclear power instead. They called it, "Megatons to Megawatts." So the result is that for over 20 years, our two nations had a program that meant that one in 10 lightbulbs in the United States was essentially fueled by former Russian warheads. So, together these two nations did something truly audacious. But the good news is, the global community has the chance to do something just as audacious today. To get rid of nuclear weapons and to end the supply of the materials required to produce them, some experts tell me would take 30 years. It would take a renaissance of sorts, the kinds of innovation that, for better or worse, underpinned both the Manhattan Project, which gave rise to nuclear weapons, and the Megatons to Megawatts program. It would take design constraints. These are fundamental to creativity, things like a platform for international collaboration; a date certain, which is a forcing mechanism; and a positive vision that inspires action. It would take us to 2045. Now, 2045 happens to be the 100th anniversary of the birth of nuclear weapons in the New Mexico desert. But it's also an important date for another reason. It's predicted to be the advent of the singularity, a new moment in human development, where the lines between artificial intelligence and human intelligence blur, where computing and consciousness become almost indistinguishable and advanced technologies help us solve the 21st century's greatest problems: hunger, energy, poverty, ushering in an era of abundance. And we all get to go to space on our way to becoming a multi-planetary species. Now, the people who really believe this vision are the first to say they don't yet know precisely how we're going to get there. But the values behind their vision and the willingness to ask "How might we?" have inspired a generation of innovators. They're working backward from the outcomes they want, using the creative problem-solving methods of collaborative design. They're busting through obstacles. They're redefining what we all consider possible. But here's the thing: that vision of abundance isn't compatible with a world that still relies on a 20th-century nuclear doctrine called "mutually assured destruction." It has to be about building the foundations for the 22nd century. It has to be about strategies for mutually assured prosperity or, at the very least, mutually assured survival. Now, every day, I get to meet people who are real pioneers in the field of nuclear threats. As you can see, many of them are young women, and they're doing fiercely interesting stuff, like Mareena Robinson Snowden here, who is developing new ways, better ways, to detect nuclear warheads, which will help us overcome a critical hurdle to international disarmament. Or Melissa Hanham, who is using satellite imaging to make sense of what's going on around far-flung nuclear sites. Or we have Beatrice Fihn in Europe, who has been campaigning to make nuclear weapons illegal in international courts of law, and just won a big victory at the UN last week. (Applause) And yet, and yet, with all of our talk in this culture about moon shots, too few members of Generation Possible and those of us who mentor them are taking on nuclear weapons. It's as if there's a taboo. But I remember something Kennedy said that has really stuck with me, and that is something to the effect that humans can be as big as the solutions to all the problems we've created. No problem of human destiny, he said, is beyond human beings. I believe that. And I bet a lot of you here believe that, too. And I know Generation Possible believes it. So it's time to commit to a date. Let's end the nuclear weapons chapter on the 100th anniversary of its inception. After all, by 2045, we will have held billions of people hostage to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Surely, 100 years will have been enough. Surely, a century of economic development and the development of military strategy will have given us better ways to manage global conflict. Surely, if ever there was a global moon shot worth supporting, this is it. Now, in the face of real threats — for instance, North Korea's recent nuclear weapons tests, which fly in the face of sanctions — reasonable people disagree about whether we should maintain some number of nuclear weapons to deter aggression. But the question is: What's the magic number? Is it a thousand? Is it a hundred? Ten? And then we have to ask: Who should be responsible for them? I think we can agree, however, that having 15,000 of them represents a greater global threat to Jasmine's generation than a promise. So it's time we make a promise of a world in which we've broken the stranglehold that nuclear weapons have on our imaginations; in which we invest in the creative solutions that come from working backward from the future we desperately want, rather than plodding forward from a present that brings all of the mental models and biases of the past with it. It's time we pledge our resources as leaders across the spectrum to work on this old problem in new ways, to ask, "How might we?" How might we make good on a promise of greater security for Jasmine's generation in a world beyond nuclear weapons? I truly hope you will join us. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Want kids to learn well? Feed them well | {0: "Sam Kass's work connects nutrition and education in an effort to make sure future generations thrive."} | TED Talks Live | I am a chef and a food policy guy, but I come from a whole family of teachers. My sister is a special ed teacher in Chicago. My father just retired after 25 years teaching fifth grade. My aunt and uncle were professors. My cousins all teach. Everybody in my family, basically, teaches except for me. They taught me that the only way to get the right answers is to ask the right questions. So what are the right questions when it comes to improving the educational outcomes for our children? There's obviously many important questions, but I think the following is a good place to start: What do we think the connection is between a child's growing mind and their growing body? What can we expect our kids to learn if their diets are full of sugar and empty of nutrients? What can they possibly learn if their bodies are literally going hungry? And with all the resources that we are pouring into schools, we should stop and ask ourselves: Are we really setting our kids up for success? Now, a few years ago, I was a judge on a cooking competition called "Chopped." Four chefs compete with mystery ingredients to see who can cook the best dishes. Except for this episode — it was a very special one. Instead of four overzealous chefs trying to break into the limelight — something that I would know nothing about — (Laughter) these chefs were school chefs; you know, the women that you used to call "lunch ladies," but the ones I insist we call "school chefs." Now, these women — God bless these women — spend their day cooking for thousands of kids, breakfast and lunch, with only $2.68 per lunch, with only about a dollar of that actually going to the food. In this episode, the main-course mystery ingredient was quinoa. Now, I know it's been a long time since most of you have had a school lunch, and we've made a lot of progress on nutrition, but quinoa still is not a staple in most school cafeterias. (Laughter) So this was a challenge. But the dish that I will never forget was cooked by a woman named Cheryl Barbara. Cheryl was the nutrition director at High School in the Community in Connecticut. She cooked this delicious pasta. It was amazing. It was a pappardelle with Italian sausage, kale, Parmesan cheese. It was delicious, like, restaurant-quality good, except — she basically just threw the quinoa, pretty much uncooked, into the dish. It was a strange choice, and it was super crunchy. (Laughter) So I took on the TV accusatory judge thing that you're supposed to do, and I asked her why she did that. Cheryl responded, "Well, first, I don't know what quinoa is." (Laughter) "But I do know that it's a Monday, and that in my school, at High School in the Community, I always cook pasta." See, Cheryl explained that for many of her kids, there were no meals on the weekends. No meals on Saturday. No meals on Sunday, either. So she cooked pasta because she wanted to make sure she cooked something she knew her children would eat. Something that would stick to their ribs, she said. Something that would fill them up. Cheryl talked about how, by the time Monday came, her kids' hunger pangs were so intense that they couldn't even begin to think about learning. Food was the only thing on their mind. The only thing. And unfortunately, the stats — they tell the same story. So, let's put this into the context of a child. And we're going to focus on the most important meal of the day, breakfast. Meet Allison. She's 12 years old, she's smart as a whip and she wants to be a physicist when she grows up. If Allison goes to a school that serves a nutritious breakfast to all of their kids, here's what's going to follow. Her chances of getting a nutritious meal, one with fruit and milk, one lower in sugar and salt, dramatically increase. Allison will have a lower rate of obesity than the average kid. She'll have to visit the nurse less. She'll have lower levels of anxiety and depression. She'll have better behavior. She'll have better attendance, and she'll show up on time more often. Why? Well, because there's a good meal waiting for her at school. Overall, Allison is in much better health than the average school kid. So what about that kid who doesn't have a nutritious breakfast waiting for him? Well, meet Tommy. He's also 12. He's a wonderful kid. He wants to be a doctor. By the time Tommy is in kindergarten, he's already underperforming in math. By the time he's in third grade, he's got lower math and reading scores. By the time he's 11, it's more likely that Tommy will have to have repeated a grade. Research shows that kids who do not have consistent nourishment, particularly at breakfast, have poor cognitive function overall. So how widespread is this problem? Well, unfortunately, it's pervasive. Let me give you two stats that seem like they're on opposite ends of the issue, but are actually two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, one in six Americans are food insecure, including 16 million children — almost 20 percent — are food insecure. In this city alone, in New York City, 474,000 kids under the age of 18 face hunger every year. It's crazy. On the other hand, diet and nutrition is the number one cause of preventable death and disease in this country, by far. And fully a third of the kids that we've been talking about tonight are on track to have diabetes in their lifetime. Now, what's hard to put together but is true is that, many times, these are the same children. So they fill up on the unhealthy and cheap calories that surround them in their communities and that their families can afford. But then by the end of the month, food stamps run out or hours get cut at work, and they don't have the money to cover the basic cost of food. But we should be able to solve this problem, right? We know what the answers are. As part of my work at the White House, we instituted a program that for all schools that had 40 percent more low-income kids, we could serve breakfast and lunch to every kid in that school. For free. This program has been incredibly successful, because it helped us overcome a very difficult barrier when it came to getting kids a nutritious breakfast. And that was the barrier of stigma. See, schools serve breakfast before school, and it was only available for the poor kids. So everybody knew who was poor and who needed government help. Now, all kids, no matter how much or how little their parents make, have a lot of pride. So what happened? Well, the schools that have implemented this program saw an increase in math and reading scores by 17.5 percent. 17.5 percent. And research shows that when kids have a consistent, nutritious breakfast, their chances of graduating increase by 20 percent. 20 percent. When we give our kids the nourishment they need, we give them the chance to thrive, both in the classroom and beyond. Now, you don't have to trust me on this, but you should talk to Donna Martin. I love Donna Martin. Donna Martin is the school nutrition director at Burke County in Waynesboro, Georgia. Burke County is one of the poorest districts in the fifth-poorest state in the country, and about 100 percent of Donna's students live at or below the poverty line. A few years ago, Donna decided to get out ahead of the new standards that were coming, and overhaul her nutrition standards. She improved and added fruit and vegetables and whole grains. She served breakfast in the classroom to all of her kids. And she implemented a dinner program. Why? Well, many of her kids didn't have dinner when they went home. So how did they respond? Well, the kids loved the food. They loved the better nutrition, and they loved not being hungry. But Donna's biggest supporter came from an unexpected place. His name from Eric Parker, and he was the head football coach for the Burke County Bears. Now, Coach Parker had coached mediocre teams for years. The Bears often ended in the middle of the pack — a big disappointment in one of the most passionate football states in the Union. But the year Donna changed the menus, the Bears not only won their division, they went on to win the state championship, beating the Peach County Trojans 28-14. (Laughter) And Coach Parker, he credited that championship to Donna Martin. When we give our kids the basic nourishment, they're going to thrive. And it's not just up to the Cheryl Barbaras and the Donna Martins of the world. It's on all of us. And feeding our kids the basic nutrition is just the starting point. What I've laid out is really a model for so many of the most pressing issues that we face. If we focus on the simple goal of properly nourishing ourselves, we could see a world that is more stable and secure; we could dramatically improve our economic productivity; we could transform our health care and we could go a long way in ensuring that the Earth can provide for generations to come. Food is that place where our collective efforts can have the greatest impact. So we have to ask ourselves: What is the right question? What would happen if we fed ourselves more nutritious, more sustainably grown food? What would be the impact? Cheryl Barbara, Donna Martin, Coach Parker and the Burke County Bears — I think they know the answer. Thank you guys so very much. (Applause) |
The lies we tell pregnant women | {0: "Sofia Jawed-Wessel's teachings utilize a sex-positive and pleasure-inclusive approach to providing medically accurate, comprehensive sexuality education."} | TEDxOmaha | We're going to share a lot of secrets today, you and I, and in doing so, I hope that we can lift some of the shame many of us feel about sex. How many here have ever been catcalled by a stranger? Lots of women. For me, the time I remember best is when that stranger was a student of mine. He came up to me after class that night and his words confirmed what I already knew: "I am so sorry, professor. If I had known it was you, I would never have said those things." (Laughter) I wasn't a person to him until I was his professor. This concept, called objectification, is the foundation of sexism, and we see it reinforced through every aspect of our lives. We see it in the government that refuses to punish men for raping women. We see it in advertisements. How many of you have seen an advertisement that uses a woman's breast to sell an entirely unrelated product? Or movie after movie after movie that portrays women as only love interests? These examples might seem inconsequential and harmless, but they're insidious, slowly building into a culture that refuses to see women as people. We see this in the school that sends home a 10-year-old girl because her clothes were a distraction to boys trying to learn, or the government that refuses to punish men for raping women over and over, or the woman who is killed because she asked a man to stop grinding on her on the dance floor. Media plays a large role in perpetuating the objectification of women. Let's consider the classic romantic comedy. We're typically introduced to two kinds of women in these movies, two kinds of desirable women, anyway. The first is the sexy bombshell. This is the unbelievably gorgeous woman with the perfect body. Our leading man has no trouble identifying her and even less trouble having sex with her. The second is our leading lady, the beautiful but demure woman our leading man falls in love with despite not noticing her at first or not liking her if he did. The first is the slut. She is to be consumed and forgotten. She is much too available. The second is desirable but modest, and therefore worthy of our leading man's future babies. Marriage material. We're actually told that women have two roles, but these two roles have a difficult time existing within the same woman. On the rare occasion that I share with a new acquaintance that I study sex, if they don't end the conversation right then, they're usually pretty intrigued. "Oh. Tell me more." So I do. "I'm really interested in studying the sexual behaviors of pregnant and postpartum couples." At this point I get a different kind of response. (Laughter) "Oh. Huh. Do pregnant people even have sex? Have you thought about studying sexual desire or orgasms? That would be interesting, and sexy." Tell me. What are the first words that come to mind when you picture a pregnant woman? I asked this question in a survey of over 500 adults, and most responded with "belly" or "round" and "cute." This didn't surprise me too much. What else do we label as cute? Babies. Puppies. Kittens. The elderly. Right? (Laughter) When we label an adult as cute, though, we take away a lot of their intelligence, their complexity. We reduce them to childlike qualities. I also asked heterosexual men to imagine a woman that they're partnered with is pregnant, and then asked women to imagine that they are pregnant, and then tell me the first words that come to mind when they imagine having sex. Most of the responses were negative. "Gross." "Awkward." "Not sexy." "Odd." "Uncomfortable." "How?" (Laughter) "Not worth the trouble." "Not worth the risk." That last one really stuck with me. We might think that because we divorce pregnant women and moms from sexuality, we are removing the constraints of sexual objectification. They experience less sexism. Right? Not exactly. What happens instead is a different kind of objectification. In my efforts to explain this to others, one conversation led to the Venus of Willendorf, a Paleolithic figurine scholars assumed was a goddess of love and beauty, hence the name Venus. This theory was later revised, though, when scholars noted the sculptor's obvious focus on the figurine's reproductive features: large breasts, considered ideal for nursing; a round, possibly pregnant belly; the remnants of red dye, alluding to menstruation or birth. They also assumed that she was meant to be held or placed lying down because her tiny feet don't allow her to be freestanding. She also had no face. For this reason, it was assumed that she was a representation of fertility and not a portrait of a person. She was an object. In the history of her interpretation, she went from object of ideal beauty and love to object of reproduction. I think this transition speaks more about the scholars who have interpreted her purpose than the actual purpose of the figurine herself. When a woman becomes pregnant, she leaves the realm of men's sexual desire and slides into her reproductive and child-rearing role. In doing so, she also becomes the property of the community, considered very important but only because she's pregnant. Right? I've taken to calling this the Willendorf effect, and once again we see it reinforced in many aspects of her life. Has anyone here ever been visibly pregnant? (Laughter) Yeah. Lots of you, right? So how many of you ever had a stranger touch your belly during pregnancy, maybe without even asking your permission first? Or told what you can and cannot eat by somebody who is not your doctor, your medical care provider? Or asked private questions about your birth plan? And then told why those choices are all wrong? Yeah, me too. Or had a server refuse to bring you a glass of wine? This one might give you pause, I know, but stay with me. This is a huge secret. It is actually safe to drink in moderation during pregnancy. Many of us don't know this because doctors don't trust pregnant women with this secret — (Laughter) especially if she's less educated or a woman of color. What this tells us is, this Willendorf effect, it's also classist and racist. It's present when the government reminds women with every new anti-choice bill that the contents of her uterus are not her own, or when an ob-gyn says, "While it's safe to have sex during pregnancy, sometimes you never know. Better safe than sorry, right?" She's denied basic privacy and bodily autonomy under the guise of "be a good mother." We don't trust her to make her own decisions. She's cute, remember? When we tell women that sexual pleasure — excuse me. When we tell women that sex isn't worth the risk during pregnancy, what we're telling her is that her sexual pleasure doesn't matter. So what we are telling her is that she in fact doesn't matter, even though the needs of her fetus are not at odds with her own needs. So medical providers, such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have the opportunity to educate about the safety of sex during pregnancy. So what do the experts say? ACOG actually has no public official statement about the safety of sex during pregnancy. Guidance from the Mayo Clinic is generally positive but presented with a caveat: "Although most women can safely have sex throughout pregnancy, sometimes it's best to be cautious." Some women don't want to have sex during pregnancy, and that's OK. Some women do want to have sex during pregnancy, and that's OK, too. What needs to stop is society telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies. (Applause) Pregnant women are not faceless, identity-less vessels of reproduction who can't stand on their own two feet. But the truth is, the real secret is, we tell all women that their sexual pleasure doesn't matter. We refuse to even acknowledge that women who have sex with women or women who don't want children even exist. "Oh, it's just a phase ... she just needs the right man to come along." Every time a woman has sex simply because it feels good, it is revolutionary. She is revolutionary. She is pushing back against society's insistence that she exist simply for men's pleasure or for reproduction. A woman who prioritizes her sexual needs is scary, because a woman who prioritizes her sexual needs prioritizes herself. (Applause) That is a woman demanding that she be treated as an equal. That is a woman who insists that you make room for her at the table of power, and that is the most terrifying of all because we can't make room for her without some of us giving up the extra space we hold. (Applause) I have one last secret for you. I am the mother of two boys and we could use your help. Even though my boys hear me say regularly that it's important for men to recognize women as equals and they see their father modeling this, we need what happens in the world to reinforce what happens in our home. This is not a men's problem or a women's problem. This is everyone's problem, and we all play a role in dismantling systems of inequality. For starters, we have got to stop telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies. (Applause) This includes not treating pregnant women like community property. If you don't know her, don't even ask to touch her belly. You wouldn't anybody else. Don't tell her what she can and cannot eat. Don't ask her private details about her medical decisions. This also includes understanding that even if you are personally against abortion, you can still fight for a woman's right to choose. When it comes to women's equality, the two need not oppose one another. If you're somebody who has sex with women, prioritize her pleasure. If you don't know how, ask. If you have children — (Laughter) have conversations about sex as early as possible, because kids don't look up s-e-x in the dictionary anymore. They look it up on the internet. And when you're having those conversations about sex, don't center them on reproduction only. People have sex for many reasons, some because they want a baby, but most of us have sex because it feels good. Admit it. And regardless of whether you have children or not, support comprehensive sex education that doesn't shame our teenagers. (Applause) Nothing positive comes from shaming teens for their sexual desires, behaviors, other than positive STD and pregnancy tests. Every single day, we are all given the opportunity to disrupt patterns of inequality. I think we can all agree that it's worth the trouble to do so. Thank you. (Applause) |
A better way to talk about love | {0: 'Mandy Len Catron explores love stories.'} | TEDxSFU | OK, so today I want to talk about how we talk about love. And specifically, I want to talk about what's wrong with how we talk about love. Most of us will probably fall in love a few times over the course of our lives, and in the English language, this metaphor, falling, is really the main way that we talk about that experience. I don't know about you, but when I conceptualize this metaphor, what I picture is straight out of a cartoon — like there's a man, he's walking down the sidewalk, without realizing it, he crosses over an open manhole, and he just plummets into the sewer below. And I picture it this way because falling is not jumping. Falling is accidental, it's uncontrollable. It's something that happens to us without our consent. And this — this is the main way we talk about starting a new relationship. I am a writer and I'm also an English teacher, which means I think about words for a living. You could say that I get paid to argue that the language we use matters, and I would like to argue that many of the metaphors we use to talk about love — maybe even most of them — are a problem. So, in love, we fall. We're struck. We are crushed. We swoon. We burn with passion. Love makes us crazy, and it makes us sick. Our hearts ache, and then they break. So our metaphors equate the experience of loving someone to extreme violence or illness. (Laughter) They do. And they position us as the victims of unforeseen and totally unavoidable circumstances. My favorite one of these is "smitten," which is the past participle of the word "smite." And if you look this word up in the dictionary — (Laughter) you will see that it can be defined as both "grievous affliction," and, "to be very much in love." I tend to associate the word "smite" with a very particular context, which is the Old Testament. In the Book of Exodus alone, there are 16 references to smiting, which is the word that the Bible uses for the vengeance of an angry God. (Laughter) Here we are using the same word to talk about love that we use to explain a plague of locusts. (Laughter) Right? So, how did this happen? How have we come to associate love with great pain and suffering? And why do we talk about this ostensibly good experience as if we are victims? These are difficult questions, but I have some theories. And to think this through, I want to focus on one metaphor in particular, which is the idea of love as madness. When I first started researching romantic love, I found these madness metaphors everywhere. The history of Western culture is full of language that equates love to mental illness. These are just a few examples. William Shakespeare: "Love is merely a madness," from "As You Like It." Friedrich Nietzsche: "There is always some madness in love." "Got me looking, got me looking so crazy in love — " (Laughter) from the great philosopher, Beyoncé Knowles. (Laughter) I fell in love for the first time when I was 20, and it was a pretty turbulent relationship right from the start. And it was long distance for the first couple of years, so for me that meant very high highs and very low lows. I can remember one moment in particular. I was sitting on a bed in a hostel in South America, and I was watching the person I love walk out the door. And it was late, it was nearly midnight, we'd gotten into an argument over dinner, and when we got back to our room, he threw his things in the bag and stormed out. While I can no longer remember what that argument was about, I very clearly remember how I felt watching him leave. I was 22, it was my first time in the developing world, and I was totally alone. I had another week until my flight home, and I knew the name of the town that I was in, and the name of the city that I needed to get to to fly out, but I had no idea how to get around. I had no guidebook and very little money, and I spoke no Spanish. Someone more adventurous than me might have seen this as a moment of opportunity, but I just froze. I just sat there. And then I burst into tears. But despite my panic, some small voice in my head thought, "Wow. That was dramatic. I must really be doing this love thing right." (Laughter) Because some part of me wanted to feel miserable in love. And it sounds so strange to me now, but at 22, I longed to have dramatic experiences, and in that moment, I was irrational and furious and devastated, and weirdly enough, I thought that this somehow legitimized the feelings I had for the guy who had just left me. I think on some level I wanted to feel a little bit crazy, because I thought that that was how love worked. This really should not be surprising, considering that according to Wikipedia, there are eight films, 14 songs, two albums and one novel with the title "Crazy Love." About half an hour later, he came back to our room. We made up. We spent another mostly happy week traveling together. And then, when I got home, I thought, "That was so terrible and so great. This must be a real romance." I expected my first love to feel like madness, and of course, it met that expectation very well. But loving someone like that — as if my entire well-being depended on him loving me back — was not very good for me or for him. But I suspect this experience of love is not that unusual. Most of us do feel a bit mad in the early stages of romantic love. In fact, there is research to confirm that this is somewhat normal, because, neurochemically speaking, romantic love and mental illness are not that easily distinguished. This is true. This study from 1999 used blood tests to confirm that the serotonin levels of the newly in love very closely resembled the serotonin levels of people who had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. (Laughter) Yes, and low levels of serotonin are also associated with seasonal affective disorder and depression. So there is some evidence that love is associated with changes to our moods and our behaviors. And there are other studies to confirm that most relationships begin this way. Researchers believe that the low levels of serotonin is correlated with obsessive thinking about the object of love, which is like this feeling that someone has set up camp in your brain. And most of us feel this way when we first fall in love. But the good news is, it doesn't always last that long — usually from a few months to a couple of years. When I got back from my trip to South America, I spent a lot of time alone in my room, checking my email, desperate to hear from the guy I loved. I decided that if my friends could not understand my grievous affliction, then I did not need their friendship. So I stopped hanging out with most of them. And it was probably the most unhappy year of my life. But I think I felt like it was my job to be miserable, because if I could be miserable, then I would prove how much I loved him. And if I could prove it, then we would have to end up together eventually. This is the real madness, because there is no cosmic rule that says that great suffering equals great reward, but we talk about love as if this is true. Our experiences of love are both biological and cultural. Our biology tells us that love is good by activating these reward circuits in our brain, and it tells us that love is painful when, after a fight or a breakup, that neurochemical reward is withdrawn. And in fact — and maybe you've heard this — neurochemically speaking, going through a breakup is a lot like going through cocaine withdrawal, which I find reassuring. (Laughter) And then our culture uses language to shape and reinforce these ideas about love. In this case, we're talking about metaphors about pain and addiction and madness. It's kind of an interesting feedback loop. Love is powerful and at times painful, and we express this in our words and stories, but then our words and stories prime us to expect love to be powerful and painful. What's interesting to me is that all of this happens in a culture that values lifelong monogamy. It seems like we want it both ways: we want love to feel like madness, and we want it to last an entire lifetime. That sounds terrible. (Laughter) To reconcile this, we need to either change our culture or change our expectations. So, imagine if we were all less passive in love. If we were more assertive, more open-minded, more generous and instead of falling in love, we stepped into love. I know that this is asking a lot, but I'm not actually the first person to suggest this. In their book, "Metaphors We Live By," linguists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff suggest a really interesting solution to this dilemma, which is to change our metaphors. They argue that metaphors really do shape the way we experience the world, and that they can even act as a guide for future actions, like self-fulfilling prophecies. Johnson and Lakoff suggest a new metaphor for love: love as a collaborative work of art. I really like this way of thinking about love. Linguists talk about metaphors as having entailments, which is essentially a way of considering all the implications of, or ideas contained within, a given metaphor. And Johnson and Lakoff talk about everything that collaborating on a work of art entails: effort, compromise, patience, shared goals. These ideas align nicely with our cultural investment in long-term romantic commitment, but they also work well for other kinds of relationships — short-term, casual, polyamorous, non-monogamous, asexual — because this metaphor brings much more complex ideas to the experience of loving someone. So if love is a collaborative work of art, then love is an aesthetic experience. Love is unpredictable, love is creative, love requires communication and discipline, it is frustrating and emotionally demanding. And love involves both joy and pain. Ultimately, each experience of love is different. When I was younger, it never occurred to me that I was allowed to demand more from love, that I didn't have to just accept whatever love offered. When 14-year-old Juliet first meets — or, when 14-year-old Juliet cannot be with Romeo, whom she has met four days ago, she does not feel disappointed or angsty. Where is she? She wants to die. Right? And just as a refresher, at this point in the play, act three of five, Romeo is not dead. He's alive, he's healthy, he's just been banished from the city. I understand that 16th-century Verona is unlike contemporary North America, and yet when I first read this play, also at age 14, Juliet's suffering made sense to me. Reframing love as something I get to create with someone I admire, rather than something that just happens to me without my control or consent, is empowering. It's still hard. Love still feels totally maddening and crushing some days, and when I feel really frustrated, I have to remind myself: my job in this relationship is to talk to my partner about what I want to make together. This isn't easy, either. But it's just so much better than the alternative, which is that thing that feels like madness. This version of love is not about winning or losing someone's affection. Instead, it requires that you trust your partner and talk about things when trusting feels difficult, which sounds so simple, but is actually a kind of revolutionary, radical act. This is because you get to stop thinking about yourself and what you're gaining or losing in your relationship, and you get to start thinking about what you have to offer. This version of love allows us to say things like, "Hey, we're not very good collaborators. Maybe this isn't for us." Or, "That relationship was shorter than I had planned, but it was still kind of beautiful." The beautiful thing about the collaborative work of art is that it will not paint or draw or sculpt itself. This version of love allows us to decide what it looks like. Thank you. (Applause) |
The next step in nanotechnology | {0: "IBM's George Tulevski wants to use carbon nanotubes to revolutionize microchip design."} | TED@IBM | Let's imagine a sculptor building a statue, just chipping away with his chisel. Michelangelo had this elegant way of describing it when he said, "Every block of stone has a statue inside of it, and it's the task of the sculptor to discover it." But what if he worked in the opposite direction? Not from a solid block of stone, but from a pile of dust, somehow gluing millions of these particles together to form a statue. I know that's an absurd notion. It's probably impossible. The only way you get a statue from a pile of dust is if the statue built itself — if somehow we could compel millions of these particles to come together to form the statue. Now, as odd as that sounds, that is almost exactly the problem I work on in my lab. I don't build with stone, I build with nanomaterials. They're these just impossibly small, fascinating little objects. They're so small that if this controller was a nanoparticle, a human hair would be the size of this entire room. And they're at the heart of a field we call nanotechnology, which I'm sure we've all heard about, and we've all heard how it is going to change everything. When I was a graduate student, it was one of the most exciting times to be working in nanotechnology. There were scientific breakthroughs happening all the time. The conferences were buzzing, there was tons of money pouring in from funding agencies. And the reason is when objects get really small, they're governed by a different set of physics that govern ordinary objects, like the ones we interact with. We call this physics quantum mechanics. And what it tells you is that you can precisely tune their behavior just by making seemingly small changes to them, like adding or removing a handful of atoms, or twisting the material. It's like this ultimate toolkit. You really felt empowered; you felt like you could make anything. And we were doing it — and by we I mean my whole generation of graduate students. We were trying to make blazing fast computers using nanomaterials. We were constructing quantum dots that could one day go in your body and find and fight disease. There were even groups trying to make an elevator to space using carbon nanotubes. You can look that up, that's true. Anyways, we thought it was going to affect all parts of science and technology, from computing to medicine. And I have to admit, I drank all of the Kool-Aid. I mean, every last drop. But that was 15 years ago, and — fantastic science was done, really important work. We've learned a lot. We were never able to translate that science into new technologies — into technologies that could actually impact people. And the reason is, these nanomaterials — they're like a double-edged sword. The same thing that makes them so interesting — their small size — also makes them impossible to work with. It's literally like trying to build a statue out of a pile of dust. And we just don't have the tools that are small enough to work with them. But even if we did, it wouldn't really matter, because we couldn't one by one place millions of particles together to build a technology. So because of that, all of the promise and all of the excitement has remained just that: promise and excitement. We don't have any disease-fighting nanobots, there's no elevators to space, and the thing that I'm most interested in, no new types of computing. Now that last one, that's a really important one. We just have come to expect the pace of computing advancements to go on indefinitely. We've built entire economies on this idea. And this pace exists because of our ability to pack more and more devices onto a computer chip. And as those devices get smaller, they get faster, they consume less power and they get cheaper. And it's this convergence that gives us this incredible pace. As an example: if I took the room-sized computer that sent three men to the moon and back and somehow compressed it — compressed the world's greatest computer of its day, so it was the same size as your smartphone — your actual smartphone, that thing you spent 300 bucks on and just toss out every two years, would blow this thing away. You would not be impressed. It couldn't do anything that your smartphone does. It would be slow, you couldn't put any of your stuff on it, you could possibly get through the first two minutes of a "Walking Dead" episode if you're lucky — (Laughter) The point is the progress — it's not gradual. The progress is relentless. It's exponential. It compounds on itself year after year, to the point where if you compare a technology from one generation to the next, they're almost unrecognizable. And we owe it to ourselves to keep this progress going. We want to say the same thing 10, 20, 30 years from now: look what we've done over the last 30 years. Yet we know this progress may not last forever. In fact, the party's kind of winding down. It's like "last call for alcohol," right? If you look under the covers, by many metrics like speed and performance, the progress has already slowed to a halt. So if we want to keep this party going, we have to do what we've always been able to do, and that is to innovate. So our group's role and our group's mission is to innovate by employing carbon nanotubes, because we think that they can provide a path to continue this pace. They are just like they sound. They're tiny, hollow tubes of carbon atoms, and their nanoscale size, that small size, gives rise to these just outstanding electronic properties. And the science tells us if we could employ them in computing, we could see up to a ten times improvement in performance. It's like skipping through several technology generations in just one step. So there we have it. We have this really important problem and we have what is basically the ideal solution. The science is screaming at us, "This is what you should be doing to solve your problem." So, all right, let's get started, let's do this. But you just run right back into that double-edged sword. This "ideal solution" contains a material that's impossible to work with. I'd have to arrange billions of them just to make one single computer chip. It's that same conundrum, it's like this undying problem. At this point, we said, "Let's just stop. Let's not go down that same road. Let's just figure out what's missing. What are we not dealing with? What are we not doing that needs to be done?" It's like in "The Godfather," right? When Fredo betrays his brother Michael, we all know what needs to be done. Fredo's got to go. (Laughter) But Michael — he puts it off. Fine, I get it. Their mother's still alive, it would make her upset. We just said, "What's the Fredo in our problem?" What are we not dealing with? What are we not doing, but needs to be done to make this a success?" And the answer is that the statue has to build itself. We have to find a way, somehow, to compel, to convince billions of these particles to assemble themselves into the technology. We can't do it for them. They have to do it for themselves. And it's the hard way, and this is not trivial, but in this case, it's the only way. Now, as it turns out, this is not that alien of a problem. We just don't build anything this way. People don't build anything this way. But if you look around — and there's examples everywhere — Mother Nature builds everything this way. Everything is built from the bottom up. You can go to the beach, you'll find these simple organisms that use proteins — basically molecules — to template what is essentially sand, just plucking it from the sea and building these extraordinary architectures with extreme diversity. And nature's not crude like us, just hacking away. She's elegant and smart, building with what's available, molecule by molecule, making structures with a complexity and a diversity that we can't even approach. And she's already at the nano. She's been there for hundreds of millions of years. We're the ones that are late to the party. So we decided that we're going to use the same tool that nature uses, and that's chemistry. Chemistry is the missing tool. And chemistry works in this case because these nanoscale objects are about the same size as molecules, so we can use them to steer these objects around, much like a tool. That's exactly what we've done in our lab. We've developed chemistry that goes into the pile of dust, into the pile of nanoparticles, and pulls out exactly the ones we need. Then we can use chemistry to arrange literally billions of these particles into the pattern we need to build circuits. And because we can do that, we can build circuits that are many times faster than what anyone's been able to make using nanomaterials before. Chemistry's the missing tool, and every day our tool gets sharper and gets more precise. And eventually — and we hope this is within a handful of years — we can deliver on one of those original promises. Now, computing is just one example. It's the one that I'm interested in, that my group is really invested in, but there are others in renewable energy, in medicine, in structural materials, where the science is going to tell you to move towards the nano. That's where the biggest benefit is. But if we're going to do that, the scientists of today and tomorrow are going to need new tools — tools just like the ones I described. And they will need chemistry. That's the point. The beauty of science is that once you develop these new tools, they're out there. They're out there forever, and anyone anywhere can pick them up and use them, and help to deliver on the promise of nanotechnology. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. (Applause) |
Meet the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet | {0: 'Dan Bricklin helped fuel the rapid growth of the personal computer industry.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | How many of you have used an electronic spreadsheet, like Microsoft Excel? Very good. Now, how many of you have run a business with a spreadsheet by hand, like my dad did for his small printing business in Philadelphia? A lot less. Well, that's the way it was done for hundreds of years. In early 1978, I started working on an idea that eventually became VisiCalc. And the next year it shipped running on something new called an Apple II personal computer. You could tell that things had really changed when, six years later, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial that assumed you knew what VisiCalc was and maybe even were using it. Steve Jobs back in 1990 said that "spreadsheets propelled the industry forward." "VisiCalc propelled the success of Apple more than any other single event." On a more personal note, Steve said, "If VisiCalc had been written for some other computer, you'd be interviewing somebody else right now." So, VisiCalc was instrumental in getting personal computers on business desks. How did it come about? What was it? What did I go through to make it be what it was? Well, I first learned to program back in 1966, when I was 15 — just a couple months after this photo was taken. Few high schoolers had access to computers in those days. But through luck and an awful lot of perseverance, I was able to get computer time around the city. After sleeping in the mud at Woodstock, I went off to MIT to go to college, where to make money, I worked on the Multics Project. Multics was a trailblazing interactive time-sharing system. Have you heard of the Linux and Unix operating systems? They came from Multics. I worked on the Multics versions of what are known as interpreted computer languages, that are used by people in noncomputer fields to do their calculations while seated at a computer terminal. After I graduated from MIT, I went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation. At DEC, I worked on software for the new area of computerized typesetting. I helped newspapers replace their reporters' typewriters with computer terminals. I'd write software and then I'd go out in the field to places like the Kansas City Star, where I would train users and get feedback. This was real-world experience that is quite different than what I saw in the lab at MIT. After that, I was project leader of the software for DEC's first word processor, again a new field. Like with typesetting, the important thing was crafting a user interface that was both natural and efficient for noncomputer people to use. After I was at DEC, I went to work for a small company that made microprocessor-based electronic cash registers for the fast-food industry. But I had always wanted to start a company with my friend Bob Frankston that I met on the Multics project at MIT. So I decided to go back to school to learn as much as I could about business. And in the fall of 1977, I entered the MBA program at Harvard Business School. I was one of the few percentage of students who had a background in computer programming. There's a picture of me from the yearbook sitting in the front row. (Laughter) Now, at Harvard, we learned by the case method. We'd do about three cases a day. Cases consist of up to a few dozen pages describing particular business situations. They often have exhibits, and exhibits often have words and numbers laid out in ways that make sense for the particular situation. They're usually all somewhat different. Here's my homework. Again, numbers, words, laid out in ways that made sense. Lots of calculations — we got really close to our calculators. In fact, here's my calculator. For Halloween, I went dressed up as a calculator. (Laughter) At the beginning of each class, the professor would call on somebody to present the case. What they would do is they would explain what was going on and then dictate information that the professor would transcribe onto the many motorized blackboards in the front of the class, and then we'd have a discussion. One of the really frustrating things is when you've done all your homework, you come in the next day only to find out that you made an error and all of the other numbers you did were wrong. And you couldn't participate as well. And we were marked by class participation. So, sitting there with 87 other people in the class, I got to daydream a lot. Most programmers in those days worked on mainframes, building things like inventory systems, payroll systems and bill-paying systems. But I had worked on interactive word processing and on-demand personal computation. Instead of thinking about paper printouts and punch cards, I imagined a magic blackboard that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all of the other numbers would automatically change, like word processing with numbers. I imagined that my calculator had mouse hardware on the bottom of it and a head-up display, like in a fighter plane. And I could type some numbers in, and circle it, and press the sum button. And right in the middle of a negotiation I'd be able to get the answer. Now I just had to take my fantasy and turn it into reality. My father taught me about prototyping. He showed me mock-ups that he'd make to figure out the placement on the page for the things for brochures that he was printing. And he'd use it to get feedback from customers and OKs before he sent the job off to the presses. The act of making a simple, working version of what you're trying to build forces you to uncover key problems. And it lets you find solutions to those problems much less expensively. So I decided to build a prototype. I went to a video terminal connected to Harvard's time-sharing system and got to work. One of the first problems that I ran into was: How do you represent values in formulas? Let me show you what I mean. I thought that you would point somewhere, type in some words, then type in some somewhere else, put in some numbers and some more numbers, point where you want the answer. And then point to the first, press minus, point to the second, and get the result. The problem was: What should I put in the formula? It had to be something the computer knew what to put in. And if you looked at the formula, you needed to know where on the screen it referred to. The first thing I thought was the programmer way of doing it. The first time you pointed to somewhere, the computer would ask you to type in a unique name. It became pretty clear pretty fast that that was going to be too tedious. The computer had to automatically make up the name and put it inside. So I thought, why not make it be the order in which you create them? I tried that. Value 1, value 2. Pretty quickly I saw that if you had more than a few values you'd never remember on the screen where things were. Then I said, why not instead of allowing you to put values anywhere, I'll restrict you to a grid? Then when you pointed to a cell, the computer could put the row and column in as a name. And, if I did it like a map and put ABC across the top and numbers along the side, if you saw B7 in a formula, you'd know exactly where it was on the screen. And if you had to type the formula in yourself, you'd know what to do. Restricting you to a grid helped solve my problem. It also opened up new capabilities, like the ability to have ranges of cells. But it wasn't too restrictive — you could still put any value, any formula, in any cell. And that's the way we do it to this day, almost 40 years later. My friend Bob and I decided that we were going to build this product together. I did more work figuring out exactly how the program was supposed to behave. I wrote a reference card to act as documentation. It also helped me ensure that the user interface I was defining could be explained concisely and clearly to regular people. Bob worked in the attic of the apartment he rented in Arlington, Massachusetts. This is the inside of the attic. Bob bought time on the MIT Multics System to write computer code on a terminal like this. And then he would download test versions to a borrowed Apple II over a phone line using an acoustic coupler, and then we would test. For one of these tests I prepared for this case about the Pepsi Challenge. Print wasn't working yet, so I had to copy everything down. Save wasn't working, so every time it crashed, I had to type in all of the formulas again, over and over again. The next day in class, I raised my hand; I got called on, and I presented the case. I did five-year projections. I did all sorts of different scenarios. I aced the case. VisiCalc was already useful. The professor said, "How did you do it?" Well, I didn't want to tell him about our secret program. (Laughter) So I said, "I took this and added this and multiplied by this and subtracted that." He said, "Well, why didn't you use a ratio?" I said, "Hah! A ratio — that wouldn't have been as exact!" What I didn't say was, "Divide isn't working yet." (Laughter) Eventually, though, we did finish enough of VisiCalc to be able to show it to the public. My dad printed up a sample reference card that we could use as marketing material. In June of 1979, our publisher announced VisiCalc to the world, in a small booth at the giant National Computer Conference in New York City. The New York Times had a humorous article about the conference. "The machines perform what seem religious rites ... Even as the believers gather, the painters in the Coliseum sign room are adding to the pantheon, carefully lettering 'VISICALC' in giant black on yellow. All hail VISICALC!" (Gasp) New York Times: "All hail VISICALC." (Laughter) That was the last mention of the electronic spreadsheet in the popular business press for about two years. Most people didn't get it yet. But some did. In October of 1979, we shipped VisiCalc. It came in packaging that looked like this. And it looked like this running on the Apple II. And the rest, as they say, is history. Now, there's an awful lot more to this story, but that'll have to wait for another day. One thing, though, Harvard remembers. Here's that classroom. They put up a plaque to commemorate what happened there. (Applause) But it also serves as a reminder that you, too, should take your unique backgrounds, skills and needs and build prototypes to discover and work out the key problems, and through that, change the world. Thank you. (Applause) |
To solve old problems, study new species | {0: 'Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado wants to understand the how and why of tissue regeneration. '} | TEDxKC | For the past few years, I've been spending my summers in the marine biological laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And there, what I've been doing is essentially renting a boat. What I would like to do is ask you to come on a boat ride with me tonight. So, we ride off from Eel Pond into Vineyard Sound, right off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, equipped with a drone to identify potential spots from which to peer into the Atlantic. Earlier, I was going to say into the depths of the Atlantic, but we don't have to go too deep to reach the unknown. Here, barely two miles away from what is arguably the greatest marine biology lab in the world, we lower a simple plankton net into the water and bring up to the surface things that humanity rarely pays any attention to, and oftentimes has never seen before. Here's one of the organisms that we caught in our net. This is a jellyfish. But look closely, and living inside of this animal is another organism that is very likely entirely new to science. A complete new species. Or how about this other transparent beauty with a beating heart, asexually growing on top of its head, progeny that will move on to reproduce sexually. Let me say that again: this animal is growing asexually on top of its head, progeny that is going to reproduce sexually in the next generation. A weird jellyfish? Not quite. This is an ascidian. This is a group of animals that now we know we share extensive genomic ancestry with, and it is perhaps the closest invertebrate species to our own. Meet your cousin, Thalia democratica. (Laughter) I'm pretty sure you didn't save a spot at your last family reunion for Thalia, but let me tell you, these animals are profoundly related to us in ways that we're just beginning to understand. So, next time you hear anybody derisively telling you that this type of research is a simple fishing expedition, I hope that you'll remember the trip that we just took. Today, many of the biological sciences only see value in studying deeper what we already know — in mapping already-discovered continents. But some of us are much more interested in the unknown. We want to discover completely new continents, and gaze at magnificent vistas of ignorance. We crave the experience of being completely baffled by something we've never seen before. And yes, I agree there's a lot of little ego satisfaction in being able to say, "Hey, I was the first one to discover that." But this is not a self-aggrandizing enterprise, because in this type of discovery research, if you don't feel like a complete idiot most of the time, you're just not sciencing hard enough. (Laughter) So every summer I bring onto the deck of this little boat of ours more and more things that we know very little about. I would like tonight to tell you a story about life that rarely gets told in an environment like this. From the vantage point of our 21st-century biological laboratories, we have begun to illuminate many mysteries of life with knowledge. We sense that after centuries of scientific research, we're beginning to make significant inroads into understanding some of the most fundamental principles of life. Our collective optimism is reflected by the growth of biotechnology across the globe, striving to utilize scientific knowledge to cure human diseases. Things like cancer, aging, degenerative diseases; these are but some of the undesirables we wish to tame. I often wonder: Why is it that we are having so much trouble trying to solve the problem of cancer? Is it that we're trying to solve the problem of cancer, and not trying to understand life? Life on this planet shares a common origin, and I can summarize 3.5 billion years of the history of life on this planet in a single slide. What you see here are representatives of all known species in our planet. In this immensity of life and biodiversity, we occupy a rather unremarkable position. (Laughter) Homo sapiens. The last of our kind. And though I don't really want to disparage at all the accomplishments of our species, as much as we wish it to be so and often pretend that it is, we are not the measure of all things. We are, however, the measurers of many things. We relentlessly quantify, analyze and compare, and some of this is absolutely invaluable and indeed necessary. But this emphasis today on forcing biological research to specialize and to produce practical outcomes is actually restricting our ability to interrogate life to unacceptably narrow confines and unsatisfying depths. We are measuring an astonishingly narrow sliver of life, and hoping that those numbers will save all of our lives. How narrow do you ask? Well, let me give you a number. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently estimated that about 95 percent of our oceans remain unexplored. Now let that sink in for a second. 95 percent of our oceans remain unexplored. I think it's very safe to say that we don't even know how much about life we do not know. So, it's not surprising that every week in my field we begin to see the addition of more and more new species to this amazing tree of life. This one for example — discovered earlier this summer, new to science, and now occupying its lonely branch in our family tree. What is even more tragic is that we know about a bunch of other species of animals out there, but their biology remains sorely under-studied. I'm sure some of you have heard about the fact that a starfish can actually regenerate its arm after it's lost. But some of you might not know that the arm itself can actually regenerate a complete starfish. And there are animals out there that do truly astounding things. I'm almost willing to bet that many of you have never heard of the flatworm, Schmidtea mediterranea. This little guy right here does things that essentially just blow my mind. You can grab one of these animals and cut it into 18 different fragments, and each and every one of those fragments will go on to regenerate a complete animal in under two weeks. 18 heads, 18 bodies, 18 mysteries. For the past decade and a half or so, I've been trying to figure out how these little dudes do what they do, and how they pull this magic trick off. But like all good magicians, they're not really releasing their secrets readily to me. (Laughter) So here we are, after 20 years of essentially studying these animals, genome mapping, chin scratching, and thousands of amputations and thousands of regenerations, we still don't fully understand how these animals do what they do. Each planarian an ocean unto itself, full of unknowns. One of the common characteristics of all of these animals I've been talking to you about is that they did not appear to have received the memo that they need to behave according to the rules that we have derived from a handful of randomly selected animals that currently populate the vast majority of biomedical laboratories across the world. Meet our Nobel Prize winners. Seven species, essentially, that have produced for us the brunt of our understanding of biological behavior today. This little guy right here — three Nobel Prizes in 12 years. And yet, after all the attention they have garnered, and all the knowledge they have generated, as well as the lion's share of the funding, here we are standing [before] the same litany of intractable problems and many new challenges. And that's because, unfortunately, these seven animals essentially correspond to 0.0009 percent of all of the species that inhabit the planet. So I'm beginning to suspect that our specialization is beginning to impede our progress at best, and at worst, is leading us astray. That's because life on this planet and its history is the history of rule breakers. Life started on the face of this planet as single-cell organisms, swimming for millions of years in the ocean, until one of those creatures decided, "I'm going to do things differently today; today I would like to invent something called multicellularity, and I'm going to do this." And I'm sure it wasn't a popular decision at the time — (Laughter) but somehow, it managed to do it. And then, multicellular organisms began to populate all these ancestral oceans, and they thrived. And we have them here today. Land masses began to emerge from the surface of the oceans, and another creature thought, "Hey, that looks like a really nice piece of real estate. I'd like to move there." "Are you crazy? You're going to desiccate out there. Nothing can live out of water." But life found a way, and there are organisms now that live on land. Once on land, they may have looked up into the sky and said, "It would be nice to go to the clouds, I'm going to fly." "You can't break the law of gravity, there's no way you can fly." And yet, nature has invented — multiple and independent times — ways to fly. I love to study these animals that break the rules, because every time they break a rule, they invent something new that made it possible for us to be able to be here today. These animals did not get the memo. They break the rules. So if we're going to study animals that break the rules, shouldn't how we study them also break the rules? I think we need to renew our spirit of exploration. Rather than bring nature into our laboratories and interrogate it there, we need to bring our science into the majestic laboratory that is nature, and there, with our modern technological armamentarium, interrogate every new form of life we find, and any new biological attribute that we may find. We actually need to bring all of our intelligence to becoming stupid again — clueless [before] the immensity of the unknown. Because after all, science is not really about knowledge. Science is about ignorance. That's what we do. Once, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea ..." As a scientist and a teacher, I like to paraphrase this to read that we scientists need to teach our students to long for the endless immensity of the sea that is our ignorance. We Homo sapiens are the only species we know of that is driven to scientific inquiry. We, like all other species on this planet, are inextricably woven into the history of life on this planet. And I think I'm a little wrong when I say that life is a mystery, because I think that life is actually an open secret that has been beckoning our species for millennia to understand it. So I ask you: Aren't we the best chance that life has to know itself? And if so, what the heck are we waiting for? Thank you. (Applause) |
If a story moves you, act on it | {0: 'Sisonke Msimang untangles the threads of race, class and gender that run through the fabric of African and global culture.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | So earlier this year, I was informed that I would be doing a TED Talk. So I was excited, then I panicked, then I was excited, then I panicked, and in between the excitement and the panicking, I started to do my research, and my research primarily consisted of Googling how to give a great TED Talk. (Laughter) And interspersed with that, I was Googling Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. How many of you know who that is? (Cheers) So I was Googling her because I always Google her because I'm just a fan, but also because she always has important and interesting things to say. And the combination of those searches kept leading me to her talk on the dangers of a single story, on what happens when we have a solitary lens through which to understand certain groups of people, and it is the perfect talk. It's the talk that I would have given if I had been famous first. (Laughter) You know, and you know, like, she's African and I'm African, and she's a feminist and I'm a feminist, and she's a storyteller and I'm a storyteller, so I really felt like it's my talk. (Laughter) So I decided that I was going to learn how to code, and then I was going to hack the internet and I would take down all the copies of that talk that existed, and then I would memorize it, and then I would come here and deliver it as if it was my own speech. So that plan was going really well, except the coding part, and then one morning a few months ago, I woke up to the news that the wife of a certain presidential candidate had given a speech that — (Laughter) (Applause) that sounded eerily like a speech given by one of my other faves, Michelle Obama. (Cheers) And so I decided that I should probably write my own TED Talk, and so that is what I am here to do. I'm here to talk about my own observations about storytelling. I want to talk to you about the power of stories, of course, but I also want to talk about their limitations, particularly for those of us who are interested in social justice. So since Adichie gave that talk seven years ago, there has been a boom in storytelling. Stories are everywhere, and if there was a danger in the telling of one tired old tale, then I think there has got to be lots to celebrate about the flourishing of so many stories and so many voices. Stories are the antidote to bias. In fact, today, if you are middle class and connected via the internet, you can download stories at the touch of a button or the swipe of a screen. You can listen to a podcast about what it's like to grow up Dalit in Kolkata. You can hear an indigenous man in Australia talk about the trials and triumphs of raising his children in dignity and in pride. Stories make us fall in love. They heal rifts and they bridge divides. Stories can even make it easier for us to talk about the deaths of people in our societies who don't matter, because they make us care. Right? I'm not so sure, and I actually work for a place called the Centre for Stories. And my job is to help to tell stories that challenge mainstream narratives about what it means to be black or a Muslim or a refugee or any of those other categories that we talk about all the time. But I come to this work after a long history as a social justice activist, and so I'm really interested in the ways that people talk about nonfiction storytelling as though it's about more than entertainment, as though it's about being a catalyst for social action. It's not uncommon to hear people say that stories make the world a better place. Increasingly, though, I worry that even the most poignant stories, particularly the stories about people who no one seems to care about, can often get in the way of action towards social justice. Now, this is not because storytellers mean any harm. Quite the contrary. Storytellers are often do-gooders like me and, I suspect, yourselves. And the audiences of storytellers are often deeply compassionate and empathetic people. Still, good intentions can have unintended consequences, and so I want to propose that stories are not as magical as they seem. So three — because it's always got to be three — three reasons why I think that stories don't necessarily make the world a better place. Firstly, stories can create an illusion of solidarity. There is nothing like that feel-good factor you get from listening to a fantastic story where you feel like you climbed that mountain, right, or that you befriended that death row inmate. But you didn't. You haven't done anything. Listening is an important but insufficient step towards social action. Secondly, I think often we are drawn towards characters and protagonists who are likable and human. And this makes sense, of course, right? Because if you like someone, then you care about them. But the inverse is also true. If you don't like someone, then you don't care about them. And if you don't care about them, you don't have to see yourself as having a moral obligation to think about the circumstances that shaped their lives. I learned this lesson when I was 14 years old. I learned that actually, you don't have to like someone to recognize their wisdom, and you certainly don't have to like someone to take a stand by their side. So my bike was stolen while I was riding it — (Laughter) which is possible if you're riding slowly enough, which I was. (Laughter) So one minute I'm cutting across this field in the Nairobi neighborhood where I grew up, and it's like a very bumpy path, and so when you're riding a bike, you don't want to be like, you know — (Laughter) And so I'm going like this, slowly pedaling, and all of a sudden, I'm on the floor. I'm on the ground, and I look up, and there's this kid peddling away in the getaway vehicle, which is my bike, and he's about 11 or 12 years old, and I'm on the floor, and I'm crying because I saved a lot of money for that bike, and I'm crying and I stand up and I start screaming. Instinct steps in, and I start screaming, "Mwizi, mwizi!" which means "thief" in Swahili. And out of the woodworks, all of these people come out and they start to give chase. This is Africa, so mob justice in action. Right? And I round the corner, and they've captured him, they've caught him. The suspect has been apprehended, and they make him give me my bike back, and they also make him apologize. Again, you know, typical African justice, right? And so they make him say sorry. And so we stand there facing each other, and he looks at me, and he says sorry, but he looks at me with this unbridled fury. He is very, very angry. And it is the first time that I have been confronted with someone who doesn't like me simply because of what I represent. He looks at me with this look as if to say, "You, with your shiny skin and your bike, you're angry at me?" So it was a hard lesson that he didn't like me, but you know what, he was right. I was a middle-class kid living in a poor country. I had a bike, and he barely had food. Sometimes, it's the messages that we don't want to hear, the ones that make us want to crawl out of ourselves, that we need to hear the most. For every lovable storyteller who steals your heart, there are hundreds more whose voices are slurred and ragged, who don't get to stand up on a stage dressed in fine clothes like this. There are a million angry-boy-on-a-bike stories and we can't afford to ignore them simply because we don't like their protagonists or because that's not the kid that we would bring home with us from the orphanage. The third reason that I think that stories don't necessarily make the world a better place is that too often we are so invested in the personal narrative that we forget to look at the bigger picture. And so we applaud someone when they tell us about their feelings of shame, but we don't necessarily link that to oppression. We nod understandingly when someone says they felt small, but we don't link that to discrimination. The most important stories, especially for social justice, are those that do both, that are both personal and allow us to explore and understand the political. But it's not just about the stories we like versus the stories we choose to ignore. Increasingly, we are living in a society where there are larger forces at play, where stories are actually for many people beginning to replace the news. Yeah? We live in a time where we are witnessing the decline of facts, when emotions rule and analysis, it's kind of boring, right? Where we value what we feel more than what we actually know. A recent report by the Pew Center on trends in America indicates that only 10 percent of young adults under the age of 30 "place a lot of trust in the media." Now, this is significant. It means that storytellers are gaining trust at precisely the same moment that many in the media are losing the confidence in the public. This is not a good thing, because while stories are important and they help us to have insights in many ways, we need the media. From my years as a social justice activist, I know very well that we need credible facts from media institutions combined with the powerful voices of storytellers. That's what pushes the needle forward in terms of social justice. In the final analysis, of course, it is justice that makes the world a better place, not stories. Right? And so if it is justice that we are after, then I think we mustn't focus on the media or on storytellers. We must focus on audiences, on anyone who has ever turned on a radio or listened to a podcast, and that means all of us. So a few concluding thoughts on what audiences can do to make the world a better place. So firstly, the world would be a better place, I think, if audiences were more curious and more skeptical and asked more questions about the social context that created those stories that they love so much. Secondly, the world would be a better place if audiences recognized that storytelling is intellectual work. And I think it would be important for audiences to demand more buttons on their favorite websites, buttons for example that say, "If you liked this story, click here to support a cause your storyteller believes in." Or "click here to contribute to your storyteller's next big idea." Often, we are committed to the platforms, but not necessarily to the storytellers themselves. And then lastly, I think that audiences can make the world a better place by switching off their phones, by stepping away from their screens and stepping out into the real world beyond what feels safe. Alice Walker has said, "Look closely at the present you are constructing. It should look like the future you are dreaming." Storytellers can help us to dream, but it's up to all of us to have a plan for justice. Thank you. (Applause) |
What happens when you have a disease doctors can't diagnose | {0: "Jennifer Brea was a PhD student at Harvard when, one night, she found she couldn't write her own name."} | TEDSummit | Hi. Thank you. [Jennifer Brea is sound-sensitive. The live audience was asked to applaud ASL-style, in silence.] So, five years ago, this was me. I was a PhD student at Harvard, and I loved to travel. I had just gotten engaged to marry the love of my life. I was 28, and like so many of us when we are in good health, I felt like I was invincible. Then one day I had a fever of 104.7 degrees. I probably should have gone to the doctor, but I'd never really been sick in my life, and I knew that usually, if you have a virus, you stay home and you make some chicken soup, and in a few days, everything will be fine. But this time it wasn't fine. After the fever broke, for three weeks I was so dizzy, I couldn't leave my house. I would walk straight into door frames. I had to hug the walls just to make it to the bathroom. That spring I got infection after infection, and every time I went to the doctor, he said there was absolutely nothing wrong. He had his laboratory tests, which always came back normal. All I had were my symptoms, which I could describe, but no one else can see. I know it sounds silly, but you have to find a way to explain things like this to yourself, and so I thought maybe I was just aging. Maybe this is what it's like to be on the other side of 25. (Laughter) Then the neurological symptoms started. Sometimes I would find that I couldn't draw the right side of a circle. Other times I wouldn't be able to speak or move at all. I saw every kind of specialist: infectious disease doctors, dermatologists, endocrinologists, cardiologists. I even saw a psychiatrist. My psychiatrist said, "It's clear you're really sick, but not with anything psychiatric. I hope they can find out what's wrong with you." The next day, my neurologist diagnosed me with conversion disorder. He told me that everything — the fevers, the sore throats, the sinus infection, all of the gastrointestinal, neurological and cardiac symptoms — were being caused by some distant emotional trauma that I could not remember. The symptoms were real, he said, but they had no biological cause. I was training to be a social scientist. I had studied statistics, probability theory, mathematical modeling, experimental design. I felt like I couldn't just reject my neurologist's diagnosis. It didn't feel true, but I knew from my training that the truth is often counterintuitive, so easily obscured by what we want to believe. So I had to consider the possibility that he was right. That day, I ran a small experiment. I walked back the two miles from my neurologist's office to my house, my legs wrapped in this strange, almost electric kind of pain. I meditated on that pain, contemplating how my mind could have possibly generated all this. As soon as I walked through the door, I collapsed. My brain and my spinal cord were burning. My neck was so stiff I couldn't touch my chin to my chest, and the slightest sound — the rustling of the sheets, my husband walking barefoot in the next room — could cause excruciating pain. I would spend most of the next two years in bed. How could my doctor have gotten it so wrong? I thought I had a rare disease, something doctors had never seen. And then I went online and found thousands of people all over the world living with the same symptoms, similarly isolated, similarly disbelieved. Some could still work, but had to spend their evenings and weekends in bed, just so they could show up the next Monday. On the other end of the spectrum, some were so sick they had to live in complete darkness, unable to tolerate the sound of a human voice or the touch of a loved one. I was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis. You've probably heard it called "chronic fatigue syndrome." For decades, that's a name that's meant that this has been the dominant image of a disease that can be as serious as this. The key symptom we all share is that whenever we exert ourselves — physically, mentally — we pay and we pay hard. If my husband goes for a run, he might be sore for a couple of days. If I try to walk half a block, I might be bedridden for a week. It is a perfect custom prison. I know ballet dancers who can't dance, accountants who can't add, medical students who never became doctors. It doesn't matter what you once were; you can't do it anymore. It's been four years, and I've still never been as well as I was the minute before I walked home from my neurologist's office. It's estimated that about 15 to 30 million people around the world have this disease. In the US, where I'm from, it's about one million people. That makes it roughly twice as common as multiple sclerosis. Patients can live for decades with the physical function of someone with congestive heart failure. Twenty-five percent of us are homebound or bedridden, and 75 to 85 percent of us can't even work part-time. Yet doctors do not treat us and science does not study us. How could a disease this common and this devastating have been forgotten by medicine? When my doctor diagnosed me with conversion disorder, he was invoking a lineage of ideas about women's bodies that are over 2,500 years old. The Roman physician Galen thought that hysteria was caused by sexual deprivation in particularly passionate women. The Greeks thought the uterus would literally dry up and wander around the body in search of moisture, pressing on internal organs — yes — causing symptoms from extreme emotions to dizziness and paralysis. The cure was marriage and motherhood. These ideas went largely unchanged for several millennia until the 1880s, when neurologists tried to modernize the theory of hysteria. Sigmund Freud developed a theory that the unconscious mind could produce physical symptoms when dealing with memories or emotions too painful for the conscious mind to handle. It converted these emotions into physical symptoms. This meant that men could now get hysteria, but of course women were still the most susceptible. When I began investigating the history of my own disease, I was amazed to find how deep these ideas still run. In 1934, 198 doctors, nurses and staff at the Los Angeles County General Hospital became seriously ill. They had muscle weakness, stiffness in the neck and back, fevers — all of the same symptoms I had when I first got diagnosed. Doctors thought it was a new form of polio. Since then, there have been more than 70 outbreaks documented around the world, of a strikingly similar post-infectious disease. All of these outbreaks have tended to disproportionately affect women, and in time, when doctors failed to find the one cause of the disease, they thought that these outbreaks were mass hysteria. Why has this idea had such staying power? I do think it has to do with sexism, but I also think that fundamentally, doctors want to help. They want to know the answer, and this category allows doctors to treat what would otherwise be untreatable, to explain illnesses that have no explanation. The problem is that this can cause real harm. In the 1950s, a psychiatrist named Eliot Slater studied a cohort of 85 patients who had been diagnosed with hysteria. Nine years later, 12 of them were dead and 30 had become disabled. Many had undiagnosed conditions like multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, brain tumors. In 1980, hysteria was officially renamed "conversion disorder." When my neurologist gave me that diagnosis in 2012, he was echoing Freud's words verbatim, and even today, women are 2 to 10 times more likely to receive that diagnosis. The problem with the theory of hysteria or psychogenic illness is that it can never be proven. It is by definition the absence of evidence, and in the case of ME, psychological explanations have held back biological research. All around the world, ME is one of the least funded diseases. In the US, we spend each year roughly 2,500 dollars per AIDS patient, 250 dollars per MS patient and just 5 dollars per year per ME patient. This was not just lightning. I was not just unlucky. The ignorance surrounding my disease has been a choice, a choice made by the institutions that were supposed to protect us. We don't know why ME sometimes runs in families, why you can get it after almost any infection, from enteroviruses to Epstein-Barr virus to Q fever, or why it affects women at two to three times the rate of men. This issue is much bigger than just my disease. When I first got sick, old friends were reaching out to me. I soon found myself a part of a cohort of women in their late 20s whose bodies were falling apart. What was striking was just how much trouble we were having being taken seriously. I learned of one woman with scleroderma, an autoimmune connective tissue disease, who was told for years that it was all in her head. Between the time of onset and diagnosis, her esophagus was so thoroughly damaged, she will never be able to eat again. Another woman with ovarian cancer, who for years was told that it was just early menopause. A friend from college, whose brain tumor was misdiagnosed for years as anxiety. Here's why this worries me: since the 1950s, rates of many autoimmune diseases have doubled to tripled. Forty-five percent of patients who are eventually diagnosed with a recognized autoimmune disease are initially told they're hypochondriacs. Like the hysteria of old, this has everything to do with gender and with whose stories we believe. Seventy-five percent of autoimmune disease patients are women, and in some diseases, it's as high as 90 percent. Even though these diseases disproportionately affect women, they are not women's diseases. ME affects children and ME affects millions of men. And as one patient told me, we get it coming and going — if you're a woman, you're told you're exaggerating your symptoms, but if you're a guy, you're told to be strong, to buck up. And men may even have a more difficult time getting diagnosed. My brain is not what it used to be. Here's the good part: despite everything, I still have hope. So many diseases were once thought of as psychological until science uncovered their biological mechanisms. Patients with epilepsy could be forcibly institutionalized until the EEG was able to measure abnormal electrical activity in the brain. Multiple sclerosis could be misdiagnosed as hysterical paralysis until the CAT scan and the MRI discovered brain lesions. And recently, we used to think that stomach ulcers were just caused by stress, until we discovered that H. pylori was the culprit. ME has never benefited from the kind of science that other diseases have had, but that's starting to change. In Germany, scientists are starting to find evidence of autoimmunity, and in Japan, of brain inflammation. In the US, scientists at Stanford are finding abnormalities in energy metabolism that are 16 standard deviations away from normal. And in Norway, researchers are running a phase-3 clinical trial on a cancer drug that in some patients causes complete remission. What also gives me hope is the resilience of patients. Online we came together, and we shared our stories. We devoured what research there was. We experimented on ourselves. We became our own scientists and our own doctors because we had to be. And slowly I added five percent here, five percent there, until eventually, on a good day, I was able to leave my home. I still had to make ridiculous choices: Will I sit in the garden for 15 minutes, or will I wash my hair today? But it gave me hope that I could be treated. I had a sick body; that was all. And with the right kind of help, maybe one day I could get better. I came together with patients around the world, and we started to fight. We have filled the void with something wonderful, but it is not enough. I still don't know if I will ever be able to run again, or walk at any distance, or do any of those kinetic things that I now only get to do in my dreams. But I am so grateful for how far I have come. Progress is slow, and it is up and it is down, but I am getting a little better each day. I remember what it was like when I was stuck in that bedroom, when it had been months since I had seen the sun. I thought that I would die there. But here I am today, with you, and that is a miracle. I don't know what would have happened had I not been one of the lucky ones, had I gotten sick before the internet, had I not found my community. I probably would have already taken my own life, as so many others have done. How many lives could we have saved, decades ago, if we had asked the right questions? How many lives could we save today if we decide to make a real start? Even once the true cause of my disease is discovered, if we don't change our institutions and our culture, we will do this again to another disease. Living with this illness has taught me that science and medicine are profoundly human endeavors. Doctors, scientists and policy makers are not immune to the same biases that affect all of us. We need to think in more nuanced ways about women's health. Our immune systems are just as much a battleground for equality as the rest of our bodies. We need to listen to patients' stories, and we need to be willing to say, "I don't know." "I don't know" is a beautiful thing. "I don't know" is where discovery starts. And if we can do that, if we can approach the great vastness of all that we do not know, and then, rather than fear uncertainty, maybe we can greet it with a sense of wonder. Thank you. Thank you. |
How online abuse of women has spiraled out of control | {0: 'Delivering pointedly frank observations with down-home sincerity, actor Ashley Judd is building a committed activist career on intense personal experience.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | [This talk contains graphic language and descriptions of sexual violence] [Viewer discretion is advised] "Ashley Judd, stupid fucking slut. "You can't sue someone for calling them a cunt." "If you can't handle the Internet, fuck off, whore." "I wish Ashley Judd would die a horrible death. She is the absolute worst." "Ashley Judd, you're the reason women shouldn't vote." "'Twisted' is such a bad movie, I don't even want to rape it." "Whatever you do, don't tell Ashley Judd. She'll die alone with a dried out vagina." "If I had to fuck an older woman, oh my God, I would fuck the shit out of Ashley Judd, that bitch is hot af. The unforgivable shit I would do to her." Online misogyny is a global gender rights tragedy, and it is imperative that it ends. (Applause) Girls' and women's voices, and our allies' voices are constrained in ways that are personally, economically, professionally and politically damaging. And when we curb abuse, we will expand freedom. I am a Kentucky basketball fan, so on a fine March day last year, I was doing one of the things I do best: I was cheering for my Wildcats. The daffodils were blooming, but the referees were not blowing the whistle when I was telling them to. (Laughter) Funny, they're very friendly to me before the opening tip, but they really ignore me during the game. (Laughter) Three of my players were bleeding, so I did the next best thing ... I tweeted. [@ArkRazorback dirty play can kiss my team's free throw making a — @KySportsRadio @marchmadness @espn Bloodied 3 players so far.] It is routine for me to be treated in the ways I've already described to you. It happens to me every single day on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Since I joined Twitter in 2011, misogyny and misogynists have amply demonstrated they will dog my every step. My spirituality, my faith, being a hillbilly — I can say that, you can't — all of it is fair game. And I have responded to this with various strategies. I've tried engaging people. This one guy was sending me hypersexual, nasty stuff, and there was a girl in his avatar. I wrote him back and said ... "Is that your daughter? I feel a lot of fear that you may think about and talk to women this way." And he surprised me by saying, "You know what? You're right. I apologize." Sometimes people want to be held accountable. This one guy was musing to I don't know who that maybe I was the definition of a cunt. I was married to a Scot for 14 years, so I said, "Cunt means many different things in different countries — (Laughter) but I'm pretty sure you epitomize the global standard of a dick." (Laughter) (Applause) I've tried to rise above it, I've tried to get in the trenches, but mostly I would scroll through these social media platforms with one eye partially closed, trying not to see it, but you can't make a cucumber out of a pickle. What is seen goes in. It's traumatic. And I was always secretly hoping in some part of me that what was being said to me and about me wasn't ... true. Because even I, an avowed, self-declared feminist, who worships at the altar of Gloria — (Laughter) internalize the patriarchy. This is really critical. Patriarchy is not boys and men. It is a system in which we all participate, including me. On that particular day, for some reason, that particular tweet after the basketball game triggered something called a "cyber mob." This vitriolic, global outpouring of the most heinous hate speech: death threats, rape threats. And don't you know, when I was sitting at home alone in my nightgown, I got a phone call, and it was my beloved former husband, and he said on a voice mail, "Loved one ... what is happening to you is not OK." And there was something about him taking a stand for me that night ... that allowed me to take a stand for myself. And I started to write. I started to write about sharing the fact that I'm a survivor of all forms of sexual abuse, including three rapes. And the hate speech I get in response to that — these are just some of the comments posted to news outlets. Being told I'm a "snitch" is really fun. [Jay: She enjoyed every second of it!!!!!] Audience: Oh, Lord Jesus. Ashley Judd: Thank you, Jesus. May your grace and mercy shine. So, I wrote this feminist op-ed, it is entitled, "Forget Your Team: It Is Your Online Gender Violence Toward Girls And Women That Can Kiss My Righteous Ass." (Laughter) (Applause) And I did that alone, and I published it alone, because my chief advisor said, "Please don't, the rain of retaliatory garbage that is inevitable — I fear for you." But I trust girls and I trust women, and I trust our allies. It was published, it went viral, it proves that every single day online misogyny is a phenomenon endured by us all, all over the world, and when it is intersectional, it is worse. Sexual orientation, gender identity, race, ethnicity, religion — you name it, it amplifies the violence endured by girls and women, and for our younger girls, it is worse. It's clearly traumatizing. Our mental health, our emotional well-being are so gravely affected because the threat of violence is experienced neurobiologically as violence. The cortisol shoots up, the limbic system gets fired, we lose productivity at work. And let's talk about work. Our ability to work is constrained. Online searches of women applying for jobs reveal nude pictures of them, false allegations they have STDs, their addresses indicating that they are available for sex with real examples of people showing up at this house for said sex. Our ability to go to school is impaired. 96 percent of all postings of sexual images of our young people ... girls. Our girls. Our boys are two to three times more likely — nonconsensually — to share images. And I want to say a word about revenge porn. Part of what came out of this tweet was my getting connected with allies and other activists who are fighting for a safe and free internet. We started something called the Speech Project; curbing abuse, expanding freedom. And that website provides a critical forum, because there is no global, legal thing to help us figure this out. But we do provide on that website a standardized list of definitions, because it's hard to attack a behavior in the right way if we're not all sharing a definition of what that behavior is. And I learned that revenge porn is often dangerously misapplied. It is the nonconsensual sharing of an image used tactically to shame and humiliate a girl or woman that attempts to pornography us. Our natural sexuality is — I don't know about yours — pretty gorgeous and wonderful. And my expressing it does not pornography make. (Applause) So, I have all these resources that I'm keenly aware so many people in the world do not. I was able to start the Speech Project with colleagues. I can often get a social media company's attention. I have a wonderful visit to Facebook HQ coming up. Hasn't helped the idiotic reporting standards yet ... I actually pay someone to scrub my social media feeds, attempting to spare my brain the daily iterations of the trauma of hate speech. And guess what? I get hate speech for that. "Oh, you live in an echo chamber." Well, guess what? Having someone post a photograph of me with my mouth open saying they "can't wait to cum on my face," I have a right to set that boundary. (Applause) And this distinction between virtual and real is specious because guess what — that actually happened to me once when I was a child, and so that tweet brought up that trauma, and I had to do work on that. But you know what we do? We take all of this hate speech, and we disaggregate it, and we code it, and we give that data so that we understand the intersectionality of it: when I get porn, when it's about political affiliation, when it's about age, when it's about all of it. We're going to win this fight. There are a lot of solutions — thank goodness. I'm going to offer just a few, and of course I challenge you to create and contribute your own. Number one: we have to start with digital media literacy, and clearly it must have a gendered lens. Kids, schools, caregivers, parents: it's essential. Two ... shall we talk about our friends in tech? Said with dignity and respect, the sexism in your workplaces must end. (Applause) (Cheers) EDGE, the global standard for gender equality, is the minimum standard. And guess what, Silicon Valley? If L'Oréal in India, in the Philippines, in Brazil and in Russia can do it, you can, too. Enough excuses. Only when women have critical mass in every department at your companies, including building platforms from the ground up, will the conversations about priorities and solutions change. And more love for my friends in tech: profiteering off misogyny in video games must end. I'm so tired of hearing you talk to me at cocktail parties — like you did a couple weeks ago in Aspen — about how deplorable #Gamergate was, when you're still making billions of dollars off games that maim and dump women for sport. Basta! — as the Italians would say. Enough. (Applause) Our friends in law enforcement have much to do, because we've seen that online violence is an extension of in-person violence. In our country, more girls and women have been murdered by their intimate partners than died on 9/11 and have died since in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. And it's not cool to say that, but it is true. We care so much geopolitically about what men are doing over there to women over there ... In 2015, 72,828 women used intimate partner violence services in this country. That is not counting the girls and women and boys who needed them. Law enforcement must be empowered with up-to-date internet technology, the devices and an understanding of these platforms — how they work. The police wanted to be helpful when Amanda Hess called about the death threat she was getting on Twitter, but they couldn't really when they said, "What's Twitter?" Our legislators must write and pass astute legislation that reflects today's technology and our notions of free and hate speech. In New York recently, the law could not be applied to a perpetrator because the crimes must have been committed — even if it was anonymous — they must have been committed by telephone, in mail, by telegraph — (Laughter) The language must be technologically neutral. So apparently, I've got a pretty bold voice. So, let's talk about our friends ... white men. You have a role to play and a choice to make. You can do something, or you can do nothing. We're cool in this room, but when this goes out, everyone will say, "Oh my God, she's a reverse racist." That quote was said by a white man, Robert Moritz, chairperson, PricewaterhouseCoopers, he asked me to include it in my talk. We need to grow support lines and help groups, so victims can help each other when their lives and finances have been derailed. We must as individuals disrupt gender violence as it is happening. 92 percent of young people 29 and under witness it. 72 percent of us have witnessed it. We must have the courage and urgency to practice stopping it as it is unfolding. And lastly, believe her. Believe her. (Applause) This is fundamentally a problem of human interaction. And as I believe that human interaction is at the core of our healing, trauma not transformed will be trauma transferred. Edith Wharton said, "The end is latent in the beginning," so we are going to end this talk replacing hate speech with love speech. Because I get lonely in this, but I know that we are allies. I recently learned about how gratitude and affirmations offset negative interactions. It takes five of those to offset one negative interaction, and gratitude in particular — free, available globally any time, anywhere, to anyone in any dialect — it fires the pregenual anterior cingulate, a watershed part of the brain that floods it with great, good stuff. So I'm going to say awesome stuff about myself. I would like for you to reflect it back to me. It might sound something like this — (Laughter) I am a powerful and strong woman, and you would say, "Yes, you are." Audience: Yes, you are. Ashley Judd: My mama loves me. A: Yes, she does. AJ: I did a great job with my talk. A: Yes, you did. AJ: I have a right to be here. A: Yes, you do. AJ: I'm really cute. (Laughter) A: Yes, you are. AJ: God does good work. A: Yes, He does. AJ: And I love you. Thank you so much for letting me be of service. Bless you. (Applause) |
Art made of the air we breathe | {0: 'Emily Parsons-Lord makes cross-disciplinary contemporary art that is informed by research and critical dialogue with materials and climate science.'} | TEDxYouth@Sydney | If I asked you to picture the air, what do you imagine? Most people think about either empty space or clear blue sky or sometimes trees dancing in the wind. And then I remember my high school chemistry teacher with really long socks at the blackboard, drawing diagrams of bubbles connected to other bubbles, and describing how they vibrate and collide in a kind of frantic soup. But really, we tend not to think about the air that much at all. We notice it mostly when there's some kind of unpleasant sensory intrusion upon it, like a terrible smell or something visible like smoke or mist. But it's always there. It's touching all of us right now. It's even inside us. Our air is immediate, vital and intimate. And yet, it's so easily forgotten. So what is the air? It's the combination of the invisible gases that envelop the Earth, attracted by the Earth's gravitational pull. And even though I'm a visual artist, I'm interested in the invisibility of the air. I'm interested in how we imagine it, how we experience it and how we all have an innate understanding of its materiality through breathing. All life on Earth changes the air through gas exchange, and we're all doing it right now. Actually, why don't we all right now together take one big, collective, deep breath in. Ready? In. (Inhales) And out. (Exhales) That air that you just exhaled, you enriched a hundred times in carbon dioxide. So roughly five liters of air per breath, 17 breaths per minute of the 525,600 minutes per year, comes to approximately 45 million liters of air, enriched 100 times in carbon dioxide, just for you. Now, that's equivalent to about 18 Olympic-sized swimming pools. For me, air is plural. It's simultaneously as small as our breathing and as big as the planet. And it's kind of hard to picture. Maybe it's impossible, and maybe it doesn't matter. Through my visual arts practice, I try to make air, not so much picture it, but to make it visceral and tactile and haptic. I try to expand this notion of the aesthetic, how things look, so that it can include things like how it feels on your skin and in your lungs, and how your voice sounds as it passes through it. I explore the weight, density and smell, but most importantly, I think a lot about the stories we attach to different kinds of air. This is a work I made in 2014. It's called "Different Kinds of Air: A Plant's Diary," where I was recreating the air from different eras in Earth's evolution, and inviting the audience to come in and breathe them with me. And it's really surprising, so drastically different. Now, I'm not a scientist, but atmospheric scientists will look for traces in the air chemistry in geology, a bit like how rocks can oxidize, and they'll extrapolate that information and aggregate it, such that they can pretty much form a recipe for the air at different times. Then I come in as the artist and take that recipe and recreate it using the component gases. I was particularly interested in moments of time that are examples of life changing the air, but also the air that can influence how life will evolve, like Carboniferous air. It's from about 300 to 350 million years ago. It's an era known as the time of the giants. So for the first time in the history of life, lignin evolves. That's the hard stuff that trees are made of. So trees effectively invent their own trunks at this time, and they get really big, bigger and bigger, and pepper the Earth, releasing oxygen, releasing oxygen, releasing oxygen, such that the oxygen levels are about twice as high as what they are today. And this rich air supports massive insects — huge spiders and dragonflies with a wingspan of about 65 centimeters. To breathe, this air is really clean and really fresh. It doesn't so much have a flavor, but it does give your body a really subtle kind of boost of energy. It's really good for hangovers. (Laughter) Or there's the air of the Great Dying — that's about 252.5 million years ago, just before the dinosaurs evolve. It's a really short time period, geologically speaking, from about 20- to 200,000 years. Really quick. This is the greatest extinction event in Earth's history, even bigger than when the dinosaurs died out. Eighty-five to 95 percent of species at this time die out, and simultaneous to that is a huge, dramatic spike in carbon dioxide, that a lot of scientists agree comes from a simultaneous eruption of volcanoes and a runaway greenhouse effect. Oxygen levels at this time go to below half of what they are today, so about 10 percent. So this air would definitely not support human life, but it's OK to just have a breath. And to breathe, it's oddly comforting. It's really calming, it's quite warm and it has a flavor a little bit like soda water. It has that kind of spritz, quite pleasant. So with all this thinking about air of the past, it's quite natural to start thinking about the air of the future. And instead of being speculative with air and just making up what I think might be the future air, I discovered this human-synthesized air. That means that it doesn't occur anywhere in nature, but it's made by humans in a laboratory for application in different industrial settings. Why is it future air? Well, this air is a really stable molecule that will literally be part of the air once it's released, for the next 300 to 400 years, before it's broken down. So that's about 12 to 16 generations. And this future air has some very sensual qualities. It's very heavy. It's about eight times heavier than the air we're used to breathing. It's so heavy, in fact, that when you breathe it in, whatever words you speak are kind of literally heavy as well, so they dribble down your chin and drop to the floor and soak into the cracks. It's an air that operates quite a lot like a liquid. Now, this air comes with an ethical dimension as well. Humans made this air, but it's also the most potent greenhouse gas that has ever been tested. Its warming potential is 24,000 times that of carbon dioxide, and it has that longevity of 12 to 16 generations. So this ethical confrontation is really central to my work. (In a lowered voice) It has another quite surprising quality. It changes the sound of your voice quite dramatically. (Laughter) So when we start to think — ooh! It's still there a bit. (Laughter) When we think about climate change, we probably don't think about giant insects and erupting volcanoes or funny voices. The images that more readily come to mind are things like retreating glaciers and polar bears adrift on icebergs. We think about pie charts and column graphs and endless politicians talking to scientists wearing cardigans. But perhaps it's time we start thinking about climate change on the same visceral level that we experience the air. Like air, climate change is simultaneously at the scale of the molecule, the breath and the planet. It's immediate, vital and intimate, as well as being amorphous and cumbersome. And yet, it's so easily forgotten. Climate change is the collective self-portrait of humanity. It reflects our decisions as individuals, as governments and as industries. And if there's anything I've learned from looking at air, it's that even though it's changing, it persists. It may not support the kind of life that we'd recognize, but it will support something. And if we humans are such a vital part of that change, I think it's important that we can feel the discussion. Because even though it's invisible, humans are leaving a very vibrant trace in the air. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to have better political conversations | {0: "Robb Willer's political research has investigated various topics, including economic inequality, racial prejudice, masculine overcompensation and Americans' views of climate change."} | TEDxMarin | So you probably have the sense, as most people do, that polarization is getting worse in our country, that the divide between the left and the right is as bad as it's been in really any of our lifetimes. But you might also reasonably wonder if research backs up your intuition. And in a nutshell, the answer is sadly yes. In study after study, we find that liberals and conservatives have grown further apart. They increasingly wall themselves off in these ideological silos, consuming different news, talking only to like-minded others and more and more choosing to live in different parts of the country. And I think that most alarming of all of it is seeing this rising animosity on both sides. Liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, more and more they just don't like one another. You see it in many different ways. They don't want to befriend one another. They don't want to date one another. If they do, if they find out, they find each other less attractive, and they more and more don't want their children to marry someone who supports the other party, a particularly shocking statistic. You know, in my lab, the students that I work with, we're talking about some sort of social pattern — I'm a movie buff, and so I'm often like, what kind of movie are we in here with this pattern? So what kind of movie are we in with political polarization? Well, it could be a disaster movie. It certainly seems like a disaster. Could be a war movie. Also fits. But what I keep thinking is that we're in a zombie apocalypse movie. (Laughter) Right? You know the kind. There's people wandering around in packs, not thinking for themselves, seized by this mob mentality trying to spread their disease and destroy society. And you probably think, as I do, that you're the good guy in the zombie apocalypse movie, and all this hate and polarization, it's being propagated by the other people, because we're Brad Pitt, right? Free-thinking, righteous, just trying to hold on to what we hold dear, you know, not foot soldiers in the army of the undead. Not that. Never that. But here's the thing: what movie do you suppose they think they're in? Right? Well, they absolutely think that they're the good guys in the zombie apocalypse movie. Right? And you'd better believe that they think that they're Brad Pitt and that we, we are the zombies. And who's to say that they're wrong? I think that the truth is that we're all a part of this. And the good side of that is that we can be a part of the solution. So what are we going to do? What can we do to chip away at polarization in everyday life? What could we do to connect with and communicate with our political counterparts? Well, these were exactly the questions that I and my colleague, Matt Feinberg, became fascinated with a few years ago, and we started doing research on this topic. And one of the first things that we discovered that I think is really helpful for understanding polarization is to understand that the political divide in our country is undergirded by a deeper moral divide. So one of the most robust findings in the history of political psychology is this pattern identified by Jon Haidt and Jesse Graham, psychologists, that liberals and conservatives tend to endorse different values to different degrees. So for example, we find that liberals tend to endorse values like equality and fairness and care and protection from harm more than conservatives do. And conservatives tend to endorse values like loyalty, patriotism, respect for authority and moral purity more than liberals do. And Matt and I were thinking that maybe this moral divide might be helpful for understanding how it is that liberals and conservatives talk to one another and why they so often seem to talk past one another when they do. So we conducted a study where we recruited liberals to a study where they were supposed to write a persuasive essay that would be compelling to a conservative in support of same-sex marriage. And what we found was that liberals tended to make arguments in terms of the liberal moral values of equality and fairness. So they said things like, "Everyone should have the right to love whoever they choose," and, "They" — they being gay Americans — "deserve the same equal rights as other Americans." Overall, we found that 69 percent of liberals invoked one of the more liberal moral values in constructing their essay, and only nine percent invoked one of the more conservative moral values, even though they were supposed to be trying to persuade conservatives. And when we studied conservatives and had them make persuasive arguments in support of making English the official language of the US, a classically conservative political position, we found that they weren't much better at this. 59 percent of them made arguments in terms of one of the more conservative moral values, and just eight percent invoked a liberal moral value, even though they were supposed to be targeting liberals for persuasion. Now, you can see right away why we're in trouble here. Right? People's moral values, they're their most deeply held beliefs. People are willing to fight and die for their values. Why are they going to give that up just to agree with you on something that they don't particularly want to agree with you on anyway? If that persuasive appeal that you're making to your Republican uncle means that he doesn't just have to change his view, he's got to change his underlying values, too, that's not going to go very far. So what would work better? Well, we believe it's a technique that we call moral reframing, and we've studied it in a series of experiments. In one of these experiments, we recruited liberals and conservatives to a study where they read one of three essays before having their environmental attitudes surveyed. And the first of these essays was a relatively conventional pro-environmental essay that invoked the liberal values of care and protection from harm. It said things like, "In many important ways we are causing real harm to the places we live in," and, "It is essential that we take steps now to prevent further destruction from being done to our Earth." Another group of participants were assigned to read a really different essay that was designed to tap into the conservative value of moral purity. It was a pro-environmental essay as well, and it said things like, "Keeping our forests, drinking water, and skies pure is of vital importance." "We should regard the pollution of the places we live in to be disgusting." And, "Reducing pollution can help us preserve what is pure and beautiful about the places we live." And then we had a third group that were assigned to read just a nonpolitical essay. It was just a comparison group so we could get a baseline. And what we found when we surveyed people about their environmental attitudes afterwards, we found that liberals, it didn't matter what essay they read. They tended to have highly pro-environmental attitudes regardless. Liberals are on board for environmental protection. Conservatives, however, were significantly more supportive of progressive environmental policies and environmental protection if they had read the moral purity essay than if they read one of the other two essays. We even found that conservatives who read the moral purity essay were significantly more likely to say that they believed in global warming and were concerned about global warming, even though this essay didn't even mention global warming. That's just a related environmental issue. But that's how robust this moral reframing effect was. And we've studied this on a whole slew of different political issues. So if you want to move conservatives on issues like same-sex marriage or national health insurance, it helps to tie these liberal political issues to conservative values like patriotism and moral purity. And we studied it the other way, too. If you want to move liberals to the right on conservative policy issues like military spending and making English the official language of the US, you're going to be more persuasive if you tie those conservative policy issues to liberal moral values like equality and fairness. All these studies have the same clear message: if you want to persuade someone on some policy, it's helpful to connect that policy to their underlying moral values. And when you say it like that it seems really obvious. Right? Like, why did we come here tonight? Why — (Laughter) It's incredibly intuitive. And even though it is, it's something we really struggle to do. You know, it turns out that when we go to persuade somebody on a political issue, we talk like we're speaking into a mirror. We don't persuade so much as we rehearse our own reasons for why we believe some sort of political position. We kept saying when we were designing these reframed moral arguments, "Empathy and respect, empathy and respect." If you can tap into that, you can connect and you might be able to persuade somebody in this country. So thinking again about what movie we're in, maybe I got carried away before. Maybe it's not a zombie apocalypse movie. Maybe instead it's a buddy cop movie. (Laughter) Just roll with it, just go with it please. (Laughter) You know the kind: there's a white cop and a black cop, or maybe a messy cop and an organized cop. Whatever it is, they don't get along because of this difference. But in the end, when they have to come together and they cooperate, the solidarity that they feel, it's greater because of that gulf that they had to cross. Right? And remember that in these movies, it's usually worst in the second act when our leads are further apart than ever before. And so maybe that's where we are in this country, late in the second act of a buddy cop movie — (Laughter) torn apart but about to come back together. It sounds good, but if we want it to happen, I think the responsibility is going to start with us. So this is my call to you: let's put this country back together. Let's do it despite the politicians and the media and Facebook and Twitter and Congressional redistricting and all of it, all the things that divide us. Let's do it because it's right. And let's do it because this hate and contempt that flows through all of us every day makes us ugly and it corrupts us, and it threatens the very fabric of our society. We owe it to one another and our country to reach out and try to connect. We can't afford to hate them any longer, and we can't afford to let them hate us either. Empathy and respect. Empathy and respect. If you think about it, it's the very least that we owe our fellow citizens. Thank you. (Applause) |
The ethical dilemma of designer babies | {0: 'Paul Knoepfler is a biomedical scientist and writer focusing on stem cells and genetics.'} | TEDxVienna | So what if I could make for you a designer baby? What if you as a parent-to-be and I as a scientist decided to go down that road together? What if we didn't? What if we thought, "That's a bad idea," but many of our family, friends and coworkers did make that decision? Let's fast-forward just 15 years from now. Let's pretend it's the year 2030, and you're a parent. You have your daughter, Marianne, next to you, and in 2030, she is what we call a natural because she has no genetic modifications. And because you and your partner consciously made that decision, many in your social circle, they kind of look down on you. They think you're, like, a Luddite or a technophobe. Marianne's best friend Jenna, who lives right next door, is a very different story. She was born a genetically modified designer baby with numerous upgrades. Yeah. Upgrades. And these enhancements were introduced using a new genetic modification technology that goes by the funny name CRISPR, you know, like something's crisp, this is CRISPR. The scientist that Jenna's parents hired to do this for several million dollars introduced CRISPR into a whole panel of human embryos. And then they used genetic testing, and they predicted that that little tiny embryo, Jenna's embryo, would be the best of the bunch. And now, Jenna is an actual, real person. She's sitting on the carpet in your living room playing with your daughter Marianne. And your families have known each other for years now, and it's become very clear to you that Jenna is extraordinary. She's incredibly intelligent. If you're honest with yourself, she's smarter than you, and she's five years old. She's beautiful, tall, athletic, and the list goes on and on. And in fact, there's a whole new generation of these GM kids like Jenna. And so far it looks like they're healthier than their parents' generation, than your generation. And they have lower health care costs. They're immune to a host of health conditions, including HIV/AIDS and genetic diseases. It all sounds so great, but you can't help but have this sort of unsettling feeling, a gut feeling, that there's something just not quite right about Jenna, and you've had the same feeling about other GM kids that you've met. You were also reading in the newspaper earlier this week that a study of these children who were born as designer babies indicates they may have some issues, like increased aggressiveness and narcissism. But more immediately on your mind is some news that you just got from Jenna's family. She's so smart, she's now going to be going to a special school, a different school than your daughter Marianne, and this is kind of throwing your family into a disarray. Marianne's been crying, and last night when you took her to bed to kiss her goodnight, she said, "Daddy, will Jenna even be my friend anymore?" So now, as I've been telling you this imagined 2030 story, I have a feeling that I may have put some of you into this sci-fi frame of reference. Right? You think you're reading a sci-fi book. Or maybe, like, in Halloween mode of thinking. But this is really a possible reality for us, just 15 years from now. I'm a stem cell and genetics researcher and I can see this new CRISPR technology and its potential impact. And we may find ourselves in that reality, and a lot will depend on what we decide to do today. And if you're still kind of thinking in sci-fi mode, consider that the world of science had a huge shock earlier this year, and the public largely doesn't even know about it. Researchers in China just a few months ago reported the creation of genetically modified human embryos. This was the first time in history. And they did it using this new CRISPR technology. It didn't work perfectly, but I still think they sort of cracked the door ajar on a Pandora's box here. And I think some people are going to run with this technology and try to make designer babies. Now, before I go on, some of you may hold up your hands and say, "Stop, Paul, wait a minute. Wouldn't that be illegal? You can't just go off and create a designer baby." And in fact, to some extent, you're right. In some countries, you couldn't do that. But in many other countries, including my country, the US, there's actually no law on this, so in theory, you could do it. And there was another development this year that resonates in this area, and that happened not so far from here over in the UK. And the UK traditionally has been the strictest country when it comes to human genetic modification. It was illegal there, but just a few months ago, they carved out an exception to that rule. They passed a new law allowing the creation of genetically modified humans with the noble goal of trying to prevent a rare kind of genetic disease. But still I think in combination these events are pushing us further towards an acceptance of human genetic modification. So I've been talking about this CRISPR technology. What actually is CRISPR? So if you think about the GMOs that we're all more familiar with, like GMO tomatoes and wheat and things like that, this technology is similar to the technologies that were used to make those, but it's dramatically better, cheaper and faster. So what is it? It's actually like a genetic Swiss army knife. We can pretend this is a Swiss army knife with different tools in it, and one of the tools is kind of like a magnifying glass or a GPS for our DNA, so it can home in on a certain spot. And the next tool is like scissors that can cut the DNA right in that spot. And finally we have a pen where we can literally rewrite the genetic code in that location. It's really that simple. And this technology, which came on the scene just three years ago, has taken science by storm. It's evolving so fast, and it's so freaking exciting to scientists, and I admit I'm fascinated by it and we use it in my own lab, that I think someone is going to go that extra step and continue the GM human embryo work and maybe make designer babies. This is so ubiquitous now. It just came on the scene three years ago. Thousands of labs literally have this in hand today, and they're doing important research. Most of them are not interested in designer babies. They're studying human disease and other important elements of science. So there's a lot of good research going on with CRISPR. And the fact that we can now do genetic modifications that used to take years and cost millions of dollars in a few weeks for a couple thousand bucks, to me as a scientist that's fantastic, but again, at the same time, it opens the door to people going too far. And I think for some people the focus is not going to be so much on science. That's not what's going to be driving them. It's going to be ideology or the chase for a profit. And they're going to go for designer babies. So why should we be concerned about this? We know from Darwin, if we go back two centuries, that evolution and genetics profoundly have impacted humanity, who we are today. And some think there's like a social Darwinism at work in our world, and maybe even a eugenics as well. Imagine those trends, those forces, with a booster rocket of this CRISPR technology that is so powerful and so ubiquitous. And in fact, we can just go back one century to the last century to see the power that eugenics can have. So my father, Peter Knoepfler, was actually born right here in Vienna. He was Viennese, and he was born here in 1929. And when my grandparents had little baby Peter, the world was very different. Right? It was a different Vienna. The United States was different. The world was different. There was a eugenics rising, and my grandparents realized, pretty quickly I think, that they were on the wrong side of the eugenics equation. And so despite this being their home and their whole extended family's home, and this area being their family's home for generations, they decided because of eugenics that they had to leave. And they survived, but they were heartbroken, and I'm not sure my dad ever really got over leaving Vienna. He left when he was just eight years old in 1938. So today, I see a new eugenics kind of bubbling to the surface. It's supposed to be a kinder, gentler, positive eugenics, different than all that past stuff. But I think even though it's focused on trying to improve people, it could have negative consequences, and it really worries me that some of the top proponents of this new eugenics, they think CRISPR is the ticket to make it happen. So I have to admit, you know, eugenics, we talk about making better people. It's a tough question. What is better when we're talking about a human being? But I admit I think maybe a lot of us could agree that human beings, maybe we could use a little betterment. Look at our politicians here, you know, back in the US — God forbid we go there right now. Maybe even if we just look in the mirror, there might be ways we think we could be better. I might wish, honestly, that I had more hair here, instead of baldness. Some people might wish they were taller, have a different weight, a different face. If we could do those things, we could make those things happen, or we could make them happen in our children, it would be very seductive. And yet coming with it would be these risks. I talked about eugenics, but there would be risks to individuals as well. So if we forget about enhancing people and we just try to make them healthier using genetic modification, this technology is so new and so powerful, that by accident we could make them sicker. That easily could happen. And there's another risk, and that is that all of the legitimate, important genetic modification research going on just in the lab — again, no interest in designer babies — a few people going the designer baby route, things go badly, that entire field could be damaged. I also think it's not that unlikely that governments might start taking an interest in genetic modification. So for example our imagined GM Jenna child who is healthier, if there's a generation that looks like they have lower health care costs, it's possible that governments may start trying to compel their citizens to go the GM route. Look at China's one-child policy. It's thought that that prevented the birth of 400 million human beings. So it's not beyond the realm of possible that genetic modification could be something that governments push. And if designer babies become popular, in our digital age — viral videos, social media — what if designer babies are thought to be fashionable, and they kind of become the new glitterati, the new Kardashians or something? (Laughter) You know, are those trends that we really could control? I'm not convinced that we could. So again, today it's Halloween and when we talk about genetic modification, there's one Halloween-associated character that is talked about or invoked more than anything else, and that is Frankenstein. Mostly that's been Frankenfoods and all this other stuff. But if we think about this now and we think about it in the human context on a day like Halloween, if parents can in essence costume their children genetically, are we going to be talking about a Frankenstein 2.0 kind of situation? I don't think so. I don't think it's going to get to that extreme. But when we are going about hacking the human code, I think all bets are off in terms of what might come of that. There would still be dangers. And we can look in the past to other elements of transformative science and see how they can basically go out of control and permeate society. So I'll just give you one example, and that is in vitro fertilization. Almost exactly 40 years ago, test tube baby number one Louise Brown was born, and that's a great thing, and I think since then five million IVF babies have been born, bringing immeasurable happiness. A lot of parents now can love those kids. But if you think about it, in four decades, five million babies being born from a new technology is pretty remarkable, and the same kind of thing could happen with human genetic modification and designer babies. So depending on the decisions we make in the next few months, the next year or so, if designer baby number one is born, within a few decades, there could well be millions of genetically modified humans. And there's a difference there too, because if we, you in the audience, or I, if we decide to have a designer baby, then their children will also be genetically modified, and so on, because it's heritable. So that's a big difference. So with all of this in mind, what should we do? There's actually going to be a meeting a month from tomorrow in Washington, D.C. by the US National Academy of Sciences to tackle that exact question. What is the right path forward with human genetic modification? I believe at this time we need a moratorium. We have to ban this. We should not allow creating genetically modified people, because it's just too dangerous and too unpredictable. But there's a lot of people — (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) And let me say, just as a scientist, it's a little bit scary for me to say that in public, because science generally doesn't like self-regulation and things like that. So I think we need to put a hold on this, but there are many people who not only disagree with me, they feel the exact opposite. They're like, step on the gas, full speed ahead, let's make designer babies. And so in the meeting in December and other meetings that are likely to follow in the next few months, it's very possible there may be no moratorium. And I think part of the problem that we have is that all of this trend, this revolution in genetic modification applying to humans, the public hasn't known about it. Nobody has been saying, look, this is a big deal, this is a revolution, and this could affect you in very personal ways. And so part of my goal is actually to change that and to educate and engage with the public and get you guys talking about this. And so I hope at these meetings that there will be a role for the public to bring their voice to bear as well. So if we kind of circle back now to 2030 again, that imagined story, and depending on the decisions we make, again, today — literally we don't have a lot of time — in the next few months, the next year or so, because this technology is spreading like wildfire. Let's pretend we're back in that reality. We're at a park, and our kid is swinging on the swing. Is that kid a regular old kid, or did we decide to have a designer baby? And let's say we went the sort of traditional route, and there's our kid swinging on the swing, and frankly, they're kind of a mess. Their hair is all over the place like mine. They have a stuffy nose. They're not the best student in the world. They're adorable, you love them, but there on the swing next to them, their best friend is a GM kid, and the two of them are kind of swinging like this, and you can't help but compare them, right? And the GM kid is swinging higher, they look better, they're a better student, they don't have that stuffy nose you need to wipe. How is that going to make you feel and what decision might you make next time? Thank you. (Applause) |
Buildings that blend nature and city | {0: 'With an eye for nature’s forms and lessons learned from its materials, Jeanne Gang creates iconic environments that stand in curvy relief to blocky urban cityscapes.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | I'm a relationship builder. When you think of a relationship builder, don't you just automatically think "architect?" Probably not. That's because most people think architects design buildings and cities, but what we really design are relationships, because cities are about people. They're places where people come together for all kinds of exchange. And besides, skylines are highly specific urban habitats with their own insects, plants and animals, and even their own weather. But today, urban habitats are out of balance. Climate change, together with political and economic troubles, are having an impact; they're adding up and stressing out cities and us, the people who live in them. For me, the field of ecology has provided important insight, because ecologists don't just look at individual species on their own, they look at the relationships between living things and their environment. They look at how all the diverse parts of the ecosystem are interconnected, and it's actually this balance, this web of life, that sustains life. My team and I have been applying insights from ecology to architecture to see how physical space can help build stronger relationships. The projects I'm going to show you today use the idea of building relationships as the key driver for design. Here's an example of what I mean. Recently, we were asked to design a center for social justice leadership called the Arcus Center. They asked us for a building that could break down traditional barriers between different groups and in doing so, create possibilities for meaningful conversations around social justice. The students wanted a place for cultural exchange. They thought a place for preparing food together could do that. And they wanted to be welcoming to the outside community. They thought a fireplace could draw people in and help start conversations. And everybody wanted the work of social justice to be visible to the outside world. There really wasn't a precedent for this kind of space, so we looked around the globe and found examples of community meeting houses. Community meeting houses are places where there's very specific relationships between people, like this one in Mali, where the elders gather. The low roof keeps everybody seated and at equal eye level. It's very egalitarian. I mean, you can't stand up and take over the meeting. You'd actually bump your head. (Laughter) In meeting houses, there's always a central space where you can sit around a circle and see each other. So we designed a space just like that right in the middle of the Arcus Center, and we anchored it with a fireplace and a kitchen. It's pretty hard to get a kitchen and a fireplace in a building like this with the building codes, but it was so important to the concept, we got it done. And now the central space works for big social gatherings and a place to meet one-on-one for the very first time. It's almost like this three-way intersection that encourages bumping into people and starting a conversation. Now you can always pass the kitchen and see something going on. You can sit by the fireplace and share stories. You can study together in big groups or in small ones, because the architecture sets up these opportunities. Even the construction is about building relationships. It's made of cordwood masonry, which is using logs the way you would use bricks. It's super low-tech and easy to do and anyone can do it — and that's the entire point. The act of making is a social activity. And it's good for the planet, too: the trees absorbed carbon when they were growing up, and they gave off oxygen, and now that carbon is trapped inside the walls and it's not being released into the atmosphere. So making the walls is equivalent to taking cars right off the road. We chose the building method because it connects people to each other and to the environment. But is it working? Is it creating relationships and nurturing them? How can we know? Well, more and more people are coming here, for one, and as a result of the fireside chats and a full calendar of programming, people are applying for the Arcus Fellowships. In fact, applications have increased tenfold for the Arcus Fellowship since the building opened. It's working. It's bringing people together. So I've shown how architecture can connect people on this kind of horizontal campus scale. But we wondered if social relationships could be scaled up — or rather, upward — in tall buildings. Tall buildings don't necessarily lend themselves to being social buildings. They can seem isolating and inward. You might only see people in those awkward elevator rides. But in several major cities, I've been designing tall buildings that are based on creating relationships between people. This is Aqua. It's a residential high-rise in Chicago aimed at young urban professionals and empty nesters, many of them new to the city. With over 700 apartments, we wanted to see if we could use architecture to help people get to know their neighbors, even when their homes are organized in the vertical dimension. So we invented a way to use balconies as the new social connectors. The shapes of the floor slabs vary slightly and they transition as you go up the tower. The result of this is that you can actually see people from your balcony. The balconies are misregistered. You can lean over your balcony and say, "Hey!" just like you would across the backyard. To make the balconies more comfortable for a longer period of time during the year, we studied the wind with digital simulations, so the effect of the balcony shapes breaks up the wind and confuses the wind and makes the balconies more comfortable and less windy. Now, just by being able to go outside on your balcony or on the third floor roof terrace, you can be connected to the outdoors, even when you're way above the ground plane. So the building acts to create community within the building and the city at the same time. It's working. And people are starting to meet each other on the building surface and we've heard — (Laughter) they've even starting getting together as couples. But besides romantic relationships, the building has a positive social effect on the community, as evidenced by people starting groups together and starting big projects together, like this organic community garden on the building's roof terrace. So I've shown how tall buildings can be social connectors, but what about public architecture? How can we create better social cohesion in public buildings and civic spaces, and why is it important? Public architecture is just not as successful if it comes from the top down. About 15 years ago in Chicago, they started to replace old police stations, and they built this identical model all over the city. And even though they had good intentions of treating all neighborhoods equally, the communities didn't feel invested in the process or feel a sense of ownership of these buildings. It was equality in the sense that everybody gets the same police station, but it wasn't equity in the sense of responding to each community's individual needs. And equity is the key issue here. You know, in my field, there's a debate about whether architecture can even do anything to improve social relationships. But I believe that we need architecture and every tool in our tool kit to improve these relationships. In the US, policy reforms have been recommended in order to rebuild trust. But my team and I wondered if design and a more inclusive design process could help add something positive to this policy conversation. We asked ourselves simply: Can design help rebuild trust? So we reached out to community members and police officers in North Lawndale; it's a neighborhood in Chicago where the police station is perceived as a scary fortress surrounded by a parking lot. In North Lawndale, people are afraid of police and of going anywhere near the police station, even to report a crime. So we organized this brainstorming session with both groups participating, and we came up with this whole new idea for the police station. It's called "Polis Station." "Polis" is a Greek word that means a place with a sense of community. It's based on the idea that if you can increase opportunities for positive social interactions between police and community members, you can rebuild that relationship and activate the neighborhood at the same time. Instead of the police station as a scary fortress, you get highly active spaces on the public side of the station — places that spark conversation, like a barbershop, a coffee shop or sports courts as well. Both cops and kids said they love sports. These insights came directly from the community members and the police officers themselves, and as designers, our role was just to connect the dots and suggest the first step. So with the help of the city and the parks, we were able to raise funds and design and build a half-court, right on the police station parking lot. It's a start. But is it rebuilding trust? The people in North Lawndale say the kids are using the courts every day and they even organize tournaments like this one shown here, and once in a while an officer joins in. But now, they even have basketballs inside the station that kids can borrow. And recently they've asked us to expand the courts and build a park on the site. And parents report something astonishing. Before, there was fear of going anywhere the station, and now they say there's a sense that the court is safer than other courts nearby, and they prefer their kids to play here. So maybe in the future, on the public side of the station, you might be able to drop in for a haircut at the barbershop or reserve the community room for a birthday party or renew your driver's license or get money out of an ATM. It can be a place for neighbors to meet each other and to get to know the officers, and vice versa. This is not a utopian fantasy. It's about how do you design to rebuild trust, trusting relationships? You know, every city has parks, libraries, schools and other public buildings that have the potential to be reimagined as social connectors. But reimagining the buildings for the future is going to require engaging the people who live there. Engaging the public can be intimidating, and I've felt that, too. But maybe that's because in architecture school, we don't really learn how to engage the public in the act of design. We're taught to defend our design against criticism. But I think that can change, too. So if we can focus the design mind on creating positive, reinforcing relationships in architecture and through architecture, I believe we can do much more than create individual buildings. We can reduce the stress and the polarization in our urban habitats. We can create relationships. We can help steady this planet we all share. See? Architects really are relationship builders. (Laughter) Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Where is cybercrime really coming from? | {0: "IBM's Caleb Barlow is focused on how we solve the cyber security problem by changing the economics for the bad guys."} | TED@IBM | Cybercrime is out of control. It's everywhere. We hear about it every single day. This year, over two billion records lost or stolen. And last year, 100 million of us, mostly Americans, lost our health insurance data to thieves — myself included. What's particularly concerning about this is that in most cases, it was months before anyone even reported that these records were stolen. So if you watch the evening news, you would think that most of this is espionage or nation-state activity. And, well, some of it is. Espionage, you see, is an accepted international practice. But in this case, it is only a small portion of the problem that we're dealing with. How often do we hear about a breach followed by, "... it was the result of a sophisticated nation-state attack?" Well, often that is companies not being willing to own up to their own lackluster security practices. There is also a widely held belief that by blaming an attack on a nation-state, you are putting regulators at bay — at least for a period of time. So where is all of this coming from? The United Nations estimates that 80 percent of it is from highly organized and ultrasophisticated criminal gangs. To date, this represents one of the largest illegal economies in the world, topping out at, now get this, 445 billion dollars. Let me put that in perspective for all of you: 445 billion dollars is larger than the GDP of 160 nations, including Ireland, Finland, Denmark and Portugal, to name a few. So how does this work? How do these criminals operate? Well, let me tell you a little story. About a year ago, our security researchers were tracking a somewhat ordinary but sophisticated banking Trojan called the Dyre Wolf. The Dyre Wolf would get on your computer via you clicking on a link in a phishing email that you probably shouldn't have. It would then sit and wait. It would wait until you logged into your bank account. And when you did, the bad guys would reach in, steal your credentials, and then use that to steal your money. This sounds terrible, but the reality is, in the security industry, this form of attack is somewhat commonplace. However, the Dyre Wolf had two distinctly different personalities — one for these small transactions, but it took on an entirely different persona if you were in the business of moving large-scale wire transfers. Here's what would happen. You start the process of issuing a wire transfer, and up in your browser would pop a screen from your bank, indicating that there's a problem with your account, and that you need to call the bank immediately, along with the number to the bank's fraud department. So you pick up the phone and you call. And after going through the normal voice prompts, you're met with an English-speaking operator. "Hello, Altoro Mutual Bank. How can I help you?" And you go through the process like you do every time you call your bank, of giving them your name and your account number, going through the security checks to verify you are who you said you are. Most of us may not know this, but in many large-scale wire transfers, it requires two people to sign off on the wire transfer, so the operator then asks you to get the second person on the line, and goes through the same set of verifications and checks. Sounds normal, right? Only one problem: you're not talking to the bank. You're talking to the criminals. They had built an English-speaking help desk, fake overlays to the banking website. And this was so flawlessly executed that they were moving between a half a million and a million and a half dollars per attempt into their criminal coffers. These criminal organizations operate like highly regimented, legitimate businesses. Their employees work Monday through Friday. They take the weekends off. How do we know this? We know this because our security researchers see repeated spikes of malware on a Friday afternoon. The bad guys, after a long weekend with the wife and kids, come back in to see how well things went. The Dark Web is where they spend their time. That is a term used to describe the anonymous underbelly of the internet, where thieves can operate with anonymity and without detection. Here they peddle their attack software and share information on new attack techniques. You can buy everything there, from a base-level attack to a much more advanced version. In fact, in many cases, you even see gold, silver and bronze levels of service. You can check references. You can even buy attacks that come with a money-back guarantee — (Laughter) if you're not successful. Now, these environments, these marketplaces — they look like an Amazon or an eBay. You see products, prices, ratings and reviews. Of course, if you're going to buy an attack, you're going to buy from a reputable criminal with good ratings, right? (Laughter) This isn't any different than checking on Yelp or TripAdvisor before going to a new restaurant. So, here is an example. This is an actual screenshot of a vendor selling malware. Notice they're a vendor level four, they have a trust level of six. They've had 400 positive reviews in the last year, and only two negative reviews in the last month. We even see things like licensing terms. Here's an example of a site you can go to if you want to change your identity. They will sell you a fake ID, fake passports. But note the legally binding terms for purchasing your fake ID. Give me a break. What are they going to do — sue you if you violate them? (Laughter) This occurred a couple of months ago. One of our security researchers was looking at a new Android malware application that we had discovered. It was called Bilal Bot. In a blog post, she positioned Bilal Bot as a new, inexpensive and beta alternative to the much more advanced GM Bot that was commonplace in the criminal underground. This review did not sit well with the authors of Bilal Bot. So they wrote her this very email, pleading their case and making the argument that they felt she had evaluated an older version. They asked her to please update her blog with more accurate information and even offered to do an interview to describe to her in detail how their attack software was now far better than the competition. So look, you don't have to like what they do, but you do have to respect the entrepreneurial nature of their endeavors. (Laughter) So how are we going to stop this? It's not like we're going to be able to identify who's responsible — remember, they operate with anonymity and outside the reach of the law. We're certainly not going to be able to prosecute the offenders. I would propose that we need a completely new approach. And that approach needs to be centered on the idea that we need to change the economics for the bad guys. And to give you a perspective on how this can work, let's think of the response we see to a healthcare pandemic: SARS, Ebola, bird flu, Zika. What is the top priority? It's knowing who is infected and how the disease is spreading. Now, governments, private institutions, hospitals, physicians — everyone responds openly and quickly. This is a collective and altruistic effort to stop the spread in its tracks and to inform anyone not infected how to protect or inoculate themselves. Unfortunately, this is not at all what we see in response to a cyber attack. Organizations are far more likely to keep information on that attack to themselves. Why? Because they're worried about competitive advantage, litigation or regulation. We need to effectively democratize threat intelligence data. We need to get all of these organizations to open up and share what is in their private arsenal of information. The bad guys are moving fast; we've got to move faster. And the best way to do that is to open up and share data on what's happening. Let's think about this in the construct of security professionals. Remember, they're programmed right into their DNA to keep secrets. We've got to turn that thinking on its head. We've got to get governments, private institutions and security companies willing to share information at speed. And here's why: because if you share the information, it's equivalent to inoculation. And if you're not sharing, you're actually part of the problem, because you're increasing the odds that other people could be impacted by the same attack techniques. But there's an even bigger benefit. By destroying criminals' devices closer to real time, we break their plans. We inform the people they aim to hurt far sooner than they had ever anticipated. We ruin their reputations, we crush their ratings and reviews. We make cybercrime not pay. We change the economics for the bad guys. But to do this, a first mover was required — someone to change the thinking in the security industry overall. About a year ago, my colleagues and I had a radical idea. What if IBM were to take our data — we had one of the largest threat intelligence databases in the world — and open it up? It had information not just on what had happened in the past, but what was happening in near-real time. What if we were to publish it all openly on the internet? As you can imagine, this got quite a reaction. First came the lawyers: What are the legal implications of doing that? Then came the business: What are the business implications of doing that? And this was also met with a good dose of a lot of people just asking if we were completely crazy. But there was one conversation that kept floating to the surface in every dialogue that we would have: the realization that if we didn't do this, then we were part of the problem. So we did something unheard of in the security industry. We started publishing. Over 700 terabytes of actionable threat intelligence data, including information on real-time attacks that can be used to stop cybercrime in its tracks. And to date, over 4,000 organizations are leveraging this data, including half of the Fortune 100. And our hope as a next step is to get all of those organizations to join us in the fight, and do the same thing and share their information on when and how they're being attacked as well. We all have the opportunity to stop it, and we already all know how. All we have to do is look to the response that we see in the world of health care, and how they respond to a pandemic. Simply put, we need to be open and collaborative. Thank you. (Applause) |
What we don't know about Europe's Muslim kids | {0: "Deeyah Khan is working to create intercultural dialogue and understanding by confronting the world's most complex and controversial topics."} | TEDxExeter | When I was a child, I knew I had superpowers. That's right. (Laughter) I thought I was absolutely amazing because I could understand and relate to the feelings of brown people, like my grandfather, a conservative Muslim guy. And also, I could understand my Afghan mother, my Pakistani father, not so religious but laid-back, fairly liberal. And of course, I could understand and relate to the feelings of white people. The white Norwegians of my country. You know, white, brown, whatever — I loved them all. I understood them all, even if they didn't always understand each other; they were all my people. My father, though, was always really worried. He kept saying that even with the best education, I was not going to get a fair shake. I would still face discrimination, according to him. And that the only way to be accepted by white people would be to become famous. Now, mind you, he had this conversation with me when I was seven years old. So while I'm seven years old, he said, "Look, so it's either got to be sports, or it's got to be music." He didn't know anything about sports — bless him — so it was music. So when I was seven years old, he gathered all my toys, all my dolls, and he threw them all away. In exchange he gave me a crappy little Casio keyboard and — (Laughter) Yeah. And singing lessons. And he forced me, basically, to practice for hours and hours every single day. Very quickly, he also had me performing for larger and larger audiences, and bizarrely, I became almost a kind of poster child for Norwegian multiculturalism. I felt very proud, of course. Because even the newspapers at this point were starting to write nice things about brown people, so I could feel that my superpower was growing. So when I was 12 years old, walking home from school, I took a little detour because I wanted to buy my favorite sweets called "salty feet." I know they sound kind of awful, but I absolutely love them. They're basically these little salty licorice bits in the shape of feet. And now that I say it out loud, I realize how terrible that sounds, but be that as it may, I absolutely love them. So on my way into the store, there was this grown white guy in the doorway blocking my way. So I tried to walk around him, and as I did that, he stopped me and he was staring at me, and he spit in my face, and he said, "Get out of my way you little black bitch, you little Paki bitch, go back home where you came from." I was absolutely horrified. I was staring at him. I was too afraid to wipe the spit off my face, even as it was mixing with my tears. I remember looking around, hoping that any minute now, a grown-up is going to come and make this guy stop. But instead, people kept hurrying past me and pretended not to see me. I was very confused because I was thinking, well, "My white people, come on! Where are they? What's going on? How come they're not coming and rescuing me?" So, needless to say, I didn't buy the sweets. I just ran home as fast as I could. Things were still OK, though, I thought. As time went on, the more successful I became, I eventually started also attracting harassment from brown people. Some men in my parent's community felt that it was unacceptable and dishonorable for a woman to be involved in music and to be so present in the media. So very quickly, I was starting to become attacked at my own concerts. I remember one of the concerts, I was onstage, I lean into the audience and the last thing I see is a young brown face, and the next thing I know is some sort of chemical is thrown in my eyes and I remember I couldn't really see and my eyes were watering but I kept singing anyway. I was spit in the face in the streets of Oslo, this time by brown men. They even tried to kidnap me at one point. The death threats were endless. I remember one older bearded guy stopped me in the street one time, and he said, "The reason I hate you so much is because you make our daughters think they can do whatever they want." A younger guy warned me to watch my back. He said music is un-Islamic and the job of whores, and if you keep this up, you are going to be raped and your stomach will be cut out so that another whore like you will not be born. Again, I was so confused. I couldn't understand what was going on. My brown people now starting to treat me like this — how come? Instead of bridging the worlds, the two worlds, I felt like I was falling between my two worlds. I suppose, for me, spit was kryptonite. So by the time I was 17 years old, the death threats were endless, and the harassment was constant. It got so bad, at one point my mother sat me down and said, "Look, we can no longer protect you, we can no longer keep you safe, so you're going to have to go." So I bought a one-way ticket to London, I packed my suitcase and I left. My biggest heartbreak at that point was that nobody said anything. I had a very public exit from Norway. My brown people, my white people — nobody said anything. Nobody said, "Hold on, this is wrong. Support this girl, protect this girl, because she is one of us." Nobody said that. Instead, I felt like — you know at the airport, on the baggage carousel you have these different suitcases going around and around, and there's always that one suitcase left at the end, the one that nobody wants, the one that nobody comes to claim. I felt like that. I'd never felt so alone. I'd never felt so lost. So, after coming to London, I did eventually resume my music career. Different place, but unfortunately the same old story. I remember a message sent to me saying that I was going to be killed and that rivers of blood were going to flow and that I was going to be raped many times before I died. By this point, I have to say, I was actually getting used to messages like this, but what became different was that now they started threatening my family. So once again, I packed my suitcase, I left music and I moved to the US. I'd had enough. I didn't want to have anything to do with this anymore. And I was certainly not going to be killed for something that wasn't even my dream — it was my father's choice. So I kind of got lost. I kind of fell apart. But I decided that what I wanted to do is spend the next however many years of my life supporting young people and to try to be there in some small way, whatever way that I could. I started volunteering for various organizations that were working with young Muslims inside of Europe. And, to my surprise, what I found was so many of these young people were suffering and struggling. They were facing so many problems with their families and their communities who seemed to care more about their honor and their reputation than the happiness and the lives of their own kids. I started feeling like maybe I wasn't so alone, maybe I wasn't so weird. Maybe there are more of my people out there. The thing is, what most people don't understand is that there are so many of us growing up in Europe who are not free to be ourselves. We're not allowed to be who we are. We are not free to marry or to be in relationships with people that we choose. We can't even pick our own career. This is the norm in the Muslim heartlands of Europe. Even in the freest societies in the world, we're not free. Our lives, our dreams, our future does not belong to us, it belongs to our parents and their community. I found endless stories of young people who are lost to all of us, who are invisible to all of us but who are suffering, and they are suffering alone. Kids we are losing to forced marriages, to honor-based violence and abuse. Eventually, I realized after several years of working with these young people, that I will not be able to keep running. I can't spend the rest of my life being scared and hiding and that I'm actually going to have to do something. And I also realized that my silence, our silence, allows abuse like this to continue. So I decided that I wanted to put my childhood superpower to some use by trying to make people on the different sides of these issues understand what it's like to be a young person stuck between your family and your country. So I started making films, and I started telling these stories. And I also wanted people to understand the deadly consequences of us not taking these problems seriously. So the first film I made was about Banaz. She was a 17-year-old Kurdish girl in London. She was obedient, she did whatever her parents wanted. She tried to do everything right. She married some guy that her parents chose for her, even though he beat and raped her constantly. And when she tried to go to her family for help, they said, "Well, you got to go back and be a better wife." Because they didn't want a divorced daughter on their hands because, of course, that would bring dishonor on the family. She was beaten so badly her ears would bleed, and when she finally left and she found a young man that she chose and she fell in love with, the community and the family found out and she disappeared. She was found three months later. She'd been stuffed into a suitcase and buried underneath the house. She had been strangled, she had been beaten to death by three men, three cousins, on the orders of her father and uncle. The added tragedy of Banaz's story is that she had gone to the police in England five times asking for help, telling them that she was going to be killed by her family. The police didn't believe her so they didn't do anything. And the problem with this is that not only are so many of our kids facing these problems within their families and within their families' communities, but they're also meeting misunderstandings and apathy in the countries that they grow up in. When their own families betray them, they look to the rest of us, and when we don't understand, we lose them. So while I was making this film, several people said to me, "Well, Deeyah, you know, this is just their culture, this is just what those people do to their kids and we can't really interfere." I can assure you being murdered is not my culture. You know? And surely people who look like me, young women who come from backgrounds like me, should be subject to the same rights, the same protections as anybody else in our country, why not? So, for my next film, I wanted to try and understand why some of our young Muslim kids in Europe are drawn to extremism and violence. But with that topic, I also recognized that I was going to have to face my worst fear: the brown men with beards. The same men, or similar men, to the ones that have hounded me for most of my life. Men that I've been afraid of most of my life. Men that I've also deeply disliked, for many, many years. So I spent the next two years interviewing convicted terrorists, jihadis and former extremists. What I already knew, what was very obvious already, was that religion, politics, Europe's colonial baggage, also Western foreign policy failures of recent years, were all a part of the picture. But what I was more interested in finding out was what are the human, what are the personal reasons why some of our young people are susceptible to groups like this. And what really surprised me was that I found wounded human beings. Instead of the monsters that I was looking for, that I was hoping to find — quite frankly because it would have been very satisfying — I found broken people. Just like Banaz, I found that these young men were torn apart from trying to bridge the gaps between their families and the countries that they were born in. And what I also learned is that extremist groups, terrorist groups are taking advantage of these feelings of our young people and channeling that — cynically — channeling that toward violence. "Come to us," they say. "Reject both sides, your family and your country because they reject you. For your family, their honor is more important than you and for your country, a real Norwegian, Brit or a French person will always be white and never you." They're also promising our young people the things that they crave: significance, heroism, a sense of belonging and purpose, a community that loves and accepts them. They make the powerless feel powerful. The invisible and the silent are finally seen and heard. This is what they're doing for our young people. Why are these groups doing this for our young people and not us? The thing is, I'm not trying to justify or excuse any of the violence. What I am trying to say is that we have to understand why some of our young people are attracted to this. I would like to also show you, actually — these are childhood photos of some of the guys in the film. What really struck me is that so many of them — I never would have thought this — but so many of them have absent or abusive fathers. And several of these young guys ended up finding caring and compassionate father figures within these extremist groups. I also found men brutalized by racist violence, but who found a way to stop feeling like victims by becoming violent themselves. In fact, I found something, to my horror, that I recognized. I found the same feelings that I felt as a 17-year-old as I fled from Norway. The same confusion, the same sorrow, the same feeling of being betrayed and not belonging to anyone. The same feeling of being lost and torn between cultures. Having said that, I did not choose destruction, I chose to pick up a camera instead of a gun. And the reason I did that is because of my superpower. I could see that understanding is the answer, instead of violence. Seeing human beings with all their virtues and all their flaws instead of continuing the caricatures: the us and them, the villains and victims. I'd also finally come to terms with the fact that my two cultures didn't have to be on a collision course but instead became a space where I found my own voice. I stopped feeling like I had to pick a side, but this took me many, many years. There are so many of our young people today who are struggling with these same issues, and they're struggling with this alone. And this leaves them open like wounds. And for some, the worldview of radical Islam becomes the infection that festers in these open wounds. There's an African proverb that says, "If the young are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth." I would like to ask — to Muslim parents and Muslim communities, will you love and care for your children without forcing them to meet your expectations? Can you choose them instead of your honor? Can you understand why they're so angry and alienated when you put your honor before their happiness? Can you try to be a friend to your child so that they can trust you and want to share with you their experiences, rather than having to seek it somewhere else? And to our young people tempted by extremism, can you acknowledge that your rage is fueled by pain? Will you find the strength to resist those cynical old men who want to use your blood for their own profits? Can you find a way to live? Can you see that the sweetest revenge is for you to live a happy, full and free life? A life defined by you and nobody else. Why do you want to become just another dead Muslim kid? And for the rest of us, when will we start listening to our young people? How can we support them in redirecting their pain into something more constructive? They think we don't like them. They think we don't care what happens to them. They think we don't accept them. Can we find a way to make them feel differently? What will it take for us to see them and notice them before they become either the victims or the perpetrators of violence? Can we make ourselves care about them and consider them to be our own? And not just be outraged when the victims of violence look like ourselves? Can we find a way to reject hatred and heal the divisions between us? The thing is we cannot afford to give up on each other or on our kids, even if they've given up on us. We are all in this together. And in the long term, revenge and violence will not work against extremists. Terrorists want us to huddle in our houses in fear, closing our doors and our hearts. They want us to tear open more wounds in our societies so that they can use them to spread their infection more widely. They want us to become like them: intolerant, hateful and cruel. The day after the Paris attacks, a friend of mine sent this photo of her daughter. This is a white girl and an Arab girl. They're best friends. This image is the kryptonite for extremists. These two little girls with their superpowers are showing the way forward towards a society that we need to build together, a society that includes and supports, rather than rejects our kids. Thank you for listening. (Applause) |
A young scientist's quest for clean water | {0: 'Water is the basis of life, and too many people around the world suffer from waterborne illnesses. Deepika Kurup is working to change that.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | Every summer, my family and I travel across the world, 3,000 miles away to the culturally diverse country of India. Now, India is a country infamous for its scorching heat and humidity. For me, the only relief from this heat is to drink plenty of water. Now, while in India, my parents always remind me to only drink boiled or bottled water, because unlike here in America, where I can just turn on a tap and easily get clean, potable water, in India, the water is often contaminated. So my parents have to make sure that the water we drink is safe. However, I soon realized that not everyone is fortunate enough to enjoy the clean water we did. Outside my grandparents' house in the busy streets of India, I saw people standing in long lines under the hot sun filling buckets with water from a tap. I even saw children, who looked the same age as me, filling up these clear plastic bottles with dirty water from streams on the roadside. Watching these kids forced to drink water that I felt was too dirty to touch changed my perspective on the world. This unacceptable social injustice compelled me to want to find a solution to our world's clean water problem. I wanted to know why these kids lacked water, a substance that is essential for life. And I learned that we are facing a global water crisis. Now, this may seem surprising, as 75 percent of our planet is covered in water, but only 2.5 percent of that is freshwater, and less than one percent of Earth's freshwater supply is available for human consumption. With rising populations, industrial development and economic growth, our demand for clean water is increasing, yet our freshwater resources are rapidly depleting. According to the World Health Organization, 660 million people in our world lack access to a clean water source. Lack of access to clean water is a leading cause of death in children under the age of five in developing countries, and UNICEF estimates that 3,000 children die every day from a water-related disease. So after returning home one summer in eighth grade, I decided that I wanted to combine my passion for solving the global water crisis with my interest in science. So I decided that the best thing to do would be to convert my garage into a laboratory. (Laughter) Actually, at first I converted my kitchen into a laboratory, but my parents didn't really approve and kicked me out. I also read a lot of journal papers on water-related research, and I learned that currently in developing countries, something called solar disinfection, or SODIS, is used to purify water. In SODIS, clear plastic bottles are filled with contaminated water and then exposed to sunlight for six to eight hours. The UV radiation from the sun destroys the DNA of these harmful pathogens and decontaminates the water. Now, while SODIS is really easy to use and energy-efficient, as it only uses solar energy, it's really slow, as it can take up to two days when it's cloudy. So in order to make the SODIS process faster, this new method called photocatalysis has recently been used. So what exactly is this photocatalysis? Let's break it down: "photo" means from the sun, and a catalyst is something that speeds up a reaction. So what photocatalysis is doing is it's just speeding up this solar disinfection process. When sunlight comes in and strikes a photocatalyst, like TiO2, or titanium dioxide, it creates these really reactive oxygen species, like superoxides, hydrogen peroxide and hydroxyl radicals. These reactive oxygen species are able to remove bacteria and organics and a whole lot of contaminants from drinking water. But unfortunately, there are several disadvantages to the way photocatalytic SODIS is currently deployed. See, what they do is they take the clear plastic bottles and they coat the inside with this photocatalytic coating. But photocatalysts like titanium dioxide are actually commonly used in sunscreens to block UV radiation. So when they're coated on the inside of these bottles, they're actually blocking some of the UV radiation and diminishing the efficiency of the process. Also, these photocatalytic coatings are not tightly bound to the plastic bottle, which means they wash off, and people end up drinking the catalyst. While TiO2 is safe and inert, it's really inefficient if you keep drinking the catalyst, because then you have to continue to replenish it, even after a few uses. So my goal was to overcome the disadvantages of these current treatment methods and create a safe, sustainable, cost-effective and eco-friendly method of purifying water. What started off as an eighth grade science fair project is now my photocatalytic composite for water purification. The composite combines titanium dioxide with cement. The cement-like composite can be formed into several different shapes, which results in an extremely versatile range of deployment methods. For example, you could create a rod that can easily be placed inside water bottles for individual use or you could create a porous filter that can filter water for families. You can even coat the inside of an existing water tank to purify larger amounts of water for communities over a longer period of time. Now, over the course of this, my journey hasn't really been easy. You know, I didn't have access to a sophisticated laboratory. I was 14 years old when I started, but I didn't let my age deter me in my interest in pursuing scientific research and wanting to solve the global water crisis. See, water isn't just the universal solvent. Water is a universal human right. And for that reason, I'm continuing to work on this science fair project from 2012 to bring it from the laboratory into the real world. And this summer, I founded Catalyst for World Water, a social enterprise aimed at catalyzing solutions to the global water crisis. (Applause) Alone, a single drop of water can't do much, but when many drops come together, they can sustain life on our planet. Just as water drops come together to form oceans, I believe that we all must come together when tackling this global problem. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Help discover ancient ruins -- before it's too late | {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.'} | TED2016 | As an archaeologist, I'm most often asked what my favorite discovery is. The answer's easy: my husband, Greg. (Laughter) We met in Egypt on my first dig. It was my first lesson in finding unexpected, wonderful things. This began an incredible archaeological partnership. Years later, I proposed to him in front of our favorite pair statue of the Prince and Princess Rahotep and Nofret, in the Cairo Museum, dating to 4,600 years ago. I thought if I was going to ask Greg to spend the rest of this life with me, then I should ask him in front of two people who had pledged to be together for eternity. These symbols endure because when we look at them, we're looking at mirrors. They are powerful reminders that our common humanity has not changed. The thrill of archaeological discovery is as powerful as love, because ancient history is the most seductive mistress imaginable. Many archaeologists have devoted their lives to unraveling the mysteries of the past under hot suns and Arctic winds and in dense rainforests. Many seek. Some discover. All worship at the temple of possibility that one discovery might change history. On my first day in Egypt, I worked at a site in the Northeast Egyptian Delta called Mendes, dating to 4,200 years ago, in a cemetery. That's a picture of me — I'm just in my bliss. On the dig, surrounded by emerald green rice paddies, I discovered an intact pot. Flipping it over, I discovered a human thumbprint left by whoever made the vessel. For a moment, time stood still. I didn't know where I was. It was because at that moment I realized, when we dig, we're digging for people, not things. Never are we so present as when we are in the midst of the great past. I can't tell you how many times I've stood in front of the Pyramids of Giza, and they leave me speechless. I feel like the luckiest person in the world. They're a monument to our human brilliance and everything that is possible. Many cannot process their brilliance as human — they think aliens built them. But this is ridiculous. All you need to do is get up close and personal, and see the hidden hand of man in the chisel marks left by the tools that built them. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built one stone at a time with 2.3 million blocks, with incredible bureaucratic efficiency. It is not the pyramids that stand the test of time; it is human ingenuity. That is our shared human brilliance. History may be cyclical, but we are singular. I love what I do, because I learn that we haven't changed. I get to read about mother-in-law jokes from Mesopotamia from 3,500 years ago. (Laughter) I get to hear about neighbors cursing each other from 4,600 years ago in Egypt. And my absolute favorite, from 3,300 years ago in Luxor: an inscription that describes schoolboys who cut class to go drinking. (Laughter) Kids these days. (Laughter) I get to see the most incredible architecture, see stunning sculptures — I mean, this is basically a selfie in stone — and see that we've always rocked serious bling. And also, we've been posting on walls and obsessing about cats — (Laughter) for thousands of years. (Laughter) (Applause) Archaeologists are the cultural memory preservers and the spokespeople for the billions of people and the thousands of cultures that came before us. Good science, imagination and a leap of faith are the trifecta we use to raise the dead. In the last year, archaeologists have made incredible discoveries, including: new human ancestors from South Africa; tools from 3.3 million years ago — these are the oldest tools ever discovered — in Kenya. And this, from a series of medical implements found from Blackbeard's ship from 1718. What you're looking at is a medical tool used to treat syphilis. Ouch! (Laughter) For each of these, there are thousands of other incredibly important discoveries made by my colleagues, that do not make headlines. However, I believe that the most important thing we do as archaeologists is acknowledge that past people existed and lived lives worth learning about. Can you even imagine what the world would be like today if we acknowledged all human beings in this way? So, on a dig, we have a challenge: it often looks like this. You can't see anything. Where are we going to start digging? This is from a site south of Cairo. Let's have a look from space. Again, you can't really see much. What you're looking at is a WorldView-3 satellite image, which has a .3 meter resolution. That's 10 inches. This means that you can zoom in from 400 miles in space and see your tablets. How do I know about this? It's because I'm a space archaeologist. Let me repeat that. I am a space archaeologist. This means — (Applause) Thank you. This means I use satellite images and process them using algorithms, and look at subtle differences in the light spectrum that indicate buried things under the ground that I get to go excavate and survey. By the way — NASA has a Space Archaeology program, so it's a real job. (Laughter) So, let's have a look again. We're back at the site just south of Cairo. You can't see anything. Keep your eye on the red rectangle. When we process the image using algorithms — think like a space-based CAT scan — this is what you see. This rectilinear form is an ancient tomb that is previously unknown and unexcavated, and you all are the first people to see it in thousands of years. (Applause) I believe we have barely scratched the surface in terms of what's left to discover. In the Egyptian Delta alone, we've excavated less than one-1000th of one percent of the total volume of Egyptian sites. When you add to that the thousands of other sites my team and I have discovered, what we thought we knew pales in comparison to what we have left to discover. When you look at the incredible work that my colleagues are doing all around the world and what they're finding, I believe that there are millions of undiscovered archaeological sites left to find. Discovering them will do nothing less than unlock the full potential of our existence. But we have a challenge. Over the last year, we've seen horrible headlines of incredible destruction going on to archaeological sites, and massive looting by people like ISIL. ISIL has destroyed temples at Palmyra. Who blows up a temple? They've destroyed the Tomb of Jonah. And we've seen looting at sites so rampant, it looks like craters of the moon. Knowing ISIL's desire to destroy modern human lives, it's a natural extension for them to destroy cultural identity as well. Countless invading armies have done the same throughout history. We know that ISIL is profiting from the looting of sites, but we don't know the scale. This means that any object purchased on the market today from the Middle East could potentially be funding terrorism. When a site is looted, it's as if a puzzle already missing 90 percent of it pieces has had the rest obscured beyond recognition. This is ancient identity theft writ large. We know that there are two kinds of looting going on: looting by criminal elements like ISIL, and then more local looting by those that are desperate for money. We would all do the same to feed our families; I don't blame the local looters. I blame the middlemen, the unethical traffickers and an international art market that exploits often ambiguous or even completely nonexistent laws. We know looting is going on on a global scale and it's increasing, but presently we don't have any tools to stop it. This is beginning to change. My team and I have just completed a study looking at looting in Egypt. We looked at open-source data and mapped the entirety of looting across Egypt from 2002 to 2013. We found evidence of looting and site destruction at 267 sites, and mapped over 200,000 looting pits. It's astonishing. And putting that data together — you can see the looting pits marked here. At one site, the looting got bad from 2009, 2011, 2012 — hundreds and hundreds of pits. Putting all the data together, what we found is that, contrary to popular opinion, looting did not start to get worse in Egypt in 2011 after the Arab Spring, but in 2009, after the global recession. Thus, we've shown with big data that looting is fundamentally an economic issue. If we do nothing to stop the problem, all of Egypt's sites will be affected by looting by 2040. Thus, we are at a tipping point. We are the generation with all the tools and all the technologies to stop looting, but we're not working fast enough. Sometimes an archaeological site can surprise you with its resilience. I am just back from the field, where I co-led a joint mission with Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities at a site called Lisht. This site dates to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt between 2,000 and 1,750 BC. The Middle Kingdom was Ancient Egypt's Renaissance period. After a time of intense internal strife and environmental challenges, Egypt rebounded with an incredible resurgence of art, architecture and literature. It's a favorite period of time to study in Egypt, because it teaches us so much about how we can survive and thrive after great disasters. Now at this site, we had already mapped countless looting pits. Lisht is a royal site; there would have been thousands of people buried there who lived and worked at the court of Pharaoh. You can see this before and after; you see dozens of looting pits. North Lisht. This is in South Lisht, before and after. When we first visited the site, we could see the tombs of many high-ranking officials that had been looted. Let me put into perspective for you what was taken. Imagine a two meter by two meter area full of coffins, jewelry and incredible statuary. Multiply that times over a thousand. That's what was taken. So, when we started work, my Egyptian co-director, Mohamed Youssef, approached me and said, "We must work at this one particular tomb. It's been attacked by looters. If we don't do anything, they'll be back." Of course I agreed, but I didn't think we'd find anything. I thought the looters had stolen everything. What we started to find were the most incredible reliefs. Look at this painting — it's just stunning. We started finding engraved inscriptions. And even the titles of the tomb owner — he had titles like, "Overseer of the Army," "Overseer of the Treasury." I began to have hope. Maybe, just maybe we would find his name. For the ancient Egyptians, having their name last for eternity was their goal. And then one day, this appeared. This is the name of the tomb owner: Intef. You can see it written out here, in hieroglyphs. Working together with my Egyptian team, we had restored someone's name from 3,900 years ago. (Applause) Working together with my Egyptian colleagues, we celebrated this moment of shared discovery. What we were doing together was right and true. We found this incredible false door, mostly intact. On it we read about Intef and his inscriptions. You can actually even see him seated here. What I realized is that everything I had assumed about looted sites had been proven wrong. Every day on site we worked together with 70 Egyptians as colleagues and friends. In the face of so much hatred and ignorance against those in the Middle East, every moment on site felt like a protest for peace. When you work with those that don't look like you, or think like you, or speak like you, your shared mission of archaeological discovery erases all superficial differences. What I learned this season is that archaeology isn't about what you find. It's about what you can prove possible. Sometimes when you travel, you end up finding long-lost family — not those with whom you share genes, but a shared entry in the book of life. This is Omer Farrouk, my brother. Omer's a Gufti from a village just North of Luxor, called Guft. Guftis are part of a celebrated tradition in Egyptology. They help with digging and work crew organization. Omer is my COO and CFO. I simply couldn't do work without him. One day many years ago, when I was a young graduate student and Omer was a young Gufti who couldn't speak much English, we learned, completely randomly, that we were born in the same year, the same month and the same day, six hours apart. Twins. (Laughter) Separated by an ocean, but forever connected for Ancient Egypt is our mother. I knew then we'd always work together — not in my brain, but in the part of your soul that knows not everything can be explained. (Arabic) Omer by brother, I will always love you. (English) Omer my brother, I will always love you. So, just before my first dig in Egypt, my mentor, the very famous Egyptologist Professor William Kelly Simpson, called me into his office. He handed me a check for $2,000, and said, "This is to cover your expenses. Have a glorious adventure this summer. Someday you will do this for someone else." Thus, my TED Prize wish is partial payback, plus interest — (Laughter) for a great human being's generosity and kindness. So, my wish. I wish for us to discover the millions of unknown archaeological sites around the world. By creating a 21st-century army of global explorers, we'll find and protect the world's hidden heritage, which contains clues to humankind's collective resilience and creativity. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) So how are we going to do this? We are going to build with the TED Prize money an online, crowdsource, citizen science platform to allow anyone in the world to engage with discovering archaeological sites. There are only a couple hundred of us space archaeologists around the world. It is my dream to engage the world with helping to find sites and protect them. What you'll do is sign in, create a username — note that this particular username is already taken. (Laughter) You'll take a tutorial and you'll start work. I want to note at the outset that in no way will be sharing GPS data or mapping data for sites. We want to treat them like human patient data, and not reveal their locations. You'll then be dealt a card from a deck — 20 x 20 meters or 30 x 30 meters, and you'll be looking for features. My team and I will have batch-processed large amounts of satellite data using algorithms in order for you to find things, so you'll be doing really good science. You'll then be starting to look. What do you see? Do you see a temple? Do you see a tomb? Do you see a pyramid? Do you see any potential site damage or site looting? You'll then begin to mark what's there. And off to the side are always going to be rich examples of exactly what you're seeing, to help guide you. All the data that you help us collect will be shared with vetted authorities, and will help create a new global alarm system to help protect sites. But it's not just going to stop there. All the archaeologists with whom we share your discoveries will take you with them as they begin to excavate them, by using Periscope, Google Plus and social media. A hundred years ago, archaeology was for the rich. Fifty years ago, it was for men. Now it's primarily for academics. Our goal is to democratize the process of archaeological discovery, and allow anyone to participate. Ninety-four years ago, Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tut. Who is the next Howard Carter? It might be you. By creating this platform, we will find the millions of places occupied by the billions of people that came before us. If we want to answer the big questions about who we are and where we've come from, the answers to those questions do not lie in pyramids or palaces, but in the cities and villages of those that came before us. If we want to learn about the past, it's time we inverted the pyramids. Acknowledging that the past is worth saving means so much more. It means that we're worth saving, too. And the greatest story ever told is the story of our shared human journey. But the only way we're going to be able to write it is if we do it together. Come with me. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why you should love statistics | {0: 'Alan Smith uses interactive graphics and statistics to breathe new life into how data is presented.'} | TEDxExeter | Back in 2003, the UK government carried out a survey. And it was a survey that measured levels of numeracy in the population. And they were shocked to find out that for every 100 working age adults in the country, 47 of them lacked Level 1 numeracy skills. Now, Level 1 numeracy skills — that's low-end GCSE score. It's the ability to deal with fractions, percentages and decimals. So this figure prompted a lot of hand-wringing in Whitehall. Policies were changed, investments were made, and then they ran the survey again in 2011. So can you guess what happened to this number? It went up to 49. (Laughter) And in fact, when I reported this figure in the FT, one of our readers joked and said, "This figure is only shocking to 51 percent of the population." (Laughter) But I preferred, actually, the reaction of a schoolchild when I presented at a school this information, who raised their hand and said, "How do we know that the person who made that number isn't one of the 49 percent either?" (Laughter) So clearly, there's a numeracy issue, because these are important skills for life, and a lot of the changes that we want to introduce in this century involve us becoming more comfortable with numbers. Now, it's not just an English problem. OECD this year released some figures looking at numeracy in young people, and leading the way, the USA — nearly 40 percent of young people in the US have low numeracy. Now, England is there too, but there are seven OECD countries with figures above 20 percent. That is a problem, because it doesn't have to be that way. If you look at the far end of this graph, you can see the Netherlands and Korea are in single figures. So there's definitely a numeracy problem that we want to address. Now, as useful as studies like these are, I think we risk herding people inadvertently into one of two categories; that there are two kinds of people: those people that are comfortable with numbers, that can do numbers, and the people who can't. And what I'm trying to talk about here today is to say that I believe that is a false dichotomy. It's not an immutable pairing. I think you don't have to have tremendously high levels of numeracy to be inspired by numbers, and that should be the starting point to the journey ahead. And one of the ways in which we can begin that journey, for me, is looking at statistics. Now, I am the first to acknowledge that statistics has got somewhat of an image problem. (Laughter) It's the part of mathematics that even mathematicians don't particularly like, because whereas the rest of maths is all about precision and certainty, statistics is almost the reverse of that. But actually, I was a late convert to the world of statistics myself. If you'd asked my undergraduate professors what two subjects would I be least likely to excel in after university, they'd have told you statistics and computer programming, and yet here I am, about to show you some statistical graphics that I programmed. So what inspired that change in me? What made me think that statistics was actually an interesting thing? It's really because statistics are about us. If you look at the etymology of the word statistics, it's the science of dealing with data about the state or the community that we live in. So statistics are about us as a group, not us as individuals. And I think as social animals, we share this fascination about how we as individuals relate to our groups, to our peers. And statistics in this way are at their most powerful when they surprise us. And there's been some really wonderful surveys carried out recently by Ipsos MORI in the last few years. They did a survey of over 1,000 adults in the UK, and said, for every 100 people in England and Wales, how many of them are Muslim? Now the average answer from this survey, which was supposed to be representative of the total population, was 24. That's what people thought. British people think 24 out of every 100 people in the country are Muslim. Now, official figures reveal that figure to be about five. So there's this big variation between what we think, our perception, and the reality as given by statistics. And I think that's interesting. What could possibly be causing that misperception? And I was so thrilled with this study, I started to take questions out in presentations. I was referring to it. Now, I did a presentation at St. Paul's School for Girls in Hammersmith, and I had an audience rather like this, except it was comprised entirely of sixth-form girls. And I said, "Girls, how many teenage girls do you think the British public think get pregnant every year?" And the girls were apoplectic when I said the British public think that 15 out of every 100 teenage girls get pregnant in the year. And they had every right to be angry, because in fact, I'd have to have closer to 200 dots before I could color one in, in terms of what the official figures tell us. And rather like numeracy, this is not just an English problem. Ipsos MORI expanded the survey in recent years to go across the world. And so, they asked Saudi Arabians, for every 100 adults in your country, how many of them are overweight or obese? And the average answer from the Saudis was just over a quarter. That's what they thought. Just over a quarter of adults are overweight or obese. The official figures show, actually, it's nearer to three-quarters. (Laughter) So again, a big variation. And I love this one: they asked in Japan, they asked the Japanese, for every 100 Japanese people, how many of them live in rural areas? The average was about a 50-50 split, just over halfway. They thought 56 out of every 100 Japanese people lived in rural areas. The official figure is seven. So extraordinary variations, and surprising to some, but not surprising to people who have read the work of Daniel Kahneman, for example, the Nobel-winning economist. He and his colleague, Amos Tversky, spent years researching this disjoint between what people perceive and the reality, the fact that people are actually pretty poor intuitive statisticians. And there are many reasons for this. Individual experiences, certainly, can influence our perceptions, but so, too, can things like the media reporting things by exception, rather than what's normal. Kahneman had a nice way of referring to that. He said, "We can be blind to the obvious" — so we've got the numbers wrong — "but we can be blind to our blindness about it." And that has enormous repercussions for decision making. So at the statistics office while this was all going on, I thought this was really interesting. I said, this is clearly a global problem, but maybe geography is the issue here. These were questions that were all about, how well do you know your country? So in this case, it's how well do you know 64 million people? Not very well, it turns out. I can't do that. So I had an idea, which was to think about this same sort of approach but to think about it in a very local sense. Is this a local? If we reframe the questions and say, how well do you know your local area, would your answers be any more accurate? So I devised a quiz: How well do you know your area? It's a simple Web app. You put in a post code and then it will ask you questions based on census data for your local area. And I was very conscious in designing this. I wanted to make it open to the widest possible range of people, not just the 49 percent who can get the numbers. I wanted everyone to engage with it. So for the design of the quiz, I was inspired by the isotypes of Otto Neurath from the 1920s and '30s. Now, these are methods for representing numbers using repeating icons. And the numbers are there, but they sit in the background. So it's a great way of representing quantity without resorting to using terms like "percentage," "fractions" and "ratios." So here's the quiz. The layout of the quiz is, you have your repeating icons on the left-hand side there, and a map showing you the area we're asking you questions about on the right-hand side. There are seven questions. Each question, there's a possible answer between zero and a hundred, and at the end of the quiz, you get an overall score between zero and a hundred. And so because this is TEDxExeter, I thought we would have a quick look at the quiz for the first few questions of Exeter. And so the first question is: For every 100 people, how many are aged under 16? Now, I don't know Exeter very well at all, so I had a guess at this, but it gives you an idea of how this quiz works. You drag the slider to highlight your icons, and then just click "Submit" to answer, and we animate away the difference between your answer and reality. And it turns out, I was a pretty terrible guess: five. How about the next question? This is asking about what the average age is, so the age at which half the population are younger and half the population are older. And I thought 35 — that sounds middle-aged to me. (Laughter) Actually, in Exeter, it's incredibly young, and I had underestimated the impact of the university in this area. The questions get harder as you go through. So this one's now asking about homeownership: For every 100 households, how many are owned with a mortgage or loan? And I hedged my bets here, because I didn't want to be more than 50 out on the answer. (Laughter) And actually, these get harder, these questions, because when you're in an area, when you're in a community, things like age — there are clues to whether a population is old or young. Just by looking around the area, you can see it. Something like homeownership is much more difficult to see, so we revert to our own heuristics, our own biases about how many people we think own their own homes. Now the truth is, when we published this quiz, the census data that it's based on was already a few years old. We've had online applications that allow you to put in a post code and get statistics back for years. So in some senses, this was all a little bit old and not necessarily new. But I was interested to see what reaction we might get by gamifying the data in the way that we have, by using animation and playing on the fact that people have their own preconceptions. It turns out, the reaction was, um ... was more than I could have hoped for. It was a long-held ambition of mine to bring down a statistics website due to public demand. (Laughter) This URL contains the words "statistics," "gov" and "UK," which are three of people's least favorite words in a URL. And the amazing thing about this was that the website came down at quarter to 10 at night, because people were actually engaging with this data of their own free will, using their own personal time. I was very interested to see that we got something like a quarter of a million people playing the quiz within the space of 48 hours of launching it. And it sparked an enormous discussion online, on social media, which was largely dominated by people having fun with their misconceptions, which is something that I couldn't have hoped for any better, in some respects. I also liked the fact that people started sending it to politicians. How well do you know the area you claim to represent? (Laughter) And then just to finish, going back to the two kinds of people, I thought it would be really interesting to see how people who are good with numbers would do on this quiz. The national statistician of England and Wales, John Pullinger, you would expect he would be pretty good. He got 44 for his own area. (Laughter) Jeremy Paxman — admittedly, after a glass of wine — 36. Even worse. It just shows you that the numbers can inspire us all. They can surprise us all. So very often, we talk about statistics as being the science of uncertainty. My parting thought for today is: actually, statistics is the science of us. And that's why we should be fascinated by numbers. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How to get better at the things you care about | {0: 'Eduardo Briceño is a learner, leader, speaker and writer devoted to enabling a more learning-oriented world.'} | TEDxManhattanBeach | Most of us go through life trying to do our best at whatever we do, whether it's our job, family, school or anything else. I feel that way. I try my best. But some time ago, I came to a realization that I wasn't getting much better at the things I cared most about, whether it was being a husband or a friend or a professional or teammate, and I wasn't improving much at those things even though I was spending a lot of time working hard at them. I've since realized from conversations I've had and from research that this stagnation, despite hard work, turns out to be pretty common. So I'd like to share with you some insights into why that is and what we can all do about it. What I've learned is that the most effective people and teams in any domain do something we can all emulate. They go through life deliberately alternating between two zones: the learning zone and the performance zone. The learning zone is when our goal is to improve. Then we do activities designed for improvement, concentrating on what we haven't mastered yet, which means we have to expect to make mistakes, knowing that we will learn from them. That is very different from what we do when we're in our performance zone, which is when our goal is to do something as best as we can, to execute. Then we concentrate on what we have already mastered and we try to minimize mistakes. Both of these zones should be part of our lives, but being clear about when we want to be in each of them, with what goal, focus and expectations, helps us better perform and better improve. The performance zone maximizes our immediate performance, while the learning zone maximizes our growth and our future performance. The reason many of us don't improve much despite our hard work is that we tend to spend almost all of our time in the performance zone. This hinders our growth, and ironically, over the long term, also our performance. So what does the learning zone look like? Take Demosthenes, a political leader and the greatest orator and lawyer in ancient Greece. To become great, he didn't spend all his time just being an orator or a lawyer, which would be his performance zone. But instead, he did activities designed for improvement. Of course, he studied a lot. He studied law and philosophy with guidance from mentors, but he also realized that being a lawyer involved persuading other people, so he also studied great speeches and acting. To get rid of an odd habit he had of involuntarily lifting his shoulder, he practiced his speeches in front of a mirror, and he suspended a sword from the ceiling so that if he raised his shoulder, it would hurt. (Laughter) To speak more clearly despite a lisp, he went through his speeches with stones in his mouth. He built an underground room where he could practice without interruptions and not disturb other people. And since courts at the time were very noisy, he also practiced by the ocean, projecting his voice above the roar of the waves. His activities in the learning zone were very different from his activities in court, his performance zone. In the learning zone, he did what Dr. Anders Ericsson calls deliberate practice. This involves breaking down abilities into component skills, being clear about what subskill we're working to improve, like keeping our shoulders down, giving full concentration to a high level of challenge outside our comfort zone, just beyond what we can currently do, using frequent feedback with repetition and adjustments, and ideally engaging the guidance of a skilled coach, because activities designed for improvement are domain-specific, and great teachers and coaches know what those activities are and can also give us expert feedback. It is this type of practice in the learning zone which leads to substantial improvement, not just time on task performing. For example, research shows that after the first couple of years working in a profession, performance usually plateaus. This has been shown to be true in teaching, general medicine, nursing and other fields, and it happens because once we think we have become good enough, adequate, then we stop spending time in the learning zone. We focus all our time on just doing our job, performing, which turns out not to be a great way to improve. But the people who continue to spend time in the learning zone do continue to always improve. The best salespeople at least once a week do activities with the goal of improvement. They read to extend their knowledge, consult with colleagues or domain experts, try out new strategies, solicit feedback and reflect. The best chess players spend a lot of time not playing games of chess, which would be their performance zone, but trying to predict the moves grand masters made and analyzing them. Each of us has probably spent many, many, many hours typing on a computer without getting faster, but if we spent 10 to 20 minutes each day fully concentrating on typing 10 to 20 percent faster than our current reliable speed, we would get faster, especially if we also identified what mistakes we're making and practiced typing those words. That's deliberate practice. In what other parts of our lives, perhaps that we care more about, are we working hard but not improving much because we're always in the performance zone? Now, this is not to say that the performance zone has no value. It very much does. When I needed a knee surgery, I didn't tell the surgeon, "Poke around in there and focus on what you don't know." (Laughter) "We'll learn from your mistakes!" I looked for a surgeon who I felt would do a good job, and I wanted her to do a good job. Being in the performance zone allows us to get things done as best as we can. It can also be motivating, and it provides us with information to identify what to focus on next when we go back to the learning zone. So the way to high performance is to alternate between the learning zone and the performance zone, purposefully building our skills in the learning zone, then applying those skills in the performance zone. When Beyoncé is on tour, during the concert, she's in her performance zone, but every night when she gets back to the hotel room, she goes right back into her learning zone. She watches a video of the show that just ended. She identifies opportunities for improvement, for herself, her dancers and her camera staff. And the next morning, everyone receives pages of notes with what to adjust, which they then work on during the day before the next performance. It's a spiral to ever-increasing capabilities, but we need to know when we seek to learn, and when we seek to perform, and while we want to spend time doing both, the more time we spend in the learning zone, the more we'll improve. So how can we spend more time in the learning zone? First, we must believe and understand that we can improve, what we call a growth mindset. Second, we must want to improve at that particular skill. There has to be a purpose we care about, because it takes time and effort. Third, we must have an idea about how to improve, what we can do to improve, not how I used to practice the guitar as a teenager, performing songs over and over again, but doing deliberate practice. And fourth, we must be in a low-stakes situation, because if mistakes are to be expected, then the consequence of making them must not be catastrophic, or even very significant. A tightrope walker doesn't practice new tricks without a net underneath, and an athlete wouldn't set out to first try a new move during a championship match. One reason that in our lives we spend so much time in the performance zone is that our environments often are, unnecessarily, high stakes. We create social risks for one another, even in schools which are supposed to be all about learning, and I'm not talking about standardized tests. I mean that every minute of every day, many students in elementary schools through colleges feel that if they make a mistake, others will think less of them. No wonder they're always stressed out and not taking the risks necessary for learning. But they learn that mistakes are undesirable inadvertently when teachers or parents are eager to hear just correct answers and reject mistakes rather than welcome and examine them to learn from them, or when we look for narrow responses rather than encourage more exploratory thinking that we can all learn from. When all homework or student work has a number or a letter on it, and counts towards a final grade, rather than being used for practice, mistakes, feedback and revision, we send the message that school is a performance zone. The same is true in our workplaces. In the companies I consult with, I often see flawless execution cultures which leaders foster to encourage great work. But that leads employees to stay within what they know and not try new things, so companies struggle to innovate and improve, and they fall behind. We can create more spaces for growth by starting conversations with one another about when we want to be in each zone. What do we want to get better at and how? And when do we want to execute and minimize mistakes? That way, we gain clarity about what success is, when, and how to best support one another. But what if we find ourselves in a chronic high-stakes setting and we feel we can't start those conversations yet? Then here are three things that we can still do as individuals. First, we can create low-stakes islands in an otherwise high-stakes sea. These are spaces where mistakes have little consequence. For example, we might find a mentor or a trusted colleague with whom we can exchange ideas or have vulnerable conversations or even role-play. Or we can ask for feedback-oriented meetings as projects progress. Or we can set aside time to read or watch videos or take online courses. Those are just some examples. Second, we can execute and perform as we're expected, but then reflect on what we could do better next time, like Beyoncé does, and we can observe and emulate experts. The observation, reflection and adjustment is a learning zone. And finally, we can lead and lower the stakes for others by sharing what we want to get better at, by asking questions about what we don't know, by soliciting feedback and by sharing our mistakes and what we've learned from them, so that others can feel safe to do the same. Real confidence is about modeling ongoing learning. What if, instead of spending our lives doing, doing, doing, performing, performing, performing, we spent more time exploring, asking, listening, experimenting, reflecting, striving and becoming? What if we each always had something we were working to improve? What if we created more low-stakes islands and waters? And what if we got clear, within ourselves and with our teammates, about when we seek to learn and when we seek to perform, so that our efforts can become more consequential, our improvement never-ending and our best even better? Thank you. |
My son was a Columbine shooter. This is my story | {0: 'Sue Klebold has become a passionate agent working to advance mental health awareness and intervention.'} | TEDMED 2016 | The last time I heard my son's voice was when he walked out the front door on his way to school. He called out one word in the darkness: "Bye." It was April 20, 1999. Later that morning, at Columbine High School, my son Dylan and his friend Eric killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 others before taking their own lives. Thirteen innocent people were killed, leaving their loved ones in a state of grief and trauma. Others sustained injuries, some resulting in disfigurement and permanent disability. But the enormity of the tragedy can't be measured only by the number of deaths and injuries that took place. There's no way to quantify the psychological damage of those who were in the school, or who took part in rescue or cleanup efforts. There's no way to assess the magnitude of a tragedy like Columbine, especially when it can be a blueprint for other shooters who go on to commit atrocities of their own. Columbine was a tidal wave, and when the crash ended, it would take years for the community and for society to comprehend its impact. It has taken me years to try to accept my son's legacy. The cruel behavior that defined the end of his life showed me that he was a completely different person from the one I knew. Afterwards people asked, "How could you not know? What kind of a mother were you?" I still ask myself those same questions. Before the shootings, I thought of myself as a good mom. Helping my children become caring, healthy, responsible adults was the most important role of my life. But the tragedy convinced me that I failed as a parent, and it's partially this sense of failure that brings me here today. Aside from his father, I was the one person who knew and loved Dylan the most. If anyone could have known what was happening, it should have been me, right? But I didn't know. Today, I'm here to share the experience of what it's like to be the mother of someone who kills and hurts. For years after the tragedy, I combed through memories, trying to figure out exactly where I failed as a parent. But there are no simple answers. I can't give you any solutions. All I can do is share what I have learned. When I talk to people who didn't know me before the shootings, I have three challenges to meet. First, when I walk into a room like this, I never know if someone there has experienced loss because of what my son did. I feel a need to acknowledge the suffering caused by a member of my family who isn't here to do it for himself. So first, with all of my heart, I'm sorry if my son has caused you pain. The second challenge I have is that I must ask for understanding and even compassion when I talk about my son's death as a suicide. Two years before he died, he wrote on a piece of paper in a notebook that he was cutting himself. He said that he was in agony and wanted to get a gun so he could end his life. I didn't know about any of this until months after his death. When I talk about his death as a suicide, I'm not trying to downplay the viciousness he showed at the end of his life. I'm trying to understand how his suicidal thinking led to murder. After a lot of reading and talking with experts, I have come to believe that his involvement in the shootings was rooted not in his desire to kill but in his desire to die. The third challenge I have when I talk about my son's murder-suicide is that I'm talking about mental health — excuse me — is that I'm talking about mental health, or brain health, as I prefer to call it, because it's more concrete. And in the same breath, I'm talking about violence. The last thing I want to do is to contribute to the misunderstanding that already exists around mental illness. Only a very small percent of those who have a mental illness are violent toward other people, but of those who die by suicide, it's estimated that about 75 to maybe more than 90 percent have a diagnosable mental health condition of some kind. As you all know very well, our mental health care system is not equipped to help everyone, and not everyone with destructive thoughts fits the criteria for a specific diagnosis. Many who have ongoing feelings of fear or anger or hopelessness are never assessed or treated. Too often, they get our attention only if they reach a behavioral crisis. If estimates are correct that about one to two percent of all suicides involves the murder of another person, when suicide rates rise, as they are rising for some populations, the murder-suicide rates will rise as well. I wanted to understand what was going on in Dylan's mind prior to his death, so I looked for answers from other survivors of suicide loss. I did research and volunteered to help with fund-raising events, and whenever I could, I talked with those who had survived their own suicidal crisis or attempt. One of the most helpful conversations I had was with a coworker who overheard me talking to someone else in my office cubicle. She heard me say that Dylan could not have loved me if he could do something as horrible as he did. Later, when she found me alone, she apologized for overhearing that conversation, but told me that I was wrong. She said that when she was a young, single mother with three small children, she became severely depressed and was hospitalized to keep her safe. At the time, she was certain that her children would be better off if she died, so she had made a plan to end her life. She assured me that a mother's love was the strongest bond on Earth, and that she loved her children more than anything in the world, but because of her illness, she was sure that they would be better off without her. What she said and what I've learned from others is that we do not make the so-called decision or choice to die by suicide in the same way that we choose what car to drive or where to go on a Saturday night. When someone is in an extremely suicidal state, they are in a stage four medical health emergency. Their thinking is impaired and they've lost access to tools of self-governance. Even though they can make a plan and act with logic, their sense of truth is distorted by a filter of pain through which they interpret their reality. Some people can be very good at hiding this state, and they often have good reasons for doing that. Many of us have suicidal thoughts at some point, but persistent, ongoing thoughts of suicide and devising a means to die are symptoms of pathology, and like many illnesses, the condition has to be recognized and treated before a life is lost. But my son's death was not purely a suicide. It involved mass murder. I wanted to know how his suicidal thinking became homicidal. But research is sparse and there are no simple answers. Yes, he probably had ongoing depression. He had a personality that was perfectionistic and self-reliant, and that made him less likely to seek help from others. He had experienced triggering events at the school that left him feeling debased and humiliated and mad. And he had a complicated friendship with a boy who shared his feelings of rage and alienation, and who was seriously disturbed, controlling and homicidal. And on top of this period in his life of extreme vulnerability and fragility, Dylan found access to guns even though we'd never owned any in our home. It was appallingly easy for a 17-year-old boy to buy guns, both legally and illegally, without my permission or knowledge. And somehow, 17 years and many school shootings later, it's still appallingly easy. What Dylan did that day broke my heart, and as trauma so often does, it took a toll on my body and on my mind. Two years after the shootings, I got breast cancer, and two years after that, I began to have mental health problems. On top of the constant, perpetual grief I was terrified that I would run into a family member of someone Dylan had killed, or be accosted by the press or by an angry citizen. I was afraid to turn on the news, afraid to hear myself being called a terrible parent or a disgusting person. I started having panic attacks. The first bout started four years after the shootings, when I was getting ready for the depositions and would have to meet the victims' families face to face. The second round started six years after the shootings, when I was preparing to speak publicly about murder-suicide for the first time at a conference. Both episodes lasted several weeks. The attacks happened everywhere: in the hardware store, in my office, or even while reading a book in bed. My mind would suddenly lock into this spinning cycle of terror and no matter how I hard I tried to calm myself down or reason my way out of it, I couldn't do it. It felt as if my brain was trying to kill me, and then, being afraid of being afraid consumed all of my thoughts. That's when I learned firsthand what it feels like to have a malfunctioning mind, and that's when I truly became a brain health advocate. With therapy and medication and self-care, life eventually returned to whatever could be thought of as normal under the circumstances. When I looked back on all that had happened, I could see that my son's spiral into dysfunction probably occurred over a period of about two years, plenty of time to get him help, if only someone had known that he needed help and known what to do. Every time someone asks me, "How could you not have known?", it feels like a punch in the gut. It carries accusation and taps into my feelings of guilt that no matter how much therapy I've had I will never fully eradicate. But here's something I've learned: if love were enough to stop someone who is suicidal from hurting themselves, suicides would hardly ever happen. But love is not enough, and suicide is prevalent. It's the second leading cause of death for people age 10 to 34, and 15 percent of American youth report having made a suicide plan in the last year. I've learned that no matter how much we want to believe we can, we cannot know or control everything our loved ones think and feel, and the stubborn belief that we are somehow different, that someone we love would never think of hurting themselves or someone else, can cause us to miss what's hidden in plain sight. And if worst case scenarios do come to pass, we'll have to learn to forgive ourselves for not knowing or for not asking the right questions or not finding the right treatment. We should always assume that someone we love may be suffering, regardless of what they say or how they act. We should listen with our whole being, without judgments, and without offering solutions. I know that I will live with this tragedy, with these multiple tragedies, for the rest of my life. I know that in the minds of many, what I lost can't compare to what the other families lost. I know my struggle doesn't make theirs any easier. I know there are even some who think I don't have the right to any pain, but only to a life of permanent penance. In the end what I know comes down to this: the tragic fact is that even the most vigilant and responsible of us may not be able to help, but for love's sake, we must never stop trying to know the unknowable. Thank you. (Applause) |
What time is it on Mars? | {0: "Nagin Cox explores Mars as part of the team that operates NASA's rovers."} | TEDxBeaconStreet | So many of you have probably seen the movie "The Martian." But for those of you who did not, it's a movie about an astronaut who is stranded on Mars, and his efforts to stay alive until the Earth can send a rescue mission to bring him back to Earth. Gladly, they do re-establish communication with the character, astronaut Watney, at some point so that he's not as alone on Mars until he can be rescued. So while you're watching the movie, or even if you haven't, when you think about Mars, you're probably thinking about how far away it is and how distant. And, what might not have occurred to you is, what are the logistics really like of working on another planet — of living on two planets when there are people on the Earth and there are rovers or people on Mars? So think about when you have friends, families and co-workers in California, on the West Coast or in other parts of the world. When you're trying to communicate with them, one of the things you probably first think about is: wait, what time is it in California? Will I wake them up? Is it OK to call? So even if you're interacting with colleagues who are in Europe, you're immediately thinking about: What does it take to coordinate communication when people are far away? So we don't have people on Mars right now, but we do have rovers. And actually right now, on Curiosity, it is 6:10 in the morning. So, 6:10 in the morning on Mars. We have four rovers on Mars. The United States has put four rovers on Mars since the mid-1990s, and I have been privileged enough to work on three of them. So, I am a spacecraft engineer, a spacecraft operations engineer, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Los Angeles, California. And these rovers are our robotic emissaries. So, they are our eyes and our ears, and they see the planet for us until we can send people. So we learn how to operate on other planets through these rovers. So before we send people, we send robots. So the reason there's a time difference on Mars right now, from the time that we're at is because the Martian day is longer than the Earth day. Our Earth day is 24 hours, because that's how long it takes the Earth to rotate, how long it takes to go around once. So our day is 24 hours. It takes Mars 24 hours and approximately 40 minutes to rotate once. So that means that the Martian day is 40 minutes longer than the Earth day. So teams of people who are operating the rovers on Mars, like this one, what we are doing is we are living on Earth, but working on Mars. So we have to think as if we are actually on Mars with the rover. Our job, the job of this team, of which I'm a part of, is to send commands to the rover to tell it what to do the next day. To tell it to drive or drill or tell her whatever she's supposed to do. So while she's sleeping — and the rover does sleep at night because she needs to recharge her batteries and she needs to weather the cold Martian night. And so she sleeps. So while she sleeps, we work on her program for the next day. So I work the Martian night shift. (Laughter) So in order to come to work on the Earth at the same time every day on Mars — like, let's say I need to be at work at 5:00 p.m., this team needs to be at work at 5:00 p.m. Mars time every day, then we have to come to work on the Earth 40 minutes later every day, in order to stay in sync with Mars. That's like moving a time zone every day. So one day you come in at 8:00, the next day 40 minutes later at 8:40, the next day 40 minutes later at 9:20, the next day at 10:00. So you keep moving 40 minutes every day, until soon you're coming to work in the middle of the night — the middle of the Earth night. Right? So you can imagine how confusing that is. Hence, the Mars watch. (Laughter) This weights in this watch have been mechanically adjusted so that it runs more slowly. Right? And we didn't start out — I got this watch in 2004 when Spirit and Opportunity, the rovers back then. We didn't start out thinking that we were going to need Mars watches. Right? We thought, OK, we'll just have the time on our computers and on the mission control screens, and that would be enough. Yeah, not so much. Because we weren't just working on Mars time, we were actually living on Mars time. And we got just instantaneously confused about what time it was. So you really needed something on your wrist to tell you: What time is it on the Earth? What time is it on Mars? And it wasn't just the time on Mars that was confusing; we also needed to be able to talk to each other about it. So a "sol" is a Martian day — again, 24 hours and 40 minutes. So when we're talking about something that's happening on the Earth, we will say, today. So, for Mars, we say, "tosol." (Laughter) Yesterday became "yestersol" for Mars. Again, we didn't start out thinking, "Oh, let's invent a language." It was just very confusing. I remember somebody walked up to me and said, "I would like to do this activity on the vehicle tomorrow, on the rover." And I said, "Tomorrow, tomorrow, or Mars, tomorrow?" We started this terminology because we needed a way to talk to each other. (Laughter) Tomorrow became "nextersol" or "solorrow." Because people have different preferences for the words they use. Some of you might say "soda" and some of you might say "pop." So we have people who say "nextersol" or "solorrow." And then something that I noticed after a few years of working on these missions, was that the people who work on the rovers, we say "tosol." The people who work on the landed missions that don't rove around, they say "tosoul." So I could actually tell what mission you worked on from your Martian accent. (Laughter) So we have the watches and the language, and you're detecting a theme here, right? So that we don't get confused. But even the Earth daylight could confuse us. If you think that right now, you've come to work and it's the middle of the Martian night and there's light streaming in from the windows that's going to be confusing as well. So you can see from this image of the control room that all of the blinds are down. So that there's no light to distract us. The blinds went down all over the building about a week before landing, and they didn't go up until we went off Mars time. So this also works for the house, for at home. I've been on Mars time three times, and my husband is like, OK, we're getting ready for Mars time. And so he'll put foil all over the windows and dark curtains and shades because it also affects your families. And so here I was living in kind of this darkened environment, but so was he. And he'd gotten used to it. But then I would get these plaintive emails from him when he was at work. Should I come home? Are you awake? What time is it on Mars? And I decided, OK, so he needs a Mars watch. (Laughter) But of course, it's 2016, so there's an app for that. (Laughter) So now instead of the watches, we can also use our phones. But the impact on families was just across the board; it wasn't just those of us who were working on the rovers but our families as well. This is David Oh, one of our flight directors, and he's at the beach in Los Angeles with his family at 1:00 in the morning. (Laughter) So because we landed in August and his kids didn't have to go back to school until September, they actually went on to Mars time with him for one month. They got up 40 minutes later every day. And they were on dad's work schedule. So they lived on Mars time for a month and had these great adventures, like going bowling in the middle of the night or going to the beach. And one of the things that we all discovered is you can get anywhere in Los Angeles at 3:00 in the morning when there's no traffic. (Laughter) So we would get off work, and we didn't want to go home and bother our families, and we were hungry, so instead of going locally to eat something, we'd go, "Wait, there's this great all-night deli in Long Beach, and we can get there in 10 minutes!" So we would drive down — it was like the 60s, no traffic. We would drive down there, and the restaurant owners would go, "Who are you people? And why are you at my restaurant at 3:00 in the morning?" So they came to realize that there were these packs of Martians, roaming the LA freeways, in the middle of the night — in the middle of the Earth night. And we did actually start calling ourselves Martians. So those of us who were on Mars time would refer to ourselves as Martians, and everyone else as Earthlings. (Laughter) And that's because when you're moving a time-zone every day, you start to really feel separated from everyone else. You're literally in your own world. So I have this button on that says, "I survived Mars time. Sol 0-90." And there's a picture of it up on the screen. So the reason we got these buttons is because we work on Mars time in order to be as efficient as possible with the rover on Mars, to make the best use of our time. But we don't stay on Mars time for more than three to four months. Eventually, we'll move to a modified Mars time, which is what we're working now. And that's because it's hard on your bodies, it's hard on your families. In fact, there were sleep researchers who actually were studying us because it was so unusual for humans to try to extend their day. And they had about 30 of us that they would do sleep deprivation experiments on. So I would come in and take the test and I fell asleep in each one. And that was because, again, this eventually becomes hard on your body. Even though it was a blast. It was a huge bonding experience with the other members on the team, but it is difficult to sustain. So these rover missions are our first steps out into the solar system. We are learning how to live on more than one planet. We are changing our perspective to become multi-planetary. So the next time you see a Star Wars movie, and there are people going from the Dagobah system to Tatooine, think about what it really means to have people spread out so far. What it means in terms of the distances between them, how they will start to feel separate from each other and just the logistics of the time. We have not sent people to Mars yet, but we hope to. And between companies like SpaceX and NASA and all of the international space agencies of the world, we hope to do that in the next few decades. So soon we will have people on Mars, and we truly will be multi-planetary. And the young boy or the young girl who will be going to Mars could be in this audience or listening today. I have wanted to work at JPL on these missions since I was 14 years old and I am privileged to be a part of it. And this is a remarkable time in the space program, and we are all in this journey together. So the next time you think you don't have enough time in your day, just remember, it's all a matter of your Earthly perspective. Thank you. (Applause) |
The incredible inventions of intuitive AI | {0: 'Maurice Conti explores new partnerships between technology, nature and humanity.'} | TEDxPortland | How many of you are creatives, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists, or maybe you just have a really big imagination? Show of hands? (Cheers) That's most of you. I have some news for us creatives. Over the course of the next 20 years, more will change around the way we do our work than has happened in the last 2,000. In fact, I think we're at the dawn of a new age in human history. Now, there have been four major historical eras defined by the way we work. The Hunter-Gatherer Age lasted several million years. And then the Agricultural Age lasted several thousand years. The Industrial Age lasted a couple of centuries. And now the Information Age has lasted just a few decades. And now today, we're on the cusp of our next great era as a species. Welcome to the Augmented Age. In this new era, your natural human capabilities are going to be augmented by computational systems that help you think, robotic systems that help you make, and a digital nervous system that connects you to the world far beyond your natural senses. Let's start with cognitive augmentation. How many of you are augmented cyborgs? (Laughter) I would actually argue that we're already augmented. Imagine you're at a party, and somebody asks you a question that you don't know the answer to. If you have one of these, in a few seconds, you can know the answer. But this is just a primitive beginning. Even Siri is just a passive tool. In fact, for the last three-and-a-half million years, the tools that we've had have been completely passive. They do exactly what we tell them and nothing more. Our very first tool only cut where we struck it. The chisel only carves where the artist points it. And even our most advanced tools do nothing without our explicit direction. In fact, to date, and this is something that frustrates me, we've always been limited by this need to manually push our wills into our tools — like, manual, literally using our hands, even with computers. But I'm more like Scotty in "Star Trek." (Laughter) I want to have a conversation with a computer. I want to say, "Computer, let's design a car," and the computer shows me a car. And I say, "No, more fast-looking, and less German," and bang, the computer shows me an option. (Laughter) That conversation might be a little ways off, probably less than many of us think, but right now, we're working on it. Tools are making this leap from being passive to being generative. Generative design tools use a computer and algorithms to synthesize geometry to come up with new designs all by themselves. All it needs are your goals and your constraints. I'll give you an example. In the case of this aerial drone chassis, all you would need to do is tell it something like, it has four propellers, you want it to be as lightweight as possible, and you need it to be aerodynamically efficient. Then what the computer does is it explores the entire solution space: every single possibility that solves and meets your criteria — millions of them. It takes big computers to do this. But it comes back to us with designs that we, by ourselves, never could've imagined. And the computer's coming up with this stuff all by itself — no one ever drew anything, and it started completely from scratch. And by the way, it's no accident that the drone body looks just like the pelvis of a flying squirrel. (Laughter) It's because the algorithms are designed to work the same way evolution does. What's exciting is we're starting to see this technology out in the real world. We've been working with Airbus for a couple of years on this concept plane for the future. It's a ways out still. But just recently we used a generative-design AI to come up with this. This is a 3D-printed cabin partition that's been designed by a computer. It's stronger than the original yet half the weight, and it will be flying in the Airbus A320 later this year. So computers can now generate; they can come up with their own solutions to our well-defined problems. But they're not intuitive. They still have to start from scratch every single time, and that's because they never learn. Unlike Maggie. (Laughter) Maggie's actually smarter than our most advanced design tools. What do I mean by that? If her owner picks up that leash, Maggie knows with a fair degree of certainty it's time to go for a walk. And how did she learn? Well, every time the owner picked up the leash, they went for a walk. And Maggie did three things: she had to pay attention, she had to remember what happened and she had to retain and create a pattern in her mind. Interestingly, that's exactly what computer scientists have been trying to get AIs to do for the last 60 or so years. Back in 1952, they built this computer that could play Tic-Tac-Toe. Big deal. Then 45 years later, in 1997, Deep Blue beats Kasparov at chess. 2011, Watson beats these two humans at Jeopardy, which is much harder for a computer to play than chess is. In fact, rather than working from predefined recipes, Watson had to use reasoning to overcome his human opponents. And then a couple of weeks ago, DeepMind's AlphaGo beats the world's best human at Go, which is the most difficult game that we have. In fact, in Go, there are more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe. So in order to win, what AlphaGo had to do was develop intuition. And in fact, at some points, AlphaGo's programmers didn't understand why AlphaGo was doing what it was doing. And things are moving really fast. I mean, consider — in the space of a human lifetime, computers have gone from a child's game to what's recognized as the pinnacle of strategic thought. What's basically happening is computers are going from being like Spock to being a lot more like Kirk. (Laughter) Right? From pure logic to intuition. Would you cross this bridge? Most of you are saying, "Oh, hell no!" (Laughter) And you arrived at that decision in a split second. You just sort of knew that bridge was unsafe. And that's exactly the kind of intuition that our deep-learning systems are starting to develop right now. Very soon, you'll literally be able to show something you've made, you've designed, to a computer, and it will look at it and say, "Sorry, homie, that'll never work. You have to try again." Or you could ask it if people are going to like your next song, or your next flavor of ice cream. Or, much more importantly, you could work with a computer to solve a problem that we've never faced before. For instance, climate change. We're not doing a very good job on our own, we could certainly use all the help we can get. That's what I'm talking about, technology amplifying our cognitive abilities so we can imagine and design things that were simply out of our reach as plain old un-augmented humans. So what about making all of this crazy new stuff that we're going to invent and design? I think the era of human augmentation is as much about the physical world as it is about the virtual, intellectual realm. How will technology augment us? In the physical world, robotic systems. OK, there's certainly a fear that robots are going to take jobs away from humans, and that is true in certain sectors. But I'm much more interested in this idea that humans and robots working together are going to augment each other, and start to inhabit a new space. This is our applied research lab in San Francisco, where one of our areas of focus is advanced robotics, specifically, human-robot collaboration. And this is Bishop, one of our robots. As an experiment, we set it up to help a person working in construction doing repetitive tasks — tasks like cutting out holes for outlets or light switches in drywall. (Laughter) So, Bishop's human partner can tell what to do in plain English and with simple gestures, kind of like talking to a dog, and then Bishop executes on those instructions with perfect precision. We're using the human for what the human is good at: awareness, perception and decision making. And we're using the robot for what it's good at: precision and repetitiveness. Here's another cool project that Bishop worked on. The goal of this project, which we called the HIVE, was to prototype the experience of humans, computers and robots all working together to solve a highly complex design problem. The humans acted as labor. They cruised around the construction site, they manipulated the bamboo — which, by the way, because it's a non-isomorphic material, is super hard for robots to deal with. But then the robots did this fiber winding, which was almost impossible for a human to do. And then we had an AI that was controlling everything. It was telling the humans what to do, telling the robots what to do and keeping track of thousands of individual components. What's interesting is, building this pavilion was simply not possible without human, robot and AI augmenting each other. OK, I'll share one more project. This one's a little bit crazy. We're working with Amsterdam-based artist Joris Laarman and his team at MX3D to generatively design and robotically print the world's first autonomously manufactured bridge. So, Joris and an AI are designing this thing right now, as we speak, in Amsterdam. And when they're done, we're going to hit "Go," and robots will start 3D printing in stainless steel, and then they're going to keep printing, without human intervention, until the bridge is finished. So, as computers are going to augment our ability to imagine and design new stuff, robotic systems are going to help us build and make things that we've never been able to make before. But what about our ability to sense and control these things? What about a nervous system for the things that we make? Our nervous system, the human nervous system, tells us everything that's going on around us. But the nervous system of the things we make is rudimentary at best. For instance, a car doesn't tell the city's public works department that it just hit a pothole at the corner of Broadway and Morrison. A building doesn't tell its designers whether or not the people inside like being there, and the toy manufacturer doesn't know if a toy is actually being played with — how and where and whether or not it's any fun. Look, I'm sure that the designers imagined this lifestyle for Barbie when they designed her. (Laughter) But what if it turns out that Barbie's actually really lonely? (Laughter) If the designers had known what was really happening in the real world with their designs — the road, the building, Barbie — they could've used that knowledge to create an experience that was better for the user. What's missing is a nervous system connecting us to all of the things that we design, make and use. What if all of you had that kind of information flowing to you from the things you create in the real world? With all of the stuff we make, we spend a tremendous amount of money and energy — in fact, last year, about two trillion dollars — convincing people to buy the things we've made. But if you had this connection to the things that you design and create after they're out in the real world, after they've been sold or launched or whatever, we could actually change that, and go from making people want our stuff, to just making stuff that people want in the first place. The good news is, we're working on digital nervous systems that connect us to the things we design. We're working on one project with a couple of guys down in Los Angeles called the Bandito Brothers and their team. And one of the things these guys do is build insane cars that do absolutely insane things. These guys are crazy — (Laughter) in the best way. And what we're doing with them is taking a traditional race-car chassis and giving it a nervous system. So we instrumented it with dozens of sensors, put a world-class driver behind the wheel, took it out to the desert and drove the hell out of it for a week. And the car's nervous system captured everything that was happening to the car. We captured four billion data points; all of the forces that it was subjected to. And then we did something crazy. We took all of that data, and plugged it into a generative-design AI we call "Dreamcatcher." So what do get when you give a design tool a nervous system, and you ask it to build you the ultimate car chassis? You get this. This is something that a human could never have designed. Except a human did design this, but it was a human that was augmented by a generative-design AI, a digital nervous system and robots that can actually fabricate something like this. So if this is the future, the Augmented Age, and we're going to be augmented cognitively, physically and perceptually, what will that look like? What is this wonderland going to be like? I think we're going to see a world where we're moving from things that are fabricated to things that are farmed. Where we're moving from things that are constructed to that which is grown. We're going to move from being isolated to being connected. And we'll move away from extraction to embrace aggregation. I also think we'll shift from craving obedience from our things to valuing autonomy. Thanks to our augmented capabilities, our world is going to change dramatically. We're going to have a world with more variety, more connectedness, more dynamism, more complexity, more adaptability and, of course, more beauty. The shape of things to come will be unlike anything we've ever seen before. Why? Because what will be shaping those things is this new partnership between technology, nature and humanity. That, to me, is a future well worth looking forward to. Thank you all so much. (Applause) |
Our story of rape and reconciliation | {0: 'Thordis Elva is one of the two authors of "South of Forgiveness," a unique collaboration between a survivor and perpetrator of rape.', 1: 'Tom Stranger is the co-author of "South of Forgiveness."'} | TEDWomen 2016 | [This talk contains graphic language and descriptions of sexual violence Viewer discretion is advised] Tom Stranger: In 1996, when I was 18 years old, I had the golden opportunity to go on an international exchange program. Ironically I'm an Australian who prefers proper icy cold weather, so I was both excited and tearful when I got on a plane to Iceland, after just having farewelled my parents and brothers goodbye. I was welcomed into the home of a beautiful Icelandic family who took me hiking, and helped me get a grasp of the melodic Icelandic language. I struggled a bit with the initial period of homesickness. I snowboarded after school, and I slept a lot. Two hours of chemistry class in a language that you don't yet fully understand can be a pretty good sedative. (Laughter) My teacher recommended I try out for the school play, just to get me a bit more socially active. It turns out I didn't end up being part of the play, but through it I met Thordis. We shared a lovely teenage romance, and we'd meet at lunchtimes to just hold hands and walk around old downtown Reykjavík. I met her welcoming family, and she met my friends. We'd been in a budding relationship for a bit over a month when our school's Christmas Ball was held. Thordis Elva: I was 16 and in love for the first time. Going together to the Christmas dance was a public confirmation of our relationship, and I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. No longer a child, but a young woman. High on my newfound maturity, I felt it was only natural to try drinking rum for the first time that night, too. That was a bad idea. I became very ill, drifting in and out of consciousness in between spasms of convulsive vomiting. The security guards wanted to call me an ambulance, but Tom acted as my knight in shining armor, and told them he'd take me home. It was like a fairy tale, his strong arms around me, laying me in the safety of my bed. But the gratitude that I felt towards him soon turned to horror as he proceeded to take off my clothes and get on top of me. My head had cleared up, but my body was still too weak to fight back, and the pain was blinding. I thought I'd be severed in two. In order to stay sane, I silently counted the seconds on my alarm clock. And ever since that night, I've known that there are 7,200 seconds in two hours. Despite limping for days and crying for weeks, this incident didn't fit my ideas about rape like I'd seen on TV. Tom wasn't an armed lunatic; he was my boyfriend. And it didn't happen in a seedy alleyway, it happened in my own bed. By the time I could identify what had happened to me as rape, he had completed his exchange program and left for Australia. So I told myself it was pointless to address what had happened. And besides, it had to have been my fault, somehow. I was raised in a world where girls are taught that they get raped for a reason. Their skirt was too short, their smile was too wide, their breath smelled of alcohol. And I was guilty of all of those things, so the shame had to be mine. It took me years to realize that only one thing could have stopped me from being raped that night, and it wasn't my skirt, it wasn't my smile, it wasn't my childish trust. The only thing that could've stopped me from being raped that night is the man who raped me — had he stopped himself. TS: I have vague memories of the next day: the after effects of drinking, a certain hollowness that I tried to stifle. Nothing more. But I didn't show up at Thordis's door. It is important to now state that I didn't see my deed for what it was. The word "rape" didn't echo around my mind as it should've, and I wasn't crucifying myself with memories of the night before. It wasn't so much a conscious refusal, it was more like any acknowledgment of reality was forbidden. My definition of my actions completely refuted any recognition of the immense trauma I caused Thordis. To be honest, I repudiated the entire act in the days afterwards and when I was committing it. I disavowed the truth by convincing myself it was sex and not rape. And this is a lie I've felt spine-bending guilt for. I broke up with Thordis a couple of days later, and then saw her a number of times during the remainder of my year in Iceland, feeling a sharp stab of heavyheartedness each time. Deep down, I knew I'd done something immeasurably wrong. But without planning it, I sunk the memories deep, and then I tied a rock to them. What followed is a nine-year period that can best be titled as "Denial and Running." When I got a chance to identify the real torment that I caused, I didn't stand still long enough to do so. Whether it be via distraction, substance use, thrill-seeking or the scrupulous policing of my inner speak, I refused to be static and silent. And with this noise, I also drew heavily upon other parts of my life to construct a picture of who I was. I was a surfer, a social science student, a friend to good people, a loved brother and son, an outdoor recreation guide, and eventually, a youth worker. I gripped tight to the simple notion that I wasn't a bad person. I didn't think I had this in my bones. I thought I was made up of something else. In my nurtured upbringing, my loving extended family and role models, people close to me were warm and genuine in their respect shown towards women. It took me a long time to stare down this dark corner of myself, and to ask it questions. TE: Nine years after the Christmas dance, I was 25 years old, and headed straight for a nervous breakdown. My self-worth was buried under a soul-crushing load of silence that isolated me from everyone that I cared about, and I was consumed with misplaced hatred and anger that I took out on myself. One day, I stormed out of the door in tears after a fight with a loved one, and I wandered into a café, where I asked the waitress for a pen. I always had a notebook with me, claiming that it was to jot down ideas in moments of inspiration, but the truth was that I needed to be constantly fidgeting, because in moments of stillness, I found myself counting seconds again. But that day, I watched in wonder as the words streamed out of my pen, forming the most pivotal letter I've ever written, addressed to Tom. Along with an account of the violence that he subjected me to, the words, "I want to find forgiveness" stared back at me, surprising nobody more than myself. But deep down I realized that this was my way out of my suffering, because regardless of whether or not he deserved my forgiveness, I deserved peace. My era of shame was over. Before sending the letter, I prepared myself for all kinds of negative responses, or what I found likeliest: no response whatsoever. The only outcome that I didn't prepare myself for was the one that I then got — a typed confession from Tom, full of disarming regret. As it turns out, he, too, had been imprisoned by silence. And this marked the start of an eight-year-long correspondence that God knows was never easy, but always honest. I relieved myself of the burdens that I'd wrongfully shouldered, and he, in turn, wholeheartedly owned up to what he'd done. Our written exchanges became a platform to dissect the consequences of that night, and they were everything from gut-wrenching to healing beyond words. And yet, it didn't bring about closure for me. Perhaps because the email format didn't feel personal enough, perhaps because it's easy to be brave when you're hiding behind a computer screen on the other side of the planet. But we'd begun a dialogue that I felt was necessary to explore to its fullest. So, after eight years of writing, and nearly 16 years after that dire night, I mustered the courage to propose a wild idea: that we'd meet up in person and face our past once and for all. TS: Iceland and Australia are geographically like this. In the middle of the two is South Africa. We decided upon the city of Cape Town, and there we met for one week. The city itself proved to be a stunningly powerful environment to focus on reconciliation and forgiveness. Nowhere else has healing and rapprochement been tested like it has in South Africa. As a nation, South Africa sought to sit within the truth of its past, and to listen to the details of its history. Knowing this only magnified the effect that Cape Town had on us. Over the course of this week, we literally spoke our life stories to each other, from start to finish. And this was about analyzing our own history. We followed a strict policy of being honest, and this also came with a certain exposure, an open-chested vulnerability. There were gutting confessions, and moments where we just absolutely couldn't fathom the other person's experience. The seismic effects of sexual violence were spoken aloud and felt, face to face. At other times, though, we found a soaring clarity, and even some totally unexpected but liberating laughter. When it came down to it, we did out best to listen to each other intently. And our individual realities were aired with an unfiltered purity that couldn't do any less than lighten the soul. TE: Wanting to take revenge is a very human emotion — instinctual, even. And all I wanted to do for years was to hurt Tom back as deeply as he had hurt me. But had I not found a way out of the hatred and anger, I'm not sure I'd be standing here today. That isn't to say that I didn't have my doubts along the way. When the plane bounced on that landing strip in Cape Town, I remember thinking, "Why did I not just get myself a therapist and a bottle of vodka like a normal person would do?" (Laughter) At times, our search for understanding in Cape Town felt like an impossible quest, and all I wanted to do was to give up and go home to my loving husband, Vidir, and our son. But despite our difficulties, this journey did result in a victorious feeling that light had triumphed over darkness, that something constructive could be built out of the ruins. I read somewhere that you should try and be the person that you needed when you were younger. And back when I was a teenager, I would have needed to know that the shame wasn't mine, that there's hope after rape, that you can even find happiness, like I share with my husband today. Which is why I started writing feverishly upon my return from Cape Town, resulting in a book co-authored by Tom, that we hope can be of use to people from both ends of the perpetrator-survivor scale. If nothing else, it's a story that we would've needed to hear when we were younger. Given the nature of our story, I know the words that inevitably accompany it — victim, rapist — and labels are a way to organize concepts, but they can also be dehumanizing in their connotations. Once someone's been deemed a victim, it's that much easier to file them away as someone damaged, dishonored, less than. And likewise, once someone has been branded a rapist, it's that much easier to call him a monster — inhuman. But how will we understand what it is in human societies that produces violence if we refuse to recognize the humanity of those who commit it? And how — (Applause) And how can we empower survivors if we're making them feel less than? How can we discuss solutions to one of the biggest threats to the lives of women and children around the world, if the very words we use are part of the problem? TS: From what I've now learnt, my actions that night in 1996 were a self-centered taking. I felt deserving of Thordis's body. I've had primarily positive social influences and examples of equitable behavior around me. But on that occasion, I chose to draw upon the negative ones. The ones that see women as having less intrinsic worth, and of men having some unspoken and symbolic claim to their bodies. These influences I speak of are external to me, though. And it was only me in that room making choices, nobody else. When you own something and really square up to your culpability, I do think a surprising thing can happen. It's what I call a paradox of ownership. I thought I'd buckle under the weight of responsibility. I thought my certificate of humanity would be burnt. Instead, I was offered to really own what I did, and found that it didn't possess the entirety of who I am. Put simply, something you've done doesn't have to constitute the sum of who you are. The noise in my head abated. The indulgent self-pity was starved of oxygen, and it was replaced with the clean air of acceptance — an acceptance that I did hurt this wonderful person standing next to me; an acceptance that I am part of a large and shockingly everyday grouping of men who have been sexually violent toward their partners. Don't underestimate the power of words. Saying to Thordis that I raped her changed my accord with myself, as well as with her. But most importantly, the blame transferred from Thordis to me. Far too often, the responsibility is attributed to female survivors of sexual violence, and not to the males who enact it. Far too often, the denial and running leaves all parties at a great distance from the truth. There's definitely a public conversation happening now, and like a lot of people, we're heartened that there's less retreating from this difficult but important discussion. I feel a real responsibility to add our voices to it. TE: What we did is not a formula that we're prescribing for others. Nobody has the right to tell anyone else how to handle their deepest pain or their greatest error. Breaking your silence is never easy, and depending on where you are in the world, it can even be deadly to speak out about rape. I realize that even the most traumatic event of my life is still a testament to my privilege, because I can talk about it without getting ostracized, or even killed. But with that privilege of having a voice comes the responsibility of using it. That's the least I owe my fellow survivors who can't. The story we've just relayed is unique, and yet it is so common with sexual violence being a global pandemic. But it doesn't have to be that way. One of the things that I found useful on my own healing journey is educating myself about sexual violence. And as a result, I've been reading, writing and speaking about this issue for over a decade now, going to conferences around the world. And in my experience, the attendees of such events are almost exclusively women. But it's about time that we stop treating sexual violence as a women's issue. (Applause) A majority of sexual violence against women and men is perpetrated by men. And yet their voices are sorely underrepresented in this discussion. But all of us are needed here. Just imagine all the suffering we could alleviate if we dared to face this issue together. Thank you. (Applause) |
New nanotech to detect cancer early | {0: "Motivated by his wife's bout with cancer, IBM's Joshua Smith applies his engineering expertise to early diagnosis."} | TED@IBM | "You have cancer." Sadly, about 40 percent of us will hear those three words within our lifetime, and half will not survive. This means that two out of five of your closest friends and relatives will be diagnosed with some form of cancer, and one will die. Beyond the physical hardships, roughly one-third of cancer survivors here in the US will go into debt from treatment. And they're at least two and a half times more likely to declare bankruptcy than those without cancer. This disease is pervasive. It's emotionally draining and, for many, financially destructive. But a cancer diagnosis doesn't have to be a death sentence. Finding cancer early, closer its genesis, is one of the critical factors to improving treatment options, reducing its emotional impact and minimizing financial burdens. Most importantly, finding cancer early — which is one of the primary aims of my research — greatly enhances your odds of survival. If we just look at the case of breast cancer for example, we find that those who are diagnosed and treated at stage one have a five-year survival rate of nearly 100 percent — odds that decrease to just 22 percent if treated at stage four. And similar trends are found for colorectal and ovarian cancer. Now, we're all aware that an early diagnosis that is accurate is critical for survival. The problem is that many cancer diagnostic tools are invasive, costly, often inaccurate and they can take an agonizing amount of time to get the results back. Still worse, when it comes to some forms of cancer, such as ovarian, liver or pancreatic cancer, good screening methods simply don't exist, meaning that often people wait until physical symptoms surface, which are themselves already indicators of late-stage progression. Like a tornado strike in an area without an early warning system, there is no alarm to warn, for the danger is already at your doorstep when your odds of survival are greatly reduced. Having the convenience and accessibility of regular screening options that are affordable, noninvasive and could provide results much sooner, would provide us with a formidable weapon in the fight against cancer. An early warning would allow us to get out ahead of the disease instead of merely following in its relentless wake. And this is exactly what I've been doing. For the past three years, I've been developing technologies that could ultimately aid clinicians with rapid, early-stage cancer diagnostics. And I've been fueled by a deep scientific curiosity, and a passion to change these statistics. Last year however, this fight became much more personal when my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was an experience that added a strong and unexpected emotional dimension to these efforts. I know firsthand how life-altering treatment can be, and I'm keenly aware of the emotional havoc that cancer can wreak on a family, which in our case included our two young daughters. Because we found it early during a routine mammogram, we were able to focus primarily on treatment options for the localized tumor, reaffirming to me how important an early diagnosis is. Unlike other forms of cancer, mammograms do offer an early-stage screening option for breast cancer. Still, not everyone has this done, or they may develop breast cancer before the middle age recommendation for having a mammogram. So, there's still a lot of room for improvement, even for cancers that do have screening options, and, of course, considerable benefits for those that don't. A key challenge then for cancer researchers is to develop methods that make regular screening for many types of cancers much more accessible. Imagine a scenario where during your regular checkup, your doctor can take a simple, noninvasive urine sample, or other liquid biopsy, and present you with the results before you even leave the doctor's office. Such a technology could dramatically reduce the number of people who slip through the net of an early-stage cancer diagnosis. My research team of engineers and biochemists is working on exactly this challenge. We're working on ways to frequently activate an early-stage cancer alarm by enabling regular screenings that would start when a person is healthy so that action could be taken to stop cancer the moment it emerges, and before it can progress beyond its infancy. The silver bullet in this case are tiny vesicles, little escape pods regularly shed by cells called exosomes. Exosomes are important biomarkers that provide an early-warning system for the development of cancer. And because they're abundantly present in just about every bodily fluid, including blood, urine and saliva, they're extremely attractive for noninvasive liquid biopsies. There's just one problem. An automated system for rapidly sorting these important biomarkers is not currently available. We've created a technology that we call nano-DLD that is capable of precisely this: automated exosome isolation to aid rapid cancer diagnostics. Exosomes are the newest early-warning weapon, if you will, to emerge on the liquid biopsy front. And they're really, really small. They measure just 30 to 150 nanometers in diameter. This is so tiny that you could fit about a million of them into a single red blood cell. That's roughly the difference between a golf ball and a fine grain piece of sand. Once thought to be little bins for unwanted cellular waste, it has been found that cells actually communicate by producing and absorbing these exosomes which contain surface receptors, proteins and other genetic material collected from their cell of origin. When absorbed by a neighboring cell, exosomes release their contents into the receiving cell, and can set in motion fundamental changes in gene expression — some good, and this is where cancer comes in, some bad. Because they are clothed in the material of the mother cell, and contain a sample of its environment, they provide a genetic snapshot of that cell's health and its origin. All of these qualities make exosomes invaluable messengers that potentially allow physicians to eavesdrop on your health at the cellular level. To catch cancer early, however, you have to frequently intercept these messages to determine when cancer-causing troublemakers within your body decide to start staging a coup, which is why regular screening is so critical and why we're developing technologies to make this possible. While the first exosome-based diagnostics emerged on the market just this year, they are not yet part of mainstream healthcare options. In addition to their recent emergence, another factor that's limiting their widespread adoption is that currently, no automated exosome isolation system exists to make regular screening economically accessible. The current gold standard for exosome isolation includes ultracentrifugation, a process requiring expensive laboratory equipment, a trained lab tech and about 30 hours of time to process a sample. We've come up with a different approach for achieving automated exosome isolation from a sample such as urine. We use a chip-based, continuous flow separation technique called deterministic lateral displacement. And we have done with it what the semiconductor industry has done so successfully for the past 50 years. We shrunk the dimensions of this technology from the micron scale to the true nanoscale. So how does it work? In a nutshell, a set of tiny pillars separated by nanoscopic gaps are arranged in such a way that the system divides the fluid into streamlines, with the larger cancer-related nanoparticles being separated through a process of redirection from the smaller, healthier ones, which can in contrast move around the pillars in a zigzag-type motion in the direction of fluid flow. The net result is a complete separation of these two particle populations. You can visualize this separation process similar to traffic on a highway that separates into two roads, with one road going into a low-clearance tunnel under a mountain, and the other road going around it. Here, smaller cars can go through the tunnel while larger trucks, carrying potentially hazardous material, are forced to take the detour route. Traffic is effectively separated by size and contents without impeding its flow. And this is exactly how our system works on a much, much smaller scale. The idea here is that the separation process for screening could be as simple as processing a sample of urine, blood or saliva, which is a near-term possibility within the next few years. Ultimately, it could be used to isolate and detect target exosomes associated with a particular type of cancer, sensing and reporting their presence within minutes. This would make rapid diagnostics virtually painless. Broadly speaking, the ability to separate and enrich biomarkers with nanoscale precision in an automated way, opens the door to better understanding diseases such as cancer, with applications ranging from sample preparation to diagnostics, and from drug resistance monitoring to therapeutics. Even before my wife's bout with cancer, it was a dream of mine to facilitate the automation of this process — to make regular screening more accessible, similar to the way Henry Ford made the automobile accessible to the general population through development of the assembly line. Automation is the key to accessibility. And in the spirit of the Hoover dream, "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage," we're developing a technology that could ultimately place an early-warning cancer detection system in every home. This would allow every man, woman and child the opportunity to be regularly tested while they're still healthy, catching cancer when it first emerges. It is my hope and dream to help people around the world avoid the high costs — physical, financial and emotional — faced by today's cancer patients, hardships that I'm well acquainted with. I'm also happy to report that because we caught my wife's cancer early, her treatment was successful, and she is now, thankfully, cancer-free. (Applause) It is an outcome that I would like to see for everyone with a cancer diagnosis. With the work that my team has already done on separation of nanoscale biomarkers for rapid, early-stage cancer diagnostics, I am optimistic that within the next decade, this type of technology will be available, helping protect our friends, our family and future generations. Even if we are so unlucky as to be diagnosed with cancer, that early-stage alarm will provide a strong beacon of hope. Thank you. (Applause) |
4 ways to make a city more walkable | {0: 'Jeff Speck is a city planner and the author of "Walkable City."'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | So I'm here to talk to you about the walkable city. What is the walkable city? Well, for want of a better definition, it's a city in which the car is an optional instrument of freedom, rather than a prosthetic device. And I'd like to talk about why we need the walkable city, and I'd like to talk about how to do the walkable city. Most of the talks I give these days are about why we need it, but you guys are smart. And also I gave that talk exactly a month ago, and you can see it at TED.com. So today I want to talk about how to do it. In a lot of time thinking about this, I've come up with what I call the general theory of walkability. A bit of a pretentious term, it's a little tongue-in-cheek, but it's something I've thought about for a long time, and I'd like to share what I think I've figured out. In the American city, the typical American city — the typical American city is not Washington, DC, or New York, or San Francisco; it's Grand Rapids or Cedar Rapids or Memphis — in the typical American city in which most people own cars and the temptation is to drive them all the time, if you're going to get them to walk, then you have to offer a walk that's as good as a drive or better. What does that mean? It means you need to offer four things simultaneously: there needs to be a proper reason to walk, the walk has to be safe and feel safe, the walk has to be comfortable and the walk has to be interesting. You need to do all four of these things simultaneously, and that's the structure of my talk today, to take you through each of those. The reason to walk is a story I learned from my mentors, Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the founders of the New Urbanism movement. And I should say half the slides and half of my talk today I learned from them. It's the story of planning, the story of the formation of the planning profession. When in the 19th century people were choking from the soot of the dark, satanic mills, the planners said, hey, let's move the housing away from the mills. And lifespans increased immediately, dramatically, and we like to say the planners have been trying to repeat that experience ever since. So there's the onset of what we call Euclidean zoning, the separation of the landscape into large areas of single use. And typically when I arrive in a city to do a plan, a plan like this already awaits me on the property that I'm looking at. And all a plan like this guarantees is that you will not have a walkable city, because nothing is located near anything else. The alternative, of course, is our most walkable city, and I like to say, you know, this is a Rothko, and this is a Seurat. It's just a different way — he was the pointilist — it's a different way of making places. And even this map of Manhattan is a bit misleading because the red color is uses that are mixed vertically. So this is the big story of the New Urbanists — to acknowledge that there are only two ways that have been tested by the thousands to build communities, in the world and throughout history. One is the traditional neighborhood. You see here several neighborhoods of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which is defined as being compact and being diverse — places to live, work, shop, recreate, get educated — all within walking distance. And it's defined as being walkable. There are lots of small streets. Each one is comfortable to walk on. And we contrast that to the other way, an invention that happened after the Second World War, suburban sprawl, clearly not compact, clearly not diverse, and it's not walkable, because so few of the streets connect, that those streets that do connect become overburdened, and you wouldn't let your kid out on them. And I want to thank Alex Maclean, the aerial photographer, for many of these beautiful pictures that I'm showing you today. So it's fun to break sprawl down into its constituent parts. It's so easy to understand, the places where you only live, the places where you only work, the places where you only shop, and our super-sized public institutions. Schools get bigger and bigger, and therefore, further and further from each other. And the ratio of the size of the parking lot to the size of the school tells you all you need to know, which is that no child has ever walked to this school, no child will ever walk to this school. The seniors and juniors are driving the freshmen and the sophomores, and of course we have the crash statistics to prove it. And then the super-sizing of our other civic institutions like playing fields — it's wonderful that Westin in the Ft. Lauderdale area has eight soccer fields and eight baseball diamonds and 20 tennis courts, but look at the road that takes you to that location, and would you let your child bike on it? And this is why we have the soccer mom now. When I was young, I had one soccer field, one baseball diamond and one tennis court, but I could walk to it, because it was in my neighborhood. Then the final part of sprawl that everyone forgot to count: if you're going to separate everything from everything else and reconnect it only with automotive infrastructure, then this is what your landscape begins to look like. The main message here is: if you want to have a walkable city, you can't start with the sprawl model. you need the bones of an urban model. This is the outcome of that form of design, as is this. And this is something that a lot of Americans want. But we have to understand it's a two-part American dream. If you're dreaming for this, you're also going to be dreaming of this, often to absurd extremes, when we build our landscape to accommodate cars first. And the experience of being in these places — (Laughter) This is not Photoshopped. Walter Kulash took this slide. It's in Panama City. This is a real place. And being a driver can be a bit of a nuisance, and being a pedestrian can be a bit of a nuisance in these places. This is a slide that epidemiologists have been showing for some time now, (Laughter) The fact that we have a society where you drive to the parking lot to take the escalator to the treadmill shows that we're doing something wrong. But we know how to do it better. Here are the two models contrasted. I show this slide, which has been a formative document of the New Urbanism now for almost 30 years, to show that sprawl and the traditional neighborhood contain the same things. It's just how big are they, how close are they to each other, how are they interspersed together and do you have a street network, rather than a cul-de-sac or a collector system of streets? So when we look at a downtown area, at a place that has a hope of being walkable, and mostly that's our downtowns in America's cities and towns and villages, we look at them and say we want the proper balance of uses. So what is missing or underrepresented? And again, in the typical American cities in which most Americans live, it is housing that is lacking. The jobs-to-housing balance is off. And you find that when you bring housing back, these other things start to come back too, and housing is usually first among those things. And, of course, the thing that shows up last and eventually is the schools, because the people have to move in, the young pioneers have to move in, get older, have kids and fight, and then the schools get pretty good eventually. The other part of this part, the useful city part, is transit, and you can have a perfectly walkable neighborhood without it. But perfectly walkable cities require transit, because if you don't have access to the whole city as a pedestrian, then you get a car, and if you get a car, the city begins to reshape itself around your needs, and the streets get wider and the parking lots get bigger and you no longer have a walkable city. So transit is essential. But every transit experience, every transit trip, begins or ends as a walk, and so we have to remember to build walkability around our transit stations. Next category, the biggest one, is the safe walk. It's what most walkability experts talk about. It is essential, but alone not enough to get people to walk. And there are so many moving parts that add up to a walkable city. The first is block size. This is Portland, Oregon, famously 200-foot blocks, famously walkable. This is Salt Lake City, famously 600-foot blocks, famously unwalkable. If you look at the two, it's almost like two different planets, but these places were both built by humans and in fact, the story is that when you have a 200-foot block city, you can have a two-lane city, or a two-to-four lane city, and a 600-foot block city is a six-lane city, and that's a problem. These are the crash statistics. When you double the block size — this was a study of 24 California cities — when you double the block size, you almost quadruple the number of fatal accidents on non-highway streets. So how many lanes do we have? This is where I'm going to tell you what I tell every audience I meet, which is to remind you about induced demand. Induced demand applies both to highways and to city streets. And induced demand tells us that when we widen the streets to accept the congestion that we're anticipating, or the additional trips that we're anticipating in congested systems, it is principally that congestion that is constraining demand, and so that the widening comes, and there are all of these latent trips that are ready to happen. People move further from work and make other choices about when they commute, and those lanes fill up very quickly with traffic, so we widen the street again, and they fill up again. And we've learned that in congested systems, we cannot satisfy the automobile. This is from Newsweek Magazine — hardly an esoteric publication: "Today's engineers acknowledge that building new roads usually makes traffic worse." My response to reading this was, may I please meet some of these engineers, because these are not the ones that I — there are great exceptions that I'm working with now — but these are not the engineers one typically meets working in a city, where they say, "Oh, that road is too crowded, we need to add a lane." So you add a lane, and the traffic comes, and they say, "See, I told you we needed that lane." This applies both to highways and to city streets if they're congested. But the amazing thing about most American cities that I work in, the more typical cities, is that they have a lot of streets that are actually oversized for the congestion they're currently experiencing. This was the case in Oklahoma City, when the mayor came running to me, very upset, because they were named in Prevention Magazine the worst city for pedestrians in the entire country. Now that can't possibly be true, but it certainly is enough to make a mayor do something about it. We did a walkability study, and what we found, looking at the car counts on the street — these are 3,000-, 4,000-, 7,000-car counts and we know that two lanes can handle 10,000 cars per day. Look at these numbers — they're all near or under 10,000 cars, and these were the streets that were designated in the new downtown plan to be four lanes to six lanes wide. So you had a fundamental disconnect between the number of lanes and the number of cars that wanted to use them. So it was my job to redesign every street in the downtown from curb face to curb face, and we did it for 50 blocks of streets, and we're rebuilding it now. So a typical oversized street to nowhere is being narrowed, and now under construction, and the project is half done. The typical street like this, you know, when you do that, you find room for medians. You find room for bike lanes. We've doubled the amount of on-street parking. We've added a full bike network where one didn't exist before. But not everyone has the money that Oklahoma City has, because they have an extraction economy that's doing quite well. The typical city is more like Cedar Rapids, where they have an all four-lane system, half one-way system. And it's a little hard to see, but what we've done — what we're doing; it's in process right now, it's in engineering right now — is turning an all four-lane system, half one-way into an all two-lane system, all two-way, and in so doing, we're adding 70 percent more on-street parking, which the merchants love, and it protects the sidewalk. That parking makes the sidewalk safe, and we're adding a much more robust bicycle network. Then the lanes themselves. How wide are they? That's really important. The standards have changed such that, as Andrés Duany says, the typical road to a subdivision in America allows you to see the curvature of the Earth. (Laughter) This is a subdivision outside of Washington from the 1960s. Look very carefully at the width of the streets. This is a subdivision from the 1980s. 1960s, 1980s. The standards have changed to such a degree that my old neighborhood of South Beach, when it was time to fix the street that wasn't draining properly, they had to widen it and take away half our sidewalk, because the standards were wider. People go faster on wider streets. People know this. The engineers deny it, but the citizens know it, so that in Birmingham, Michigan, they fight for narrower streets. Portland, Oregon, famously walkable, instituted its "Skinny Streets" program in its residential neighborhood. We know that skinny streets are safer. The developer Vince Graham, in his project I'On, which we worked on in South Carolina, he goes to conferences and he shows his amazing 22-foot roads. These are two-way roads, very narrow rights of way, and he shows this well-known philosopher, who said, "Broad is the road that leads to destruction ... narrow is the road that leads to life." (Laughter) (Applause) This plays very well in the South. Now: bicycles. Bicycles and bicycling are the current revolution underway in only some American cities. But where you build it, they come. As a planner, I hate to say that, but the one thing I can say is that bicycle population is a function of bicycle infrastructure. I asked my friend Tom Brennan from Nelson\Nygaard in Portland to send me some pictures of the Portland bike commute. He sent me this. I said, "Was that bike to work day?" He said, "No, that was Tuesday." When you do what Portland did and spend money on bicycle infrastructure — New York City has doubled the number of bikers in it several times now by painting these bright green lanes. Even automotive cities like Long Beach, California: vast uptick in the number of bikers based on the infrastructure. And of course, what really does it, if you know 15th Street here in Washington, DC — please meet Rahm Emanuel's new bike lanes in Chicago, the buffered lane, the parallel parking pulled off the curb, the bikes between the parked cars and the curb — these mint cyclists. If, however, as in Pasadena, every lane is a bike lane, then no lane is a bike lane. And this is the only bicyclist that I met in Pasadena, so ... (Laughter) The parallel parking I mentioned — it's an essential barrier of steel that protects the curb and pedestrians from moving vehicles. This is Ft. Lauderdale; one side of the street, you can park, the other side of the street, you can't. This is happy hour on the parking side. This is sad hour on the other side. And then the trees themselves slow cars down. They move slower when trees are next to the road, and, of course, sometimes they slow down very quickly. All the little details — the curb return radius. Is it one foot or is it 40 feet? How swoopy is that curb to determine how fast the car goes and how much room you have to cross. And then I love this, because this is objective journalism. "Some say the entrance to CityCenter is not inviting to pedestrians." When every aspect of the landscape is swoopy, is aerodynamic, is stream-form geometrics, it says: "This is a vehicular place." So no one detail, no one speciality, can be allowed to set the stage. And here, you know, this street: yes, it will drain within a minute of the hundred-year storm, but this poor woman has to mount the curb every day. So then quickly, the comfortable walk has to do with the fact that all animals seek, simultaneously, prospect and refuge. We want to be able to see our predators, but we also want to feel that our flanks are covered. And so we're drawn to places that have good edges, and if you don't supply the edges, people won't want to be there. What's the proper ratio of height to width? Is it one to one? Three to one? If you get beyond one to six, you're not very comfortable anymore. You don't feel enclosed. Now, six to one in Salzburg can be perfectly delightful. The opposite of Salzburg is Houston. The point being the parking lot is the principal problem here. However, missing teeth, those empty lots can be issues as well, and if you have a missing corner because of an outdated zoning code, then you could have a missing nose in your neighborhood. That's what we had in my neighborhood. This was the zoning code that said I couldn't build on that site. As you may know, Washington, DC is now changing its zoning to allow sites like this to become sites like this. We needed a lot of variances to do that. Triangular houses can be interesting to build, but if you get one built, people generally like it. So you've got to fill those missing noses. And then, finally, the interesting walk: signs of humanity. We are among the social primates. Nothing interests us more than other people. We want signs of people. So the perfect one-to-one ratio, it's a great thing. This is Grand Rapids, a very walkable city, but nobody walks on this street that connects the two best hotels together, because if on the left, you have an exposed parking deck, and on the right, you have a conference facility that was apparently designed in admiration for that parking deck, then you don't attract that many people. Mayor Joe Riley, in his 10th term, Mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, taught us it only takes 25 feet of building to hide 250 feet of garage. This one I call the Chia Pet Garage. It's in South Beach. That active ground floor. I want to end with this project that I love to show. It's by Meleca Architects. It's in Columbus, Ohio. To the left is the convention center neighborhood, full of pedestrians. To the right is the Short North neighborhood — ethnic, great restaurants, great shops, struggling. It wasn't doing very well because this was the bridge, and no one was walking from the convention center into that neighborhood. Well, when they rebuilt the highway, they added an extra 80 feet to the bridge. Sorry — they rebuilt the bridge over the highway. The city paid 1.9 million dollars, they gave the site to a developer, the developer built this and now the Short North has come back to life. And everyone says, the newspapers, not the planning magazines, the newspapers say it's because of that bridge. So that's it. That's the general theory of walkability. Think about your own cities. Think about how you can apply it. You've got to do all four things at once. So find those places where you have most of them and fix what you can, fix what still needs fixing in those places. I really appreciate your attention, and thank you for coming today. (Applause) |
What it's like to be a parent in a war zone | {0: 'Aala El-Khani explores the needs of families affected by war and displacement and the mental health of children who have experienced armed conflict.'} | TEDxManchester | Worldwide, over 1.5 billion people experience armed conflict. In response, people are forced to flee their country, leaving over 15 million refugees. Children, without a doubt, are the most innocent and vulnerable victims ... but not just from the obvious physical dangers, but from the often unspoken effects that wars have on their families. The experiences of war leave children at a real high risk for the development of emotional and behavioral problems. Children, as we can only imagine, will feel worried, threatened and at risk. But there is good news. The quality of care that children receive in their families can have a more significant effect on their well-being than from the actual experiences of war that they have been exposed to. So actually, children can be protected by warm, secure parenting during and after conflict. In 2011, I was a first-year PhD student in the University of Manchester School of Psychological Sciences. Like many of you here, I watched the crisis in Syria unfold in front of me on the TV. My family is originally from Syria, and very early on, I lost several family members in really horrifying ways. I'd sit and I'd gather with my family and watch the TV. We've all seen those scenes: bombs destroying buildings, chaos, destruction and people screaming and running. It was always the people screaming and running that really got me the most, especially those terrified-looking children. I was a mother to two young, typically inquisitive children. They were five and six then, at an age where they typically asked lots and lots of questions, and expected real, convincing answers. So, I began to wonder what it might be like to parent my children in a war zone and a refugee camp. Would my children change? Would my daughter's bright, happy eyes lose their shine? Would my son's really relaxed and carefree nature become fearful and withdrawn? How would I cope? Would I change? As psychologists and parent trainers, we know that arming parents with skills in caring for their children can have a huge effect on their well-being, and we call this parent training. The question I had was, could parent training programs be useful for families while they were still in war zones or refugee camps? Could we reach them with advice or training that would help them through these struggles? So I approached my PhD supervisor, Professor Rachel Calam, with the idea of using my academic skills to make some change in the real world. I wasn't quite sure what exactly I wanted to do. She listened carefully and patiently, and then to my joy she said, "If that's what you want to do, and it means so much to you, then let's do it. Let's find ways to see if parent programs can be useful for families in these contexts." So for the past five years, myself and my colleagues — Prof. Calam and Dr. Kim Cartwright — have been working on ways to support families that have experienced war and displacement. Now, to know how to help families that have been through conflict support their children, the first step must obviously be to ask them what they're struggling with, right? I mean, it seems obvious. But it's often those that are the most vulnerable, that we're trying to support, that we actually don't ask. How many times have we just assumed we know exactly the right thing that's going to help someone or something without actually asking them first? So I travelled to refugee camps in Syria and in Turkey, and I sat with families, and I listened. I listened to their parenting challenges, I listened to their parenting struggles and I listened to their call for help. And sometimes that was just paused, as all I could do was hold hands with them and just join them in silent crying and prayer. They told me about their struggles, they told me about the rough, harsh refugee camp conditions that made it hard to focus on anything but practical chores like collecting clean water. They told me how they watched their children withdraw; the sadness, depression, anger, bed-wetting, thumb-sucking, fear of loud noises, fear of nightmares — terrifying, terrifying nightmares. These families had been through what we had been watching on the TV. The mothers — almost half of them were now widows of war, or didn't even know if their husbands were dead or alive — described how they felt they were coping so badly. They watched their children change and they had no idea how to help them. They didn't know how to answer their children's questions. What I found incredibly astonishing and so motivational was that these families were so motivated to support their children. Despite all these challenges they faced, they were trying to help their children. They were making attempts at seeking support from NGO workers, from refugee camp teachers, professional medics, other parents. One mother I met had only been in a camp for four days, and had already made two attempts at seeking support for her eight-year-old daughter who was having terrifying nightmares. But sadly, these attempts are almost always useless. Refugee camp doctors, when available, are almost always too busy, or don't have the knowledge or the time for basic parenting supports. Refugee camp teachers and other parents are just like them — part of a new refugee community who's struggling with new needs. So then we began to think. How could we help these families? The families were struggling with things much bigger than they could cope with. The Syrian crisis made it clear how incredibly impossible it would be to reach families on an individual level. How else could we help them? How would we reach families at a population level and low costs in these terrifying, terrifying times? After hours of speaking to NGO workers, one suggested a fantastic innovative idea of distributing parenting information leaflets via bread wrappers — bread wrappers that were being delivered to families in a conflict zone in Syria by humanitarian workers. So that's what we did. The bread wrappers haven't changed at all in their appearance, except for the addition of two pieces of paper. One was a parenting information leaflet that had basic advice and information that normalized to the parent what they might be experiencing, and what their child might be experiencing. And information on how they could support themselves and their children, such as information like spending time talking to your child, showing them more affection, being more patient with your child, talking to your children. The other piece of paper was a feedback questionnaire, and of course, there was a pen. So is this simply leaflet distribution, or is this actually a possible means of delivering psychological first aid that provides warm, secure, loving parenting? We managed to distribute 3,000 of these in just one week. What was incredible was we had a 60 percent response rate. 60 percent of the 3,000 families responded. I don't know how many researchers we have here today, but that kind of response rate is fantastic. To have that in Manchester would be a huge achievement, let alone in a conflict zone in Syria — really highlighting how important these kinds of messages were to families. I remember how excited and eager we were for the return of the questionnaires. The families had left hundreds of messages — most incredibly positive and encouraging. But my favorite has got to be, "Thank you for not forgetting about us and our children." This really illustrates the potential means of the delivery of psychological first aid to families, and the return of feedback, too. Just imagine replicating this using other means such as baby milk distribution, or female hygiene kits, or even food baskets. But let's bring this closer to home, because the refugee crisis is one that is having an effect on every single one of us. We're bombarded with images daily of statistics and of photos, and that's not surprising, because by last month, over one million refugees had reached Europe. One million. Refugees are joining our communities, they're becoming our neighbors, their children are attending our children's schools. So we've adapted the leaflet to meet the needs of European refugees, and we have them online, open-access, in areas with a really high refugee influx. For example, the Swedish healthcare uploaded it onto their website, and within the first 45 minutes, it was downloaded 343 times — really highlighting how important it is for volunteers, practitioners and other parents to have open-access, psychological first-aid messages. In 2013, I was sitting on the cold, hard floor of a refugee camp tent with mothers sitting around me as I was conducting a focus group. Across from me stood an elderly lady with what seemed to be a 13-year-old girl lying beside her, with her head on the elderly lady's knees. The girl stayed quiet throughout the focus group, not talking at all, with her knees curled up against her chest. Towards the end of the focus group, and as I was thanking the mothers for their time, the elderly lady looked at me while pointing at the young girl, and said to me, "Can you help us with...?" Not quite sure what she expected me to do, I looked at the young girl and smiled, and in Arabic I said, "Salaam alaikum. Shu-ismak?" "What's your name?" She looked at me really confused and unengaged, but then said, "Halul." Halul is the pet's name for the Arabic female name, Hala, and is only really used to refer to really young girls. At that point I realized that actually Hala was probably much older than 13. It turns out Hala was a 25-year-old mother to three young children. Hala had been a confident, bright, bubbly, loving, caring mother to her children, but the war had changed all of that. She had lived through bombs being dropped in her town; she had lived through explosions. When fighter jets were flying around their building, dropping bombs, her children would be screaming, terrified from the noise. Hala would frantically grab pillows and cover her children's ears to block out the noise, all the while screaming herself. When they reached the refugee camp and she knew they were finally in some kind of safety, she completely withdrew to acting like her old childhood self. She completely rejected her family — her children, her husband. Hala simply could no longer cope. This is a parenting struggle with a really tough ending, but sadly, it's not uncommon. Those who experience armed conflict and displacement will face serious emotional struggles. And that's something we can all relate to. If you have been through a devastating time in your life, if you have lost someone or something you really care about, how would you continue to cope? Could you still be able to care for yourself and for your family? Given that the first years of a child's life are crucial for healthy physical and emotional development, and that 1.5 billion people are experiencing armed conflict — many of whom are now joining our communities — we cannot afford to turn a blind eye to the needs of those who are experiencing war and displacement. We must prioritize these families' needs — both those who are internally displaced, and those who are refugees worldwide. These needs must be prioritized by NGO workers, policy makers, the WHO, the UNHCR and every single one of us in whatever capacity it is that we function in our society. When we begin to recognize the individual faces of the conflict, when we begin to notice those intricate emotions on their faces, we begin to see them as humans, too. We begin to see the needs of these families, and these are the real human needs. When these family needs are prioritized, interventions for children in humanitarian settings will prioritize and recognize the primary role of the family in supporting children. Family mental health will be shouting loud and clear in global, international agenda. And children will be less likely to enter social service systems in resettlement countries because their families would have had support earlier on. And we will be more open-minded, more welcoming, more caring and more trusting to those who are joining our communities. We need to stop wars. We need to build a world where children can dream of planes dropping gifts, and not bombs. Until we stop armed conflicts raging throughout the world, families will continue to be displaced, leaving children vulnerable. But by improving parenting and caregiver support, it may be possible to weaken the links between war and psychological difficulties in children and their families. Thank you. (Applause) |
How racism harms pregnant women -- and what can help | {0: 'Miriam Zoila Pérez investigates how race and gender affect health -- and the people who create spaces for healing.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | Most of you can probably relate to what I'm feeling right now. My heart is racing in my chest. My palms are a little bit clammy. I'm sweating. And my breath is a little bit shallow. Now, these familiar sensations are obviously the result of standing up in front of a thousand of you and giving a talk that might be streamed online to perhaps a million more. But the physical sensations I'm experiencing right now are actually the result of a much more basic mind-body mechanism. My nervous system is sending a flood of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline into my bloodstream. It's a very old and very necessary response that sends blood and oxygen to the organs and muscles that I might need to respond quickly to a potential threat. But there's a problem with this response, and that is, it can get over-activated. If I face these kinds of stressors on a daily basis, particularly over an extended period of time, my system can get overloaded. So basically, if this response happens infrequently: super-necessary for my well-being and survival. But if it happens too much, it can actually make me sick. There's a growing body of research examining the relationship between chronic stress and illness. Things like heart disease and even cancer are being shown to have a relationship to stress. And that's because, over time, too much activation from stress can interfere with my body's processes that keep me healthy. Now, let's imagine for a moment that I was pregnant. What might this kind of stress, particularly over the length of my pregnancy, what kind of impact might that have on the health of my developing fetus? You probably won't be surprised when I tell you that this kind of stress during pregnancy is not good. It can even cause the body to initiate labor too early, because in a basic sense, the stress communicates that the womb is no longer a safe place for the child. Stress during pregnancy is linked with things like high blood pressure and low infant birth weight, and it can begin a cascade of health challenges that make birth much more dangerous for both parent and child. Now of course stress, particularly in our modern lifestyle, is a somewhat universal experience, right? Maybe you've never stood up to give a TED Talk, but you've faced a big presentation at work, a sudden job loss, a big test, a heated conflict with a family member or friend. But it turns out that the kind of stress we experience and whether we're able to stay in a relaxed state long enough to keep our bodies working properly depends a lot on who we are. There's also a growing body of research showing that people who experience more discrimination are more likely to have poor health. Even the threat of discrimination, like worrying you might be stopped by police while driving your car, can have a negative impact on your health. Harvard Professor Dr. David Williams, the person who pioneered the tools that have proven these linkages, says that the more marginalized groups in our society experience more discrimination and more impacts on their health. I've been interested in these issues for over a decade. I became interested in maternal health when a failed premed trajectory instead sent me down a path looking for other ways to help pregnant people. I became a doula, a lay person trained to provide support to people during pregnancy and childbirth. And because I'm Latina and a Spanish speaker, in my first volunteer doula gig at a public hospital in North Carolina, I saw clearly how race and class impacted the experiences of the women that I supported. If we take a look at the statistics about the rates of illness during pregnancy and childbirth, we see clearly the pattern outlined by Dr. Williams. African-American women in particular have an entirely different experience than white women when it comes to whether their babies are born healthy. In certain parts of the country, particularly the Deep South, the rates of mother and infant death for black women actually approximate those rates in Sub-Saharan African. In those same communities, the rates for white women are near zero. Even nationally, black women are four times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than white women. Four times more likely to die. They're also twice as likely for their infants to die before the first year of life than white infants, and two to three times more likely to give birth too early or too skinny — a sign of insufficient development. Native women are also more likely to have higher rates of these problems than white women, as are some groups of Latinas. For the last decade as a doula turned journalist and blogger, I've been trying to raise the alarm about just how different the experiences of women of color, but particularly black women, are when it comes to pregnancy and birth in the US. But when I tell people about these appalling statistics, I'm usually met with an assumption that it's about either poverty or lack of access to care. But it turns out, neither of these things tell the whole story. Even middle-class black women still have much worse outcomes than their middle-class white counterparts. The gap actually widens among this group. And while access to care is definitely still a problem, even women of color who receive the recommended prenatal care still suffer from these high rates. And so we come back to the path from discrimination to stress to poor health, and it begins to paint a picture that many people of color know to be true: racism is actually making us sick. Still sound like a stretch? Consider this: immigrants, particularly black and Latina immigrants, actually have better health when they first arrive in the United States. But the longer they stay in this country, the worse their health becomes. People like me, born in the United States to Cuban immigrant parents, are actually more likely to have worse health than my grandparents did. It's what researchers call "the immigrant paradox," and it further illustrates that there's something in the US environment that is making us sick. But here's the thing: this problem, that racism is making people of color, but especially black women and babies, sick, is vast. I could spend all of my time with you talking about it, but I won't, because I want to make sure to tell you about one solution. And the good news is, it's a solution that isn't particularly expensive, and doesn't require any fancy drug treatments or new technologies. The solution is called, "The JJ Way." Meet Jennie Joseph. She's a midwife in the Orlando, Florida area who has been serving pregnant women for over a decade. In what she calls her easy-access clinics, Jennie and her team provide prenatal care to over 600 women per year. Her clients, most of whom are black, Haitian and Latina, deliver at the local hospital. But by providing accessible and respectful prenatal care, Jennie has achieved something remarkable: almost all of her clients give birth to healthy, full-term babies. Her method is deceptively simple. Jennie says that all of her appointments start at the front desk. Every member of her team, and every moment a women is at her clinic, is as supportive as possible. No one is turned away due to lack of funds. The JJ Way is to make the finances work no matter what the hurdles. No one is chastised for showing up late to their appointments. No one is talked down to or belittled. Jennie's waiting room feels more like your aunt's living room than a clinic. She calls this space "a classroom in disguise." With the plush chairs arranged in a circle, women wait for their appointments in one-on-one chats with a staff educator, or in group prenatal classes. When you finally are called back to your appointment, you are greeted by Alexis or Trina, two of Jennie's medical assistants. Both are young, African-American and moms themselves. Their approach is casual and friendly. During one visit I observed, Trina chatted with a young soon-to-be mom while she took her blood pressure. This Latina mom was having trouble keeping food down due to nausea. As Trina deflated the blood pressure cuff, she said, "We'll see about changing your prescription, OK? We can't have you not eating." That "we" is actually a really crucial aspect of Jennie's model. She sees her staff as part of a team that, alongside the woman and her family, has one goal: get mom to term with a healthy baby. Jennie says that Trina and Alexis are actually the center of her care model, and that her role as a provider is just to support their work. Trina spends a lot of her day on her cell phone, texting with clients about all sorts of things. One woman texted to ask if a medication she was prescribed at the hospital was OK to take while pregnant. The answer was no. Another woman texted with pictures of an infant born under Jennie's care. Lastly, when you finally are called back to see the provider, you've already taken your own weight in the waiting room, and done your own pee test in the bathroom. This is a big departure from the traditional medical model, because it places responsibility and information back in the woman's hands. So rather than a medical setting where you might be chastised for not keeping up with provider recommendations — the kind of settings often available to low-income women — Jennie's model is to be as supportive as possible. And that support provides a crucial buffer to the stress of racism and discrimination facing these women every day. But here's the best thing about Jennie's model: it's been incredibly successful. Remember those statistics I told you, that black women are more likely to give birth too early, to give birth to low birth weight babies, to even die due to complications of pregnancy and childbirth? Well, The JJ Way has almost entirely eliminated those problems, starting with what Jennie calls "skinny babies." She's been able to get almost all her clients to term with healthy, chunky babies like this one. Audience: Aw! Miriam Zoila Pérez: This is a baby girl born to a client of Jennie's this past June. A similar demographic of women in Jennie's area who gave birth at the same hospital her clients did were three times more likely to give birth to a baby below a healthy weight. Jennie is making headway into what has been seen for decades as an almost intractable problem. Some of you might be thinking, all this one-on-one attention that The JJ Way requires must be too expensive to scale. Well, you'd be wrong. The visit with the provider is not the center of Jennie's model, and for good reason. Those visits are expensive, and in order to maintain her model, she's got to see a lot of clients to cover costs. But Jennie doesn't have to spend a ton of time with each woman, if all of the members of her team can provide the support, information and care that her clients need. The beauty of Jennie's model is that she actually believes it can be implemented in pretty much any health care setting. It's a revolution in care just waiting to happen. These problems I've been sharing with you are big. They come from long histories of racism, classism, a society based on race and class stratification. They involve elaborate physiological mechanisms meant to protect us, that, when overstimulated, actually make us sick. But if there's one thing I've learned from my work as a doula, it's that a little bit of unconditional support can go a really long way. History has shown that people are incredibly resilient, and while we can't eradicate racism or the stress that results from it overnight, we might just be able to create environments that provide a buffer to what people of color experience on a daily basis. And during pregnancy, that buffer can be an incredible tool towards shifting the impact of racism for generations to come. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to practice safe sexting | {0: 'Amy Adele Hasinoff studies gender, sexuality, privacy and consent in new media.'} | TEDxMileHigh | People have been using media to talk about sex for a long time. Love letters, phone sex, racy Polaroids. There's even a story of a girl who eloped with a man that she met over the telegraph in 1886. Today we have sexting, and I am a sexting expert. Not an expert sexter. Though, I do know what this means — I think you do too. [it's a penis] (Laughter) I have been studying sexting since the media attention to it began in 2008. I wrote a book on the moral panic about sexting. And here's what I found: most people are worrying about the wrong thing. They're trying to just prevent sexting from happening entirely. But let me ask you this: As long as it's completely consensual, what's the problem with sexting? People are into all sorts of things that you may not be into, like blue cheese or cilantro. (Laughter) Sexting is certainly risky, like anything that's fun, but as long as you're not sending an image to someone who doesn't want to receive it, there's no harm. What I do think is a serious problem is when people share private images of others without their permission. And instead of worrying about sexting, what I think we need to do is think a lot more about digital privacy. The key is consent. Right now most people are thinking about sexting without really thinking about consent at all. Did you know that we currently criminalize teen sexting? It can be a crime because it counts as child pornography, if there's an image of someone under 18, and it doesn't even matter if they took that image of themselves and shared it willingly. So we end up with this bizarre legal situation where two 17-year-olds can legally have sex in most US states but they can't photograph it. Some states have also tried passing sexting misdemeanor laws but these laws repeat the same problem because they still make consensual sexting illegal. It doesn't make sense to try to ban all sexting to try to address privacy violations. This is kind of like saying, let's solve the problem of date rape by just making dating completely illegal. Most teens don't get arrested for sexting, but can you guess who does? It's often teens who are disliked by their partner's parents. And this can be because of class bias, racism or homophobia. Most prosecutors are, of course, smart enough not to use child pornography charges against teenagers, but some do. According to researchers at the University of New Hampshire seven percent of all child pornography possession arrests are teens, sexting consensually with other teens. Child pornography is a serious crime, but it's just not the same thing as teen sexting. Parents and educators are also responding to sexting without really thinking too much about consent. Their message to teens is often: just don't do it. And I totally get it — there are serious legal risks and of course, that potential for privacy violations. And when you were a teen, I'm sure you did exactly as you were told, right? You're probably thinking, my kid would never sext. And that's true, your little angel may not be sexting because only 33 percent of 16- and 17-year-olds are sexting. But, sorry, by the time they're older, odds are they will be sexting. Every study I've seen puts the rate above 50 percent for 18- to 24-year-olds. And most of the time, nothing goes wrong. People ask me all the time things like, isn't sexting just so dangerous, though? It's like you wouldn't leave your wallet on a park bench and you expect it's going to get stolen if you do that, right? Here's how I think about it: sexting is like leaving your wallet at your boyfriend's house. If you come back the next day and all the money is just gone, you really need to dump that guy. (Laughter) So instead of criminalizing sexting to try to prevent these privacy violations, instead we need to make consent central to how we think about the circulation of our private information. Every new media technology raises privacy concerns. In fact, in the US the very first major debates about privacy were in response to technologies that were relatively new at the time. In the late 1800s, people were worried about cameras, which were just suddenly more portable than ever before, and newspaper gossip columns. They were worried that the camera would capture information about them, take it out of context and widely disseminate it. Does this sound familiar? It's exactly what we're worrying about now with social media and drone cameras, and, of course, sexting. And these fears about technology, they make sense because technologies can amplify and bring out our worst qualities and behaviors. But there are solutions. And we've been here before with a dangerous new technology. In 1908, Ford introduced the Model T car. Traffic fatality rates were rising. It was a serious problem — it looks so safe, right? Our first response was to try to change drivers' behavior, so we developed speed limits and enforced them through fines. But over the following decades, we started to realize the technology of the car itself is not just neutral. We could design the car to make it safer. So in the 1920s, we got shatter-resistant windshields. In the 1950s, seat belts. And in the 1990s, airbags. All three of these areas: laws, individuals and industry came together over time to help solve the problem that a new technology causes. And we can do the same thing with digital privacy. Of course, it comes back to consent. Here's the idea. Before anyone can distribute your private information, they should have to get your permission. This idea of affirmative consent comes from anti-rape activists who tell us that we need consent for every sexual act. And we have really high standards for consent in a lot of other areas. Think about having surgery. Your doctor has to make sure that you are meaningfully and knowingly consenting to that medical procedure. This is not the type of consent like with an iTunes Terms of Service where you just scroll to the bottom and you're like, agree, agree, whatever. (Laughter) If we think more about consent, we can have better privacy laws. Right now, we just don't have that many protections. If your ex-husband or your ex-wife is a terrible person, they can take your nude photos and upload them to a porn site. It can be really hard to get those images taken down. And in a lot of states, you're actually better off if you took the images of yourself because then you can file a copyright claim. (Laughter) Right now, if someone violates your privacy, whether that's an individual or a company or the NSA, you can try filing a lawsuit, though you may not be successful because many courts assume that digital privacy is just impossible. So they're not willing to punish anyone for violating it. I still hear people asking me all the time, isn't a digital image somehow blurring the line between public and private because it's digital, right? No! No! Everything digital is not just automatically public. That doesn't make any sense. As NYU legal scholar Helen Nissenbaum tells us, we have laws and policies and norms that protect all kinds of information that's private, and it doesn't make a difference if it's digital or not. All of your health records are digitized but your doctor can't just share them with anyone. All of your financial information is held in digital databases, but your credit card company can't just post your purchase history online. Better laws could help address privacy violations after they happen, but one of the easiest things we can all do is make personal changes to help protect each other's privacy. We're always told that privacy is our own, sole, individual responsibility. We're told, constantly monitor and update your privacy settings. We're told, never share anything you wouldn't want the entire world to see. This doesn't make sense. Digital media are social environments and we share things with people we trust all day, every day. As Princeton researcher Janet Vertesi argues, our data and our privacy, they're not just personal, they're actually interpersonal. And so one thing you can do that's really easy is just start asking for permission before you share anyone else's information. If you want to post a photo of someone online, ask for permission. If you want to forward an email thread, ask for permission. And if you want to share someone's nude selfie, obviously, ask for permission. These individual changes can really help us protect each other's privacy, but we need technology companies on board as well. These companies have very little incentive to help protect our privacy because their business models depend on us sharing everything with as many people as possible. Right now, if I send you an image, you can forward that to anyone that you want. But what if I got to decide if that image was forwardable or not? This would tell you, you don't have my permission to send this image out. We do this kind of thing all the time to protect copyright. If you buy an e-book, you can't just send it out to as many people as you want. So why not try this with mobile phones? What you can do is we can demand that tech companies add these protections to our devices and our platforms as the default. After all, you can choose the color of your car, but the airbags are always standard. If we don't think more about digital privacy and consent, there can be serious consequences. There was a teenager from Ohio — let's call her Jennifer, for the sake of her privacy. She shared nude photos of herself with her high school boyfriend, thinking she could trust him. Unfortunately, he betrayed her and sent her photos around the entire school. Jennifer was embarrassed and humiliated, but instead of being compassionate, her classmates harassed her. They called her a slut and a whore and they made her life miserable. Jennifer started missing school and her grades dropped. Ultimately, Jennifer decided to end her own life. Jennifer did nothing wrong. All she did was share a nude photo with someone she thought that she could trust. And yet our laws tell her that she committed a horrible crime equivalent to child pornography. Our gender norms tell her that by producing this nude image of herself, she somehow did the most horrible, shameful thing. And when we assume that privacy is impossible in digital media, we completely write off and excuse her boyfriend's bad, bad behavior. People are still saying all the time to victims of privacy violations, "What were you thinking? You should have never sent that image." If you're trying to figure out what to say instead, try this. Imagine you've run into your friend who broke their leg skiing. They took a risk to do something fun, and it didn't end well. But you're probably not going to be the jerk who says, "Well, I guess you shouldn't have gone skiing then." If we think more about consent, we can see that victims of privacy violations deserve our compassion, not criminalization, shaming, harassment or punishment. We can support victims, and we can prevent some privacy violations by making these legal, individual and technological changes. Because the problem is not sexting, the issue is digital privacy. And one solution is consent. So the next time a victim of a privacy violation comes up to you, instead of blaming them, let's do this instead: let's shift our ideas about digital privacy, and let's respond with compassion. Thank you. (Applause) |
An electrifying acoustic guitar performance | {0: 'Rodrigo y Gabriela fuse metal, jazz and world music into an exhilarating cocktail of complex arrangements and virtuoso musicianship.'} | TED2015 | (Guitar music starts) (Cheers) (Cheers) (Music ends) |
3 ways to fix a broken news industry | {0: 'Lara Setrakian is building innovative news platforms that stand ready to engage and explain the complexity of our world.'} | TEDNYC | Five years ago, I had my dream job. I was a foreign correspondent in the Middle East reporting for ABC News. But there was a crack in the wall, a problem with our industry, that I felt we needed to fix. You see, I got to the Middle East right around the end of 2007, which was just around the midpoint of the Iraq War. But by the time I got there, it was already nearly impossible to find stories about Iraq on air. Coverage had dropped across the board, across networks. And of the stories that did make it, more than 80 percent of them were about us. We were missing the stories about Iraq, the people who live there, and what was happening to them under the weight of the war. Afghanistan had already fallen off the agenda. There were less than one percent of all news stories in 2008 that went to the war in Afghanistan. It was the longest war in US history, but information was so scarce that schoolteachers we spoke to told us they had trouble explaining to their students what we were doing there, when those students had parents who were fighting and sometimes dying overseas. We had drawn a blank, and it wasn't just Iraq and Afghanistan. From conflict zones to climate change to all sorts of issues around crises in public health, we were missing what I call the species-level issues, because as a species, they could actually sink us. And by failing to understand the complex issues of our time, we were facing certain practical implications. How were we going to solve problems that we didn't fundamentally understand, that we couldn't track in real time, and where the people working on the issues were invisible to us and sometimes invisible to each other? When you look back on Iraq, those years when we were missing the story, were the years when the society was falling apart, when we were setting the conditions for what would become the rise of ISIS, the ISIS takeover of Mosul and terrorist violence that would spread beyond Iraq's borders to the rest of the world. Just around that time where I was making that observation, I looked across the border of Iraq and noticed there was another story we were missing: the war in Syria. If you were a Middle-East specialist, you knew that Syria was that important from the start. But it ended up being, really, one of the forgotten stories of the Arab Spring. I saw the implications up front. Syria is intimately tied to regional security, to global stability. I felt like we couldn't let that become another one of the stories we left behind. So I left my big TV job to start a website, called "Syria Deeply." It was designed to be a news and information source that made it easier to understand a complex issue, and for the past four years, it's been a resource for policymakers and professionals working on the conflict in Syria. We built a business model based on consistent, high-quality information, and convening the top minds on the issue. And we found it was a model that scaled. We got passionate requests to do other things "Deeply." So we started to work our way down the list. I'm just one of many entrepreneurs, and we are just one of many start-ups trying to fix what's wrong with news. All of us in the trenches know that something is wrong with the news industry. It's broken. Trust in the media has hit an all-time low. And the statistic you're seeing up there is from September — it's arguably gotten worse. But we can fix this. We can fix the news. I know that that's true. You can call me an idealist; I call myself an industrious optimist. And I know there are a lot of us out there. We have ideas for how to make things better, and I want to share three of them that we've picked up in our own work. Idea number one: we need news that's built on deep-domain knowledge. Given the waves and waves of layoffs at newsrooms across the country, we've lost the art of specialization. Beat reporting is an endangered thing. When it comes to foreign news, the way we can fix that is by working with more local journalists, treating them like our partners and collaborators, not just fixers who fetch us phone numbers and sound bites. Our local reporters in Syria and across Africa and across Asia bring us stories that we certainly would not have found on our own. Like this one from the suburbs of Damascus, about a wheelchair race that gave hope to those wounded in the war. Or this one from Sierra Leone, about a local chief who curbed the spread of Ebola by self-organizing a quarantine in his district. Or this one from the border of Pakistan, about Afghan refugees being forced to return home before they are ready, under the threat of police intimidation. Our local journalists are our mentors. They teach us something new every day, and they bring us stories that are important for all of us to know. Idea number two: we need a kind of Hippocratic oath for the news industry, a pledge to first do no harm. (Applause) Journalists need to be tough. We need to speak truth to power, but we also need to be responsible. We need to live up to our own ideals, and we need to recognize when what we're doing could potentially harm society, where we lose track of journalism as a public service. I watched us cover the Ebola crisis. We launched Ebola Deeply. We did our best. But what we saw was a public that was flooded with hysterical and sensational coverage, sometimes inaccurate, sometimes completely wrong. Public health experts tell me that that actually cost us in human lives, because by sparking more panic and by sometimes getting the facts wrong, we made it harder for people to resolve what was actually happening on the ground. All that noise made it harder to make the right decisions. We can do better as an industry, but it requires us recognizing how we got it wrong last time, and deciding not to go that way next time. It's a choice. We have to resist the temptation to use fear for ratings. And that decision has to be made in the individual newsroom and with the individual news executive. Because the next deadly virus that comes around could be much worse and the consequences much higher, if we do what we did last time; if our reporting isn't responsible and it isn't right. The third idea? We need to embrace complexity if we want to make sense of a complex world. Embrace complexity — (Applause) not treat the world simplistically, because simple isn't accurate. We live in a complex world. News is adult education. It's our job as journalists to get elbow deep in complexity and to find new ways to make it easier for everyone else to understand. If we don't do that, if we pretend there are just simple answers, we're leading everyone off a steep cliff. Understanding complexity is the only way to know the real threats that are around the corner. It's our responsibility to translate those threats and to help you understand what's real, so you can be prepared and know what it takes to be ready for what comes next. I am an industrious optimist. I do believe we can fix what's broken. We all want to. There are great journalists out there doing great work — we just need new formats. I honestly believe this is a time of reawakening, reimagining what we can do. I believe we can fix what's broken. I know we can fix the news. I know it's worth trying, and I truly believe that in the end, we're going to get this right. Thank you. (Applause) |
How jails extort the poor | {0: 'Salil Dudani has experienced the legal system from two vantage points: being detained by D.C. police on suspicion of "terrorist activity," and working as an investigator with civil rights lawyers challenging poverty-jailing.'} | TEDxStanford | One summer afternoon in 2013, DC police detained, questioned and searched a man who appeared suspicious and potentially dangerous. This wasn't what I was wearing the day of the detention, to be fair, but I have a picture of that as well. I know it's very frightening — try to remain calm. (Laughter) At this time, I was interning at the Public Defender Service in Washington DC, and I was visiting a police station for work. I was on my way out, and before I could make it to my car, two police cars pulled up to block my exit, and an officer approached me from behind. He told me to stop, take my backpack off and put my hands on the police car parked next to us. About a dozen officers then gathered near us. All of them had handguns, some had assault rifles. They rifled through my backpack. They patted me down. They took pictures of me spread on the police car, and they laughed. And as all this was happening — as I was on the police car trying to ignore the shaking in my legs, trying to think clearly about what I should do — something stuck out to me as odd. When I look at myself in this photo, if I were to describe myself, I think I'd say something like, "19-year-old Indian male, bright T-shirt, wearing glasses." But they weren't including any of these details. Into their police radios as they described me, they kept saying, "Middle Eastern male with a backpack. Middle Eastern male with a backpack." And this description carried on into their police reports. I never expected to be described by my own government in these terms: "lurking," "nefarious," "terrorist." And the detention dragged on like this. They sent dogs trained to smell explosives to sweep the area I'd been in. They called the federal government to see if I was on any watch lists. They sent a couple of detectives to cross-examine me on why, if I claimed I had nothing to hide, I wouldn't consent to a search of my car. And I could see they weren't happy with me, but I felt I had no way of knowing what they'd want to do next. At one point, the officer who patted me down scanned the side of the police station to see where the security camera was to see how much of this was being recorded. And when he did that, it really sank in how completely I was at their mercy. I think we're all normalized from a young age to the idea of police officers and arrests and handcuffs, so it's easy to forget how demeaning and coercive a thing it is to seize control over another person's body. I know it sounds like the point of my story is how badly treated I was because of my race — and yes, I don't think I would've been detained if I were white. But actually, what I have in mind today is something else. What I have in mind is how much worse things might've been if I weren't affluent. I mean, they thought I might be trying to plant an explosive, and they investigated that possibility for an hour and a half, but I was never put in handcuffs, I was never taken to a jail cell. I think if I were from one of Washington DC's poor communities of color, and they thought I was endangering officers' lives, things might've ended differently. And in fact, in our system, I think it's better to be an affluent person suspected of trying to blow up a police station than it is to be a poor person who's suspected of much, much less than this. I want to give you an example from my current work. Right now, I'm working at a civil rights organization in DC, called Equal Justice Under Law. Let me start by asking you all a question. How many of you have ever gotten a parking ticket in your life? Raise your hand. Yeah. So have I. And when I had to pay it, it felt annoying and it felt bad, but I paid it and I moved on. I'm guessing most of you have paid your tickets as well. But what would happen if you couldn't afford the amount on the ticket and your family doesn't have the money either, what happens then? Well, one thing that's not supposed to happen under the law is, you're not supposed to be arrested and jailed simply because you can't afford to pay. That's illegal under federal law. But that's what local governments across the country are doing to people who are poor. And so many of our lawsuits at Equal Justice Under Law target these modern-day debtors' prisons. One of our cases is against Ferguson, Missouri. And I know when I say Ferguson, many of you will think of police violence. But today I want to talk about a different aspect of the relationship between their police force and their citizens. Ferguson was issuing an average of over two arrest warrants, per person, per year, mostly for unpaid debt to the courts. When I imagine what that would feel like if, every time I left my house, there was a chance a police officer would run my license plate, see a warrant for unpaid debt, seize my body they way the did in DC and then take me to a jail cell, I feel a little sick. I've met many of the people in Ferguson who have experienced this, and I've heard some of their stories. In Ferguson's jail, in each small cell, there's a bunk bed and a toilet, but they'd pack four people into each cell. So there'd be two people on the bunks and two people on the floor, one with nowhere to go except right next to the filthy toilet, which was never cleaned. In fact, the whole cell was never cleaned, so the floor and the walls were lined with blood and mucus. No water to drink, except coming out of a spigot connected to the toilet. The water looked and tasted dirty, there was never enough food, never any showers, women menstruating without any hygiene products, no medical attention whatsoever. When I asked a woman about medical attention, she laughed, and she said, "Oh, no, no. The only attention you get from the guards in there is sexual." So, they'd take the debtors to this place and they'd say, "We're not letting you leave until you make a payment on your debt." And if you could — if you could call a family member who could somehow come up with some money, then maybe you were out. If it was enough money, you were out. But if it wasn't, you'd stay there for days or weeks, and every day the guards would come down to the cells and haggle with the debtors about the price of release that day. You'd stay until, at some point, the jail would be booked to capacity, and they'd want to book someone new in. And at that point, they'd think, "OK, it's unlikely this person can come up with the money, it's more likely this new person will." You're out, they're in, and the machine kept moving like that. I met a man who, nine years ago, was arrested for panhandling in a Walgreens. He couldn't afford his fines and his court fees from that case. When he was young he survived a house fire, only because he jumped out of the third-story window to escape. But that fall left him with damage to his brain and several parts of this body, including his leg. So he can't work, and he relies on social security payments to survive. When I met him in his apartment, he had nothing of value there — not even food in his fridge. He's chronically hungry. He had nothing of value in his apartment except a small piece of cardboard on which he'd written the names of his children. He cherished this a lot. He was happy to show it to me. But he can't pay his fines and fees because he has nothing to give. In the last nine years, he's been arrested 13 times, and jailed for a total of 130 days on that panhandling case. One of those stretches lasted 45 days. Just imagine spending from right now until sometime in June in the place that I described to you a few moments ago. He told me about all the suicide attempts he's seen in Ferguson's jail; about the time a man found a way to hang himself out of reach of the other inmates, so all they could do was yell and yell and yell, trying to get the guards' attention so they could come down and cut him down. And he told me that it took the guards over five minutes to respond, and when they came, the man was unconscious. So they called the paramedics and the paramedics went to the cell. They said, "He'll be OK," so they just left him there on the floor. I heard many stories like this and they shouldn't have surprised me, because suicide is the single leading cause of death in our local jails. This is related to the lack of mental health care in our jails. I met a woman, single mother of three, making seven dollars an hour. She relies on food stamps to feed herself and her children. About a decade ago, she got a couple of traffic tickets and a minor theft charge, and she can't afford her fines and fees on those cases. Since then, she's been jailed about 10 times on those cases, but she has schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and she needs medication every day. She doesn't have access to those medications in Ferguson's jail, because no one has access to their medications. She told me about what it was like to spend two weeks in a cage, hallucinating people and shadows and hearing voices, begging for the medication that would make it all stop, only to be ignored. And this isn't anomalous, either: thirty percent of women in our local jails have serious mental health needs just like hers, but only one in six receives any mental health care while in jail. And so, I heard all these stories about this grotesque dungeon that Ferguson was operating for its debtors, and when it came time for me to actually see it and to go visit Ferguson's jail, I'm not sure what I was expecting to see, but I wasn't expecting this. It's an ordinary government building. It could be a post office or a school. It reminded me that these illegal extortion schemes aren't being run somewhere in the shadows, they're being run out in the open by our public officials. They're a matter of public policy. And this reminded me that poverty jailing in general, even outside the debtors' prison context, plays a very visible and central role in our justice system. What I have in mind is our policy of bail. In our system, whether you're detained or free, pending trial is not a matter of how dangerous you are or how much of a flight risk you pose. It's a matter of whether you can afford to post your bail amount. So Bill Cosby, whose bail was set at a million dollars, immediately writes the check, and doesn't spend a second in a jail cell. But Sandra Bland, who died in jail, was only there because her family was unable to come up with 500 dollars. In fact, there are half a million Sandra Blands across the country — 500,000 people who are in jail right now, only because they can't afford their bail amount. We're told that our jails are places for criminals, but statistically that's not the case: three out of every five people in jail right now are there pretrial. They haven't been convicted of any crime; they haven't pled guilty to any offense. Right here in San Francisco, 85 percent of the inmates in our jail in San Francisco are pretrial detainees. This means San Francisco is spending something like 80 million dollars every year to fund pretrial detention. Many of these people who are in jail only because they can't post bail are facing allegations so minor that the amount of time it would take for them to sit waiting for trial is longer than the sentence they would receive if convicted, which means they're guaranteed to get out faster if they just plead guilty. So now the choice is: Should I stay here in this horrible place, away from my family and my dependents, almost guaranteed to lose my job, and then fight the charges? Or should I just plead guilty to whatever the prosecutor wants and get out? And at this point, they're pretrial detainees, not criminals. But once they take that plea deal, we'll call them criminals, even though an affluent person would never have been in this situation, because an affluent person would have simply been bailed out. At this point you might be wondering, "This guy's in the inspiration section, what is he doing — (Laughter) "This is extremely depressing. I want my money back." (Laughter) But in actuality, I find talking about jailing much less depressing than the alternative, because I think if we don't talk about these issues and collectively change how we think about jailing, at the end of all of our lives, we'll still have jails full of poor people who don't belong there. That really is depressing to me. But what's exciting to me is the thought that these stories can move us to think about jailing in different terms. Not in sterile policy terms like "mass incarceration," or "sentencing of nonviolent offenders," but in human terms. When we put a human being in a cage for days or weeks or months or even years, what are we doing to that person's mind and body? Under what conditions are we really willing to do that? And so if starting with a few hundred of us in this room, we can commit to thinking about jailing in this different light, then we can undo that normalization I was referring to earlier. If I leave you with anything today, I hope it's with the thought that if we want anything to fundamentally change — not just to reform our policies on bail and fines and fees — but also to make sure that whatever new policies replace those don't punish the poor and the marginalized in their own new way. If we want that kind of change, then this shift in thinking is required of each of us. Thank you. (Applause) |
Don't fear superintelligent AI | {0: "IBM's Grady Booch is shaping the future of cognitive computing by building intelligent systems that can reason and learn."} | TED@IBM | When I was a kid, I was the quintessential nerd. I think some of you were, too. (Laughter) And you, sir, who laughed the loudest, you probably still are. (Laughter) I grew up in a small town in the dusty plains of north Texas, the son of a sheriff who was the son of a pastor. Getting into trouble was not an option. And so I started reading calculus books for fun. (Laughter) You did, too. That led me to building a laser and a computer and model rockets, and that led me to making rocket fuel in my bedroom. Now, in scientific terms, we call this a very bad idea. (Laughter) Around that same time, Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" came to the theaters, and my life was forever changed. I loved everything about that movie, especially the HAL 9000. Now, HAL was a sentient computer designed to guide the Discovery spacecraft from the Earth to Jupiter. HAL was also a flawed character, for in the end he chose to value the mission over human life. Now, HAL was a fictional character, but nonetheless he speaks to our fears, our fears of being subjugated by some unfeeling, artificial intelligence who is indifferent to our humanity. I believe that such fears are unfounded. Indeed, we stand at a remarkable time in human history, where, driven by refusal to accept the limits of our bodies and our minds, we are building machines of exquisite, beautiful complexity and grace that will extend the human experience in ways beyond our imagining. After a career that led me from the Air Force Academy to Space Command to now, I became a systems engineer, and recently I was drawn into an engineering problem associated with NASA's mission to Mars. Now, in space flights to the Moon, we can rely upon mission control in Houston to watch over all aspects of a flight. However, Mars is 200 times further away, and as a result it takes on average 13 minutes for a signal to travel from the Earth to Mars. If there's trouble, there's not enough time. And so a reasonable engineering solution calls for us to put mission control inside the walls of the Orion spacecraft. Another fascinating idea in the mission profile places humanoid robots on the surface of Mars before the humans themselves arrive, first to build facilities and later to serve as collaborative members of the science team. Now, as I looked at this from an engineering perspective, it became very clear to me that what I needed to architect was a smart, collaborative, socially intelligent artificial intelligence. In other words, I needed to build something very much like a HAL but without the homicidal tendencies. (Laughter) Let's pause for a moment. Is it really possible to build an artificial intelligence like that? Actually, it is. In many ways, this is a hard engineering problem with elements of AI, not some wet hair ball of an AI problem that needs to be engineered. To paraphrase Alan Turing, I'm not interested in building a sentient machine. I'm not building a HAL. All I'm after is a simple brain, something that offers the illusion of intelligence. The art and the science of computing have come a long way since HAL was onscreen, and I'd imagine if his inventor Dr. Chandra were here today, he'd have a whole lot of questions for us. Is it really possible for us to take a system of millions upon millions of devices, to read in their data streams, to predict their failures and act in advance? Yes. Can we build systems that converse with humans in natural language? Yes. Can we build systems that recognize objects, identify emotions, emote themselves, play games and even read lips? Yes. Can we build a system that sets goals, that carries out plans against those goals and learns along the way? Yes. Can we build systems that have a theory of mind? This we are learning to do. Can we build systems that have an ethical and moral foundation? This we must learn how to do. So let's accept for a moment that it's possible to build such an artificial intelligence for this kind of mission and others. The next question you must ask yourself is, should we fear it? Now, every new technology brings with it some measure of trepidation. When we first saw cars, people lamented that we would see the destruction of the family. When we first saw telephones come in, people were worried it would destroy all civil conversation. At a point in time we saw the written word become pervasive, people thought we would lose our ability to memorize. These things are all true to a degree, but it's also the case that these technologies brought to us things that extended the human experience in some profound ways. So let's take this a little further. I do not fear the creation of an AI like this, because it will eventually embody some of our values. Consider this: building a cognitive system is fundamentally different than building a traditional software-intensive system of the past. We don't program them. We teach them. In order to teach a system how to recognize flowers, I show it thousands of flowers of the kinds I like. In order to teach a system how to play a game — Well, I would. You would, too. I like flowers. Come on. To teach a system how to play a game like Go, I'd have it play thousands of games of Go, but in the process I also teach it how to discern a good game from a bad game. If I want to create an artificially intelligent legal assistant, I will teach it some corpus of law but at the same time I am fusing with it the sense of mercy and justice that is part of that law. In scientific terms, this is what we call ground truth, and here's the important point: in producing these machines, we are therefore teaching them a sense of our values. To that end, I trust an artificial intelligence the same, if not more, as a human who is well-trained. But, you may ask, what about rogue agents, some well-funded nongovernment organization? I do not fear an artificial intelligence in the hand of a lone wolf. Clearly, we cannot protect ourselves against all random acts of violence, but the reality is such a system requires substantial training and subtle training far beyond the resources of an individual. And furthermore, it's far more than just injecting an internet virus to the world, where you push a button, all of a sudden it's in a million places and laptops start blowing up all over the place. Now, these kinds of substances are much larger, and we'll certainly see them coming. Do I fear that such an artificial intelligence might threaten all of humanity? If you look at movies such as "The Matrix," "Metropolis," "The Terminator," shows such as "Westworld," they all speak of this kind of fear. Indeed, in the book "Superintelligence" by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, he picks up on this theme and observes that a superintelligence might not only be dangerous, it could represent an existential threat to all of humanity. Dr. Bostrom's basic argument is that such systems will eventually have such an insatiable thirst for information that they will perhaps learn how to learn and eventually discover that they may have goals that are contrary to human needs. Dr. Bostrom has a number of followers. He is supported by people such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. With all due respect to these brilliant minds, I believe that they are fundamentally wrong. Now, there are a lot of pieces of Dr. Bostrom's argument to unpack, and I don't have time to unpack them all, but very briefly, consider this: super knowing is very different than super doing. HAL was a threat to the Discovery crew only insofar as HAL commanded all aspects of the Discovery. So it would have to be with a superintelligence. It would have to have dominion over all of our world. This is the stuff of Skynet from the movie "The Terminator" in which we had a superintelligence that commanded human will, that directed every device that was in every corner of the world. Practically speaking, it ain't gonna happen. We are not building AIs that control the weather, that direct the tides, that command us capricious, chaotic humans. And furthermore, if such an artificial intelligence existed, it would have to compete with human economies, and thereby compete for resources with us. And in the end — don't tell Siri this — we can always unplug them. (Laughter) We are on an incredible journey of coevolution with our machines. The humans we are today are not the humans we will be then. To worry now about the rise of a superintelligence is in many ways a dangerous distraction because the rise of computing itself brings to us a number of human and societal issues to which we must now attend. How shall I best organize society when the need for human labor diminishes? How can I bring understanding and education throughout the globe and still respect our differences? How might I extend and enhance human life through cognitive healthcare? How might I use computing to help take us to the stars? And that's the exciting thing. The opportunities to use computing to advance the human experience are within our reach, here and now, and we are just beginning. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Nationalism vs. globalism: the new political divide | {0: 'In his book "Homo Deus," Yuval Noah Harari explores the future of humankind: the destinies we may set for ourselves and the quests we\'ll undertake.', 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.'} | TED Dialogues | Chris Anderson: Hello. Welcome to this TED Dialogues. It's the first of a series that's going to be done in response to the current political upheaval. I don't know about you; I've become quite concerned about the growing divisiveness in this country and in the world. No one's listening to each other. Right? They aren't. I mean, it feels like we need a different kind of conversation, one that's based on — I don't know, on reason, listening, on understanding, on a broader context. That's at least what we're going to try in these TED Dialogues, starting today. And we couldn't have anyone with us who I'd be more excited to kick this off. This is a mind right here that thinks pretty much like no one else on the planet, I would hasten to say. I'm serious. (Yuval Noah Harari laughs) I'm serious. He synthesizes history with underlying ideas in a way that kind of takes your breath away. So, some of you will know this book, "Sapiens." Has anyone here read "Sapiens"? (Applause) I mean, I could not put it down. The way that he tells the story of mankind through big ideas that really make you think differently — it's kind of amazing. And here's the follow-up, which I think is being published in the US next week. YNH: Yeah, next week. CA: "Homo Deus." Now, this is the history of the next hundred years. I've had a chance to read it. It's extremely dramatic, and I daresay, for some people, quite alarming. It's a must-read. And honestly, we couldn't have someone better to help make sense of what on Earth is happening in the world right now. So a warm welcome, please, to Yuval Noah Harari. (Applause) It's great to be joined by our friends on Facebook and around the Web. Hello, Facebook. And all of you, as I start asking questions of Yuval, come up with your own questions, and not necessarily about the political scandal du jour, but about the broader understanding of: Where are we heading? You ready? OK, we're going to go. So here we are, Yuval: New York City, 2017, there's a new president in power, and shock waves rippling around the world. What on Earth is happening? YNH: I think the basic thing that happened is that we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories. And for the last few decades, we had a very simple and very attractive story about what's happening in the world. And the story said that, oh, what's happening is that the economy is being globalized, politics is being liberalized, and the combination of the two will create paradise on Earth, and we just need to keep on globalizing the economy and liberalizing the political system, and everything will be wonderful. And 2016 is the moment when a very large segment, even of the Western world, stopped believing in this story. For good or bad reasons — it doesn't matter. People stopped believing in the story, and when you don't have a story, you don't understand what's happening. CA: Part of you believes that that story was actually a very effective story. It worked. YNH: To some extent, yes. According to some measurements, we are now in the best time ever for humankind. Today, for the first time in history, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little, which is an amazing achievement. (Laughter) Also for the first time in history, more people die from old age than from infectious diseases, and violence is also down. For the first time in history, more people commit suicide than are killed by crime and terrorism and war put together. Statistically, you are your own worst enemy. At least, of all the people in the world, you are most likely to be killed by yourself — (Laughter) which is, again, very good news, compared — (Laughter) compared to the level of violence that we saw in previous eras. CA: But this process of connecting the world ended up with a large group of people kind of feeling left out, and they've reacted. And so we have this bombshell that's sort of ripping through the whole system. I mean, what do you make of what's happened? It feels like the old way that people thought of politics, the left-right divide, has been blown up and replaced. How should we think of this? YNH: Yeah, the old 20th-century political model of left versus right is now largely irrelevant, and the real divide today is between global and national, global or local. And you see it again all over the world that this is now the main struggle. We probably need completely new political models and completely new ways of thinking about politics. In essence, what you can say is that we now have global ecology, we have a global economy but we have national politics, and this doesn't work together. This makes the political system ineffective, because it has no control over the forces that shape our life. And you have basically two solutions to this imbalance: either de-globalize the economy and turn it back into a national economy, or globalize the political system. CA: So some, I guess many liberals out there view Trump and his government as kind of irredeemably bad, just awful in every way. Do you see any underlying narrative or political philosophy in there that is at least worth understanding? How would you articulate that philosophy? Is it just the philosophy of nationalism? YNH: I think the underlying feeling or idea is that the political system — something is broken there. It doesn't empower the ordinary person anymore. It doesn't care so much about the ordinary person anymore, and I think this diagnosis of the political disease is correct. With regard to the answers, I am far less certain. I think what we are seeing is the immediate human reaction: if something doesn't work, let's go back. And you see it all over the world, that people, almost nobody in the political system today, has any future-oriented vision of where humankind is going. Almost everywhere, you see retrograde vision: "Let's make America great again," like it was great — I don't know — in the '50s, in the '80s, sometime, let's go back there. And you go to Russia a hundred years after Lenin, Putin's vision for the future is basically, ah, let's go back to the Tsarist empire. And in Israel, where I come from, the hottest political vision of the present is: "Let's build the temple again." So let's go back 2,000 years backwards. So people are thinking sometime in the past we've lost it, and sometimes in the past, it's like you've lost your way in the city, and you say OK, let's go back to the point where I felt secure and start again. I don't think this can work, but a lot of people, this is their gut instinct. CA: But why couldn't it work? "America First" is a very appealing slogan in many ways. Patriotism is, in many ways, a very noble thing. It's played a role in promoting cooperation among large numbers of people. Why couldn't you have a world organized in countries, all of which put themselves first? YNH: For many centuries, even thousands of years, patriotism worked quite well. Of course, it led to wars an so forth, but we shouldn't focus too much on the bad. There are also many, many positive things about patriotism, and the ability to have a large number of people care about each other, sympathize with one another, and come together for collective action. If you go back to the first nations, so, thousands of years ago, the people who lived along the Yellow River in China — it was many, many different tribes and they all depended on the river for survival and for prosperity, but all of them also suffered from periodical floods and periodical droughts. And no tribe could really do anything about it, because each of them controlled just a tiny section of the river. And then in a long and complicated process, the tribes coalesced together to form the Chinese nation, which controlled the entire Yellow River and had the ability to bring hundreds of thousands of people together to build dams and canals and regulate the river and prevent the worst floods and droughts and raise the level of prosperity for everybody. And this worked in many places around the world. But in the 21st century, technology is changing all that in a fundamental way. We are now living — all people in the world — are living alongside the same cyber river, and no single nation can regulate this river by itself. We are all living together on a single planet, which is threatened by our own actions. And if you don't have some kind of global cooperation, nationalism is just not on the right level to tackle the problems, whether it's climate change or whether it's technological disruption. CA: So it was a beautiful idea in a world where most of the action, most of the issues, took place on national scale, but your argument is that the issues that matter most today no longer take place on a national scale but on a global scale. YNH: Exactly. All the major problems of the world today are global in essence, and they cannot be solved unless through some kind of global cooperation. It's not just climate change, which is, like, the most obvious example people give. I think more in terms of technological disruption. If you think about, for example, artificial intelligence, over the next 20, 30 years pushing hundreds of millions of people out of the job market — this is a problem on a global level. It will disrupt the economy of all the countries. And similarly, if you think about, say, bioengineering and people being afraid of conducting, I don't know, genetic engineering research in humans, it won't help if just a single country, let's say the US, outlaws all genetic experiments in humans, but China or North Korea continues to do it. So the US cannot solve it by itself, and very quickly, the pressure on the US to do the same will be immense because we are talking about high-risk, high-gain technologies. If somebody else is doing it, I can't allow myself to remain behind. The only way to have regulations, effective regulations, on things like genetic engineering, is to have global regulations. If you just have national regulations, nobody would like to stay behind. CA: So this is really interesting. It seems to me that this may be one key to provoking at least a constructive conversation between the different sides here, because I think everyone can agree that the start point of a lot of the anger that's propelled us to where we are is because of the legitimate concerns about job loss. Work is gone, a traditional way of life has gone, and it's no wonder that people are furious about that. And in general, they have blamed globalism, global elites, for doing this to them without asking their permission, and that seems like a legitimate complaint. But what I hear you saying is that — so a key question is: What is the real cause of job loss, both now and going forward? To the extent that it's about globalism, then the right response, yes, is to shut down borders and keep people out and change trade agreements and so forth. But you're saying, I think, that actually the bigger cause of job loss is not going to be that at all. It's going to originate in technological questions, and we have no chance of solving that unless we operate as a connected world. YNH: Yeah, I think that, I don't know about the present, but looking to the future, it's not the Mexicans or Chinese who will take the jobs from the people in Pennsylvania, it's the robots and algorithms. So unless you plan to build a big wall on the border of California — (Laughter) the wall on the border with Mexico is going to be very ineffective. And I was struck when I watched the debates before the election, I was struck that certainly Trump did not even attempt to frighten people by saying the robots will take your jobs. Now even if it's not true, it doesn't matter. It could have been an extremely effective way of frightening people — (Laughter) and galvanizing people: "The robots will take your jobs!" And nobody used that line. And it made me afraid, because it meant that no matter what happens in universities and laboratories, and there, there is already an intense debate about it, but in the mainstream political system and among the general public, people are just unaware that there could be an immense technological disruption — not in 200 years, but in 10, 20, 30 years — and we have to do something about it now, partly because most of what we teach children today in school or in college is going to be completely irrelevant to the job market of 2040, 2050. So it's not something we'll need to think about in 2040. We need to think today what to teach the young people. CA: Yeah, no, absolutely. You've often written about moments in history where humankind has ... entered a new era, unintentionally. Decisions have been made, technologies have been developed, and suddenly the world has changed, possibly in a way that's worse for everyone. So one of the examples you give in "Sapiens" is just the whole agricultural revolution, which, for an actual person tilling the fields, they just picked up a 12-hour backbreaking workday instead of six hours in the jungle and a much more interesting lifestyle. (Laughter) So are we at another possible phase change here, where we kind of sleepwalk into a future that none of us actually wants? YNH: Yes, very much so. During the agricultural revolution, what happened is that immense technological and economic revolution empowered the human collective, but when you look at actual individual lives, the life of a tiny elite became much better, and the lives of the majority of people became considerably worse. And this can happen again in the 21st century. No doubt the new technologies will empower the human collective. But we may end up again with a tiny elite reaping all the benefits, taking all the fruits, and the masses of the population finding themselves worse than they were before, certainly much worse than this tiny elite. CA: And those elites might not even be human elites. They might be cyborgs or — YNH: Yeah, they could be enhanced super humans. They could be cyborgs. They could be completely nonorganic elites. They could even be non-conscious algorithms. What we see now in the world is authority shifting away from humans to algorithms. More and more decisions — about personal lives, about economic matters, about political matters — are actually being taken by algorithms. If you ask the bank for a loan, chances are your fate is decided by an algorithm, not by a human being. And the general impression is that maybe Homo sapiens just lost it. The world is so complicated, there is so much data, things are changing so fast, that this thing that evolved on the African savanna tens of thousands of years ago — to cope with a particular environment, a particular volume of information and data — it just can't handle the realities of the 21st century, and the only thing that may be able to handle it is big-data algorithms. So no wonder more and more authority is shifting from us to the algorithms. CA: So we're in New York City for the first of a series of TED Dialogues with Yuval Harari, and there's a Facebook Live audience out there. We're excited to have you with us. We'll start coming to some of your questions and questions of people in the room in just a few minutes, so have those coming. Yuval, if you're going to make the argument that we need to get past nationalism because of the coming technological ... danger, in a way, presented by so much of what's happening we've got to have a global conversation about this. Trouble is, it's hard to get people really believing that, I don't know, AI really is an imminent threat, and so forth. The things that people, some people at least, care about much more immediately, perhaps, is climate change, perhaps other issues like refugees, nuclear weapons, and so forth. Would you argue that where we are right now that somehow those issues need to be dialed up? You've talked about climate change, but Trump has said he doesn't believe in that. So in a way, your most powerful argument, you can't actually use to make this case. YNH: Yeah, I think with climate change, at first sight, it's quite surprising that there is a very close correlation between nationalism and climate change. I mean, almost always, the people who deny climate change are nationalists. And at first sight, you think: Why? What's the connection? Why don't you have socialists denying climate change? But then, when you think about it, it's obvious — because nationalism has no solution to climate change. If you want to be a nationalist in the 21st century, you have to deny the problem. If you accept the reality of the problem, then you must accept that, yes, there is still room in the world for patriotism, there is still room in the world for having special loyalties and obligations towards your own people, towards your own country. I don't think anybody is really thinking of abolishing that. But in order to confront climate change, we need additional loyalties and commitments to a level beyond the nation. And that should not be impossible, because people can have several layers of loyalty. You can be loyal to your family and to your community and to your nation, so why can't you also be loyal to humankind as a whole? Of course, there are occasions when it becomes difficult, what to put first, but, you know, life is difficult. Handle it. (Laughter) CA: OK, so I would love to get some questions from the audience here. We've got a microphone here. Speak into it, and Facebook, get them coming, too. Howard Morgan: One of the things that has clearly made a huge difference in this country and other countries is the income distribution inequality, the dramatic change in income distribution in the US from what it was 50 years ago, and around the world. Is there anything we can do to affect that? Because that gets at a lot of the underlying causes. YNH: So far I haven't heard a very good idea about what to do about it, again, partly because most ideas remain on the national level, and the problem is global. I mean, one idea that we hear quite a lot about now is universal basic income. But this is a problem. I mean, I think it's a good start, but it's a problematic idea because it's not clear what "universal" is and it's not clear what "basic" is. Most people when they speak about universal basic income, they actually mean national basic income. But the problem is global. Let's say that you have AI and 3D printers taking away millions of jobs in Bangladesh, from all the people who make my shirts and my shoes. So what's going to happen? The US government will levy taxes on Google and Apple in California, and use that to pay basic income to unemployed Bangladeshis? If you believe that, you can just as well believe that Santa Claus will come and solve the problem. So unless we have really universal and not national basic income, the deep problems are not going to go away. And also it's not clear what basic is, because what are basic human needs? A thousand years ago, just food and shelter was enough. But today, people will say education is a basic human need, it should be part of the package. But how much? Six years? Twelve years? PhD? Similarly, with health care, let's say that in 20, 30, 40 years, you'll have expensive treatments that can extend human life to 120, I don't know. Will this be part of the basket of basic income or not? It's a very difficult problem, because in a world where people lose their ability to be employed, the only thing they are going to get is this basic income. So what's part of it is a very, very difficult ethical question. CA: There's a bunch of questions on how the world affords it as well, who pays. There's a question here from Facebook from Lisa Larson: "How does nationalism in the US now compare to that between World War I and World War II in the last century?" YNH: Well the good news, with regard to the dangers of nationalism, we are in a much better position than a century ago. A century ago, 1917, Europeans were killing each other by the millions. In 2016, with Brexit, as far as I remember, a single person lost their life, an MP who was murdered by some extremist. Just a single person. I mean, if Brexit was about British independence, this is the most peaceful war of independence in human history. And let's say that Scotland will now choose to leave the UK after Brexit. So in the 18th century, if Scotland wanted — and the Scots wanted several times — to break out of the control of London, the reaction of the government in London was to send an army up north to burn down Edinburgh and massacre the highland tribes. My guess is that if, in 2018, the Scots vote for independence, the London government will not send an army up north to burn down Edinburgh. Very few people are now willing to kill or be killed for Scottish or for British independence. So for all the talk of the rise of nationalism and going back to the 1930s, to the 19th century, in the West at least, the power of national sentiments today is far, far smaller than it was a century ago. CA: Although some people now, you hear publicly worrying about whether that might be shifting, that there could actually be outbreaks of violence in the US depending on how things turn out. Should we be worried about that, or do you really think things have shifted? YNH: No, we should be worried. We should be aware of two things. First of all, don't be hysterical. We are not back in the First World War yet. But on the other hand, don't be complacent. We reached from 1917 to 2017, not by some divine miracle, but simply by human decisions, and if we now start making the wrong decisions, we could be back in an analogous situation to 1917 in a few years. One of the things I know as a historian is that you should never underestimate human stupidity. (Laughter) It's one of the most powerful forces in history, human stupidity and human violence. Humans do such crazy things for no obvious reason, but again, at the same time, another very powerful force in human history is human wisdom. We have both. CA: We have with us here moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who I think has a question. Jonathan Haidt: Thanks, Yuval. So you seem to be a fan of global governance, but when you look at the map of the world from Transparency International, which rates the level of corruption of political institutions, it's a vast sea of red with little bits of yellow here and there for those with good institutions. So if we were to have some kind of global governance, what makes you think it would end up being more like Denmark rather than more like Russia or Honduras, and aren't there alternatives, such as we did with CFCs? There are ways to solve global problems with national governments. What would world government actually look like, and why do you think it would work? YNH: Well, I don't know what it would look like. Nobody still has a model for that. The main reason we need it is because many of these issues are lose-lose situations. When you have a win-win situation like trade, both sides can benefit from a trade agreement, then this is something you can work out. Without some kind of global government, national governments each have an interest in doing it. But when you have a lose-lose situation like with climate change, it's much more difficult without some overarching authority, real authority. Now, how to get there and what would it look like, I don't know. And certainly there is no obvious reason to think that it would look like Denmark, or that it would be a democracy. Most likely it wouldn't. We don't have workable democratic models for a global government. So maybe it would look more like ancient China than like modern Denmark. But still, given the dangers that we are facing, I think the imperative of having some kind of real ability to force through difficult decisions on the global level is more important than almost anything else. CA: There's a question from Facebook here, and then we'll get the mic to Andrew. So, Kat Hebron on Facebook, calling in from Vail: "How would developed nations manage the millions of climate migrants?" YNH: I don't know. CA: That's your answer, Kat. (Laughter) YNH: And I don't think that they know either. They'll just deny the problem, maybe. CA: But immigration, generally, is another example of a problem that's very hard to solve on a nation-by-nation basis. One nation can shut its doors, but maybe that stores up problems for the future. YNH: Yes, I mean — it's another very good case, especially because it's so much easier to migrate today than it was in the Middle Ages or in ancient times. CA: Yuval, there's a belief among many technologists, certainly, that political concerns are kind of overblown, that actually, political leaders don't have that much influence in the world, that the real determination of humanity at this point is by science, by invention, by companies, by many things other than political leaders, and it's actually very hard for leaders to do much, so we're actually worrying about nothing here. YNH: Well, first, it should be emphasized that it's true that political leaders' ability to do good is very limited, but their ability to do harm is unlimited. There is a basic imbalance here. You can still press the button and blow everybody up. You have that kind of ability. But if you want, for example, to reduce inequality, that's very, very difficult. But to start a war, you can still do so very easily. So there is a built-in imbalance in the political system today which is very frustrating, where you cannot do a lot of good but you can still do a lot of harm. And this makes the political system still a very big concern. CA: So as you look at what's happening today, and putting your historian's hat on, do you look back in history at moments when things were going just fine and an individual leader really took the world or their country backwards? YNH: There are quite a few examples, but I should emphasize, it's never an individual leader. I mean, somebody put him there, and somebody allowed him to continue to be there. So it's never really just the fault of a single individual. There are a lot of people behind every such individual. CA: Can we have the microphone here, please, to Andrew? Andrew Solomon: You've talked a lot about the global versus the national, but increasingly, it seems to me, the world situation is in the hands of identity groups. We look at people within the United States who have been recruited by ISIS. We look at these other groups which have formed which go outside of national bounds but still represent significant authorities. How are they to be integrated into the system, and how is a diverse set of identities to be made coherent under either national or global leadership? YNH: Well, the problem of such diverse identities is a problem from nationalism as well. Nationalism believes in a single, monolithic identity, and exclusive or at least more extreme versions of nationalism believe in an exclusive loyalty to a single identity. And therefore, nationalism has had a lot of problems with people wanting to divide their identities between various groups. So it's not just a problem, say, for a global vision. And I think, again, history shows that you shouldn't necessarily think in such exclusive terms. If you think that there is just a single identity for a person, "I am just X, that's it, I can't be several things, I can be just that," that's the start of the problem. You have religions, you have nations that sometimes demand exclusive loyalty, but it's not the only option. There are many religions and many nations that enable you to have diverse identities at the same time. CA: But is one explanation of what's happened in the last year that a group of people have got fed up with, if you like, the liberal elites, for want of a better term, obsessing over many, many different identities and them feeling, "But what about my identity? I am being completely ignored here. And by the way, I thought I was the majority"? And that that's actually sparked a lot of the anger. YNH: Yeah. Identity is always problematic, because identity is always based on fictional stories that sooner or later collide with reality. Almost all identities, I mean, beyond the level of the basic community of a few dozen people, are based on a fictional story. They are not the truth. They are not the reality. It's just a story that people invent and tell one another and start believing. And therefore all identities are extremely unstable. They are not a biological reality. Sometimes nationalists, for example, think that the nation is a biological entity. It's made of the combination of soil and blood, creates the nation. But this is just a fictional story. CA: Soil and blood kind of makes a gooey mess. (Laughter) YNH: It does, and also it messes with your mind when you think too much that I am a combination of soil and blood. If you look from a biological perspective, obviously none of the nations that exist today existed 5,000 years ago. Homo sapiens is a social animal, that's for sure. But for millions of years, Homo sapiens and our hominid ancestors lived in small communities of a few dozen individuals. Everybody knew everybody else. Whereas modern nations are imagined communities, in the sense that I don't even know all these people. I come from a relatively small nation, Israel, and of eight million Israelis, I never met most of them. I will never meet most of them. They basically exist here. CA: But in terms of this identity, this group who feel left out and perhaps have work taken away, I mean, in "Homo Deus," you actually speak of this group in one sense expanding, that so many people may have their jobs taken away by technology in some way that we could end up with a really large — I think you call it a "useless class" — a class where traditionally, as viewed by the economy, these people have no use. YNH: Yes. CA: How likely a possibility is that? Is that something we should be terrified about? And can we address it in any way? YNH: We should think about it very carefully. I mean, nobody really knows what the job market will look like in 2040, 2050. There is a chance many new jobs will appear, but it's not certain. And even if new jobs do appear, it won't necessarily be easy for a 50-year old unemployed truck driver made unemployed by self-driving vehicles, it won't be easy for an unemployed truck driver to reinvent himself or herself as a designer of virtual worlds. Previously, if you look at the trajectory of the industrial revolution, when machines replaced humans in one type of work, the solution usually came from low-skill work in new lines of business. So you didn't need any more agricultural workers, so people moved to working in low-skill industrial jobs, and when this was taken away by more and more machines, people moved to low-skill service jobs. Now, when people say there will be new jobs in the future, that humans can do better than AI, that humans can do better than robots, they usually think about high-skill jobs, like software engineers designing virtual worlds. Now, I don't see how an unemployed cashier from Wal-Mart reinvents herself or himself at 50 as a designer of virtual worlds, and certainly I don't see how the millions of unemployed Bangladeshi textile workers will be able to do that. I mean, if they are going to do it, we need to start teaching the Bangladeshis today how to be software designers, and we are not doing it. So what will they do in 20 years? CA: So it feels like you're really highlighting a question that's really been bugging me the last few months more and more. It's almost a hard question to ask in public, but if any mind has some wisdom to offer in it, maybe it's yours, so I'm going to ask you: What are humans for? YNH: As far as we know, for nothing. (Laughter) I mean, there is no great cosmic drama, some great cosmic plan, that we have a role to play in. And we just need to discover what our role is and then play it to the best of our ability. This has been the story of all religions and ideologies and so forth, but as a scientist, the best I can say is this is not true. There is no universal drama with a role in it for Homo sapiens. So — CA: I'm going to push back on you just for a minute, just from your own book, because in "Homo Deus," you give really one of the most coherent and understandable accounts about sentience, about consciousness, and that unique sort of human skill. You point out that it's different from intelligence, the intelligence that we're building in machines, and that there's actually a lot of mystery around it. How can you be sure there's no purpose when we don't even understand what this sentience thing is? I mean, in your own thinking, isn't there a chance that what humans are for is to be the universe's sentient things, to be the centers of joy and love and happiness and hope? And maybe we can build machines that actually help amplify that, even if they're not going to become sentient themselves? Is that crazy? I kind of found myself hoping that, reading your book. YNH: Well, I certainly think that the most interesting question today in science is the question of consciousness and the mind. We are getting better and better in understanding the brain and intelligence, but we are not getting much better in understanding the mind and consciousness. People often confuse intelligence and consciousness, especially in places like Silicon Valley, which is understandable, because in humans, they go together. I mean, intelligence basically is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things, to feel joy and sadness and boredom and pain and so forth. In Homo sapiens and all other mammals as well — it's not unique to humans — in all mammals and birds and some other animals, intelligence and consciousness go together. We often solve problems by feeling things. So we tend to confuse them. But they are different things. What's happening today in places like Silicon Valley is that we are creating artificial intelligence but not artificial consciousness. There has been an amazing development in computer intelligence over the last 50 years, and exactly zero development in computer consciousness, and there is no indication that computers are going to become conscious anytime soon. So first of all, if there is some cosmic role for consciousness, it's not unique to Homo sapiens. Cows are conscious, pigs are conscious, chimpanzees are conscious, chickens are conscious, so if we go that way, first of all, we need to broaden our horizons and remember very clearly we are not the only sentient beings on Earth, and when it comes to sentience — when it comes to intelligence, there is good reason to think we are the most intelligent of the whole bunch. But when it comes to sentience, to say that humans are more sentient than whales, or more sentient than baboons or more sentient than cats, I see no evidence for that. So first step is, you go in that direction, expand. And then the second question of what is it for, I would reverse it and I would say that I don't think sentience is for anything. I think we don't need to find our role in the universe. The really important thing is to liberate ourselves from suffering. What characterizes sentient beings in contrast to robots, to stones, to whatever, is that sentient beings suffer, can suffer, and what they should focus on is not finding their place in some mysterious cosmic drama. They should focus on understanding what suffering is, what causes it and how to be liberated from it. CA: I know this is a big issue for you, and that was very eloquent. We're going to have a blizzard of questions from the audience here, and maybe from Facebook as well, and maybe some comments as well. So let's go quick. There's one right here. Keep your hands held up at the back if you want the mic, and we'll get it back to you. Question: In your work, you talk a lot about the fictional stories that we accept as truth, and we live our lives by it. As an individual, knowing that, how does it impact the stories that you choose to live your life, and do you confuse them with the truth, like all of us? YNH: I try not to. I mean, for me, maybe the most important question, both as a scientist and as a person, is how to tell the difference between fiction and reality, because reality is there. I'm not saying that everything is fiction. It's just very difficult for human beings to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and it has become more and more difficult as history progressed, because the fictions that we have created — nations and gods and money and corporations — they now control the world. So just to even think, "Oh, this is just all fictional entities that we've created," is very difficult. But reality is there. For me the best ... There are several tests to tell the difference between fiction and reality. The simplest one, the best one that I can say in short, is the test of suffering. If it can suffer, it's real. If it can't suffer, it's not real. A nation cannot suffer. That's very, very clear. Even if a nation loses a war, we say, "Germany suffered a defeat in the First World War," it's a metaphor. Germany cannot suffer. Germany has no mind. Germany has no consciousness. Germans can suffer, yes, but Germany cannot. Similarly, when a bank goes bust, the bank cannot suffer. When the dollar loses its value, the dollar doesn't suffer. People can suffer. Animals can suffer. This is real. So I would start, if you really want to see reality, I would go through the door of suffering. If you can really understand what suffering is, this will give you also the key to understand what reality is. CA: There's a Facebook question here that connects to this, from someone around the world in a language that I cannot read. YNH: Oh, it's Hebrew. CA: Hebrew. There you go. (Laughter) Can you read the name? YNH: Or Lauterbach Goren. CA: Well, thank you for writing in. The question is: "Is the post-truth era really a brand-new era, or just another climax or moment in a never-ending trend? YNH: Personally, I don't connect with this idea of post-truth. My basic reaction as a historian is: If this is the era of post-truth, when the hell was the era of truth? CA: Right. (Laughter) YNH: Was it the 1980s, the 1950s, the Middle Ages? I mean, we have always lived in an era, in a way, of post-truth. CA: But I'd push back on that, because I think what people are talking about is that there was a world where you had fewer journalistic outlets, where there were traditions, that things were fact-checked. It was incorporated into the charter of those organizations that the truth mattered. So if you believe in a reality, then what you write is information. There was a belief that that information should connect to reality in a real way, and if you wrote a headline, it was a serious, earnest attempt to reflect something that had actually happened. And people didn't always get it right. But I think the concern now is you've got a technological system that's incredibly powerful that, for a while at least, massively amplified anything with no attention paid to whether it connected to reality, only to whether it connected to clicks and attention, and that that was arguably toxic. That's a reasonable concern, isn't it? YNH: Yeah, it is. I mean, the technology changes, and it's now easier to disseminate both truth and fiction and falsehood. It goes both ways. It's also much easier, though, to spread the truth than it was ever before. But I don't think there is anything essentially new about this disseminating fictions and errors. There is nothing that — I don't know — Joseph Goebbels, didn't know about all this idea of fake news and post-truth. He famously said that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will think it's the truth, and the bigger the lie, the better, because people won't even think that something so big can be a lie. I think that fake news has been with us for thousands of years. Just think of the Bible. (Laughter) CA: But there is a concern that the fake news is associated with tyrannical regimes, and when you see an uprise in fake news that is a canary in the coal mine that there may be dark times coming. YNH: Yeah. I mean, the intentional use of fake news is a disturbing sign. But I'm not saying that it's not bad, I'm just saying that it's not new. CA: There's a lot of interest on Facebook on this question about global governance versus nationalism. Question here from Phil Dennis: "How do we get people, governments, to relinquish power? Is that — is that — actually, the text is so big I can't read the full question. But is that a necessity? Is it going to take war to get there? Sorry Phil — I mangled your question, but I blame the text right here. YNH: One option that some people talk about is that only a catastrophe can shake humankind and open the path to a real system of global governance, and they say that we can't do it before the catastrophe, but we need to start laying the foundations so that when the disaster strikes, we can react quickly. But people will just not have the motivation to do such a thing before the disaster strikes. Another thing that I would emphasize is that anybody who is really interested in global governance should always make it very, very clear that it doesn't replace or abolish local identities and communities, that it should come both as — It should be part of a single package. CA: I want to hear more on this, because the very words "global governance" are almost the epitome of evil in the mindset of a lot of people on the alt-right right now. It just seems scary, remote, distant, and it has let them down, and so globalists, global governance — no, go away! And many view the election as the ultimate poke in the eye to anyone who believes in that. So how do we change the narrative so that it doesn't seem so scary and remote? Build more on this idea of it being compatible with local identity, local communities. YNH: Well, I think again we should start really with the biological realities of Homo sapiens. And biology tells us two things about Homo sapiens which are very relevant to this issue: first of all, that we are completely dependent on the ecological system around us, and that today we are talking about a global system. You cannot escape that. And at the same time, biology tells us about Homo sapiens that we are social animals, but that we are social on a very, very local level. It's just a simple fact of humanity that we cannot have intimate familiarity with more than about 150 individuals. The size of the natural group, the natural community of Homo sapiens, is not more than 150 individuals, and everything beyond that is really based on all kinds of imaginary stories and large-scale institutions, and I think that we can find a way, again, based on a biological understanding of our species, to weave the two together and to understand that today in the 21st century, we need both the global level and the local community. And I would go even further than that and say that it starts with the body itself. The feelings that people today have of alienation and loneliness and not finding their place in the world, I would think that the chief problem is not global capitalism. The chief problem is that over the last hundred years, people have been becoming disembodied, have been distancing themselves from their body. As a hunter-gatherer or even as a peasant, to survive, you need to be constantly in touch with your body and with your senses, every moment. If you go to the forest to look for mushrooms and you don't pay attention to what you hear, to what you smell, to what you taste, you're dead. So you must be very connected. In the last hundred years, people are losing their ability to be in touch with their body and their senses, to hear, to smell, to feel. More and more attention goes to screens, to what is happening elsewhere, some other time. This, I think, is the deep reason for the feelings of alienation and loneliness and so forth, and therefore part of the solution is not to bring back some mass nationalism, but also reconnect with our own bodies, and if you are back in touch with your body, you will feel much more at home in the world also. CA: Well, depending on how things go, we may all be back in the forest soon. We're going to have one more question in the room and one more on Facebook. Ama Adi-Dako: Hello. I'm from Ghana, West Africa, and my question is: I'm wondering how do you present and justify the idea of global governance to countries that have been historically disenfranchised by the effects of globalization, and also, if we're talking about global governance, it sounds to me like it will definitely come from a very Westernized idea of what the "global" is supposed to look like. So how do we present and justify that idea of global versus wholly nationalist to people in countries like Ghana and Nigeria and Togo and other countries like that? YNH: I would start by saying that history is extremely unfair, and that we should realize that. Many of the countries that suffered most from the last 200 years of globalization and imperialism and industrialization are exactly the countries which are also most likely to suffer most from the next wave. And we should be very, very clear about that. If we don't have a global governance, and if we suffer from climate change, from technological disruptions, the worst suffering will not be in the US. The worst suffering will be in Ghana, will be in Sudan, will be in Syria, will be in Bangladesh, will be in those places. So I think those countries have an even greater incentive to do something about the next wave of disruption, whether it's ecological or whether it's technological. Again, if you think about technological disruption, so if AI and 3D printers and robots will take the jobs from billions of people, I worry far less about the Swedes than about the people in Ghana or in Bangladesh. And therefore, because history is so unfair and the results of a calamity will not be shared equally between everybody, as usual, the rich will be able to get away from the worst consequences of climate change in a way that the poor will not be able to. CA: And here's a great question from Cameron Taylor on Facebook: "At the end of 'Sapiens,'" you said we should be asking the question, 'What do we want to want?' Well, what do you think we should want to want?" YNH: I think we should want to want to know the truth, to understand reality. Mostly what we want is to change reality, to fit it to our own desires, to our own wishes, and I think we should first want to understand it. If you look at the long-term trajectory of history, what you see is that for thousands of years we humans have been gaining control of the world outside us and trying to shape it to fit our own desires. And we've gained control of the other animals, of the rivers, of the forests, and reshaped them completely, causing an ecological destruction without making ourselves satisfied. So the next step is we turn our gaze inwards, and we say OK, getting control of the world outside us did not really make us satisfied. Let's now try to gain control of the world inside us. This is the really big project of science and technology and industry in the 21st century — to try and gain control of the world inside us, to learn how to engineer and produce bodies and brains and minds. These are likely to be the main products of the 21st century economy. When people think about the future, very often they think in terms, "Oh, I want to gain control of my body and of my brain." And I think that's very dangerous. If we've learned anything from our previous history, it's that yes, we gain the power to manipulate, but because we didn't really understand the complexity of the ecological system, we are now facing an ecological meltdown. And if we now try to reengineer the world inside us without really understanding it, especially without understanding the complexity of our mental system, we might cause a kind of internal ecological disaster, and we'll face a kind of mental meltdown inside us. CA: Putting all the pieces together here — the current politics, the coming technology, concerns like the one you've just outlined — I mean, it seems like you yourself are in quite a bleak place when you think about the future. You're pretty worried about it. Is that right? And if there was one cause for hope, how would you state that? YNH: I focus on the most dangerous possibilities partly because this is like my job or responsibility as a historian or social critic. I mean, the industry focuses mainly on the positive sides, so it's the job of historians and philosophers and sociologists to highlight the more dangerous potential of all these new technologies. I don't think any of that is inevitable. Technology is never deterministic. You can use the same technology to create very different kinds of societies. If you look at the 20th century, so, the technologies of the Industrial Revolution, the trains and electricity and all that could be used to create a communist dictatorship or a fascist regime or a liberal democracy. The trains did not tell you what to do with them. Similarly, now, artificial intelligence and bioengineering and all of that — they don't predetermine a single outcome. Humanity can rise up to the challenge, and the best example we have of humanity rising up to the challenge of a new technology is nuclear weapons. In the late 1940s, '50s, many people were convinced that sooner or later the Cold War will end in a nuclear catastrophe, destroying human civilization. And this did not happen. In fact, nuclear weapons prompted humans all over the world to change the way that they manage international politics to reduce violence. And many countries basically took out war from their political toolkit. They no longer tried to pursue their interests with warfare. Not all countries have done so, but many countries have. And this is maybe the most important reason why international violence declined dramatically since 1945, and today, as I said, more people commit suicide than are killed in war. So this, I think, gives us a good example that even the most frightening technology, humans can rise up to the challenge and actually some good can come out of it. The problem is, we have very little margin for error. If we don't get it right, we might not have a second option to try again. CA: That's a very powerful note, on which I think we should draw this to a conclusion. Before I wrap up, I just want to say one thing to people here and to the global TED community watching online, anyone watching online: help us with these dialogues. If you believe, like we do, that we need to find a different kind of conversation, now more than ever, help us do it. Reach out to other people, try and have conversations with people you disagree with, understand them, pull the pieces together, and help us figure out how to take these conversations forward so we can make a real contribution to what's happening in the world right now. I think everyone feels more alive, more concerned, more engaged with the politics of the moment. The stakes do seem quite high, so help us respond to it in a wise, wise way. Yuval Harari, thank you. (Applause) |
The racial politics of time | {0: 'With scholarship and incisive commentary that exposes the marginalized narratives hidden within "mainstream" history, Brittney Cooper writes at the vanguard of cultural criticism.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | What if I told you that time has a race, a race in the contemporary way that we understand race in the United States? Typically, we talk about race in terms of black and white issues. In the African-American communities from which I come, we have a long-standing multi-generational joke about what we call "CP time," or "colored people's time." Now, we no longer refer to African-Americans as "colored," but this long-standing joke about our perpetual lateness to church, to cookouts, to family events and even to our own funerals, remains. I personally am a stickler for time. It's almost as if my mother, when I was growing up, said, "We will not be those black people." So we typically arrive to events 30 minutes early. But today, I want to talk to you more about the political nature of time, for if time had a race, it would be white. White people own time. I know, I know. Making such "incendiary statements" makes us uncomfortable: Haven't we moved past the point where race really matters? Isn't race a heavy-handed concept? Shouldn't we go ahead with our enlightened, progressive selves and relegate useless concepts like race to the dustbins of history? How will we ever get over racism if we keep on talking about race? Perhaps we should lock up our concepts of race in a time capsule, bury them and dig them up in a thousand years, peer at them with the clearly more enlightened, raceless versions of ourselves that belong to the future. But you see there, that desire to mitigate the impact of race and racism shows up in how we attempt to manage time, in the ways we narrate history, in the ways we attempt to shove the negative truths of the present into the past, in the ways we attempt to argue that the future that we hope for is the present in which we're currently living. Now, when Barack Obama became President of the US in 2008, many Americans declared that we were post-racial. I'm from the academy where we're enamored with being post-everything. We're postmodern, we're post-structural, we're post-feminist. "Post" has become a simple academic appendage that we apply to a range of terms to mark the way we were. But prefixes alone don't have the power to make race and racism a thing of the past. The US was never "pre-race." So to claim that we're post-race when we have yet to grapple with the impact of race on black people, Latinos or the indigenous is disingenuous. Just about the moment we were preparing to celebrate our post-racial future, our political conditions became the most racial they've been in the last 50 years. So today, I want to offer to you three observations, about the past, the present and the future of time, as it relates to the combating of racism and white dominance. First: the past. Time has a history, and so do black people. But we treat time as though it is timeless, as though it has always been this way, as though it doesn't have a political history bound up with the plunder of indigenous lands, the genocide of indigenous people and the stealing of Africans from their homeland. When white male European philosophers first thought to conceptualize time and history, one famously declared, "[Africa] is no historical part of the World." He was essentially saying that Africans were people outside of history who had had no impact on time or the march of progress. This idea, that black people have had no impact on history, is one of the foundational ideas of white supremacy. It's the reason that Carter G. Woodson created "Negro History Week" in 1926. It's the reason that we continue to celebrate Black History Month in the US every February. Now, we also see this idea that black people are people either alternately outside of the bounds of time or stuck in the past, in a scenario where, much as I'm doing right now, a black person stands up and insists that racism still matters, and a person, usually white, says to them, "Why are you stuck in the past? Why can't you move on? We have a black president. We're past all that." William Faulkner famously said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." But my good friend Professor Kristie Dotson says, "Our memory is longer than our lifespan." We carry, all of us, family and communal hopes and dreams with us. We don't have the luxury of letting go of the past. But sometimes, our political conditions are so troubling that we don't know if we're living in the past or we're living in the present. Take, for instance, when Black Lives Matter protesters go out to protest unjust killings of black citizens by police, and the pictures that emerge from the protest look like they could have been taken 50 years ago. The past won't let us go. But still, let us press our way into the present. At present, I would argue that the racial struggles we are experiencing are clashes over time and space. What do I mean? Well, I've already told you that white people own time. Those in power dictate the pace of the workday. They dictate how much money our time is actually worth. And Professor George Lipsitz argues that white people even dictate the pace of social inclusion. They dictate how long it will actually take for minority groups to receive the rights that they have been fighting for. Let me loop back to the past quickly to give you an example. If you think about the Civil Rights Movement and the cries of its leaders for "Freedom Now," they were challenging the slow pace of white social inclusion. By 1965, the year the Voting Rights Act was passed, there had been a full 100 years between the end of the Civil War and the conferral of voting rights on African-American communities. Despite the urgency of a war, it still took a full 100 years for actual social inclusion to occur. Since 2012, conservative state legislatures across the US have ramped up attempts to roll back African-American voting rights by passing restrictive voter ID laws and curtailing early voting opportunities. This past July, a federal court struck down North Carolina's voter ID law saying it "... targeted African-Americans with surgical precision." Restricting African-American inclusion in the body politic is a primary way that we attempt to manage and control people by managing and controlling time. But another place that we see these time-space clashes is in gentrifying cities like Atlanta, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Washington, DC — places that have had black populations for generations. But now, in the name of urban renewal and progress, these communities are pushed out, in service of bringing them into the 21st century. Professor Sharon Holland asked: What happens when a person who exists in time meets someone who only occupies space? These racial struggles are battles over those who are perceived to be space-takers and those who are perceived to be world-makers. Those who control the flow and thrust of history are considered world-makers who own and master time. In other words: white people. But when Hegel famously said that Africa was no historical part of the world, he implied that it was merely a voluminous land mass taking up space at the bottom of the globe. Africans were space-takers. So today, white people continue to control the flow and thrust of history, while too often treating black people as though we are merely taking up space to which we are not entitled. Time and the march of progress is used to justify a stunning degree of violence towards our most vulnerable populations, who, being perceived as space-takers rather than world-makers, are moved out of the places where they live, in service of bringing them into the 21st century. Shortened life span according to zip code is just one example of the ways that time and space cohere in an unjust manner in the lives of black people. Children who are born in New Orleans zip code 70124, which is 93 percent white, can expect to live a full 25 years longer than children born in New Orleans zip code 70112, which is 60 percent black. Children born in Washington, DC's wealthy Maryland suburbs can expect to live a full 20 years longer than children born in its downtown neighborhoods. Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that, "The defining feature of being drafted into the Black race is the inescapable robbery of time." We experience time discrimination, he tells us, not just as structural, but as personal: in lost moments of joy, lost moments of connection, lost quality of time with loved ones and lost years of healthy quality of life. In the future, do you see black people? Do black people have a future? What if you belong to the very race of people who have always been pitted against time? What if your group is the group for whom a future was never imagined? These time-space clashes — between protesters and police, between gentrifiers and residents — don't paint a very pretty picture of what America hopes for black people's future. If the present is any indicator, our children will be under-educated, health maladies will take their toll and housing will continue to be unaffordable. So if we're really ready to talk about the future, perhaps we should begin by admitting that we're out of time. We black people have always been out of time. Time does not belong to us. Our lives are lives of perpetual urgency. Time is used to displace us, or conversely, we are urged into complacency through endless calls to just be patient. But if past is prologue, let us seize upon the ways in which we're always out of time anyway to demand with urgency freedom now. I believe the future is what we make it. But first, we have to decide that time belongs to all of us. No, we don't all get equal time, but we can decide that the time we do get is just and free. We can stop making your zip code the primary determinant of your lifespan. We can stop stealing learning time from black children through excessive use of suspensions and expulsions. We can stop stealing time from black people through long periods of incarceration for nonviolent crimes. The police can stop stealing time and black lives through use of excessive force. I believe the future is what we make it. But we can't get there on colored people's time or white time or your time or even my time. It's our time. Ours. Thank you. (Applause) |
A robot that eats pollution | {0: 'Jonathan Rossiter develops soft robotic technologies and turns them into real robots and smart machines for engineers, musicians, doctors and artists. '} | TEDxWarwick | Hi, I'm an engineer and I make robots. Now, of course you all know what a robot is, right? If you don't, you'd probably go to Google, and you'd ask Google what a robot is. So let's do that. We'll go to Google and this is what we get. Now, you can see here there are lots of different types of robots, but they're predominantly humanoid in structure. And they look pretty conventional because they've got plastic, they've got metal, they've got motors and gears and so on. Some of them look quite friendly, and you could go up and you could hug them. Some of them not so friendly, they look like they're straight out of "Terminator," in fact they may well be straight out of "Terminator." You can do lots of really cool things with these robots — you can do really exciting stuff. But I'd like to look at different kinds of robots — I want to make different kinds of robots. And I take inspiration from the things that don't look like us, but look like these. So these are natural biological organisms and they do some really cool things that we can't, and current robots can't either. They do all sorts of great things like moving around on the floor; they go into our gardens and they eat our crops; they climb trees; they go in water, they come out of water; they trap insects and digest them. So they do really interesting things. They live, they breathe, they die, they eat things from the environment. Our current robots don't really do that. Now, wouldn't it be great if you could use some of those characteristics in future robots so that you could solve some really interesting problems? I'm going to look at a couple of problems now in the environment where we can use the skills and the technologies derived from these animals and from the plants, and we can use them to solve those problems. Let's have a look at two environmental problems. They're both of our making — this is man interacting with the environment and doing some rather unpleasant things. The first one is to do with the pressure of population. Such is the pressure of population around the world that agriculture and farming is required to produce more and more crops. Now, to do that, farmers put more and more chemicals onto the land. They put on fertilizers, nitrates, pesticides — all sorts of things that encourage the growth of the crops, but there are some negative impacts. One of the negative impacts is if you put lots of fertilizer on the land, not all of it goes into the crops. Lots of it stays in the soil, and then when it rains, these chemicals go into the water table. And in the water table, then they go into streams, into lakes, into rivers and into the sea. Now, if you put all of these chemicals, these nitrates, into those kinds of environments, there are organisms in those environments that will be affected by that — algae, for example. Algae loves nitrates, it loves fertilizer, so it will take in all these chemicals, and if the conditions are right, it will mass produce. It will produce masses and masses of new algae. That's called a bloom. The trouble is that when algae reproduces like this, it starves the water of oxygen. As soon as you do that, the other organisms in the water can't survive. So, what do we do? We try to produce a robot that will eat the algae, consume it and make it safe. So that's the first problem. The second problem is also of our making, and it's to do with oil pollution. Now, oil comes out of the engines that we use, the boats that we use. Sometimes tankers flush their oil tanks into the sea, so oil is released into the sea that way. Wouldn't it be nice if we could treat that in some way using robots that could eat the pollution the oil fields have produced? So that's what we do. We make robots that will eat pollution. To actually make the robot, we take inspiration from two organisms. On the right there you see the basking shark. The basking shark is a massive shark. It's noncarnivorous, so you can swim with it, as you can see. And the basking shark opens its mouth, and it swims through the water, collecting plankton. As it does that, it digests the food, and then it uses that energy in its body to keep moving. So, could we make a robot like that — like the basking shark that chugs through the water and eats up pollution? Well, let's see if we can do that. But also, we take the inspiration from other organisms. I've got a picture here of a water boatman, and the water boatman is really cute. When it's swimming in the water, it uses its paddle-like legs to push itself forward. So we take those two organisms and we combine them together to make a new kind of robot. In fact, because we're using the water boatman as inspiration, and our robot sits on top of the water, and it rows, we call it the "Row-bot." So a Row-bot is a robot that rows. OK. So what does it look like? Here's some pictures of the Row-bot, and you'll see, it doesn't look anything like the robots we saw right at the beginning. Google is wrong; robots don't look like that, they look like this. So I've got the Row-bot here. I'll just hold it up for you. It gives you a sense of the scale, and it doesn't look anything like the others. OK, so it's made out of plastic, and we'll have a look now at the components that make up the Row-bot — what makes it really special. The Row-bot is made up of three parts, and those three parts are really like the parts of any organism. It's got a brain, it's got a body and it's got a stomach. It needs the stomach to create the energy. Any Row-bot will have those three components, and any organism will have those three components, so let's go through them one at a time. It has a body, and its body is made out of plastic, and it sits on top of the water. And it's got flippers on the side here — paddles that help it move, just like the water boatman. It's got a plastic body, but it's got a soft rubber mouth here, and a mouth here — it's got two mouths. Why does it have two mouths? One is to let the food go in and the other is to let the food go out. So you can see really it's got a mouth and a derriere, or a — (Laughter) something where the stuff comes out, which is just like a real organism. So it's starting to look like that basking shark. So that's the body. The second component might be the stomach. We need to get the energy into the robot and we need to treat the pollution, so the pollution goes in, and it will do something. It's got a cell in the middle here called a microbial fuel cell. I'll put this down, and I'll lift up the fuel cell. Here. So instead of having batteries, instead of having a conventional power system, it's got one of these. This is its stomach. And it really is a stomach because you can put energy in this side in the form of pollution, and it creates electricity. So what is it? It's called a microbial fuel cell. It's a little bit like a chemical fuel cell, which you might have come across in school, or you might've seen in the news. Chemical fuel cells take hydrogen and oxygen, and they can combine them together and you get electricity. That's well-established technology; it was in the Apollo space missions. That's from 40, 50 years ago. This is slightly newer. This is a microbial fuel cell. It's the same principle: it's got oxygen on one side, but instead of having hydrogen on the other, it's got some soup, and inside that soup there are living microbes. Now, if you take some organic material — could be some waste products, some food, maybe a bit of your sandwich — you put it in there, the microbes will eat that food, and they will turn it into electricity. Not only that, but if you select the right kind of microbes, you can use the microbial fuel cell to treat some of the pollution. If you choose the right microbes, the microbes will eat the algae. If you use other kinds of microbes, they will eat petroleum spirits and crude oil. So you can see how this stomach could be used to not only treat the pollution but also to generate electricity from the pollution. So the robot will move through the environment, taking food into its stomach, digest the food, create electricity, use that electricity to move through the environment and keep doing this. OK, so let's see what happens when we run the Row-bot — when it does some rowing. Here we've got a couple of videos, the first thing you'll see — hopefully you can see here is the mouth open. The front mouth and the bottom mouth open, and it will stay opened enough, then the robot will start to row forward. It moves through the water so that food goes in as the waste products go out. Once it's moved enough, it stops and then it closes the mouth — slowly closes the mouths — and then it will sit there, and it will digest the food. Of course these microbial fuel cells, they contain microbes. What you really want is lots of energy coming out of those microbes as quickly as possible. But we can't force the microbes and they generate a small amount of electricity per second. They generate milliwatts, or microwatts. Let's put that into context. Your mobile phone for example, one of these modern ones, if you use it, it takes about one watt. So that's a thousand or a million times as much energy that that uses compared to the microbial fuel cell. How can we cope with that? Well, when the Row-bot has done its digestion, when it's taken the food in, it will sit there and it will wait until it has consumed all that food. That could take some hours, it could take some days. A typical cycle for the Row-bot looks like this: you open your mouth, you move, you close your mouth and you sit there for a while waiting. Once you digest your food, then you can go about doing the same thing again. But you know what, that looks like a real organism, doesn't it? It looks like the kind of thing we do. Saturday night, we go out, open our mouths, fill our stomachs, sit in front of the telly and digest. When we've had enough, we do the same thing again. OK, if we're lucky with this cycle, at the end of the cycle we'll have enough energy left over for us to be able to do something else. We could send a message, for example. We could send a message saying, "This is how much pollution I've eaten recently," or, "This is the kind of stuff that I've encountered," or, "This is where I am." That ability to send a message saying, "This is where I am," is really, really important. If you think about the oil slicks that we saw before, or those massive algal blooms, what you really want to do is put your Row-bot out there, and it eats up all of those pollutions, and then you have to go collect them. Why? Because these Row-bots at the moment, this Row-bot I've got here, it contains motors, it contains wires, it contains components which themselves are not biodegradable. Current Row-bots contain things like toxic batteries. You can't leave those in the environment, so you need to track them, and then when they've finished their job of work, you need to collect them. That limits the number of Row-bots you can use. If, on the other hand, you have robot a little bit like a biological organism, when it comes to the end of its life, it dies and it degrades to nothing. So wouldn't it be nice if these robots, instead of being like this, made out of plastic, were made out of other materials, which when you throw them out there, they biodegrade to nothing? That changes the way in which we use robots. Instead of putting 10 or 100 out into the environment, having to track them, and then when they die, collect them, you could put a thousand, a million, a billion robots into the environment. Just spread them around. You know that at the end of their lives, they're going to degrade to nothing. You don't need to worry about them. So that changes the way in which you think about robots and the way you deploy them. Then the question is: Can you do this? Well, yes, we have shown that you can do this. You can make robots which are biodegradable. What's really interesting is you can use household materials to make these biodegradable robots. I'll show you some; you might be surprised. You can make a robot out of jelly. Instead of having a motor, which we have at the moment, you can make things called artificial muscles. Artificial muscles are smart materials, you apply electricity to them, and they contract, or they bend or they twist. They look like real muscles. So instead of having a motor, you have these artificial muscles. And you can make artificial muscles out of jelly. If you take some jelly and some salts, and do a bit of jiggery-pokery, you can make an artificial muscle. We've also shown you can make the microbial fuel cell's stomach out of paper. So you could make the whole robot out of biodegradable materials. You throw them out there, and they degrade to nothing. Well, this is really, really exciting. It's going to totally change the way in which we think about robots, but also it allows you to be really creative in the way in which you think about what you can do with these robots. I'll give you an example. If you can use jelly to make a robot — now, we eat jelly, right? So, why not make something like this? A robot gummy bear. Here, I've got some I prepared earlier. There we go. I've got a packet — and I've got a lemon-flavored one. I'll take this gummy bear — he's not robotic, OK? We have to pretend. And what you do with one of these is you put it in your mouth — the lemon's quite nice. Try not to chew it too much, it's a robot, it may not like it. And then you swallow it. And then it goes into your stomach. And when it's inside your stomach, it moves, it thinks, it twists, it bends, it does something. It could go further down into your intestines, find out whether you've got some ulcer or cancer, maybe do an injection, something like that. You know that once it's done its job of work, it could be consumed by your stomach, or if you don't want that, it could go straight through you, into the toilet, and be degraded safely in the environment. So this changes the way, again, in which we think about robots. So, we started off looking at robots that would eat pollution, and then we're looking at robots which we can eat. I hope this gives you some idea of the kinds of things we can do with future robots. Thank you very much for your attention. (Applause) |
A few ways to fix a government | {0: "IBM's Charity Wayua is a research manager in Nairobi, Kenya, where she leads the company's public sector research team."} | TED@IBM | Growing up in Kenya, I knew I always wanted to study biochemistry. See, I had seen the impact of the high prevalence of diseases like malaria, and I wanted to make medicines that would cure the sick. So I worked really hard, got a scholarship to the United States, where I became a cancer researcher, and I loved it. For someone who wants to cure diseases, there is no higher calling. Ten years later, I returned to Kenya to do just that. A freshly minted PhD, ready to take on this horrific illness, which in Kenya was almost certainly a death sentence. But instead of landing a job in a pharmaceutical company or a hospital, I found myself drawn to a different kind of lab, working with a different kind of patient — a patient whose illness was so serious it impacted every single person in my country; a patient who needed to get healthy fast. That patient was my government. (Laughter) See, many of us will agree that lots of governments are unhealthy today. (Laughter) (Applause) And Kenya was no exception. When I returned to Kenya in 2014, there was 17 percent youth unemployment. And Nairobi, the major business hub, was rated 177th on the quality of living index. It was bad. Now, an economy is only as healthy as the entities that make it up. So when government — one of its most vital entities — is weak or unhealthy, everyone and everything suffers. Sometimes you might put a Band-Aid in place to try and temporarily stop the pain. Maybe some of you here have participated in a Band-Aid operation to an African country — setting up alternative schools, building hospitals, digging wells — because governments there either weren't or couldn't provide the services to their citizens. We all know this is a temporary solution. There are just some things Band-Aids can't fix, like providing an environment where businesses feel secure that they'll have an equal opportunity to be able to run and start their businesses successfully. Or there are systems in place that would protect the private property that they create. I would argue, only government is capable of creating these necessary conditions for economies to thrive. Economies thrive when business are able to quickly and easily set up shop. Business owners create new sources of income for themselves, new jobs get added into the economy and then more taxes are paid to fund public projects. New business is good for everyone. And it's such an important measure of economic growth, the World Bank has a ranking called the "Ease of Doing Business Ranking," which measures how easy or difficult it is to start a business in any given country. And as you can imagine, starting or running a business in a country with an ailing government — almost impossible. The President of Kenya knew this, which is why in 2014, he came to our lab and asked us to partner with him to be able to help Kenya to jump-start business growth. He set an ambitious goal: he wanted Kenya to be ranked top 50 in this World Bank ranking. In 2014 when he came, Kenya was ranked 136 out of 189 countries. We had our work cut out for us. Fortunately, he came to the right place. We're not just a Band-Aid kind of team. We're a group of computer scientists, mathematicians, engineers and a cancer researcher, who understood that in order to cure the sickness of a system as big as government, we needed to examine the whole body, and then we needed to drill down all the way from the organs, into the tissues, all the way to single cells, so that we could properly make a diagnosis. So with our marching orders from the President himself, we embarked on the purest of the scientific method: collecting data — all the data we could get our hands on — making hypotheses, creating solutions, one after the other. So we met with hundreds of individuals who worked at government agencies, from the tax agency, the lands office, utilities company, the agency that's responsible for registering companies, and with each of them, we observed them as they served customers, we documented their processes — most of them were manual. We also just went back and looked at a lot of their previous paperwork to try and really understand; to try and diagnose what bodily malfunctions had occurred that lead to that 136th spot on the World Bank list. What did we find? Well, in Kenya it was taking 72 days for a business owner to register their property, compared to just one day in New Zealand, which was ranked second on the World Bank list. It took 158 days to get a new electric connection. In Korea it took 18 days. If you wanted to get a construction permit so you could put up a building, in Kenya, it was going to take you 125 days. In Singapore, which is ranked first, that would only take you 26 days. God forbid you had to go to court to get help in being able to settle a dispute to enforce a contract, because that process alone would take you 465 days. And if that wasn't bad enough, you would lose 40 percent of your claim in just fees — legal fees, enforcement fees, court fees. Now, I know what you're thinking: for there to exist such inefficiencies in an African country, there must be corruption. The very cells that run the show must be corrupt to the bone. I thought so, too, actually. When we started out, I thought I was going to find so much corruption, I was literally going to either die or get killed in the process. (Laughter) But when we dug deeper, we didn't find corruption in the classic sense: slimy gangsters lurking in the darkness, waiting to grease the palms of their friends. What we found was an overwhelming sense of helplessness. Our government was sick, because government employees felt helpless. They felt that they were not empowered to drive change. And when people feel stuck and helpless, they stop seeing their role in a bigger system. They start to think the work they do doesn't matter in driving change. And when that happens, things slow down, fall through the cracks and inefficiencies flourish. Now imagine with me, if you had a process you had to go through — had no other alternative — and this process was inefficient, complex and very, very slow. What would you do? I think you might start by trying to find somebody to outsource it to, so that they can just take care of that for you. If that doesn't work, maybe you'd consider paying somebody to just "unofficially" take care of it on your behalf — especially if you thought nobody was going to catch you. Not out of malice or greed, just trying to make sure that you get something to work for you so you can move on. Unfortunately, that is the beginning of corruption. And if left to thrive and grow, it seeps into the whole system, and before you know it, the whole body is sick. Knowing this, we had to start by making sure that every single stakeholder we worked with had a shared vision for what we wanted to do. So we met with everyone, from the clerk whose sole job is to remove staples from application packets, to the legal drafters at the attorney general's office, to the clerks who are responsible for serving business owners when they came to access government services. And with them, we made sure that they understood how their day-to-day actions were impacting our ability as a country to create new jobs and to attract investments. No one's role was too small; everyone's role was vital. Now, guess what we started to see? A coalition of government employees who are excited and ready to drive change, began to grow and form. And together we started to implement changes that impacted the service delivery of our country. The result? In just two years, Kenya's ranking moved from 136 to 92. (Applause) And in recognition of the significant reforms we've been able to implement in such a short time, Kenya was recognized to be among the top three global reformers in the world two years in a row. (Applause) Are we fully healthy? No. We have some serious work still to do. I like to think about these two years like a weight-loss program. (Laughter) It's that time after months of hard, grueling work at the gym, and then you get your first time to weigh yourself, and you've lost 20 pounds. You're feeling unstoppable. Now, some of you may think this doesn't apply to you. You're not from Kenya. You don't intend to be an entrepreneur. But think with me for just a moment. When is the last time you accessed a government service? Maybe applied for your driver's license, tried to do your taxes on your own. It's easy in this political and global economy to want to give up when we think about transforming government. We can easily resign to the fact or to the thinking that government is too inefficient, too corrupt, unfixable. We might even rarely get some key government responsibilities to other sectors, to Band-Aid solutions, or to just give up and feel helpless. But just because a system is sick doesn't mean it's dying. We cannot afford to give up when it comes to the challenges of fixing our governments. In the end, what really makes a government healthy is when healthy cells — that's you and I — get to the ground, roll up our sleeves, refuse to be helpless and believe that sometimes, all it takes is for us to create some space for healthy cells to grow and thrive. Thank you. (Applause) |
The data behind Hollywood's sexism | {0: 'Stacy Smith shows how Hollywood’s homogenous (and overwhelmingly male) culture systematically excludes women and minorities.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | Today, I want to tell you about a pressing social issue. Now, it's not nuclear arms, it's not immigration, and it's not malaria. I'm here to talk about movies. Now, in all seriousness, movies are actually really important. In film, we can be wildly entertained, and we can also be transported through storytelling. Storytelling is so important. Stories tell us what societies value, they offer us lessons, and they share and preserve our history. Stories are amazing. But stories don't give everyone the same opportunity to appear within them, particularly not stories compartmentalized in the form of American movies. In film, interestingly enough, females are still erased and marginalized in a lot of our stories. And I learned this for the first time about 10 years ago when I did my first study on gender role in G-rated films. Since then, we've conducted more than 30 investigations. My team is tired. And I've committed my life as researcher and activist to fighting the inclusion crisis in Hollywood. So today, what I'd like to do is tell you about that crisis. I want to talk about gender inequality in film. I want to tell you how it is perpetuated, and then I'm going to tell you how we're going to fix it. However, one caveat before I begin: my data are really depressing. So I want to apologize in advance, because I'm going to put you all in a really bad mood. But I'm going to bring it up at the end, and I'm going to present a silver lining to fix this mess that we've been in for a very, very long time. So, let's start with the gravity of the situation. Each year, my research team examines the top 100 grossing films in the United States. What we do is we look at every speaking or named character on-screen. Now, to count in one of my investigations, all a character has to do is say one word. This is a very low bar. (Laughter) Thus far, we've looked at 800 movies, from 2007 to 2015, cataloguing every speaking character on-screen for gender, race, ethnicity, LGBT and characters with a disability. Let's take a look at really some problematic trends. First, females are still noticeably absent on-screen in film. Across 800 movies and 35,205 speaking characters, less than a third of all roles go to girls and women. Less than a third! There's been no change from 2007 to 2015, and if you compare our results to a small sample of films from 1946 to 1955, there's been no change in over a half of a century. Over half of a century! But we're half of the population. Now, if we look at this data intersectionally, which has been a focus of today, the picture becomes even more problematic. Across the top 100 films of just last year, 48 films didn't feature one black or African-American speaking character, not one. 70 films were devoid of Asian or Asian-American speaking characters that were girls or women. None. Eighty-four films didn't feature one female character that had a disability. And 93 were devoid of lesbian, bisexual or transgender female speaking characters. This is not underrepresentation. This is erasure, and I call this the epidemic of invisibility. Now, when we move from prevalence to protagonist, the story is still problematic. Out of a hundred films last year, only 32 featured a female lead or colead driving the action. Only three out of a hundred films featured an underrepresented female driving the story, and only one diverse woman that was 45 years of age or older at the time of theatrical release. Now let's look at portrayal. In addition to the numbers you just saw, females are far more likely to be sexualized in film than their male counterparts. Matter of fact, they're about three times as likely to be shown in sexually revealing clothing, partially naked, and they're far more likely to be thin. Now, sometimes, in animation, females are so thin that their waist size approximates the circumference of their upper arm. (Laughter) We like to say that these gals have no room for a womb or any other internal organ. (Laughter) Now, all joking aside, theories suggest, research confirms, exposure to thin ideals and objectifying content can lead to body dissatisfaction, internalization of the thin ideal and self-objectification among some female viewers. Obviously, what we see on-screen and what we see in the world, they do not match. They do not match! Matter of fact, if we lived in the screen world, we would have a population crisis on our hands. So, as soon as I recognized these patterns, I wanted to find out why, and it turns out that there are two drivers to inequality on-screen: content creator gender and misperceptions of the audience. Let's unpack them really quick. If you want to change any of the patterns I just talked about, all you have to do is hire female directors. Turns out, the female directors are associated with, in terms of short films and indie films, more girls and women on-screen, more stories with women in the center, more stories with women 40 years of age or older on-screen, which I think is good news for this crowd. More underrepresented — (Laughter) Sorry. (Laughter) Sorry but not sorry. More underrepresented characters in terms of race and ethnicity, and most importantly, more women working behind the camera in key production roles. Easy answer to the problems that we just talked about. Or is it? It's actually not. 800 films, 2007-2015, 886 directors. Only 4.1 percent are women. Only three are African-American or black, and only one woman was Asian. So why is it so difficult to have female directors if they're part of the solution? Well, to answer this question, we conducted a study. We interviewed dozens of industry insiders and asked them about directors. Turns out, both male and female executives, when they think director, they think male. They perceive the traits of leadership to be masculine in nature. So when they're going to hire a director to command a crew, lead a ship, be a visionary or be General Patton, all the things that we've heard — their thoughts and ideations pull male. The perception of director or a leader is inconsistent with the perception of a woman. The roles are incongruous, which is consistent with a lot of research in the psychological arena. Second factor contributing to inequality on-screen is misperceptions of the audience. I don't need to tell this crowd: 50 percent of the people that go to the box office and buy tickets are girls and women in this country. Right? But we're not perceived to be a viable or financially lucrative target audience. Further, there's some misperceptions about whether females can open a film. Open a film means that if you place a female at the center, it doesn't have the return on investment that if you place a male at the center of a story does. This misperception is actually costly. Right? Especially in the wake of franchise successes like "The Hunger Games," "Pitch Perfect" or that small little indie film, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." Our own economic analyses show that gender of the lead character doesn't play a role in economic success in the United States. But what does? Production costs alone or in conjunction with how widely a film is distributed in this country. It's not the gender of the lead character. So at this point, we should all be sufficiently depressed. No change in 50 years, few female directors working behind the camera and the entertainment industry does not trust us as an audience. Well, I told you there would be a silver lining, and there is. There are actually simple and tangible solutions to fixing this problem that involve content creators, executives and consumers like the individuals in this room. Let's talk about a few of them. The first is what I call "just add five." Did you know if we looked at the top 100 films next year and simply added five female speaking characters on-screen to each of those films, it would create a new norm. If we were to do this for three contiguous years, we would be at gender parity for the first time in over a half of a century. Now, this approach is advantageous for a variety of reasons. One? It doesn't take away jobs for male actors. Heaven forbid. (Laughter) Two, it's actually cost-effective. It doesn't cost that much. Three, it builds a pipeline for talent. And four, it humanizes the production process. Why? Because it makes sure that there's women on set. Second solution is for A-list talent. A-listers, as we all know, can make demands in their contracts, particularly the ones that work on the biggest Hollywood films. What if those A-listers simply added an equity clause or an inclusion rider into their contract? Now, what does that mean? Well, you probably don't know but the typical feature film has about 40 to 45 speaking characters in it. I would argue that only 8 to 10 of those characters are actually relevant to the story. Except maybe "Avengers." Right? A few more in "Avengers." The remaining 30 or so roles, there's no reason why those minor roles can't match or reflect the demography of where the story is taking place. An equity rider by an A-lister in their contract can stipulate that those roles reflect the world in which we actually live. Now, there's no reason why a network, a studio or a production company cannot adopt the same contractual language in their negotiation processes. Third solution: this would be for the entertainment industry, Hollywood in particular, to adopt the Rooney Rule when it comes to hiring practices around directors. Now, in the NFL, the Rooney Rule stipulates that if a team wants to hire a coach from outside the organization, what they have to do is interview an underrepresented candidate. The exact same principle can apply to Hollywood films. How? Well, on these top films, executives and agents can make sure that women and people of color are not only on the consideration list, but they're actually interviewed for the job. Now, one might say, why is this important? Because it exposes or introduces executives to female directors who otherwise fall prey to exclusionary hiring practices. The fourth solution is for consumers like me and you. If we want to see more films by, for and about women, we have to support them. It may mean going to the independent theater chain instead of the multiplex. Or it might mean scrolling down a little further online to find a film by a female director. Or it may be writing a check and funding a film, particularly by a female director from an underrepresented background. Right? We need to write, call and email companies that are making and distributing films, and we need to post on our social media accounts when we want to see inclusive representation, women on-screen, and most importantly, women behind the camera. We need to make our voices heard and our dollars count. Now, we actually have the ability to change the world on this one. The US and its content, films in particular, have captured the imaginations of audiences worldwide. Worldwide. So that means that the film industry has unprecedented access to be able to distribute stories about equality all around the world. Imagine what would happen if the film industry aligned its values with what it shows on-screen. It could foster inclusion and acceptance for girls and women, people of color, the LGBT community, individuals with disabilities, and so many more around the world. The only thing that the film industry has to do is unleash its secret weapon, and that's storytelling. Now, at the beginning of this talk, I said that films — that they can actually transport us, but I would like to argue that films, they can transform us. None of us in this room have grown up or experienced a storytelling landscape with fully realized female characters, none of us, because the numbers haven't changed. What would happen if the next generation of audiences grew up with a whole different screen reality? What would happen? Well I'm here to tell you today that it's not only possible to change what we see on-screen but I am impatient for it to get here. So let's agree to take action today to eradicate the epidemic of invisibility. And let's agree to take action today to agree that US audiences and global viewers demand and deserve more. And let's agree today that the next generation of viewers and audiences, that they deserve to see the stories we were never able to see. Thank you. (Applause) |
Smelfies, and other experiments in synthetic biology | {0: 'Ani Liu explores the intersection between technology and sensory perception.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | What if our plants could sense the toxicity levels in the soil and express that toxicity through the color of its leaves? What if those plants could also remove those toxins from the soil? Instead, what if those plants grew their own packaging, or were designed to only be harvested by their owners' own patented machines? What happens when biological design is driven by the motivations of mass-produced commodities? What kind of world would that be? My name is Ani, and I'm a designer and researcher at MIT Media Lab, where I'm part of a relatively new and unique group called Design Fiction, where we're wedged somewhere between science fiction and science fact. And at MIT, I am lucky enough to rub shoulders with scientists studying all kinds of cutting edge fields like synthetic neurobiology, artificial intelligence, artificial life and everything in between. And across campus, there's truly brilliant scientists asking questions like, "How can I make the world a better place?" And part of what my group likes to ask is, "What is better?" What is better for you, for me, for a white woman, a gay man, a veteran, a child with a prosthetic? Technology is never neutral. It frames a reality and reflects a context. Can you imagine what it would say about the work-life balance at your office if these were standard issue on the first day? (Laughter) I believe it's the role of artists and designers to raise critical questions. Art is how you can see and feel the future, and today is an exciting time to be a designer, for all the new tools becoming accessible. For instance, synthetic biology seeks to write biology as a design problem. And through these developments, my lab asks, what are the roles and responsibilities of an artist, designer, scientist or businessman? What are the implications of synthetic biology, genetic engineering, and how are they shaping our notions of what it means to be a human? What are the implications of this on society, on evolution and what are the stakes in this game? My own speculative design research at the current moment plays with synthetic biology, but for more emotionally driven output. I'm obsessed with olfaction as a design space, and this project started with this idea of what if you could take a smell selfie, a smelfie? (Laughter) What if you could take your own natural body odor and send it to a lover? Funny enough, I found that this was a 19th century Austrian tradition, where couples in courtship would keep a slice of apple crammed under their armpit during dances, and at the end of the evening, the girl would give the guy she most fancied her used fruit, and if the feeling was mutual, he would wolf down that stinky apple. (Laughter) Famously, Napoleon wrote many love letters to Josephine, but perhaps amongst the most memorable is this brief and urgent note: "Home in three days. Don't bathe." (Laughter) Both Napoleon and Josephine adored violets. Josephine wore violet-scented perfume, carried violets on their wedding day, and Napoleon sent her a bouquet of violets every year on their anniversary. When Josephine passed away, he planted violets at her grave, and just before his exile, he went back to that tomb site, picked some of those flowers, entombed them in a locket and wore them until the day he died. And I found this so moving, I thought, could I engineer that violet to smell just like Josephine? What if, for the rest of eternity, when you went to visit her site, you could smell Josephine just as Napoleon loved her? Could we engineer new ways of mourning, new rituals for remembering? After all, we've engineered transgenic crops to be maximized for profit, crops that stand up to transport, crops that have a long shelf life, crops that taste sugary sweet but resist pests, sometimes at the expense of nutritional value. Can we harness these same technologies for an emotionally sensitive output? So currently in my lab, I'm researching questions like, what makes a human smell like a human? And it turns out it's fairly complicated. Factors such as your diet, your medications, your lifestyle all factor into the way you smell. And I found that our sweat is mostly odorless, but it's our bacteria and microbiome that's responsible for your smells, your mood, your identity and so much beyond. And there's all kinds of molecules that you emit but which we only perceive subconsciously. So I've been cataloging and collecting bacteria from different sites of my body. After talking to a scientist, we thought, maybe the perfect concoction of Ani is like 10 percent collarbone, 30 percent underarm, 40 percent bikini line and so forth, and occasionally I let researchers from other labs take a sniff of my samples. And it's been interesting to hear how smell of the body is perceived outside of the context of the body. I've gotten feedback such as, smells like flowers, like chicken, like cornflakes, like beef carnitas. (Laughter) At the same time, I cultivate a set of carnivorous plants for their ability to emit fleshlike odors to attract prey, in an attempt to kind of create this symbiotic relationship between my bacteria and this organism. And as it so happens, I'm at MIT and I'm in a bar, and I was talking to a scientist who happens to be a chemist and a plant scientist, and I was telling him about my project, and he was like, "Well, this sounds like botany for lonely women." (Laughter) Unperturbed, I said, "OK." I challenged him. "Can we engineer a plant that can love me back?" And for some reason, he was like, "Sure, why not?" So we started with, can we get a plant to grow towards me like I was the sun? And so we're looking at mechanisms in plants such as phototropism, which causes the plant to grow towards the sun by producing hormones like auxin, which causes cell elongation on the shady side. And right now I'm creating a set of lipsticks that are infused with these chemicals that allow me to interact with a plant on its own chemical signatures — lipsticks that cause plants to grow where I kiss it, plants that blossom where I kiss the bloom. And through these projects, I'm asking questions like, how do we define nature? How do we define nature when we can reengineer its properties, and when should we do it? Should we do it for profit, for utility? Can we do it for emotional ends? Can biotechnology be used to create work as moving as music? What are the thresholds between science and its ability to shape our emotional landscape? It's a famous design mantra that form follows function. Well, now, wedged somewhere between science, design and art I get to ask, what if fiction informs fact? What kind of R&D lab would that look like and what kind of questions would we ask together? We often look to technology as the answer, but as an artist and designer, I like to ask, but what is the question? Thank you. (Applause) |
This app makes it fun to pick up litter | {0: "Jeff Kirschner created a global community that's eradicating litter one piece at a time."} | TED Residency | This story starts with these two — my kids. We were hiking in the Oakland woods when my daughter noticed a plastic tub of cat litter in a creek. She looked at me and said, "Daddy? That doesn't go there." When she said that, it reminded me of summer camp. On the morning of visiting day, right before they'd let our anxious parents come barreling through the gates, our camp director would say, "Quick! Everyone pick up five pieces of litter." You get a couple hundred kids each picking up five pieces, and pretty soon, you've got a much cleaner camp. So I thought, why not apply that crowdsourced cleanup model to the entire planet? And that was the inspiration for Litterati. The vision is to create a litter-free world. Let me show you how it started. I took a picture of a cigarette using Instagram. Then I took another photo ... and another photo ... and another photo. And I noticed two things: one, litter became artistic and approachable; and two, at the end of a few days, I had 50 photos on my phone and I had picked up each piece, and I realized that I was keeping a record of the positive impact I was having on the planet. That's 50 less things that you might see, or you might step on, or some bird might eat. So I started telling people what I was doing, and they started participating. One day, this photo showed up from China. And that's when I realized that Litterati was more than just pretty pictures; we were becoming a community that was collecting data. Each photo tells a story. It tells us who picked up what, a geotag tells us where and a time stamp tells us when. So I built a Google map, and started plotting the points where pieces were being picked up. And through that process, the community grew and the data grew. My two kids go to school right in that bullseye. Litter: it's blending into the background of our lives. But what if we brought it to the forefront? What if we understood exactly what was on our streets, our sidewalks and our school yards? How might we use that data to make a difference? Well, let me show you. The first is with cities. San Francisco wanted to understand what percentage of litter was cigarettes. Why? To create a tax. So they put a couple of people in the streets with pencils and clipboards, who walked around collecting information which led to a 20-cent tax on all cigarette sales. And then they got sued by big tobacco, who claimed that collecting information with pencils and clipboards is neither precise nor provable. The city called me and asked if our technology could help. I'm not sure they realized that our technology was my Instagram account — (Laughter) But I said, "Yes, we can." (Laughter) "And we can tell you if that's a Parliament or a Pall Mall. Plus, every photograph is geotagged and time-stamped, providing you with proof." Four days and 5,000 pieces later, our data was used in court to not only defend but double the tax, generating an annual recurring revenue of four million dollars for San Francisco to clean itself up. Now, during that process I learned two things: one, Instagram is not the right tool — (Laughter) so we built an app. And two, if you think about it, every city in the world has a unique litter fingerprint, and that fingerprint provides both the source of the problem and the path to the solution. If you could generate a revenue stream just by understanding the percentage of cigarettes, well, what about coffee cups or soda cans or plastic bottles? If you could fingerprint San Francisco, well, how about Oakland or Amsterdam or somewhere much closer to home? And what about brands? How might they use this data to align their environmental and economic interests? There's a block in downtown Oakland that's covered in blight. The Litterati community got together and picked up 1,500 pieces. And here's what we learned: most of that litter came from a very well-known taco brand. Most of that brand's litter were their own hot sauce packets, and most of those hot sauce packets hadn't even been opened. The problem and the path to the solution — well, maybe that brand only gives out hot sauce upon request or installs bulk dispensers or comes up with more sustainable packaging. How does a brand take an environmental hazard, turn it into an economic engine and become an industry hero? If you really want to create change, there's no better place to start than with our kids. A group of fifth graders picked up 1,247 pieces of litter just on their school yard. And they learned that the most common type of litter were the plastic straw wrappers from their own cafeteria. So these kids went to their principal and asked, "Why are we still buying straws?" And they stopped. And they learned that individually they could each make a difference, but together they created an impact. It doesn't matter if you're a student or a scientist, whether you live in Honolulu or Hanoi, this is a community for everyone. It started because of two little kids in the Northern California woods, and today it's spread across the world. And you know how we're getting there? One piece at a time. Thank you. (Applause) |
What I learned from 2,000 obituaries | {0: 'Lux Narayan is a perpetual learner of various things -- from origami and molecular gastronomy to stand-up and improv comedy.'} | TEDNYC | Joseph Keller used to jog around the Stanford campus, and he was struck by all the women jogging there as well. Why did their ponytails swing from side to side like that? Being a mathematician, he set out to understand why. (Laughter) Professor Keller was curious about many things: why teapots dribble or how earthworms wriggle. Until a few months ago, I hadn't heard of Joseph Keller. I read about him in the New York Times, in the obituaries. The Times had half a page of editorial dedicated to him, which you can imagine is premium space for a newspaper of their stature. I read the obituaries almost every day. My wife understandably thinks I'm rather morbid to begin my day with scrambled eggs and a "Let's see who died today." (Laughter) But if you think about it, the front page of the newspaper is usually bad news, and cues man's failures. An instance where bad news cues accomplishment is at the end of the paper, in the obituaries. In my day job, I run a company that focuses on future insights that marketers can derive from past data — a kind of rearview-mirror analysis. And we began to think: What if we held a rearview mirror to obituaries from the New York Times? Were there lessons on how you could get your obituary featured — even if you aren't around to enjoy it? (Laughter) Would this go better with scrambled eggs? (Laughter) And so, we looked at the data. 2,000 editorial, non-paid obituaries over a 20-month period between 2015 and 2016. What did these 2,000 deaths — rather, lives — teach us? Well, first we looked at words. This here is an obituary headline. This one is of the amazing Lee Kuan Yew. If you remove the beginning and the end, you're left with a beautifully worded descriptor that tries to, in just a few words, capture an achievement or a lifetime. Just looking at these is fascinating. Here are a few famous ones, people who died in the last two years. Try and guess who they are. [An Artist who Defied Genre] That's Prince. [Titan of Boxing and the 20th Century] Oh, yes. [Muhammad Ali] [Groundbreaking Architect] Zaha Hadid. So we took these descriptors and did what's called natural language processing, where you feed these into a program, it throws out the superfluous words — "the," "and," — the kind of words you can mime easily in "Charades," — and leaves you with the most significant words. And we did it not just for these four, but for all 2,000 descriptors. And this is what it looks like. Film, theatre, music, dance and of course, art, are huge. Over 40 percent. You have to wonder why in so many societies we insist that our kids pursue engineering or medicine or business or law to be construed as successful. And while we're talking profession, let's look at age — the average age at which they achieved things. That number is 37. What that means is, you've got to wait 37 years ... before your first significant achievement that you're remembered for — on average — 44 years later, when you die at the age of 81 — on average. (Laughter) Talk about having to be patient. (Laughter) Of course, it varies by profession. If you're a sports star, you'll probably hit your stride in your 20s. And if you're in your 40s like me, you can join the fun world of politics. (Laughter) Politicians do their first and sometimes only commendable act in their mid-40s. (Laughter) If you're wondering what "others" are, here are some examples. Isn't it fascinating, the things people do and the things they're remembered for? (Laughter) Our curiosity was in overdrive, and we desired to analyze more than just a descriptor. So, we ingested the entire first paragraph of all 2,000 obituaries, but we did this separately for two groups of people: people that are famous and people that are not famous. Famous people — Prince, Ali, Zaha Hadid — people who are not famous are people like Jocelyn Cooper, Reverend Curry or Lorna Kelly. I'm willing to bet you haven't heard of most of their names. Amazing people, fantastic achievements, but they're not famous. So what if we analyze these two groups separately — the famous and the non-famous? What might that tell us? Take a look. Two things leap out at me. First: "John." (Laughter) Anyone here named John should thank your parents — (Laughter) and remind your kids to cut out your obituary when you're gone. And second: "help." We uncovered, many lessons from lives well-led, and what those people immortalized in print could teach us. The exercise was a fascinating testament to the kaleidoscope that is life, and even more fascinating was the fact that the overwhelming majority of obituaries featured people famous and non-famous, who did seemingly extraordinary things. They made a positive dent in the fabric of life. They helped. So ask yourselves as you go back to your daily lives: How am I using my talents to help society? Because the most powerful lesson here is, if more people lived their lives trying to be famous in death, the world would be a much better place. Thank you. (Applause) |
Stories from a home for terminally ill children | {0: 'Kathy Nicholson Hull founded the first freestanding pediatric palliative care center in the US.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | I want to introduce you to some very wise kids that I've known, but first I want to introduce you to a camel. This is Cassie, a therapy camel visiting one of our young patients in her room, which is pretty magical. A friend of mine raises camels at his ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He has about eight of them, and he started 30 years ago because he thought horses were too mundane. John is an out-of-the-box thinker, which explains why the two of us have been such good friends all of our lives. Over the years, I've convinced him to shuttle those sweet furry beasts up to hang out with our sick kids from time to time. Talking to John, I was surprised to learn that camels have an average life expectancy of 40 to 50 years. The life expectancy of many of the children with whom I work is less than a year. This is a picture of the George Mark Children's House, the first pediatric palliative respite care center to open in the United States. I founded it in 2004, after years of working as a psychologist on pediatric intensive care units, frustrated with the undignified deaths that so many children experienced and their families had to endure. As I sat with families whose children were at the end of their lives, I was acutely aware of our surroundings. While the elevated train rumbled overhead on its track, quite literally the room reverberated with each passing train car. The lights on the ward were fluorescent and too bright. Monitors beeped, as did the elevator, noisily announcing its arrival. These families were experiencing some of the most excruciating moments of their lives, and I so wanted them to have a more peaceful place in which to say a last goodbye to their young daughters and sons. Surely, I thought, there must be a better spot than a hospital intensive care unit for children at the end of their lives. Our children's house is calm and nurturing. It's a place where families can stay together to enjoy quality time with their children, many of whom are there for respite stays, some with repeated visits over a span of many years. We call those kids our frequent flyers. Rather than the bright, noisy quarters of the hospital, their rooms are calm and comfortable, with actual living spaces for the families, a sanctuary of gardens and a wonderful outdoor playground with special structures for children with physical limitations. This sweet baby Lars came to us directly from a hospital intensive care unit. Imagine hearing the heartbreaking news that none of us would ever want to hear. His parents had been told that Lars had a brain anomaly that would keep him from ever swallowing, walking, talking or developing mentally. Recognizing what little chance he had for survival, his parents chose to focus on the quality of time that they could spend together. They moved into one of our family apartments and treasured each day that they had, which were far too few. Lars's life was brief, to be sure, mere weeks, but it was calm and comfortable. He went on hikes with his parents. The time that he spent in the pool with our aquatic therapist lessened the seizures he was experiencing and helped him to sleep at night. His family had a peaceful place in which to both celebrate his life and mourn his death. It has been five years since Lars was with us, and in that time, his family has welcomed a daughter and another son. They are such a powerful testament to the positive outcome that specialized children's hospice care can create. Their baby's physical discomfort was well managed, giving all of them the gift of time to be together in a beautiful place. I'm going to talk to you now about the elephant rather than the camel in the room. Very few people want to talk about death, and even fewer about children's death. Loss of a child, especially for those of us who have our own children, is frightening, more than frightening, paralyzing, debilitating, impossible. But what I've learned is this: children don't stop dying just because we the adults can't comprehend the injustice of losing them. And what's more, if we can be brave enough to face the possibility of death, even among the most innocent, we gain an unparalleled kind of wisdom. Take Crystal, for example. She was one of the first children to come for care after we opened our doors. She was nine when she arrived, and her neurologist expected that she might live another two weeks. She had an inoperable brain tumor, and her decline had really accelerated in the week before she came to us. After settling into her room, dressed entirely in pink and lavender, surrounded by the Hello Kitty accessories that she loved, she spent the next several days winning over the hearts of every staff member. Bit by bit, her condition stabilized, and then to our astonishment, she actually improved. There were a variety of factors that contributed to Crystal's improvement which we later came to call the "George Mark bump," a lovely, not uncommon phenomenon where children outlive the prognoses of their illnesses if they're outside of the hospital. The calmer atmosphere of her surroundings, tasty meals that were fixed often to accommodate her requests, the resident pets, the therapy dog and rabbit spent lots of cozy time with Crystal. After she had been with us for about a week, she called her grandmother, and she said, "Gee, I'm staying in a great big house, and there's room for you to come, too. And guess what? You don't have to bring any quarters because the washer and dryer are free." (Laughter) Crystal's grandmother soon arrived from out of town, and they spent the remaining four months of Crystal's life enjoying very special days together. Some days were special because Crystal was outside in her wheelchair sitting by the fountain. For a little girl who had spent most of the year earlier in a hospital bed, being outside counting hummingbirds made for an amazing time with her grandma, and lots of laughter. Other days were special because of the activities that our child life specialist created for her. Crystal strung beads and made jewelry for everybody in the house. She painted a pumpkin to help decorate for Halloween. She spent many excited days planning her tenth birthday, which of course none of us thought she would ever see. All of us wore pink boas for the occasion, and Crystal, as you can see, queen for a day, wore a sparkly tiara. One hot morning, I arrived at work and Crystal and her partner in crime, Charlie, greeted me. With some help, they had set up a lemonade and cookie stand outside the front door, a very strategic location. I asked Crystal the price of the cookie that I had selected, and she said, "Three dollars." (Laughter) I said that seemed a bit high for one cookie. (Laughter) It was small. "I know," she acknowledged with a grin, "but I'm worth it." And therein lie the words of wisdom of a young girl whose brief life forever impacted mine. Crystal was worth it, and shouldn't every child whose life is shortened by a horrific illness be worth it? Together, all of us today can offer that same specialized care that Crystal received by recognizing that children's respite and hospice care is a critical component missing from our healthcare landscape. It's also interesting to note that we are able to provide this care at about one third of the cost of a hospital intensive care unit, and our families don't see a bill. We are ever grateful to the supporters who believe in this important work that we're doing. The truth is that my colleagues and I and the parents and other family members who get to experience this special wisdom are in a unique position. There are only two freestanding pediatric hospices in the United States, although I'm happy to report that based on our model, there are 18 others under various stages of development. (Applause) Still, most of the children who die in the United States every year die in hospital rooms, surrounded by beeping machines and anxious, exhausted adults who have no other option but to say goodbye under those harsh, institutional lights and among virtual strangers. For comparison's sake, the United Kingdom, which is a country with about one fifth the population of the United States, and about half the size of the state of California, has 54 hospice and respite centers. Why is that? I've asked myself that question obviously many times. My best guess is that Americans, with our positive can-do attitude hold the expectation that our medical care system will fix it, even though it may be a childhood illness for which there is no cure. We go to extraordinary measures to keep children alive when in fact the greatest kindness that we might give them would be a peaceful, pain-free end of life. The transition from cure to care remains a challenging one for many hospital physicians whose training has really been about saving lives, not about gently guiding the patient to the end of life. The dad of a sweet baby for whom we cared at the end of her life certainly captured this dichotomy when he reflected that there are a lot of people to help you bring an infant into the world but very few to help you usher a baby out. So what is the magic ingredient at George Mark? The complex medical diagnoses that bring our young patients to us mean that their lives have often been restricted, some to a hospital bed for long periods of time, others to wheelchairs, still others to intensive courses of chemotherapy or rehab. We make a practice of ignoring those limitations. Our default answer is "yes" and our default question is, "Why not?" That's why we took a young boy who wasn't going to live for another baseball season to Game 5 of the World Series. That's why we have a talent show put on by the staff and kids for family and friends. Who wouldn't be enchanted by a young boy playing a piano piece with his feet, because his arms are atrophied? That's why we have a prom every year. It's pretty magical. We started the prom after hearing a dad lament that he would never pin a boutonniere on his son's tuxedo lapel. The weeks before the dance, the house is in a flurry, and I don't know who's more excited, the staff or the kids. (Laughter) The night of the event involves rides in vintage cars, a walk on a red carpet into the great room, a terrific DJ and a photographer at the ready to capture pictures of these attendees and their families. At the end of the evening this year, one of our young, delightful teenaged girls, Caitlin, said to her mom, "That was the best night of my whole life." And that's just the point, to capture the best days and nights, to abolish limitations, to have your default answer be "yes" and your default question be, "Why not?" Ultimately life is too short, whether we live to be 85 years or just eight. Trust me. Better yet, trust Sam. It's not by pretending that death doesn't exist that we keep the people, especially the little people that we love, safe. In the end, we can't control how long any of us lives. What we can control is how we spend our days, the spaces we create, the meaning and joy that we make. We cannot change the outcome, but we can change the journey. Isn't it time to recognize that children deserve nothing less than our most uncompromising bravery and our wildest imagination. Thank you. (Applause) |
A scientific approach to the paranormal | {0: 'Carrie Poppy tells stories on the fringes of human experience through writing, live storytelling and radio.'} | TEDxVienna | Eight years ago, I was haunted by an evil spirit. I was 25 at the time, and I was living in a tiny house behind someone else's house in Los Angeles. It was this guest house, it had kind of been dilapidated, not taken care of for a long time. And one night, I was sitting there and I got this really spooky feeling, kind of the feeling like you're being watched. But no one was there except my two dogs, and they were just chewing their feet. And I looked around. No one was there. And I thought, OK, it's just my imagination. But the feeling just kept getting worse, and I started to feel this pressure in my chest, sort of like the feeling when you get bad news. But it started to sink lower and lower and almost hurt. And over the course of that week, this feeling got worse and worse, and I started to become convinced that something was there in my little guest house, haunting me. And I started to hear these sounds, this "whoosh," kind of whisper, like something passing through me. I called my best friend, Claire, and said, "I know this is going to sound crazy, but, um ... I think there's a ghost in my house, and I need to get rid of it." And she said — she's very open-minded — and she said, "I don't think you're crazy. I think you just need to do a cleansing ritual." (Laughter) "So get some sage and burn it, and tell it to go away." So I said, "OK," and I went and I bought sage. I had never done this before, so I set the sage on fire, waved it about, and said, "Go away! This is my house! I live here. You don't live here!" But the feeling stayed. Nothing got better. And then I started to think, OK, well now this thing is probably just laughing at me, because it hasn't left, and I probably just look like this impotent, powerless thing that couldn't get it to go away. So every day I'd come home and you guys, this feeling got so bad that — I mean, I'm laughing at it now — but I would sit there in bed and cry every night. And the feeling on my chest got worse and worse. It was physically painful. And I even went to a psychiatrist and tried to get her to prescribe me medicine, and she wouldn't just because I don't have schizophrenia, OK. (Laughter) So finally I got on the internet, and I Googled "hauntings." And I came upon this forum of ghost hunters. But these were a special kind of ghost hunters — they were skeptics. They believed that every case of ghosts that they had investigated so far had been explained away by science. And I was like, "OK, smart guys, this is what's happening to me, and if you have an explanation for me, I would love to hear it." And one of them said, "OK. Um, have you heard of carbon monoxide poisoning?" And I said, "Yeah. Like, gas poisoning?" Carbon monoxide poisoning is when you have a gas leak leaking into your home. I looked it up, and the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning include a pressure on your chest, auditory hallucinations — whoosh — and an unexplained feeling of dread. So that night, I called the gas company. I said, "I have an emergency. I need you to come out. I don't want to get into the story now, but I need you to come out." (Laughter) They came out. I said, "I suspect a gas leak." They brought their carbon monoxide detector, and the man said, "It's a really good thing that you called us tonight, because you could have been dead very soon." Thirty-seven percent of Americans believe in haunted houses, and I wonder how many of them have been in one and how many of them have been in danger. So that haunting story has led me to my job. I'm an investigator, and I'm an investigator in two senses: I'm an investigative journalist, and I'm also an investigator of the claims of the paranormal and claims of the spiritual. And that means a few things. Sometimes that means that I'm pretending to need an exorcism so I can get — yes, that's right! — so I can go to an exorcist and see if he's using gimmicks or psychological tricks to try to convince someone that they're possessed. Sometimes that means I'm going undercover in a fringe group which I report on for a podcast that I co-host. And I've done over 70 investigations like this with my co-host, Ross. I would love to tell you that nine times out of 10, science wins, saves the day, it's all explained. That's not true. The truth is, 10 times out of 10, science wins, it saves the day. (Applause) And that doesn't mean there's no such thing as a mystery. Of course there are mysteries, but a mystery is a mystery. It is not a ghost. Now, I believe there are two kinds of truth, and it's taken me a while to get to this place, but I think this is right, so hear me out. I think there is outer truth and there's inner truth. So if you say to me, "There was a man named Jesus and he once existed," that's outer truth, right? And we can go and look at the historical record. We can determine whether that seems to be true. And I would argue, it does seem to be true. If you say, "Jesus rose from the dead," — ooh, trickier. (Laughter) I would say that's an outer-truth claim, because he physically rose or he didn't. I'm not going to get into whether he rose or he didn't, but I would say that's an outer-truth claim. It happened or it didn't happen. But if you say, "I don't care whether he rose from the dead. It's symbolically important to me, and that metaphor is so meaningful, so purposeful to me, and I'm not going to try to persuade you of it," now you've moved it from outer truth to inner truth, from science to art. And I think we have a tendency to not be clear about this, to try to move our inner truths to outer truths, or to not be fair about it to each other, and when people are telling us their inner truths, to try to make them defend them by outer-truth standards. So I'm talking here about outer truth, about objective things. And there was an objective reality in my haunted house, right? Now that I've told you about the gas leak, I doubt a single person here would be like, "I still think there was a ghost, too" — (Laughter) because as soon as we have these scientific explanations, we know to give up the ghost. We use these things as stopgaps for things that we can't explain. We don't believe them because of evidence; we believe them because of a lack of evidence. So there is a group in Los Angeles called the Independent Investigations Group, or the IIG, and they do great work. They'll give a $10,000 prize to anyone who can show, under scientific conditions, that they have a paranormal ability. No one's done it yet, but they've had a couple people who claim that they were clairaudients, which means that they can hear voices either from the great beyond or they can read minds. And they had one person who was very sincere, who believed that he could read minds. So they set up a test with him, and this is the way it always works. The group says, "OK, we have a protocol, we have a way to scientifically test this. Do you agree with it?" The person says yes. Then they test it. It's very important that both sides agree. They did that, they tested him. They said, "OK, you know what? You weren't able to predict what Lisa was thinking. It matched up about the same as chance. Looks like you don't have the power." And that gave them the opportunity to compassionately sit down with him and have a very difficult discussion, which basically amounted to, "Hey, we know you're sincere, and what that means is, you do hear something in your head." And that guy got to make the very difficult decision, but really the life-changing decision about whether to go get help. We're actually helping people to make these connections that maybe before seemed like otherworldly explanations, help draw us into reality and maybe change our lives for the better. Now, on the other hand, maybe one time it'll turn out to be true. Maybe we'll find out there are ghosts, and holy shit, it will be the best thing! And every time I do one of these investigations, I still get so excited, and I'm like 75 into them, and still I swear on number 76, I'm going to be like, "This is the one!" (Laughter) Maybe I'm just eternally optimistic, but I hope I never lose this hope, and I invite you to take this same attitude when people share their outer beliefs with you. When talking about testable claims, respect them enough to ask these good questions. Challenge and see how you can examine them together, because there's this idea that you can't respect a belief and still challenge it, but that's not true. When we jiggle the lock, when we test the claim, we're saying, OK, I respect you, I'm listening to what you're saying, I'm going to test it out with you. We've all had that experience where you're telling someone something, and they're like, "Oh, that's really interesting, yeah," you know you're being had. But when someone says, "Really? Huh. Sounds a little sketchy to me, but I'm listening," you at least know you're being engaged and respected. And that's the kind of attitude we should have with these claims. That's showing someone that you care what they're saying. That's respect. Now, yes, most of these searches will come up empty, but that's how all of science works. Every cure for cancer so far has not panned out, but we don't stop looking, for two reasons. Because number one, the answer matters. Whether it's looking at the afterlife or the paranormal or the cure for cancer, it all amounts to the same question: How long will we be here? And two, because looking for the truth, being open-minded, and being willing to be wrong and to change your whole worldview is awe-inspiring. I still get excited at ghost stories every single time. I still consider that every group I join might be right, and I hope I never lose that hope. Let's all never lose that hope, because searching for what's out there helps us understand what's in here. And also, please have a carbon monoxide detector in your home. Thank you. (Applause) |
"Rollercoaster" | {0: 'Broadway and TV veteran Sara Ramirez challenges stereotypes even as she beguiles audiences.', 1: 'Michael Pemberton is a New York-based actor and singer/songwriter. '} | TED Talks Live | (Guitar) (Singing) Rollercoaster, carousel. Where the highs are heaven, but the lows, oh, they can be hell. You can grab the ring, you can ring that bell, when the ride is over, you can never tell. People tell you this one thing — will make your life complete. So you, you give it everything you got and you wind up on the street. Then one day you wake up, and they tell you "you're a queen," but then you find that someone else is pulling on the strings. Rollercoaster, carousel. Where the highs are heaven, but the lows, oh, they can be hell. You can grab the ring, you can ring that bell, when the ride is over, you can never tell. The one you love, they love you — oh yeah — until the end of time. But lose your edge or lose your cool, they will drop you like a dime. Everyone is crowding 'round when fortune is your friend. When your luck is running out, you're all alone again. Rollercoaster, carousel. Where the highs are heaven but the lows, oh, they can be hell. You can grab the ring, you can ring that bell, when the ride is over you can never tell. Well, maybe I'm just cynical, and all these words are lies, but experience keeps telling me that the cautious one is wise. But caution makes you hesitate, and hesitate you're lost, so take your opportunities and never count the cost. Rollercoaster, carousel. Where the highs are heaven, but the lows, oh, they can be hell. You can grab the ring, you can ring that bell, when the ride is over — over, over, you can never, ever tell. Rollercoaster, carousel, rollercoaster, yeah, yeah, yeah, carousel. Carousel, carousel, carousel, carousel. (Applause) Michael Pemberton. (Applause) Thank you so much. Thank you. |
I grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here's why I left | {0: 'A former member of Westboro Baptist Church, Megan Phelps-Roper is now a writer and educator on topics related to extremism, bullying and empathy in dialogue.'} | TEDNYC | I was a blue-eyed, chubby-cheeked five-year-old when I joined my family on the picket line for the first time. My mom made me leave my dolls in the minivan. I'd stand on a street corner in the heavy Kansas humidity, surrounded by a few dozen relatives, with my tiny fists clutching a sign that I couldn't read yet: "Gays are worthy of death." This was the beginning. Our protests soon became a daily occurrence and an international phenomenon, and as a member of Westboro Baptist Church, I became a fixture on picket lines across the country. The end of my antigay picketing career and life as I knew it, came 20 years later, triggered in part by strangers on Twitter who showed me the power of engaging the other. In my home, life was framed as an epic spiritual battle between good and evil. The good was my church and its members, and the evil was everyone else. My church's antics were such that we were constantly at odds with the world, and that reinforced our otherness on a daily basis. "Make a difference between the unclean and the clean," the verse says, and so we did. From baseball games to military funerals, we trekked across the country with neon protest signs in hand to tell others exactly how "unclean" they were and exactly why they were headed for damnation. This was the focus of our whole lives. This was the only way for me to do good in a world that sits in Satan's lap. And like the rest of my 10 siblings, I believed what I was taught with all my heart, and I pursued Westboro's agenda with a special sort of zeal. In 2009, that zeal brought me to Twitter. Initially, the people I encountered on the platform were just as hostile as I expected. They were the digital version of the screaming hordes I'd been seeing at protests since I was a kid. But in the midst of that digital brawl, a strange pattern developed. Someone would arrive at my profile with the usual rage and scorn, I would respond with a custom mix of Bible verses, pop culture references and smiley faces. They would be understandably confused and caught off guard, but then a conversation would ensue. And it was civil — full of genuine curiosity on both sides. How had the other come to such outrageous conclusions about the world? Sometimes the conversation even bled into real life. People I'd sparred with on Twitter would come out to the picket line to see me when I protested in their city. A man named David was one such person. He ran a blog called "Jewlicious," and after several months of heated but friendly arguments online, he came out to see me at a picket in New Orleans. He brought me a Middle Eastern dessert from Jerusalem, where he lives, and I brought him kosher chocolate and held a "God hates Jews" sign. (Laughter) There was no confusion about our positions, but the line between friend and foe was becoming blurred. We'd started to see each other as human beings, and it changed the way we spoke to one another. It took time, but eventually these conversations planted seeds of doubt in me. My friends on Twitter took the time to understand Westboro's doctrines, and in doing so, they were able to find inconsistencies I'd missed my entire life. Why did we advocate the death penalty for gays when Jesus said, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?" How could we claim to love our neighbor while at the same time praying for God to destroy them? The truth is that the care shown to me by these strangers on the internet was itself a contradiction. It was growing evidence that people on the other side were not the demons I'd been led to believe. These realizations were life-altering. Once I saw that we were not the ultimate arbiters of divine truth but flawed human beings, I couldn't pretend otherwise. I couldn't justify our actions — especially our cruel practice of protesting funerals and celebrating human tragedy. These shifts in my perspective contributed to a larger erosion of trust in my church, and eventually it made it impossible for me to stay. In spite of overwhelming grief and terror, I left Westboro in 2012. In those days just after I left, the instinct to hide was almost paralyzing. I wanted to hide from the judgement of my family, who I knew would never speak to me again — people whose thoughts and opinions had meant everything to me. And I wanted to hide from the world I'd rejected for so long — people who had no reason at all to give me a second chance after a lifetime of antagonism. And yet, unbelievably, they did. The world had access to my past because it was all over the internet — thousands of tweets and hundreds of interviews, everything from local TV news to "The Howard Stern Show" — but so many embraced me with open arms anyway. I wrote an apology for the harm I'd caused, but I also knew that an apology could never undo any of it. All I could do was try to build a new life and find a way somehow to repair some of the damage. People had every reason to doubt my sincerity, but most of them didn't. And — given my history, it was more than I could've hoped for — forgiveness and the benefit of the doubt. It still amazes me. I spent my first year away from home adrift with my younger sister, who had chosen to leave with me. We walked into an abyss, but we were shocked to find the light and a way forward in the same communities we'd targeted for so long. David, my "Jewlicious" friend from Twitter, invited us to spend time among a Jewish community in Los Angeles. We slept on couches in the home of a Hasidic rabbi and his wife and their four kids — the same rabbi that I'd protested three years earlier with a sign that said, "Your rabbi is a whore." We spent long hours talking about theology and Judaism and life while we washed dishes in their kosher kitchen and chopped vegetables for dinner. They treated us like family. They held nothing against us, and again I was astonished. That period was full of turmoil, but one part I've returned to often is a surprising realization I had during that time — that it was a relief and a privilege to let go of the harsh judgments that instinctively ran through my mind about nearly every person I saw. I realized that now I needed to learn. I needed to listen. This has been at the front of my mind lately, because I can't help but see in our public discourse so many of the same destructive impulses that ruled my former church. We celebrate tolerance and diversity more than at any other time in memory, and still we grow more and more divided. We want good things — justice, equality, freedom, dignity, prosperity — but the path we've chosen looks so much like the one I walked away from four years ago. We've broken the world into us and them, only emerging from our bunkers long enough to lob rhetorical grenades at the other camp. We write off half the country as out-of-touch liberal elites or racist misogynist bullies. No nuance, no complexity, no humanity. Even when someone does call for empathy and understanding for the other side, the conversation nearly always devolves into a debate about who deserves more empathy. And just as I learned to do, we routinely refuse to acknowledge the flaws in our positions or the merits in our opponent's. Compromise is anathema. We even target people on our own side when they dare to question the party line. This path has brought us cruel, sniping, deepening polarization, and even outbreaks of violence. I remember this path. It will not take us where we want to go. What gives me hope is that we can do something about this. The good news is that it's simple, and the bad news is that it's hard. We have to talk and listen to people we disagree with. It's hard because we often can't fathom how the other side came to their positions. It's hard because righteous indignation, that sense of certainty that ours is the right side, is so seductive. It's hard because it means extending empathy and compassion to people who show us hostility and contempt. The impulse to respond in kind is so tempting, but that isn't who we want to be. We can resist. And I will always be inspired to do so by those people I encountered on Twitter, apparent enemies who became my beloved friends. And in the case of one particularly understanding and generous guy, my husband. There was nothing special about the way I responded to him. What was special was their approach. I thought about it a lot over the past few years and I found four things they did differently that made real conversation possible. These four steps were small but powerful, and I do everything I can to employ them in difficult conversations today. The first is don't assume bad intent. My friends on Twitter realized that even when my words were aggressive and offensive, I sincerely believed I was doing the right thing. Assuming ill motives almost instantly cuts us off from truly understanding why someone does and believes as they do. We forget that they're a human being with a lifetime of experience that shaped their mind, and we get stuck on that first wave of anger, and the conversation has a very hard time ever moving beyond it. But when we assume good or neutral intent, we give our minds a much stronger framework for dialogue. The second is ask questions. When we engage people across ideological divides, asking questions helps us map the disconnect between our differing points of view. That's important because we can't present effective arguments if we don't understand where the other side is actually coming from and because it gives them an opportunity to point out flaws in our positions. But asking questions serves another purpose; it signals to someone that they're being heard. When my friends on Twitter stopped accusing and started asking questions, I almost automatically mirrored them. Their questions gave me room to speak, but they also gave me permission to ask them questions and to truly hear their responses. It fundamentally changed the dynamic of our conversation. The third is stay calm. This takes practice and patience, but it's powerful. At Westboro, I learned not to care how my manner of speaking affected others. I thought my rightness justified my rudeness — harsh tones, raised voices, insults, interruptions — but that strategy is ultimately counterproductive. Dialing up the volume and the snark is natural in stressful situations, but it tends to bring the conversation to an unsatisfactory, explosive end. When my husband was still just an anonymous Twitter acquaintance, our discussions frequently became hard and pointed, but we always refused to escalate. Instead, he would change the subject. He would tell a joke or recommend a book or gently excuse himself from the conversation. We knew the discussion wasn't over, just paused for a time to bring us back to an even keel. People often lament that digital communication makes us less civil, but this is one advantage that online conversations have over in-person ones. We have a buffer of time and space between us and the people whose ideas we find so frustrating. We can use that buffer. Instead of lashing out, we can pause, breathe, change the subject or walk away, and then come back to it when we're ready. And finally ... make the argument. This might seem obvious, but one side effect of having strong beliefs is that we sometimes assume that the value of our position is or should be obvious and self-evident, that we shouldn't have to defend our positions because they're so clearly right and good that if someone doesn't get it, it's their problem — that it's not my job to educate them. But if it were that simple, we would all see things the same way. As kind as my friends on Twitter were, if they hadn't actually made their arguments, it would've been so much harder for me to see the world in a different way. We are all a product of our upbringing, and our beliefs reflect our experiences. We can't expect others to spontaneously change their own minds. If we want change, we have to make the case for it. My friends on Twitter didn't abandon their beliefs or their principles — only their scorn. They channeled their infinitely justifiable offense and came to me with pointed questions tempered with kindness and humor. They approached me as a human being, and that was more transformative than two full decades of outrage, disdain and violence. I know that some might not have the time or the energy or the patience for extensive engagement, but as difficult as it can be, reaching out to someone we disagree with is an option that is available to all of us. And I sincerely believe that we can do hard things, not just for them but for us and our future. Escalating disgust and intractable conflict are not what we want for ourselves, or our country or our next generation. My mom said something to me a few weeks before I left Westboro, when I was desperately hoping there was a way I could stay with my family. People I have loved with every pulse of my heart since even before I was that chubby-cheeked five-year-old, standing on a picket line holding a sign I couldn't read. She said, "You're just a human being, my dear, sweet child." She was asking me to be humble — not to question but to trust God and my elders. But to me, she was missing the bigger picture — that we're all just human beings. That we should be guided by that most basic fact, and approach one another with generosity and compassion. Each one of us contributes to the communities and the cultures and the societies that we make up. The end of this spiral of rage and blame begins with one person who refuses to indulge these destructive, seductive impulses. We just have to decide that it's going to start with us. Thank you. (Applause) |
To raise brave girls, encourage adventure | {0: 'Brimming with insights gained on her picaresque journey from firefighter to best-selling author, Caroline Paul’s "The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure" is a revolutionary guide for raising brave young women.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the Guinness Book of World Records, and I really wanted to set a world record myself. But there was just one small problem: I had absolutely no talent. So I decided to set a world record in something that demanded absolutely no skill at all. I decided to set a world record in crawling. (Laughter) Now, the record at the time was 12 and a half miles, and for some reason, this seemed totally manageable. (Laughter) I recruited my friend Anne, and together we decided, we didn't even need to train. (Laughter) And on the day of our record attempt, we put furniture pads on the outside of our good luck jeans and we set off, and right away, we were in trouble, because the denim was against our skin and it began to chafe, and soon our knees were being chewed up. Hours in, it began to rain. Then, Anne dropped out. Then, it got dark. Now, by now, my knees were bleeding through my jeans, and I was hallucinating from the cold and the pain and the monotony. And to give you an idea of the suffer-fest that I was undergoing, the first lap around the high school track took 10 minutes. The last lap took almost 30. After 12 hours of crawling, I stopped, and I had gone eight and a half miles. So I was short of the 12-and-a-half-mile record. Now, for many years, I thought this was a story of abject failure, but today I see it differently, because when I was attempting the world record, I was doing three things. I was getting outside my comfort zone, I was calling upon my resilience, and I was finding confidence in myself and my own decisions. I didn't know it then, but those are not the attributes of failure. Those are the attributes of bravery. Now, in 1989, at the age of 26, I became a San Francisco firefighter, and I was the 15th woman in a department of 1,500 men. (Applause) And as you can imagine, when I arrived there were many doubts about whether we could do the job. So even though I was a 5'10", 150-pound collegiate rower, and someone who could endure 12 hours of searing knee pain — (Laughter) I knew I still had to prove my strength and fitness. So one day a call came in for a fire, and sure enough, when my engine group pulled up, there was black smoke billowing from a building off an alleyway. And I was with a big guy named Skip, and he was on the nozzle, and I was right behind, and it was a typical sort of fire. It was smoky, it was hot, and all of a sudden, there was an explosion, and Skip and I were blown backwards, my mask was knocked sideways, and there was this moment of confusion. And then I picked myself up, I groped for the nozzle, and I did what a firefighter was supposed to do: I lunged forward, opened up the water and I tackled the fire myself. The explosion had been caused by a water heater, so nobody was hurt, and ultimately it was not a big deal, but later Skip came up to me and said, "Nice job, Caroline," in this surprised sort of voice. (Laughter) And I was confused, because the fire hadn't been difficult physically, so why was he looking at me with something like astonishment? And then it became clear: Skip, who was by the way a really nice guy and an excellent firefighter, not only thought that women could not be strong, he thought that they could not be brave either. And he wasn't the only one. Friends, acquaintances and strangers, men and women throughout my career ask me over and over, "Caroline, all that fire, all that danger, aren't you scared?" Honestly, I never heard a male firefighter asked this. And I became curious. Why wasn't bravery expected of women? Now, the answer began to come when a friend of mine lamented to me that her young daughter was a big scaredy-cat, and so I began to notice, and yes, the daughter was anxious, but more than that, the parents were anxious. Most of what they said to her when she was outside began with, "Be careful," "Watch out," or "No." Now, my friends were not bad parents. They were just doing what most parents do, which is cautioning their daughters much more than they caution their sons. There was a study involving a playground fire pole, ironically, in which researchers saw that little girls were very likely to be warned by both their moms and dads about the fire pole's risk, and if the little girls still wanted to play on the fire pole, a parent was very likely to assist her. But the little boys? They were encouraged to play on the fire pole despite any trepidations that they might have, and often the parents offered guidance on how to use it on their own. So what message does this send to both boys and girls? Well, that girls are fragile and more in need of help, and that boys can and should master difficult tasks by themselves. It says that girls should be fearful and boys should be gutsy. Now, the irony is that at this young age, girls and boys are actually very alike physically. In fact, girls are often stronger until puberty, and more mature. And yet we adults act as if girls are more fragile and more in need of help, and they can't handle as much. This is the message that we absorb as kids, and this is the message that fully permeates as we grow up. We women believe it, men believe it, and guess what? As we become parents, we pass it on to our children, and so it goes. Well, so now I had my answer. This is why women, even firewomen, were expected to be scared. This is why women often are scared. Now, I know some of you won't believe me when I tell you this, but I am not against fear. I know it's an important emotion, and it's there to keep us safe. But the problem is when fear is the primary reaction that we teach and encourage in girls whenever they face something outside their comfort zone. So I was a paraglider pilot for many years — (Applause) and a paraglider is a parachute-like wing, and it does fly very well, but to many people I realize it looks just like a bedsheet with strings attached. (Laughter) And I spent a lot of time on mountaintops inflating this bedsheet, running off and flying. And I know what you're thinking. You're like, Caroline, a little fear would make sense here. And you're right, it does. I assure you, I did feel fear. But on that mountaintop, waiting for the wind to come in just right, I felt so many other things, too: exhilaration, confidence. I knew I was a good pilot. I knew the conditions were good, or I wouldn't be there. I knew how great it was going to be a thousand feet in the air. So yes, fear was there, but I would take a good hard look at it, assess just how relevant it was and then put it where it belonged, which was more often than not behind my exhilaration, my anticipation and my confidence. So I'm not against fear. I'm just pro-bravery. Now, I'm not saying your girls must be firefighters or that they should be paragliders, but I am saying that we are raising our girls to be timid, even helpless, and it begins when we caution them against physical risk. The fear we learn and the experiences we don't stay with us as we become women and morphs into all those things that we face and try to shed: our hesitation in speaking out, our deference so that we can be liked and our lack of confidence in our own decisions. So how do we become brave? Well, here's the good news. Bravery is learned, and like anything learned, it just needs to be practiced. So first, we have to take a deep breath and encourage our girls to skateboard, climb trees and clamber around on that playground fire pole. This is what my own mother did. She didn't know it then, but researchers have a name for this. They call it risky play, and studies show that risky play is really important for kids, all kids, because it teaches hazard assessment, it teaches delayed gratification, it teaches resilience, it teaches confidence. In other words, when kids get outside and practice bravery, they learn valuable life lessons. Second, we have to stop cautioning our girls willy-nilly. So notice next time you say, "Watch out, you're going to get hurt," or, "Don't do that, it's dangerous." And remember that often what you're really telling her is that she shouldn't be pushing herself, that she's really not good enough, that she should be afraid. Third, we women have to start practicing bravery, too. We cannot teach our girls until we teach ourselves. So here's another thing: fear and exhilaration feel very similar — the shaky hands, the heightened heart rate, the nervous tension, and I'm betting that for many of you the last time you thought you were scared out of your wits, you may have been feeling mostly exhilaration, and now you've missed an opportunity. So practice. And while girls should be getting outside to learn to be gutsy, I get that adults don't want to get on hoverboards or climb trees, so we all should be practicing at home, in the office and even right here getting up the guts to talk to someone that you really admire. Finally, when your girl is, let's say, on her bike on the top of the steep hill that she insists she's too scared to go down, guide her to access her bravery. Ultimately, maybe that hill really is too steep, but she'll come to that conclusion through courage, not fear. Because this is not about the steep hill in front of her. This is about the life ahead of her and that she has the tools to handle and assess all the dangers that we cannot protect her from, all the challenges that we won't be there to guide her through, everything that our girls here and around the world face in their future. So by the way, the world record for crawling today — (Laughter) is 35.18 miles, and I would really love to see a girl go break that. (Applause) |
Why women should tell the stories of humanity | {0: 'Jude Kelly is artistic director of Southbank Centre, Britain’s largest cultural institution.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | Why do we think that stories by men are deemed to be of universal importance, and stories by women are thought to be merely about women? My grandmother left school when she was 12. She had 14 children. My mother left school when she was 15. She was a secretary. I graduated from university to become a theater director, and that progress is entirely to do with the fact that people I'll never meet fought for women to have rights, get the vote, get education, have progress. And I'm determined to do the same, and obviously you are, too. Why not? (Applause) So I started a festival called WOW, Women of the World, seven years ago, and it's now in 20 countries across five continents. And one of those countries is Somaliland in Africa. So I traveled there last year, and part of the joy I had in going there was going to these caves. The Laas Geel caves. Now, these caves contain some of the oldest cave paintings in the world. These paintings are thought to be round about 9,000 to 11,000 years old. Art: what humanity has done ever since it evolved. It's how we speak about ourselves, how we understand our identity, how we look at our surroundings, who we find out about each other because of the meaning of our lives. That's what art is for. So look at this little picture. I think it's a little girl. I thought it was a bit like me when I was a little girl. And I thought, well, who painted this joyful, youthful figure? And I asked the curator of the caves. I said, "Tell me about the men and women who painted these." And he looked at me absolutely askance, and he said, "Women didn't paint these pictures." And I said, "Well, it was 11,000 years ago." I said, "How do you know?" (Laughter) And he said, "Women don't do these things. Men made these marks. Women don't." Now, I wasn't really surprised, because that's an attitude that I've seen continuously all my life as a theater maker. We are told that divine knowledge comes down through the masculine, whether it be to the imam, the priest, the rabbi, the holy man. Similarly, we're told that creative genius resides in the masculine, that it is the masculine that will be able to tell us about who we really are, that the masculine will tell the universal story on behalf of all of us, whereas women artists will really just talk about women's experiences, women's issues only really relevant to women and of passing interest to men — and really only some men. And it's that conviction, that that we are taught, that I think colors so much of whether we're prepared to believe that women's stories really matter. And unless we're prepared to believe that women's stories really matter, then women's rights don't really matter, and then change can't really come. I want to tell you about two examples of stories that are thought to be of universal importance: "E.T." and "Hamlet." (Laughter) So I took my two children when they were little — Caroline was eight and Robby was five — to see "E.T." And it's a fantastic story of this little alien who ends up in an American family with a mum, two brothers and a sister, but he wants to go home. Not only that, but some really bad scientists want to do some experiments on him, and they're looking for him. So the children have a plot. They decide they're going to take him back to his spaceship as soon as they can, and they plop him in a bicycle basket, and off they ride. But unfortunately, the baddies have found out, and they're catching up and they've got sirens and they've got their guns, they've got the loud-hailers, it's terribly frightening, and they're closing up on the children, and the children are never going to make it. And then all of a sudden, magically, the bikes fly up in the air, over the clouds, over the moon, and they're going to save "E.T." So I turn to see my children's faces, and Robby is enraptured, he's there with them, he's saving E.T., he's a happy boy. And I turn to Caroline, and she's crying her eyes out. And I said, "What's the matter?" And she said, "Why can't I save E.T.? Why can't I come?" And then all of a sudden I realized: they weren't children; they were boys — all boys. And Caroline, who had invested so much in E.T., well, she wasn't invited to save him, and she felt humiliated and spurned. So I wrote to Steven Spielberg — (Laughter) (Applause) and I said, "I don't know if you understand the psychological importance of what's happened, and are you prepared to pay for the therapy bills?" (Laughter) Twenty years later, I haven't had a word back from him, but I'm still hopeful. (Laughter) But I thought it was interesting, because if you read reviews of what he intended with E.T., he says very specifically, "I wanted the world to understand that we should love and embrace difference." But somehow he didn't include the idea of girls' difference in this thinking. He thought he was writing a story about all humanity. Caroline thought he was marginalizing half of humanity. He thought he was writing a story about human goodness; she thought he was writing a lad's heroic adventure. And this is common. Men feel they have been given the mantle for universal communication, but of course, how could they be? They are writing from male experience through male's eyes. We have to have a look at this ourselves. We have to be prepared to go back through all our books and our films, all our favorite things, and say, "Actually, this is written by a male artist — not an artist. We have to see that so many of these stories are written through a male perspective. Which is fine, but then females need to have 50 percent of the rights for the stage, the film, the novel, the place of creativity. Let me talk about "Hamlet." To be or not to be. That is the question. But it's not my question. My question is: Why was I taught as a young woman that this was the quintessential example of human dilemma and human experience? It's a marvelous story, but actually, it's about a young man fearful that he won't be able to make it as a powerful figure in a male world unless he takes revenge for his father's murder. He talks a great deal to us about suicide being an option, but the reality is that the person who actually commits suicide, Ophelia, after she's been humiliated and abused by him, never gets a chance to talk to the audience about her feelings. And then when he's finished with Ophelia, he turns on his mum, because basically she has the audacity to fall in love with his uncle and enjoy sex. (Laughter) It is a great story, but it is a story about male conflict, male dilemma, male struggle. But I was told this was the story of human beings, despite the fact that it only had two women in it. And unless I reeducate myself, I am always going to think that women's stories matter less than men's. A woman could have written "Hamlet," but she would have written it differently, and it wouldn't have had global recognition. As the writer Margaret Atwood says, "When a man writes about doing the dishes, it's realism. When a woman writes about doing it, it's an unfortunate genetic disposition." (Laughter) Now, this is not just something that belongs to then. I mean, when I was a young girl, wanting desperately to be a theater director, this is what my male lecturer said to me: "Well, there are three women directors in Britain," he said, "Jude." "There's Joan Knight, who's a lesbian, there's Joan Littlewood, who's retired, and there's Buzz Goodbody, who's just killed herself. So, which of those three would you like to be?" (Laughter) Now, leaving aside the disgusting slur on gay women, the fact is, he wanted to humiliate me. He thought it was silly that I wanted to be a director. And I told my friend Marin Alsop, the conductor, and she said, "Oh yes, well, my music teacher said exactly the same. He said, 'Women don't conduct.'" But all these years later, we've made our mark. You think, "Well, it'll be different now." I'm afraid it's not different now. The current head of the Paris Conservatoire said recently, "It takes great physical strength to conduct a symphony, and women are too weak." (Laughter) The artist George Baselitz said, "Well, the fact is women can't paint. Well — they can't paint very well." The writer V.S. Naipaul said two years ago, "I can read two paragraphs and know immediately if it's written by a woman, and I just stop reading, because it's not worthy of me." Audience: Whoa! And it goes on. We have to find a way of stopping young girls and women feeling not only that their story doesn't matter, but they're not allowed to be the storyteller. Because once you feel that you can't stand in the central space and speak on behalf of the world, you will feel that you can offer your goods up to a small, select group. You will tend to do smaller work on smaller stages, your economic power will be less, your reach of audiences will be less, and your credit will be less as an artist. And we do finally give artists these incredible, prominent spaces in the world, because they are our storytellers. Now, why should it matter to you if you're not an artist? Supposing you're an accountant or an entrepreneur or a medic or a scientist: Should you care about women artists? Absolutely, you must, because as you can see from the cave paintings, all civilizations, all of humanity have relied upon artists to tell the human story, and if the human story is finally told by men, take my word for it, it will be about men. So let's make a change. Let's make a change to all our institutions, and not just in the West. Don't forget — this message of incapability of women to hold creative genius is being told to girls and women in Nigeria, in China, in Russia, in Indonesia. All over the world, girls and women are being told that they can't finally hold the idea of creative inspiration. And I want to ask you: Do you believe that? Do you believe that women can be a creative genius? (Applause and cheers) Well then, please go forward, support women artists, buy their work, insist that their voices are heard, find platforms on which their voices will be made. And remember this: that in a sense, if we're going to get past this moment of a world where we know that we are unequal, it's artists who have to imagine a different world. And I'm calling on all artists, women and men, to imagine a gender-equal world. Let's paint it. Let's draw it. Let's write about it. Let's film it. And if we could imagine it, then we would have the energy and the stamina to work towards it. When I see this little girl, 11,000 years ago, I want to know that the little girl now can stand there and think she's entitled to her dreams, she's entitled to her destiny and she's entitled to speak on behalf of the whole world, be recognized for it and applauded. Thank you. (Applause) |
How I'm fighting bias in algorithms | {0: "Joy Buolamwini's research explores the intersection of social impact technology and inclusion."} | TEDxBeaconStreet | Hello, I'm Joy, a poet of code, on a mission to stop an unseen force that's rising, a force that I called "the coded gaze," my term for algorithmic bias. Algorithmic bias, like human bias, results in unfairness. However, algorithms, like viruses, can spread bias on a massive scale at a rapid pace. Algorithmic bias can also lead to exclusionary experiences and discriminatory practices. Let me show you what I mean. (Video) Joy Buolamwini: Hi, camera. I've got a face. Can you see my face? No-glasses face? You can see her face. What about my face? I've got a mask. Can you see my mask? Joy Buolamwini: So how did this happen? Why am I sitting in front of a computer in a white mask, trying to be detected by a cheap webcam? Well, when I'm not fighting the coded gaze as a poet of code, I'm a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, and there I have the opportunity to work on all sorts of whimsical projects, including the Aspire Mirror, a project I did so I could project digital masks onto my reflection. So in the morning, if I wanted to feel powerful, I could put on a lion. If I wanted to be uplifted, I might have a quote. So I used generic facial recognition software to build the system, but found it was really hard to test it unless I wore a white mask. Unfortunately, I've run into this issue before. When I was an undergraduate at Georgia Tech studying computer science, I used to work on social robots, and one of my tasks was to get a robot to play peek-a-boo, a simple turn-taking game where partners cover their face and then uncover it saying, "Peek-a-boo!" The problem is, peek-a-boo doesn't really work if I can't see you, and my robot couldn't see me. But I borrowed my roommate's face to get the project done, submitted the assignment, and figured, you know what, somebody else will solve this problem. Not too long after, I was in Hong Kong for an entrepreneurship competition. The organizers decided to take participants on a tour of local start-ups. One of the start-ups had a social robot, and they decided to do a demo. The demo worked on everybody until it got to me, and you can probably guess it. It couldn't detect my face. I asked the developers what was going on, and it turned out we had used the same generic facial recognition software. Halfway around the world, I learned that algorithmic bias can travel as quickly as it takes to download some files off of the internet. So what's going on? Why isn't my face being detected? Well, we have to look at how we give machines sight. Computer vision uses machine learning techniques to do facial recognition. So how this works is, you create a training set with examples of faces. This is a face. This is a face. This is not a face. And over time, you can teach a computer how to recognize other faces. However, if the training sets aren't really that diverse, any face that deviates too much from the established norm will be harder to detect, which is what was happening to me. But don't worry — there's some good news. Training sets don't just materialize out of nowhere. We actually can create them. So there's an opportunity to create full-spectrum training sets that reflect a richer portrait of humanity. Now you've seen in my examples how social robots was how I found out about exclusion with algorithmic bias. But algorithmic bias can also lead to discriminatory practices. Across the US, police departments are starting to use facial recognition software in their crime-fighting arsenal. Georgetown Law published a report showing that one in two adults in the US — that's 117 million people — have their faces in facial recognition networks. Police departments can currently look at these networks unregulated, using algorithms that have not been audited for accuracy. Yet we know facial recognition is not fail proof, and labeling faces consistently remains a challenge. You might have seen this on Facebook. My friends and I laugh all the time when we see other people mislabeled in our photos. But misidentifying a suspected criminal is no laughing matter, nor is breaching civil liberties. Machine learning is being used for facial recognition, but it's also extending beyond the realm of computer vision. In her book, "Weapons of Math Destruction," data scientist Cathy O'Neil talks about the rising new WMDs — widespread, mysterious and destructive algorithms that are increasingly being used to make decisions that impact more aspects of our lives. So who gets hired or fired? Do you get that loan? Do you get insurance? Are you admitted into the college you wanted to get into? Do you and I pay the same price for the same product purchased on the same platform? Law enforcement is also starting to use machine learning for predictive policing. Some judges use machine-generated risk scores to determine how long an individual is going to spend in prison. So we really have to think about these decisions. Are they fair? And we've seen that algorithmic bias doesn't necessarily always lead to fair outcomes. So what can we do about it? Well, we can start thinking about how we create more inclusive code and employ inclusive coding practices. It really starts with people. So who codes matters. Are we creating full-spectrum teams with diverse individuals who can check each other's blind spots? On the technical side, how we code matters. Are we factoring in fairness as we're developing systems? And finally, why we code matters. We've used tools of computational creation to unlock immense wealth. We now have the opportunity to unlock even greater equality if we make social change a priority and not an afterthought. And so these are the three tenets that will make up the "incoding" movement. Who codes matters, how we code matters and why we code matters. So to go towards incoding, we can start thinking about building platforms that can identify bias by collecting people's experiences like the ones I shared, but also auditing existing software. We can also start to create more inclusive training sets. Imagine a "Selfies for Inclusion" campaign where you and I can help developers test and create more inclusive training sets. And we can also start thinking more conscientiously about the social impact of the technology that we're developing. To get the incoding movement started, I've launched the Algorithmic Justice League, where anyone who cares about fairness can help fight the coded gaze. On codedgaze.com, you can report bias, request audits, become a tester and join the ongoing conversation, #codedgaze. So I invite you to join me in creating a world where technology works for all of us, not just some of us, a world where we value inclusion and center social change. Thank you. (Applause) But I have one question: Will you join me in the fight? (Laughter) (Applause) |
Beautiful new words to describe obscure emotions | {0: 'John Koenig is writing an original dictionary of made-up words.'} | TEDxBerkeley | Today I want to talk about the meaning of words, how we define them and how they, almost as revenge, define us. The English language is a magnificent sponge. I love the English language. I'm glad that I speak it. But for all that, it has a lot of holes. In Greek, there's a word, "lachesism" which is the hunger for disaster. You know, when you see a thunderstorm on the horizon and you just find yourself rooting for the storm. In Mandarin, they have a word "yù yī" — I'm not pronouncing that correctly — which means the longing to feel intensely again the way you did when you were a kid. In Polish, they have a word "jouska" which is the kind of hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head. And finally, in German, of course in German, they have a word called "zielschmerz" which is the dread of getting what you want. (Laughter) Finally fulfilling a lifelong dream. I'm German myself, so I know exactly what that feels like. Now, I'm not sure if I would use any of these words as I go about my day, but I'm really glad they exist. But the only reason they exist is because I made them up. I am the author of "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows," which I've been writing for the last seven years. And the whole mission of the project is to find holes in the language of emotion and try to fill them so that we have a way of talking about all those human peccadilloes and quirks of the human condition that we all feel but may not think to talk about because we don't have the words to do it. And about halfway through this project, I defined "sonder," the idea that we all think of ourselves as the main character and everyone else is just extras. But in reality, we're all the main character, and you yourself are an extra in someone else's story. And so as soon as I published that, I got a lot of response from people saying, "Thank you for giving voice to something I had felt all my life but there was no word for that." So it made them feel less alone. That's the power of words, to make us feel less alone. And it was not long after that that I started to notice sonder being used earnestly in conversations online, and not long after I actually noticed it, I caught it next to me in an actual conversation in person. There is no stranger feeling than making up a word and then seeing it take on a mind of its own. I don't have a word for that yet, but I will. (Laughter) I'm working on it. I started to think about what makes words real, because a lot of people ask me, the most common thing I got from people is, "Well, are these words made up? I don't really understand." And I didn't really know what to tell them because once sonder started to take off, who am I to say what words are real and what aren't. And so I sort of felt like Steve Jobs, who described his epiphany as when he realized that most of us, as we go through the day, we just try to avoid bouncing against the walls too much and just sort of get on with things. But once you realize that people — that this world was built by people no smarter than you, then you can reach out and touch those walls and even put your hand through them and realize that you have the power to change it. And when people ask me, "Are these words real?" I had a variety of answers that I tried out. Some of them made sense. Some of them didn't. But one of them I tried out was, "Well, a word is real if you want it to be real." The way that this path is real because people wanted it to be there. (Laughter) It happens on college campuses all the time. It's called a "desire path." (Laughter) But then I decided, what people are really asking when they're asking if a word is real, they're really asking, "Well, how many brains will this give me access to?" Because I think that's a lot of how we look at language. A word is essentially a key that gets us into certain people's heads. And if it gets us into one brain, it's not really worth it, not really worth knowing. Two brains, eh, it depends on who it is. A million brains, OK, now we're talking. And so a real word is one that gets you access to as many brains as you can. That's what makes it worth knowing. Incidentally, the realest word of all by this measure is this. [O.K.] That's it. The realest word we have. That is the closest thing we have to a master key. That's the most commonly understood word in the world, no matter where you are. The problem with that is, no one seems to know what those two letters stand for. (Laughter) Which is kind of weird, right? I mean, it could be a misspelling of "all correct," I guess, or "old kinderhook." No one really seems to know, but the fact that it doesn't matter says something about how we add meaning to words. The meaning is not in the words themselves. We're the ones that pour ourselves into it. And I think, when we're all searching for meaning in our lives, and searching for the meaning of life, I think words have something to do with that. And I think if you're looking for the meaning of something, the dictionary is a decent place to start. It brings a sense of order to a very chaotic universe. Our view of things is so limited that we have to come up with patterns and shorthands and try to figure out a way to interpret it and be able to get on with our day. We need words to contain us, to define ourselves. I think a lot of us feel boxed in by how we use these words. We forget that words are made up. It's not just my words. All words are made up, but not all of them mean something. We're all just sort of trapped in our own lexicons that don't necessarily correlate with people who aren't already like us, and so I think I feel us drifting apart a little more every year, the more seriously we take words. Because remember, words are not real. They don't have meaning. We do. And I'd like to leave you with a reading from one of my favorite philosophers, Bill Watterson, who created "Calvin and Hobbes." He said, "Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it is still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble." Thank you. (Applause) |
A burial practice that nourishes the planet | {0: 'Caitlin Doughty asks: What if we re-designed the funeral industry for an eco-friendly end of life?'} | TEDMED 2016 | When I die, I would like for my body to be laid out to be eaten by animals. Having your body laid out to be eaten by animals is not for everyone. (Laughter) Maybe you have already had the end-of-life talk with your family and decided on, I don't know, cremation. And in the interest of full disclosure, what I am proposing for my dead body is not strictly legal at the moment, but it's not without precedent. We've been laying out our dead for all of human history; it's call exposure burial. In fact, it's likely happening right now as we speak. In the mountainous regions of Tibet, they practice "sky burial," a ritual where the body is left to be consumed by vultures. In Mumbai, in India, those who follow the Parsi religion put their dead in structures called "Towers of Silence." These are interesting cultural tidbits, but they just haven't really been that popular in the Western world — they're not what you'd expect. In America, our death traditions have come to be chemical embalming, followed by burial at your local cemetery, or, more recently, cremation. I myself, am a recent vegetarian, which means I spent the first 30 years or so of my life frantically inhaling animals — as many as I could get my hands on. Why, when I die, should they not have their turn with me? (Laughter) Am I not an animal? Biologically speaking, are we not all, in this room, animals? Accepting the fact that we are animals has some potentially terrifying consequences. It means accepting that we are doomed to decay and die, just like any other creature on earth. For the last nine years, I've worked in the funeral industry, first as a crematory operator, then as a mortician and most recently, as the owner of my own funeral home. And I have some good news: if you're looking to avoid the whole "doomed to decay and die" thing: you will have all the help in the world in that avoidance from the funeral industry. It's a multi-billion-dollar industry, and its economic model is based on the principle of protection, sanitation and beautification of the corpse. Whether they mean to or not, the funeral industry promotes this idea of human exceptionalism. It doesn't matter what it takes, how much it costs, how bad it is for the environment, we're going to do it because humans are worth it! It ignores the fact that death can be an emotionally messy and complex affair, and that there is beauty in decay — beauty in the natural return to the earth from whence we came. Now, I don't want you to get me wrong — I absolutely understand the importance of ritual, especially when it comes to the people that we love. But we have to be able to create and practice this ritual without harming the environment, which is why we need new options. So let's return to the idea of protection, sanitation and beautification. We'll start with a dead body. The funeral industry will protect your dead body by offering to sell your family a casket made of hardwood or metal with a rubber sealant. At the cemetery, on the day of burial, that casket will be lowered into a large concrete or metal vault. We're wasting all of these resources — concretes, metal, hardwoods — hiding them in vast underground fortresses. When you choose burial at the cemetery, your dead body is not coming anywhere near the dirt that surrounds it. Food for worms you are not. Next, the industry will sanitize your body through embalming: the chemical preservation of the dead. This procedure drains your blood and replaces it with a toxic, cancer-causing formaldehyde. They say they do this for the public health because the dead body can be dangerous, but the doctors in this room will tell you that that claim would only apply if the person had died of some wildly infectious disease, like Ebola. Even human decomposition, which, let's be honest, is a little stinky and unpleasant, is perfectly safe. The bacteria that causes disease is not the same bacteria that causes decomposition. Finally, the industry will beautify the corpse. They'll tell you that the natural dead body of your mother or father is not good enough as it is. They'll put it in makeup. They'll put it in a suit. They'll inject dyes so the person looks a little more alive — just resting. Embalming is a cheat code, providing the illusion that death and then decay are not the natural end for all organic life on this planet. Now, if this system of beautification, sanitation, protection doesn't appeal to you, you are not alone. There is a whole wave of people — funeral directors, designers, environmentalists — trying to come up with a more eco-friendly way of death. For these people, death is not necessarily a pristine, makeup, powder-blue tuxedo kind of affair. There's no question that our current methods of death are not particularly sustainable, what with the waste of resources and our reliance on chemicals. Even cremation, which is usually considered the environmentally friendly option, uses, per cremation, the natural gas equivalent of a 500-mile car trip. So where do we go from here? Last summer, I was in the mountains of North Carolina, hauling buckets of wood chips in the summer sun. I was at Western Carolina University at their "Body Farm," more accurately called a "human decomposition facility." Bodies donated to science are brought here, and their decay is studied to benefit the future of forensics. On this particular day, there were 12 bodies laid out in various stages of decomposition. Some were skeletonized, one was wearing purple pajamas, one still had blonde facial hair visible. The forensic aspect is really fascinating, but not actually why I was there. I was there because a colleague of mine named Katrina Spade is attempting to create a system, not of cremating the dead, but composting the dead. She calls the system "Recomposition," and we've been doing it with cattle and other livestock for years. She imagines a facility where the family could come and lay their dead loved one in a nutrient-rich mixture that would, in four-to-six weeks, reduce the body — bones and all — to soil. In those four-to-six weeks, your molecules become other molecules; you literally transform. How would this fit in with the very recent desire a lot of people seem to have to be buried under a tree, or to become a tree when they die? In a traditional cremation, the ashes that are left over — inorganic bone fragments — form a thick, chalky layer that, unless distributed in the soil just right, can actually hurt or kill the tree. But if you're recomposed, if you actually become the soil, you can nourish the tree, and become the post-mortem contributor you've always wanted to be — that you deserve to be. So that's one option for the future of cremation. But what about the future of cemeteries? There are a lot of people who think we shouldn't even have cemeteries anymore because we're running out of land. But what if we reframed it, and the corpse wasn't the land's enemy, but its potential savior? I'm talking about conservation burial, where large swaths of land are purchased by a land trust. The beauty of this is that once you plant a few dead bodies in that land, it can't be touched, it can't be developed on — hence the term, "conservation burial." It's the equivalent of chaining yourself to a tree post-mortem — "Hell no, I won't go! No, really — I can't. I'm decomposing under here." (Laughter) Any money that the family gives to the cemetery would go back into protecting and managing the land. There are no headstones and no graves in the typical sense. The graves are scattered about the property under elegant mounds, marked only by a rock or a small metal disk, or sometimes only locatable by GPS. There's no embalming, no heavy, metal caskets. My funeral home sells a few caskets made out of things like woven willow and bamboo, but honestly, most of our families just choose a simple shroud. There are none of the big vaults that most cemeteries require just because it makes it easier for them to landscape. Families can come here; they can luxuriate in nature; they can even plant a tree or a shrub, though only native plants to the area are allowed. The dead then blend seamlessly in with the landscape. There's hope in conservation cemeteries. They offer dedicated green space in both urban and rural areas. They offer a chance to reintroduce native plants and animals to a region. They offer public trails, places for spiritual practice, places for classes and events — places where nature and mourning meet. Most importantly, they offer us, once again, a chance to just decompose in a hole in the ground. The soil, let me tell you, has missed us. I think for a lot of people, they're starting to get the sense that our current funeral industry isn't really working for them. For many of us, being sanitized and beautified just doesn't reflect us. It doesn't reflect what we stood for during our lives. Will changing the way we bury our dead solve climate change? No. But it will make bold moves in how we see ourselves as citizens of this planet. If we can die in a way that is more humble and self-aware, I believe that we stand a chance. Thank you. (Applause) |
Adventures of an asteroid hunter | {0: "Carrie Nugent is part of a team that uses NASA's NEOWISE telescope to search the skies for and catalog asteroids."} | TED2016 | I am holding something remarkably old. It is older than any human artifact, older than life on Earth, older than the continents and the oceans between them. This was formed over four billion years ago in the earliest days of the solar system while the planets were still forming. This rusty lump of nickel and iron may not appear special, but when it is cut open ... you can see that it is different from earthly metals. This pattern reveals metallic crystals that can only form out in space where molten metal can cool extremely slowly, a few degrees every million years. This was once part of a much larger object, one of millions left over after the planets formed. We call these objects asteroids. Asteroids are our oldest and most numerous cosmic neighbors. This graphic shows near-Earth asteroids orbiting around the Sun, shown in yellow, and swinging close to the Earth's orbit, shown in blue. The sizes of the Earth, Sun and asteroids have been greatly exaggerated so you can see them clearly. Teams of scientists across the globe are searching for these objects, discovering new ones every day, steadily mapping near-Earth space. Much of this work is funded by NASA. I think of the search for these asteroids as a giant public works project, but instead of building a highway, we're charting outer space, building an archive that will last for generations. These are the 1,556 near-Earth asteroids discovered just last year. And these are all of the known near-Earth asteroids, which at last count was 13,733. Each one has been imaged, cataloged and had its path around the Sun determined. Although it varies from asteroid to asteroid, the paths of most asteroids can be predicted for dozens of years. And the paths of some asteroids can be predicted with incredible precision. For example, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory predicted where the asteroid Toutatis was going to be four years in advance to within 30 kilometers. In those four years, Toutatis traveled 8.5 billion kilometers. That's a fractional precision of 0.000000004. (Laughter) Now, the reason I have this beautiful asteroid fragment is because, like all neighbors, asteroids sometimes drop by unexpectedly. (Laughter) Three years ago today, a small asteroid exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. That object was about 19 meters across, or about as big as a convenience store. Objects of this size hit the Earth every 50 years or so. 66 million years ago, a much larger object hit the Earth, causing a massive extinction. 75 percent of plant and animal species were lost, including, sadly, the dinosaurs. That object was about 10 kilometers across, and 10 kilometers is roughly the cruising altitude of a 747 jet. So the next time you're in an airplane, snag a window seat, look out and imagine a rock so enormous that resting on the ground, it just grazes your wingtip. It's so wide that it takes your plane one full minute to fly past it. That's the size of the asteroid that hit the Earth. It has only been within my lifetime that asteroids have been considered a credible threat to our planet. And since then, there's been a focused effort underway to discover and catalog these objects. I am lucky enough to be part of this effort. I'm part of a team of scientists that use NASA's NEOWISE telescope. Now, NEOWISE was not designed to find asteroids. It was designed to orbit the earth and look far beyond our solar system to seek out the coldest stars and the most luminous galaxies. And it did that very well for its designed lifetime of seven months. But today, six years later, it's still going. We've repurposed it to discover and study asteroids. And although it's a wonderful little space robot, these days it's kind of like a used car. The cryogen that used to refrigerate its sensors is long gone, so we joke that its air-conditioning is broken. It's got 920 million miles on the odometer, but it still runs great and reliably takes a photograph of the sky every 11 seconds. It's taken 23 photos since I began speaking to you. One of the reasons NEOWISE is so valuable is that it sees the sky in the thermal infrared. That means that instead of seeing the sunlight that asteroids reflect, NEOWISE sees the heat that they emit. This is a vital capability since some asteroids are as dark as coal and can be difficult or impossible to spot with other telescopes. But all asteroids, light or dark, shine brightly for NEOWISE. Astronomers are using every technique at their disposal to discover and study asteroids. In 2010, a historic milestone was reached. The community, together, discovered over 90 percent of asteroids bigger than one kilometer across — objects capable of massive destruction to Earth. But the job's not done yet. An object 140 meters or bigger could decimate a medium-sized country. So far, we've only found 25 percent of those. We must keep searching the sky for near-Earth asteroids. We are the only species able to understand calculus or build telescopes. We know how to find these objects. This is our responsibility. If we found a hazardous asteroid with significant early warning, we could nudge it out of the way. Unlike earthquakes, hurricanes or volcanic eruptions, an asteroid impact can be precisely predicted and prevented. What we need to do now is map near-Earth space. We must keep searching the sky. Thank you. (Applause) |
What young women believe about their own sexual pleasure | {0: 'In her groundbreaking book Girls & Sex, Peggy Orenstein explores the changing landscape of modern sexual expectations and its troubling impact on adolescents and young women.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | For several years now, we've been engaged in a national debate about sexual assault on campus. No question — it's crucial that young people understand the ground rules for consent, but that's where the conversation about sex is ending. And in that vacuum of information the media and the Internet — that new digital street corner — are educating our kids for us. If we truly want young people to engage safely, ethically, and yes, enjoyably, it's time to have open honest discussion about what happens after "yes," and that includes breaking the biggest taboo of all and talking to young people about women's capacity for and entitlement to sexual pleasure. Yeah. (Applause) Come on, ladies. (Applause) I spent three years talking to girls ages 15 to 20 about their attitudes and experience of sex. And what I found was that while young women may feel entitled to engage in sexual behavior, they don't necessarily feel entitled to enjoy it. Take this sophomore at the Ivy League college who told me, "I come from a long line of smart, strong women. My grandmother was a firecracker, my mom is a professional, my sister and I are loud, and that's our form of feminine power." She then proceeded to describe her sex life to me: a series of one-off hookups, starting when she was 13, that were ... not especially responsible, not especially reciprocal and not especially enjoyable. She shrugged. "I guess we girls are just socialized to be these docile creatures who don't express our wants or needs." "Wait a minute," I replied. "Didn't you just tell me what a smart, strong woman you are?" She hemmed and hawed. "I guess," she finally said, "no one told me that that smart, strong image applies to sex." I should probably say right up top that despite the hype, teenagers are not engaging in intercourse more often or at a younger age than they were 25 years ago. They are, however, engaging in other behavior. And when we ignore that, when we label that as "not sex," that opens the door to risky behavior and disrespect. That's particularly true of oral sex, which teenagers consider to be less intimate than intercourse. Girls would tell me, "it's no big deal," like they'd all read the same instruction manual — at least if boys were on the receiving end. Young women have lots of reasons for participating. It made them feel desired; it was a way to boost social status. Sometimes, it was a way to get out of an uncomfortable situation. As a freshman at a West Coast college said to me, "A girl will give a guy a blow job at the end of the night because she doesn't want to have sex with him, and he expects to be satisfied. So, if I want him to leave and I don't want anything to happen ... " I heard so many stories of girls performing one-sided oral sex that I started asking, "What if every time you were alone with a guy, he told you to get him a glass of water from the kitchen, and he never got you a glass of water — or if he did, it was like ... 'you want me to uh ...?'" You know, totally begrudging. You wouldn't stand for it. But it wasn't always that boys didn't want to. It was that girls didn't want them to. Girls expressed a sense of shame around their genitals. A sense that they were simultaneously icky and sacred. Women's feelings about their genitals have been directly linked to their enjoyment of sex. Yet, Debby Herbenick, a researcher at Indiana University, believes that girls' genital self-image is under siege, with more pressure than ever to see them as unacceptable in their natural state. According to research, about three-quarters of college women remove their pubic hair — all of it — at least on occasion, and more than half do so regularly. Girls would tell me that hair removal made them feel cleaner, that it was a personal choice. Though, I kind of wondered if left alone on a desert island, if this was how they would choose to spend their time. (Laughter) And when I pushed further, a darker motivation emerged: avoiding humiliation. "Guys act like they would be disgusted by it," one young woman told me. "No one wants to be talked about like that." The rising pubic hair removal reminded me of the 1920s, when women first started regularly shaving their armpits and their legs. That's when flapper dresses came into style, and women's limbs were suddenly visible, open to public scrutiny. There's a way that I think that this too is a sign. That a girl's most intimate part is open to public scrutiny, open to critique, to becoming more about how it looks to someone else than how it feels to her. The shaving trend has sparked another rise in labiaplasty. Labiaplasty, which is the trimming of the inner and outer labia, is the fastest-growing cosmetic surgery among teenage girls. It rose 80 percent between 2014 and 2015, and whereas girls under 18 comprise two percent of all cosmetic surgeries, they are five percent of labiaplasty. The most sought-after look, incidentally, in which the outer labia appear fused like a clam shell, is called ... wait for it ... "The Barbie." (Groan) I trust I don't have to tell you that Barbie is a) made of plastic and b) has no genitalia. (Laughter) The labiaplasty trend has become so worrisome that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has issued a statement on the procedure, which is rarely medically indicated, has not been proven safe and whose side effects include scarring, numbness, pain and diminished sexual sensation. Now, admittedly, and blessedly, the number of girls involved is still quite small, but you could see them as canaries in a coal mine, telling us something important about the way girls see their bodies. Sara McClelland, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, coined what is my favorite phrase ever in talking about all of this: "Intimate justice." That's the idea that sex has political, as well as personal implications, just like, who does the dishes in your house, or who vacuums the rug. And it raises similar issues about inequality, about economic disparity, violence, physical and mental health. Intimate justice asks us to consider who is entitled to engage in an experience. Who is entitled to enjoy it? Who is the primary beneficiary? And how does each partner define "good enough"? Honestly, I think those questions are tricky and sometimes traumatic for adult women to confront, but when we're talking about girls, I just kept coming back to the idea that their early sexual experience shouldn't have to be something that they get over. In her work, McClelland found that young women were more likely than young men to use their partner's pleasure as a measure of their satisfaction. So they'd say things like, "If he's sexually satisfied, then I'm sexually satisfied." Young men were more likely to measure their satisfaction by their own orgasm. Young women also defined bad sex differently. In the largest ever survey ever conducted on American sexual behavior, they reported pain in their sexual encounters 30 percent of the time. They also used words like "depressing," "humiliating," "degrading." The young men never used that language. So when young women report sexual satisfaction levels that are equal to or greater than young men's — and they do in research — that can be deceptive. If a girl goes into an encounter hoping that it won't hurt, wanting to feel close to her partner and expecting him to have an orgasm, she'll be satisfied if those criteria are met. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to feel close to your partner, or wanting him to be happy, and orgasm isn't the only measure of an experience ... but absence of pain — that's a very low bar for your own sexual fulfillment. Listening to all of this and thinking about it, I began to realize that we performed a kind of psychological clitoridectomy on American girls. Starting in infancy, parents of baby boys are more likely to name all their body parts, at least they'll say, "here's your pee-pee." Parents of baby girls go right from navel to knees, and they leave this whole situation in here unnamed. (Laughter) There's no better way to make something unspeakable than not to name it. Then kids go into their puberty education classes and they learn that boys have erections and ejaculations, and girls have ... periods and unwanted pregnancy. And they see that internal diagram of a woman's reproductive system — you know, the one that looks kind of like a steer head — (Laughter) And it always grays out between the legs. So we never say vulva, we certainly never say clitoris. No surprise, fewer than half of teenage girls age 14 to 17 have ever masturbated. And then they go into their partnered experience and we expect that somehow they'll think sex is about them, that they'll be able to articulate their needs, their desires, their limits. It's unrealistic. Here's something, though. Girls' investment in their partner's pleasure remains regardless of the gender of the partner. So in same-sex encounters, the orgasm gap disappears. And young women climax at the same rate as men. Lesbian and bisexual girls would tell me that they felt liberated to get off the script — free to create an encounter that worked for them. Gay girls also challenged the idea of first intercourse as the definition of virginity. Not because intercourse isn't a big deal, but it's worth questioning why we consider this one act, which most girls associate with discomfort or pain, to be the line in the sand of sexual adulthood — so much more meaningful, so much more transformative than anything else. And it's worth considering how this is serving girls; whether it's keeping them safer from disease, coercion, betrayal, assault. Whether it's encouraging mutuality and caring; what it means about the way they see other sex acts; whether it's giving them more control over and joy in their experience, and what it means about gay teens, who can have multiple sex partners without heterosexual intercourse. So I asked a gay girl that I met, "How'd you know you weren't a virgin anymore?" She said she had to Google it. (Laughter) And Google wasn't sure. (Laughter) She finally decided that she wasn't a virgin anymore after she'd had her first orgasm with a partner. And I thought — whoa. What if just for a second we imagined that was the definition? Again, not because intercourse isn't a big deal — of course it is — but it isn't the only big deal, and rather than thinking about sex as a race to a goal, this helps us reconceptualize it as a pool of experiences that include warmth, affection, arousal, desire, touch, intimacy. And it's worth asking young people: who's really the more sexually experienced person? The one who makes out with a partner for three hours and experiments with sensual tension and communication, or the one who gets wasted at a party and hooks up with a random in order to dump their "virginity" before they get to college? The only way that shift in thinking can happen though is if we talk to young people more about sex — if we normalize those discussions, integrating them into everyday life, talking about those intimate acts in a different way — the way we mostly have changed in the way that we talk about women in the public realm. Consider a survey of 300 randomly chosen girls from a Dutch and an American university, two similar universities, talking about their early experience of sex. The Dutch girls embodied everything we say we want from our girls. They had fewer negative consequences, like disease, pregnancy, regret — more positive outcomes like being able to communicate with their partner, who they said they knew very well; preparing for the experience responsibly; enjoying themselves. What was their secret? The Dutch girls said that their doctors, teachers and parents talked to them candidly, from an early age, about sex, pleasure and the importance of mutual trust. What's more, while American parents weren't necessarily less comfortable talking about sex, we tend to frame those conversations entirely in terms or risk and danger, whereas Dutch parents talk about balancing responsibility and joy. I have to tell you, as a parent myself, that hit me hard, because I know, had I not delved into that research, I would have talked to my own child about contraception, about disease protection, about consent because I'm a modern parent, and I would have thought ... job well done. Now I know that's not enough. I also know what I hope for for our girls. I want them to see sexuality as a source of self-knowledge, creativity and communication, despite its potential risks. I want them to be able to revel in their bodies' sensuality without being reduced to it. I want them to be able to ask for what they want in bed, and to get it. I want them to be safe from unwanted pregnancy, disease, cruelty, dehumanization, violence. If they are assaulted, I want them to have recourse from their schools, their employers, the courts. It's a lot to ask, but it's not too much. As parents, teachers, advocates and activists, we have raised a generation of girls to have a voice, to expect egalitarian treatment in the home, in the classroom, in the workplace. Now it's time to demand that intimate justice in their personal lives as well. Thank you. (Applause) |
Should we simplify spelling? | {0: 'Karina Galperin studies the culture, language and literature of early modern Iberia.'} | TEDxRiodelaPlata | We lost a lot of time at school learning spelling. Kids are still losing a lot of time at school with spelling. That's why I want to share a question with you: Do we need new spelling rules? I believe that yes, we do. Or even better, I think we need to simplify the ones we already have. Neither the question nor the answer are new in the Spanish language. They have been bouncing around from century to century since 1492, when in the first grammar guide of the Spanish language, Antonio de Nebrija, set a clear and simple principle for our spelling: "... thus, we have to write words as we pronounce them, and pronounce words as we write them." Each sound was to correspond to one letter, each letter was to represent a single sound, and those which did not represent any sound should be removed. This approach, the phonetic approach, which says we have to write words as we pronounce them, both is and isn't at the root of spelling as we practice it today. It is, because the Spanish language, in contrast to English, French or others, always strongly resisted writing words too differently to how we pronounce them. But the phonetic approach is also absent today, because when, in the 18th century, we decided how we would standardize our writing, there was another approach which guided a good part of the decisions. It was the etymological approach, the one that says we have to write words according to how they were written in their original language, in Latin, in Greek. That's how we ended up with silent H's, which we write but don't pronounce. That's how we have B's and V's that, contrary to what many people believe, were never differentiated in Spanish pronunciation. That's how we wound up with G's, that are sometimes aspirated, as in "gente," and other times unaspirated, as in "gato." That's how we ended up with C's, S's and Z's, three letters that in some places correspond to one sound, and in others, to two, but nowhere to three. I'm not here to tell you anything you don't know from your own experience. We all went to school, we all invested big amounts of learning time, big amounts of pliant, childlike brain time in dictation, in the memorization of spelling rules filled, nevertheless, with exceptions. We were told in many ways, implicitly and explicitly, that in spelling, something fundamental to our upbringing was at stake. Yet, I have the feeling that teachers didn't ask themselves why it was so important. In fact, they didn't ask themselves a previous question: What is the purpose of spelling? What do we need spelling for? And the truth is, when someone asks themselves this question, the answer is much simpler and less momentous than we'd usually believe. We use spelling to unify the way we write, so we can all write the same way, making it easier for us to understand when we read to each other. But unlike in other aspects of language such as punctuation, in spelling, there's no individual expression involved. In punctuation, there is. With punctuation, I can choose to change the meaning of a phrase. With punctuation, I can impose a particular rhythm to what I am writing, but not with spelling. When it comes to spelling, it's either wrong or right, according to whether it conforms or not to the current rules. But then, wouldn't it be more sensible to simplify the current rules so it would be easier to teach, learn and use spelling correctly? Wouldn't it be more sensible to simplify the current rules so that all the time we devote today to teaching spelling, we could devote to other language issues whose complexities do, in fact, deserve the time and effort? What I propose is not to abolish spelling, and have everyone write however they want. Language is a tool of common usage, and so I believe it's fundamental that we use it following common criteria. But I also find it fundamental that those common criteria be as simple as possible, especially because if we simplify our spelling, we're not leveling it down; when spelling is simplified, the quality of the language doesn't suffer at all. I work every day with Spanish Golden Age literature, I read Garcilaso, Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo, who sometimes write "hombre" without H, sometimes write "escribir" with V, and it's absolutely clear to me that the difference between those texts and ours is one of convention, or rather, a lack of convention during their time. But it's not a difference of quality. But let me go back to the masters, because they're key characters in this story. Earlier, I mentioned this slightly thoughtless insistence with which teachers pester and pester us over spelling. But the truth is, things being as they are, this makes perfect sense. In our society, spelling serves as an index of privilege, separating the cultured from the brute, the educated from the ignorant, independent of the content that's being written. One can get or not get a job because of an H that one put or did not. One can become an object of public ridicule because of a misplaced B. Therefore, in this context, of course, it makes sense to dedicate all this time to spelling. But we shouldn't forget that throughout the history of our language, it has always been teachers or people involved in the early learning of language who promoted spelling reforms, who realized that in our spelling there was often an obstacle to the transmission of knowledge. In our case, for example, Sarmiento, together with Andrés Bello, spearheaded the biggest spelling reform to take place in the Spanish language: the mid-19th century Chilean reform. Then, why not take over the task of those teachers and start making progress in our spelling? Here, in this intimate group of 10,000, I'd like to bring to the table some changes that I find reasonable to start discussing. Let's remove the silent H. In places where we write an H but pronounce nothing, let's not write anything. (Applause) It's hard for me to imagine what sentimental attachment can justify to someone all the hassle caused by the silent H. B and V, as we said before, were never differentiated in the Spanish language — (Applause) Let's choose one; it could be either. We can discuss it, talk it over. Everyone will have their preferences and can make their arguments. Let's keep one, remove the other. G and J, let's separate their roles. G should keep the unaspirated sound, like in "gato," "mago," and "águila," and J should keep the aspirated sound, as in "jarabe," "jirafa," "gente," "argentino." The case of C, S and Z is interesting, because it shows that the phonetic approach must be a guide, but it can't be an absolute principle. In some cases, the differences in pronunciation must be addressed. As I said before, C, S and Z, in some places, correspond to one sound, in others to two. If we go from three letters to two, we're all better off. To some, these changes may seem a bit drastic. They're really not. The Royal Spanish Academy, all of language academies, also believes that spelling should be progressively modified; that language is linked to history, tradition and custom, but that at the same time, it is a practical everyday tool and that sometimes this attachment to history, tradition and custom becomes an obstacle for its current usage. Indeed, this explains the fact that our language, much more than the others we are geographically close to, has been historically modifying itself based on us, for example, we went from "ortographia" to "ortografía," from "theatro" to "teatro," from "quantidad" to "cantidad," from "symbolo" to "símbolo." And some silent H's are slowly being stealthily removed: in the Dictionary of the Royal Academy, "arpa" and "armonía" can be written with or without an H. And everybody is OK. I also believe that this is a particularly appropriate moment to have this discussion. It's always said that language changes spontaneously, from the bottom up, that its users are the ones who incorporate new words and who introduce grammatical changes, and that the authority — in some places an academy, in others a dictionary, in others a ministry — accepts and incorporates them long after the fact. This is true only for some levels of language. It is true on the lexical level, the level of words. It is less true on the grammatical level, and I would almost say it is not true for the spelling level, that has historically changed from the top down. Institutions have always been the ones to establish the rules and propose changes. Why do I say this is a particularly appropriate moment? Until today, writing always had a much more restricted and private use than speech. But in our time, the age of social networks, this is going through a revolutionary change. Never before have people written so much; never before have people written for so many others to see. And in these social networks, for the first time, we're seeing innovative uses of spelling on a large scale, where even more-than-educated people with impeccable spelling, when using social networks, behave a lot like the majority of users of social networks behave. That is to say, they slack on spell-checking and prioritize speed and efficacy in communication. For now, on social networks, we see chaotic, individual usages. But I think we have to pay attention to them, because they're probably telling us that an era that designates a new place for writing seeks new criteria for that writing. I think we'd be wrong to reject them, to discard them, because we identify them as symptoms of the cultural decay of our times. No, I believe we have to observe them, organize them and channel them within guidelines that better correspond to the needs of our times. I can anticipate some objections. There will be those who'll say that if we simplify spelling we'll lose etymology. Strictly speaking, if we wanted to preserve etymology, it would go beyond just spelling. We'd also have to learn Latin, Greek, Arabic. With simplified spelling, we would normalize etymology in the same place we do now: in etymological dictionaries. A second objection will come from those who say: "If we simplify spelling, we'll stop distinguishing between words that differ in just one letter." That is true, but it's not a problem. Our language has homonyms, words with more than one meaning, yet we don't confuse the "banco" where we sit with the "banco" where we deposit money, or the "traje" that we wear with the things we "trajimos." In the vast majority of situations, context dispels any confusion. But there's a third objection. To me, it's the most understandable, even the most moving. It's the people who'll say: "I don't want to change. I was brought up like this, I got used to doing it this way, when I read a written word in simplified spelling, my eyes hurt." (Laughter) This objection is, in part, in all of us. What do I think we should do? The same thing that's always done in these cases: changes are made looking forward; children are taught the new rules, those of us who don't want to adapt can write the way we're used to writing, and hopefully, time will cement the new rules in place. The success of every spelling reform that affects deeply rooted habits lies in caution, agreement, gradualism and tolerance. At the same time, can't allow the attachment to old customs impede us from moving forward. The best tribute we can pay to the past is to improve upon what it's given us. So I believe that we must reach an agreement, that academies must reach an agreement, and purge from our spelling rules all the habits we practice just for the sake of tradition, even if they are useless now. I'm convinced that if we do that in the humble but extremely important realm of language, we'll be leaving a better future to the next generations. (Applause) |
Inside America's dead shopping malls | {0: 'Dan Bell films urban decay.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | In the last couple of years, I have produced what I call "The Dead Mall Series," 32 short films and counting about dead malls. Now, for those of you who are not familiar with what a dead mall is, it's basically a shopping mall that has fallen into hard times. So it either has few shops and fewer shoppers, or it's abandoned and crumbling into ruin. No sale at Penny's. (Laughter) I started producing this series in early 2015 after going through kind of a dark period in my life where I just didn't want to create films anymore. I put my camera away and I just stopped. So in 2015, I decided to make a short film about the Owings Mills Mall. Owings Mills Mall opened in 1986. I should know because I was there on opening day. I was there with my family, along with every other family in Baltimore, and you had to drive around for 45 minutes just to find a parking spot. So if you can imagine, that's not happening at the malls today. My first mall job that I had as a teenager was at a sporting goods store called Herman's World of Sports. Maybe you remember. (Singing) Herman's World of Sports. You guys remember that? (Laughter) Yeah, so I worked in a lady's shoe store. I worked in a leather goods store, and I also worked in a video store, and not being one who was very fond of the retail arts — (Laughter) I got fired from every single job. (Laughter) In between these low-paying retail jobs, I did what any normal teenager did in the 1990s. I shoplifted. I'm just kidding. I hung out with my friends at the mall. (Laughter) Everyone's like, "Oh my God, what kind of talk is this?" (Laughter) Hanging out at the mall could be fun, but it could be really lame, too, like sharing a cigarette with a 40-year-old unemployed mall rat who has put on black lipstick for the night while you're on your break from your crappy minimum wage job. As I stand here today, Owings Mills has been gutted and it's ready for the wrecking ball. The last time I was there, it was in the evening, and it was about three days before they closed the mall for good. And you kind of felt — they never announced the mall was closing, but you had this sort of feeling, this ominous feeling, that something big was going to happen, like it was the end of the road. It was a very creepy walk through the mall. Let me show you. (Music) So when I started producing "The Dead Mall Series," I put the videos up onto YouTube, and while I thought they were interesting, frankly I didn't think others would share the enthusiasm for such a drab and depressing topic. But apparently I was wrong, because a lot of people started to comment. And at first the comments were like — basically like, "Oh my God, that's the mall from my childhood. What happened?" And then I would get comments from people who were like, "There's a dead mall in my town. You should come and film it." So I started to travel around the mid-Atlantic region filming these dead malls. Some were open. Some were abandoned. It was kind of always hard to get into the ones that were abandoned, but I somehow always found a way in. (Laughter) The malls that are still open, they always do this weird thing — like the dead malls. They'll have three stores left, but they try to spruce it up to make it appear like things are on the up-and-up. For example, you'll have an empty store and they bring the gate down. So at Owings Mills, for example, they put this tarp over the gate. Right? And it's got a stock photo of a woman who is so happy and she's holding a blouse, and she's like — (Laughter) And then there's a guy standing next to her, with, like, an espresso cup, and he's like — (Laughter) And it says, "What brings you today?" (Laughter) I wanted to be scared and depressed. Thank you. So the comments just kept pouring in on the videos, from all over the country, and then all over the world. And I started to think, this could really be something, but I had to get creative, because I'm like, how long are people going to sit and watch me waddling through an empty mall? (Laughter) So the original episodes I filmed with an iPhone. So I'd walk through the mall with an iPhone, and, you know. Like that. (Laughter) And security — because malls, they don't like photography — so the security would come up and be like, "Put that away," and I'm like, "OK." So I had to get creative and sneaky, so I started using a hidden camera and different techniques to get the footage that I needed, and basically what I wanted to do was make the video like it was a first-person experience, like you are sitting — put your headphones on watching the screen — it's like, you're there in the video, like a video game, basically. I also started to use music, collaborating with artists who create music called vaporwave. And vaporwave is a music genre that emerged in the early 2010s among internet communities. Here's an example. (Music) That's by an artist named Disconscious from an album he did called "Hologram Plaza." So if you look that up, you can hear more of those tunes. Vaporwave is more than an art form. It's like a movement. It's nihilistic, it's angsty, but it's somehow comforting. The whole aesthetic is a way of dealing with things you can't do anything about, like no jobs, or sitting in your parents' basement eating ramen noodles. Vaporwave came out of this generation's desire to express their hopelessness, the same way that the pre-internet generation did sitting around in the food court. One of my favorite malls I've been to is in Corpus Christi, and it's called the Sunrise Mall. When I was a kid, my favorite thing to do was watch movies, and I used to watch movies over and over and over again. And one of my favorite films was "The Legend of Billie Jean." Now, for those of you who have seen "The Legend of Billie Jean," you'll know that it's a great film. I love it. And Helen Slater and Christian Slater — and if you didn't know, they are not related. Many people thought that they were brother and sister. They're not. But anyway, Sunrise Mall was used in the film as a filming location. The mall is exactly the same as it was in 1984. We're talking 32 years later. Let me show you. (Video) Dan Bell: And here's Billie Jean running across the fountain, being chased by Hubie Pyatt's friends. And she jumps over here. And you can see the shot right here is what it looks like today. It's pretty incredible. I mean, honestly, it's exactly the same. And there they are falling in the fountain, and she runs up the stairs. This is a nice shot of the whole thing here. Dan Bell: I love that so much. (Laughter) I always think in my head, if I owned a dead mall — why don't they embrace their vintage look? Put in a bar, like, put vegan food in the food court and invite millennials and hipsters to come and drink and eat, and I guarantee you within three weeks H&M and Levi's will be banging on the door trying to get space. I don't know why they don't do this, but apparently, it's only in my mind, it goes all day. (Laughter) Anyway, in closing — (Laughter) When they first asked me to do this talk, I said, "Do you have the right person?" (Laughter) These talks are supposed to be kind of inspiring and — (Laughter) I remembered something, though. I put my camera down three or four years ago, and it took going to these malls for me to be inspired again. And to see my audience and people from all over the world writing me and saying, "God, I love your videos," is incredible. I don't know how to even explain it, as an artist, how fulfilling that is. If you would have told me a year ago that I would be standing on this stage talking to all of you wonderful people, I would have never believed it. I am humbled and so appreciative. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Lifelike simulations that make real-life surgery safer | {0: "Dr. Peter Weinstock is an Intensive Care Unit physician and Director of the Pediatric Simulator Program at Boston Children's Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Peter and his team fuse medicine with state of the art special effects, puppeteering and 3D printing technologies to create lifelike simulations of complex surgeries."} | TEDxNatick | What if I told you there was a new technology that, when placed in the hands of doctors and nurses, improved outcomes for children and adults, patients of all ages; reduced pain and suffering, reduced time in the operating rooms, reduced anesthetic times, had the ultimate dose-response curve that the more you did it, the better it benefitted patients? Here's a kicker: it has no side effects, and it's available no matter where care is delivered. I can tell you as an ICU doctor at Boston Children's Hospital, this would be a game changer for me. That technology is lifelike rehearsal. This lifelike rehearsal is being delivered through medical simulation. I thought I would start with a case, just to really describe the challenge ahead, and why this technology is not just going to improve health care but why it's critical to health care. This is a child that's born, young girl. "Day of life zero," we call it, the first day of life, just born into the world. And just as she's being born, we notice very quickly that she is deteriorating. Her heart rate is going up, her blood pressure is going down, she's breathing very, very fast. And the reason for this is displayed in this chest X-ray. That's called a babygram, a full X-ray of a child's body, a little infant's body. As you look on the top side of this, that's where the heart and lungs are supposed to be. As you look at the bottom end, that's where the abdomen is, and that's where the intestines are supposed to be. And you can see how there's sort of that translucent area that made its way up into the right side of this child's chest. And those are the intestines — in the wrong place. As a result, they're pushing on the lungs and making it very difficult for this poor baby to breathe. The fix for this problem is to take this child immediately to the operating room, bring those intestines back into the abdomen, let the lungs expand and allow this child to breathe again. But before she can go to the operating room, she must get whisked away to the ICU, where I work. I work with surgical teams. We gather around her, and we place this child on heart-lung bypass. We put her to sleep, we make a tiny little incision in the neck, we place catheters into the major vessels of the neck — and I can tell you that these vessels are about the size of a pen, the tip of a pen — and then we have blood drawn from the body, we bring it through a machine, it gets oxygenated, and it goes back into the body. We save her life, and get her safely to the operating room. Here's the problem: these disorders — what is known is congenital diaphragmatic hernia — this hole in the diaphragm that has allowed these intestines to sneak up — these disorders are rare. Even in the best hands in the world, there is still a challenge to get the volume — the natural volume of these patients — in order to get our expertise curve at 100 percent. They just don't present that often. So how do you make the rare common? Here's the other problem: in the health care system that I trained for over 20 years, what currently exists, the model of training is called the apprenticeship model. It's been around for centuries. It's based on this idea that you see a surgery maybe once, maybe several times, you then go do that surgery, and then ultimately you teach that surgery to the next generation. And implicit in this model — I don't need to tell you this — is that we practice on the very patients that we are delivering care to. That's a problem. I think there's a better approach. Medicine may very well be the last high-stakes industry that does not practice prior to game time. I want to describe to you a better approach through medical simulation. Well, the first thing we did is we went to other high-stakes industries that had been using this type of methodology for decades. This is nuclear power. Nuclear power runs scenarios on a regular basis in order to practice what they hope will never occur. And as we're all very familiar, the airline industry — we all get on planes now, comforted by the idea that pilots and crews have trained on simulators much like these, training on scenarios that we hope will never occur, but we know if they did, they would be prepared for the worst. In fact, the airline industry has gone as far as to create fuselages of simulation environments, because of the importance of the team coming together. This is an evacuation drill simulator. So again, if that ever were to happen, these rare, rare events, they're ready to act on the drop of a dime. I guess the most compelling for me in some ways is the sports industry — arguably high stakes. You think about a baseball team: baseball players practice. I think it's a beautiful example of progressive training. The first thing they do is go out to spring training. They go to a spring training camp, perhaps a simulator in baseball. They're not on the real field, but they're on a simulated field, and they're playing in the pregame season. Then they make their way to the field during the season games, and what's the first thing they do before they start the game? They go into the batting cage and do batting practice for hours, having different types of pitches being thrown at them, hitting ball after ball as they limber their muscles, getting ready for the game itself. And here's the most phenomenal part of this, and for all of you who watch any sport event, you will see this phenomenon happen. The batter gets into the batter's box, the pitcher gets ready to pitch. Right before the pitch is thrown, what does that batter do? The batter steps out of the box and takes a practice swing. He wouldn't do it any other way. I want to talk to you about how we're building practice swings like this in medicine. We are building batting cages for the patients that we care about at Boston Children's. I want to use this case that we recently built. It's the case of a four-year-old who had a progressively enlarging head, and as a result, had loss of developmental milestones, neurologic milestones, and the reason for this problem is here — it's called hydrocephalus. So, a quick study in neurosurgery. There's the brain, and you can see the cranium surrounding the brain. What surrounds the brain, between the brain and cranium, is something called cerebrospinal fluid or fluid, which acts as a shock absorber. In your heads right now, there is cerebrospinal fluid just bathing your brains and making its way around. It's produced in one area and flows through, and then is re-exchanged. And this beautiful flow pattern occurs for all of us. But unfortunately in some children, there's a blockage of this flow pattern, much like a traffic jam. As a result, the fluid accumulates, and the brain is pushed aside. It has difficulty growing. As a result, the child loses neurologic milestones. This is a devastating disease in children. The cure for this is surgery. The traditional surgery is to take a bit of the cranium off, a bit of the skull, drain this fluid out, stick a drain in place, and then eventually bring this drain internal to the body. Big operation. But some great news is that advances in neurosurgical care have allowed us to develop minimally invasive approaches to this surgery. Through a small pinhole, a camera can be inserted, led into the deep brain structure, and cause a little hole in a membrane that allows all that fluid to drain, much like it would in a sink. All of a sudden, the brain is no longer under pressure, can re-expand and we cure the child through a single-hole incision. But here's the problem: hydrocephalus is relatively rare. And there are no good training methods to get really good at getting this scope to the right place. But surgeons have been quite creative about this, even our own. And they've come up with training models. Here's the current training model. (Laughter) I kid you not. This is a red pepper, not made in Hollywood; it's real red pepper. And what surgeons do is they stick a scope into the pepper, and they do what is called a "seedectomy." (Laughter) They use this scope to remove seeds using a little tweezer. And that is a way to get under their belts the rudimentary components of doing this surgery. Then they head right into the apprenticeship model, seeing many of them as they present themselves, then doing it, and then teaching it — waiting for these patients to arrive. We can do a lot better. We are manufacturing reproductions of children in order for surgeons and surgical teams to rehearse in the most relevant possible ways. Let me show you this. Here's my team in what's called the SIM Engineering Division of the Simulator Program. This is an amazing team of individuals. They are mechanical engineers; you're seeing here, illustrators. They take primary data from CT scans and MRIs, translate it into digital information, animate it, put it together into the components of the child itself, surface-scan elements of the child that have been casted as needed, depending on the surgery itself, and then take this digital data and be able to output it on state-of-the-art, three-dimensional printing devices that allow us to print the components exactly to the micron detail of what the child's anatomy will look like. You can see here, the skull of this child being printed in the hours before we performed this surgery. But we could not do this work without our dear friends on the West Coast in Hollywood, California. These are individuals that are incredibly talented at being able to recreate reality. It was not a long leap for us. The more we got into this field, the more it became clear to us that we are doing cinematography. We're doing filmmaking, it's just that the actors are not actors. They're real doctors and nurses. So these are some photos of our dear friends at Fractured FX in Hollywood California, an Emmy-Award-winning special effects firm. This is Justin Raleigh and his group — this is not one of our patients — (Laughter) but kind of the exquisite work that these individuals do. We have now collaborated and fused our experience, bringing their group to Boston Children's Hospital, sending our group out to Hollywood, California and exchanging around this to be able to develop these type of simulators. What I'm about to show you is a reproduction of this child. You'll notice here that every hair on the child's head is reproduced. And in fact, this is also that reproduced child — and I apologize for any queasy stomachs, but that is a reproduction and simulation of the child they're about to operate on. Here's that membrane we had talked about, the inside of this child's brain. What you're going to be seeing here is, on one side, the actual patient, and on the other side, the simulator. As I mentioned, a scope, a little camera, needs to make its way down, and you're seeing that here. It needs to make a small hole in this membrane and allow this fluid to seep out. I won't do a quiz show to see who thinks which side is which, but on the right is the simulator. So surgeons can now produce training opportunities, do these surgeries as many times as they want, to their heart's content, until they feel comfortable. And then, and only then, bring the child into the operating room. But we don't stop here. We know that a key step to this is not just the skill itself, but combining that skill with a team who's going to deliver that care. Now we turn to Formula One. And here is an example of a technician putting on a tire and doing that time and time again on this car. But that is very quickly going to be incorporated within team-training experiences, now as a full team orchestrating the exchange of tires and getting this car back on the speedway. We've done that step in health care, so now what you're about to see is a simulated operation. We've taken the simulator I just described to you, we've brought it into the operating room at Boston Children's Hospital, and these individuals — these native teams, operative teams — are doing the surgery before the surgery. Operate twice; cut once. Let me show that to you. (Video) Surgical team member 1: You want the head down or head up? STM 2: Can you lower it down to 10? STM 3: And then lower the whole table down a little bit? STM 4: Table coming down. STM 3: All right, this is behaving like a vessel. Could we have the scissors back, please? STM 5: I'm taking my gloves, 8 to 8 1/2, all right? I'll be right in. STM 6: Great! Thank you. Peter Weinstock: It's really amazing. The second step to this, which is critical, is we take these teams out immediately and debrief them. We use the same technologies that are used in Lean and Six Sigma in the military, and we bring them out and talk about what went right, but more importantly, we talk about what didn't go well, and how we're going to fix it. Then we bring them right back in and do it again. Deliberative batting practice in the moments when it matters most. Let's go back to this case now. Same child, but now let me describe how we care for this child at Boston Children's Hospital. This child was born at three o'clock in the morning. At two o'clock in the morning, we assembled the team, and took the reproduced anatomy that we would gain out of scans and images, and brought that team to the virtual bedside, to a simulated bedside — the same team that's going to operate on this child in the hours ahead — and we have them do the procedure. Let me show you a moment of this. This is not a real incision. And the baby has not yet been born. Imagine this. So now the conversations that I have with families in the intensive care unit at Boston Children's Hospital are totally different. Imagine this conversation: "Not only do we take care of this disorder frequently in our ICU, and not only have we done surgeries like the surgery we're going to do on your child, but we have done your child's surgery. And we did it two hours ago. And we did it 10 times. And now we're prepared to take them back to the operating room." So a new technology in health care: lifelike rehearsal. Practicing prior to game time. Thank you. (Applause) |
Asking for help is a strength, not a weakness | {0: 'Michele L. Sullivan is known for her sustainable and collaborative approach to philanthropic investing.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | We all have milestones in life that we remember so vividly. The first one for me was when I was entering kindergarten. My big brother was in school, and by golly, it was my time. And I went trottin' down that hallway. I was so excited, I almost wet myself. And I go to the door, and there was the teacher with a warm welcome, and she took me into the classroom, showed me my little cubbyhole — we all remember those little cubbyholes, don't we — and we put our stuff in there. And then she said, "Go over to the circle and play with the kids until class starts." So I went over there and plopped down like I owned the place, and I'm playing, and all of a sudden, the boy next to me, he was wearing a white shirt with blue shorts. I remember it like it was yesterday. Suddenly he stopped playing and he said, "Why are you so short?" And I just kept playing. I didn't think he was talking to me. (Laughter) And in a louder voice, he said, "Hey, why are you so short?" So I looked up and I said, "What are you talking about? Let's just play. We're happy. I've been waiting for this." And so we played, and about a minute later, the girl next to him, in a white shirt and a pink skirt, stood up, put her hands on her hips, and said, "Yeah, why do you look so different?" And I went, "What are you talking about? I don't look different. I'm not short. Again, let's just play." About this time, I looked all around the circle I was in, and all the kids had stopped playing and they were all looking at me. And I'm thinking — in today's language, it would be "OMG" or "WTF." (Laughter) What just happened? So all the confidence that I went in with that morning was withering away as the morning went on and the questions kept coming. And at the end of the morning, before I went home, the teacher had us in a circle, and I actually found myself outside of the circle. I couldn't look at anybody. I could not understand what just happened. And over the next few years, I hated to go out in public. I felt every stare, every giggle, every pointed finger, not the finger, but every pointed finger, and I hated it. I would hide behind my parents' legs like nobody could see me. And as a child, you can't understand another child's curiosity, nor an adult's ignorance. It became very apparent to me that the real world was not built for someone of my size, both literally or figuratively. And so I have no anonymity, as you can probably tell, and while you can see my size, we all go through many challenges through our lifetime. And some you can see, like mine. Most you can't. You can't tell if someone's dealing with a mental illness, or they're struggling with their gender identity, they're caring for an aging parent, they're having financial difficulty. You can't see that kind of stuff. So while you can see one of my challenges is my size, seeing does not mean you understand what it's truly to be me on a daily basis, or what I go through. And so I'm here to debunk a myth. I do not believe you can walk in someone else's shoes, and because of that, we must adopt a new way of giving of ourselves. Simply stated, I will never know what it's like to be you and you will never know what it's like to be me. I cannot face your fears or chase your dreams, and you can't do that for me, but we can be supportive of each other. Instead of trying to walk in each other's shoes, we must adopt a new way of giving of ourselves. I learned at an early age that I did have to do some things different than most people, but I also learned there were things I was on equal footing with, and one of those was the classroom. Heh, heh, heh. I was equal. As a matter of fact, I excelled in the classroom. This was vitally important, I discovered as I grew older and realized I wasn't going to be able to do a physical job. I needed an education. So I went on and got a university degree, but I felt to be one step ahead of everyone for employment, I needed to have an advanced university degree, so I went ahead and got that. Now I'm ready for my interview. Remember your first interview? What am I going to wear? What questions? And don't forget that firm handshake. I was right there with you. So 24 hours before my interview, a friend of mine who I've known all my life called and said, "Michele, the building you're going in has steps." And she knew I couldn't climb steps. So suddenly, my focus changed. In my shoes, I was worried about how am I going to get there? So I went early and found a loading dock and got in and had a great interview. They had no idea what I went through for the day and that's OK. You're probably thinking my greatest challenge that day was the interview, or getting in the building. In reality, my biggest challenge that day was getting through the loading dock without getting run over. I am very vulnerable in certain situations: airports, hallways, parking lots, loading docks. And so I have to be very careful. I have to anticipate and be flexible and move as quickly as I can sometimes. So I got the job, and in my current role I travel quite a bit. And travel is a challenge for all of us these days. And so you probably get to the airport, run through security, get to the gate. Did I get my aisle seat or my window seat? Did I get my upgrade? Me, first of all, I don't run through anything. (Laughter) And I especially don't run through the TSA because I get to experience the personal patdown. I won't comment on that. And then I make my way to the gate, and with my gift of gab that my parents said I was born with, I talk to the gate agent, and then I say, "By the way, my scooter weighs this much, I have a dry cell battery, and I can drive it down to the door of the plane." Also, the day before, I had called the city where I'm traveling to to find out where I could rent a scooter in case mine gets broken on the way. So in my shoes, it's a little bit different. When I get onto the plane, I use my gift of gab to ask the lady to put my bag up, and they graciously do. I try not to eat or drink on a plane because I don't want to have to get up and walk on the plane, but nature has its own schedule, and not long ago, it knocked and I answered. So I walked up to the front of the plane and gabbed with the flight attendant, and said, "Can you watch the door? I can't reach the lock." So I'm in there doing my business, and the door flies open. And there's a gentleman there with a look of horror on his face. I'm sure I had the same look. As I came out, I noticed that he was sitting right across from me, and he's in total, complete embarrassment. So I walk up to him and I quietly go, "Are you going to remember this as much as I am?" (Laughter) And he goes, "I think so." (Laughter) Now, while he's probably not talking about it publicly, I am. (Laughter) But we talked for the rest of the flight, and we got to know each other, our families, sports, work, and when we landed, he said, "Michele, I noticed someone put your bag up. Can I get that for you?" And I said, "Of course, thank you." And we wished each other well, and the most important thing that day was that he was not going to leave with that embarrassment, that experience of embarrassment. He won't forget it, and neither will I, but I think he will remember more our chat and our different perspectives. When you travel internationally, it can be even more challenging in certain ways. A few years ago, I was in Zanzibar, and I come wheeling in, and think about that. Short, white, blond woman in a chair. That doesn't probably happen every day. So I go up, and with my gift of gab, I start to talk to the agent. So friendly, and I ask about their culture and so forth, and I notice there wasn't a jet bridge. So I had to kind of say, "Not only do you have to lift my chair, I could use some help getting up the steps." So we got to spend about an hour together while we waited for the flight, and it was the most magnificent hour. Our perspective changed for both of us that day. And once I got on the flight, he patted me on the back and wished me well, and I thanked him so much. And again, I think he's going to remember that experience more than when I first came in, and there was a bit of hesitation. And as you notice, I get a lot of help. I would not be where I am today if it was not for my family, my friends, my colleagues and the many strangers that help me every single day of my life. And it's important that we all have a support system. Asking for help is a strength, not a weakness. (Applause) We all need help throughout our lifetime, but it is just as important that we are part of other people's support systems. We must adopt that way of giving back. We all obviously have a role to play in our own successes, but think about the role we have to play in other people's successes, just like people do for me every single day. It's vitally important that we help each other, because society is increasingly placing people in silos based on biases and ideologies. And we must look past the surface and be confronted with the truth that none of us are what you can see. There's more to us than that, and we're all dealing with things that you cannot see. So living a life free of judgment allows all of us to share those experiences together and have a totally different perspective, just like the couple of people I mentioned earlier in my stories. So remember, the only shoes you truly can walk in are your own. I cannot walk in yours. I know you can't walk in my size 1s — (Laughter) but you can try. But we can do something better than that. With compassion, courage and understanding, we can walk side by side and support one another, and think about how society can change if we all do that instead of judging on only what you can see. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. |
Why civilians suffer more once a war is over | {0: 'Margaret Bourdeaux investigates the best ways to protect, recover and reconstruct health systems and institutions disrupted by war or disaster.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | So have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a place with no rules? That sounds pretty cool. (Laughter) You wake up one morning, however, and you discover that the reason there are no rules is because there's no government, and there are no laws. In fact, all social institutions have disappeared. So there's no schools, there's no hospitals, there's no police, there's no banks, there's no athletic clubs, there's no utilities. Well, I know a little bit about what this is like, because when I was a medical student in 1999, I worked in a refugee camp in the Balkans during the Kosovo War. When the war was over, I got permission — unbelievably — from my medical school to take some time off and follow some of the families that I had befriended in the camp back to their village in Kosovo, and understand how they navigated life in this postwar setting. Postwar Kosovo was a very interesting place because NATO troops were there, mostly to make sure the war didn't break out again. But other than that, it was actually a lawless place, and almost every social institution, both public and private, had been destroyed. So I can tell you that when you go into one of these situations and settings, it is absolutely thrilling ... for about 30 minutes, because that's about how long it takes before you run into a situation where you realize how incredibly vulnerable you are. For me, that moment came when I had to cross the first checkpoint, and I realized as I drove up that I would be negotiating passage through this checkpoint with a heavily armed individual who, if he decided to shoot me right then and there, actually wouldn't be doing anything illegal. But the sense of vulnerability that I had was absolutely nothing in comparison to the vulnerability of the families that I got to know over that year. You see, life in a society where there are no social institutions is riddled with danger and uncertainty, and simple questions like, "What are we going to eat tonight?" are very complicated to answer. Questions about security, when you don't have any security systems, are terrifying. Is that altercation I had with the neighbor down the block going to turn into a violent episode that will end my life or my family's life? Health concerns when there is no health system are also terrifying. I listened as many families had to sort through questions like, "My infant has a fever. What am I going to do?" "My sister, who is pregnant, is bleeding. What should I do? Who should I turn to?" "Where are the doctors, where are the nurses? If I could find one, are they trustworthy? How will I pay them? In what currency will I pay them?" "If I need medications, where will I find them? If I take those medications, are they actually counterfeits?" And on and on. So for life in these settings, the dominant theme, the dominant feature of life, is the incredible vulnerability that people have to manage day in and day out, because of the lack of social systems. And it actually turns out that this feature of life is incredibly difficult to explain and be understood by people who are living outside of it. I discovered this when I left Kosovo. I came back to Boston, I became a physician, I became a global public health policy researcher. I joined the Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital Division of Global Health. And I, as a researcher, really wanted to get started on this problem right away. I was like, "How do we reduce the crushing vulnerability of people living in these types of fragile settings? Is there any way we can start to think about how to protect and quickly recover the institutions that are critical to survival, like the health system?" And I have to say, I had amazing colleagues. But one interesting thing about it was, this was sort of an unusual question for them. They were kind of like, "Oh, if you work in war, doesn't that mean you work on refugee camps, and you work on documenting mass atrocities?" — which is, by the way, very, very, very important. So it took me a while to explain why I was so passionate about this issue, until about six years ago. That's when this landmark study that looked at and described the public health consequences of war was published. They came to an incredible, provocative conclusion. These researchers concluded that the vast majority of death and disability from war happens after the cessation of conflict. So the most dangerous time to be a person living in a conflict-affected state is after the cessation of hostilities; it's after the peace deal has been signed. It's when that political solution has been achieved. That seems so puzzling, but of course it's not, because war kills people by robbing them of their clinics, of their hospitals, of their supply chains. Their doctors are targeted, are killed; they're on the run. And more invisible and yet more deadly is the destruction of the health governance institutions and their finances. So this is really not surprising at all to me. But what is surprising and somewhat dismaying, is how little impact this insight has had, in terms of how we think about human suffering and war. Let me give you a couple examples. Last year, you may remember, Ebola hit the West African country of Liberia. There was a lot of reporting about this group, Doctors Without Borders, sounding the alarm and calling for aid and assistance. But not a lot of that reporting answered the question: Why is Doctors Without Borders even in Liberia? Doctors Without Borders is an amazing organization, dedicated and designed to provide emergency care in war zones. Liberia's civil war had ended in 2003 — that was 11 years before Ebola even struck. When Ebola struck Liberia, there were less than 50 doctors in the entire country of 4.5 million people. Doctors Without Borders is in Liberia because Liberia still doesn't really have a functioning health system, 11 years later. When the earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, the outpouring of international aid was phenomenal. But did you know that only two percent of that funding went to rebuild Haitian public institutions, including its health sector? From that perspective, Haitians continue to die from the earthquake even today. I recently met this gentleman. This is Dr. Nezar Ismet. He's the Minister of Health in the northern autonomous region of Iraq, in Kurdistan. Here he is announcing that in the last nine months, his country, his region, has increased from four million people to five million people. That's a 25 percent increase. Thousands of these new arrivals have experienced incredible trauma. His doctors are working 16-hour days without pay. His budget has not increased by 25 percent; it has decreased by 20 percent, as funding has flowed to security concerns and to short-term relief efforts. When his health sector fails — and if history is any guide, it will — how do you think that's going to influence the decision making of the five million people in his region as they think about whether they should flee that type of vulnerable living situation? So as you can see, this is a frustrating topic for me, and I really try to understand: Why the reluctance to protect and support indigenous health systems and security systems? I usually tier two concerns, two arguments. The first concern is about corruption, and the concern that people in these settings are corrupt and they are untrustworthy. And I will admit that I have met unsavory characters working in health sectors in these situations. But I will tell you that the opposite is absolutely true in every case I have worked on, from Afghanistan to Libya, to Kosovo, to Haiti, to Liberia — I have met inspiring people, who, when the chips were down for their country, they risked everything to save their health institutions. The trick for the outsider who wants to help is identifying who those individuals are, and building a pathway for them to lead. That is exactly what happened in Afghanistan. One of the unsung and untold success stories of our nation-building effort in Afghanistan involved the World Bank in 2002 investing heavily in identifying, training and promoting Afghani health sector leaders. These health sector leaders have pulled off an incredible feat in Afghanistan. They have aggressively increased access to health care for the majority of the population. They are rapidly improving the health status of the Afghan population, which used to be the worst in the world. In fact, the Afghan Ministry of Health does things that I wish we would do in America. They use things like data to make policy. It's incredible. (Laughter) The other concern I hear a lot about is: "We just can't afford it, we just don't have the money. It's just unsustainable." I would submit to you that the current situation and the current system we have is the most expensive, inefficient system we could possibly conceive of. The current situation is that when governments like the US — or, let's say, the collection of governments that make up the European Commission — every year, they spend 15 billion dollars on just humanitarian and emergency and disaster relief worldwide. That's nothing about foreign aid, that's just disaster relief. Ninety-five percent of it goes to international relief agencies, that then have to import resources into these areas, and knit together some type of temporary health system, let's say, which they then dismantle and send away when they run out of money. So our job, it turns out, is very clear. We, as the global health community policy experts, our first job is to become experts in how to monitor the strengths and vulnerabilities of health systems in threatened situations. And that's when we see doctors fleeing, when we see health resources drying up, when we see institutions crumbling — that's the emergency. That's when we need to sound the alarm and wave our arms. OK? Not now. Everyone can see that's an emergency, they don't need us to tell them that. Number two: places like where I work at Harvard need to take their cue from the World Bank experience in Afghanistan, and we need to — and we will — build robust platforms to support health sector leaders like these. These people risk their lives. I think we can match their courage with some support. Number three: we need to reach out and make new partnerships. At our global health center, we have launched a new initiative with NATO and other security policy makers to explore with them what they can do to protect health system institutions during deployments. We want them to see that protecting health systems and other critical social institutions is an integral part of their mission. It's not just about avoiding collateral damage; it's about winning the peace. But the most important partner we need to engage is you, the American public, and indeed, the world public. Because unless you understand the value of social institutions, like health systems in these fragile settings, you won't support efforts to save them. You won't click on that article that talks about "Hey, all those doctors are on the run in country X. I wonder what that means. I wonder what that means for that health system's ability to, let's say, detect influenza." "Hmm, it's probably not good." That's what I'd tell you. Up on the screen, I've put up my three favorite American institution defenders and builders. Over here is George C. Marshall, he was the guy that proposed the Marshall Plan to save all of Europe's economic institutions after World War II. And this Eleanor Roosevelt. Her work on human rights really serves as the foundation for all of our international human rights organizations. Then my big favorite is Ben Franklin, who did many things in terms of creating institutions, but was the midwife of our constitution. And I would say to you that these are folks who, when our country was threatened, or our world was threatened, they didn't retreat. They didn't talk about building walls. They talked about building institutions to protect human security, for their generation and also for ours. And I think our generation should do the same. Thank you. (Applause) |
Who would the rest of the world vote for in your country's election? | {0: 'After 20 years working with the presidents and prime ministers of 54 countries, Simon Anholt has a plan to make the world work better.'} | TEDxFrankfurt | Well, as many of you know, the results of the recent election were as follows: Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate won a landslide victory with 52 percent of the overall vote. Jill Stein, the Green candidate, came a distant second, with 19 percent. Donald J. Trump, the Republic candidate, was hot on her heels with 14 percent, and the remainder of the vote were shared between abstainers and Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate. (Laughter) Now, what parallel universe do you suppose I live in? Well, I don't live in a parallel universe. I live in the world, and that is how the world voted. So let me take you back and explain what I mean by that. In June this year, I launched something called the Global Vote. And the Global Vote does exactly what it says on the tin. For the first time in history, it lets anybody, anywhere in the world, vote in the elections of other people's countries. Now, why would you do that? What's the point? Well, let me show you what it looks like. You go to a website, rather a beautiful website, and then you select an election. Here's a bunch that we've already covered. We do about one a month, or thereabouts. So you can see Bulgaria, the United States of America, Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Brexit referendum at the end there. You select the election that you're interested in, and you pick the candidates. These are the candidates from the recent presidential election in the tiny island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, 199,000 inhabitants, off the coast of West Africa. And then you can look at the brief summary of each of those candidates which I dearly hope is very neutral, very informative and very succinct. And when you've found the one you like, you vote. These were the candidates in the recent Icelandic presidential election, and that's the way it goes. So why on earth would you want to vote in another country's election? Well, the reason that you wouldn't want to do it, let me reassure you, is in order to interfere in the democratic processes of another country. That's not the purpose at all. In fact, you can't, because usually what I do is I release the results after the electorate in each individual country has already voted, so there's no way that we could interfere in that process. But more importantly, I'm not particularly interested in the domestic issues of individual countries. That's not what we're voting on. So what Donald J. Trump or Hillary Clinton proposed to do for the Americans is frankly none of our business. That's something that only the Americans can vote on. No, in the global vote, you're only considering one aspect of it, which is what are those leaders going to do for the rest of us? And that's so very important because we live, as no doubt you're sick of hearing people tell you, in a globalized, hyperconnected, massively interdependent world where the political decisions of people in other countries can and will have an impact on our lives no matter who we are, no matter where we live. Like the wings of the butterfly beating on one side of the Pacific that can apparently create a hurricane on the other side, so it is with the world that we live in today and the world of politics. There is no longer a dividing line between domestic and international affairs. Any country, no matter how small, even if it's São Tomé and Príncipe, could produce the next Nelson Mandela or the next Stalin. They could pollute the atmosphere and the oceans, which belong to all of us, or they could be responsible and they could help all of us. And yet, the system is so strange because the system hasn't caught up with this globalized reality. Only a small number of people are allowed to vote for those leaders, even though their impact is gigantic and almost universal. What number was it? 140 million Americans voted for the next president of the United States, and yet, as all of us knows, in a few weeks time, somebody is going to hand over the nuclear launch codes to Donald J. Trump. Now, if that isn't having a potential impact on all of us, I don't know what is. Similarly, the election for the referendum on the Brexit vote, a small number of millions of British people voted on that, but the outcome of the vote, whichever way it went, would have had a significant impact on the lives of tens, hundreds of millions of people around the world. And yet, only a tiny number could vote. What kind of democracy is that? Huge decisions that affect all of us being decided by relatively very small numbers of people. And I don't know about you, but I don't think that sounds very democratic. So I'm trying to clear it up. But as I say, we don't ask about domestic questions. In fact, I only ever ask two questions of all of the candidates. I send them the same two questions every single time. I say, one, if you get elected, what are you going to do for the rest of us, for the remainder of the seven billion who live on this planet? Second question: What is your vision for your country's future in the world? What role do you see it playing? Every candidate, I send them those questions. They don't all answer. Don't get me wrong. I reckon if you're standing to become the next president of the United States, you're probably pretty tied up most of the time, so I'm not altogether surprised that they don't all answer, but many do. More every time. And some of them do much more than answer. Some of them answer in the most enthusiastic and most exciting way you could imagine. I just want to say a word here for Saviour Chishimba, who was one of the candidates in the recent Zambian presidential election. His answers to those two questions were basically an 18-page dissertation on his view of Zambia's potential role in the world and in the international community. I posted it on the website so anybody could read it. Now, Saviour won the global vote, but he didn't win the Zambian election. So I found myself wondering, what am I going to do with this extraordinary group of people? I've got some wonderful people here who won the global vote. We always get it wrong, by the way. The one that we elect is never the person who's elected by the domestic electorate. That may be partly because we always seem to go for the woman. But I think it may also be a sign that the domestic electorate is still thinking very nationally. They're still thinking very inwardly. They're still asking themselves: What's in it for me? ... instead of what they should be asking today, which is, what's in it for we? But there you go. So suggestions, please, not right now, but send me an email if you've got an idea about what we can do with this amazing team of glorious losers. (Laughter) We've got Saviour Chishimba, who I mentioned before. We've got Halla Tómasdóttir, who was the runner up in the Icelandic presidential election. Many of you may have seen her amazing talk at TEDWomen just a few weeks ago where she spoke about the need for more women to get into politics. We've got Maria das Neves from São Tomé and Príncipe. We've got Hillary Clinton. I don't know if she's available. We've got Jill Stein. And we covered also the election for the next Secretary-General of the United Nations. We've got the ex-prime minister of New Zealand, who would be a wonderful member of the team. So I think maybe those people, the glorious loser's club, could travel around the world wherever there's an election and remind people of the necessity in our modern age of thinking a little bit outwards and thinking of the international consequences. So what comes next for the global vote? Well, obviously, the Donald and Hillary show is a bit of a difficult one to follow, but there are some other really important elections coming up. In fact, they seem to be multiplying. There's something going on, I'm sure you've noticed, in the world. And the next row of elections are all critically important. In just a few day's time we've got the rerun of the Austrian presidential election, with the prospect of Norbert Hofer becoming what is commonly described as the first far-right head of state in Europe since the Second World War. Next year we've got Germany, we've got France, we've got presidential elections in Iran and a dozen others. It doesn't get less important. It gets more and more important. Clearly, the global vote is not a stand-alone project. It's not just there on its own. It has some background. It's part of a project which I launched back in 2014, which I call the Good Country. The idea of the Good Country is basically very simple. It's my simple diagnosis of what's wrong with the world and how we can fix it. What's wrong with the world I've already hinted at. Basically, we face an enormous and growing number of gigantic, existential global challenges: climate change, human rights abuses, mass migration, terrorism, economic chaos, weapons proliferation. All of these problems which threaten to wipe us out are by their very nature globalized problems. No individual country has the capability of tackling them on its own. And so very obviously we have to cooperate and we have to collaborate as nations if we're going to solve these problems. It's so obvious, and yet we don't. We don't do it nearly often enough. Most of the time, countries still persist in behaving as if they were warring, selfish tribes battling against each other, much as they have done since the nation-state was invented hundreds of years ago. And this has got to change. This is not a change in political systems or a change in ideology. This is a change in culture. We, all of us, have to understand that thinking inwards is not the solution to the world's problems. We have to learn how to cooperate and collaborate a great deal more and compete just a tiny bit less. Otherwise things are going to carry on getting bad and they're going to get much worse, much sooner than we anticipate. This change will only happen if we ordinary people tell our politicians that things have changed. We have to tell them that the culture has changed. We have to tell them that they've got a new mandate. The old mandate was very simple and very single: if you're in a position of power or authority, you're responsible for your own people and your own tiny slice of territory, and that's it. And if in order to do the best thing for your own people, you screw over everybody else on the planet, that's even better. That's considered to be a bit macho. Today, I think everybody in a position of power and responsibility has got a dual mandate, which says if you're in a position of power and responsibility, you're responsible for your own people and for every single man, woman, child and animal on the planet. You're responsible for your own slice of territory and for every single square mile of the earth's surface and the atmosphere above it. And if you don't like that responsibility, you should not be in power. That for me is the rule of the modern age, and that's the message that we've got to get across to our politicians, and show them that that's the way things are done these days. Otherwise, we're all screwed. I don't have a problem, actually, with Donald Trump's credo of "America first." It seems to me that that's a pretty banal statement of what politicians have always done and probably should always do. Of course they're elected to represent the interests of their own people. But what I find so boring and so old-fashioned and so unimaginative about his take on that is that America first means everyone else last, that making America great again means making everybody else small again, and it's just not true. In my job as a policy advisor over the last 20 years or so, I've seen so many hundreds of examples of policies that harmonize the international and the domestic needs, and they make better policy. I'm not asking nations to be altruistic or self-sacrificing. That would be ridiculous. No nation would ever do that. I'm asking them to wake up and understand that we need a new form of governance, which is possible and which harmonizes those two needs, those good for our own people and those good for everybody else. Since the US election and since Brexit it's become more and more obvious to me that those old distinctions of left wing and right wing no longer make sense. They really don't fit the pattern. What does seem to matter today is very simple, whether your view of the world is that you take comfort from looking inwards and backwards, or whether, like me, you find hope in looking forwards and outwards. That's the new politics. That's the new division that is splitting the world right down the middle. Now, that may sound judgmental, but it's not meant to be. I don't at all misunderstand why so many people find their comfort in looking inwards and backwards. When times are difficult, when you're short of money, when you're feeling insecure and vulnerable, it's almost a natural human tendency to turn inwards, to think of your own needs and to discard everybody else's, and perhaps to start to imagine that the past was somehow better than the present or the future could ever be. But I happen to believe that that's a dead end. History shows us that it's a dead end. When people turn inwards and turn backwards, human progress becomes reversed and things get worse for everybody very quickly indeed. If you're like me and you believe in forwards and outwards, and you believe that the best thing about humanity is its diversity, and the best thing about globalization is the way that it stirs up that diversity, that cultural mixture to make something more creative, more exciting, more productive than there's ever been before in human history, then, my friends, we've got a job on our hands, because the inwards and backwards brigade are uniting as never before, and that creed of inwards and backwards, that fear, that anxiety, playing on the simplest instincts, is sweeping across the world. Those of us who believe, as I believe, in forwards and outwards, we have to get ourselves organized, because time is running out very, very quickly. Thank you. (Applause) |
3 ways to spot a bad statistic | {0: 'Mona Chalabi tries to take the numb out of numbers. She\'s left with lots of "ers."'} | TEDNYC | I'm going to be talking about statistics today. If that makes you immediately feel a little bit wary, that's OK, that doesn't make you some kind of crazy conspiracy theorist, it makes you skeptical. And when it comes to numbers, especially now, you should be skeptical. But you should also be able to tell which numbers are reliable and which ones aren't. So today I want to try to give you some tools to be able to do that. But before I do, I just want to clarify which numbers I'm talking about here. I'm not talking about claims like, "9 out of 10 women recommend this anti-aging cream." I think a lot of us always roll our eyes at numbers like that. What's different now is people are questioning statistics like, "The US unemployment rate is five percent." What makes this claim different is it doesn't come from a private company, it comes from the government. About 4 out of 10 Americans distrust the economic data that gets reported by government. Among supporters of President Trump it's even higher; it's about 7 out of 10. I don't need to tell anyone here that there are a lot of dividing lines in our society right now, and a lot of them start to make sense, once you understand people's relationships with these government numbers. On the one hand, there are those who say these statistics are crucial, that we need them to make sense of society as a whole in order to move beyond emotional anecdotes and measure progress in an [objective] way. And then there are the others, who say that these statistics are elitist, maybe even rigged; they don't make sense and they don't really reflect what's happening in people's everyday lives. It kind of feels like that second group is winning the argument right now. We're living in a world of alternative facts, where people don't find statistics this kind of common ground, this starting point for debate. This is a problem. There are actually moves in the US right now to get rid of some government statistics altogether. Right now there's a bill in congress about measuring racial inequality. The draft law says that government money should not be used to collect data on racial segregation. This is a total disaster. If we don't have this data, how can we observe discrimination, let alone fix it? In other words: How can a government create fair policies if they can't measure current levels of unfairness? This isn't just about discrimination, it's everything — think about it. How can we legislate on health care if we don't have good data on health or poverty? How can we have public debate about immigration if we can't at least agree on how many people are entering and leaving the country? Statistics come from the state; that's where they got their name. The point was to better measure the population in order to better serve it. So we need these government numbers, but we also have to move beyond either blindly accepting or blindly rejecting them. We need to learn the skills to be able to spot bad statistics. I started to learn some of these when I was working in a statistical department that's part of the United Nations. Our job was to find out how many Iraqis had been forced from their homes as a result of the war, and what they needed. It was really important work, but it was also incredibly difficult. Every single day, we were making decisions that affected the accuracy of our numbers — decisions like which parts of the country we should go to, who we should speak to, which questions we should ask. And I started to feel really disillusioned with our work, because we thought we were doing a really good job, but the one group of people who could really tell us were the Iraqis, and they rarely got the chance to find our analysis, let alone question it. So I started to feel really determined that the one way to make numbers more accurate is to have as many people as possible be able to question them. So I became a data journalist. My job is finding these data sets and sharing them with the public. Anyone can do this, you don't have to be a geek or a nerd. You can ignore those words; they're used by people trying to say they're smart while pretending they're humble. Absolutely anyone can do this. I want to give you guys three questions that will help you be able to spot some bad statistics. So, question number one is: Can you see uncertainty? One of things that's really changed people's relationship with numbers, and even their trust in the media, has been the use of political polls. I personally have a lot of issues with political polls because I think the role of journalists is actually to report the facts and not attempt to predict them, especially when those predictions can actually damage democracy by signaling to people: don't bother to vote for that guy, he doesn't have a chance. Let's set that aside for now and talk about the accuracy of this endeavor. Based on national elections in the UK, Italy, Israel and of course, the most recent US presidential election, using polls to predict electoral outcomes is about as accurate as using the moon to predict hospital admissions. No, seriously, I used actual data from an academic study to draw this. There are a lot of reasons why polling has become so inaccurate. Our societies have become really diverse, which makes it difficult for pollsters to get a really nice representative sample of the population for their polls. People are really reluctant to answer their phones to pollsters, and also, shockingly enough, people might lie. But you wouldn't necessarily know that to look at the media. For one thing, the probability of a Hillary Clinton win was communicated with decimal places. We don't use decimal places to describe the temperature. How on earth can predicting the behavior of 230 million voters in this country be that precise? And then there were those sleek charts. See, a lot of data visualizations will overstate certainty, and it works — these charts can numb our brains to criticism. When you hear a statistic, you might feel skeptical. As soon as it's buried in a chart, it feels like some kind of objective science, and it's not. So I was trying to find ways to better communicate this to people, to show people the uncertainty in our numbers. What I did was I started taking real data sets, and turning them into hand-drawn visualizations, so that people can see how imprecise the data is; so people can see that a human did this, a human found the data and visualized it. For example, instead of finding out the probability of getting the flu in any given month, you can see the rough distribution of flu season. This is — (Laughter) a bad shot to show in February. But it's also more responsible data visualization, because if you were to show the exact probabilities, maybe that would encourage people to get their flu jabs at the wrong time. The point of these shaky lines is so that people remember these imprecisions, but also so they don't necessarily walk away with a specific number, but they can remember important facts. Facts like injustice and inequality leave a huge mark on our lives. Facts like Black Americans and Native Americans have shorter life expectancies than those of other races, and that isn't changing anytime soon. Facts like prisoners in the US can be kept in solitary confinement cells that are smaller than the size of an average parking space. The point of these visualizations is also to remind people of some really important statistical concepts, concepts like averages. So let's say you hear a claim like, "The average swimming pool in the US contains 6.23 fecal accidents." That doesn't mean every single swimming pool in the country contains exactly 6.23 turds. So in order to show that, I went back to the original data, which comes from the CDC, who surveyed 47 swimming facilities. And I just spent one evening redistributing poop. So you can kind of see how misleading averages can be. (Laughter) OK, so the second question that you guys should be asking yourselves to spot bad numbers is: Can I see myself in the data? This question is also about averages in a way, because part of the reason why people are so frustrated with these national statistics, is they don't really tell the story of who's winning and who's losing from national policy. It's easy to understand why people are frustrated with global averages when they don't match up with their personal experiences. I wanted to show people the way data relates to their everyday lives. I started this advice column called "Dear Mona," where people would write to me with questions and concerns and I'd try to answer them with data. People asked me anything. questions like, "Is it normal to sleep in a separate bed to my wife?" "Do people regret their tattoos?" "What does it mean to die of natural causes?" All of these questions are great, because they make you think about ways to find and communicate these numbers. If someone asks you, "How much pee is a lot of pee?" which is a question that I got asked, you really want to make sure that the visualization makes sense to as many people as possible. These numbers aren't unavailable. Sometimes they're just buried in the appendix of an academic study. And they're certainly not inscrutable; if you really wanted to test these numbers on urination volume, you could grab a bottle and try it for yourself. (Laughter) The point of this isn't necessarily that every single data set has to relate specifically to you. I'm interested in how many women were issued fines in France for wearing the face veil, or the niqab, even if I don't live in France or wear the face veil. The point of asking where you fit in is to get as much context as possible. So it's about zooming out from one data point, like the unemployment rate is five percent, and seeing how it changes over time, or seeing how it changes by educational status — this is why your parents always wanted you to go to college — or seeing how it varies by gender. Nowadays, male unemployment rate is higher than the female unemployment rate. Up until the early '80s, it was the other way around. This is a story of one of the biggest changes that's happened in American society, and it's all there in that chart, once you look beyond the averages. The axes are everything; once you change the scale, you can change the story. OK, so the third and final question that I want you guys to think about when you're looking at statistics is: How was the data collected? So far, I've only talked about the way data is communicated, but the way it's collected matters just as much. I know this is tough, because methodologies can be opaque and actually kind of boring, but there are some simple steps you can take to check this. I'll use one last example here. One poll found that 41 percent of Muslims in this country support jihad, which is obviously pretty scary, and it was reported everywhere in 2015. When I want to check a number like that, I'll start off by finding the original questionnaire. It turns out that journalists who reported on that statistic ignored a question lower down on the survey that asked respondents how they defined "jihad." And most of them defined it as, "Muslims' personal, peaceful struggle to be more religious." Only 16 percent defined it as, "violent holy war against unbelievers." This is the really important point: based on those numbers, it's totally possible that no one in the survey who defined it as violent holy war also said they support it. Those two groups might not overlap at all. It's also worth asking how the survey was carried out. This was something called an opt-in poll, which means anyone could have found it on the internet and completed it. There's no way of knowing if those people even identified as Muslim. And finally, there were 600 respondents in that poll. There are roughly three million Muslims in this country, according to Pew Research Center. That means the poll spoke to roughly one in every 5,000 Muslims in this country. This is one of the reasons why government statistics are often better than private statistics. A poll might speak to a couple hundred people, maybe a thousand, or if you're L'Oreal, trying to sell skin care products in 2005, then you spoke to 48 women to claim that they work. (Laughter) Private companies don't have a huge interest in getting the numbers right, they just need the right numbers. Government statisticians aren't like that. In theory, at least, they're totally impartial, not least because most of them do their jobs regardless of who's in power. They're civil servants. And to do their jobs properly, they don't just speak to a couple hundred people. Those unemployment numbers I keep on referencing come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and to make their estimates, they speak to over 140,000 businesses in this country. I get it, it's frustrating. If you want to test a statistic that comes from a private company, you can buy the face cream for you and a bunch of friends, test it out, if it doesn't work, you can say the numbers were wrong. But how do you question government statistics? You just keep checking everything. Find out how they collected the numbers. Find out if you're seeing everything on the chart you need to see. But don't give up on the numbers altogether, because if you do, we'll be making public policy decisions in the dark, using nothing but private interests to guide us. Thank you. (Applause) |
A plan to recycle the unrecyclable | {0: 'Ashton Cofer and his FIRST Robotics team won the Google Science Fair for developing a process to convert Styrofoam waste into activated carbon for purifying water.'} | TED-Ed Weekend | It was just an ordinary Saturday. My dad was outside mowing the lawn, my mom was upstairs folding laundry, my sister was in her room doing homework and I was in the basement playing video games. And as I came upstairs to get something to drink, I looked out the window and realized that there was something that I was supposed to be doing, and this is what I saw. No, this wasn't my family's dinner on fire. This was my science project. Flames were pouring out, smoke was in the air and it looked like our wooden deck was about to catch fire. I immediately started yelling. My mom was freaking out, my dad ran around to put out the fire and of course my sister started recording a Snapchat video. (Laughter) This was just the beginning of my team's science project. My team is composed of me and three other students who are here in the audience today. We competed in FIRST LEGO League which is an international LEGO robotics competition for kids, and in addition to a robotics game, we also worked on a separate science project, and this was the project that we were working on. So the idea for this project all started when a few months earlier, a couple of my teammates took a trip to Central America and saw beaches littered with Styrofoam, or expanded polystyrene foam. And when they came back and told us about it, we really started thinking about the ways in which we see Styrofoam every day. Get a new flat-screen TV? You end up with a block of Styrofoam bigger than the TV itself. Drink a cup of coffee? Well, those Styrofoam coffee cups are sure going to add up. And where do all these items go after their one-time use? Since there aren't any good existing solutions for used Styrofoam, almost all of them end up right in the landfill, or the oceans and beaches, taking over 500 years to degrade. And in fact, every year, the US alone produces over two billion pounds of Styrofoam, filling up a staggering 25 percent of landfills. So why do we have these ghost accumulations of Styrofoam waste? Why can't we just recycle them like many plastics? Well, simply put, recycled polystyrene is too expensive and potentially contaminated, so there is very little market demand for Styrofoam that has to be recycled. And as a result, Styrofoam is considered a nonrenewable material, because it is neither feasible nor viable to recycle polystyrene. And in fact, many cities across the US have even passed ordinances that simply ban the production of many products containing polystyrene, which includes disposable utensils, packing peanuts, takeout containers and even plastic beach toys, all products that are very useful in today's society. And now France has become the first country to completely ban all plastic utensils, cups and plates. But what if we could keep using Styrofoam and keep benefiting from its cheap, lightweight, insulating and excellent packing ability, while not having to suffer from the repercussions of having to dispose of it? What if we could turn it into something else that's actually useful? What if we could make the impossible possible? My team hypothesized that we could use the carbon that's already in Styrofoam to create activated carbon, which is used in almost every water filter today. And activated carbon works by using very small micropores to filter out contaminants from water or even air. So we started out by doing a variety of heating tests, and unfortunately, we had many failures. Literally, nothing worked. Besides my dad's grill catching on fire, most of our samples vaporized into nothing, or exploded inside expensive furnaces, leaving a horribly sticky mess. In fact, we were so saddened by our failures that we almost gave up. So why did we keep trying when all the adults said it was impossible? Well, maybe it's because we're kids. We don't know any better. But the truth is, we kept trying because we thought it was still possible. We knew that if we were successful, we would be helping the environment and making the world a better place. So we kept trying and failing and trying and failing. We were so ready to give up. But then it happened. With the right temperatures, times and chemicals, we finally got that successful test result showing us that we had created activated carbon from Styrofoam waste. And at that moment, the thing that had been impossible all of a sudden wasn't. It showed us that although we had many failures at the beginning, we were able to persevere through them to get the test results that we wanted. And moreover, not only were we able to create activated carbon for purifying water, but we were also able to reduce Styrofoam waste, solving two global problems with just one solution. So from then on, we were inspired to take our project further, performing more tests to make it more effective and testing it in real world situations. We then proceeded to receive funding from the NSTA's eCYBERMISSION STEM-in-Action program sponsored by the US Army, as well as FIRST Global Innovation Awards sponsored by XPRIZE. And we were also honored with the Scientific American Innovator Award from Google Science Fair. And using these funds, we plan to file a full patent on our process and to continue to work on our project. So yes, although we started with catching my dad's grill on fire and failing so many times that we almost quit, it was well worth it when we look back at it now. We took a problem that many people said was impossible and we made it possible, and we persevered when it looked like nothing that we did would work. We learned that you can't have success without a little, or a lot, of failure. So in the future, don't be afraid if your grill goes up in flames, because you never know when your idea might just catch fire. Thank you. (Applause) |
What we don't know about mother's milk | {0: 'Katie Hinde is studying breast milk’s status as the first superfood, providing babies with invaluable microbes custom-tailored to their individual needs, via an incredible and unlikely dialogue between the mother’s enzymes and the baby’s saliva.'} | TEDWomen 2016 | Have you ever heard the one about how breastfeeding is free? (Laughter) Yeah, it's pretty funny, because it's only free if we don't value women's time and energy. Any mother can tell you how much time and energy it takes to liquify her body — to literally dissolve herself — (Laughter) as she feeds this precious little cannibal. (Laughter) Milk is why mammals suck. At Arizona State University, in the Comparative Lactation Lab, I decode mothers' milk composition to understand its complexity and how it influences infant development. The most important thing that I've learned is that we do not do enough to support mothers and babies. And when we fail mothers and babies, we fail everyone who loves mothers and babies: the fathers, the partners, the grandparents, the aunties, the friends and kin that make our human social networks. It's time that we abandon simple solutions and simple slogans, and grapple with the nuance. I was very fortunate to run smack-dab into that nuance very early, during my first interview with a journalist when she asked me, "How long should a mother breastfeed her baby?" And it was that word "should" that brought me up short, because I will never tell a woman what she should do with her body. Babies survive and thrive because their mother's milk is food, medicine and signal. For young infants, mother's milk is a complete diet that provides all the building blocks for their bodies, that shapes their brain and fuels all of their activity. Mother's milk also feeds the microbes that are colonizing the infant's intestinal tract. Mothers aren't just eating for two, they're eating for two to the trillions. Milk provides immunofactors that help fight pathogens and mother's milk provides hormones that signal to the infant's body. But in recent decades, we have come to take milk for granted. We stopped seeing something in plain sight. We began to think of milk as standardized, homogenized, pasteurized, packaged, powdered, flavored and formulated. We abandoned the milk of human kindness and turned our priorities elsewhere. At the National Institutes of Health in Washington DC is the National Library of Medicine, which contains 25 million articles — the brain trust of life science and biomedical research. We can use keywords to search that database, and when we do that, we discover nearly a million articles about pregnancy, but far fewer about breast milk and lactation. When we zoom in on the number of articles just investigating breast milk, we see that we know much more about coffee, wine and tomatoes. (Laughter) We know over twice as much about erectile dysfunction. (Laughter) I'm not saying we shouldn't know about those things — I'm a scientist, I think we should know about everything. But that we know so much less — (Laughter) about breast milk — the first fluid a young mammal is adapted to consume — should make us angry. Globally, nine out of 10 women will have at least one child in her lifetime. That means that nearly 130 million babies are born each year. These mothers and babies deserve our best science. Recent research has shown that milk doesn't just grow the body, it fuels behavior and shapes neurodevelopment. In 2015, researchers discovered that the mixture of breast milk and baby saliva — specifically, baby saliva — causes a chemical reaction that produces hydrogen peroxide that can kill staph and salmonella. And from humans and other mammal species, we're starting to understand that the biological recipe of milk can be different when produced for sons or daughters. When we reach for donor milk in the neonatal intensive care unit, or formula on the store shelf, it's nearly one-size-fits-all. We aren't thinking about how sons and daughters may grow at different rates, or different ways, and that milk may be a part of that. Mothers have gotten the message and the vast majority of mothers intend to breastfeed, but many do not reach their breastfeeding goals. That is not their failure; it's ours. Increasingly common medical conditions like obesity, endocrine disorders, C-section and preterm births all can disrupt the underlying biology of lactation. And many women do not have knowledgeable clinical support. Twenty-five years ago, the World Health Organization and UNICEF established criteria for hospitals to be considered baby friendly — that provide the optimal level of support for mother-infant bonding and infant feeding. Today, only one in five babies in the United States is born in a baby-friendly hospital. This is a problem, because mothers can grapple with many problems in the minutes, hours, days and weeks of lactation. They can have struggles with establishing latch, with pain, with milk letdown and perceptions of milk supply. These mothers deserve knowledgeable clinical staff that understand these processes. Mothers will call me as they're grappling with these struggles, crying with wobbly voices. "It's not working. This is what I'm supposed to naturally be able to do. Why is it not working?" And just because something is evolutionarily ancient doesn't mean that it's easy or that we're instantly good at it. You know what else is evolutionarily ancient? (Laughter) Sex. And nobody expects us to start out being good at it. (Laughter) Clinicians best deliver quality equitable care when they have continuing education about how to best support lactation and breastfeeding. And in order to have that continuing education, we need to anchor it to cutting-edge research in both the life sciences and the social sciences, because we need to recognize that too often historical traumas and implicit biases sit in the space between a new mother and her clinician. The body is political. If our breastfeeding support is not intersectional, it's not good enough. And for moms who have to return for work, because countries like the United States do not provide paid parental leave, they can have to go back in as short as just a few days after giving birth. How do we optimize mother and infant health just by messaging about breast milk to moms without providing the institutional support that facilitates that mother-infant bonding to support breastfeeding? The answer is: we can't. I'm talking to you, legislators, and the voters who elect them. I'm talking to you, job creators and collective bargaining units, and workers, and shareholders. We all have a stake in the public health of our community, and we all have a role to play in achieving it. Breast milk is a part of improving human health. In the NICU, when infants are born early or sick or injured, milk or bioactive constituents in milk can be critically important. Environments or ecologies, or communities where there's high risk of infectious disease, breast milk can be incredibly protective. Where there are emergencies like storms and earthquakes, when the electricity goes out, when safe water is not available, breast milk can keep babies fed and hydrated. And in the context of humanitarian crises, like Syrian mothers fleeing war zones, the smallest drops can buffer babies from the biggest global challenges. But understanding breast milk is not just about messaging to mothers and policy makers. It's also about understanding what is important in breast milk so that we can deliver better formulas to moms who cannot or do not breastfeed for whatever reason. We can all do a better job of supporting the diversity of moms raising their babies in a diversity of ways. As women around the world struggle to achieve political, social and economic equality, we must reimagine motherhood as not the central, core aspect of womanhood, but one of the many potential facets of what makes women awesome. It's time. (Applause) |
Addiction is a disease. We should treat it like one | {0: 'As Director of National Drug Control Policy, Michael Botticelli led the Obama Administration’s drug policy efforts to diminish the consequences of substance use through evidence-based prevention, treatment and recovery support services.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | Twenty-eight years ago, I was a broken man. And you probably wouldn't be able to tell that if you met me. I had a good job at a well-respected academic institution. I dressed well, of course. But my insides were rotting away. You see, I grew up in a family riddled with addiction, and as a kid, I also struggled with coming to terms with my own sexuality. And even though I couldn't name it then, growing up as a gay kid just compounded my issues of isolation and insecurities. But drinking took all of that away. Like many, I drank at an early age. I continued to drink my way through college. And when I finally did come out in the early 1980s, about the only places to meet other gay people, to socialize, to be yourself, were gay bars. And what do you do in gay bars? You drink. And I did — a lot. My story is not unique. Like millions of Americans, my disease progressed undiagnosed. It took me to people and places and things that I never would have chosen. It wasn't until an intersection with the law gave me an "opportunity" to get care, that I began my journey of recovery. My journey of recovery has been filled with love and with joy, but it hasn't been without pain. Like many of you, I've lost too many friends and family to this disease. I've heard too many heartbreaking stories of people who've lost loved ones to addiction. And I've also lost countless friends to HIV and AIDS. Our current opioid epidemic and the AIDS epidemic tragically have much in common. Right now, we are in the midst of one of the greatest health crises of our time. During 2014 alone, 28,000 people died of drug overdoses associated with prescription drugs and heroin. During the 1980s, scores of people were dying from HIV and AIDS. Public officials ignored it. Some wouldn't even utter the words. They didn't want treatment. And tragically, there are many parallels with our current epidemic. Some called it the gay plague. They called for quarantines. They wanted to separate the innocent victims from the rest of us. I was afraid we were losing this battle because people were blaming us for being sick. Public policy was being held hostage by stigma and fear, and also held hostage were compassion, care, research, recovery and treatment. But we changed all that. Because out of the pain of those deaths, we saw a social and political movement. AIDS galvanized us into action; to stand up, to speak up and to act out. And it also galvanized the LGBT movement. We knew we were in a battle for our lives because silence equaled death, but we changed, and we made things happen. And right now, we have the potential to see the end of HIV/AIDS in our lifetime. These changes came in no small part by the courageous, yet simple decision for people to come out to their neighbors, to their friends, to their families and to their coworkers. Years ago, I was a volunteer for the Names Project. This was an effort started by Cleve Jones in San Francisco to show that people who died of AIDS had names and faces and families and people who loved them. I still recall unfolding the AIDS memorial quilt on the National Mall on a brilliant day in October, 1988. So fast forward to 2015. The Supreme Court's decision to strike down the ban on same-sex marriage. My husband, Dave, and I walk over to the steps of the Supreme Court to celebrate that decision with so many other people, and I couldn't help but think how far we came around LGBT rights and yet how far we needed to go around issues of addiction. When I was nominated by President Obama to be his Director of Drug Policy, I was very open about my recovery and about the fact that I was a gay man. And at no point during my confirmation process — at least that I know of — did the fact that I was a gay man come to bear on my candidacy or my fitness to do this job. But my addiction did. At one point, a congressional staffer said that there was no way that I was going to be confirmed by the United States Senate because of my past, despite the fact that I had been in recovery for over 20 years, and despite the fact that this job takes a little bit of knowledge around addiction. (Laughter) So, you know, this is the stigma that people with substance use disorders face every single day, and you know, I have to tell you it's still why I'm more comfortable coming out as a gay man than I am as a person with a history of addiction. Nearly every family in America is affected by addiction. Yet, unfortunately, too often, it's not talked about openly and honestly. It's whispered about. It's met with derision and scorn. We hear these stories, time and time again, on TV, online, we hear it from public officials, and we hear it from family and friends. And those of us with an addiction, we hear those voices, and somehow we believe that we are less deserving of care and treatment. Today in the United States, only one in nine people get care and treatment for their disorder. One in nine. Think about that. Generally, people with other diseases get care and treatment. If you have cancer, you get treatment, if you have diabetes, you get treatment. If you have a heart attack, you get emergency services, and you get referred to care. But somehow people with addiction have to wait for treatment or often can't get when they need it. And left untreated, addiction has significant, dire consequences. And for many people that means death or incarceration. We've been down that road before. For too long our country felt like we could arrest our way out of this problem. But we know that we can't. Decades of scientific research has shown that this is a medical issue — that this is a chronic medical condition that people inherit and that people develop. So the Obama administration has taken a different tack on drug policy. We've developed and implemented a comprehensive plan to expand prevention services, treatment services, early intervention and recovery support. We've pushed criminal justice reform. We've knocked down barriers to give people second chances. We see public health and public safety officials working hand in hand at the community level. We see police chiefs across the country guiding people to treatment instead of jail and incarceration. We see law enforcement and other first responders reversing overdoses with naloxone to give people a second chance for care. The Affordable Care Act is the biggest expansion of substance use disorder treatment in a generation, and it also calls for the integration of treatment services within primary care. But fundamentally, all of this work is not enough. Unless we change the way that we view people with addiction in the United States. Years ago when I finally understood that I had a problem and I knew that I needed help, I was too afraid to ask for it. I felt that people would think I was stupid, that I was weak-willed, that I was morally flawed. But I talk about my recovery because I want to make change. I want us to see that we need to be open and candid about who we are and what we can do. I am public about my own recovery not to be self-congratulatory. I am open about my own recovery to change public opinion, to change public policy and to change the course of this epidemic and empower the millions of Americans who struggle with this journey to be open and candid about who they are. People are more than their disease. And all of us have the opportunity to change public opinion and to change public policy. All of us know someone who has an addiction, and all of us can do our part to change how we view people with addiction in the United States. So when you see someone with an addiction, don't think of a drunk or a junkie or an addict or an abuser — see a person; offer them help; give them kindness and compassion. And together, we can be part of a growing movement in the United States to change how we view people with addiction. Together we can change public policy. We can ensure that people get care when they need it, just like any other disease. We can be part of a growing, unstoppable movement to have millions of Americans enter recovery, and put an end to this epidemic. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How early life experience is written into DNA | {0: "Moshe Szyf's research is focused on understanding the broad implications of epigenetic mechanisms in human behavior, health and disease."} | TEDxBratislava | So it all came to life in a dark bar in Madrid. I encountered my colleague from McGill, Michael Meaney. And we were drinking a few beers, and like scientists do, he told me about his work. And he told me that he is interested in how mother rats lick their pups after they were born. And I was sitting there and saying, "This is where my tax dollars are wasted — (Laughter) on this kind of soft science." And he started telling me that the rats, like humans, lick their pups in very different ways. Some mothers do a lot of that, some mothers do very little, and most are in between. But what's interesting about it is when he follows these pups when they become adults — like, years in human life, long after their mother died. They are completely different animals. The animals that were licked and groomed heavily, the high-licking and grooming, are not stressed. They have different sexual behavior. They have a different way of living than those that were not treated as intensively by their mothers. So then I was thinking to myself: Is this magic? How does this work? As geneticists would like you to think, perhaps the mother had the "bad mother" gene that caused her pups to be stressful, and then it was passed from generation to generation; it's all determined by genetics. Or is it possible that something else is going on here? In rats, we can ask this question and answer it. So what we did is a cross-fostering experiment. You essentially separate the litter, the babies of this rat, at birth, to two kinds of fostering mothers — not the real mothers, but mothers that will take care of them: high-licking mothers and low-licking mothers. And you can do the opposite with the low-licking pups. And the remarkable answer was, it wasn't important what gene you got from your mother. It was not the biological mother that defined this property of these rats. It is the mother that took care of the pups. So how can this work? I am an a epigeneticist. I am interested in how genes are marked by a chemical mark during embryogenesis, during the time we're in the womb of our mothers, and decide which gene will be expressed in what tissue. Different genes are expressed in the brain than in the liver and the eye. And we thought: Is it possible that the mother is somehow reprogramming the gene of her offspring through her behavior? And we spent 10 years, and we found that there is a cascade of biochemical events by which the licking and grooming of the mother, the care of the mother, is translated to biochemical signals that go into the nucleus and into the DNA and program it differently. So now the animal can prepare itself for life: Is life going to be harsh? Is there going to be a lot of food? Are there going to be a lot of cats and snakes around, or will I live in an upper-class neighborhood where all I have to do is behave well and proper, and that will gain me social acceptance? And now one can think about how important that process can be for our lives. We inherit our DNA from our ancestors. The DNA is old. It evolved during evolution. But it doesn't tell us if you are going to be born in Stockholm, where the days are long in the summer and short in the winter, or in Ecuador, where there's an equal number of hours for day and night all year round. And that has such an enormous [effect] on our physiology. So what we suggest is, perhaps what happens early in life, those signals that come through the mother, tell the child what kind of social world you're going to be living in. It will be harsh, and you'd better be anxious and be stressful, or it's going to be an easy world, and you have to be different. Is it going to be a world with a lot of light or little light? Is it going to be a world with a lot of food or little food? If there's no food around, you'd better develop your brain to binge whenever you see a meal, or store every piece of food that you have as fat. So this is good. Evolution has selected this to allow our fixed, old DNA to function in a dynamic way in new environments. But sometimes things can go wrong; for example, if you're born to a poor family and the signals are, "You better binge, you better eat every piece of food you're going to encounter." But now we humans and our brain have evolved, have changed evolution even faster. Now you can buy McDonald's for one dollar. And therefore, the preparation that we had by our mothers is turning out to be maladaptive. The same preparation that was supposed to protect us from hunger and famine is going to cause obesity, cardiovascular problems and metabolic disease. So this concept that genes could be marked by our experience, and especially the early life experience, can provide us a unifying explanation of both health and disease. But is true only for rats? The problem is, we cannot test this in humans, because ethically, we cannot administer child adversity in a random way. So if a poor child develops a certain property, we don't know whether this is caused by poverty or whether poor people have bad genes. So geneticists will try to tell you that poor people are poor because their genes make them poor. Epigeneticists will tell you poor people are in a bad environment or an impoverished environment that creates that phenotype, that property. So we moved to look into our cousins, the monkeys. My colleague, Stephen Suomi, has been rearing monkeys in two different ways: randomly separated the monkey from the mother and reared her with a nurse and surrogate motherhood conditions. So these monkeys didn't have a mother; they had a nurse. And other monkeys were reared with their normal, natural mothers. And when they were old, they were completely different animals. The monkeys that had a mother did not care about alcohol, they were not sexually aggressive. The monkeys that didn't have a mother were aggressive, were stressed and were alcoholics. So we looked at their DNA early after birth, to see: Is it possible that the mother is marking? Is there a signature of the mother in the DNA of the offspring? These are Day-14 monkeys, and what you see here is the modern way by which we study epigenetics. We can now map those chemical marks, which we call methylation marks, on DNA at a single nucleotide resolution. We can map the entire genome. We can now compare the monkey that had a mother or not. And here's a visual presentation of this. What you see is the genes that got more methylated are red. The genes that got less methylated are green. You can see many genes are changing, because not having a mother is not just one thing — it affects the whole way; it sends signals about the whole way your world is going to look when you become an adult. And you can see the two groups of monkeys extremely well-separated from each other. How early does this develop? These monkeys already didn't see their mothers, so they had a social experience. Do we sense our social status, even at the moment of birth? So in this experiment, we took placentas of monkeys that had different social status. What's interesting about social rank is that across all living beings, they will structure themselves by hierarchy. Monkey number one is the boss; monkey number four is the peon. You put four monkeys in a cage, there will always be a boss and always be a peon. And what's interesting is that the monkey number one is much healthier than monkey number four. And if you put them in a cage, monkey number one will not eat as much. Monkey number four will eat [a lot]. And what you see here in this methylation mapping, a dramatic separation at birth of the animals that had a high social status versus the animals that did not have a high status. So we are born already knowing the social information, and that social information is not bad or good, it just prepares us for life, because we have to program our biology differently if we are in the high or the low social status. But how can you study this in humans? We can't do experiments, we can't administer adversity to humans. But God does experiments with humans, and it's called natural disasters. One of the hardest natural disasters in Canadian history happened in my province of Quebec. It's the ice storm of 1998. We lost our entire electrical grid because of an ice storm when the temperatures were, in the dead of winter in Quebec, minus 20 to minus 30. And there were pregnant mothers during that time. And my colleague Suzanne King followed the children of these mothers for 15 years. And what happened was, that as the stress increased — and here we had objective measures of stress: How long were you without power? Where did you spend your time? Was it in your mother-in-law's apartment or in some posh country home? So all of these added up to a social stress scale, and you can ask the question: How did the children look? And it appears that as stress increases, the children develop more autism, they develop more metabolic diseases and they develop more autoimmune diseases. We would map the methylation state, and again, you see the green genes becoming red as stress increases, the red genes becoming green as stress increases, an entire rearrangement of the genome in response to stress. So if we can program genes, if we are not just the slaves of the history of our genes, that they could be programmed, can we deprogram them? Because epigenetic causes can cause diseases like cancer, metabolic disease and mental health diseases. Let's talk about cocaine addiction. Cocaine addiction is a terrible situation that can lead to death and to loss of human life. We asked the question: Can we reprogram the addicted brain to make that animal not addicted anymore? We used a cocaine addiction model that recapitulates what happens in humans. In humans, you're in high school, some friends suggest you use some cocaine, you take cocaine, nothing happens. Months pass by, something reminds you of what happened the first time, a pusher pushes cocaine, and you become addicted and your life has changed. In rats, we do the same thing. My colleague, Gal Yadid, he trains the animals to get used to cocaine, then for one month, no cocaine. Then he reminds them of the party when they saw the cocaine the first time by cue, the colors of the cage when they saw cocaine. And they go crazy. They will press the lever to get cocaine until they die. We first determined that the difference between these animals is that during that time when nothing happens, there's no cocaine around, their epigenome is rearranged. Their genes are re-marked in a different way, and when the cue comes, their genome is ready to develop this addictive phenotype. So we treated these animals with drugs that either increase DNA methylation, which was the epigenetic marker to look at, or decrease epigenetic markings. And we found that if we increased methylation, these animals go even crazier. They become more craving for cocaine. But if we reduce the DNA methylation, the animals are not addicted anymore. We have reprogrammed them. And a fundamental difference between an epigenetic drug and any other drug is that with epigenetic drugs, we essentially remove the signs of experience, and once they're gone, they will not come back unless you have the same experience. The animal now is reprogrammed. So when we visited the animals 30 days, 60 days later, which is in human terms many years of life, they were still not addicted — by a single epigenetic treatment. So what did we learn about DNA? DNA is not just a sequence of letters; it's not just a script. DNA is a dynamic movie. Our experiences are being written into this movie, which is interactive. You're, like, watching a movie of your life, with the DNA, with your remote control. You can remove an actor and add an actor. And so you have, in spite of the deterministic nature of genetics, you have control of the way your genes look, and this has a tremendous optimistic message for the ability to now encounter some of the deadly diseases like cancer, mental health, with a new approach, looking at them as maladaptation. And if we can epigenetically intervene, [we can] reverse the movie by removing an actor and setting up a new narrative. So what I told you today is, our DNA is really combined of two components, two layers of information. One layer of information is old, evolved from millions of years of evolution. It is fixed and very hard to change. The other layer of information is the epigenetic layer, which is open and dynamic and sets up a narrative that is interactive, that allows us to control, to a large extent, our destiny, to help the destiny of our children and to hopefully conquer disease and serious health challenges that have plagued humankind for a long time. So even though we are determined by our genes, we have a degree of freedom that can set up our life to a life of responsibility. Thank you. (Applause) |
A young poet tells the story of Darfur | {0: 'Emtithal "Emi" Mahmoud dedicates her time to spreading understanding through poetry and advocacy, particularly for the cause of refugees and disadvantaged communities the world over.'} | TEDMED 2016 | I was 10 years old when I learned what the word "genocide" meant. It was 2003, and my people were being brutally attacked because of their race — hundreds of thousands murdered, millions displaced, a nation torn apart at the hands of its own government. My mother and father immediately began speaking out against the crisis. I didn't really understand it, except for the fact that it was destroying my parents. One day, I walked in on my mother crying, and I asked her why we are burying so many people. I don't remember the words that she chose to describe genocide to her 10-year-old daughter, but I remember the feeling. We felt completely alone, as if no one could hear us, as if we were essentially invisible. This is when I wrote my first poem about Darfur. I wrote poetry to convince people to hear and see us, and that's how I learned the thing that changed me. It's easy to be seen. I mean, look at me — I'm a young African woman with a scarf around my head, an American accent on my tongue and a story that makes even the most brutal of Monday mornings seem inviting. But it's hard to convince people that they deserve to be seen. I learned this in my high school classroom one day, when my teacher asked me to give a presentation about Darfur. I was setting up the projector when a classmate of mine said, "Why do you have to talk about this? Can't you think about us and how it will make us feel?" (Laughter) My 14-year-old self didn't know what to say to her, or how to explain the pain that I felt in that moment, and in every moment that we were forced not to talk about "this." Her words took me back to the days and nights on the ground in Darfur, where we were forced to remain silent; where we didn't speak over morning tea because the warplanes overhead would swallow any and all noise; back to the days when we were told not only that we don't deserve to be heard but that we do not have a right to exist. And this is where the magic happened, in that classroom when all the students started taking their seats and I began to speak, despite this renewed feeling that I didn't deserve to be there, that I didn't belong there or have a right to break the silence. As I talked, and my classmates listened, the fear ebbed away. My mind became calm, and I felt safe. It was the sound of our grieving, the feel of their arms around me, the steady walls that held us together. It felt nothing like a vacuum. I choose poetry because it's so visceral. When someone is standing in front of you, mind, body and soul, saying "Witness me," it's impossible not to become keenly aware of your own humanity. This changed everything for me. It gave me courage. Every day I experience the power of witness, and because of that, I am whole. And so now I ask: Will you witness me? They hand me the microphone as my shoulders sink under the weight of this stress. The woman says, "The one millionth refugee just left South Sudan. Can you comment?" I feel my feet rock back and forth on the heels my mother bought, begging the question: Do we stay, or is it safer to choose flight? My mind echoes the numbers: one million gone, two million displaced, 400,000 dead in Darfur. And this lump takes over my throat, as if each of those bodies just found a grave right here in my esophagus. Our once country, all north and south and east and west, so restless the Nile couldn't hold us together, and you ask me to summarize. They talk about the numbers as if this isn't still happening, as if 500,000 didn't just die in Syria, as if 3,000 aren't still making their final stand at the bottom of the Mediterranean, as if there aren't entire volumes full of fact sheets about our genocides, and now they want me to write one. Fact: we never talked over breakfast, because the warplanes would swallow our voices. Fact: my grandfather didn't want to leave home, so he died in a war zone. Fact: a burning bush without God is just a fire. I measure the distance between what I know and what is safe to say on a microphone. Do I talk about sorrow? Displacement? Do I mention the violence, how it's never as simple as what you see on TV, how there are weeks' worth of fear before the camera is on? Do I tell her about our bodies, how they are 60 percent water, but we still burn like driftwood, making fuel of our sacrifice? Do I tell her the men died first, mothers forced to watch the slaughter? That they came for our children, scattering them across the continent until our homes sank? That even castles sink at the bite of the bomb? Do I talk about the elderly, our heroes, too weak to run, too expensive to shoot, how they would march them, hands raised, rifles at their backs, into the fire? How their walking sticks kept the flames alive? It feels too harsh for a bundle of wires and an audience to swallow. Too relentless, like the valley that filled with the putrid smoke of our deaths. Is it better in verse? Can a stanza become a burial shroud? Will it sting less if I say it softly? If you don't see me cry, will you listen better? Will the pain leave when the microphone does? Why does every word feel as if I'm saying my last? Thirty seconds for the sound bite, and now three minutes for the poem. My tongue goes dry the same way we died, becoming ash, having never been coal. I feel my left leg go numb, and I realize that I locked my knees, bracing for impact. I never wear shoes I can't run in. Thank you. (Applause) So, I wanted to leave on a positive note, because that's the paradox that this life has been: in the places where I learned to cry the most, I also learned how to smile after. So, here goes. "You Have a Big Imagination or 400,000 Ways to Cry." For Zeinab. I am a sad girl, but my face makes other plans, focusing energy on this smile, so as not to waste it on pain. The first thing they took was my sleep, eyes heavy but wide open, thinking maybe I missed something, maybe the cavalry is still coming. They didn't come, so I bought bigger pillows. (Laughter) My grandmother could cure anything by talking the life out of it. And she said that I could make a thief in a silo laugh in the middle of our raging war. War makes a broken marriage bed out of sorrow. You want nothing more than to disappear, but your heart can't salvage enough remnants to leave. But joy — joy is the armor we carried across the borders of our broken homeland. A hasty mix of stories and faces that lasts long after the flavor is gone. A muscle memory that overcomes even the most bitter of times, my memory is spotted with days of laughing until I cried, or crying until I laughed. Laughter and tears are both involuntary human reactions, testaments to our capacity for expression. So allow me to express that if I make you laugh, it's usually on purpose. And if I make you cry, I'll still think you are beautiful. This is for my cousin Zeinab, bedridden on a random afternoon. I hadn't seen her since the last time we were in Sudan together, and there I was at her hospital bedside in a 400-year-old building in France. Zeinab wanted to hear poems. Suddenly, English, Arabic and French were not enough. Every word I knew became empty noise, and Zeinab said, "Well, get on with it." (Laughter) And I read her everything that I could, and we laughed, and we loved it, and it was the most important stage that I've ever stood on, surrounded by family, by remnants of a people who were given as a dowry to a relentless war but still managed to make pearls of this life; by the ones who taught me to not only laugh, but to live in the face of death; who placed their hands across the sky, measuring the distance to the sun and saying, "Smile; I'm gonna meet you there." And for Zeinab — Zeinab, who taught me love in a place like France, Zeinab, who wanted to he.ar poems on her deathbed — Dilated fibromyalgia. Her heart muscles expanded until they couldn't function. And she held me, and she made me feel like gold. And I said, "Zeinab, isn't it strange that your only problem is that your heart was too big?" Thank you. (Applause) |
Know your worth, and then ask for it | {0: 'Casey Brown wants people to be paid well for their excellence.'} | TEDxColumbusWomen | No one will ever pay you what you're worth. No one will ever pay you what you're worth. They'll only ever pay you what they think you're worth. And you control their thinking, not like this, although that would be cool. (Laughter) That would be really cool. Instead, like this: clearly defining and communicating your value are essential to being paid well for your excellence. Anyone here want to be paid well? OK, good, then this talk is for everyone. It's got universal applicability. It's true if you're a business owner, if you're an employee, if you're a job seeker. It's true if you're a man or a woman. Now, I approach this today through the lens of the woman business owner, because in my work I've observed that women underprice more so than men. The gender wage gap is a well-traveled narrative in this country. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a woman employee earns just 83 cents for every dollar a man earns. What may surprise you is that this trend continues even into the entrepreneurial sphere. A woman business owner earns just 80 cents for every dollar a man earns. In my work, I've often heard women express that they're uncomfortable communicating their value, especially early on in business ownership. They say things like, "I don't like to toot my own horn." "I'd rather let the work speak for itself." "I don't like to sing my own praises." I hear very different narratives in working with male business owners, and I think this difference is costing women 20 cents on the dollar. I'd like to tell you the story of a consulting firm that helps their clients dramatically improve their profitability. That company is my company. After my first year in business, I saw the profit increases that my clients were realizing in working with me, and I realized that I needed to reevaluate my pricing. I was really underpriced relative to the value I was delivering. It's hard for me to admit to you, because I'm a pricing consultant. (Laughter) It's what I do. I help companies price for value. But nonetheless, it's what I saw, and so I sat down to evaluate my pricing, evaluate my value, and I did that by asking key value questions. What are my clients' needs and how do I meet them? What is my unique skill set that makes me better qualified to serve my clients? What do I do that no one else does? What problems do I solve for clients? What value do I add? I answered these questions and defined the value that my clients get from working with me, calculated their return on investment, and what I saw was that I needed to double my price, double it. Now, I confess to you, this terrified me. I'm supposed to be the expert in this, but I'm not cured. I knew the value was there. I was convinced the value was there, and I was still scared out of my wits. What if nobody would pay me that? What if clients said, "That's ridiculous. You're ridiculous." Was I really worth that? Not my work, mind you, but me. Was I worth that? I'm the mother of two beautiful little girls who depend upon me. I'm a single mom. What if my business fails? What if I fail? But I know how to take my own medicine, the medicine that I prescribe to my clients. I had done the homework. I knew the value was there. So when prospects came, I prepared the proposals with the new higher pricing and sent them out and communicated the value. How's the story end? Clients continued to hire me and refer me and recommend me, and I'm still here. And I share this story because doubts and fears are natural and normal. But they don't define our value, and they shouldn't limit our earning potential. I'd like to share another story, about a woman who learned to communicate her value and found her own voice. She runs a successful web development company and employs several people. When she first started her firm and for several years thereafter, she would say, "I have a little web design company." She'd actually use those words with clients. "I have a little web design company." In this and in many other small ways, she was diminishing her company in the eyes of prospects and clients, and diminishing herself. It was really impacting her ability to earn what she was worth. I believe her language and her style communicated that she didn't believe she had much value to offer. In her own words, she was practically giving her services away. And so she began her journey to take responsibility for communicating value to clients and changing her message. One thing I shared with her is that it's so important to find your own voice, a voice that's authentic and true to you. Don't try to channel your sister-in-law just because she's a great salesperson or your neighbor who tells a great joke if that's not who you are. Give up this notion that it's tooting your own horn. Make it about the other party. Focus on serving and adding value, and it won't feel like bragging. What do you love about what you do? What excites you about the work that you do? If you connect with that, communicating your value will come naturally. So she embraced her natural style, found her voice and changed her message. For one thing, she stopped calling herself a little web design company. She really found a lot of strength and power in communicating her message. She's now charging three times as much for web design, and her business is growing. She told me about a recent meeting with a gruff and sometimes difficult client who had called a meeting questioning progress on search engine optimization. She said in the old days, that would have been a really intimidating meeting for her, but her mindset was different. She said, she prepared the information, sat down with the client, said this isn't about me, it's not personal, it's about the client. She took them through the data, through the numbers, laid out the trends and the progress in her own voice and in her own way, but very directly said, "Here's what we've done for you." The client sat up and took notice, and said, "OK, I got it." And she said in describing that meeting, "I didn't feel scared or panicky or small, which is how I used to feel. Instead I feel like, 'OK, I got this. I know what I'm doing. I'm confident.'" Being properly valued is so important. You can hear in this story that the implications range far beyond just finances into the realm of self-respect and self-confidence. Today I've told two stories, one about defining our value and the other about communicating our value, and these are the two elements to realizing our full earning potential. That's the equation. And if you're sitting in the audience today and you're not being paid what you're worth, I'd like to welcome you into this equation. Just imagine what life could be like, how much more we could do, how much more we could give back, how much more we could plan for the future, how validated and respected we would feel if we could earn our full potential, realize our full value. No one will ever pay you what you're worth. They'll only ever pay you what they think you're worth, and you control their thinking. Thank you. (Applause) |
Political common ground in a polarized United States | {0: "Gretchen Carlson is a tireless advocate for workplace equality and women's empowerment.", 1: "Vy Higginsen's Gospel Choir of Harlem is an influential source of education and self-development for young people.", 2: 'Writer and thinker David Brooks has covered business, crime and politics over a long career in journalism. ', 3: 'After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.'} | TED Dialogues | Chris Anderson: Welcome to this next edition of TED Dialogues. We're trying to do some bridging here today. You know, the American dream has inspired millions of people around the world for many years. Today, I think, you can say that America is divided, perhaps more than ever, and the divisions seem to be getting worse. It's actually really hard for people on different sides to even have a conversation. People almost feel... disgusted with each other. Some families can't even speak to each other right now. Our purpose in this dialogue today is to try to do something about that, to try to have a different kind of conversation, to do some listening, some thinking, some understanding. And I have two people with us to help us do that. They're not going to come at this hammer and tong against each other. This is not like cable news. This is two people who have both spent a lot of their working life in the political center or right of the center. They've immersed themselves in conservative worldviews, if you like. They know that space very well. And we're going to explore together how to think about what is happening right now, and whether we can find new ways to bridge and just to have wiser, more connected conversations. With me, first of all, Gretchen Carlson, who has spent a decade working at Fox News, hosting "Fox and Friends" and then "The Real Story," before taking a courageous stance in filing sexual harassment claims against Roger Ailes, which eventually led to his departure from Fox News. David Brooks, who has earned the wrath of many of [The New York Times's] left-leaning readers because of his conservative views, and more recently, perhaps, some of the right-leaning readers because of his criticism of some aspects of Trump. Yet, his columns are usually the top one, two or three most-read content of the day because they're brilliant, because they bring psychology and social science to providing understanding for what's going on. So without further ado, a huge welcome to Gretchen and David. Come and join me. (Applause) So, Gretchen. Sixty-three million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Why did they do this? Gretchen Carlson: There are a lot of reasons, in my mind, why it happened. I mean, I think it was a movement of sorts, but it started long ago. It didn't just happen overnight. "Anger" would be the first word that I would think of — anger with nothing being done in Washington, anger about not being heard. I think there was a huge swath of the population that feels like Washington never listens to them, you know, a good part of the middle of America, not just the coasts, and he was somebody they felt was listening to their concerns. So I think those two issues would be the main reason. I have to throw in there also celebrity. I think that had a huge impact on Donald Trump becoming president. CA: Was the anger justified? David Brooks: Yeah, I think so. In 2015 and early 2016, I wrote about 30 columns with the following theme: don't worry, Donald Trump will never be the Republican nominee. (Laughter) And having done that and gotten that so wrong, I decided to spend the ensuing year just out in Trumpworld, and I found a lot of economic dislocation. I ran into a woman in West Virginia who was going to a funeral for her mom. She said, "The nice thing about being Catholic is we don't have to speak, and that's good, because we're not word people." That phrase rung in my head: word people. A lot of us in the TED community are word people, but if you're not, the economy has not been angled toward you, and so 11 million men, for example, are out of the labor force because those jobs are done away. A lot of social injury. You used to be able to say, "I'm not the richest person in the world, I'm not the most famous, but my neighbors can count on me and I get some dignity out of that." And because of celebritification or whatever, if you're not rich or famous, you feel invisible. And a lot of moral injury, sense of feeling betrayed, and frankly, in this country, we almost have one success story, which is you go to college, get a white-collar job, and you're a success, and if you don't fit in that formula, you feel like you're not respected. And so that accumulation of things — and when I talked to Trump voters and still do, I found most of them completely realistic about his failings, but they said, this is my shot. GC: And yet I predicted that he would be the nominee, because I've known him for 27 years. He's a master marketer, and one of the things he did extremely well that President Obama also did extremely well, was simplifying the message, simplifying down to phrases and to a populist message. Even if he can't achieve it, it sounded good. And many people latched on to that simplicity again. It's something they could grasp onto: "I get that. I want that. That sounds fantastic." And I remember when he used to come on my show originally, before "The Apprentice" was even "The Apprentice," and he'd say it was the number one show on TV. I'd say back to him, "No, it's not." And he would say, "Yes it is, Gretchen." And I would say, "No it's not." But people at home would see that, and they'd be like, "Wow, I should be watching the number one show on TV." And — lo and behold — it became the number one show on TV. So he had this, I've seen this ability in him to be the master marketer. CA: It's puzzling to a lot of people on the left that so many women voted for him, despite some of his comments. GC: I wrote a column about this for Time Motto, saying that I really believe that lot of people put on blinders, and maybe for the first time, some people decided that policies they believed in and being heard and not being invisible anymore was more important to them than the way in which he had acted or acts as a human. And so human dignity — whether it would be the dust-up about the disabled reporter, or what happened in that audiotape with Billy Bush and the way in which he spoke about women — they put that aside and pretended as if they hadn't seen that or heard that, because to them, policies were more important. CA: Right, so just because someone voted for Trump, it's not blind adherence to everything that he's said or stood for. GC: No. I heard a lot of people that would say to me, "Wow, I just wish he would shut up before the election. If he would just stay quiet, he'd get elected." CA: And so, maybe for people on the left there's a trap there, to sort of despise or just be baffled by the support, assuming that it's for some of the unattractive features. Actually, maybe they're supporting him despite those, because they see something exciting. They see a man of action. They see the choking hold of government being thrown off in some way and they're excited by that. GC: But don't forget we saw that on the left as well — Bernie Sanders. So this is one of the commonalities that I think we can talk about today, "The Year of the Outsider," David — right? And even though Bernie Sanders has been in Congress for a long time, he was deemed an outsider this time. And so there was anger on the left as well, and so many people were in favor of Bernie Sanders. So I see it as a commonality. People who like Trump, people who like Bernie Sanders, they were liking different policies, but the underpinning was anger. CA: David, there's often this narrative, then, that the sole explanation for Trump's victory and his rise is his tapping into anger in a very visceral way. But you've written a bit about that it's actually more than that, that there's a worldview that's being worked on here. Could you talk about that? DB: I would say he understood what, frankly, I didn't, which is what debate we were having. And so I'd grown up starting with Reagan, and it was the big government versus small government debate. It was Barry Goldwater versus George McGovern, and that was the debate we had been having for a generation. It was: Democrats wanted to use government to enhance equality, Republicans wanted to limit government to enhance freedom. That was the debate. He understood what I think the two major parties did not, which was that's not the debate anymore. The debate is now open versus closed. On one side are those who have the tailwinds of globalization and the meritocracy blowing at their back, and they tend to favor open trade, open borders, open social mores, because there are so many opportunities. On the other side are those who feel the headwinds of globalization and the meritocracy just blasting in their faces, and they favor closed trade, closed borders, closed social mores, because they just want some security. And so he was right on that fundamental issue, and people were willing to overlook a lot to get there. And so he felt that sense of security. We're speaking the morning after Trump's joint session speech. There are three traditional groups in the Republican Party. There are the foreign policies hawks who believe in America as global policeman. Trump totally repudiated that view. Second, there was the social conservatives who believed in religious liberty, pro-life, prayer in schools. He totally ignored that. There was not a single mention of a single social conservative issue. And then there were the fiscal hawks, the people who wanted to cut down on the national debt, Tea Party, cut the size of government. He's expanding the size of government! Here's a man who has single-handedly revolutionized a major American party because he understood where the debate was headed before other people. And then guys like Steve Bannon come in and give him substance to his impulses. CA: And so take that a bit further, and maybe expand a bit more on your insights into Steve Bannon's worldview. Because he's sometimes tarred in very simple terms as this dangerous, racist, xenophobic, anger-sparking person. There's more to the story; that is perhaps an unfair simplification. DB: I think that part is true, but there's another part that's probably true, too. He's part of a global movement. It's like being around Marxists in 1917. There's him here, there's the UKIP party, there's the National Front in France, there's Putin, there's a Turkish version, a Philippine version. So we have to recognize that this is a global intellectual movement. And it believes that wisdom and virtue is not held in individual conversation and civility the way a lot of us in the enlightenment side of the world do. It's held in — the German word is the "volk" — in the people, in the common, instinctive wisdom of the plain people. And the essential virtue of that people is always being threatened by outsiders. And he's got a strategy for how to get there. He's got a series of policies to bring the people up and repudiate the outsiders, whether those outsiders are Islam, Mexicans, the media, the coastal elites... And there's a whole worldview there; it's a very coherent worldview. I sort of have more respect for him. I loathe what he stands for and I think he's wrong on the substance, but it's interesting to see someone with a set of ideas find a vehicle, Donald Trump, and then try to take control of the White House in order to advance his viewpoint. CA: So it's almost become, like, that the core question of our time now is: Can you be patriotic but also have a global mindset? Are these two things implacably opposed to each other? I mean, a lot of conservatives and, to the extent that it's a different category, a lot of Trump supporters, are infuriated by the coastal elites and the globalists because they see them as, sort of, not cheering for America, not embracing fully American values. I mean, have you seen that in your conversations with people, in your understanding of their mindset? GC: I do think that there's a huge difference between — I hate to put people in categories, but, Middle America versus people who live on the coasts. It's an entirely different existence. And I grew up in Minnesota, so I have an understanding of Middle America, and I've never forgotten it. And maybe that's why I have an understanding of what happened here, because those people often feel like nobody's listening to them, and that we're only concentrating on California and New York. And so I think that was a huge reason why Trump was elected. I mean, these people felt like they were being heard. Whether or not patriotism falls into that, I'm not sure about that. I do know one thing: a lot of things Trump talked about last night are not conservative things. Had Hillary Clinton gotten up and given that speech, not one Republican would have stood up to applaud. I mean, he's talking about spending a trillion dollars on infrastructure. That is not a conservative viewpoint. He talked about government-mandated maternity leave. A lot of women may love that; it's not a conservative viewpoint. So it's fascinating that people who loved what his message was during the campaign, I'm not sure — how do you think they'll react to that? DB: I should say I grew up in Lower Manhattan, in the triangle between ABC Carpets, the Strand Bookstore and The Odeon restaurant. (Laughter) GC: Come to Minnesota sometime! (Laughter) CA: You are a card-carrying member of the coastal elite, my man. But what did you make of the speech last night? It seemed to be a move to a more moderate position, on the face of it. DB: Yeah, I thought it was his best speech, and it took away the freakishness of him. I do think he's a moral freak, and I think he'll be undone by that fact, the fact that he just doesn't know anything about anything and is uncurious about it. (Laughter) But if you take away these minor flaws, I think we got to see him at his best, and it was revealing for me to see him at his best, because to me, it exposed a central contradiction that he's got to confront, that a lot of what he's doing is offering security. So, "I'm ordering closed borders, I'm going to secure the world for you, for my people." But then if you actually look at a lot of his economic policies, like health care reform, which is about private health care accounts, that's not security, that's risk. Educational vouchers: that's risk. Deregulation: that's risk. There's really a contradiction between the security of the mindset and a lot of the policies, which are very risk-oriented. And what I would say, especially having spent this year, the people in rural Minnesota, in New Mexico — they've got enough risk in their lives. And so they're going to say, "No thank you." And I think his health care repeal will fail for that reason. CA: But despite the criticisms you just made of him, it does at least seem that he's listening to a surprisingly wide range of voices; it's not like everyone is coming from the same place. And maybe that leads to a certain amount of chaos and confusion, but — GC: I actually don't think he's listening to a wide range of voices. I think he's listening to very few people. That's just my impression of it. I believe that some of the things he said last night had Ivanka all over them. So I believe he was listening to her before that speech. And he was Teleprompter Trump last night, as opposed to Twitter Trump. And that's why, before we came out here, I said, "We better check Twitter to see if anything's changed." And also I think you have to keep in mind that because he's such a unique character, what was the bar that we were expecting last night? Was it here or here or here? And so he comes out and gives a looking political speech, and everyone goes, "Wow! He can do it." It just depends on which direction he goes. DB: Yeah, and we're trying to build bridges here, and especially for an audience that may have contempt for Trump, it's important to say, no, this is a real thing. But as I try my best to go an hour showing respect for him, my thyroid is surging, because I think the oddities of his character really are condemnatory and are going to doom him. CA: Your reputation is as a conservative. People would you describe you as right of center, and yet here you are with this visceral reaction against him and some of what he stands for. I mean, I'm — how do you have a conversation? The people who support him, on evidence so far, are probably pretty excited. He's certainly shown real engagement in a lot of what he promised to do, and there is a strong desire to change the system radically. People hate what government has become and how it's left them out. GC: I totally agree with that, but I think that when he was proposing a huge government program last night that we used to call the bad s-word, "stimulus," I find it completely ironic. To spend a trillion dollars on something — that is not a conservative viewpoint. Then again, I don't really believe he's a Republican. DB: And I would say, as someone who identifies as conservative: first of all, to be conservative is to believe in the limitations of politics. Samuel Johnson said, "Of all the things that human hearts endure, how few are those that kings can cause and cure." Politics is a limited realm; what matters most is the moral nature of the society. And so I have to think character comes first, and a man who doesn't pass the character threshold cannot be a good president. Second, I'm the kind of conservative who — I harken back to Alexander Hamilton, who was a Latino hip-hop star from the heights — (Laughter) but his definition of America was very future-oriented. He was a poor boy from the islands who had this rapid and amazing rise to success, and he wanted government to give poor boys and girls like him a chance to succeed, using limited but energetic government to create social mobility. For him and for Lincoln and for Teddy Roosevelt, the idea of America was the idea of the future. We may have division and racism and slavery in our past, but we have a common future. The definition of America that Steve Bannon stands for is backwards-looking. It's nostalgic; it's for the past. And that is not traditionally the American identity. That's traditionally, frankly, the Russian identity. That's how they define virtue. And so I think it is a fundamental and foundational betrayal of what conservatism used to stand for. CA: Well, I'd like actually like to hear from you, and if we see some comments coming in from some of you, we'll — oh, well here's one right now. Jeffrey Alan Carnegie: I've tried to convince progressive friends that they need to understand what motivates Trump supporters, yet many of them have given up trying to understand in the face of what they perceive as lies, selfishness and hatred. How would you reach out to such people, the Tea Party of the left, to try to bridge this divide? GC: I actually think there are commonalities in anger, as I expressed earlier. So I think you can come to the table, both being passionate about something. So at least you care. And I would like to believe — the c-word has also become a horrible word — "compromise," right? So you have the far left and the far right, and compromise — forget it. Those groups don't want to even think about it. But you have a huge swath of voters, myself included, who are registered independents, like 40 percent of us, right? So there is a huge faction of America that wants to see change and wants to see people come together. It's just that we have to figure out how to do that. CA: So let's talk about that for a minute, because we're having these TED Dialogues, we're trying to bridge. There's a lot of people out there, right now, perhaps especially on the left, who think this is a terrible idea, that actually, the only moral response to the great tyranny that may be about to emerge in America is to resist it at every stage, is to fight it tooth and nail, it's a mistake to try and do this. Just fight! Is there a case for that? DB: It depends what "fight" means. If it means literal fighting, then no. If it means marching, well maybe marching to raise consciousness, that seems fine. But if you want change in this country, we do it through parties and politics. We organize parties, and those parties are big, diverse, messy coalitions, and we engage in politics, and politics is always morally unsatisfying because it's always a bunch of compromises. But politics is essentially a competition between partial truths. The Trump people have a piece of the truth in America. I think Trump himself is the wrong answer to the right question, but they have some truth, and it's truth found in the epidemic of opiates around the country, it's truth found in the spread of loneliness, it's the truth found in people whose lives are inverted. They peaked professionally at age 30, and it's all been downhill since. And so, understanding that doesn't take fighting, it takes conversation and then asking, "What are we going to replace Trump with?" GC: But you saw fighting last night, even at the speech, because you saw the Democratic women who came and wore white to honor the suffragette movement. I remember back during the campaign where some Trump supporters wanted to actually get rid of the amendment that allowed us to vote as women. It was like, what? So I don't know if that's the right way to fight. It was interesting, because I was looking in the audience, trying to see Democratic women who didn't wear white. So there's a lot going on there, and there's a lot of ways to fight that are not necessarily doing that. CA: I mean, one of the key questions, to me, is: The people who voted for Trump but, if you like, are more in the center, like they're possibly amenable to persuasion — are they more likely to be persuaded by seeing a passionate uprising of people saying, "No, no, no, you can't!" or will that actually piss them off and push them away? DB: How are any of us persuaded? Am I going to persuade you by saying, "Well, you're kind of a bigot, you're supporting bigotry, you're supporting sexism. You're a primitive, fascistic rise from some authoritarian past"? That's probably not going to be too persuasive to you. And so the way any of us are persuaded is by: a) some basic show of respect for the point of view, and saying, "I think this guy is not going to get you where you need to go." And there are two phrases you've heard over and over again, wherever you go in the country. One, the phrase "flyover country." And that's been heard for years, but I would say this year, I heard it almost on an hourly basis, a sense of feeling invisible. And then the sense a sense of the phrase "political correctness." Just that rebellion: "They're not even letting us say what we think." And I teach at Yale. The narrowing of debate is real. CA: So you would say this is a trap that liberals have fallen into by celebrating causes they really believe in, often expressed through the language of "political correctness." They have done damage. They have pushed people away. DB: I would say a lot of the argument, though, with "descent to fascism," "authoritarianism" — that just feels over-the-top to people. And listen, I've written eight million anti-Trump columns, but it is a problem, especially for the coastal media, that every time he does something slightly wrong, we go to 11, and we're at 11 every day. And it just strains credibility at some point. CA: Crying wolf a little too loud and a little too early. But there may be a time when we really do have to cry wolf. GC: But see — one of the most important things to me is how the conservative media handles Trump. Will they call him out when things are not true, or will they just go along with it? To me, that is what is essential in this entire discussion, because when you have followers of somebody who don't really care if he tells the truth or not, that can be very dangerous. So to me, it's: How is the conservative media going to respond to it? I mean, you've been calling them out. But how will other forms of conservative media deal with that as we move forward? DB: It's all shifted, though. The conservative media used to be Fox or Charles Krauthammer or George Will. They're no longer the conservative media. Now there's another whole set of institutions further right, which is Breitbart and Infowars, Alex Jones, Laura Ingraham, and so they're the ones who are now his base, not even so much Fox. CA: My last question for the time being is just on this question of the truth. I mean, it's one of the scariest things to people right now, that there is no agreement, nationally, on what is true. I've never seen anything like it, where facts are so massively disputed. Your whole newspaper, sir, is delivering fake news every day. DB: And failing. (Laughter) CA: And failing. My commiserations. But is there any path whereby we can start to get some kind of consensus, to believe the same things? Can online communities play a role here? How do we fix this? GC: See, I understand how that happened. That's another groundswell kind of emotion that was going on in the middle of America and not being heard, in thinking that the mainstream media was biased. There's a difference, though, between being biased and being fake. To me, that is a very important distinction in this conversation. So let's just say that there was some bias in the mainstream media. OK. So there are ways to try and mend that. But what Trump's doing is nuclearizing that and saying, "Look, we're just going to call all of that fake." That's where it gets dangerous. CA: Do you think enough of his supporters have a greater loyalty to the truth than to any ... Like, the principle of not supporting something that is demonstrably not true actually matters, so there will be a correction at some point? DB: I think the truth eventually comes out. So for example, Donald Trump has based a lot of his economic policy on this supposition that Americans have lost manufacturing jobs because they've been stolen by the Chinese. That is maybe 13 percent of the jobs that left. The truth is that 87 percent of the jobs were replaced by technology. That is just the truth. And so as a result, when he says, "I'm going to close TPP and all the jobs will come roaring back," they will not come roaring back. So that is an actual fact, in my belief. And — (Laughter) GC: But I'm saying what his supporters think is the truth, no matter how many times you might say that, they still believe him. DB: But eventually either jobs will come back or they will not come back, and at that point, either something will work or it doesn't work, and it doesn't work or not work because of great marketing, it works because it actually addresses a real problem and so I happen to think the truth will out. CA: If you've got a question, please raise your hand here. Yael Eisenstat: I'll speak into the box. My name's Yael Eisenstat. I hear a lot of this talk about how we all need to start talking to each other more and understanding each other more, and I've even written about this, published on this subject as well, but now today I keep hearing liberals — yes, I live in New York, I can be considered a liberal — we sit here and self-analyze: What did we do to not understand the Rust Belt? Or: What can we do to understand Middle America better? And what I'd like to know: Have you seen any attempts or conversations from Middle America of what can I do to understand the so-called coastal elites better? Because I'm just offended as being put in a box as a coastal elite as someone in Middle America is as being considered a flyover state and not listened to. CA: There you go, I can hear Facebook cheering as you — (Laughter) DB: I would say — and this is someone who has been conservative all my adult life — when you grow up conservative, you learn to speak both languages. Because if I'm going to listen to music, I'm not going to listen to Ted Nugent. So a lot of my favorite rock bands are all on the left. If I'm going to go to a school, I'm going probably to school where the culture is liberal. If I'm going to watch a sitcom or a late-night comedy show, it's going to be liberal. If I'm going to read a good newspaper, it'll be the New York Times. As a result, you learn to speak both languages. And that actually, at least for a number of years, when I started at National Review with William F. Buckley, it made us sharper, because we were used to arguing against people every day. The problem now that's happened is you have ghettoization on the right and you can live entirely in rightworld, so as a result, the quality of argument on the right has diminished, because you're not in the other side all the time. But I do think if you're living in Minnesota or Iowa or Arizona, the coastal elites make themselves aware to you, so you know that language as well, but it's not the reverse. CA: But what does Middle America not get about coastal elites? So the critique is, you are not dealing with the real problems. There's a feeling of a snobbishness, an elitism that is very off-putting. What are they missing? If you could plant one piece of truth from the mindset of someone in this room, for example, what would you say to them? DB: Just how insanely wonderful we are. (Laughter) No, I reject the category. The problem with populism is the same problem with elitism. It's just a prejudice on the basis of probably an over-generalized social class distinction which is too simplistic to apply in reality. Those of us in New York know there are some people in New York who are completely awesome, and some people who are pathetic, and if you live in Iowa, some people are awesome and some people are pathetic. It's not a question of what degree you have or where you happen to live in the country. The distinction is just a crude simplification to arouse political power. GC: But I would encourage people to watch a television news show or read a column that they normally wouldn't. So if you are a Trump supporter, watch the other side for a day, because you need to come out of the bubble if you're ever going to have a conversation. And both sides — so if you're a liberal, then watch something that's very conservative. Read a column that is not something you would normally read, because then you gain perspective of what the other side is thinking, and to me, that's a start of coming together. I worry about the same thing you worry about, these bubbles. I think if you only watch certain entities, you have no idea what the rest of the world is talking about. DB: I think not only watching, being part of an organization that meets at least once a month that puts you in direct contact with people completely unlike yourself is something we all have a responsibility for. I may get this a little wrong, but I think of the top-selling automotive models in this country, I think the top three or four are all pickup trucks. So ask yourself: How many people do I know who own a pickup truck? And it could be very few or zero for a lot of people. And that's sort of a warning sign kind of a problem. Where can I join a club where I'll have a lot in common with a person who drives a pickup truck because we have a common interest in whatever? CA: And so the internet is definitely contributing to this. A question here from Chris Ajemian: "How do you feel structure of communications, especially the prevalence of social media and individualized content, can be used to bring together a political divide, instead of just filing communities into echo chambers?" I mean, it looks like Facebook and Google, since the election, are working hard on this question. They're trying to change the algorithms so that they don't amplify fake news to the extent that it happened last time round. Do you see any other promising signs of ...? GC: ... or amplify one side of the equation. CA: Exactly. GC: I think that was the constant argument from the right, that social media and the internet in general was putting articles towards the top that were not their worldview. I think, again, that fed into the anger. It fed into the anger of: "You're pushing something that's not what I believe." But social media has obviously changed everything, and I think Trump is the example of Twitter changing absolutely everything. And from his point of view, he's reaching the American people without a filter, which he believes the media is. CA: Question from the audience. Destiny: Hi. I'm Destiny. I have a question regarding political correctness, and I'm curious: When did political correctness become synonymous with silencing, versus a way that we speak about other people to show them respect and preserve their dignity? GC: Well, I think the conservative media really pounded this issue for the last 10 years. I think that they really, really spent a lot of time talking about political correctness, and how people should have the ability to say what they think. Another reason why Trump became so popular: because he says what he thinks. It also makes me think about the fact that I do believe there are a lot of people in America who agree with Steve Bannon, but they would never say it publicly, and so voting for Trump gave them the opportunity to agree with it silently. DB: On the issue of immigration, it's a legitimate point of view that we have too many immigrants in the country, that it's economically costly. CA: That we have too many — DB: Immigrants in the country, especially from Britain. (Laughter) GC: I kind of like the British accent, OK? CA: I apologize. America, I am sorry. (Laughter) I'll go now. DB: But it became sort of impermissible to say that, because it was a sign that somehow you must be a bigot of some sort. So the political correctness was not only cracking down on speech that we would all find completely offensive, it was cracking down on some speech that was legitimate, and then it was turning speech and thought into action and treating it as a crime, and people getting fired and people thrown out of schools, and there were speech codes written. Now there are these diversity teams, where if you say something that somebody finds offensive, like, "Smoking is really dangerous," you can say "You're insulting my group," and the team from the administration will come down into your dorm room and put thought police upon you. And so there has been a genuine narrowing of what is permissible to say. And some of it is legitimate. There are certain words that there should be some social sanction against, but some of it was used to enforce a political agenda. CA: So is that a project you would urge on liberals, if you like — progressives — to rethink the ground rules around political correctness and accept a little more uncomfortable language in certain circumstances? Can you see that being solved to an extent that others won't be so offended? DB: I mean, most American universities, especially elite universities, are overwhelmingly on the left, and there's just an ease of temptation to use your overwhelming cultural power to try to enforce some sort of thought that you think is right and correct thought. So, be a little more self-suspicious of, are we doing that? And second, my university, the University of Chicago, sent out this letter saying, we will have no safe spaces. There will be no critique of micro-aggression. If you get your feelings hurt, well, welcome to the world of education. I do think that policy — which is being embraced by a lot of people on the left, by the way — is just a corrective to what's happened. CA: So here's a question from Karen Holloway: How do we foster an American culture that's forward-looking, like Hamilton, that expects and deals with change, rather than wanting to have everything go back to some fictional past? That's an easy question, right? GC: Well, I'm still a believer in the American dream, and I think what we can teach our children is the basics, which is that hard work and believing in yourself in America, you can achieve whatever you want. I was told that every single day. When I got in the real world, I was like, wow, that's maybe not always so true. But I still believe in that. Maybe I'm being too optimistic. So I still look towards the future for that to continue. DB: I think you're being too optimistic. GC: You do? DB: The odds of an American young person exceeding their parents' salary — a generation ago, like 86 percent did it. Now 51 percent do it. There's just been a problem in social mobility in the country. CA: You've written that this entire century has basically been a disaster, that the age of sunny growth is over and we're in deep trouble. DB: Yeah, I mean, we averaged, in real terms, population-adjusted, two or three percent growth for 50 years, and now we've had less than one percent growth. And so there's something seeping out. And so if I'm going to tell people that they should take risks, one of the things we're seeing is a rapid decline in mobility, the number of people who are moving across state lines, and that's especially true among millennials. It's young people that are moving less. So how do we give people the security from which they can take risk? And I'm a big believer in attachment theory of raising children, and attachment theory is based on the motto that all of life is a series of daring adventures from a secure base. Have you parents given you a secure base? And as a society, we do not have a secure base, and we won't get to that "Hamilton," risk-taking, energetic ethos until we can supply a secure base. CA: So I wonder whether there's ground here to create almost like a shared agenda, a bridging conversation, on the one hand recognizing that there is this really deep problem that the system, the economic system that we built, seems to be misfiring right now. Second, that maybe, if you're right that it's not all about immigrants, it's probably more about technology, if you could win that argument, that de-emphasizes what seems to me the single most divisive territory between Trump supporters and others, which is around the role of the other. It's very offensive to people on the left to have the other demonized to the extent that the other seems to be demonized. That feels deeply immoral, and maybe people on the left could agree, as you said, that immigration may have happened too fast, and there is a limit beyond which human societies struggle, but nonetheless this whole problem becomes de-emphasized if automation is the key issue, and then we try to work together on recognizing that it's real, recognizing that the problem probably wasn't properly addressed or seen or heard, and try to figure out how to rebuild communities using, well, using what? That seems to me to become the fertile conversation of the future: How do we rebuild communities in this modern age, with technology doing what it's doing, and reimagine this bright future? GC: That's why I go back to optimism. I'm not being ... it's not like I'm not looking at the facts, where we've come or where we've come from. But for gosh sakes, if we don't look at it from an optimistic point of view — I'm refusing to do that just yet. I'm not raising my 12- and 13-year-old to say, "Look, the world is dim." CA; We're going to have one more question from the room here. Questioner: Hi. Hello. Sorry. You both mentioned the infrastructure plan and Russia and some other things that wouldn't be traditional Republican priorities. What do you think, or when, will Republicans be motivated to take a stand against Trumpism? GC: After last night, not for a while. He changed a lot last night, I believe. DB: His popularity among Republicans — he's got 85 percent approval, which is higher than Reagan had at this time, and that's because society has just gotten more polarized. So people follow the party much more than they used to. So if you're waiting for Paul Ryan and the Republicans in Congress to flake away, it's going to take a little while. GC: But also because they're all concerned about reelection, and Trump has so much power with getting people either for you or against you, and so, they're vacillating every day, probably: "Well, should I go against or should I not?" But last night, where he finally sounded presidential, I think most Republicans are breathing a sigh of relief today. DB: The half-life of that is short. GC: Right — I was just going to say, until Twitter happens again. CA: OK, I want to give each of you the chance to imagine you're speaking to — I don't know — the people online who are watching this, who may be Trump supporters, who may be on the left, somewhere in the middle. How would you advise them to bridge or to relate to other people? Can you share any final wisdom on this? Or if you think that they shouldn't, tell them that as well. GC: I would just start by saying that I really think any change and coming together starts from the top, just like any other organization. And I would love if, somehow, Trump supporters or people on the left could encourage their leaders to show that compassion from the top, because imagine the change that we could have if Donald Trump tweeted out today, to all of his supporters, "Let's not be vile anymore to each other. Let's have more understanding. As a leader, I'm going to be more inclusive to all of the people of America." To me, it starts at the top. Is he going to do that? I have no idea. But I think that everything starts from the top, and the power that he has in encouraging his supporters to have an understanding of where people are coming from on the other side. CA: David. DB: Yeah, I guess I would say I don't think we can teach each other to be civil, and give us sermons on civility. That's not going to do it. It's substance and how we act, and the nice thing about Donald Trump is he smashed our categories. All the categories that we thought we were thinking in, they're obsolete. They were great for the 20th century. They're not good for today. He's got an agenda which is about closing borders and closing trade. I just don't think it's going to work. I think if we want to rebuild communities, recreate jobs, we need a different set of agenda that smashes through all our current divisions and our current categories. For me, that agenda is Reaganism on macroeconomic policy, Sweden on welfare policy and cuts across right and left. I think we have to have a dynamic economy that creates growth. That's the Reagan on economic policy. But people have to have that secure base. There have to be nurse-family partnerships; there has to be universal preschool; there have to be charter schools; there have to be college programs with wraparound programs for parents and communities. We need to help heal the crisis of social solidarity in this country and help heal families, and government just has to get a lot more involved in the way liberals like to rebuild communities. At the other hand, we have to have an economy that's free and open the way conservatives used to like. And so getting the substance right is how you smash through the partisan identities, because the substance is what ultimately shapes our polarization. CA: David and Gretchen, thank you so much for an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you. That was really, really interesting. (Applause) Hey, let's keep the conversation going. We're continuing to try and figure out whether we can add something here, so keep the conversation going on Facebook. Give us your thoughts from whatever part of the political spectrum you're on, and actually, wherever in the world you are. This is not just about America. It's about the world, too. But we're not going to end today without music, because if we put music in every political conversation, the world would be completely different, frankly. It just would. (Applause) Up in Harlem, this extraordinary woman, Vy Higginsen, who's actually right here — let's get a shot of her. (Applause) She created this program that brings teens together, teaches them the joy and the impact of gospel music, and hundreds of teens have gone through this program. It's transformative for them. The music they made, as you already heard, is extraordinary, and I can't think of a better way of ending this TED Dialogue than welcoming Vy Higginsen's Gospel Choir from Harlem. Thank you. (Applause) (Singing) Choir: O beautiful for spacious skies For amber waves of grain For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain America! America! America! America! God shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea From sea to shining sea (Applause) |
How to take a picture of a black hole | {0: "Katie Bouman is part of an international team of astronomers that's creating the world's largest telescope to take the very first picture of a black hole."} | TEDxBeaconStreet | In the movie "Interstellar," we get an up-close look at a supermassive black hole. Set against a backdrop of bright gas, the black hole's massive gravitational pull bends light into a ring. However, this isn't a real photograph, but a computer graphic rendering — an artistic interpretation of what a black hole might look like. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein first published his theory of general relativity. In the years since then, scientists have provided a lot of evidence in support of it. But one thing predicted from this theory, black holes, still have not been directly observed. Although we have some idea as to what a black hole might look like, we've never actually taken a picture of one before. However, you might be surprised to know that that may soon change. We may be seeing our first picture of a black hole in the next couple years. Getting this first picture will come down to an international team of scientists, an Earth-sized telescope and an algorithm that puts together the final picture. Although I won't be able to show you a real picture of a black hole today, I'd like to give you a brief glimpse into the effort involved in getting that first picture. My name is Katie Bouman, and I'm a PhD student at MIT. I do research in a computer science lab that works on making computers see through images and video. But although I'm not an astronomer, today I'd like to show you how I've been able to contribute to this exciting project. If you go out past the bright city lights tonight, you may just be lucky enough to see a stunning view of the Milky Way Galaxy. And if you could zoom past millions of stars, 26,000 light-years toward the heart of the spiraling Milky Way, we'd eventually reach a cluster of stars right at the center. Peering past all the galactic dust with infrared telescopes, astronomers have watched these stars for over 16 years. But it's what they don't see that is the most spectacular. These stars seem to orbit an invisible object. By tracking the paths of these stars, astronomers have concluded that the only thing small and heavy enough to cause this motion is a supermassive black hole — an object so dense that it sucks up anything that ventures too close — even light. But what happens if we were to zoom in even further? Is it possible to see something that, by definition, is impossible to see? Well, it turns out that if we were to zoom in at radio wavelengths, we'd expect to see a ring of light caused by the gravitational lensing of hot plasma zipping around the black hole. In other words, the black hole casts a shadow on this backdrop of bright material, carving out a sphere of darkness. This bright ring reveals the black hole's event horizon, where the gravitational pull becomes so great that not even light can escape. Einstein's equations predict the size and shape of this ring, so taking a picture of it wouldn't only be really cool, it would also help to verify that these equations hold in the extreme conditions around the black hole. However, this black hole is so far away from us, that from Earth, this ring appears incredibly small — the same size to us as an orange on the surface of the moon. That makes taking a picture of it extremely difficult. Why is that? Well, it all comes down to a simple equation. Due to a phenomenon called diffraction, there are fundamental limits to the smallest objects that we can possibly see. This governing equation says that in order to see smaller and smaller, we need to make our telescope bigger and bigger. But even with the most powerful optical telescopes here on Earth, we can't even get close to the resolution necessary to image on the surface of the moon. In fact, here I show one of the highest resolution images ever taken of the moon from Earth. It contains roughly 13,000 pixels, and yet each pixel would contain over 1.5 million oranges. So how big of a telescope do we need in order to see an orange on the surface of the moon and, by extension, our black hole? Well, it turns out that by crunching the numbers, you can easily calculate that we would need a telescope the size of the entire Earth. (Laughter) If we could build this Earth-sized telescope, we could just start to make out that distinctive ring of light indicative of the black hole's event horizon. Although this picture wouldn't contain all the detail we see in computer graphic renderings, it would allow us to safely get our first glimpse of the immediate environment around a black hole. However, as you can imagine, building a single-dish telescope the size of the Earth is impossible. But in the famous words of Mick Jagger, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need." And by connecting telescopes from around the world, an international collaboration called the Event Horizon Telescope is creating a computational telescope the size of the Earth, capable of resolving structure on the scale of a black hole's event horizon. This network of telescopes is scheduled to take its very first picture of a black hole next year. Each telescope in the worldwide network works together. Linked through the precise timing of atomic clocks, teams of researchers at each of the sites freeze light by collecting thousands of terabytes of data. This data is then processed in a lab right here in Massachusetts. So how does this even work? Remember if we want to see the black hole in the center of our galaxy, we need to build this impossibly large Earth-sized telescope? For just a second, let's pretend we could build a telescope the size of the Earth. This would be a little bit like turning the Earth into a giant spinning disco ball. Each individual mirror would collect light that we could then combine together to make a picture. However, now let's say we remove most of those mirrors so only a few remained. We could still try to combine this information together, but now there are a lot of holes. These remaining mirrors represent the locations where we have telescopes. This is an incredibly small number of measurements to make a picture from. But although we only collect light at a few telescope locations, as the Earth rotates, we get to see other new measurements. In other words, as the disco ball spins, those mirrors change locations and we get to observe different parts of the image. The imaging algorithms we develop fill in the missing gaps of the disco ball in order to reconstruct the underlying black hole image. If we had telescopes located everywhere on the globe — in other words, the entire disco ball — this would be trivial. However, we only see a few samples, and for that reason, there are an infinite number of possible images that are perfectly consistent with our telescope measurements. However, not all images are created equal. Some of those images look more like what we think of as images than others. And so, my role in helping to take the first image of a black hole is to design algorithms that find the most reasonable image that also fits the telescope measurements. Just as a forensic sketch artist uses limited descriptions to piece together a picture using their knowledge of face structure, the imaging algorithms I develop use our limited telescope data to guide us to a picture that also looks like stuff in our universe. Using these algorithms, we're able to piece together pictures from this sparse, noisy data. So here I show a sample reconstruction done using simulated data, when we pretend to point our telescopes to the black hole in the center of our galaxy. Although this is just a simulation, reconstruction such as this give us hope that we'll soon be able to reliably take the first image of a black hole and from it, determine the size of its ring. Although I'd love to go on about all the details of this algorithm, luckily for you, I don't have the time. But I'd still like to give you a brief idea of how we define what our universe looks like, and how we use this to reconstruct and verify our results. Since there are an infinite number of possible images that perfectly explain our telescope measurements, we have to choose between them in some way. We do this by ranking the images based upon how likely they are to be the black hole image, and then choosing the one that's most likely. So what do I mean by this exactly? Let's say we were trying to make a model that told us how likely an image were to appear on Facebook. We'd probably want the model to say it's pretty unlikely that someone would post this noise image on the left, and pretty likely that someone would post a selfie like this one on the right. The image in the middle is blurry, so even though it's more likely we'd see it on Facebook compared to the noise image, it's probably less likely we'd see it compared to the selfie. But when it comes to images from the black hole, we're posed with a real conundrum: we've never seen a black hole before. In that case, what is a likely black hole image, and what should we assume about the structure of black holes? We could try to use images from simulations we've done, like the image of the black hole from "Interstellar," but if we did this, it could cause some serious problems. What would happen if Einstein's theories didn't hold? We'd still want to reconstruct an accurate picture of what was going on. If we bake Einstein's equations too much into our algorithms, we'll just end up seeing what we expect to see. In other words, we want to leave the option open for there being a giant elephant at the center of our galaxy. (Laughter) Different types of images have very distinct features. We can easily tell the difference between black hole simulation images and images we take every day here on Earth. We need a way to tell our algorithms what images look like without imposing one type of image's features too much. One way we can try to get around this is by imposing the features of different kinds of images and seeing how the type of image we assume affects our reconstructions. If all images' types produce a very similar-looking image, then we can start to become more confident that the image assumptions we're making are not biasing this picture that much. This is a little bit like giving the same description to three different sketch artists from all around the world. If they all produce a very similar-looking face, then we can start to become confident that they're not imposing their own cultural biases on the drawings. One way we can try to impose different image features is by using pieces of existing images. So we take a large collection of images, and we break them down into their little image patches. We then can treat each image patch a little bit like pieces of a puzzle. And we use commonly seen puzzle pieces to piece together an image that also fits our telescope measurements. Different types of images have very distinctive sets of puzzle pieces. So what happens when we take the same data but we use different sets of puzzle pieces to reconstruct the image? Let's first start with black hole image simulation puzzle pieces. OK, this looks reasonable. This looks like what we expect a black hole to look like. But did we just get it because we just fed it little pieces of black hole simulation images? Let's try another set of puzzle pieces from astronomical, non-black hole objects. OK, we get a similar-looking image. And then how about pieces from everyday images, like the images you take with your own personal camera? Great, we see the same image. When we get the same image from all different sets of puzzle pieces, then we can start to become more confident that the image assumptions we're making aren't biasing the final image we get too much. Another thing we can do is take the same set of puzzle pieces, such as the ones derived from everyday images, and use them to reconstruct many different kinds of source images. So in our simulations, we pretend a black hole looks like astronomical non-black hole objects, as well as everyday images like the elephant in the center of our galaxy. When the results of our algorithms on the bottom look very similar to the simulation's truth image on top, then we can start to become more confident in our algorithms. And I really want to emphasize here that all of these pictures were created by piecing together little pieces of everyday photographs, like you'd take with your own personal camera. So an image of a black hole we've never seen before may eventually be created by piecing together pictures we see all the time of people, buildings, trees, cats and dogs. Imaging ideas like this will make it possible for us to take our very first pictures of a black hole, and hopefully, verify those famous theories on which scientists rely on a daily basis. But of course, getting imaging ideas like this working would never have been possible without the amazing team of researchers that I have the privilege to work with. It still amazes me that although I began this project with no background in astrophysics, what we have achieved through this unique collaboration could result in the very first images of a black hole. But big projects like the Event Horizon Telescope are successful due to all the interdisciplinary expertise different people bring to the table. We're a melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers. This is what will make it soon possible to achieve something once thought impossible. I'd like to encourage all of you to go out and help push the boundaries of science, even if it may at first seem as mysterious to you as a black hole. Thank you. (Applause) |
The conversation we're not having about digital child abuse | {0: "Sebastián Bortnik's work is focused on preventing cyber attacks."} | TEDxRiodelaPlata | [This talk contains graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised.] This is Nina Rodríguez's Facebook profile. This person had three different profiles and 890 kids between 8 and 13 years old among her friends list. These are excerpts of a chat with one of those kids. This is an exact copy of the chat. It's part of the case file. This kid started sending private photos until his family realized what was going on. The police report and subsequent investigation lead them to a house. This was the girl's bedroom. Nina Rodríguez was actually a 24-year-old man that used to do this with lots of kids. Micaela Ortega was 12 years old when she went to meet her new Facebook friend, also 12. "Rochi de River," was her name. She actually met Jonathan Luna, who was 26 years old. When they finally caught him, he confessed that he killed the girl because she refused to have sex with him. He had four Facebook profiles and 1,700 women on his contact list; 90 percent of them were under 13 years old. These are two different cases of "grooming": an adult contacts a kid through the internet, and through manipulation or lying, leads that kid into sexual territory — from talking about sex to sharing private photos, recording the kid using a webcam or arranging an in-person meeting. This is grooming. This is happening, and it's on the rise. The question is: What are we going to do? Because, in the meantime, kids are alone. They finish dinner, go to their rooms, close the door, get on their computer, their cell phones, and get into a bar, into a club. Think for one second about what I've just said: they're in a place full of strangers in an uninhibited environment. The internet broke physical boundaries. When we're alone in our bedroom and we go online, we're not really alone. There are at least two reasons why we're not taking care of this, or at least not in the right way. First, we're sure that everything that happens online is "virtual." In fact, we call it "the virtual world." If you look it up in the dictionary, something virtual is something that seems to exist but is not real. And we use that word to talk about the internet: something not real. And that's the problem with grooming. It is real. Degenerate, perverted adults use the internet to abuse boys and girls and take advantage of, among other things, the fact that the kids and their parents think that what happens online doesn't actually happen. Several years ago, some colleagues and I founded an NGO called "Argentina Cibersegura," dedicated to raising awareness about online safety. In 2013, we attended meetings at the House of Legislature to discuss a law about grooming. I remember that a lot of people thought that grooming was strictly a precursor to arranging an in-person meeting with a kid to have sex with them. But they didn't think about what happened to the kids who were exposed by talking about sex with an adult without knowing it, or who shared intimate photos thinking only another kid would see them, or even worse, who had exposed themselves using their web cam. Nobody considered that rape. I'm sure lots of you find it odd to think one person can abuse another without physical contact. We're programmed to think that way. I know, because I used to think that way. I was just an IT security guy until this happened to me. At the end of 2011, in a little town in Buenos Aires Province, I heard about a case for the first time. After giving a talk, I met the parents of an 11-year-old girl who had been a victim of grooming. A man had manipulated her into masturbating in front of her web cam, and recorded it. And the video was on several websites. That day, her parents asked us, in tears, to tell them the magic formula for how to delete those videos from the internet. It broke my heart and changed me forever to be their last disappointment, telling them it was too late: once content is online, we've already lost control. Since that day, I think about that girl waking up in the morning, having breakfast with her family, who had seen the video, and then walking to school, meeting people that had seen her naked, arriving to school, playing with her friends, who had also seen her. That was her life. Exposed. Of course, nobody raped her body. But hadn't her sexuality been abused? We clearly use different standards to measure physical and digital things. And we get angry at social networks because being angry with ourselves is more painful and more true. And this brings us to the second reason why we aren't paying proper attention to this issue. We're convinced that kids don't need our help, that they "know everything" about technology. When I was a kid, at one point, my parents started letting me walk to school alone. After years of taking me by the hand and walking me to school, one day they sat me down, gave me the house keys and said, "Be very careful with these; don't give them to anyone, take the route we showed you, be at home at the time we said, cross at the corner, and look both ways before you cross, and no matter what, don't talk to strangers." I knew everything about walking, and yet, there was a responsible adult there taking care of me. Knowing how to do something is one thing, knowing how to take care of yourself is another. Imagine this situation: I'm 10 or 11 years old, I wake up in the morning, my parents toss me the keys and say, "Seba, now you can walk to school alone." And when I come back late, they say, "No, you need to be home at the time we said." And two weeks later, when it comes up, they say, "You know what? You have to cross at the corner, and look both ways before crossing." And two years later, they say, "And also, don't talk to strangers." It sounds absurd, right? We have the same absurd behavior in relation to technology. We give kids total access and we see if one day, sooner or later, they learn how to take care of themselves. Knowing how to do something is one thing, knowing how to take care of yourself is another. Along those same lines, when we talk to parents, they often say they don't care about technology and social networks. I always rejoin that by asking if they care about their kids. As adults, being interested or not in technology is the same as being interested or not in our kids. The internet is part of their lives. Technology forces us to rethink the relationship between adults and kids. Education was always based on two main concepts: experience and knowledge. How do we teach our kids to be safe online when we don't have either? Nowadays, we adults have to guide our children through what is often for us unfamiliar territory — territory much more inviting for them. It's impossible to find an answer without doing new things — things that make us uncomfortable, things we're not used to. A lot of you may think it's easy for me, because I'm relatively young. And it used to be that way. Used to. Until last year, when I felt the weight of my age on my shoulders the first time I opened Snapchat. (Laughter) (Applause) I didn't understand a thing! I found it unnecessary, useless, hard to understand; it looked like a camera! It didn't have menu options! It was the first time I felt the gap that sometimes exists between kids and adults. But it was also an opportunity to do the right thing, to leave my comfort zone, to force myself. I never thought I'd ever use Snapchat, but then I asked my teenage cousin to show me how to use it. I also asked why she used it. What was fun about it? We had a really nice talk. She showed me her Snapchat, she told me things, we got closer, we laughed. Today, I use it. (Laughter) I don't know if I do it right, but the most important thing is that I know it and I understand it. The key was to overcome the initial shock and do something new. Something new. Today, we have the chance to create new conversations. What's the last app you downloaded? Which social network do you use to contact your friends? What kind of information do you share? Have you ever been approached by strangers? Could we have these conversations between kids and adults? We have to force ourselves to do it. All of us. Today, lots of kids are listening to us. Sometimes when we go to schools to give our talks, or through social networks, kids ask or tell us things they haven't told their parents or their teachers. They tell us — they don't even know us. Those kids need to know what the risks of being online are, how to take care of themselves, but also that, fundamentally, as with almost everything else, kids can learn this from any adult. Online safety needs to be a conversation topic in every house and every classroom in the country. We did a survey this year that showed that 15 percent of schools said they knew of cases of grooming in their school. And this number is growing. Technology changed every aspect of our life, including the risks we face and how we take care of ourselves. Grooming shows us this in the most painful way: by involving our kids. Are we going to do something to avoid this? The solution starts with something as easy as: talking about it. Thank you. (Applause) |
How racism makes us sick | {0: "David R. Williams asks: What if we decided to tackle the striking levels of early death and poor health that are due to the color of one's skin?"} | TEDMED 2016 | An article in the Yale Alumni Magazine told the story of Clyde Murphy, a black man who was a member of the Class of 1970. Clyde was a success story. After Yale and a law degree from Columbia, Clyde spent the next 30 years as one of America's top civil rights lawyers. He was also a great husband and father. But despite his success, personally and professionally, Clyde's story had a sad ending. In 2010, at the age of 62, Clyde died from a blood clot in his lung. Clyde's experience was not unique. Many of his black classmates from Yale also died young. In fact, the magazine article indicated that 41 years after graduation from Yale, the black members of the Class of 1970 had a death rate that was three times higher than that of the average class member. It's stunning. America has recently awakened to a steady drumbeat of unarmed black men being shot by the police. What is even a bigger story is that every seven minutes, a black person dies prematurely in the United States. That is over 200 black people die every single day who would not die if the health of blacks and whites were equal. For the last 25 years, I have been on a mission to understand why does race matter so profoundly for health. When I started my career, many believed that it was simply about racial differences in income and education. I discovered that while economic status matters for health, there is more to the story. So for example, if we look at life expectancy at age 25, at age 25 there's a five-year gap between blacks and whites. And the gap by education for both whites and blacks is even larger than the racial gap. At the same time, at every level of education, whites live longer than blacks. So whites who are high school dropouts live 3.4 years longer than their black counterparts, and the gap is even larger among college graduates. Most surprising of all, whites who have graduated from high school live longer than blacks with a college degree or more education. So why does race matter so profoundly for health? What else is it beyond education and income that might matter? In the early 1990s, I was asked to review a new book on the health of black America. I was struck that almost every single one of its 25 chapters said that racism was a factor that was hurting the health of blacks. All of these researchers were stating that racism was a factor adversely impacting blacks, but they provided no evidence. For me, that was not good enough. A few months later, I was speaking at a conference in Washington, DC, and I said that one of the priorities for research was to document the ways in which racism affected health. A white gentleman stood in the audience and said that while he agreed with me that racism was important, we could never measure racism. "We measure self-esteem," I said. "There's no reason why we can't measure racism if we put our minds to it." And so I put my mind to it and developed three scales. The first one captured major experiences of discrimination, like being unfairly fired or being unfairly stopped by the police. But discrimination also occurs in more minor and subtle experiences, and so my second scale, called the Everyday Discrimination Scale, captures nine items that captures experiences like you're treated with less courtesy than others, you receive poorer service than others in restaurants or stores, or people act as if they're afraid of you. This scale captures ways in which the dignity and the respect of people who society does not value is chipped away on a daily basis. Research has found that higher levels of discrimination are associated with an elevated risk of a broad range of diseases from blood pressure to abdominal obesity to breast cancer to heart disease and even premature mortality. Strikingly, some of the effects are observed at a very young age. For example, a study of black teens found that those who reported higher levels of discrimination as teenagers had higher levels of stress hormones, of blood pressure and of weight at age 20. However, the stress of discrimination is only one aspect. Discrimination and racism also matters in other profound ways for health. For example, there's discrimination in medical care. In 1999, the National Academy of Medicine asked me to serve on a committee that found, concluded based on the scientific evidence, that blacks and other minorities receive poorer quality care than whites. This was true for all kinds of medical treatment, from the most simple to the most technologically sophisticated. One explanation for this pattern was a phenomenon that's called "implicit bias" or "unconscious discrimination." Research for decades by social psychologists indicates that if you hold a negative stereotype about a group in your subconscious mind and you meet someone from that group, you will discriminate against that person. You will treat them differently. It's an unconscious process. It's an automatic process. It is a subtle process, but it's normal and it occurs even among the most well-intentioned individuals. But the deeper that I delved into the health impact of racism, the more insidious the effects became. There is institutional discrimination, which refers to discrimination that exists in the processes of social institutions. Residential segregation by race, which has led to blacks and whites living in very different neighborhood contexts, is a classic example of institutional racism. One of America's best-kept secrets is how residential segregation is the secret source that creates racial inequality in the United States. In America, where you live determines your access to opportunities in education, in employment, in housing and even in access to medical care. One study of the 171 largest cities in the United States concluded that there is not even one city where whites live under equal conditions to blacks, and that the worst urban contexts in which whites reside is considerably better than the average context of black communities. Another study found that if you could eliminate statistically residential segregation, you would completely erase black-white differences in income, education and unemployment, and reduce black-white differences in single motherhood by two thirds, all of that driven by segregation. I have also learned how the negative stereotypes and images of blacks in our culture literally create and sustain both institutional and individual discrimination. A group of researchers have put together a database that contains the books, magazines and articles that an average college-educated American would read over their lifetime. It allows us to look within this database and see how Americans have seen words paired together as they grow up in their society. So when the word "black" appears in American culture, what co-occurs with it? "Poor," "violent," "religious," "lazy," "cheerful," "dangerous." When "white" occurs, the frequently co-occurring words are "wealthy," "progressive," "conventional," "stubborn," "successful," "educated." So when a police officer overreacts when he sees an unarmed black male and perceives him to be violent and dangerous, we are not necessarily dealing with an inherently bad cop. We may be simply viewing a normal American who is reflecting what he has been exposed to as a result of being raised in this society. From my own experience, I believe that your race does not have to be a determinant of your destiny. I migrated to the United States from the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia in the late 1970s in pursuit of higher education, and in the last 40 years, I have done well. I have had a supportive family, I have worked hard, I have done well. But it took more for me to be successful. I received a minority fellowship from the University of Michigan. Yes. I am an affirmative action baby. Without affirmative action, I would not be here. But in the last 40 years, black America has been less successful than I have. In 1978, black households in the United States earned 59 cents for every dollar of income whites earned. In 2015, black families still earn 59 cents for every dollar of income that white families receive, and the racial gaps in wealth are even more stunning. For every dollar of wealth that whites have, black families have six pennies and Latinos have seven pennies. The fact is, racism is producing a truly rigged system that is systematically disadvantaging some racial groups in the United States. To paraphrase Plato, there is nothing so unfair as the equal treatment of unequal people. And that's why I am committed to working to dismantle racism. I deeply appreciate the fact that I am standing on the shoulders of those who have sacrificed even their lives to open the doors that I have walked through. I want to ensure that those doors remain open and that everyone can walk through those doors. Robert Kennedy said, "Each time a man" — or woman, I would add — "stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and those ripples can build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." I am optimistic today because all across America, I have seen ripples of hope. The Boston Medical Center has added lawyers to the medical team so that physicians can improve the health of their patients because the lawyers are addressing the nonmedical needs their patients have. Loma Linda University has built a gateway college in nearby San Bernardino so that in addition to delivering medical care, they can provide job skills and job training to a predominantly minority, low-income community members so that they will have the skills they need to get a decent job. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the Abecedarian Project has figured out how to ensure that they have lowered the risks for heart disease for blacks in their mid-30s by providing high-quality day care from birth to age five. In after-school centers across the United States, Wintley Phipps and the US Dream Academy is breaking the cycle of incarceration by providing high-quality academic enrichment and mentoring to the children of prisoners and children who have fallen behind in school. In Huntsville, Alabama, Oakwood University, a historically black institution, is showing how we can improve the health of black adults by including a health evaluation as a part of freshman orientation and giving those students the tools they need to make healthy choices and providing them annually a health transcript so they can monitor their progress. And in Atlanta, Georgia, Purpose Built Communities has dismantled the negative effects of segregation by transforming a crime-ridden, drug-infested public housing project into an oasis of mixed-income housing, of academic performance, of great community wellness and of full employment. And finally, there is the Devine solution. Professor Patricia Devine of the University of Wisconsin has shown us how we can attack our hidden biases head on and effectively reduce them. Each one of us can be a ripple of hope. This work will not always be easy, but former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall has told us, "We must dissent. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the hatred and from the mistrust. We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better." Thank you. (Applause) |
How we can find ourselves in data | {0: 'Giorgia Lupi sees beauty in data. She challenges the impersonality that data communicate, designing engaging visual narratives that re-connect numbers to what they stand for: stories, people, ideas.'} | TEDNYC | This is what my last week looked like. What I did, who I was with, the main sensations I had for every waking hour ... If the feeling came as I thought of my dad who recently passed away, or if I could have just definitely avoided the worries and anxieties. And if you think I'm a little obsessive, you're probably right. But clearly, from this visualization, you can learn much more about me than from this other one, which are images you're probably more familiar with and which you possibly even have on your phone right now. Bar charts for the steps you walked, pie charts for the quality of your sleep — the path of your morning runs. In my day job, I work with data. I run a data visualization design company, and we design and develop ways to make information accessible through visual representations. What my job has taught me over the years is that to really understand data and their true potential, sometimes we actually have to forget about them and see through them instead. Because data are always just a tool we use to represent reality. They're always used as a placeholder for something else, but they are never the real thing. But let me step back for a moment to when I first understood this personally. In 1994, I was 13 years old. I was a teenager in Italy. I was too young to be interested in politics, but I knew that a businessman, Silvio Berlusconi, was running for president for the moderate right. We lived in a very liberal town, and my father was a politician for the Democratic Party. And I remember that no one thought that Berlusconi could get elected — that was totally not an option. But it happened. And I remember the feeling very vividly. It was a complete surprise, as my dad promised that in my town he knew nobody who voted for him. This was the first time when the data I had gave me a completely distorted image of reality. My data sample was actually pretty limited and skewed, so probably it was because of that, I thought, I lived in a bubble, and I didn't have enough chances to see outside of it. Now, fast-forward to November 8, 2016 in the United States. The internet polls, statistical models, all the pundits agreeing on a possible outcome for the presidential election. It looked like we had enough information this time, and many more chances to see outside the closed circle we lived in — but we clearly didn't. The feeling felt very familiar. I had been there before. I think it's fair to say the data failed us this time — and pretty spectacularly. We believed in data, but what happened, even with the most respected newspaper, is that the obsession to reduce everything to two simple percentage numbers to make a powerful headline made us focus on these two digits and them alone. In an effort to simplify the message and draw a beautiful, inevitable red and blue map, we lost the point completely. We somehow forgot that there were stories — stories of human beings behind these numbers. In a different context, but to a very similar point, a peculiar challenge was presented to my team by this woman. She came to us with a lot of data, but ultimately she wanted to tell one of the most humane stories possible. She's Samantha Cristoforetti. She has been the first Italian woman astronaut, and she contacted us before being launched on a six-month-long expedition to the International Space Station. She told us, "I'm going to space, and I want to do something meaningful with the data of my mission to reach out to people." A mission to the International Space Station comes with terabytes of data about anything you can possibly imagine — the orbits around Earth, the speed and position of the ISS and all of the other thousands of live streams from its sensors. We had all of the hard data we could think of — just like the pundits before the election — but what is the point of all these numbers? People are not interested in data for the sake of it, because numbers are never the point. They're always the means to an end. The story we needed to tell is that there is a human being in a teeny box flying in space above your head, and that you can actually see her with your naked eye on a clear night. So we decided to use data to create a connection between Samantha and all of the people looking at her from below. We designed and developed what we called "Friends in Space," a web application that simply lets you say "hello" to Samantha from where you are, and "hello" to all the people who are online at the same time from all over the world. And all of these "hellos" left visible marks on the map as Samantha was flying by and as she was actually waving back every day at us using Twitter from the ISS. This made people see the mission's data from a very different perspective. It all suddenly became much more about our human nature and our curiosity, rather than technology. So data powered the experience, but stories of human beings were the drive. The very positive response of its thousands of users taught me a very important lesson — that working with data means designing ways to transform the abstract and the uncountable into something that can be seen, felt and directly reconnected to our lives and to our behaviors, something that is hard to achieve if we let the obsession for the numbers and the technology around them lead us in the process. But we can do even more to connect data to the stories they represent. We can remove technology completely. A few years ago, I met this other woman, Stefanie Posavec — a London-based designer who shares with me the passion and obsession about data. We didn't know each other, but we decided to run a very radical experiment, starting a communication using only data, no other language, and we opted for using no technology whatsoever to share our data. In fact, our only means of communication would be through the old-fashioned post office. For "Dear Data," every week for one year, we used our personal data to get to know each other — personal data around weekly shared mundane topics, from our feelings to the interactions with our partners, from the compliments we received to the sounds of our surroundings. Personal information that we would then manually hand draw on a postcard-size sheet of paper that we would every week send from London to New York, where I live, and from New York to London, where she lives. The front of the postcard is the data drawing, and the back of the card contains the address of the other person, of course, and the legend for how to interpret our drawing. The very first week into the project, we actually chose a pretty cold and impersonal topic. How many times do we check the time in a week? So here is the front of my card, and you can see that every little symbol represents all of the times that I checked the time, positioned for days and different hours chronologically — nothing really complicated here. But then you see in the legend how I added anecdotal details about these moments. In fact, the different types of symbols indicate why I was checking the time — what was I doing? Was I bored? Was I hungry? Was I late? Did I check it on purpose or just casually glance at the clock? And this is the key part — representing the details of my days and my personality through my data collection. Using data as a lens or a filter to discover and reveal, for example, my never-ending anxiety for being late, even though I'm absolutely always on time. Stefanie and I spent one year collecting our data manually to force us to focus on the nuances that computers cannot gather — or at least not yet — using data also to explore our minds and the words we use, and not only our activities. Like at week number three, where we tracked the "thank yous" we said and were received, and when I realized that I thank mostly people that I don't know. Apparently I'm a compulsive thanker to waitresses and waiters, but I definitely don't thank enough the people who are close to me. Over one year, the process of actively noticing and counting these types of actions became a ritual. It actually changed ourselves. We became much more in tune with ourselves, much more aware of our behaviors and our surroundings. Over one year, Stefanie and I connected at a very deep level through our shared data diary, but we could do this only because we put ourselves in these numbers, adding the contexts of our very personal stories to them. It was the only way to make them truly meaningful and representative of ourselves. I am not asking you to start drawing your personal data, or to find a pen pal across the ocean. But I'm asking you to consider data — all kind of data — as the beginning of the conversation and not the end. Because data alone will never give us a solution. And this is why data failed us so badly — because we failed to include the right amount of context to represent reality — a nuanced, complicated and intricate reality. We kept looking at these two numbers, obsessing with them and pretending that our world could be reduced to a couple digits and a horse race, while the real stories, the ones that really mattered, were somewhere else. What we missed looking at these stories only through models and algorithms is what I call "data humanism." In the Renaissance humanism, European intellectuals placed the human nature instead of God at the center of their view of the world. I believe something similar needs to happen with the universe of data. Now data are apparently treated like a God — keeper of infallible truth for our present and our future. The experiences that I shared with you today taught me that to make data faithfully representative of our human nature and to make sure they will not mislead us anymore, we need to start designing ways to include empathy, imperfection and human qualities in how we collect, process, analyze and display them. I do see a place where, ultimately, instead of using data only to become more efficient, we will all use data to become more humane. Thank you. (Applause) |
3 ways to plan for the (very) long term | {0: 'Ari Wallach helps leaders more consciously and ethically shape tomorrow.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | So I've been "futuring," which is a term I made up — (Laughter) about three seconds ago. I've been futuring for about 20 years, and when I first started, I would sit down with people, and say, "Hey, let's talk 10, 20 years out." And they'd say, "Great." And I've been seeing that time horizon get shorter and shorter and shorter, so much so that I met with a CEO two months ago and I said — we started our initial conversation. He goes, "I love what you do. I want to talk about the next six months." (Laughter) We have a lot of problems that we are facing. These are civilizational-scale problems. The issue though is, we can't solve them using the mental models that we use right now to try and solve these problems. Yes, a lot of great technical work is being done, but there is a problem that we need to solve for a priori, before, if we want to really move the needle on those big problems. "Short-termism." Right? There's no marches. There's no bracelets. There's no petitions that you can sign to be against short-termism. I tried to put one up, and no one signed. It was weird. (Laughter) But it prevents us from doing so much. Short-termism, for many reasons, has pervaded every nook and cranny of our reality. I just want you to take a second and just think about an issue that you're thinking, working on. It could be personal, it could be at work or it could be move-the-needle world stuff, and think about how far out you tend to think about the solution set for that. Because short-termism prevents the CEO from buying really expensive safety equipment. It'll hurt the bottom line. So we get the Deepwater Horizon. Short-termism prevents teachers from spending quality one-on-one time with their students. So right now in America, a high school student drops out every 26 seconds. Short-termism prevents Congress — sorry if there's anyone in here from Congress — (Laughter) or not really that sorry — (Laughter) from putting money into a real infrastructure bill. So what we get is the I-35W bridge collapse over the Mississippi a few years ago, 13 killed. It wasn't always like this. We did the Panama Canal. We pretty much have eradicated global polio. We did the transcontinental railroad, the Marshall Plan. And it's not just big, physical infrastructure problems and issues. Women's suffrage, the right to vote. But in our short-termist time, where everything seems to happen right now and we can only think out past the next tweet or timeline post, we get hyper-reactionary. So what do we do? We take people who are fleeing their war-torn country, and we go after them. We take low-level drug offenders, and we put them away for life. And then we build McMansions without even thinking about how people are going to get between them and their job. It's a quick buck. Now, the reality is, for a lot of these problems, there are some technical fixes, a lot of them. I call these technical fixes sandbag strategies. So you know there's a storm coming, the levee is broken, no one's put any money into it, you surround your home with sandbags. And guess what? It works. Storm goes away, the water level goes down, you get rid of the sandbags, and you do this storm after storm after storm. And here's the insidious thing. A sandbag strategy can get you reelected. A sandbag strategy can help you make your quarterly numbers. Now, if we want to move forward into a different future than the one we have right now, because I don't think we've hit — 2016 is not peak civilization. (Laughter) There's some more we can do. But my argument is that unless we shift our mental models and our mental maps on how we think about the short, it's not going to happen. So what I've developed is something called "longpath," and it's a practice. And longpath isn't a kind of one-and-done exercise. I'm sure everyone here at some point has done an off-site with a lot of Post-It notes and whiteboards, and you do — no offense to the consultants in here who do that — and you do a long-term plan, and then two weeks later, everyone forgets about it. Right? Or a week later. If you're lucky, three months. It's a practice because it's not necessarily a thing that you do. It's a process where you have to revisit different ways of thinking for every major decision that you're working on. So I want to go through those three ways of thinking. So the first: transgenerational thinking. I love the philosophers: Plato, Socrates, Habermas, Heidegger. I was raised on them. But they all did one thing that didn't actually seem like a big deal until I really started kind of looking into this. And they all took, as a unit of measure for their entire reality of what it meant to be virtuous and good, the single lifespan, from birth to death. But here's a problem with these issues: they stack up on top of us, because the only way we know how to do something good in the world is if we do it between our birth and our death. That's what we're programmed to do. If you go to the self-help section in any bookstore, it's all about you. Which is great, unless you're dealing with some of these major issues. And so with transgenerational thinking, which is really kind of transgenerational ethics, you're able to expand how you think about these problems, what is your role in helping to solve them. Now, this isn't something that just has to be done at the Security Council chamber. It's something that you can do in a very kind of personal way. So every once in a while, if I'm lucky, my wife and I like to go out to dinner, and we have three children under the age of seven. So you can imagine it's a very peaceful, quiet meal. (Laughter) So we sit down and literally all I want to do is just eat and chill, and my kids have a completely and totally different idea of what we're going to be doing. And so my first idea is my sandbag strategy, right? It's to go into my pocket and take out the iPhone and give them "Frozen" or some other bestselling game thing. And then I stop and I have to kind of put on this transgenerational thinking cap. I don't do this in the restaurant, because it would be bizarre, but I have to — I did it once, and that's how I learned it was bizarre. (Laughter) And you have to kind of think, "OK, I can do this." But what is this teaching them? So what does it mean if I actually bring some paper or engage with them in conversation? It's hard. It's not easy, and I'm making this very personal. It's actually more traumatic than some of the big issues that I work on in the world — entertaining my kids at dinner. But what it does is it connects them here in the present with me, but it also — and this is the crux of transgenerational thinking ethics — it sets them up to how they're going to interact with their kids and their kids and their kids. Second, futures thinking. When we think about the future, 10, 15 years out, give me a vision of what the future is. You don't have to give it to me, but think in your head. And what you're probably going to see is the dominant cultural lens that dominates our thinking about the future right now: technology. So when we think about the problems, we always put it through a technological lens, a tech-centric, a techno-utopia, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's something that we have to really think deeply about if we're going to move on these major issues, because it wasn't always like this. Right? The ancients had their way of thinking about what the future was. The Church definitely had their idea of what the future could be, and you could actually pay your way into that future. Right? And luckily for humanity, we got the scientific revolution. From there, we got the technology, but what has happened — And by the way, this is not a critique. I love technology. Everything in my house talks back to me, from my children to my speakers to everything. (Laughter) But we've abdicated the future from the high priests in Rome to the high priests of Silicon Valley. So when we think, well, how are we going to deal with climate or with poverty or homelessness, our first reaction is to think about it through a technology lens. And look, I'm not advocating that we go to this guy. I love Joel, don't get me wrong, but I'm not saying we go to Joel. What I'm saying is we have to rethink our base assumption about only looking at the future in one way, only looking at it through the dominant lens. Because our problems are so big and so vast that we need to open ourselves up. So that's why I do everything in my power not to talk about the future. I talk about futures. It opens the conversation again. So when you're sitting and thinking about how do we move forward on this major issue — it could be at home, it could be at work, it could be again on the global stage — don't cut yourself off from thinking about something beyond technology as a fix because we're more concerned about technological evolution right now than we are about moral evolution. And unless we fix for that, we're not going to be able to get out of short-termism and get to where we want to be. The final, telos thinking. This comes from the Greek root. Ultimate aim and ultimate purpose. And it's really asking one question: to what end? When was the last time you asked yourself: To what end? And when you asked yourself that, how far out did you go? Because long isn't long enough anymore. Three, five years doesn't cut it. It's 30, 40, 50, 100 years. In Homer's epic, "The Odyssey," Odysseus had the answer to his "what end." It was Ithaca. It was this bold vision of what he wanted — to return to Penelope. And I can tell you, because of the work that I'm doing, but also you know it intuitively — we have lost our Ithaca. We have lost our "to what end," so we stay on this hamster wheel. And yes, we're trying to solve these problems, but what comes after we solve the problem? And unless you define what comes after, people aren't going to move. The businesses — this isn't just about business — but the businesses that do consistently, who break out of short-termism not surprisingly are family-run businesses. They're transgenerational. They're telos. They think about the futures. And this is an ad for Patek Philippe. They're 175 years old, and what's amazing is that they literally embody this kind of longpathian sense in their brand, because, by the way, you never actually own a Patek Philippe, and I definitely won't — (Laughter) unless somebody wants to just throw 25,000 dollars on the stage. You merely look after it for the next generation. So it's important that we remember, the future, we treat it like a noun. It's not. It's a verb. It requires action. It requires us to push into it. It's not this thing that washes over us. It's something that we actually have total control over. But in a short-term society, we end up feeling like we don't. We feel like we're trapped. We can push through that. Now I'm getting more comfortable in the fact that at some point in the inevitable future, I will die. But because of these new ways of thinking and doing, both in the outside world and also with my family at home, and what I'm leaving my kids, I get more comfortable in that fact. And it's something that a lot of us are really uncomfortable with, but I'm telling you, think it through. Apply this type of thinking and you can push yourself past what's inevitably very, very uncomfortable. And it all begins really with yourself asking this question: What is your longpath? But I ask you, when you ask yourself that now or tonight or behind a steering wheel or in the boardroom or the situation room: push past the longpath, quick, oh, what's my longpath the next three years or five years? Try and push past your own life if you can because it makes you do things a little bit bigger than you thought were possible. Yes, we have huge, huge problems out there. With this process, with this thinking, I think we can make a difference. I think you can make a difference, and I believe in you guys. Thank you. (Applause) |
In praise of conflict | {0: 'Jonathan Marks works at the intersections of ethics, law and policy -- writing and speaking about torture, obesity, fracking, health care and other pressing issues of our time.'} | TEDxPSU | Twenty years ago, when I was a barrister and human rights lawyer in full-time legal practice in London, and the highest court in the land still convened, some would say by an accident of history, in this building here, I met a young man who had just quit his job in the British Foreign Office. When I asked him, "Why did you leave," he told me this story. He had gone to his boss one morning and said, "Let's do something about human rights abuses in China." And his boss had replied, "We can't do anything about human rights abuses in China because we have trade relations with China." So my friend went away with his tail between his legs, and six months later, he returned again to his boss, and he said this time, "Let's do something about human rights in Burma," as it was then called. His boss once again paused and said, "Oh, but we can't do anything about human rights in Burma because we don't have any trade relations with Burma." (Laughter) This was the moment he knew he had to leave. It wasn't just the hypocrisy that got to him. It was the unwillingness of his government to engage in conflict with other governments, in tense discussions, all the while, innocent people were being harmed. We are constantly told that conflict is bad that compromise is good; that conflict is bad but consensus is good; that conflict is bad and collaboration is good. But in my view, that's far too simple a vision of the world. We cannot know whether conflict is bad unless we know who is fighting, why they are fighting and how they are fighting. And compromises can be thoroughly rotten if they harm people who are not at the table, people who are vulnerable, disempowered, people whom we have an obligation to protect. Now, you might be somewhat skeptical of a lawyer arguing about the benefits of conflict and creating problems for compromise, but I did also qualify as a mediator, and these days, I spend my time giving talks about ethics for free. So as my bank manager likes to remind me, I'm downwardly mobile. But if you accept my argument, it should change not just the way we lead our personal lives, which I wish to put to one side for the moment, but it will change the way we think about major problems of public health and the environment. Let me explain. Every middle schooler in the United States, my 12-year-old daughter included, learns that there are three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch. James Madison wrote, "If there is any principle more sacred in our Constitution, and indeed in any free constitution, than any other, it is that which separates the legislative, the executive and the judicial powers." Now, the framers were not just concerned about the concentration and exercise of power. They also understood the perils of influence. Judges cannot determine the constitutionality of laws if they participate in making those laws, nor can they hold the other branches of government accountable if they collaborate with them or enter into close relationships with them. The Constitution is, as one famous scholar put it, "an invitation to struggle." And we the people are served when those branches do, indeed, struggle with each other. Now, we recognize the importance of struggle not just in the public sector between our branches of government. We also know it too in the private sector, in relationships among corporations. Let's imagine that two American airlines get together and agree that they will not drop the price of their economy class airfares below 250 dollars a ticket. That is collaboration, some would say collusion, not competition, and we the people are harmed because we pay more for our tickets. Imagine similarly two airlines were to say, "Look, Airline A, we'll take the route from LA to Chicago," and Airline B says, "We'll take the route from Chicago to DC, and we won't compete." Once again, that's collaboration or collusion instead of competition, and we the people are harmed. So we understand the importance of struggle when it comes to relationships between branches of government, the public sector. We also understand the importance of conflict when it comes to relationships among corporations, the private sector. But where we have forgotten it is in the relationships between the public and the private. And governments all over the world are collaborating with industry to solve problems of public health and the environment, often collaborating with the very corporations that are creating or exacerbating the problems they are trying to solve. We are told that these relationships are a win-win. But what if someone is losing out? Let me give you some examples. A United Nations agency decided to address a serious problem: poor sanitation in schools in rural India. They did so not just in collaboration with national and local governments but also with a television company and with a major multinational soda company. In exchange for less than one million dollars, that corporation received the benefits of a months-long promotional campaign including a 12-hour telethon all using the company's logo and color scheme. This was an arrangement which was totally understandable from the corporation's point of view. It enhances the reputation of the company and it creates brand loyalty for its products. But in my view, this is profoundly problematic for the intergovernmental agency, an agency that has a mission to promote sustainable living. By increasing consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages made from scarce local water supplies and drunk out of plastic bottles in a country that is already grappling with obesity, this is neither sustainable from a public health nor an environmental point of view. And in order to solve one public health problem, the agency is sowing the seeds of another. This is just one example of dozens I discovered in researching a book on the relationships between government and industry. I could also have told you about the initiatives in parks in London and throughout Britain, involving the same company, promoting exercise, or indeed of the British government creating voluntary pledges in partnership with industry instead of regulating industry. These collaborations or partnerships have become the paradigm in public health, and once again, they make sense from the point of view of industry. It allows them to frame public health problems and their solutions in ways that are least threatening to, most consonant with their commercial interests. So obesity becomes a problem of individual decision-making, of personal behavior, personal responsibility and lack of physical activity. It is not a problem, when framed this way, of a multinational food system involving major corporations. And again, I don't blame industry. Industry naturally engages in strategies of influence to promote its commercial interests. But governments have a responsibility to develop counterstrategies to protect us and the common good. The mistake that governments are making when they collaborate in this way with industry is that they conflate the common good with common ground. When you collaborate with industry, you necessarily put off the table things that might promote the common good to which industry will not agree. Industry will not agree to increased regulation unless it believes this will stave off even more regulation or perhaps knock some competitors out of the market. Nor can companies agree to do certain things, for example raise the prices of their unhealthy products, because that would violate competition law, as we've established. So our governments should not confound the common good and common ground, especially when common ground means reaching agreement with industry. I want to give you another example, moving from high-profile collaboration to something that is below ground both literally and figuratively: the hydraulic fracturing of natural gas. Imagine that you purchase a plot of land not knowing the mineral rights have been sold. This is before the fracking boom. You build your dream home on that plot, and shortly afterwards, you discover that a gas company is building a well pad on your land. That was the plight of the Hallowich family. Within a very short period of time, they began to complain of headaches, of sore throats, of itchy eyes, in addition to the interference of the noise, vibration and the bright lights from the flaring of natural gas. They were very vocal in their criticisms, and then they fell silent. And thanks to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where this image appeared, and one other newspaper, we discovered why they fell silent. The newspapers went to the court and said, "What happened to the Hallowiches?" And it turned out the Hallowiches had made a secret settlement with the gas operators, and it was a take-it-or-leave-it settlement. The gas company said, you can have a six-figure sum to move elsewhere and start your lives again, but in return you must promise not to speak of your experience with our company, not to speak of your experience with fracking, not to speak about the health consequences that might have been revealed by a medical examination. Now, I do not blame the Hallowiches for accepting a take-it-or-leave-it settlement and starting their lives elsewhere. And one can understand why the company would wish to silence a squeaky wheel. What I want to point the finger at is the legal and regulatory system, a system in which there are networks of agreements just like this one which serve to silence people and seal off data points from public health experts and epidemiologists, a system in which regulators will even refrain from issuing a violation notice in the event of pollution if the landowner and the gas company agree to settle. This is a system which isn't just bad from a public health point of view; it exposes hazards to local families who remain in the dark. Now, I have given you two examples not because they are isolated examples. They are examples of a systemic problem. I could share some counterexamples, the case for example of the public official who sues the pharmaceutical company for concealing the fact that its antidepressant increases suicidal thoughts in adolescents. I can tell you about the regulator who went after the food company for exaggerating the purported health benefits of its yogurt. And I can tell you about the legislator who despite heavy lobbying directed at both sides of the aisle pushes for environmental protections. These are isolated examples, but they are beacons of light in the darkness, and they can show us the way. I began by suggesting that sometimes we need to engage in conflict. Governments should tussle with, struggle with, at times engage in direct conflict with corporations. This is not because governments are inherently good and corporations are inherently evil. Each is capable of good or ill. But corporations understandably act to promote their commercial interests, and they do so either sometimes undermining or promoting the common good. But it is the responsibility of governments to protect and promote the common good. And we should insist that they fight to do so. This is because governments are the guardians of public health; governments are the guardians of the environment; and it is governments that are guardians of these essential parts of our common good. Thank you. (Applause) |
An intergalactic guide to using a defibrillator | {0: 'Todd Scott uses humor and pop culture to make CPR training more memorable.'} | TEDNYC | Last year, I got a chance to watch the new "Star Wars" movie, which was fantastic, but one thing kept bugging me. I don't know if you noticed this or not. In this entirely technically advanced world, I did not see a single AED anywhere, which was totally shocking — almost as shocking as not knowing what an AED is, which you guys do know. But for those at home, an AED is an automated external defibrillator. It's the device you use when your heart goes into cardiac arrest to shock it back into a normal rhythm, or, as one of the guys I was teaching a class to referred to it as: "The shocky-hearty-box thing." (Laughter) But I really can't blame the Empire, since health and safety regulations aren't really their first order of business. Though, even if we — I think worse than not having an AED would be if there was one there, but just, no one knew where to find it. These devices can drastically increase your chance of survival — almost like a tauntaun on Hoth. (Laughter) But I'm pretty sure that stormtrooper is going to be toast, regardless if we have an AED or not, since what happens is the chest plate is going to be quite hard to get off, and like that tauntaun, the AED has a very short window of time at which it's highly effective. In this case — basically, we've got to use it within the first 10 minutes. The Jedi, on the other hand, have no problems with their outfits. Those robes open straight up, you can place the pads right onto the chest — so upper-right-hand side of the chest, lower left, wait for the unit to determine if it's a shockable rhythm and get ready to shock. But, the Jedi do have a problem. They have a head appendage issue. And so I can be totally clear, thinking I'm ready to go, but I'm accidentally touching a tentacle and inadvertently shocking myself. (Laughter) So before you hit that button, make sure you are clear and everyone else is clear. Going back to that stormtrooper: If I did get that chest plate off in time, what would you do if you suddenly found there was a Wookiee under there, or possibly two Ewoks? (Laughter) Well, lucky for us, in the kit there's actually a razor, and we can use that to shave the chest on the upper right-hand side and the lower left. Wookiees also have another problem. They have an accessory issue. What we want to do is remove these — anything between the two pads we want to remove, since it can cause something called "arcing." For those who don't know what arcing is, do you remember the Emperor, when he shoots electricity out the ends of his fingers — (Laughter) that would be kind of like arcing. Another thing that — Oh! By the way, he creates that by wearing wool socks under his robes. (Laughter) We can also get arcing if we have an extremely wet chest. The electricity travels across the surface instead of through the heart. We can correct this with the immortal words of Douglas Adams: "Don't panic," which most of us have done today — and also always having a towel. So, good words to go by. The metal bikini — unfortunately, this is where panic sets in — like the modern bra, we have to make sure we remove, because this can cause severe arcing along with burns. But unfortunately this opens up an issue that's almost as controversial as talking about the prequels. (Laughter) The mere mention of the word "nipples," and people get into a little bit of a tizzy. By the way, that is not a nipple, that's a cupcake. (Laughter) Chances are, if you do have to use this, this is going to be on someone you know. And remember, everyone has nipples, except for Jabba. (Laughter) But he does love cupcakes. Speaking about Jabba, if we do have to use an AED on him, remember pad placement is the same, even though he doesn't have nipples. So it's going to be upper right-hand side, lower left. If we were going through, we're shocking, getting ready to go — after we've done the shock, one of the things we need to do is remember to do compression. The preferred method is 30 compressions and two breaths in the center of the chest, between the nipples, pressing down at least two inches, no more than two and a half, at a rate of at least 100 beats a minute, no more than 120. Unfortunately, due to the size of Jabba's mouth and also what he puts in said mouth, we may not want to actually do the mouth-to-mouth part. So instead, we can do compression-only CPR. The way of remembering the compression-only part is we can actually use the Imperial March. I would sing it for you — (Laughter) Unfortunately, that would be more something an interrogation droid would do. Yoda. Small little guy, like a baby. What we do is basically treat him like a baby, in the sense that we're going to place one pad in the center of the chest and one in the back. If we place them both in the front, they can be too close and cause severe arcing, so we want to avoid that. Hopefully, this helped to clarify and put some light on some of the darker issues of using an AED in the Star Wars universe, or any universe in total. I'll leave you with one point. Remember, if you do find yourself dealing with a Wookiee, do not shave the entire Wookiee. This takes way too much time, and it only pisses them off. (Laughter) Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A simple birth kit for mothers in the developing world | {0: 'Zubaida Bai innovates health and livelihood solutions for underserved women and girls around the world.'} | TED Residency | In the next six minutes that you will listen to me, the world will have lost three mothers while delivering their babies: one, because of a severe complication; second, because she will be a teenager and her body will not be prepared for birth; but the third, only because of lack of access to basic clean tools at the time of childbirth. She will not be alone. Over one million mothers and babies die every single year in the developing world, only because of lack of access to basic cleanliness while giving birth to their babies. My journey began on a hot summer afternoon in India in 2008, when after a day of meeting women and listening to their needs, I landed in a thatched hut with a midwife. As a mother, I was very curious on how she delivered babies in her house. After a deep and engaging conversation with her on how she considered it a profound calling to do what she was doing, I asked her a parting question: Do you have the tools that you need to deliver the babies? I got to see her tool. "This is what I use to separate the mother and the baby," she said. Unsure of how to react, I held this agricultural tool in my hand in shock. I took a picture of this, hugged her and walked away. My mind was flooded with reflections of my own infection that I had to struggle with for a year past childbirth despite having access to the best medical care, and memories of my conversation with my father, who had lost his mom to childbirth, on how he thought his life would be so different if she would have been just next to him growing up. As a product developer, I started my process of research. I was very excited to find that there was a product out there called the Clean Birth Kit. But I just couldn't buy one for months. They were only assembled based on availability of funding. Finally, when I got my hands on one, I was in shock again. I would never use these tools to deliver my baby, I thought. But to confirm my instincts, I went back to the women, some of whom had the experience of using this product. Lo and behold, they had the same reaction and more. The women said they would rather deliver on a floor than on a plastic sheet that smeared blood all over. They were absolutely right — it would cause more infection. The thread provided was a highway to bacterial infection through the baby's umbilical cord, and the blade used was the kind that men used for shaving, and they did not want it anywhere close to them. There was no incentive for anybody to redesign this product, because it was based on charity. The women were never consulted in this process. And to my surprise, the need was not only in homes but also in institutional settings with high-volume births. Situations in remote areas were even more daunting. This had to change. I made this my area of focus. I started the design process by collecting feedback, developing prototypes and engaging with various stakeholders researching global protocols. With every single prototype, we went back to the women to ensure that we had a product for them. What I learned through this process was that these women, despite their extreme poverty, placed great value on their health and well-being. They were absolutely not poor in mind. As with all of us, they would appreciate a well-designed product developed for their needs. After many iterations working with experts, medical health professionals and the women themselves, I should say it was not an easy process at all, but we had a simple and beautiful design. For a dollar more than what the existing product was offered for, at three dollars, we were able to deliver "janma," a clean birth kit in a purse. Janma, meaning "birth," contained a blood-absorbing sheet for the woman to give birth on, a surgical scalpel, a cord clamp, a bar of soap, a pair of gloves and the first cloth to wipe the baby clean. All this came packaged in a beautiful purse that was given to the mother as a gift after all her hard work, that she carried home with pride as a symbol of prosperity. One woman reacted to this gift. She said, "Is this really mine? Can I keep it?" The other one said, "Will you give me a different color when I have my next baby?" (Laughter) Better yet, a woman expressed that this was the first purse that she had ever owned in her life. The kit, aside from its symbolism and its simplicity, is designed to follow globally recommended medical protocol and serves as a behavior-change tool to follow steps one after the other. It can not only be used in homes, but also in institutional settings. To date, our kit has impacted over 600,000 mothers and babies around the world. It's a humbling experience to watch these numbers grow, and I cannot wait until we reach a hundred million. But women's health issues do not end here. There are thousands of simple issues that require low-cost interventions. We have facts to prove that if we invest in women and girls and provide them with better health and well-being, they will deliver healthier and wealthier and prosperous communities. We have to start by bringing simplicity and dignity to women's health issues: from reducing maternal mortality, to breaking taboos, to empowering women to take control of their own lives. This is my dream. But it is not possible to achieve it without engaging men and women alike from around the world — yes, all of you. I recently heard this lyric by Leonard Cohen: "Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." This is my bit of light. But we need more light. In fact, we need huge spotlights placed in the world of women's health if we need a better tomorrow. We should never forget that women are at the center of a sustainable world, and we do not exist without them. Thank you. (Applause) |
We should all be feminists | {0: 'Inspired by Nigerian history and tragedies all but forgotten by recent generations of westerners, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels and stories are jewels in the crown of diasporan literature. '} | TEDxEuston | So I would like to start by telling you about one of my greatest friends, Okoloma Maduewesi. Okoloma lived on my street and looked after me like a big brother. If I liked a boy, I would ask Okoloma's opinion. Okoloma died in the notorious Sosoliso plane crash in Nigeria in December of 2005. Almost exactly seven years ago. Okoloma was a person I could argue with, laugh with and truly talk to. He was also the first person to call me a feminist. I was about fourteen, we were at his house, arguing. Both of us bristling with half bit knowledge from books that we had read. I don't remember what this particular argument was about, but I remember that as I argued and argued, Okoloma looked at me and said, "You know, you're a feminist." It was not a compliment. (Laughter) I could tell from his tone, the same tone that you would use to say something like, "You're a supporter of terrorism." (Laughter) I did not know exactly what this word "feminist" meant, and I did not want Okoloma to know that I did not know. So I brushed it aside, and I continued to argue. And the first thing I planned to do when I got home was to look up the word "feminist" in the dictionary. Now fast forward to some years later, I wrote a novel about a man who among other things beats his wife and whose story doesn't end very well. While I was promoting the novel in Nigeria, a journalist, a nice, well-meaning man, told me he wanted to advise me. And for the Nigerians here, I'm sure we're all familiar with how quick our people are to give unsolicited advice. He told me that people were saying that my novel was feminist and his advice to me — and he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke — was that I should never call myself a feminist because feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands. (Laughter) So I decided to call myself "a happy feminist." Then an academic, a Nigerian woman told me that feminism was not our culture and that feminism wasn't African, and that I was calling myself a feminist because I had been corrupted by "Western books." Which amused me, because a lot of my early readings were decidedly unfeminist. I think I must have read every single Mills & Boon romance published before I was sixteen. And each time I tried to read those books called "the feminist classics," I'd get bored, and I really struggled to finish them. But anyway, since feminism was un-African, I decided that I would now call myself "a happy African feminist." At some point I was a happy African feminist who does not hate men and who likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself but not for men. (Laughter) Of course a lot of this was tongue-in-cheek, but that word feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage. You hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, that sort of thing. Now here's a story from my childhood. When I was in primary school, my teacher said at the beginning of term that she would give the class a test and whoever got the highest score would be the class monitor. Now, class monitor was a big deal. If you were a class monitor, you got to write down the names of noisemakers — (Laughter) which was having enough power of its own. But my teacher would also give you a cane to hold in your hand while you walk around and patrol the class for noisemakers. Now, of course you were not actually allowed to use the cane. But it was an exciting prospect for the nine-year-old me. I very much wanted to be the class monitor. And I got the highest score on the test. Then, to my surprise, my teacher said that the monitor had to be a boy. She had forgotten to make that clear earlier because she assumed it was ... obvious. (Laughter) A boy had the second highest score on the test, and he would be monitor. Now, what was even more interesting about this is that the boy was a sweet, gentle soul who had no interest in patrolling the class with the cane, while I was full of ambition to do so. But I was female and he was male, and so he became the class monitor. And I've never forgotten that incident. I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else. Now, take my dear friend Louis for example. Louis is a brilliant, progressive man, and we would have conversations and he would tell me, "I don't know what you mean by things being different or harder for women. Maybe in the past, but not now." And I didn't understand how Louis could not see what seems so self-evident. Then one evening, in Lagos, Louis and I went out with friends. And for people here who are not familiar with Lagos, there's that wonderful Lagos' fixture, the sprinkling of energetic men who hang around outside establishments and very dramatically "help" you park your car. I was impressed with the particular theatrics of the man who found us a parking spot that evening. And so as we were leaving, I decided to leave him a tip. I opened my bag, put my hand inside my bag, brought out my money that I had earned from doing my work, and I gave it to the man. And he, this man who was very grateful and very happy, took the money from me, looked across at Louis and said, "Thank you, sir!" (Laughter) Louis looked at me, surprised, and asked, "Why is he thanking me? I didn't give him the money." Then I saw realization dawn on Louis' face. The man believed that whatever money I had had ultimately come from Louis. Because Louis is a man. Men and women are different. We have different hormones, we have different sexual organs, we have different biological abilities. Women can have babies, men can't. At least not yet. (Laughter) Men have testosterone and are in general physically stronger than women. There's slightly more women than men in the world, about 52 percent of the world's population is female. But most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men. The late Kenyan Nobel Peace laureate, Wangari Maathai, put it simply and well when she said: "The higher you go, the fewer women there are." In the recent US elections we kept hearing of the Lilly Ledbetter law, and if we go beyond the nicely alliterative name of that law, it was really about a man and a woman doing the same job, being equally qualified, and the man being paid more because he's a man. So in the literal way, men rule the world, and this made sense a thousand years ago because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival. The physically stronger person was more likely to lead, and men, in general, are physically stronger. Of course there are many exceptions. (Laughter) But today we live in a vastly different world. The person more likely to lead is not the physically stronger person; it is the more creative person, the more intelligent person, the more innovative person, and there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, to be creative, to be innovative. We have evolved; but it seems to me that our ideas of gender had not evolved. Some weeks ago, I walked into a lobby of one of the best Nigerian hotels. I thought about naming the hotel, but I thought I probably shouldn't. And a guard at the entrance stopped me and asked me annoying questions, because their automatic assumption is that a Nigerian female walking into a hotel alone is a sex worker. And by the way, why do these hotels focus on the ostensible supply rather than the demand for sex workers? In Lagos I cannot go alone into many "reputable" bars and clubs. They just don't let you in if you're a woman alone, you have to be accompanied by a man. Each time I walk into a Nigerian restaurant with a man, the waiter greets the man and ignores me. The waiters are products — (Laughter) At this some women felt like, "Yes! I thought that!" The waiters are products of a society that has taught them that men are more important than women. And I know that waiters don't intend any harm. But it's one thing to know intellectually and quite another to feel it emotionally. Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible. I feel upset. I want to tell them that I am just as human as the man, that I'm just as worthy of acknowledgment. These are little things, but sometimes it's the little things that sting the most. And not long ago, I wrote an article about what it means to be young and female in Lagos, and the printers told me, "It was so angry." Of course it was angry! (Laughter) I am angry. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change; but, in addition to being angry, I'm also hopeful. Because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to make and remake themselves for the better. Gender matters everywhere in the world, but I want to focus on Nigeria and on Africa in general, because it is where I know, and because it is where my heart is. And I would like today to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world, a fairer world, a world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: we must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently. We do a great disservice to boys on how we raise them; we stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian speak, "hard man!" In secondary school, a boy and a girl, both of them teenagers, both of them with the same amount of pocket money, would go out and then the boy would be expected always to pay, to prove his masculinity. And yet we wonder why boys are more likely to steal money from their parents. What if both boys and girls were raised not to link masculinity with money? What if the attitude was not "the boy has to pay" but rather "whoever has more should pay?" Now, of course because of that historical advantage, it is mostly men who will have more today, but if we start raising children differently, then in fifty years, in a hundred years, boys will no longer have the pressure of having to prove this masculinity. But by far the worst thing we do to males, by making them feel that they have to be hard, is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The more "hard man" the man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is. And then we do a much greater disservice to girls because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of men. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller, we say to girls, "You can have ambition, but not too much." (Laughter) "You should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you would threaten the man." If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, you have to pretend that you're not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him. But what if we question the premise itself? Why should a woman's success be a threat to a man? What if we decide to simply dispose of that word, and I don't think there's an English word I dislike more than "emasculation." A Nigerian acquaintance once asked me if I was worried that men would be intimidated by me. I was not worried at all. In fact, it had not occurred to me to be worried because a man who would be intimidated by me is exactly the kind of man I would have no interest in. (Laughter) (Applause) But still I was really struck by this. Because I'm female, I'm expected to aspire to marriage; I'm expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. A marriage can be a good thing; it can be a source of joy and love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don't teach boys the same? I know a woman who decided to sell her house because she didn't want to intimidate a man who might marry her. I know an unmarried woman in Nigeria who, when she goes to conferences, wears a wedding ring because according to her, she wants the other participants in the conference to "give her respect." I know young women who are under so much pressure from family, from friends, even from work to get married, and they're pushed to make terrible choices. A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep, personal failure. And a man at a certain age who is unmarried, we just think he hasn't come around to making his pick. (Laughter) It's easy for us to say, "Oh, but women can just say no to all of this." But the reality is more difficult and more complex. We're all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization. Even the language we use in talking about marriage and relationships illustrates this. The language of marriage is often the language of ownership rather than the language of partnership. We use the word "respect" to mean something a woman shows a man but often not something a man shows a woman. Both men and women in Nigeria will say — this is an expression I'm very amused by — "I did it for peace in my marriage." Now, when men say it, it is usually about something that they should not be doing anyway. (Laughter) Sometimes they say it to their friends, it's something to say to their friends in a kind of fondly exasperated way, you know, something that ultimately proves how masculine they are, how needed, how loved. "Oh, my wife said I can't go to the club every night, so for peace in my marriage, I do it only on weekends." (Laughter) Now, when a woman says, "I did it for peace in my marriage," she's usually talking about giving up a job, a dream, a career. We teach females that in relationships, compromise is what women do. We raise girls to see each other as competitors — not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our sons' girlfriends. But our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid. (Laughter) But of course when the time is right, we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husbands. We police girls, we praise girls for virginity, but we don't praise boys for virginity, and it's always made me wonder how exactly this is supposed to work out because ... (Laughter) (Applause) I mean, the loss of virginity is usually a process that involves ... Recently a young woman was gang raped in a university in Nigeria, I think some of us know about that. And the response of many young Nigerians, both male and female, was something along the lines of this: "Yes, rape is wrong. But what is a girl doing in a room with four boys?" Now, if we can forget the horrible inhumanity of that response, these Nigerians have been raised to think of women as inherently guilty, and they have been raised to expect so little of men that the idea of men as savage beings without any control is somehow acceptable. We teach girls shame. "Close your legs." "Cover yourself." We make them feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot see they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think, and they grow up — and this is the worst thing we did to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form. (Applause) I know a woman who hates domestic work, she just hates it, but she pretends that she likes it, because she's been taught that to be "good wife material" she has to be — to use that Nigerian word — very "homely." And then she got married, and after a while her husband's family began to complain that she had changed. (Laughter) Actually, she had not changed, she just got tired of pretending. The problem with gender, is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Now imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations. Boys and girls are undeniably different biologically, but socialization exaggerates the differences and then it becomes a self-fulfilling process. Now, take cooking for example. Today women in general are more likely to do the housework than men, the cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a cooking gene? (Laughter) Or because over years they have been socialized to see cooking as their role? Actually, I was going to say that maybe women are born with a cooking gene, until I remember that the majority of the famous cooks in the world, whom we give the fancy title of "chefs," are men. I used to look up to my grandmother who was a brilliant, brilliant woman, and wonder how she would have been if she had the same opportunities as men when she was growing up. Now today, there are many more opportunities for women than there were during my grandmother's time because of changes in policy, changes in law, all of which are very important. But what matters even more is our attitude, our mindset, what we believe and what we value about gender. What if in raising children we focus on ability instead of gender? What if in raising children we focus on interest instead of gender? I know a family who have a son and a daughter, both of whom are brilliant at school, who are wonderful, lovely children. When the boy is hungry, the parents say to the girl, "Go and cook Indomie noodles for your brother." (Laughter) Now, the daughter doesn't particularly like to cook Indomie noodles, but she's a girl, and so she has to. Now, what if the parents, from the beginning, taught both the boy and the girl to cook Indomie? Cooking, by the way, is a very useful skill for boys to have. I've never thought it made sense to leave such a crucial thing, the ability to nourish oneself — (Laughter) in the hands of others. (Applause) I know a woman who has the same degree and the same job as her husband. When they get back from work, she does most of the housework, which I think is true for many marriages. But what struck me about them was that whenever her husband changed the baby's diaper, she said "thank you" to him. Now, what if she saw this as perfectly normal and natural that he should, in fact, care for his child? (Laughter) I'm trying to unlearn many of the lessons of gender that I internalized when I was growing up. But I sometimes still feel very vulnerable in the face of gender expectations. The first time I taught a writing class in graduate school, I was worried. I wasn't worried about the material I would teach because I was well-prepared, and I was going to teach what I enjoy teaching. Instead, I was worried about what to wear. I wanted to be taken seriously. I knew that because I was female I will automatically have to prove my worth. And I was worried that if I looked too feminine, I would not be taken seriously. I really wanted to wear my shiny lip gloss and my girly skirt, but I decided not to. Instead, I wore a very serious, very manly and very ugly suit. (Laughter) Because the sad truth is that when it comes to appearance we start off with men as the standard, as the norm. If a man is getting ready for a business meeting, he doesn't worry about looking too masculine and therefore not being taken for granted. If a woman has to get ready for business meeting, she has to worry about looking too feminine and what it says and whether or not she will be taken seriously. I wish I had not worn that ugly suit that day. I've actually banished it from my closet, by the way. Had I then the confidence that I have now to be myself, my students would have benefited even more from my teaching, because I would have been more comfortable and more fully and more truly myself. I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and for my femininity. (Applause) And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be. Gender is not an easy conversation to have. For both men and women, to bring up gender is sometimes to encounter almost immediate resistance. I can imagine some people here are actually thinking, "Women too do sef." Some of the men here might be thinking, "OK, all of this is interesting, but I don't think like that." And that is part of the problem. That many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender is part of the problem of gender. That many men, say, like my friend Louis, that everything is fine now. And that many men do nothing to change it. If you are a man and you walk into a restaurant with a woman and the waiter greets only you, does it occur to you to ask the waiter, "Why haven't you greeted her?" Because gender can be — (Laughter) Actually, we may repose part of a longer version of this talk. So, because gender can be a very uncomfortable conversation to have, there are very easy ways to close it, to close the conversation. So some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how, you know, female apes bow down to male apes and that sort of thing. But the point is we're not apes. (Laughter) (Applause) Apes also live on trees and have earthworms for breakfast, and we don't. Some people will say, "Well, poor men also have a hard time." And this is true. But that is not what this — (Laughter) But this is not what this conversation is about. Gender and class are different forms of oppression. I actually learned quite a bit about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men. I was once talking to a black man about gender and he said to me, "Why do you have to say 'my experience as a woman'? Why can't it be 'your experience as a human being'?" Now, this was the same man who would often talk about his experience as a black man. Gender matters. Men and women experience the world differently. Gender colors the way we experience the world. But we can change that. Some people will say, "Oh, but women have the real power, bottom power." And for non-Nigerians, bottom power is an expression which I suppose means something like a woman who uses her sexuality to get favors from men. But bottom power is not power at all. Bottom power means that a woman simply has a good root to tap into, from time to time — somebody else's power. And then, of course, we have to wonder what happens when that somebody else is in a bad mood, or sick or impotent. (Laughter) Some people will say that a woman being subordinate to a man is our culture. But culture is constantly changing. I have beautiful twin nieces who are fifteen and live in Lagos. If they had been born a hundred years ago they would have been taken away and killed. Because it was our culture, it was our culture to kill twins. So what is the point of culture? I mean there's the decorative, the dancing ... but also, culture really is about preservation and continuity of a people. In my family, I am the child who is most interested in the story of who we are, in our traditions, in the knowledge about ancestral lands. My brothers are not as interested as I am. But I cannot participate, I cannot go to umunna meetings, I cannot have a say. Because I'm female. Culture does not make people, people make culture. So if it is in fact true — (Applause) So if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we must make it our culture. I think very often of my dear friend, Okoloma Maduewesi. May he and all the others who passed away in that Sosoliso crash continue to rest in peace. He will always be remembered by those of us who loved him. And he was right that day many years ago when he called me a feminist. I am a feminist. And when I looked up the word in the dictionary that day, this is what it said: "Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes." My great grandmother, from the stories I've heard, was a feminist. She ran away from the house of the man she did not want to marry and ended up marrying the man of her choice. She refused, she protested, she spoke up whenever she felt she was being deprived of access, of land, that sort of thing. My great grandmother did not know that word "feminist," but it doesn't mean that she wasn't one. More of us should reclaim that word. My own definition of feminist is: "A feminist is a man or a woman who says — (Laughter) (Applause) A feminist is a man or a woman who says, "Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it. We must do better." The best feminist I know is my brother Kene. He's also a kind, good-looking, lovely man, and he's very masculine. Thank you. (Applause) |
How do you build a sacred space? | {0: 'Siamak Hariri holds deep respect for the transformative potential of architecture, specializing in creating works of enduring value.'} | TEDNYC | The school of architecture that I studied at some 30 years ago happened to be across the street from the wonderful art gallery designed by the great architect Louis Kahn. I love the building, and I used to visit it quite often. One day, I saw the security guard run his hand across the concrete wall. And it was the way he did it, the expression on his face — something touched me. I could see that the security guard was moved by the building and that architecture has that capacity to move you. I could see it, and I remember thinking, "Wow. How does architecture do that?" At school, I was learning to design, but here — here was a reaction of the heart. And it touched me to the core. You know, you aspire for beauty, for sensuousness, for atmosphere, the emotional response. That's the realm of the ineffable and the immeasurable. And that's what you live for: a chance to try. So in 2003, there was an open call for designs for the Bahá'í Temple for South America. This was the first temple in all of South America. It's a continental temple, a hugely important milestone for the Bahá'í community, because this would be the last of the continental temples and would open the door for national and local temples to be built around the world. And the brief was deceptively simple and unique in the annals of religion: a circular room, nine sides, nine entrances, nine paths, allowing you to come to the temple from all directions, nine symbolizing completeness, perfection. No pulpit, no sermons, as there are no clergy in the Bahá'í faith. And in a world which is putting up walls, the design needed to express in form the very opposite. It had to be open, welcoming to people of all faiths, walks of life, backgrounds, or no faith at all; a new form of sacred space with no pattern or models to draw from. It was like designing one of the first churches for Christianity or one of the first mosques for Islam. So we live in a secular world. How do you design sacred space today? And how do you even define what's sacred today? I stumbled across this beautiful quote from the Bahá'í writings, and it speaks to prayer. It says that if you reach out in prayer, and if your prayer is answered — which is already very interesting — that the pillars of your heart will become ashine. And I loved this idea of the inner and the outer, like when you see someone and you say, "That person is radiant." And I was thinking, "My gosh, how could we make something architectural out of that, where you create a building and it becomes alive with light? Like alabaster, if you kiss it with light, it becomes alive. And I drew this sketch, something with two layers, translucent with structure in between capturing light. Maybe a pure form, a single form of emanation that you could imagine would be all dome and everything we kept making was looking too much like an egg. (Laughter) A blob. So you search. You all know this crazy search, letting the process take you, and you live for the surprises. And I remember quite by accident I saw this little video of a plant moving in light, and it made me think of movement, reach, this idea that the temple could have reach, like this reach for the divine. You can imagine also that movement within a circle could mean movement and stillness, like the cosmos, something you see in many places. (Laughter) But rotation was not enough, because we needed a form. In the Bahá'í writings, it talks about the temples being as perfect as is humanly possible, and we kept thinking, well, what is perfection? And I remember I stumbled into this image of this Japanese basket and thinking our Western notions of perfection need to be challenged, that this wonderful silhouette of this basket, this wonkiness, and that it has the kind of dimple of what you might imagine a shoulder or the cheekbone, and that kind of organic form. And so we drew and made models, these lines that merge at the top, soft lines, which became like drapery and translucent veils and folding, and the idea of not only folding but torquing — you remember the plant and the way it was reaching. And this started to become an interesting form, carving the base, making the entrances. And then we ended up with this. This is this temple with two layers, nine luminous veils, embodied light, soft-flowing lines like luminescent drapery. 180 submissions were received from 80 countries, and this was selected. So we went to the next stage of how to build it. We had submitted alabaster. But alabaster was too soft, and we were experimenting, many experiments with materials, trying to think how we could have this kind of shimmer, and we ended up with borosilicate. And borosilicate glass, as you know, is very strong, and if you break borosilicate rods just so and melt them at just the right temperature, we ended up with this new material, this new cast glass which took us about two years to make. And it had this quality that we loved, this idea of the embodied light, but on the inside, we wanted something with a soft light, like the inner lining of a jacket. On the outside you have protection, but on the inside you touch it. So we found this tiny vein in a huge quarry in Portugal with this beautiful stone, which the owner had kept for seven generations in his family, waiting for the right project, if you can believe it. Look at this material, it's beautiful. And the way it lights up; it has that translucent quality. So here you see the structure. It lets the light through. And looking down, the nine wings are bound, structurally but symbolically strong, a great symbol of unity: pure geometry, a perfect circle, 30 meters in section and in plan, perfectly symmetrical, like the idea of sacredness and geometry. And here you see the building going up, 2,000 steel nodes, 9,000 pieces of steel, 7,800 stone pieces, 10,000 cast glass pieces, all individual shapes, the entire superstructure all described, engineered, fabricated with aerospace technology, prefabricated machine to machine, robotically, a huge team effort, you can imagine, of literally hundreds, and within three percent of our $30 million budget set in 2006. (Applause) Nine wings bound together forming a nine-pointed star, and the star shape moving in space, tracking the sun. So here it is. Audience: Wow! (Applause) Hopefully, a befitting response to that beautiful quote, "a prayer answered," open in all directions, capturing the blue light of dawn, tent-like white light of day, the gold light of the afternoon, and of course, at night, the reversal: sensuous, catching the light in all kinds of mysterious ways. And the site: it's interesting; 14 years ago when we made the submission, we showed the temple set against the Andes. We didn't have the Andes as our site, but after nine years, that's exactly where we ended up, the lines of the temple set against nothing but pure nature, and you turn around and you get nothing but the city below you, and inside, a view in all directions, radiating gardens from each of the alcoves, radiating paths. Last October, the opening ceremonies — a beautiful, sacred event, 5,000 people from 80 countries, a continuous river of visitors, indigenous people from all over South America, some who had never left their villages. And of course, that this temple belongs to people, the collective, of many cultures and walks of life, many beliefs, and for me, what's most important is what it feels like on the inside; that it feel intimate, sacred, and that everyone is welcome. And if even a few who come have the same reaction as that security guard, then it truly would be their temple. And I would love that. Thank you. (Applause) |
How radio telescopes show us unseen galaxies | {0: 'Natasha Hurley-Walker uses novel radio telescopes to explore the universe at some of the longest wavelengths of light.'} | TEDxPerth | Space, the final frontier. I first heard these words when I was just six years old, and I was completely inspired. I wanted to explore strange new worlds. I wanted to seek out new life. I wanted to see everything that the universe had to offer. And those dreams, those words, they took me on a journey, a journey of discovery, through school, through university, to do a PhD and finally to become a professional astronomer. Now, I learned two amazing things, one slightly unfortunate, when I was doing my PhD. I learned that the reality was I wouldn't be piloting a starship anytime soon. But I also learned that the universe is strange, wonderful and vast, actually too vast to be explored by spaceship. And so I turned my attention to astronomy, to using telescopes. Now, I show you before you an image of the night sky. You might see it anywhere in the world. And all of these stars are part of our local galaxy, the Milky Way. Now, if you were to go to a darker part of the sky, a nice dark site, perhaps in the desert, you might see the center of our Milky Way galaxy spread out before you, hundreds of billions of stars. And it's a very beautiful image. It's colorful. And again, this is just a local corner of our universe. You can see there's a sort of strange dark dust across it. Now, that is local dust that's obscuring the light of the stars. But we can do a pretty good job. Just with our own eyes, we can explore our little corner of the universe. It's possible to do better. You can use wonderful telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope. Now, astronomers have put together this image. It's called the Hubble Deep Field, and they've spent hundreds of hours observing just a tiny patch of the sky no larger than your thumbnail held at arm's length. And in this image you can see thousands of galaxies, and we know that there must be hundreds of millions, billions of galaxies in the entire universe, some like our own and some very different. So you think, OK, well, I can continue this journey. This is easy. I can just use a very powerful telescope and just look at the sky, no problem. It's actually really missing out if we just do that. Now, that's because everything I've talked about so far is just using the visible spectrum, just the thing that your eyes can see, and that's a tiny slice, a tiny, tiny slice of what the universe has to offer us. Now, there's also two very important problems with using visible light. Not only are we missing out on all the other processes that are emitting other kinds of light, but there's two issues. Now, the first is that dust that I mentioned earlier. The dust stops the visible light from getting to us. So as we look deeper into the universe, we see less light. The dust stops it getting to us. But there's a really strange problem with using visible light in order to try and explore the universe. Now take a break for a minute. Say you're standing on a corner, a busy street corner. There's cars going by. An ambulance approaches. It has a high-pitched siren. (Imitates a siren passing by) The siren appeared to change in pitch as it moved towards and away from you. The ambulance driver did not change the siren just to mess with you. That was a product of your perception. The sound waves, as the ambulance approached, were compressed, and they changed higher in pitch. As the ambulance receded, the sound waves were stretched, and they sounded lower in pitch. The same thing happens with light. Objects moving towards us, their light waves are compressed and they appear bluer. Objects moving away from us, their light waves are stretched, and they appear redder. So we call these effects blueshift and redshift. Now, our universe is expanding, so everything is moving away from everything else, and that means everything appears to be red. And oddly enough, as you look more deeply into the universe, more distant objects are moving away further and faster, so they appear more red. So if I come back to the Hubble Deep Field and we were to continue to peer deeply into the universe just using the Hubble, as we get to a certain distance away, everything becomes red, and that presents something of a problem. Eventually, we get so far away everything is shifted into the infrared and we can't see anything at all. So there must be a way around this. Otherwise, I'm limited in my journey. I wanted to explore the whole universe, not just whatever I can see, you know, before the redshift kicks in. There is a technique. It's called radio astronomy. Astronomers have been using this for decades. It's a fantastic technique. I show you the Parkes Radio Telescope, affectionately known as "The Dish." You may have seen the movie. And radio is really brilliant. It allows us to peer much more deeply. It doesn't get stopped by dust, so you can see everything in the universe, and redshift is less of a problem because we can build receivers that receive across a large band. So what does Parkes see when we turn it to the center of the Milky Way? We should see something fantastic, right? Well, we do see something interesting. All that dust has gone. As I mentioned, radio goes straight through dust, so not a problem. But the view is very different. We can see that the center of the Milky Way is aglow, and this isn't starlight. This is a light called synchrotron radiation, and it's formed from electrons spiraling around cosmic magnetic fields. So the plane is aglow with this light. And we can also see strange tufts coming off of it, and objects which don't appear to line up with anything that we can see with our own eyes. But it's hard to really interpret this image, because as you can see, it's very low resolution. Radio waves have a wavelength that's long, and that makes their resolution poorer. This image is also black and white, so we don't really know what is the color of everything in here. Well, fast-forward to today. We can build telescopes which can get over these problems. Now, I'm showing you here an image of the Murchison Radio Observatory, a fantastic place to build radio telescopes. It's flat, it's dry, and most importantly, it's radio quiet: no mobile phones, no Wi-Fi, nothing, just very, very radio quiet, so a perfect place to build a radio telescope. Now, the telescope that I've been working on for a few years is called the Murchison Widefield Array, and I'm going to show you a little time lapse of it being built. This is a group of undergraduate and postgraduate students located in Perth. We call them the Student Army, and they volunteered their time to build a radio telescope. There's no course credit for this. And they're putting together these radio dipoles. They just receive at low frequencies, a bit like your FM radio or your TV. And here we are deploying them across the desert. The final telescope covers 10 square kilometers of the Western Australian desert. And the interesting thing is, there's no moving parts. We just deploy these little antennas essentially on chicken mesh. It's fairly cheap. Cables take the signals from the antennas and bring them to central processing units. And it's the size of this telescope, the fact that we've built it over the entire desert that gives us a better resolution than Parkes. Now, eventually all those cables bring them to a unit which sends it off to a supercomputer here in Perth, and that's where I come in. (Sighs) Radio data. I have spent the last five years working with very difficult, very interesting data that no one had really looked at before. I've spent a long time calibrating it, running millions of CPU hours on supercomputers and really trying to understand that data. And with this telescope, with this data, we've performed a survey of the entire southern sky, the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA Survey, or GLEAM, as I call it. And I'm very excited. This survey is just about to be published, but it hasn't been shown yet, so you are literally the first people to see this southern survey of the entire sky. So I'm delighted to share with you some images from this survey. Now, imagine you went to the Murchison, you camped out underneath the stars and you looked towards the south. You saw the south's celestial pole, the galaxy rising. If I fade in the radio light, this is what we observe with our survey. You can see that the galactic plane is no longer dark with dust. It's alight with synchrotron radiation, and thousands of dots are in the sky. Our large Magellanic Cloud, our nearest galactic neighbor, is orange instead of its more familiar blue-white. So there's a lot going on in this. Let's take a closer look. If we look back towards the galactic center, where we originally saw the Parkes image that I showed you earlier, low resolution, black and white, and we fade to the GLEAM view, you can see the resolution has gone up by a factor of a hundred. We now have a color view of the sky, a technicolor view. Now, it's not a false color view. These are real radio colors. What I've done is I've colored the lowest frequencies red and the highest frequencies blue, and the middle ones green. And that gives us this rainbow view. And this isn't just false color. The colors in this image tell us about the physical processes going on in the universe. So for instance, if you look along the plane of the galaxy, it's alight with synchrotron, which is mostly reddish orange, but if we look very closely, we see little blue dots. Now, if we zoom in, these blue dots are ionized plasma around very bright stars, and what happens is that they block the red light, so they appear blue. And these can tell us about these star-forming regions in our galaxy. And we just see them immediately. We look at the galaxy, and the color tells us that they're there. You can see little soap bubbles, little circular images around the galactic plane, and these are supernova remnants. When a star explodes, its outer shell is cast off and it travels outward into space gathering up material, and it produces a little shell. It's been a long-standing mystery to astronomers where all the supernova remnants are. We know that there must be a lot of high-energy electrons in the plane to produce the synchrotron radiation that we see, and we think they're produced by supernova remnants, but there don't seem to be enough. Fortunately, GLEAM is really, really good at detecting supernova remnants, so we're hoping to have a new paper out on that soon. Now, that's fine. We've explored our little local universe, but I wanted to go deeper, I wanted to go further. I wanted to go beyond the Milky Way. Well, as it happens, we can see a very interesting object in the top right, and this is a local radio galaxy, Centaurus A. If we zoom in on this, we can see that there are two huge plumes going out into space. And if you look right in the center between those two plumes, you'll see a galaxy just like our own. It's a spiral. It has a dust lane. It's a normal galaxy. But these jets are only visible in the radio. If we looked in the visible, we wouldn't even know they were there, and they're thousands of times larger than the host galaxy. What's going on? What's producing these jets? At the center of every galaxy that we know about is a supermassive black hole. Now, black holes are invisible. That's why they're called that. All you can see is the deflection of the light around them, and occasionally, when a star or a cloud of gas comes into their orbit, it is ripped apart by tidal forces, forming what we call an accretion disk. The accretion disk glows brightly in the x-rays, and huge magnetic fields can launch the material into space at nearly the speed of light. So these jets are visible in the radio and this is what we pick up in our survey. Well, very well, so we've seen one radio galaxy. That's nice. But if you just look at the top of that image, you'll see another radio galaxy. It's a little bit smaller, and that's just because it's further away. OK. Two radio galaxies. We can see this. This is fine. Well, what about all the other dots? Presumably those are just stars. They're not. They're all radio galaxies. Every single one of the dots in this image is a distant galaxy, millions to billions of light-years away with a supermassive black hole at its center pushing material into space at nearly the speed of light. It is mind-blowing. And this survey is even larger than what I've shown here. If we zoom out to the full extent of the survey, you can see I found 300,000 of these radio galaxies. So it's truly an epic journey. We've discovered all of these galaxies right back to the very first supermassive black holes. I'm very proud of this, and it will be published next week. Now, that's not all. I've explored the furthest reaches of the galaxy with this survey, but there's something even more in this image. Now, I'll take you right back to the dawn of time. When the universe formed, it was a big bang, which left the universe as a sea of hydrogen, neutral hydrogen. And when the very first stars and galaxies switched on, they ionized that hydrogen. So the universe went from neutral to ionized. That imprinted a signal all around us. Everywhere, it pervades us, like the Force. Now, because that happened so long ago, the signal was redshifted, so now that signal is at very low frequencies. It's at the same frequency as my survey, but it's so faint. It's a billionth the size of any of the objects in my survey. So our telescope may not be quite sensitive enough to pick up this signal. However, there's a new radio telescope. So I can't have a starship, but I can hopefully have one of the biggest radio telescopes in the world. We're building the Square Kilometre Array, a new radio telescope, and it's going to be a thousand times bigger than the MWA, a thousand times more sensitive, and have an even better resolution. So we should find tens of millions of galaxies. And perhaps, deep in that signal, I will get to look upon the very first stars and galaxies switching on, the beginning of time itself. Thank you. (Applause) |
A video game to cope with grief | {0: 'Amy Green creates narrative video games that focus on innovative stories.'} | TEDNYC | Two months ago, my kids and I huddled around a cell phone watching the live stream of the Game Awards, one of the video game industry's biggest nights. They announced the nominees for the Game for Impact, an award that's given to a thought-provoking video game with a profound prosocial message or meaning. They opened the envelope and they read the title of our video game. An award ... for impact. It was almost funny, actually, because I always thought that winning an award like that would have this huge impact on my life, but I found that the opposite is true. The big nights, the accomplishments — they fade. But the hardest nights of my life have stuck with me, impacting who I am and what I do. In 2010, my third son, Joel, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain tumor. And before that year was finished, doctors sat my husband and I down and let us know that his tumor had returned despite the most aggressive chemotherapy and radiation that they could offer him. On that terrible night, after learning that Joel had perhaps four months to live, I cuddled up with my two older sons in bed — they were five and three at the time — and I never really knew how much they understood, so I started telling them a bedtime story. I told them about this very brave knight named Joel and his adventure fighting a terrible dragon called cancer. Every night, I told them more of the story, but I never let the story end. I was just building up a context that they could understand and hoping that our prayers would be answered and I would never have to tell them that that knight, who had fought so bravely, was done fighting and could rest now, forever. Fortunately, I never did have to finish that bedtime story. My children outgrew it. Joel responded better than anyone expected to palliative treatment, and so instead of months, we spent years learning how to love our dying child with all of our hearts. Learning to recognize that shameful feeling of holding back just a little love to try to spare ourselves just a little pain somewhere further down the road. We pushed past that self-preservation because Joel was worth loving even if that love could crush us. And that lesson of intense vulnerability has changed me ... more than any award ever could. We started living like Joel could live, and we began developing a video game called "That Dragon, Cancer." It was the story of Joel. It was the story of hope in the shadow of death. It was the story of faith and doubt, and the realization that a wrestle with doubt is a part of faith — maybe the biggest part of it. It was a story that began as a miracle and ended as a memorial. (Music) (Giggle) (Clapping) (Music) (Video) Dad: Bouncing around, do you like that? (Giggle) I love your giggle. (Music) (Giggle) [A Journey of Hope In the Shadow of Death] [That Dragon, Cancer] (Music) When you play "That Dragon, Cancer," you're transformed into a witness of Joel's life, exploring an emotional landscape, clicking to discover more of what we as a family felt and experienced. It feels a little bit like analyzing interactive poetry because every game mechanic is a metaphor, and so the more the player asks themselves what we as designers were trying to express and why, the richer the experience becomes. We took that vulnerability that Joel taught us, and we encoded the game with it. Players expect their video games to offer them branching narrative so that every decision that they make feels important and can change the outcome of the game. We subverted that principle of game design, collapsing the choices in on the player so that they discover for themselves that there is nothing that they can do that will change the outcome for Joel. And they feel that discovery as deeply and desperately as we felt it on nights when we held Joel in our arms praying for hours, stubbornly holding out hope for a grace that we could not create for ourselves. We'd all prefer to win, but when you discover that you can't win, what do you value instead? I never planned to write video games, but these moments that really change our lives, they often come as the result of our hardship — and not our glory. When we thought that Joel could live, I left the game designing to my husband. I chimed in here and there with a scene or two and some suggestions. But after the night that Joel died, the passion, the possibility of sharing Joel's life through our video game — it was something that I couldn't resist. I started writing more, I sat in on our team's design meetings, I added more ideas and I helped direct scenes. And I discovered that creating a video game is telling a story, but with an entirely new vocabulary. All the same elements of imagination and symbolism are there, but they're just partnered with player agency and system responsiveness. It's challenging work. I have to think in a totally new way to do it, but I love it. And I wouldn't have known that without Joel. Maybe you're a little surprised by our choice to share our story of terminal cancer through a video game. Perhaps you're even thinking like so many people before you: cancer is not a game. Well, tell that to any pediatric cancer parent that's ever taken an exam glove and blown it up into a balloon, or transformed a syringe into a rocket ship, or let their child ride their IV pole through the hospital halls like it was a race car. Because when you have children, everything is a game. And when your young child experiences something traumatic, you work even harder to make sure that their life feels like a game because children naturally explore their worlds through play. While cancer can steal many things from a family, it shouldn't steal play. If you're listening to me and you're trying to imagine this family that revolves entirely around a dying child, and you can't imagine joy as part of that picture, then we were right to share our story with you, because that season of our life was hard. Unspeakably hard at times, but it was also pure hope, deep love and joy like I have never experienced since. Our video game was our attempt to share that world with people who hadn't experienced it before, because we never could imagine that world until it became ours. We made a video game that's hard to play. It will never be a blockbuster. People have to prepare themselves to invest emotionally in a story that they know will break their hearts. But when our hearts break, they heal a little differently. My broken heart has been healing with a new and a deeper compassion — a desire to sit with people in their pain, to hear their stories and try to help tell them so that they know that they're seen. On the night when "That Dragon, Cancer" won the Game for Impact Award, we cheered, we smiled and we talked about Joel and the impact he had on our life — on all of those hard and hopeful nights that we shared with him when he changed our hearts and taught us so much more about life and love and faith and purpose. That award will never mean as much to me as even a single photograph of my son, but it does represent all of the people who his life has impacted, people I'll never meet. They write me emails sometimes. They tell me that they miss Joel, even though they never met him. They describe the tears that they've shed for my son, and it makes my burden of grief just a little bit lighter knowing that it's shared with a 10-year-old watching a YouTube playthrough, or a doctor playing on his airplane with a smartphone, or a professor introducing Joel to her first-year philosophy students. We made a video game that's hard to play. But that feels just right to me, because the hardest moments of our lives change us more than any goal we could ever accomplish. Tragedy has shifted my heart more than any dream I could ever see come true. Thank you. (Applause) |
A doctor's case for medical marijuana | {0: 'David Casarett asks: What if mainstream health care operated more like a medical marijuana dispensary? '} | TEDMED 2016 | I would like to tell you about the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me in my years of working as a palliative care physician. This happened a couple of years ago. I was asked as a consultant to see a woman in her 70s — retired English professor who had pancreatic cancer. I was asked to see her because she had pain, nausea, vomiting ... When I went to see her, we talked about those symptoms and in the course of that consultation, she asked me whether I thought that medical marijuana might help her. I thought back to everything that I had learned in medical school about medical marijuana, which didn't take very long because I had learned absolutely nothing. And so I told her that as far as I knew, medical marijuana had no benefits whatsoever. And she smiled and nodded and reached into the handbag next to the bed, and pulled out a stack of about a dozen randomized controlled trials showing that medical marijuana has benefits for symptoms like nausea and pain and anxiety. She handed me those articles and said, "Maybe you should read these before offering an opinion ... doctor." (Laughter) So I did. That night I read all of those articles and found a bunch more. When I came to see her the next morning, I had to admit that it looks like there is some evidence that marijuana can offer medical benefits and I suggested that if she really was interested, she should try it. You know what she said? This 73-year-old, retired English professor? She said, "I did try it about six months ago. It was amazing. I've been using it every day since. It's the best drug I've discovered. I don't know why it took me 73 years to discover this stuff. It's amazing." (Laughter) That was the moment at which I realized I needed to learn something about medical marijuana because what I was prepared for in medical school bore no relationship to reality. So I started reading more articles, I started talking to researchers, I started talking to doctors, and most importantly, I started listening to patients. I ended up writing a book based on those conversations, and that book really revolved around three surprises — surprises to me, anyway. One I already alluded to — that there really are some benefits to medical marijuana. Those benefits may not be as huge or as stunning as some of the most avid proponents of medical marijuana would have us believe, but they are real. Surprise number two: medical marijuana does have some risks. Those risks may not be as huge and as scary as some of the opponents of medical marijuana would have us believe, but they are real risks, nonetheless. But it was the third surprise that was most ... surprising. And that is that a lot of the patients I talked with who've turned to medical marijuana for help, weren't turning to medical marijuana because of its benefits or the balance of risks and benefits, or because they thought it was a wonder drug, but because it gave them control over their illness. It let them manage their health in a way that was productive and efficient and effective and comfortable for them. To show you what I mean, let me tell you about another patient. Robin was in her early 40s when I met her. She looked though like she was in her late 60s. She had suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for the last 20 years, her hands were gnarled by arthritis, her spine was crooked, she had to rely on a wheelchair to get around. She looked weak and frail, and I guess physically she probably was, but emotionally, cognitively, psychologically, she was among the toughest people I've ever met. And when I sat down next to her in a medical marijuana dispensary in Northern California to ask her about why she turned to medical marijuana, what it did for her and how it helped her, she started out by telling me things that I had heard from many patients before. It helped with her anxiety; it helped with her pain; when her pain was better, she slept better. And I'd heard all that before. But then she said something that I'd never heard before, and that is that it gave her control over her life and over her health. She could use it when she wanted, in the way that she wanted, at the dose and frequency that worked for her. And if it didn't work for her, then she could make changes. Everything was up to her. The most important thing she said was she didn't need anybody else's permission — not a clinic appointment, not a doctor's prescription, not a pharmacist's order. It was all up to her. She was in control. And if that seems like a little thing for somebody with chronic illness, it's not — not at all. When we face a chronic serious illness, whether it's rheumatoid arthritis or lupus or cancer or diabetes, or cirrhosis, we lose control. And note what I said: "when," not "if." All of us at some point in our lives will face a chronic serious illness that causes us to lose control. We'll see our function decline, some of us will see our cognition decline, we'll be no longer able to care for ourselves, to do the things that we want to do. Our bodies will betray us, and in that process, we'll lose control. And that's scary. Not just scary — that's frightening, it's terrifying. When I talk to my patients, my palliative care patients, many of whom are facing illnesses that will end their lives, they have a lot of be frightened of — pain, nausea, vomiting, constipation, fatigue, their impending mortality. But what scares them more than anything else is this possibility that at some point, tomorrow or a month from now, they're going to lose control of their health, of their lives, of their healthcare, and they're going to become dependent on others, and that's terrifying. So it's no wonder really that patients like Robin, who I just told you about, who I met in that clinic, turn to medical marijuana to try to claw back some semblance of control. How do they do it though? How do these medical marijuana dispensaries — like the one where I met Robin — how do they give patients like Robin back the sort of control that they need? And how do they do it in a way that mainstream medical hospitals and clinics, at least for Robin, weren't able to? What's their secret? So I decided to find out. I went to a seedy clinic in Venice Beach in California and got a recommendation that would allow me to be a medical marijuana patient. I got a letter of recommendation that would let me buy medical marijuana. I got that recommendation illegally, because I'm not a resident of California — I should note that. I should also note, for the record, that I never used that letter of recommendation to make a purchase, and to all of you DEA agents out there — (Laughter) love the work that you're doing, keep it up. (Laughter) Even though it didn't let me make a purchase though, that letter was priceless because it let me be a patient. It let me experience what patients like Robin experience when they go to a medical marijuana dispensary. And what I experienced — what they experience every day, hundreds of thousands of people like Robin — was really amazing. I walked into the clinic, and from the moment that I entered many of these clinics and dispensaries, I felt like that dispensary, that clinic, was there for me. There were questions at the outset about who I am, what kind of work I do, what my goals are in looking for a medical marijuana prescription, or product, what my goals are, what my preferences are, what my hopes are, how do I think, how do I hope this might help me, what am I afraid of. These are the sorts of questions that patients like Robin get asked all the time. These are the sorts of questions that make me confident that the person I'm talking with really has my best interests at heart and wants to get to know me. The second thing I learned in those clinics is the availability of education. Education from the folks behind the counter, but also education from folks in the waiting room. People I met were more than happy, as I was sitting next to them — people like Robin — to tell me about who they are, why they use medical marijuana, what helps them, how it helps them, and to give me advice and suggestions. Those waiting rooms really are a hive of interaction, advice and support. And third, the folks behind the counter. I was amazed at how willing those people were to spend sometimes an hour or more talking me through the nuances of this strain versus that strain, smoking versus vaporizing, edibles versus tinctures — all, remember, without me making any purchase whatsoever. Think about the last time you went to any hospital or clinic and the last time anybody spent an hour explaining those sorts of things to you. The fact that patients like Robin are going to these clinics, are going to these dispensaries and getting that sort of personalized attention and education and service, really should be a wake-up call to the healthcare system. People like Robin are turning away from mainstream medicine, turning to medical marijuana dispensaries because those dispensaries are giving them what they need. If that's a wake-up call to the medical establishment, it's a wake-up call that many of my colleagues are either not hearing or not wanting to hear. When I talk to my colleagues, physicians in particular, about medical marijuana, they say, "Oh, we need more evidence. We need more research into benefits, we need more evidence about risks." And you know what? They're right. They're absolutely right. We do need much more evidence about the benefits of medical marijuana. We also need to ask the federal government to reschedule marijuana to Schedule II, or to deschedule it entirely to make that research possible. We also need more research into medical marijuana's risks. Medical marijuana's risks — we know a lot about the risks of recreational use, we know next to nothing about the risks of medical marijuana. So we absolutely do need research, but to say that we need research and not that we need to make any changes now is to miss the point entirely. People like Robin aren't seeking out medical marijuana because they think it's a wonder drug, or because they think it's entirely risk-free. They seek it out because the context in which it's delivered and administered and used, gives them the sort of control they need over their lives. And that's a wake-up call we really need to pay attention to. The good news though is that there are lessons we can learn today from those medical marijuana dispensaries. And those are lessons we really should learn. These are often small, mom-and-pop operations run by people with no medical training. And while it's embarrassing to think that many of these clinics and dispensaries are providing services and support and meeting patients' needs in ways that billion-dollar healthcare systems aren't — we should be embarrassed by that — but we can also learn from that. And there are probably three lessons at least that we can learn from those small dispensaries. One: we need to find ways to give patients more control in small but important ways. How to interact with healthcare providers, when to interact with healthcare providers, how to use medications in ways that work for them. In my own practice, I've gotten much more creative and flexible in supporting my patients in using drugs safely to manage their symptoms — with the emphasis on safely. Many of the drugs I prescribe are drugs like opioids or benzodiazepines which can be dangerous if overused. But here's the point. They can be dangerous if they're overused, but they can also be ineffective if they're not used in a way that's consistent with what patients want and need. So that flexibility, if it's delivered safely, can be extraordinarily valuable for patients and their families. That's number one. Number two: education. Huge opportunities to learn from some of the tricks of those medical marijuana dispensaries to provide more education that doesn't require a lot of physician time necessarily, or any physician time, but opportunities to learn about what medications we're using and why, prognoses, trajectories of illness, and most importantly, opportunities for patients to learn from each other. How can we replicate what goes on in those clinic and medical dispensary waiting rooms? How patients learn from each other, how people share with each other. And last but not least, putting patients first the way those medical marijuana dispensaries do, making patients feel legitimately like what they want, what they need, is why, as healthcare providers, we're here. Asking patients about their hopes, their fears, their goals and preferences. As a palliative care provider, I ask all my patients what they're hoping for and what they're afraid of. But here's the thing. Patients shouldn't have to wait until they're chronically seriously ill, often near the end of life, they shouldn't have to wait until they're seeing a physician like me before somebody asks them, "What are you hoping for?" "What are you afraid of?" That should be baked into the way that healthcare is delivered. We can do this — we really can. Medical marijuana dispensaries and clinics all across the country are figuring this out. They're figuring this out in ways that larger, more mainstream health systems are years behind. But we can learn from them, and we have to learn from them. All we have to do is swallow our pride — put aside the thought for a minute that because we have lots of letters after our name, because we're experts, because we're chief medical officers of a large healthcare system, we know all there is to know about how to meet patients' needs. We need to swallow our pride. We need to go visit a few medical marijuana dispensaries. We need to figure out what they're doing. We need to figure out why so many patients like Robin are leaving our mainstream medical clinics and going to these medical marijuana dispensaries instead. We need to figure out what their tricks are, what their tools are, and we need to learn from them. If we do, and I think we can, and I absolutely think we have to, we can guarantee all of our patients will have a much better experience. Thank you. (Applause) |
How I learned to read -- and trade stocks -- in prison | {0: 'Curtis “Wall Street” Carroll overcame poverty, illiteracy, incarceration and a lack of outside support to become a stock investor, creator and teacher of his own financial literacy philosophy.'} | TEDxSanQuentin | I was 14 years old inside of a bowling alley, burglarizing an arcade game, and upon exiting the building a security guard grabbed my arm, so I ran. I ran down the street, and I jumped on top of a fence. And when I got to the top, the weight of 3,000 quarters in my book bag pulled me back down to the ground. So when I came to, the security guard was standing on top of me, and he said, "Next time you little punks steal something you can carry." (Laughter) I was taken to juvenile hall and when I was released into the custody of my mother, the first words my uncle said was, "How'd you get caught?" I said, "Man, the book bag was too heavy." He said, "Man, you weren't supposed to take all the quarters." I said, "Man, they were small. What am I supposed to do?" And 10 minutes later, he took me to burglarize another arcade game. We needed gas money to get home. That was my life. I grew up in Oakland, California, with my mother and members of my immediate family addicted to crack cocaine. My environment consisted of living with family, friends, and homeless shelters. Oftentimes, dinner was served in breadlines and soup kitchens. The big homey told me this: money rules the world and everything in it. And in these streets, money is king. And if you follow the money, it'll lead you to the bad guy or the good guy. Soon after, I committed my first crime, and it was the first time that I was told that I had potential and felt like somebody believed in me. Nobody ever told me that I could be a lawyer, doctor or engineer. I mean, how was I supposed to do that? I couldn't read, write or spell. I was illiterate. So I always thought crime was my way to go. And then one day I was talking to somebody and he was telling me about this robbery that we could do. And we did it. The reality was that I was growing up in the strongest financial nation in the world, the United States of America, while I watched my mother stand in line at a blood bank to sell her blood for 40 dollars just to try to feed her kids. She still has the needle marks on her arms to day to show for that. So I never cared about my community. They didn't care about my life. Everybody there was doing what they were doing to take what they wanted, the drug dealers, the robbers, the blood bank. Everybody was taking blood money. So I got mine by any means necessary. I got mine. Financial literacy really did rule the world, and I was a child slave to it following the bad guy. At 17 years old, I was arrested for robbery and murder and I soon learned that finances in prison rule more than they did on the streets, so I wanted in. One day, I rushed to grab the sports page of the newspaper so my cellie could read it to me, and I accidentally picked up the business section. And this old man said, "Hey youngster, you pick stocks?" And I said, "What's that?" He said, "That's the place where white folks keep all their money." (Laughter) And it was the first time that I saw a glimpse of hope, a future. He gave me this brief description of what stocks were, but it was just a glimpse. I mean, how was I supposed to do it? I couldn't read, write or spell. The skills that I had developed to hide my illiteracy no longer worked in this environment. I was trapped in a cage, prey among predators, fighting for freedom I never had. I was lost, tired, and I was out of options. So at 20 years old, I did the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life. I picked up a book, and it was the most agonizing time of my life, trying to learn how to read, the ostracizing from my family, the homeys. It was rough, man. It was a struggle. But little did I know I was receiving the greatest gifts I had ever dreamed of: self-worth, knowledge, discipline. I was so excited to be reading that I read everything I could get my hands on: candy wrappers, clothing logos, street signs, everything. I was just reading stuff! (Applause) Just reading stuff. I was so excited to know how to read and know how to spell. The homey came up, said, "Man, what you eating?" I said, "C-A-N-D-Y, candy." (Laughter) He said, "Let me get some." I said, "N-O. No." (Laughter) It was awesome. I mean, I can actually now for the first time in my life read. The feeling that I got from it was amazing. And then at 22, feeling myself, feeling confident, I remembered what the OG told me. So I picked up the business section of the newspaper. I wanted to find these rich white folks. (Laughter) So I looked for that glimpse. As I furthered my career in teaching others how to financially manage money and invest, I soon learned that I had to take responsibility for my own actions. True, I grew up in a very complex environment, but I chose to commit crimes, and I had to own up to that. I had to take responsibility for that, and I did. I was building a curriculum that could teach incarcerated men how to manage money through prison employments. Properly managing our lifestyle would provide transferrable tools that we can use to manage money when we reenter society, like the majority of people did who didn't commit crimes. Then I discovered that according to MarketWatch, over 60 percent of the American population has under 1,000 dollars in savings. Sports Illustrated said that over 60 percent of NBA players and NFL players go broke. 40 percent of marital problems derive from financial issues. What the hell? (Laughter) You mean to tell me that people worked their whole lives, buying cars, clothes, homes and material stuff but were living check to check? How in the world were members of society going to help incarcerated individuals back into society if they couldn't manage they own stuff? We screwed. (Laughter) I needed a better plan. This is not going to work out too well. So ... I thought. I now had an obligation to meet those on the path and help, and it was crazy because I now cared about my community. Wow, imagine that. I cared about my community. Financial illiteracy is a disease that has crippled minorities and the lower class in our society for generations and generations, and we should be furious about that. Ask yourselves this: How can 50 percent of the American population be financially illiterate in a nation driven by financial prosperity? Our access to justice, our social status, living conditions, transportation and food are all dependent on money that most people can't manage. It's crazy! It's an epidemic and a bigger danger to public safety than any other issue. According to the California Department of Corrections, over 70 percent of those incarcerated have committed or have been charged with money-related crimes: robberies, burglaries, fraud, larceny, extortion — and the list goes on. Check this out: a typical incarcerated person would enter the California prison system with no financial education, earn 30 cents an hour, over 800 dollars a year, with no real expenses and save no money. Upon his parole, he will be given 200 dollars gate money and told, "Hey, good luck, stay out of trouble. Don't come back to prison." With no meaningful preparation or long-term financial plan, what does he do ... ? At 60? Get a good job, or go back to the very criminal behavior that led him to prison in the first place? You taxpayers, you choose. Well, his education already chose for him, probably. So how do we cure this disease? I cofounded a program that we call Financial Empowerment Emotional Literacy. We call it FEEL, and it teaches how do you separate your emotional decisions from your financial decisions, and the four timeless rules to personal finance: the proper way to save, control your cost of living, borrow money effectively and diversify your finances by allowing your money to work for you instead of you working for it. Incarcerated people need these life skills before we reenter society. You can't have full rehabilitation without these life skills. This idea that only professionals can invest and manage money is absolutely ridiculous, and whoever told you that is lying. (Applause) A professional is a person who knows his craft better than most, and nobody knows how much money you need, have or want better than you, which means you are the professional. Financial literacy is not a skill, ladies and gentlemen. It's a lifestyle. Financial stability is a byproduct of a proper lifestyle. A financially sound incarcerated person can become a taxpaying citizen, and a financially sound taxpaying citizen can remain one. This allows us to create a bridge between those people who we influence: family, friends and those young people who still believe that crime and money are related. So let's lose the fear and anxiety of all the big financial words and all that other nonsense that you've been out there hearing. And let's get to the heart of what's been crippling our society from taking care of your responsibility to be better life managers. And let's provide a simple and easy to use curriculum that gets to the heart, the heart of what financial empowerment and emotional literacy really is. Now, if you're sitting out here in the audience and you said, "Oh yeah, well, that ain't me and I don't buy it," then come take my class — (Laughter) so I can show you how much money it costs you every time you get emotional. (Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) |
How fake news does real harm | {0: 'Stephanie Busari is a journalist and editor at CNN International Digital.'} | TEDLagos Ideas Search | I want to tell you a story about a girl. But I can't tell you her real name. So let's just call her Hadiza. Hadiza is 20. She's shy, but she has a beautiful smile that lights up her face. But she's in constant pain. And she will likely be on medication for the rest of her life. Do you want to know why? Hadiza is a Chibok girl, and on April 14, 2014, she was kidnapped by Boko Haram terrorists. She managed to escape, though, by jumping off the truck that was carrying the girls. But when she landed, she broke both her legs, and she had to crawl on her tummy to hide in the bushes. She told me she was terrified that Boko Haram would come back for her. She was one of 57 girls who would escape by jumping off trucks that day. This story, quite rightly, caused ripples around the world. People like Michelle Obama, Malala and others lent their voices in protest, and at about the same time — I was living in London at the time — I was sent from London to Abuja to cover the World Economic Forum that Nigeria was hosting for the first time. But when we arrived, it was clear that there was only one story in town. We put the government under pressure. We asked tough questions about what they were doing to bring these girls back. Understandably, they weren't too happy with our line of questioning, and let's just say we received our fair share of "alternative facts." (Laughter) Influential Nigerians were telling us at the time that we were naïve, we didn't understand the political situation in Nigeria. But they also told us that the story of the Chibok girls was a hoax. Sadly, this hoax narrative has persisted, and there are still people in Nigeria today who believe that the Chibok girls were never kidnapped. Yet I was talking to people like these — devastated parents, who told us that on the day Boko Haram kidnapped their daughters, they ran into the Sambisa Forest after the trucks carrying their daughters. They were armed with machetes, but they were forced to turn back because Boko Haram had guns. For two years, inevitably, the news agenda moved on, and for two years, we didn't hear much about the Chibok girls. Everyone presumed they were dead. But in April last year, I was able to obtain this video. This is a still from the video that Boko Haram filmed as a proof of life, and through a source, I obtained this video. But before I could publish it, I had to travel to the northeast of Nigeria to talk to the parents, to verify it. I didn't have to wait too long for confirmation. One of the mothers, when she watched the video, told me that if she could have reached into the laptop and pulled our her child from the laptop, she would have done so. For those of you who are parents, like myself, in the audience, you can only imagine the anguish that that mother felt. This video would go on to kick-start negotiation talks with Boko Haram. And a Nigerian senator told me that because of this video they entered into those talks, because they had long presumed that the Chibok girls were dead. Twenty-one girls were freed in October last year. Sadly, nearly 200 of them still remain missing. I must confess that I have not been a dispassionate observer covering this story. I am furious when I think about the wasted opportunities to rescue these girls. I am furious when I think about what the parents have told me, that if these were daughters of the rich and the powerful, they would have been found much earlier. And I am furious that the hoax narrative, I firmly believe, caused a delay; it was part of the reason for the delay in their return. This illustrates to me the deadly danger of fake news. So what can we do about it? There are some very smart people, smart engineers at Google and Facebook, who are trying to use technology to stop the spread of fake news. But beyond that, I think everybody here — you and I — we have a role to play in that. We are the ones who share the content. We are the ones who share the stories online. In this day and age, we're all publishers, and we have responsibility. In my job as a journalist, I check, I verify. I trust my gut, but I ask tough questions. Why is this person telling me this story? What do they have to gain by sharing this information? Do they have a hidden agenda? I really believe that we must all start to ask tougher questions of information that we discover online. Research shows that some of us don't even read beyond headlines before we share stories. Who here has done that? I know I have. But what if we stopped taking information that we discover at face value? What if we stop to think about the consequence of the information that we pass on and its potential to incite violence or hatred? What if we stop to think about the real-life consequences of the information that we share? Thank you very much for listening. (Applause) |
Science in service to the public good | {0: 'Siddhartha Roy is an environmental engineer and science communicator who works at the nexus of water quality, public health and environmental justice. He and his team helped uncover the Flint, Michigan Water Crisis.'} | TEDxVirginiaTech | Fresh out of college, I went to work for a consulting firm. During orientation, the leaders dished out advice. Amongst them was one pithy counsel I will never forget. He told us, "Be easy to manage." Considering how naïve I really was at the time, I took his advice to heart. I told myself, "Yes, I will be the ultimate team player. I will do everything I'm told. I will be easy to manage." It wasn't until I arrived in graduate school and witnessed firsthand the criminal actions of scientists and engineers in the water crisis in Flint, Michigan that I realized how dangerous and yet surprisingly common this line of thinking really is. Make no mistake: the Flint water crisis is one of the most egregious environmental injustices of our time. For over 18 months, 100,000 residents, including thousands of young children, were exposed to contaminated drinking water with high levels of lead. Lead is a potent neurotoxin which causes cognitive and developmental disabilities and is especially harmful to growing fetuses and young children. We've known about its dangers since the Roman Empire. Amongst a whole host of health issues, 12 people died by contracting Legionnaires' disease. Flint's water infrastructure — the complex network of underground pipes — has been severely damaged. And while the water quality is slowly improving and the pipes are being replaced now, more than two years later, the water is still not safe to drink. So, people are still in shock. They ask themselves, "How could this have happened?" The short answer is: the crisis began when an emergency manager, appointed by Michigan's governor, decided to switch their water source to a local river to save money. But it continued for so long because scientists and engineers at government agencies in the state of Michigan and in the federal government did not follow federal regulations for treating the water right. What was more, they actively cheated on the law and orchestrated cover-ups. They ridiculed residents asking for help, while publicly insisting that the brown, smelly water coming out of the tap was safe to drink. The system at the local, state and federal levels completely failed to protect our most vulnerable, and an entire population was left to fend for itself. Now, amidst this injustice, Flint residents were rallying together. Amongst them were some amazing women of Flint — mothers concerned about their kids — who came together forming many grassroots coalitions, and these groups started protesting and demanding change. The group also reached out to outside scientists for help, and a few responded. Amongst them was a guy named Miguel Del Toral, a water expert at the US EPA — the Environmental Protection Agency — who actually wrote this scientific memo and sent it to the state of Michigan and the federal government to bring their attention to this problem. He was characterized a "rogue employee," and silenced. In collaboration with Flint residents, our research team here at Tech, of students and scientists led by professor Marc Edwards, conducted citywide testing to prove that Flint's water was indeed contaminated, even toxic in some homes. We substantiated what Flint had been screaming for months, and put it on the Internet for the world to see. Now, when I was getting involved, when I said yes to this, I had no idea what I was getting into. But every second of this journey has been totally worth it. This was science in service to the public. This is what I came to graduate school for, and this is how I would rather spend my life. And so this coalition — this unlikely coalition of citizens, pastors, journalists and scientists — came together to uncover the truth using science, advocacy and activism. A local pediatrician figured out that the instances of childhood lead poisoning had indeed doubled in Flint during the crisis. And the state of Michigan was forced to acknowledge the problem and take steps to correct it. This group and many others got Flint's kids protected. A few months later, President Obama came in and declared a federal emergency, and now Flint is getting more than 600 million dollars in healthcare, nutrition, education and overhauling their water infrastructure. However, the arrogance and the callous disregard for public health shown by scientists and engineers at these government agencies is beyond belief. These unhealthy cultures that are festering in these groups, where the focus is on meeting regulations and checking boxes as opposed to protecting public health, is just appalling. Just consider this email that an EPA employee wrote, where she goes, "I'm not so sure Flint is a community we want to go out on a limb for." The dehumanization of an entire population could not be more obvious. Now, contrast that to the first canon of engineering, which, in my opinion, should be the first law of humanity: "To hold paramount the health, safety and welfare of the public," above all else. This is the Hippocratic Oath we've rarely acknowledged, let alone embraced. And so when scientists and engineers, very much like medical doctors, screw up, people can get hurt — even die. If our professionals and even students fail to get that, society pays a huge price. Buried deep in history lies a character I deeply admire — an engineer named Peter Palchinsky. He lived in the time of the Soviet Union. And Palchinsky repeatedly got in trouble for his radical honesty and willingness to point out major flaws in the Soviets' mindless pursuit of rapid industrialization. Everyone was expected to follow orders coming from the top. Anyone asking questions or offering feedback was unwelcome. The Soviets had created the largest army of engineers the world had ever seen, and yet most of them were mere cogs in a gigantic machine heading for doom. Palchinsky, on the other hand, implored engineers to look at the economic, political and social consequences of their actions; in other words, be more public-focused. His fearless voice of reason was seen as a threat to the political establishment, and Joseph Stalin had him executed in 1929. Palchinsky's view on technocrats is very different from one that is still very popular, still very common — that of a dispassionate researcher working in his ivory tower lab, or a nerdy engineer working in his cubicle. Brilliant, no doubt, yet somehow cut off from the world, shows little emotion — kind of like Spock from "Star Trek," you know? This guy. (Laughter) Let's try and do the Spock salute. I don't think I'll succeed ... See, I can't be Spock. Thank goodness I can't be Spock. (Laughter) I was reminded of this distinction because a recent article came out in a very reputed scientific journal, which kind of characterized our Flint work as driven by "youthful idealism," and "Hollywood's dramatic sensibilities." It asks scientists to protect their research funding and institutions at all costs, no matter how just the cause. And if you think you have to get involved in something, even if it's an emergency, try finding an activist group or an NGO, and obtain the full support of the academic community — whatever that means — before you get involved. Not one mention of our moral and professional obligation of preventing harm to the public, or the fact that we have all this expertise, resources and, for some, even tenure to, you know, accomplish this task. I'm not saying every scientist should be an activist. There are real and sometimes very painful consequences of speaking up. But to denounce this idea, this possibility so completely so that you can protect research funding, simply screams of self-serving cowardice, and these are not the ideals we would want to pass to our students. And so you may think, "OK, all this sounds great, but you'll never completely change organizational cultures, or imbibe mindsets in students and professionals to look at their work as a public good — science in service to the public." Maybe so. But could a big reason for that be that we are not training our students right? Because if you look closely, our education system today is focused more on creating what ex-Yale professor Bill Deresiewicz calls "excellent sheep" — young people who are smart and ambitious, and yet somehow risk-averse, timid, directionless and, sometimes, full of themselves. Now, kids ... you know, we fell in love with science when we were kids, and yet we somehow spend most of our time during high school and college just jumping through hoops and doing things so that we can polish our résumé instead of sitting down and reflecting on what we want to do and who we want to be. And so, the markers of empathy in our college graduates have been dropping dramatically in the past two decades, while those of narcissism are on the rise. There is also a growing culture of disengagement between engineering students and the public. We are trained to build bridges and solve complex problems but not how to think or live or be a citizen of this world. My undergraduate years were explicit job preparation, and I cannot tell you how suffocating and painful it was at times. And so, some people think the solution to great engineers, to great scientists, is more technical training. Maybe so. But where are the discussions on ethical decision-making, or building character, or discerning right from wrong? Consider this project that I deeply love and admire. It's called, "Heroic Imagination Project." A brainchild of Dr. Phil Zimbardo, famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment, this program seeks to train school-going children around the world to look at themselves as heroes-in-waiting, or heroes-in-training. So, these young minds work over time to develop skills and virtues so that when the opportunity comes, no matter what that opportunity be, to stand up and do the right thing. In other words, anyone can be a hero. Think about that idea for a second. Why don't we teach science and engineering like that — where heroism and public service are seen as key values, because indeed, it's often heroism that is not only the antidote to public indifference, but also to systemic evil like we saw in Flint. And so, dream with me what a 21st-century scientist slash engineer could look like: individuals who are driven to master the sciences so that they can serve society, and are also aware of the tremendous power their knowledge and decisions have; folks who are developing their moral courage at all times, and who realize that conflict and controversy are not necessarily bad things if our ultimate loyalty is to the public and the planet. These are the people who will stand up like we did in Flint — not to be saviors or heroes in the media, but altruistic and fundamentally good actors that you and I can trust. Imagine fostering such a public-focused mindset in classes, on service trips and during activities during college or even high school, so that these young minds will hold onto those ideals when they actually enter the real world, whether that be consulting, academia, policy making — or even becoming the president of a country. Some of mankind's greatest challenges lie ahead of us; contaminated drinking water is just one example. We could definitely use more — nay, we desperately need more — compassionate upstanders and public-focused scientists and engineers who will strive to the do right thing, and not be easy to manage. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why the only future worth building includes everyone | {0: 'Pope Francis is the Bishop of Rome and the head of the Roman Catholic Church. '} | TED2017 | [His Holiness Pope Francis Filmed in Vatican City First shown at TED2017] Good evening – or, good morning, I am not sure what time it is there. Regardless of the hour, I am thrilled to be participating in your conference. I very much like its title – "The Future You" – because, while looking at tomorrow, it invites us to open a dialogue today, to look at the future through a "you." "The Future You:" the future is made of yous, it is made of encounters, because life flows through our relations with others. Quite a few years of life have strengthened my conviction that each and everyone's existence is deeply tied to that of others: life is not time merely passing by, life is about interactions. As I meet, or lend an ear to those who are sick, to the migrants who face terrible hardships in search of a brighter future, to prison inmates who carry a hell of pain inside their hearts, and to those, many of them young, who cannot find a job, I often find myself wondering: "Why them and not me?" I, myself, was born in a family of migrants; my father, my grandparents, like many other Italians, left for Argentina and met the fate of those who are left with nothing. I could have very well ended up among today's "discarded" people. And that's why I always ask myself, deep in my heart: "Why them and not me?" First and foremost, I would love it if this meeting could help to remind us that we all need each other, none of us is an island, an autonomous and independent "I," separated from the other, and we can only build the future by standing together, including everyone. We don’t think about it often, but everything is connected, and we need to restore our connections to a healthy state. Even the harsh judgment I hold in my heart against my brother or my sister, the open wound that was never cured, the offense that was never forgiven, the rancor that is only going to hurt me, are all instances of a fight that I carry within me, a flare deep in my heart that needs to be extinguished before it goes up in flames, leaving only ashes behind. Many of us, nowadays, seem to believe that a happy future is something impossible to achieve. While such concerns must be taken very seriously, they are not invincible. They can be overcome when we don't lock our door to the outside world. Happiness can only be discovered as a gift of harmony between the whole and each single component. Even science – and you know it better than I do – points to an understanding of reality as a place where every element connects and interacts with everything else. And this brings me to my second message. How wonderful would it be if the growth of scientific and technological innovation would come along with more equality and social inclusion. How wonderful would it be, while we discover faraway planets, to rediscover the needs of the brothers and sisters orbiting around us. How wonderful would it be if solidarity, this beautiful and, at times, inconvenient word, were not simply reduced to social work, and became, instead, the default attitude in political, economic and scientific choices, as well as in the relationships among individuals, peoples and countries. Only by educating people to a true solidarity will we be able to overcome the "culture of waste," which doesn't concern only food and goods but, first and foremost, the people who are cast aside by our techno-economic systems which, without even realizing it, are now putting products at their core, instead of people. Solidarity is a term that many wish to erase from the dictionary. Solidarity, however, is not an automatic mechanism. It cannot be programmed or controlled. It is a free response born from the heart of each and everyone. Yes, a free response! When one realizes that life, even in the middle of so many contradictions, is a gift, that love is the source and the meaning of life, how can they withhold their urge to do good to another fellow being? In order to do good, we need memory, we need courage and we need creativity. And I know that TED gathers many creative minds. Yes, love does require a creative, concrete and ingenious attitude. Good intentions and conventional formulas, so often used to appease our conscience, are not enough. Let us help each other, all together, to remember that the other is not a statistic or a number. The other has a face. The "you" is always a real presence, a person to take care of. There is a parable Jesus told to help us understand the difference between those who'd rather not be bothered and those who take care of the other. I am sure you have heard it before. It is the Parable of the Good Samaritan. When Jesus was asked: "Who is my neighbor?" - namely, "Who should I take care of?" - he told this story, the story of a man who had been assaulted, robbed, beaten and abandoned along a dirt road. Upon seeing him, a priest and a Levite, two very influential people of the time, walked past him without stopping to help. After a while, a Samaritan, a very much despised ethnicity at the time, walked by. Seeing the injured man lying on the ground, he did not ignore him as if he weren't even there. Instead, he felt compassion for this man, which compelled him to act in a very concrete manner. He poured oil and wine on the wounds of the helpless man, brought him to a hostel and paid out of his pocket for him to be assisted. The story of the Good Samaritan is the story of today’s humanity. People's paths are riddled with suffering, as everything is centered around money, and things, instead of people. And often there is this habit, by people who call themselves "respectable," of not taking care of the others, thus leaving behind thousands of human beings, or entire populations, on the side of the road. Fortunately, there are also those who are creating a new world by taking care of the other, even out of their own pockets. Mother Teresa actually said: "One cannot love, unless it is at their own expense." We have so much to do, and we must do it together. But how can we do that with all the evil we breathe every day? Thank God, no system can nullify our desire to open up to the good, to compassion and to our capacity to react against evil, all of which stem from deep within our hearts. Now you might tell me, "Sure, these are beautiful words, but I am not the Good Samaritan, nor Mother Teresa of Calcutta." On the contrary: we are precious, each and every one of us. Each and every one of us is irreplaceable in the eyes of God. Through the darkness of today's conflicts, each and every one of us can become a bright candle, a reminder that light will overcome darkness, and never the other way around. To Christians, the future does have a name, and its name is Hope. Feeling hopeful does not mean to be optimistically naïve and ignore the tragedy humanity is facing. Hope is the virtue of a heart that doesn't lock itself into darkness, that doesn't dwell on the past, does not simply get by in the present, but is able to see a tomorrow. Hope is the door that opens onto the future. Hope is a humble, hidden seed of life that, with time, will develop into a large tree. It is like some invisible yeast that allows the whole dough to grow, that brings flavor to all aspects of life. And it can do so much, because a tiny flicker of light that feeds on hope is enough to shatter the shield of darkness. A single individual is enough for hope to exist, and that individual can be you. And then there will be another "you," and another "you," and it turns into an "us." And so, does hope begin when we have an "us?" No. Hope began with one "you." When there is an "us," there begins a revolution. The third message I would like to share today is, indeed, about revolution: the revolution of tenderness. And what is tenderness? It is the love that comes close and becomes real. It is a movement that starts from our heart and reaches the eyes, the ears and the hands. Tenderness means to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other, to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future. To listen also to the silent cry of our common home, of our sick and polluted earth. Tenderness means to use our hands and our heart to comfort the other, to take care of those in need. Tenderness is the language of the young children, of those who need the other. A child’s love for mom and dad grows through their touch, their gaze, their voice, their tenderness. I like when I hear parents talk to their babies, adapting to the little child, sharing the same level of communication. This is tenderness: being on the same level as the other. God himself descended into Jesus to be on our level. This is the same path the Good Samaritan took. This is the path that Jesus himself took. He lowered himself, he lived his entire human existence practicing the real, concrete language of love. Yes, tenderness is the path of choice for the strongest, most courageous men and women. Tenderness is not weakness; it is fortitude. It is the path of solidarity, the path of humility. Please, allow me to say it loud and clear: the more powerful you are, the more your actions will have an impact on people, the more responsible you are to act humbly. If you don’t, your power will ruin you, and you will ruin the other. There is a saying in Argentina: "Power is like drinking gin on an empty stomach." You feel dizzy, you get drunk, you lose your balance, and you will end up hurting yourself and those around you, if you don’t connect your power with humility and tenderness. Through humility and concrete love, on the other hand, power – the highest, the strongest one – becomes a service, a force for good. The future of humankind isn't exclusively in the hands of politicians, of great leaders, of big companies. Yes, they do hold an enormous responsibility. But the future is, most of all, in the hands of those people who recognize the other as a "you" and themselves as part of an "us." We all need each other. And so, please, think of me as well with tenderness, so that I can fulfill the task I have been given for the good of the other, of each and every one, of all of you, of all of us. Thank you. |
On tennis, love and motherhood | {0: 'With her legendary spirit and unstoppable serve, tennis legend Serena Williams has become one of the world’s most enduring athletic superstars.', 1: 'Gayle King is a co-host of "CBS This Morning” and Editor-at-Large of the award-winning O, the Oprah Magazine.'} | TED2017 | Gayle King: Have a seat, Serena Williams, or should we say, have a seat, mom. (Cheers) So no doubt, you guys are like me. You saw the release of Serena in that great yellow bathing suit last week and when I saw it, all I could think of was, "Gosh, why couldn't she have waited til we sat onstage for TED?" I was very selfish, I know. So I asked you about that picture, and you said nobody was supposed to see that picture. What do you mean? Serena Williams: Well, actually, it was an accident. I was on vacation, just taking some time for myself, and I have this thing where I've been checking my status and taking pictures every week to see how far along I'm going — GK: And sharing it with friends, maybe? SW: No, actually I have just been saving it, and I didn't really tell a lot of people, to be quite honest, and I'd been saving it, and you know how social media is, you press the wrong button and — (Laughter) GK: And there it was. SW: So 30 minutes later — my phone doesn't ring that much — and 30 minutes later, I missed like four calls, and I'm like, that's weird, and then I picked it up and I was like, oh no. But it was a good moment. I was gonna wait literally just five or six more days — that's OK. GK: I know, because it was weird, Serena, because it only said 20 weeks, so it's not like there was a whole lot of information on it. SW: Exactly, so that's what I've been doing all this time. I've been just tracking it. 18, 19 — every week I'd just take a picture and save it, and I've been so good about it, and this was the one time that I slipped. GK: There you go. Well, congratulations. SW: Yes, thank you. GK: It really is OK. When you heard the news, were you excited? Were you afraid? Were you worried? That you were pregnant, I mean. SW: So I heard it two days before the beginning of the Australian Open, which is one of the biggest grand slams. GK: You found out two days before? SW: Yeah, so it was two days before, and I knew. I was nervous. I wasn't quite sure what to think, but I just knew that at that moment it was really important for me to just focus right there at the Australian Open, and I was definitely not sure what to do. I was like, can I play? I know it's very dangerous, maybe, sometimes in the first 12 weeks or so, so I had a lot of questions. GK: But not only did you play, Ms. Williams, you won. (Cheers) SW: Yeah. May I just say, 23 grand slams to you. SW: Thank you. (Applause) GK: While pregnant! SW: Well, I was looking for another handicap, so ... no. GK: Did you play differently that game, knowing you were pregnant? SW: I did. It wasn't very easy. You hear all these stories about people when they're pregnant, they get sick and they get tired. GK: Have you had morning sickness? SW: No, I've been so fortunate and so I haven't. But they get really tired and they get really stressed out, and I had to really take all that energy, put it in a paper bag, so to say, and throw it away, because I really felt like I didn't have time to deal with any extra emotions, any extra anything, because pregnant or not, no one knew, and I was supposed to win that tournament as I am every tournament that I show up. I am expected to win, and if I don't win, it's actually much bigger news. GK: Yeah, when you don't win, that's a big story. SW: Yes, so for me, I had to really take anything negative and any emotions that I was feeling at that point and kind of just bottle them up and really figure out what the next step for me to do was. GK: You have a lot of support. You have a lot of love. Even when I was coming here, people stopped me at the airport. I was saying to the flight attendant, the pilot, "Guess where I'm going?" They said, "Oh my God, we're so glad she's pregnant." But then you always have these cranky Yankees. On the way over here, somebody was telling me about Ilie Nastase, who said some very unkind, inappropriate, dare I say racial things. You have responded to him. I'm not even going to dignify what he said, but you responded. Why did you respond? SW: Well, I think there are very inappropriate comments, and not only that, I've been really supportive of my peers and the people that I've worked with. I've been a pro for almost 20 years, and so for me, it's really important to hold women up, and it's something that these young women, they'll come to the locker room, they'll want to take pictures with me, and for me, it's just like, I want to be able to be a good leader and a good example for them. So not only — (Applause) Not only did he have rude things to say about me and my peers, I felt it was important for us to stand up for each other and to stand up for myself. And at that point it was really important for me to say, like, I'm not afraid, I'm not going anywhere, but this is inappropriate, and there's time and there's a place for everything. And that really wasn't the time and the place. GK: We cut the part where you said you're not going anywhere, because you'll be 36 in September. Baby's coming, 36. And your coach said age is always important, but in tennis it's very important, but he has no doubt that you're coming back. Have you thought, am I coming back? Will I take some time off? I know the women on the tour are saying, "How long does it take to have a baby? Two years will she be gone?" What are you thinking? SW: Well, I'm always trying to defy the odds, you know, so for me everything is really mental. I definitely plan on coming back. I'm not done yet. I'm really inspired by my sister. She's a year older than me, and that's something that — if she's still playing, I know I can play. (Laughter) And there's so many — Roger Federer, he's a little bit older than me and he's still winning everything, so I'm like, I know I can do that too. So that's been so inspiring to me, especially recently, and I know that it's something I want to do. And my story is definitely not over yet. I was talking to my coach about it, and we were talking about how this is just a new part of my life, and my baby's going to be in the stands and hopefully cheering for me, not crying too much. GK: No, you wrote a beautiful letter to your baby yesterday that you said — from the oldest mommy to the youngest one, to the oldest, to the youngest, I can't wait for you to get here. A lot of people feel that. I saw you about a year ago, because I think about your life, Serena. You've had three life-changing things in a six-month time: pregnant, huge win, fell in love. And when I saw you last year, I was saying, "How's your love life? Da da da." You said, "I met a guy. He's a nerdy, kinda geeky guy. You won't know who he is." I said, "What's his name?" SW: I remember talking to you about that, yes. GK: And you said, "Alexis Ohanian." I said, "I know him!" He's awesome. But I would never put you with a nerdy geek, and you said, you neither. SW: I'm going to be honest with you, I didn't either, but it's been the best thing for me. GK: The best thing why? Does that look like a nerdy geek? Look at the shirt. (Laughter) No, he's a very nice guy. SW: You can tell he's into technology. GK: He's a very, very nice guy. I like him very much. So how did he succeed when others have failed? How was he the one that you knew, this is the one for me? SW: Well, I'm not going to say that, but ... (Laughter) GK: Say it, Serena, say it! SW: Well ... (Laughter) Yes. (Applause) GK: But you know what I mean. SW: He is very loving and he's very kind, and my mom says he's very considerate, and when she said that to me, I was like, you know, he really is, and it's the little things that really make a huge difference in life. GK: Like? SW: Something simple. My fashion company, we have a show every year, so in our show last year, I was running around like crazy, because I do everything for the show, and everything for it, so I was running around like crazy, and he, it was a simple gesture of this shirt that he had, and he just wanted to make sure that I had the same one, and it was — it's a weird story. It was better in person, I promise. GK: Was it a wonderful proposal? Or was it a Beyoncé song? "If you like it then you ought to put a ring on it"? Were you feeling pressure to get married? Did you know it was coming? SW: Yeah, I actually never felt pressure to get married and I can't say I'm the marrying type of person. I really love my life. I love my freedom. I heard that kind of changes. But I love everything that I do, and I love my career, and I always felt like I didn't want anything to interfere with that. I've actually been so career-oriented and in fact, when he proposed, I was almost angry. Not almost. I was angry, because it was right in the middle of my training season, and I said, "I gotta win the Australian Open. I can't fly to Rome." Because he wanted to take me to Rome, and I said, "I can't. I gotta win." But that's how focused I was. GK: This is a girl that says, "No, I can't go to Rome." OK. SW: But I was really focused on reaching my goals and I knew at that point there was one player that I wanted to pass. I wanted to pass Steffi Graf's record, and that really meant a lot to me, and when I put my mind to something, I really am determined to reach it no matter what. GK: You know, you said that for you — I've heard you say that winning is addictive to you. SW: It is. GK: What do you mean? SW: I feel like winning for me is superaddictive. I feel like once you experience it, you always want to get that feeling again, and when I won my first championship, I was only 17 years old, but I never forgot that feeling, and I feel like every time I win one, I want to reach that feeling of your first championship. There's really no feeling in the world like that. And it's like, all these years of training and being a little kid and playing, and then winning is a wonderful experience. So for me I've always felt like I loved that feeling, and obviously I don't like the feeling of losing. I feel like — GK: No, in fact, people close to you say you're a very bad loser. SW: I'm not the best loser. GK: That you're very, very, very bad. Listen, no athlete, no champion likes to lose. I get that. But they say when it comes to losing, you are very, very, very bad at it. (Laughter) SW: I'm number one at losing too, so you know, that's all I can say. (Laughter) (Applause) GK: I'm always curious about the dynamic between you and Venus, because everybody that knows you and has followed the story knows that you two are very close, and you always bring your A game in whatever you do, but I often wonder, when you're playing her, do you bring your A- game because you want to do something for her or do you bring your A++ game because you want to crush her. Is it harder for you playing her or easier? SW: Well, playing Venus is like playing myself, because we grew up playing each other, we grew up practicing together. And it was something that has been difficult, because she's my toughest opponent. She's tall, she's fast, she hits hard like me, she serves like me. It's really like playing a wall. GK: She knows you. SW: She knows where I'm hitting the ball before I hit it, so it's something that is not very easy, but it's really about, when I go out there, I really have to shut down my mind and I have to say to myself, "You know what? I'm just playing a great player, but today I have to be better. I don't care who it is, if it's my sister or it's my friend, today is the day I have to show up and I have to be better and I have to want it more than anyone else at this moment anywhere on this world." GK: So never on the court do you fall back for Venus? Because, you know, it was always Venus and Serena. SW: Yes. GK: And now baby sister has surpassed older sister. Do you feel guilt about that? Do you feel joy in that? Is that a difficult position for you? SW: I don't feel anything in there. In my life, it still and forever is always going to be Venus and Serena. She's really love of my life, she's my best friend, she's my soul mate. I mean — There's pictures of her pushing me, really low-quality pictures or else I would have shared them, of her pushing me in a stroller on a tennis court, and she always took care of me. I used to spend all of my allowance money on the ice cream truck and stuff, and she would take her money and give it to me at school and make sure I had something to eat and she would go without, and that's the kind of person she actually is since I've always known her. So we always have this incredible respect for each other and this incredible love, and I think it's important for people to realize you can be successful but you can still have a wonderful relationship. On the court we are mortal enemies, but the second we shake hands, we are best friends again. And if I lose, it might be a day later for me, but for Venus — (Laughter) GK: There's never a time on the court where you hit the ball and say, "That's for seventh grade when you did the blah blah blah"? You never have any moment like that? SW: I feel like she should have those moments, because she's never done anything bad to me, but I'm the youngest. I'm the younger sister. GK: Serena, she's never done anything bad to you? Really? I have three sisters. I can think of some stuff I've done bad. SW: Unless she brainwashed me to forget them. GK: No, but the love you have for her I know is very pure. I know that. SW: Yes. GK: I know that. SW: We were always brought up to be superclose, and we are incredibly close. Not only her. I have three other sisters as well, and we were always so close. GK: So before a big match, the two of you don't get together and say, look, we're going to go out there and — there's nothing? SW: Well, it's funny. Before the Australian Open, we were in the locker room together, and I always pick on her, so I pulled out my camera while she was changing. I started taking pictures of her, which is totally inappropriate, but she was so mad at me. She's like, "Serena, stop!" And I was just laughing at her. But that's the kind of relationship that we have, and like I said, the second we step on the court, it was like, we were definitely mortal enemies, but the second we stepped off, and moments before, we're just — It is what it is, because at the end of the day, she'll always be my sister. I'm not going to play Australia in — Well, who knows, I've been playing forever, but I don't think I'll be playing in 50 years, say? Let's be safe and say 50 years. GK: I don't know, Serena. There's never been anybody like you. When you think about it, never been anybody who has intersected gender and race the way you have, the dominance that you have and the scrutiny that you have. And when you were growing up, did you say, "I want to be like that"? Because now little girls are looking at you saying, "I want to be like that." Who was the "I want to be like that" for you? SW: Well, it's interesting, and I'm glad you brought that up. For me, when I grew up, I always wanted to be the best, and I said, if you want to be the best, you've got to emulate the best. So when I started to go on tour when I was really young, I would see Steffi Graf, I would see Monica Seles, and I would even see Pete Sampras, and I would see what they did, and I noticed that Steffi and Monica didn't really talk to a lot of the other players, and they kind of were on their own, and they were just so focused and I would see Pete Sampras, the technique that he did, and I was like, "I want to do that." So I did that, and I felt that to be the best, and if you want to be the best, you have to hang around people and you have to look at people that are the best, because you're not going to be the best if you're looking at someone that's not at the top level. GK: People say nobody works as hard as you. SW: I'm a very hard worker. GK: That's what I heard. SW: People say, "Oh, she's talented, she's athletic." Actually, I wasn't. I was really small for my age. I grew up when I got older, and I had to work really hard, and I think one of the reasons why I fight so hard and I work so hard is because I was really, really, really small. GK: Yeah. You are no longer small. SW: No, I'm fully grown now. But I was small when I was really young for whatever reason. I think Venus maybe ate all the Wheaties. GK: You know, the other thing people talk about is your body. Your body brings men and women to their knees. And I mean in a good way. A lot has been made about your body. It's a work of art, it's masculine, it's glorious, there's never been anything like it. Did you have body issues when you were growing up? Have you always been comfortable with your body? SW: It's interesting, because when you're a teenage female growing up in the public eye, it is a lot of scrutiny that you face, and as any female that's a teenager, I definitely was not comfortable in my body. I didn't like it. I didn't understand why I had muscles. And I stopped lifting weights. I was like, I'm not going to do this. But then after I won the US Open, I realized that my body helped me reach goals that I wanted to reach, and I wanted to be happy with it, and I was so appreciative of it. I'm always healthy. I'm really fortunate and superblessed, and I felt like not only am I happy with my body, but I want other people and other young girls that have experienced what I've experienced to be happy with themselves. So whatever people say — masculine, whatever, too much, too little — I'm OK with it as long as I love myself. (Applause) GK: I know you learn a lot from winning, but what have you learned from losing? SW: I hate to lose, but I think losing has brought me here today. The only reason I am who I am is because of my losses, and some of them are extremely painful, but I wouldn't take any of them away, because every time I lose, it takes a really long time for me to lose again because I learn so much from it. And I encourage everyone that I talk to — I'm like, listen, if you lose or if something happens — not in sports — in business or in school — learn from it. Don't live in the past, live in the present, and don't make the same mistakes in the future. That's something that I always try to live by. GK: Now you're planning a wedding and I want to know, is it a destination wedding in the Catskills or Poconos or are you going to do it in Florida? What are you thinking? Big or small? SW: We're thinking medium size. We don't want to do too big, but then we're like, OK, we can't say no to this person, this person. So we're thinking medium size and we're just thinking — My personality is a lot of fun. Hopefully you can see that today. I'm not too serious. GK: And you like to dance. And the next chapter for Serena Williams is what? SW: Oh, next for me. Obviously I'm going to have a baby and I'm going to stay fit and kind of come back and play tennis and keep working on my fashion line. That'll be really fun. GK: Do you know if it's a boy or girl? SW: I don't. I have a feeling of one or the other. It's a 50-50 chance, but I have a feeling. GK: Gayle is a unisex name. Whatever you and Alexis decide, we are cheering you on! SW: Thank you for that. GK: You're welcome. We are cheering you on, Serena Williams. SW: Thank you so much. Thank you guys. (Applause) |
What you can do to prevent Alzheimer's | {0: 'Through her fiction, Lisa Genova beckons us into the lives of people with neurological disease, making their worlds real and relatable.'} | TED2017 | How many people here would like to live to be at least 80 years old? Yeah. I think we all have this hopeful expectation of living into old age. Let's project out into the future, to your future "you's," and let's imagine that we're all 85. Now, everyone look at two people. One of you probably has Alzheimer's disease. (Laughter) Alright, alright. And maybe you're thinking, "Well, it won't be me." Then, OK. You are a caregiver. So — (Laughter) so in some way, this terrifying disease is likely to affect us all. Part of the fear around Alzheimer's stems from the sense that there's nothing we can do about it. Despite decades of research, we still have no disease-modifying treatment and no cure. So if we're lucky enough to live long enough, Alzheimer's appears to be our brain's destiny. But maybe it doesn't have to be. What if I told you we could change these statistics, literally change our brain's destiny, without relying on a cure or advancements in medicine? Let's begin by looking at what we currently understand about the neuroscience of Alzheimer's. Here's a picture of two neurons connecting. The point of connection, this space circled in red, is called the synapse. The synapse is where neurotransmitters are released. This is where signals are transmitted, where communication happens. This is where we think, feel, see, hear, desire ... and remember. And the synapse is where Alzheimer's happens. Let's zoom in on the synapse and look at a cartoon representation of what's going on. During the business of communicating information, in addition to releasing neurotransmitters like glutamate into the synapse, neurons also release a small peptide called amyloid beta. Normally, amyloid beta is cleared away metabolized by microglia, the janitor cells of our brains. While the molecular causes of Alzheimer's are still debated, most neuroscientists believe that the disease begins when amyloid beta begins to accumulate. Too much is released, or not enough is cleared away, and the synapse begins to pile up with amyloid beta. And when this happens, it binds to itself, forming sticky aggregates called amyloid plaques. How many people here are 40 years old or older? You're afraid to admit it now. This initial step into the disease, this presence of amyloid plaques accumulating, can already be found in your brains. The only way we could be sure of this would be through a PET scan, because at this point, you are blissfully unaware. You're not showing any impairments in memory, language, or cognition ... yet. We think it takes at least 15 to 20 years of amyloid plaque accumulation before it reaches a tipping point, then triggering a molecular cascade that causes the clinical symptoms of the disease. Prior to the tipping point, your lapses in memory might include things like, "Why did I come in this room?" or "Oh ... what's his name?" or "Where did I put my keys?" Now, before you all start freaking out again, because I know half of you did at least one of those in the last 24 hours — these are all normal kinds of forgetting. In fact, I would argue that these examples might not even involve your memory, because you didn't pay attention to where you put your keys in the first place. After the tipping point, the glitches in memory, language and cognition are different. Instead of eventually finding your keys in your coat pocket or on the table by the door, you find them in the refrigerator, or you find them and you think, "What are these for?" So what happens when amyloid plaques accumulate to this tipping point? Our microglia janitor cells become hyper-activated, releasing chemicals that cause inflammation and cellular damage. We think they might actually start clearing away the synapses themselves. A crucial neural transport protein called "tau" becomes hyperphosphorylated and twists itself into something called "tangles," which choke off the neurons from the inside. By mid-stage Alzheimer's, we have massive inflammation and tangles and all-out war at the synapse and cell death. So if you were a scientist trying to cure this disease, at what point would you ideally want to intervene? Many scientists are betting big on the simplest solution: keep amyloid plaques from reaching that tipping point, which means that drug discovery is largely focused on developing a compound that will prevent, eliminate, or reduce amyloid plaque accumulation. So the cure for Alzheimer's will likely be a preventative medicine. We're going to have to take this pill before we reach that tipping point, before the cascade is triggered, before we start leaving our keys in the refrigerator. We think this is why, to date, these kinds of drugs have failed in clinical trials — not because the science wasn't sound, but because the people in these trials were already symptomatic. It was too late. Think of amyloid plaques as a lit match. At the tipping point, the match sets fire to the forest. Once the forest is ablaze, it doesn't do any good to blow out the match. You have to blow out the match before the forest catches fire. Even before scientists sort this out, this information is actually really good news for us, because it turns out that the way we live can influence the accumulation of amyloid plaques. And so there are things we can do to keep us from reaching that tipping point. Let's picture your risk of Alzheimer's as a see-saw scale. We're going to pile risk factors on one arm, and when that arm hits the floor, you are symptomatic and diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Let's imagine you're 50 years old. You're not a spring chicken anymore, so you've accumulated some amyloid plaques with age. Your scale is tipped a little bit. Now let's look at your DNA. We've all inherited our genes from our moms and our dads. Some of these genes will increase our risk and some will decrease it. If you're like Alice in "Still Alice," you've inherited a rare genetic mutation that cranks out amyloid beta, and this alone will tip your scale arm to the ground. But for most of us, the genes we inherit will only tip the arm a bit. For example, APOE4 is a gene variant that increases amyloid, but you can inherit a copy of APOE4 from mom and dad and still never get Alzheimer's, which means that for most of us, our DNA alone does not determine whether we get Alzheimer's. So what does? We can't do anything about getting older or the genes we've inherited. So far, we haven't changed our brain's destiny. What about sleep? In slow-wave deep sleep, our glial cells rinse cerebral spinal fluid throughout our brains, clearing away metabolic waste that accumulated in our synapses while we were awake. Deep sleep is like a power cleanse for the brain. But what happens if you shortchange yourself on sleep? Many scientists believe that poor sleep hygiene might actually be a predictor of Alzheimer's. A single night of sleep deprivation leads to an increase in amyloid beta. And amyloid accumulation has been shown to disrupt sleep, which in turn causes more amyloid to accumulate. And so now we have this positive feedback loop that's going to accelerate the tipping of that scale. What else? Cardiovascular health. High blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, smoking, high cholesterol, have all been shown to increase our risk of developing Alzheimer's. Some autopsy studies have shown that as many as 80 percent of people with Alzheimer's also had cardiovascular disease. Aerobic exercise has been shown in many studies to decrease amyloid beta in animal models of the disease. So a heart-healthy Mediterranean lifestyle and diet can help to counter the tipping of this scale. So there are many things we can do to prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer's. But let's say you haven't done any of them. Let's say you're 65; there's Alzheimer's in your family, so you've likely inherited a gene or two that tips your scale arm a bit; you've been burning the candle at both ends for years; you love bacon; and you don't run unless someone's chasing you. (Laughter) Let's imagine that your amyloid plaques have reached that tipping point. Your scale arm has crashed to the floor. You've tripped the cascade, setting fire to the forest, causing inflammation, tangles, and cell death. You should be symptomatic for Alzheimer's. You should be having trouble finding words and keys and remembering what I said at the beginning of this talk. But you might not be. There's one more thing you can do to protect yourself from experiencing the symptoms of Alzheimer's, even if you have the full-blown disease pathology ablaze in your brain. It has to do with neural plasticity and cognitive reserve. Remember, the experience of having Alzheimer's is ultimately a result of losing synapses. The average brain has over a hundred trillion synapses, which is fantastic; we've got a lot to work with. And this isn't a static number. We gain and lose synapses all the time, through a process called neural plasticity. Every time we learn something new, we are creating and strengthening new neural connections, new synapses. In the Nun Study, 678 nuns, all over the age of 75 when the study began, were followed for more than two decades. They were regularly given physical checkups and cognitive tests, and when they died, their brains were all donated for autopsy. In some of these brains, scientists discovered something surprising. Despite the presence of plaques and tangles and brain shrinkage — what appeared to be unquestionable Alzheimer's — the nuns who had belonged to these brains showed no signs of having the disease while they were alive. How can this be? We think it's because these nuns had a high level of cognitive reserve, which is a way of saying that they had more functional synapses. People who have more years of formal education, who have a high degree of literacy, who engage regularly in mentally stimulating activities, all have more cognitive reserve. They have an abundance and a redundancy in neural connections. So even if they have a disease like Alzheimer's compromising some of their synapses, they've got many extra backup connections, and this buffers them from noticing that anything is amiss. Let's imagine a simplified example. Let's say you only know one thing about a subject. Let's say it's about me. You know that Lisa Genova wrote "Still Alice," and that's the only thing you know about me. You have that single neural connection, that one synapse. Now imagine you have Alzheimer's. You have plaques and tangles and inflammation and microglia devouring that synapse. Now when someone asks you, "Hey, who wrote 'Still Alice?'" you can't remember, because that synapse is either failing or gone. You've forgotten me forever. But what if you had learned more about me? Let's say you learned four things about me. Now imagine you have Alzheimer's, and three of those synapses are damaged or destroyed. You still have a way to detour the wreckage. You can still remember my name. So we can be resilient to the presence of Alzheimer's pathology through the recruitment of yet-undamaged pathways. And we create these pathways, this cognitive reserve, by learning new things. Ideally, we want these new things to be as rich in meaning as possible, recruiting sight and sound and associations and emotion. So this really doesn't mean doing crossword puzzles. You don't want to simply retrieve information you've already learned, because this is like traveling down old, familiar streets, cruising neighborhoods you already know. You want to pave new neural roads. Building an Alzheimer's-resistant brain means learning to speak Italian, meeting new friends, reading a book, or listening to a great TED Talk. And if, despite all of this, you are someday diagnosed with Alzheimer's, there are three lessons I've learned from my grandmother and the dozens of people I've come to know living with this disease. Diagnosis doesn't mean you're dying tomorrow. Keep living. You won't lose your emotional memory. You'll still be able to understand love and joy. You might not remember what I said five minutes ago, but you'll remember how I made you feel. And you are more than what you can remember. Thank you. (Applause) |
The future we're building -- and boring | {0: 'Elon Musk is the CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors and the CEO/CTO of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX).'} | TED2017 | Chris Anderson: Elon, hey, welcome back to TED. It's great to have you here. Elon Musk: Thanks for having me. CA: So, in the next half hour or so, we're going to spend some time exploring your vision for what an exciting future might look like, which I guess makes the first question a little ironic: Why are you boring? EM: Yeah. I ask myself that frequently. We're trying to dig a hole under LA, and this is to create the beginning of what will hopefully be a 3D network of tunnels to alleviate congestion. So right now, one of the most soul-destroying things is traffic. It affects people in every part of the world. It takes away so much of your life. It's horrible. It's particularly horrible in LA. (Laughter) CA: I think you've brought with you the first visualization that's been shown of this. Can I show this? EM: Yeah, absolutely. So this is the first time — Just to show what we're talking about. So a couple of key things that are important in having a 3D tunnel network. First of all, you have to be able to integrate the entrance and exit of the tunnel seamlessly into the fabric of the city. So by having an elevator, sort of a car skate, that's on an elevator, you can integrate the entrance and exits to the tunnel network just by using two parking spaces. And then the car gets on a skate. There's no speed limit here, so we're designing this to be able to operate at 200 kilometers an hour. CA: How much? EM: 200 kilometers an hour, or about 130 miles per hour. So you should be able to get from, say, Westwood to LAX in six minutes — five, six minutes. (Applause) CA: So possibly, initially done, it's like on a sort of toll road-type basis. EM: Yeah. CA: Which, I guess, alleviates some traffic from the surface streets as well. EM: So, I don't know if people noticed it in the video, but there's no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have. You can go much further deep than you can go up. The deepest mines are much deeper than the tallest buildings are tall, so you can alleviate any arbitrary level of urban congestion with a 3D tunnel network. This is a very important point. So a key rebuttal to the tunnels is that if you add one layer of tunnels, that will simply alleviate congestion, it will get used up, and then you'll be back where you started, back with congestion. But you can go to any arbitrary number of tunnels, any number of levels. CA: But people — seen traditionally, it's incredibly expensive to dig, and that would block this idea. EM: Yeah. Well, they're right. To give you an example, the LA subway extension, which is — I think it's a two-and-a-half mile extension that was just completed for two billion dollars. So it's roughly a billion dollars a mile to do the subway extension in LA. And this is not the highest utility subway in the world. So yeah, it's quite difficult to dig tunnels normally. I think we need to have at least a tenfold improvement in the cost per mile of tunneling. CA: And how could you achieve that? EM: Actually, if you just do two things, you can get to approximately an order of magnitude improvement, and I think you can go beyond that. So the first thing to do is to cut the tunnel diameter by a factor of two or more. So a single road lane tunnel according to regulations has to be 26 feet, maybe 28 feet in diameter to allow for crashes and emergency vehicles and sufficient ventilation for combustion engine cars. But if you shrink that diameter to what we're attempting, which is 12 feet, which is plenty to get an electric skate through, you drop the diameter by a factor of two and the cross-sectional area by a factor of four, and the tunneling cost scales with the cross-sectional area. So that's roughly a half-order of magnitude improvement right there. Then tunneling machines currently tunnel for half the time, then they stop, and then the rest of the time is putting in reinforcements for the tunnel wall. So if you design the machine instead to do continuous tunneling and reinforcing, that will give you a factor of two improvement. Combine that and that's a factor of eight. Also these machines are far from being at their power or thermal limits, so you can jack up the power to the machine substantially. I think you can get at least a factor of two, maybe a factor of four or five improvement on top of that. So I think there's a fairly straightforward series of steps to get somewhere in excess of an order of magnitude improvement in the cost per mile, and our target actually is — we've got a pet snail called Gary, this is from Gary the snail from "South Park," I mean, sorry, "SpongeBob SquarePants." (Laughter) So Gary is capable of — currently he's capable of going 14 times faster than a tunnel-boring machine. (Laughter) CA: You want to beat Gary. EM: We want to beat Gary. (Laughter) He's not a patient little fellow, and that will be victory. Victory is beating the snail. CA: But a lot of people imagining, dreaming about future cities, they imagine that actually the solution is flying cars, drones, etc. You go aboveground. Why isn't that a better solution? You save all that tunneling cost. EM: Right. I'm in favor of flying things. Obviously, I do rockets, so I like things that fly. This is not some inherent bias against flying things, but there is a challenge with flying cars in that they'll be quite noisy, the wind force generated will be very high. Let's just say that if something's flying over your head, a whole bunch of flying cars going all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation. (Laughter) You don't think to yourself, "Well, I feel better about today." You're thinking, "Did they service their hubcap, or is it going to come off and guillotine me?" Things like that. CA: So you've got this vision of future cities with these rich, 3D networks of tunnels underneath. Is there a tie-in here with Hyperloop? Could you apply these tunnels to use for this Hyperloop idea you released a few years ago. EM: Yeah, so we've been sort of puttering around with the Hyperloop stuff for a while. We built a Hyperloop test track adjacent to SpaceX, just for a student competition, to encourage innovative ideas in transport. And it actually ends up being the biggest vacuum chamber in the world after the Large Hadron Collider, by volume. So it was quite fun to do that, but it was kind of a hobby thing, and then we think we might — so we've built a little pusher car to push the student pods, but we're going to try seeing how fast we can make the pusher go if it's not pushing something. So we're cautiously optimistic we'll be able to be faster than the world's fastest bullet train even in a .8-mile stretch. CA: Whoa. Good brakes. EM: Yeah, I mean, it's — yeah. It's either going to smash into tiny pieces or go quite fast. CA: But you can picture, then, a Hyperloop in a tunnel running quite long distances. EM: Exactly. And looking at tunneling technology, it turns out that in order to make a tunnel, you have to — In order to seal against the water table, you've got to typically design a tunnel wall to be good to about five or six atmospheres. So to go to vacuum is only one atmosphere, or near-vacuum. So actually, it sort of turns out that automatically, if you build a tunnel that is good enough to resist the water table, it is automatically capable of holding vacuum. CA: Huh. EM: So, yeah. CA: And so you could actually picture, what kind of length tunnel is in Elon's future to running Hyperloop? EM: I think there's no real length limit. You could dig as much as you want. I think if you were to do something like a DC-to-New York Hyperloop, I think you'd probably want to go underground the entire way because it's a high-density area. You're going under a lot of buildings and houses, and if you go deep enough, you cannot detect the tunnel. Sometimes people think, well, it's going to be pretty annoying to have a tunnel dug under my house. Like, if that tunnel is dug more than about three or four tunnel diameters beneath your house, you will not be able to detect it being dug at all. In fact, if you're able to detect the tunnel being dug, whatever device you are using, you can get a lot of money for that device from the Israeli military, who is trying to detect tunnels from Hamas, and from the US Customs and Border patrol that try and detect drug tunnels. So the reality is that earth is incredibly good at absorbing vibrations, and once the tunnel depth is below a certain level, it is undetectable. Maybe if you have a very sensitive seismic instrument, you might be able to detect it. CA: So you've started a new company to do this called The Boring Company. Very nice. Very funny. (Laughter) EM: What's funny about that? (Laughter) CA: How much of your time is this? EM: It's maybe ... two or three percent. CA: You've called it a hobby. This is what an Elon Musk hobby looks like. (Laughter) EM: I mean, it really is, like — This is basically interns and people doing it part time. We bought some second-hand machinery. It's kind of puttering along, but it's making good progress, so — CA: So an even bigger part of your time is being spent on electrifying cars and transport through Tesla. Is one of the motivations for the tunneling project the realization that actually, in a world where cars are electric and where they're self-driving, there may end up being more cars on the roads on any given hour than there are now? EM: Yeah, exactly. A lot of people think that when you make cars autonomous, they'll be able to go faster and that will alleviate congestion. And to some degree that will be true, but once you have shared autonomy where it's much cheaper to go by car and you can go point to point, the affordability of going in a car will be better than that of a bus. Like, it will cost less than a bus ticket. So the amount of driving that will occur will be much greater with shared autonomy, and actually traffic will get far worse. CA: You started Tesla with the goal of persuading the world that electrification was the future of cars, and a few years ago, people were laughing at you. Now, not so much. EM: OK. (Laughter) I don't know. I don't know. CA: But isn't it true that pretty much every auto manufacturer has announced serious electrification plans for the short- to medium-term future? EM: Yeah. Yeah. I think almost every automaker has some electric vehicle program. They vary in seriousness. Some are very serious about transitioning entirely to electric, and some are just dabbling in it. And some, amazingly, are still pursuing fuel cells, but I think that won't last much longer. CA: But isn't there a sense, though, Elon, where you can now just declare victory and say, you know, "We did it." Let the world electrify, and you go on and focus on other stuff? EM: Yeah. I intend to stay with Tesla as far into the future as I can imagine, and there are a lot of exciting things that we have coming. Obviously the Model 3 is coming soon. We'll be unveiling the Tesla Semi truck. CA: OK, we're going to come to this. So Model 3, it's supposed to be coming in July-ish. EM: Yeah, it's looking quite good for starting production in July. CA: Wow. One of the things that people are so excited about is the fact that it's got autopilot. And you put out this video a while back showing what that technology would look like. EM: Yeah. CA: There's obviously autopilot in Model S right now. What are we seeing here? EM: Yeah, so this is using only cameras and GPS. So there's no LIDAR or radar being used here. This is just using passive optical, which is essentially what a person uses. The whole road system is meant to be navigated with passive optical, or cameras, and so once you solve cameras or vision, then autonomy is solved. If you don't solve vision, it's not solved. So that's why our focus is so heavily on having a vision neural net that's very effective for road conditions. CA: Right. Many other people are going the LIDAR route. You want cameras plus radar is most of it. EM: You can absolutely be superhuman with just cameras. Like, you can probably do it ten times better than humans would, just cameras. CA: So the new cars being sold right now have eight cameras in them. They can't yet do what that showed. When will they be able to? EM: I think we're still on track for being able to go cross-country from LA to New York by the end of the year, fully autonomous. CA: OK, so by the end of the year, you're saying, someone's going to sit in a Tesla without touching the steering wheel, tap in "New York," off it goes. EM: Yeah. CA: Won't ever have to touch the wheel — by the end of 2017. EM: Yeah. Essentially, November or December of this year, we should be able to go all the way from a parking lot in California to a parking lot in New York, no controls touched at any point during the entire journey. (Applause) CA: Amazing. But part of that is possible because you've already got a fleet of Teslas driving all these roads. You're accumulating a huge amount of data of that national road system. EM: Yes, but the thing that will be interesting is that I'm actually fairly confident it will be able to do that route even if you change the route dynamically. So, it's fairly easy — If you say I'm going to be really good at one specific route, that's one thing, but it should be able to go, really be very good, certainly once you enter a highway, to go anywhere on the highway system in a given country. So it's not sort of limited to LA to New York. We could change it and make it Seattle-Florida, that day, in real time. So you were going from LA to New York. Now go from LA to Toronto. CA: So leaving aside regulation for a second, in terms of the technology alone, the time when someone will be able to buy one of your cars and literally just take the hands off the wheel and go to sleep and wake up and find that they've arrived, how far away is that, to do that safely? EM: I think that's about two years. So the real trick of it is not how do you make it work say 99.9 percent of the time, because, like, if a car crashes one in a thousand times, then you're probably still not going to be comfortable falling asleep. You shouldn't be, certainly. (Laughter) It's never going to be perfect. No system is going to be perfect, but if you say it's perhaps — the car is unlikely to crash in a hundred lifetimes, or a thousand lifetimes, then people are like, OK, wow, if I were to live a thousand lives, I would still most likely never experience a crash, then that's probably OK. CA: To sleep. I guess the big concern of yours is that people may actually get seduced too early to think that this is safe, and that you'll have some horrible incident happen that puts things back. EM: Well, I think that the autonomy system is likely to at least mitigate the crash, except in rare circumstances. The thing to appreciate about vehicle safety is this is probabilistic. I mean, there's some chance that any time a human driver gets in a car, that they will have an accident that is their fault. It's never zero. So really the key threshold for autonomy is how much better does autonomy need to be than a person before you can rely on it? CA: But once you get literally safe hands-off driving, the power to disrupt the whole industry seems massive, because at that point you've spoken of people being able to buy a car, drops you off at work, and then you let it go and provide a sort of Uber-like service to other people, earn you money, maybe even cover the cost of your lease of that car, so you can kind of get a car for free. Is that really likely? EM: Yeah. Absolutely this is what will happen. So there will be a shared autonomy fleet where you buy your car and you can choose to use that car exclusively, you could choose to have it be used only by friends and family, only by other drivers who are rated five star, you can choose to share it sometimes but not other times. That's 100 percent what will occur. It's just a question of when. CA: Wow. So you mentioned the Semi and I think you're planning to announce this in September, but I'm curious whether there's anything you could show us today? EM: I will show you a teaser shot of the truck. (Laughter) It's alive. CA: OK. EM: That's definitely a case where we want to be cautious about the autonomy features. Yeah. (Laughter) CA: We can't see that much of it, but it doesn't look like just a little friendly neighborhood truck. It looks kind of badass. What sort of semi is this? EM: So this is a heavy duty, long-range semitruck. So it's the highest weight capability and with long range. So essentially it's meant to alleviate the heavy-duty trucking loads. And this is something which people do not today think is possible. They think the truck doesn't have enough power or it doesn't have enough range, and then with the Tesla Semi we want to show that no, an electric truck actually can out-torque any diesel semi. And if you had a tug-of-war competition, the Tesla Semi will tug the diesel semi uphill. (Laughter) (Applause) CA: That's pretty cool. And short term, these aren't driverless. These are going to be trucks that truck drivers want to drive. EM: Yes. So what will be really fun about this is you have a flat torque RPM curve with an electric motor, whereas with a diesel motor or any kind of internal combustion engine car, you've got a torque RPM curve that looks like a hill. So this will be a very spry truck. You can drive this around like a sports car. There's no gears. It's, like, single speed. CA: There's a great movie to be made here somewhere. I don't know what it is and I don't know that it ends well, but it's a great movie. (Laughter) EM: It's quite bizarre test-driving. When I was driving the test prototype for the first truck. It's really weird, because you're driving around and you're just so nimble, and you're in this giant truck. CA: Wait, you've already driven a prototype? EM: Yeah, I drove it around the parking lot, and I was like, this is crazy. CA: Wow. This is no vaporware. EM: It's just like, driving this giant truck and making these mad maneuvers. CA: This is cool. OK, from a really badass picture to a kind of less badass picture. This is just a cute house from "Desperate Housewives" or something. What on earth is going on here? EM: Well, this illustrates the picture of the future that I think is how things will evolve. You've got an electric car in the driveway. If you look in between the electric car and the house, there are actually three Powerwalls stacked up against the side of the house, and then that house roof is a solar roof. So that's an actual solar glass roof. CA: OK. EM: That's a picture of a real — well, admittedly, it's a real fake house. That's a real fake house. (Laughter) CA: So these roof tiles, some of them have in them basically solar power, the ability to — EM: Yeah. Solar glass tiles where you can adjust the texture and the color to a very fine-grained level, and then there's sort of microlouvers in the glass, such that when you're looking at the roof from street level or close to street level, all the tiles look the same whether there is a solar cell behind it or not. So you have an even color from the ground level. If you were to look at it from a helicopter, you would be actually able to look through and see that some of the glass tiles have a solar cell behind them and some do not. You can't tell from street level. CA: You put them in the ones that are likely to see a lot of sun, and that makes these roofs super affordable, right? They're not that much more expensive than just tiling the roof. EM: Yeah. We're very confident that the cost of the roof plus the cost of electricity — A solar glass roof will be less than the cost of a normal roof plus the cost of electricity. So in other words, this will be economically a no-brainer, we think it will look great, and it will last — We thought about having the warranty be infinity, but then people thought, well, that might sound like were just talking rubbish, but actually this is toughened glass. Well after the house has collapsed and there's nothing there, the glass tiles will still be there. (Applause) CA: I mean, this is cool. So you're rolling this out in a couple week's time, I think, with four different roofing types. EM: Yeah, we're starting off with two, two initially, and the second two will be introduced early next year. CA: And what's the scale of ambition here? How many houses do you believe could end up having this type of roofing? EM: I think eventually almost all houses will have a solar roof. The thing is to consider the time scale here to be probably on the order of 40 or 50 years. So on average, a roof is replaced every 20 to 25 years. But you don't start replacing all roofs immediately. But eventually, if you say were to fast-forward to say 15 years from now, it will be unusual to have a roof that does not have solar. CA: Is there a mental model thing that people don't get here that because of the shift in the cost, the economics of solar power, most houses actually have enough sunlight on their roof pretty much to power all of their needs. If you could capture the power, it could pretty much power all their needs. You could go off-grid, kind of. EM: It depends on where you are and what the house size is relative to the roof area, but it's a fair statement to say that most houses in the US have enough roof area to power all the needs of the house. CA: So the key to the economics of the cars, the Semi, of these houses is the falling price of lithium-ion batteries, which you've made a huge bet on as Tesla. In many ways, that's almost the core competency. And you've decided that to really, like, own that competency, you just have to build the world's largest manufacturing plant to double the world's supply of lithium-ion batteries, with this guy. What is this? EM: Yeah, so that's the Gigafactory, progress so far on the Gigafactory. Eventually, you can sort of roughly see that there's sort of a diamond shape overall, and when it's fully done, it'll look like a giant diamond, or that's the idea behind it, and it's aligned on true north. It's a small detail. CA: And capable of producing, eventually, like a hundred gigawatt hours of batteries a year. EM: A hundred gigawatt hours. We think probably more, but yeah. CA: And they're actually being produced right now. EM: They're in production already. CA: You guys put out this video. I mean, is that speeded up? EM: That's the slowed down version. (Laughter) CA: How fast does it actually go? EM: Well, when it's running at full speed, you can't actually see the cells without a strobe light. It's just blur. (Laughter) CA: One of your core ideas, Elon, about what makes an exciting future is a future where we no longer feel guilty about energy. Help us picture this. How many Gigafactories, if you like, does it take to get us there? EM: It's about a hundred, roughly. It's not 10, it's not a thousand. Most likely a hundred. CA: See, I find this amazing. You can picture what it would take to move the world off this vast fossil fuel thing. It's like you're building one, it costs five billion dollars, or whatever, five to 10 billion dollars. Like, it's kind of cool that you can picture that project. And you're planning to do, at Tesla — announce another two this year. EM: I think we'll announce locations for somewhere between two and four Gigafactories later this year. Yeah, probably four. CA: Whoa. (Applause) No more teasing from you for here? Like — where, continent? You can say no. EM: We need to address a global market. CA: OK. (Laughter) This is cool. I think we should talk for — Actually, global market. I'm going to ask you one question about politics, only one. I'm kind of sick of politics, but I do want to ask you this. You're on a body now giving advice to a guy — EM: Who? CA: Who has said he doesn't really believe in climate change, and there's a lot of people out there who think you shouldn't be doing that. They'd like you to walk away from that. What would you say to them? EM: Well, I think that first of all, I'm just on two advisory councils where the format consists of going around the room and asking people's opinion on things, and so there's like a meeting every month or two. That's the sum total of my contribution. But I think to the degree that there are people in the room who are arguing in favor of doing something about climate change, or social issues, I've used the meetings I've had thus far to argue in favor of immigration and in favor of climate change. (Applause) And if I hadn't done that, that wasn't on the agenda before. So maybe nothing will happen, but at least the words were said. CA: OK. (Applause) So let's talk SpaceX and Mars. Last time you were here, you spoke about what seemed like a kind of incredibly ambitious dream to develop rockets that were actually reusable. And you've only gone and done it. EM: Finally. It took a long time. CA: Talk us through this. What are we looking at here? EM: So this is one of our rocket boosters coming back from very high and fast in space. So just delivered the upper stage at high velocity. I think this might have been at sort of Mach 7 or so, delivery of the upper stage. (Applause) CA: So that was a sped-up — EM: That was the slowed down version. (Laughter) CA: I thought that was the sped-up version. But I mean, that's amazing, and several of these failed before you finally figured out how to do it, but now you've done this, what, five or six times? EM: We're at eight or nine. CA: And for the first time, you've actually reflown one of the rockets that landed. EM: Yeah, so we landed the rocket booster and then prepped it for flight again and flew it again, so it's the first reflight of an orbital booster where that reflight is relevant. So it's important to appreciate that reusability is only relevant if it is rapid and complete. So like an aircraft or a car, the reusability is rapid and complete. You do not send your aircraft to Boeing in-between flights. CA: Right. So this is allowing you to dream of this really ambitious idea of sending many, many, many people to Mars in, what, 10 or 20 years time, I guess. EM: Yeah. CA: And you've designed this outrageous rocket to do it. Help us understand the scale of this thing. EM: Well, visually you can see that's a person. Yeah, and that's the vehicle. (Laughter) CA: So if that was a skyscraper, that's like, did I read that, a 40-story skyscraper? EM: Probably a little more, yeah. The thrust level of this is really — This configuration is about four times the thrust of the Saturn V moon rocket. CA: Four times the thrust of the biggest rocket humanity ever created before. EM: Yeah. Yeah. CA: As one does. EM: Yeah. (Laughter) In units of 747, a 747 is only about a quarter of a million pounds of thrust, so for every 10 million pounds of thrust, there's 40 747s. So this would be the thrust equivalent of 120 747s, with all engines blazing. CA: And so even with a machine designed to escape Earth's gravity, I think you told me last time this thing could actually take a fully loaded 747, people, cargo, everything, into orbit. EM: Exactly. This can take a fully loaded 747 with maximum fuel, maximum passengers, maximum cargo on the 747 — this can take it as cargo. CA: So based on this, you presented recently this Interplanetary Transport System which is visualized this way. This is a scene you picture in, what, 30 years time? 20 years time? People walking into this rocket. EM: I'm hopeful it's sort of an eight- to 10-year time frame. Aspirationally, that's our target. Our internal targets are more aggressive, but I think — (Laughter) CA: OK. EM: While vehicle seems quite large and is large by comparison with other rockets, I think the future spacecraft will make this look like a rowboat. The future spaceships will be truly enormous. CA: Why, Elon? Why do we need to build a city on Mars with a million people on it in your lifetime, which I think is kind of what you've said you'd love to do? EM: I think it's important to have a future that is inspiring and appealing. I just think there have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Like, why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? And if we're not out there, if the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multiplanet species, I find that it's incredibly depressing if that's not the future that we're going to have. (Applause) CA: People want to position this as an either or, that there are so many desperate things happening on the planet now from climate to poverty to, you know, you pick your issue. And this feels like a distraction. You shouldn't be thinking about this. You should be solving what's here and now. And to be fair, you've done a fair old bit to actually do that with your work on sustainable energy. But why not just do that? EM: I think there's — I look at the future from the standpoint of probabilities. It's like a branching stream of probabilities, and there are actions that we can take that affect those probabilities or that accelerate one thing or slow down another thing. I may introduce something new to the probability stream. Sustainable energy will happen no matter what. If there was no Tesla, if Tesla never existed, it would have to happen out of necessity. It's tautological. If you don't have sustainable energy, it means you have unsustainable energy. Eventually you will run out, and the laws of economics will drive civilization towards sustainable energy, inevitably. The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy, faster than it would otherwise occur. So when I think, like, what is the fundamental good of a company like Tesla, I would say, hopefully, if it accelerated that by a decade, potentially more than a decade, that would be quite a good thing to occur. That's what I consider to be the fundamental aspirational good of Tesla. Then there's becoming a multiplanet species and space-faring civilization. This is not inevitable. It's very important to appreciate this is not inevitable. The sustainable energy future I think is largely inevitable, but being a space-faring civilization is definitely not inevitable. If you look at the progress in space, in 1969 you were able to send somebody to the moon. 1969. Then we had the Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle could only take people to low Earth orbit. Then the Space Shuttle retired, and the United States could take no one to orbit. So that's the trend. The trend is like down to nothing. People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better, and actually it will, I think, by itself degrade, actually. You look at great civilizations like Ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that. And then the Romans, they built these incredible aqueducts. They forgot how to do it. CA: Elon, it almost seems, listening to you and looking at the different things you've done, that you've got this unique double motivation on everything that I find so interesting. One is this desire to work for humanity's long-term good. The other is the desire to do something exciting. And often it feels like you feel like you need the one to drive the other. With Tesla, you want to have sustainable energy, so you made these super sexy, exciting cars to do it. Solar energy, we need to get there, so we need to make these beautiful roofs. We haven't even spoken about your newest thing, which we don't have time to do, but you want to save humanity from bad AI, and so you're going to create this really cool brain-machine interface to give us all infinite memory and telepathy and so forth. And on Mars, it feels like what you're saying is, yeah, we need to save humanity and have a backup plan, but also we need to inspire humanity, and this is a way to inspire. EM: I think the value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear. I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. That is not the — I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad. (Applause) CA: Beautiful statement. I think everyone here would agree that it is not — None of this is going to happen inevitably. The fact that in your mind, you dream this stuff, you dream stuff that no one else would dare dream, or no one else would be capable of dreaming at the level of complexity that you do. The fact that you do that, Elon Musk, is a really remarkable thing. Thank you for helping us all to dream a bit bigger. EM: But you'll tell me if it ever starts getting genuinely insane, right? (Laughter) CA: Thank you, Elon Musk. That was really, really fantastic. That was really fantastic. (Applause) |
Behind the lies of Holocaust denial | {0: 'Deborah Lipstadt\'s research focuses on the development of Holocaust denial and how to fight for the truth in an era marked by "alternative facts."'} | TEDxSkoll | I come to you today to speak of liars, lawsuits and laughter. The first time I heard about Holocaust denial, I laughed. Holocaust denial? The Holocaust which has the dubious distinction of being the best-documented genocide in the world? Who could believe it didn't happen? Think about it. For deniers to be right, who would have to be wrong? Well, first of all, the victims — the survivors who have told us their harrowing stories. Who else would have to be wrong? The bystanders. The people who lived in the myriads of towns and villages and cities on the Eastern front, who watched their neighbors be rounded up — men, women, children, young, old — and be marched to the outskirts of the town to be shot and left dead in ditches. Or the Poles, who lived in towns and villages around the death camps, who watched day after day as the trains went in filled with people and came out empty. But above all, who would have to be wrong? The perpetrators. The people who say, "We did it. I did it." Now, maybe they add a caveat. They say, "I didn't have a choice; I was forced to do it." But nonetheless, they say, "I did it." Think about it. In not one war crimes trial since the end of World War II has a perpetrator of any nationality ever said, "It didn't happen." Again, they may have said, "I was forced," but never that it didn't happen. Having thought that through, I decided denial was not going to be on my agenda; I had bigger things to worry about, to write about, to research, and I moved on. Fast-forward a little over a decade, and two senior scholars — two of the most prominent historians of the Holocaust — approached me and said, "Deborah, let's have coffee. We have a research idea that we think is perfect for you." Intrigued and flattered that they came to me with an idea and thought me worthy of it, I asked, "What is it?" And they said, "Holocaust denial." And for the second time, I laughed. Holocaust denial? The Flat Earth folks? The Elvis-is-alive people? I should study them? And these two guys said, "Yeah, we're intrigued. What are they about? What's their objective? How do they manage to get people to believe what they say?" So thinking, if they thought it was worthwhile, I would take a momentary diversion — maybe a year, maybe two, three, maybe even four — in academic terms, that's momentary. (Laughter) We work very slowly. (Laughter) And I would look at them. So I did. I did my research, and I came up with a number of things, two of which I'd like to share with you today. One: deniers are wolves in sheep's clothing. They are the same: Nazis, neo-Nazis — you can decide whether you want to put a "neo" there or not. But when I looked at them, I didn't see any SS-like uniforms, swastika-like symbols on the wall, Sieg Heil salutes — none of that. What I found instead were people parading as respectable academics. What did they have? They had an institute. An "Institute for Historical Review." They had a journal — a slick journal — a "Journal of Historical Review." One filled with papers — footnote-laden papers. And they had a new name. Not neo-Nazis, not anti-Semites — revisionists. They said, "We are revisionists. We are out to do one thing: to revise mistakes in history." But all you had to do was go one inch below the surface, and what did you find there? The same adulation of Hitler, praise of the Third Reich, anti-Semitism, racism, prejudice. This is what intrigued me. It was anti-Semitism, racism, prejudice, parading as rational discourse. The other thing I found — many of us have been taught to think there are facts and there are opinions — after studying deniers, I think differently. There are facts, there are opinions, and there are lies. And what deniers want to do is take their lies, dress them up as opinions — maybe edgy opinions, maybe sort of out-of-the-box opinions — but then if they're opinions, they should be part of the conversation. And then they encroach on the facts. I published my work — the book was published, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," it came out in many different countries, including here in Penguin UK, and I was done with those folks and ready to move on. Then came the letter from Penguin UK. And for the third time, I laughed ... mistakenly. I opened the letter, and it informed me that David Irving was bringing a libel suit against me in the United Kingdom for calling him a Holocaust denier. David Irving suing me? Who was David Irving? David Irving was a writer of historical works, most of them about World War II, and virtually all of those works took the position that the Nazis were really not so bad, and the Allies were really not so good. And the Jews, whatever happened to them, they sort of deserved it. He knew the documents, he knew the facts, but he somehow twisted them to get this opinion. He hadn't always been a Holocaust denier, but in the late '80s, he embraced it with great vigor. The reason I laughed also was this was a man who not only was a Holocaust denier, but seemed quite proud of it. Here was a man — and I quote — who said, "I'm going to sink the battleship Auschwitz." Here was a man who pointed to the number tattooed on a survivor's arm and said, "How much money have you made from having that number tattooed on your arm?" Here was a man who said, "More people died in Senator Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in gas chambers at Auschwitz." That's an American reference, but you can look it up. This was not a man who seemed at all ashamed or reticent about being a Holocaust denier. Now, lots of my academic colleagues counseled me — "Eh, Deborah, just ignore it." When I explained you can't just ignore a libel suit, they said, "Who's going to believe him anyway?" But here was the problem: British law put the onus, put the burden of proof on me to prove the truth of what I said, in contrast to as it would have been in the United States and in many other countries: on him to prove the falsehood. What did that mean? That meant if I didn't fight, he would win by default. And if he won by default, he could then legitimately say, "My David Irving version of the Holocaust is a legitimate version. Deborah Lipstadt was found to have libeled me when she called me a Holocaust denier. Ipso facto, I, David Irving, am not a Holocaust denier." And what is that version? There was no plan to murder the Jews, there were no gas chambers, there were no mass shootings, Hitler had nothing to do with any suffering that went on, and the Jews have made this all up to get money from Germany and to get a state, and they've done it with the aid and abettance of the Allies — they've planted the documents and planted the evidence. I couldn't let that stand and ever face a survivor or a child of survivors. I couldn't let that stand and consider myself a responsible historian. So we fought. And for those of you who haven't seen "Denial," spoiler alert: we won. (Laughter) (Applause) The judge found David Irving to be a liar, a racist, an anti-Semite. His view of history was tendentious, he lied, he distorted — and most importantly, he did it deliberately. We showed a pattern, in over 25 different major instances. Not small things — many of us in this audience write books, are writing books; we always make mistakes, that's why we're glad to have second editions: correct the mistakes. (Laughter) But these always moved in the same direction: blame the Jews, exonerate the Nazis. But how did we win? What we did is follow his footnotes back to his sources. And what did we find? Not in most cases, and not in the preponderance of cases, but in every single instance where he made some reference to the Holocaust, that his supposed evidence was distorted, half-truth, date-changed, sequence-changed, someone put at a meeting who wasn't there. In other words, he didn't have the evidence. His evidence didn't prove it. We didn't prove what happened. We proved that what he said happened — and by extension, all deniers, because he either quotes them or they get their arguments from him — is not true. What they claim — they don't have the evidence to prove it. So why is my story more than just the story of a quirky, long, six-year, difficult lawsuit, an American professor being dragged into a courtroom by a man that the court declared in its judgment was a neo-Nazi polemicist? What message does it have? I think in the context of the question of truth, it has a very significant message. Because today, as we well know, truth and facts are under assault. Social media, for all the gifts it has given us, has also allowed the difference between facts — established facts — and lies to be flattened. Third of all: extremism. You may not see Ku Klux Klan robes, you may not see burning crosses, you may not even hear outright white supremacist language. It may go by names: "alt-right," "National Front" — pick your names. But underneath, it's that same extremism that I found in Holocaust denial parading as rational discourse. We live in an age where truth is on the defensive. I'm reminded of a New Yorker cartoon. A quiz show recently appeared in "The New Yorker" where the host of the quiz show is saying to one of the contestants, "Yes, ma'am, you had the right answer. But your opponent yelled more loudly than you did, so he gets the point." What can we do? First of all, we cannot be beguiled by rational appearances. We've got to look underneath, and we will find there the extremism. Second of all, we must understand that truth is not relative. Number three, we must go on the offensive, not the defensive. When someone makes an outrageous claim, even though they may hold one of the highest offices in the land, if not the world — we must say to them, "Where's the proof? Where's the evidence?" We must hold their feet to the fire. We must not treat it as if their lies are the same as the facts. And as I said earlier, truth is not relative. Many of us have grown up in the world of the academy and enlightened liberal thought, where we're taught everything is open to debate. But that's not the case. There are certain things that are true. There are indisputable facts — objective truths. Galileo taught it to us centuries ago. Even after being forced to recant by the Vatican that the Earth moved around the Sun, he came out, and what is he reported to have said? "And yet, it still moves." The Earth is not flat. The climate is changing. Elvis is not alive. (Laughter) (Applause) And most importantly, truth and fact are under assault. The job ahead of us, the task ahead of us, the challenge ahead of us is great. The time to fight is short. We must act now. Later will be too late. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How (and why) Russia hacked the US election | {0: 'Laura Galante profiles advanced cyber threats and network breaches and investigates the political, military and financial implications of cyber operations.'} | TED2017 | Let's say you despise Western democracy. Democracy, in all its trappings, free elections, town halls, endless debates about the proper role of government. Too messy, too unpredictable, too constraining for your taste. And the way these democracies band together and lecture everyone else about individual rights and freedoms — it gets under your skin. So what to do about it? You can call out the hypocrisy and failures of Western democracies and explain how your way is better, but that's never really worked for you. What if you could get the people whose support is the very foundation of these democracies to start questioning the system? Make the idea occur in their own minds that democracy and its institutions are failing them, their elite are corrupt puppet masters and the country they knew is in free fall. To do that, you'll need to infiltrate the information spheres of these democracies. You'll need to turn their most powerful asset — an open mind — into their greatest vulnerability. You'll need people to question the truth. Now, you'll be familiar of hacking and leaks that happened in 2016. One was the Democratic National Committee's networks, and the personal email accounts of its staff, later released on WikiLeaks. After that, various online personas, like a supposed Romanian cybercriminal who didn't speak Romanian, aggressively pushed news of these leaks to journalists. The media took the bait. They were consumed by how much the DNC hated Bernie. At the time, it was that narrative that far outshined the news that a group of Russian government sponsored hackers who we called "Advanced Persistent Threat 28," or "APT28" for short, was carrying out these operations against the US. And there was no shortage of evidence. This group of Russian government hackers hadn't just appeared out of nowhere in 2016. We had started tracking this group back in 2014. And the tools that APT28 used to compromise its victims' networks demonstrated a thoughtful, well-resourced effort that had taken place for now over a decade in Moscow's time zone from about 9 am to 6 pm. APT28 loved to prey on the emails and contacts of journalists in Chechnya, the Georgian government, eastern European defense attachés — all targets with an undeniable interest to the Russian government. We weren't the only ones onto this. Governments, research teams across the world, were coming to similar conclusions and observing the same types of operations. But what Russia was doing in 2016 went far beyond espionage. The DNC hack was just one of many where stolen data was posted online accompanied by a sensational narrative, then amplified in social media for lightning-speed adoption by the media. This didn't ring the alarm bells that a nation-state was trying to interfere with the credibility of another's internal affairs. So why, collectively, did we not see this coming? Why did it take months before Americans understood that they were under a state-sponsored information attack? The easy answer is politics. The Obama Administration was caught in a perfect catch-22. By raising the specter that the Russian government was interfering in the US presidential campaign, the Administration risked appearing to meddle in the campaign itself. But the better answer, I think, is that the US and the West were utterly unequipped to recognize and respond to a modern information operation, despite the fact that the US had wielded information with devastating success in an era not so long ago. Look, so while the US and the West spent the last 20 years caught up in cybersecurity — what networks to harden, which infrastructure to deem critical, how to set up armies of cyber warriors and cyber commands — Russia was thinking in far more consequential terms. Before the first iPhone even hit the shelf, the Russian government understood the risks and the opportunity that technology provided and the inter-communication and instant communication it provided us. As our realities are increasingly based on the information that we're consuming at the palm of our hand and from the news feeds that we're scanning and the hashtags and stories that we see trending, the Russian government was the first to recognize how this evolution had turned your mind into the most exploitable device on the planet. And your mind is particularly exploitable if you're accustomed to an unfettered flow of information, now increasingly curated to your own tastes. This panorama of information that's so interesting to you gives a state, or anyone for that matter, a perfect back door into your mind. It's this new brand of state-sponsored information operations that can be that much more successful, more insidious, and harder for the target audience — that includes the media — to decipher and characterize. If you can get a hashtag trending on Twitter, or chum the waters with fake news directed to audiences primed to receive it, or drive journalists to dissect terabytes of email for a cent of impropriety — all tactics used in Russian operations — then you've got a shot at effectively camouflaging your operations in the mind of your target. This is what Russia's long called "reflexive control." It's the ability to use information on someone else so that they make a decision on their own accord that's favorable to you. This is nation-state-grade image control and perception management, and it's conducted by any means, with any tools, network-based or otherwise, that will achieve it. Take this for another example. In early February 2014, a few weeks before Russia would invade Crimea, a phone call is posted on YouTube. In it, there's two US diplomats. They sound like they're playing kingmaker in Ukraine, and worse, they curse the EU for its lack of speed and leadership in resolving the crisis. The media covers the phone call, and then the ensuing diplomatic backlash leaves Washington and Europe reeling. And it creates a fissured response and a feckless attitude towards Russia's land grab in Ukraine. Mission accomplished. So while hacked phone calls and emails and networks keep grabbing the headlines, the real operations are the ones that are influencing the decisions you make and the opinions you hold, all in the service of a nation-state's strategic interest. This is power in the information age. And this information is all that much more seductive, all that much easier to take at face value and pass on, when it's authentic. Who's not interested in the truth that's presented in phone calls and emails that were never intended for public consumption? But how meaningful is that truth if you don't know why it's being revealed to you? We must recognize that this place where we're increasingly living, which we've quaintly termed "cyberspace," isn't defined by ones and zeroes, but by information and the people behind it. This is far more than a network of computers and devices. This is a network composed of minds interacting with computers and devices. And for this network, there's no encryption, there's no firewall, no two-factor authentication, no password complex enough to protect you. What you have for defense is far stronger, it's more adaptable, it's always running the latest version. It's the ability to think critically: call out falsehood, press for the facts. And above all, you must have the courage to unflinchingly pursue the truth. (Applause) |
There's no shame in taking care of your mental health | {0: 'Sangu Delle is an entrepreneur and clean water activist. A TED Fellow who hails from Ghana, he sees incredible potential in the African economy.'} | TEDLagos Ideas Search | Last year ... was hell. (Laughter) It was my first time eating Nigerian "jollof." (Laughter) Actually, in all seriousness, I was going through a lot of personal turmoil. Faced with enormous stress, I suffered an anxiety attack. On some days, I could do no work. On other days, I just wanted to lay in my bed and cry. My doctor asked if I'd like to speak with a mental health professional about my stress and anxiety. Mental health? I clammed up and violently shook my head in protest. I felt a profound sense of a shame. I felt the weight of stigma. I have a loving, supportive family and incredibly loyal friends, yet I could not entertain the idea of speaking to anyone about my feeling of pain. I felt suffocated by the rigid architecture of our African masculinity. "People have real problems, Sangu. Get over yourself!" The first time I heard "mental health," I was a boarding school student fresh off the boat from Ghana, at the Peddie School in New Jersey. I had just gone through the brutal experience of losing seven loved ones in the same month. The school nurse, concerned about what I'd gone through — God bless her soul — she inquired about my mental health. "Is she mental?" I thought. Does she not know I'm an African man? (Laughter) Like Okonkwo in "Things Fall Apart," we African men neither process nor express our emotions. We deal with our problems. (Applause) We deal with our problems. I called my brother and laughed about "Oyibo" people — white people — and their strange diseases — depression, ADD and those "weird things." Growing up in West Africa, when people used the term "mental," what came to mind was a madman with dirty, dread-locked hair, bumbling around half-naked on the streets. We all know this man. Our parents warned us about him. "Mommy, mommy, why is he mad?" "Drugs! If you even look at drugs, you end up like him." (Laughter) Come down with pneumonia, and your mother will rush you to the nearest hospital for medical treatment. But dare to declare depression, and your local pastor will be driving out demons and blaming witches in your village. According to the World Health Organization, mental health is about being able to cope with the normal stressors of life; to work productively and fruitfully; and to be able to make a contribution to your community. Mental health includes our emotional, psychological and social well-being. Globally, 75 percent of all mental illness cases can be found in low-income countries. Yet most African governments invest less than one percent of their health care budget in mental health. Even worse, we have a severe shortage of psychiatrists in Africa. Nigeria, for example, is estimated to have 200 — in a country of almost 200 million. In all of Africa, 90 percent of our people lack access to treatment. As a result, we suffer in solitude, silenced by stigma. We as Africans often respond to mental health with distance, ignorance, guilt, fear and anger. In a study conducted by Arboleda-Flórez, directly asking, "What is the cause of mental illness?" 34 percent of Nigerian respondents cited drug misuse; 19 percent said divine wrath and the will of God — (Laughter) 12 percent, witchcraft and spiritual possession. But few cited other known causes of mental illness, like genetics, socioeconomic status, war, conflict or the loss of a loved one. The stigmatization against mental illness often results in the ostracizing and demonizing of sufferers. Photojournalist Robin Hammond has documented some of these abuses ... in Uganda, in Somalia, and here in Nigeria. For me, the stigma is personal. In 2009, I received a frantic call in the middle of the night. My best friend in the world — a brilliant, philosophical, charming, hip young man — was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I witnessed some of the friends we'd grown up with recoil. I heard the snickers. I heard the whispers. "Did you hear he has gone mad?" (Kru English) "He has gone crazy!" Derogatory, demeaning commentary about his condition — words we would never say about someone with cancer or someone with malaria. Somehow, when it comes to mental illness, our ignorance eviscerates all empathy. I stood by his side as his community isolated him, but our love never wavered. Tacitly, I became passionate about mental health. Inspired by his plight, I helped found the mental health special interest alumni group at my college. And during my tenure as a resident tutor in graduate school, I supported many undergraduates with their mental health challenges. I saw African students struggle and unable to speak to anyone. Even with this knowledge and with their stories in tow, I, in turn, struggled, and could not speak to anyone when I faced my own anxiety, so deep is our fear of being the madman. All of us — but we Africans especially — need to realize that our mental struggles do not detract from our virility, nor does our trauma taint our strength. We need to see mental health as important as physical health. We need to stop suffering in silence. We must stop stigmatizing disease and traumatizing the afflicted. Talk to your friends. Talk to your loved ones. Talk to health professionals. Be vulnerable. Do so with the confidence that you are not alone. Speak up if you're struggling. Being honest about how we feel does not make us weak; it makes us human. It is time to end the stigma associated with mental illness. So the next time your hear "mental," do not just think of the madman. Think of me. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
A summer school kids actually want to attend | {0: 'Karim Abouelnaga is working to provide kids with access to high-quality academic summer programming.'} | TED2017 | Getting a college education is a 20-year investment. When you're growing up poor, you're not accustomed to thinking that far ahead. Instead, you're thinking about where you're going to get your next meal and how your family is going to pay rent that month. Besides, my parents and my friends' parents seemed to be doing just fine driving taxis and working as janitors. It wasn't until I was a teenager when I realized I didn't want to do those things. By then, I was two-thirds of the way through my education, and it was almost too late to turn things around. When you grow up poor, you want to be rich. I was no different. I'm the second-oldest of seven, and was raised by a single mother on government aid in Queens, New York. By virtue of growing up low-income, my siblings and I went to some of New York City's most struggling public schools. I had over 60 absences when I was in seventh grade, because I didn't feel like going to class. My high school had a 55 percent graduation rate, and even worse, only 20 percent of the kids graduating were college-ready. When I actually did make it to college, I told my friend Brennan how our teachers would always ask us to raise our hands if we were going to college. I was taken aback when Brennan said, "Karim, I've never been asked that question before." It was always, "What college are you going to?" Just the way that question is phrased made it unacceptable for him not to have gone to college. Nowadays I get asked a different question. "How were you able to make it out?" For years I said I was lucky, but it's not just luck. When my older brother and I graduated from high school at the very same time and he later dropped out of a two-year college, I wanted to understand why he dropped out and I kept studying. It wasn't until I got to Cornell as a Presidential Research Scholar that I started to learn about the very real educational consequences of being raised by a single mother on government aid and attending the schools that I did. That's when my older brother's trajectory began to make complete sense to me. I also learned that our most admirable education reformers, people like Arne Duncan, the former US Secretary of Education, or Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America, had never attended an inner city public school like I had. So much of our education reform is driven by a sympathetic approach, where people are saying, "Let's go and help these poor inner city kids, or these poor black and Latino kids," instead of an empathetic approach, where someone like me, who had grown up in this environment, could say, "I know the adversities that you're facing and I want to help you overcome them." Today when I get questions about how I made it out, I share that one of the biggest reasons is that I wasn't ashamed to ask for help. In a typical middle class or affluent household, if a kid is struggling, there's a good chance that a parent or a teacher will come to their rescue even if they don't ask for help. However, if that same kid is growing up poor and doesn't ask for help, there's a good chance that no one will help them. There are virtually no social safety nets available. So seven years ago, I started to reform our public education system shaped by my firsthand perspective. And I started with summer school. Research tells us that two-thirds of the achievement gap, which is the disparity in educational attainment between rich kids and poor kids or black kids and white kids, could be directly attributed to the summer learning loss. In low-income neighborhoods, kids forget almost three months of what they learned during the school year over the summer. They return to school in the fall, and their teachers spend another two months reteaching them old material. That's five months. The school year in the United States is only 10 months. If kids lose five months of learning every single year, that's half of their education. Half. If kids were in school over the summer, then they couldn't regress, but traditional summer school is poorly designed. For kids it feels like punishment, and for teachers it feels like babysitting. But how can we expect principals to execute an effective summer program when the school year ends the last week of June and then summer school starts just one week later? There just isn't enough time to find the right people, sort out the logistics, and design an engaging curriculum that excites kids and teachers. But what if we created a program over the summer that empowered teachers as teaching coaches to develop aspiring educators? What if we empowered college-educated role models as teaching fellows to help kids realize their college ambitions? What if empowered high-achieving kids as mentors to tutor their younger peers and inspire them to invest in their education? What if we empowered all kids as scholars, asked them what colleges they were going to, designed a summer school they want to attend to completely eliminate the summer learning loss and close two-thirds of the achievement gap? By this summer, my team will have served over 4,000 low-income children, trained over 300 aspiring teachers and created more than 1,000 seasonal jobs across some of New York City's most disadvantaged neighborhoods. (Applause) And our kids are succeeding. Two years of independent evaluations tell us that our kids eliminate the summer learning loss and make growth of one month in math and two months in reading. So instead of returning to school in the fall three months behind, they now go back four months ahead in math and five months ahead in reading. (Applause) Ten years ago, if you would have told me that I'd graduate in the top 10 percent of my class from an Ivy League institution and have an opportunity to make a dent on our public education system just by tackling two months of the calendar year, I would have said, "Nah. No way." What's even more exciting is that if we can prevent five months of lost time just by redesigning two months, imagine the possibilities that we can unlock by tackling the rest of the calendar year. Thank you. (Applause) |
A tribute to nurses | {0: 'Carolyn Jones creates projects that point our attention towards issues of global concern.'} | TEDMED 2016 | As patients, we usually remember the names of our doctors, but often we forget the names of our nurses. I remember one. I had breast cancer a few years ago, and somehow I managed to get through the surgeries and the beginning of the treatment just fine. I could hide what was going on. Everybody didn't really have to know. I could walk my daughter to school, I could go out to dinner with my husband; I could fool people. But then my chemo was scheduled to begin and that terrified me because I knew that I was going to lose every single hair on my body because of the kind of chemo that I was going to have. I wasn't going to be able to pretend anymore as though everything was normal. I was scared. I knew what it felt like to have everybody treating me with kid gloves, and I just wanted to feel normal. I had a port installed in my chest. I went to my first day of chemotherapy, and I was an emotional wreck. My nurse, Joanne, walked in the door, and every bone in my body was telling me to get up out of that chair and take for the hills. But Joanne looked at me and talked to me like we were old friends. And then she asked me, "Where'd you get your highlights done?" (Laughter) And I was like, are you kidding me? You're going to talk to me about my hair when I'm on the verge of losing it? I was kind of angry, and I said, "Really? Hair?" And with a shrug of her shoulders she said, "It's gonna grow back." And in that moment she said the one thing I had overlooked, and that was that at some point, my life would get back to normal. She really believed that. And so I believed it, too. Now, worrying about losing your hair when you're fighting cancer may seem silly at first, but it's not just that you're worried about how you're going to look. It's that you're worried that everybody's going to treat you so carefully. Joanne made me feel normal for the first time in six months. We talked about her boyfriends, we talked about looking for apartments in New York City, and we talked about my reaction to the chemotherapy — all kind of mixed in together. And I always wondered, how did she so instinctively know just how to talk to me? Joanne Staha and my admiration for her marked the beginning of my journey into the world of nurses. A few years later, I was asked to do a project that would celebrate the work that nurses do. I started with Joanne, and I met over 100 nurses across the country. I spent five years interviewing, photographing and filming nurses for a book and a documentary film. With my team, we mapped a trip across America that would take us to places dealing with some of the biggest public health issues facing our nation — aging, war, poverty, prisons. And then we went places where we would find the largest concentration of patients dealing with those issues. Then we asked hospitals and facilities to nominate nurses who would best represent them. One of the first nurses I met was Bridget Kumbella. Bridget was born in Cameroon, the oldest of four children. Her father was at work when he had fallen from the fourth floor and really hurt his back. And he talked a lot about what it was like to be flat on your back and not get the kind of care that you need. And that propelled Bridget to go into the profession of nursing. Now, as a nurse in the Bronx, she has a really diverse group of patients that she cares for, from all walks of life, and from all different religions. And she's devoted her career to understanding the impact of our cultural differences when it comes to our health. She spoke of a patient — a Native American patient that she had — that wanted to bring a bunch of feathers into the ICU. That's how he found spiritual comfort. And she spoke of advocating for him and said that patients come from all different religions and use all different kinds of objects for comfort; whether it's a holy rosary or a symbolic feather, it all needs to be supported. This is Jason Short. Jason is a home health nurse in the Appalachian mountains, and his dad had a gas station and a repair shop when he was growing up. So he worked on cars in the community that he now serves as a nurse. When he was in college, it was just not macho at all to become a nurse, so he avoided it for years. He drove trucks for a little while, but his life path was always pulling him back to nursing. As a nurse in the Appalachian mountains, Jason goes places that an ambulance can't even get to. In this photograph, he's standing in what used to be a road. Top of the mountain mining flooded that road, and now the only way for Jason to get to the patient living in that house with black lung disease is to drive his SUV against the current up that creek. The day I was with him, we ripped the front fender off the car. The next morning he got up, put the car on the lift, fixed the fender, and then headed out to meet his next patient. I witnessed Jason caring for this gentleman with such enormous compassion, and I was struck again by how intimate the work of nursing really is. When I met Brian McMillion, he was raw. He had just come back from a deployment and he hadn't really settled back in to life in San Diego yet. He talked about his experience of being a nurse in Germany and taking care of the soldiers coming right off the battlefield. Very often, he would be the first person they would see when they opened their eyes in the hospital. And they would look at him as they were lying there, missing limbs, and the first thing they would say is, "When can I go back? I left my brothers out there." And Brian would have to say, "You're not going anywhere. You've already given enough, brother." Brian is both a nurse and a soldier who's seen combat. So that puts him in a unique position to be able to relate to and help heal the veterans in his care. This is Sister Stephen, and she runs a nursing home in Wisconsin called Villa Loretto. And the entire circle of life can be found under her roof. She grew up wishing they lived on a farm, so given the opportunity to adopt local farm animals, she enthusiastically brings them in. And in the springtime, those animals have babies. And Sister Stephen uses those baby ducks, goats and lambs as animal therapy for the residents at Villa Loretto who sometimes can't remember their own name, but they do rejoice in the holding of a baby lamb. The day I was with Sister Stephen, I needed to take her away from Villa Loretto to film part of her story. And before we left, she went into the room of a dying patient. And she leaned over and she said, "I have to go away for the day, but if Jesus calls you, you go. You go straight home to Jesus." I was standing there and thinking it was the first time in my life I witnessed that you could show someone you love them completely by letting go. We don't have to hold on so tightly. I saw more life rolled up at Villa Loretto than I have ever seen at any other time at any other place in my life. We live in a complicated time when it comes to our health care. It's easy to lose sight of the need for quality of life, not just quantity of life. As new life-saving technologies are created, we're going to have really complicated decisions to make. These technologies often save lives, but they can also prolong pain and the dying process. How in the world are we supposed to navigate these waters? We're going to need all the help we can get. Nurses have a really unique relationship with us because of the time spent at bedside. During that time, a kind of emotional intimacy develops. This past summer, on August 9, my father died of a heart attack. My mother was devastated, and she couldn't imagine her world without him in it. Four days later she fell, she broke her hip, she needed surgery and she found herself fighting for her own life. Once again I found myself on the receiving end of the care of nurses — this time for my mom. My brother and my sister and I stayed by her side for the next three days in the ICU. And as we tried to make the right decisions and follow my mother's wishes, we found that we were depending upon the guidance of nurses. And once again, they didn't let us down. They had an amazing insight in terms of how to care for my mom in the last four days of her life. They brought her comfort and relief from pain. They knew to encourage my sister and I to put a pretty nightgown on my mom, long after it mattered to her, but it sure meant a lot to us. And they knew to come and wake me up just in time for my mom's last breath. And then they knew how long to leave me in the room with my mother after she died. I have no idea how they know these things, but I do know that I am eternally grateful that they've guided me once again. Thank you so very much. (Applause) |
The biology of our best and worst selves | {0: 'Robert Sapolsky is one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, studying stress in primates (including humans). '} | TED2017 | Chris Anderson: So Robert spent the last few years think about how weird human behavior is, and how inadequate most of our language trying to explain it is. And it's very exciting to hear him explain some of the thinking behind it in public for the first time. Over to you now, Robert Sapolsky. (Applause) Robert Sapolsky: Thank you. The fantasy always runs something like this. I've overpowered his elite guard, burst into his secret bunker with my machine gun ready. He lunges for his Luger. I knock it out of his hand. He lunges for his cyanide pill. I knock that out of his hand. He snarls, comes at me with otherworldly strength. We grapple, we fight, I manage to pin him down and put on handcuffs. "Adolf Hitler," I say, "I arrest you for crimes against humanity." Here's where the Medal of Honor version of the fantasy ends and the imagery darkens. What would I do if I had Hitler? It's not hard to imagine once I allow myself. Sever his spine at the neck. Take out his eyes with a blunt instrument. Puncture his eardrums. Cut out his tongue. Leave him alive on a respirator, tube-fed, not able to speak or move or see or hear, just to feel, and then inject him with something cancerous that's going to fester and pustulate until every cell in his body is screaming in agony, until every second feels like an eternity in hell. That's what I would do to Hitler. I've had this fantasy since I was a kid, still do sometimes, and when I do, my heart speeds up — all these plans for the most evil, wicked soul in history. But there's a problem, which is I don't actually believe in souls or evil, and I think wicked belongs in a musical. But there's some people I would like to see killed, but I'm against the death penalty. But I like schlocky violent movies, but I'm for strict gun control. But then there was a time I was at a laser tag place, and I had such a good time hiding in a corner shooting at people. In other words, I'm your basic confused human when it comes to violence. Now, as a species, we obviously have problems with violence. We use shower heads to deliver poison gas, letters with anthrax, airplanes as weapons, mass rape as a military strategy. We're a miserably violent species. But there's a complication, which is we don't hate violence, we hate the wrong kind. And when it's the right kind, we cheer it on, we hand out medals, we vote for, we mate with our champions of it. When it's the right kind of violence, we love it. And there's another complication, which is, in addition to us being this miserably violent species, we're also this extraordinarily altruistic, compassionate one. So how do you make sense of the biology of our best behaviors, our worst ones and all of those ambiguously in between? Now, for starters, what's totally boring is understanding the motoric aspects of the behavior. Your brain tells your spine, tells your muscles to do something or other, and hooray, you've behaved. What's hard is understanding the meaning of the behavior, because in some settings, pulling a trigger is an appalling act; in others, it's heroically self-sacrificial. In some settings, putting your hand one someone else's is deeply compassionate. In others, it's a deep betrayal. The challenge is to understand the biology of the context of our behaviors, and that's real tough. One thing that's clear, though, is you're not going to get anywhere if you think there's going to be the brain region or the hormone or the gene or the childhood experience or the evolutionary mechanism that explains everything. Instead, every bit of behavior has multiple levels of causality. Let's look at an example. You have a gun. There's a crisis going on: rioting, violence, people running around. A stranger is running at you in an agitated state — you can't quite tell if the expression is frightened, threatening, angry — holding something that kind of looks like a handgun. You're not sure. The stranger comes running at you and you pull the trigger. And it turns out that thing in this person's hand was a cell phone. So we asked this biological question: what was going on that caused this behavior? What caused this behavior? And this is a multitude of questions. We start. What was going on in your brain one second before you pulled that trigger? And this brings us into the realm of a brain region called the amygdala. The amygdala, which is central to violence, central to fear, initiates volleys of cascades that produce pulling of a trigger. What was the level of activity in your amygdala one second before? But to understand that, we have to step back a little bit. What was going on in the environment seconds to minutes before that impacted the amygdala? Now, obviously, the sights, the sounds of the rioting, that was pertinent. But in addition, you're more likely to mistake a cell phone for a handgun if that stranger was male and large and of a different race. Furthermore, if you're in pain, if you're hungry, if you're exhausted, your frontal cortex is not going to work as well, part of the brain whose job it is to get to the amygdala in time saying, "Are you really sure that's a gun there?" But we need to step further back. Now we have to look at hours to days before, and with this, we have entered the realm of hormones. For example, testosterone, where regardless of your sex, if you have elevated testosterone levels in your blood, you're more likely to think a face with a neutral expression is instead looking threatening. Elevated testosterone levels, elevated levels of stress hormones, and your amygdala is going to be more active and your frontal cortex will be more sluggish. Pushing back further, weeks to months before, where's the relevance there? This is the realm of neural plasticity, the fact that your brain can change in response to experience, and if your previous months have been filled with stress and trauma, your amygdala will have enlarged. The neurons will have become more excitable, your frontal cortex would have atrophied, all relevant to what happens in that one second. But we push back even more, back years, back, for example, to your adolescence. Now, the central fact of the adolescent brain is all of it is going full blast except the frontal cortex, which is still half-baked. It doesn't fully mature until you're around 25. And thus, adolescence and early adulthood are the years where environment and experience sculpt your frontal cortex into the version you're going to have as an adult in that critical moment. But pushing back even further, even further back to childhood and fetal life and all the different versions that that could come in. Now, obviously, that's the time that your brain is being constructed, and that's important, but in addition, experience during those times produce what are called epigenetic changes, permanent, in some cases, permanently activating certain genes, turning off others. And as an example of this, if as a fetus you were exposed to a lot of stress hormones through your mother, epigenetics is going to produce your amygdala in adulthood as a more excitable form, and you're going to have elevated stress hormone levels. But pushing even further back, back to when you were just a fetus, back to when all you were was a collection of genes. Now, genes are really important to all of this, but critically, genes don't determine anything, because genes work differently in different environments. Key example here: there's a variant of a gene called MAO-A, and if you have that variant, you are far more likely to commit antisocial violence if, and only if, you were abused as a child. Genes and environment interact, and what's happening in that one second before you pull that trigger reflects your lifetime of those gene-environment interactions. Now, remarkably enough, we've got to push even further back now, back centuries. What were your ancestors up to. And if, for example, they were nomadic pastoralists, they were pastoralists, people living in deserts or grasslands with their herds of camels, cows, goats, odds are they would have invented what's called a culture of honor filled with warrior classes, retributive violence, clan vendettas, and amazingly, centuries later, that would still be influencing the values with which you were raised. But we've got to push even further back, back millions of years, because if we're talking about genes, implicitly we're now talking about the evolution of genes. And what you see is, for example, patterns across different primate species. Some of them have evolved for extremely low levels of aggression, others have evolved in the opposite direction, and floating there in between by every measure are humans, once again this confused, barely defined species that has all these potentials to go one way or the other. So what has this gotten us to? Basically, what we're seeing here is, if you want to understand a behavior, whether it's an appalling one, a wondrous one, or confusedly in between, if you want to understand that, you've got take into account what happened a second before to a million years before, everything in between. So what can we conclude at this point? Officially, it's complicated. Wow, that's really helpful. It's complicated, and you'd better be real careful, real cautious before you conclude you know what causes a behavior, especially if it's a behavior you're judging harshly. Now, to me, the single most important point about all of this is one having to do with change. Every bit of biology I have mentioned here can change in different circumstances. For example, ecosystems change. Thousands of years ago, the Sahara was a lush grassland. Cultures change. In the 17th century, the most terrifying people in Europe were the Swedes, rampaging all over the place. This is what the Swedish military does now. They haven't had a war in 200 years. Most importantly, brains change. Neurons grow new processes. Circuits disconnect. Everything in the brain changes, and out of this come extraordinary examples of human change. First one: this is a man named John Newton, a British theologian who played a central role in the abolition of slavery from the British Empire in the early 1800s. And amazingly, this man spent decades as a younger man as the captain of a slave ship, and then as an investor in slavery, growing rich from this. And then something changed. Something changed in him, something that Newton himself celebrated in the thing that he's most famous for, a hymn that he wrote: "Amazing Grace." This is a man named Zenji Abe on the morning of December 6, 1941, about to lead a squadron of Japanese bombers to attack Pearl Harbor. And this is the same man 50 years later to the day hugging a man who survived the attack on the ground. And as an old man, Zenji Abe came to a collection of Pearl Harbor survivors at a ceremony there and in halting English apologized for what he had done as a young man. Now, it doesn't always require decades. Sometimes, extraordinary change could happen in just hours. Consider the World War I Christmas truce of 1914. The powers that be had negotiated a brief truce so that soldiers could go out, collect bodies from no-man's-land in between the trench lines. And soon British and German soldiers were doing that, and then helping each other carry bodies, and then helping each other dig graves in the frozen ground, and then praying together, and then having Christmas together and exchanging gifts, and by the next day, they were playing soccer together and exchanging addresses so they could meet after the war. That truce kept going until the officers had to arrive and said, "We will shoot you unless you go back to trying to kill each other." And all it took here was hours for these men to develop a completely new category of "us," all of us in the trenches here on both sides, dying for no damn reason, and who is a "them," those faceless powers behind the lines who were using them as pawns. And sometimes, change can occur in seconds. Probably the most horrifying event in the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre. A brigade of American soldiers went into an undefended village full of civilians and killed between 350 and 500 of them, mass-raped women and children, mutilated bodies. It was appalling. It was appalling because it occurred, because the government denied it, because the US government eventually did nothing more than a slap on the wrist, and appalling because it almost certainly was not a singular event. This man, Hugh Thompson, this is the man who stopped the My Lai Massacre. He was piloting a helicopter gunship, landed there, got out and saw American soldiers shooting babies, shooting old women, figured out what was going on, and he then took his helicopter and did something that undid his lifetime of conditioning as to who is an "us" and who is a "them." He landed his helicopter in between some surviving villagers and American soldiers and he trained his machine guns on his fellow Americans, and said, "If you don't stop the killing, I will mow you down." Now, these people are no more special than any of us. Same neurons, same neurochemicals, same biology. What we're left with here is this inevitable cliche: "Those who don't study history are destined to repeat it." What we have here is the opposite of it. Those who don't study the history of extraordinary human change, those who don't study the biology of what can transform us from our worst to our best behaviors, those who don't do this are destined not to be able to repeat these incandescent, magnificent moments. So thank you. (Applause) CA: Talks that really give you a new mental model about something, those are some of my favorite TED Talks, and we just got one. Robert, thank you so much for that. Good luck with the book. That was amazing, and we're going to try and get you to come here in person one year. Thank you so much. RS: Thank you. Thank you all. |
Poetry, music and identity | {0: 'Jorge Drexler is a musician and the first Uruguayan to win an Oscar. His music plays with genre and influence, combining subtle harmonies and regional styles with electronic effects.'} | TED2017 | I'm going to tell you the story of a song. I was in Madrid one night in 2002 with my teacher and friend Joaquín Sabina, when he said he had something to give me. He said, "Jorge, I have some lines that you need to put into a song. Take these down, take these down." I looked on the table but all I found was a circular coaster, on which I wrote the lines my teacher dictated. They were four lines that went like this: "I am a Jewish Moor living among Christians I don't know who my God is, nor who my brothers are." Those lines really made an impression on me. I said, "What beautiful lyrics, Joaquín. Did you write them?" He said no, they were by another composer named Chicho Sánchez Ferlosio, who was less known than Joaquín, but also a great poet. These lines came to me at a time where I had been wanting to express something for a while, but didn't quite know how. I was getting up to leave and go home to write, when Joaquín stopped me and said, "Hang on, hang on," and presented me with this challenge: "Write the stanzas for this song in Décimas." Now, at this point in my life, I still wasn't completely sure what Décimas were, but I was too embarrassed to tell my teacher I didn't know. So I put on my best "Yeah, I totally understand" face, and went home to look up what Décimas were. I learned that a Décima is a type of verse that only exists in Spanish, and that it has 10 lines. It's very, very complex — perhaps the most complex style of stanza that we have in Spanish. It also has a very concrete date of origin, which is very rare for a style of stanza. The Décima was invented in Spain in 1591, by a guy named Vicente Espinel, a musician and poet from Málaga. And listen to this coincidence: he was the same guy who added the sixth string to what would later be called the Spanish guitar. This string right here — it's called the "bordona." From Spain, the Décima, with its 10 lines, crosses over to America, just like the Spanish guitar, but in contrast to the Décima, the Spanish guitar continues to live today on both sides of the Atlantic. But the Décima, in Spain, its birthplace, disappeared; it died out. It died out about 200 years ago, and yet in Latin America, from Mexico to Chile, all our countries maintain some form of the Décima in our popular traditions. In each place, they've given it a different name, and set it to different music. It has a lot of different names — more than 20 in total on the continent. In Mexico, for example, it's called the "Son Jarocho," "Canto de mejorana" in Panama; "Galerón" in Venezuela; "Payada" in Uruguay and Argentina; "Repentismo" in Cuba. In Peru, they call it the Peruvian Décima, because the Décima becomes so integrated into our traditions, that if someone asks, people from each place are completely convinced that the Décima was invented in their country. (Laughter) It's also got a really surprising feature, which is that despite the fact that it developed independently in each of the different countries, it maintains even today, 400 years after its creation, exactly the same rhyme, syllable and line structure — the same structure Vicente Espinel gave it during the Spanish Baroque period. Here's the structure — I'll give you the basic idea and then later you can look online and learn more about it. The Décima is ten lines long; each line has eight syllables. The first line rhymes with the fourth and the fifth; the second line, with the third; the sixth line, with the seventh and the tenth; and the eighth line rhymes with the ninth. It's a bit complicated, to be honest. And me — imagine me, trying to write in Décimas. But it's not as complicated as it seems. Plus, it's amazing that it's survived with the same structure for more than four centuries. It's not that complicated, because it has an impressive musicality to it, a type of musicality that's very hard to describe technically. I prefer that you listen to it. So I'm going to recite a Décima, one of the Décimas that I wrote for this song. I'm going to ask that you concentrate just on the musicality of the rhymes. For those of you with headphones on — I see that some of you are listening to the translation — please take them off for a minute. (English) Take your headphones off, it you have them. (English) Forget about the meaning of the words for a few seconds, (English) and then you'll put them back. (English) Forget about the structure. (Spanish) Forget about the structure. (English) And just ... it's all about the choreography of sound of the Décima. (Spanish) A choreography of sound. (Sings in Spanish) "There is not one death that does not cause me pain, there are no winners, here’s nothing but suffering and another life blown away. War is a terrible school no matter what the disguise, forgive me for not enlisting under any flag, any daydream is worth more than a sad piece of cloth." That's a Décima. (English) You can put your headphones back on. (Applause) (English) Thank you. (Applause) I also applaud Vicente Espinel, because here it is 426 years later, and the Décima lives on everywhere in its original state. I wrote three like that one; you just heard the second. I wrote the first one having only recently learned how, and it has some errors in terms of meter, so it's not presentable in its current state. But the one I sang was good, more or less. So: What was it about? What was the meaning behind those lines? I had just returned from doing a concert in Israel, and I was very emotional over a problem that hits really close to home, which is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I'll explain: my dad's family is Jewish, and my mom's family are non-practicing Christians. I was raised in a home where the two traditions lived together more or less in harmony. It wasn't unusual to see my Jewish grandpa dressed as Santa Claus, for example, or to see my non-Jewish grandpa at the synagogue wearing his kippah, at family celebrations, wearing the same expression that I probably had when Sabina told me — (Laughter) that he had some Décima lines for me. For someone raised in that kind of environment, it's especially painful to see the difficulty the opposing parties have in putting themselves in the other side's shoes even for a moment. So that's what I wrote about. I already had the lyrics, I had the form — the Décima — and the content. I needed to write the music. I'll give you some context. I had only recently moved from Uruguay, where I'm from, to Spain. And I was feeling very raw with nostalgia, like many of you here, who are away from home. And I wanted my song to be very, very Uruguayan, the most Uruguayan type of song there is — the milonga. So now, I had been studying the Décima, and after finding out that everyone tried to claim the Décima as their own, that it was invented in their country, it made me wonder: What does it mean when we say the milonga is Uruguayan? The milonga has a rhythmic pattern that we musicians call 3-3-2. (Counts out the beats) One two three, one two three, one two. And it has a characteristic emphasis. (Sings) But this characteristic rhythm pattern comes from Africa. In the ninth century you could find it in the brothels of Persia, and in the thirteenth, in Spain, from where, five centuries later, it would cross over to America with the African slaves. Meanwhile, in the Balkans, it encounters the Roma scale — (Sings) which in part, gives birth to klezmer music, which Ukrainian Jewish immigrants bring to Brooklyn, New York. They sing it in their banquet halls. (Sings "Hava Nagila") And their neighbor, an Argentine kid of Italian origin named Astor Piazzolla, hears it, assimilates it and transforms the tango of the second half of the 20th century with his ... (Counts out the beats) One two three, one two three, one two. (Sings "Adios Nonino") He also played it on his bandoneon, a 19th-century German instrument created for churches that couldn't afford to buy organs, and that ends up, incredibly, in Río de la Plata, forming the very essence of the tango and the milonga, in the very same way another instrument just as important as the bandoneon did: the Spanish guitar. (Applause) To which, by the way, Vicente Espinel, in the 16th century, added a sixth string. It's amazing how all these things are coming full circle. What have I learned in these 15 years since the song was born from going all over the world with four lines written on a coaster from a bar in Madrid? That Décimas, the milonga, songs, people — the closer you get to them, the more complex their identity becomes, and the more nuances and details appear. I learned that identity is infinitely dense, like an infinite series of real numbers, and that even if you get very close and zoom in, it never ends. Before I sing you a song and say goodbye, allow me to tell you one last story. Not long ago, we were in Mexico after a concert. And since the concert promoters know me, they knew I was a Décima freak and that everywhere I go I ask about it, insisting on hearing Décima artists. So they organized a son jarocho show for me at their house. If you recall, the son jarocho is one of the styles of music that uses Décimas in its verses. When these amazing musicians finished playing what is for me, something amazing, which is the son jarocho, they finished playing and were ... I went up to greet them, really excited, getting ready to thank them for their gift of music, and this young kid says to me — and he says it with the best of intentions — he says, "We're very proud, sir, to be keeping alive the purest origins of our Mexican identity." And to tell you the truth, I didn't really know what to say. (Laughter) I stood there looking at him. I gave him a hug and left, but ... (Laughter) But he was right, too, though. Right? In reality, the Décima is its origin, but at the same time, just like in the milonga and in the Décima, are the roots of many more cultures from all over the place, like he said. Later, when I got back to the hotel, I thought about it for a while. And I thought: things only look pure if you look at them from far away. It's very important to know about our roots, to know where we come from, to understand our history. But at the same time, as important as knowing where we're from, is understanding that deep down, we're not completely from one place, and a little from everywhere. Thank you very much. (Applause) This is "The milonga of the Jewish Moor." (Music) (Sings) For every wall a lament in Jerusalem the golden and 1000 wasted lives for every commandment. I am dust in your wind and although I bleed through your wound, and every beloved stone has my deepest affection, there is not a stone in the world worth more than a human life. I am a Jewish Moor who lives among Christians I don't know who my God is, nor who my brothers are. I don't know who my God is, nor who my brothers are. There is not one death that does not cause me pain, there are no winners there's nothing but suffering and another life blown away. War is a terrible school no matter what the disguise, forgive me for not enlisting under any flag, any daydream is worth more than a sad piece of cloth. I am a Jewish Moor who lives among Christians I don't know who my God is, nor who my brothers are. I don't know who my God is, nor who my brothers are. And nobody has my permission for killing in my name, a man is but a man and if there is a God, this was his wish, the very ground I tread will live on, once I am gone on my way to oblivion, and all doctrines will suffer the same fate, and there is not one nation that has not proclaimed itself the chosen people. I am a Jewish Moor who lives among Christians I don't know who my God is, nor who my brothers are. I don't know who my God is, nor who my brothers are. I am a Jewish Moor who lives among Christians (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Thoughts on humanity, fame and love | {0: 'With a fan following that runs into multi-millions, Shah Rukh Khan is at forefront of the Indian film industry and continues to rule at the box office in India.'} | TED2017 | Namaskar. I'm a movie star, I'm 51 years of age, and I don't use Botox as yet. (Laughter) So I'm clean, but I do behave like you saw like a 21-year-old in my movies. Yeah, I do that. I sell dreams, and I peddle love to millions of people back home in India who assume that I'm the best lover in the world. (Laughter) If you don't tell anyone, I'm going to tell you I'm not, but I never let that assumption go away. (Laughter) I've also been made to understand there are lots of you here who haven't seen my work, and I feel really sad for you. (Laughter) (Applause) That doesn't take away from the fact that I'm completely self-obsessed, as a movie star should be. (Laughter) That's when my friends, Chris and Juliet called me here to speak about the future "you." Naturally, it follows I'm going to speak about the present me. (Laughter) Because I truly believe that humanity is a lot like me. (Laughter) It is. It is. It's an aging movie star, grappling with all the newness around itself, wondering whether it got it right in the first place, and still trying to find a way to keep on shining regardless. I was born in a refugee colony in the capital city of India, New Delhi. And my father was a freedom fighter. My mother was, well, just a fighter like mothers are. And much like the original homo sapiens, we struggled to survive. When I was in my early 20s, I lost both my parents, which I must admit seems a bit careless of me now, but — (Laughter) I do remember the night my father died, and I remember the driver of a neighbor who was driving us to the hospital. He mumbled something about "dead people don't tip so well" and walked away into the dark. And I was only 14 then, and I put my father's dead body in the back seat of the car, and my mother besides me, I started driving back from the hospital to the house. And in the middle of her quiet crying, my mother looked at me and she said, "Son, when did you learn to drive?" And I thought about it and realized, and I said to my mom, "Just now, Mom." (Laughter) So from that night onwards, much akin to humanity in its adolescence, I learned the crude tools of survival. And the framework of life was very, very simple then, to be honest. You know, you just ate what you got and did whatever you were told to do. I thought celiac was a vegetable, and vegan, of course, was Mr. Spock's lost comrade in "Star Trek." (Laughter) You married the first girl that you dated, and you were a techie if you could fix the carburetor in your car. I really thought that gay was a sophisticated English word for happy. And Lesbian, of course, was the capital of Portugal, as you all know. (Laughter) Where was I? We relied on systems created through the toil and sacrifice of generations before to protect us, and we felt that governments actually worked for our betterment. Science was simple and logical, Apple was still then just a fruit owned by Eve first and then Newton, not by Steve Jobs, until then. And "Eureka!" was what you screamed when you wanted to run naked on the streets. You went wherever life took you for work, and people were mostly welcoming of you. Migration was a term then still reserved for Siberian cranes, not human beings. Most importantly, you were who you were and you said what you thought. Then in my late 20s, I shifted to the sprawling metropolis of Mumbai, and my framework, like the newly industrialized aspirational humanity, began to alter. In the urban rush for a new, more embellished survival, things started to look a little different. I met people who had descended from all over the world, faces, races, genders, money-lenders. Definitions became more and more fluid. Work began to define you at that time in an overwhelmingly equalizing manner, and all the systems started to feel less reliable to me, almost too thick to hold on to the diversity of mankind and the human need to progress and grow. Ideas were flowing with more freedom and speed. And I experienced the miracle of human innovation and cooperation, and my own creativity, when supported by the resourcefulness of this collective endeavor, catapulted me into superstardom. I started to feel that I had arrived, and generally, by the time I was 40, I was really, really flying. I was all over the place. You know? I'd done 50 films by then and 200 songs, and I'd been knighted by the Malaysians. I had been given the highest civil honor by the French government, the title of which for the life of me I can't pronounce even until now. (Laughter) I'm sorry, France, and thank you, France, for doing that. But much bigger than that, I got to meet Angelina Jolie — (Laughter) for two and a half seconds. (Laughter) And I'm sure she also remembers that encounter somewhere. OK, maybe not. And I sat next to Hannah Montana on a round dinner table with her back towards me most of the time. Like I said, I was flying, from Miley to Jolie, and humanity was soaring with me. We were both pretty much flying off the handle, actually. And then you all know what happened. The internet happened. I was in my late 40s, and I started tweeting like a canary in a birdcage and assuming that, you know, people who peered into my world would admire it for the miracle I believed it to be. But something else awaited me and humanity. You know, we had expected an expansion of ideas and dreams with the enhanced connectivity of the world. We had not bargained for the village-like enclosure of thought, of judgment, of definition that flowed from the same place that freedom and revolution was taking place in. Everything I said took a new meaning. Everything I did — good, bad, ugly — was there for the world to comment upon and judge. As a matter of fact, everything I didn't say or do also met with the same fate. Four years ago, my lovely wife Gauri and me decided to have a third child. It was claimed on the net that he was the love child of our first child who was 15 years old. Apparently, he had sown his wild oats with a girl while driving her car in Romania. And yeah, there was a fake video to go with it. And we were so disturbed as a family. My son, who is 19 now, even now when you say "hello" to him, he just turns around and says, "But bro, I didn't even have a European driving license." (Laughter) Yeah. In this new world, slowly, reality became virtual and virtual became real, and I started to feel that I could not be who I wanted to be or say what I actually thought, and humanity at this time completely identified with me. I think both of us were going through our midlife crisis, and humanity, like me, was becoming an overexposed prima donna. I started to sell everything, from hair oil to diesel generators. Humanity was buying everything from crude oil to nuclear reactors. You know, I even tried to get into a skintight superhero suit to reinvent myself. I must admit I failed miserably. And just an aside I want to say on behalf of all the Batmen, Spider-Men and Supermen of the world, you have to commend them, because it really hurts in the crotch, that superhero suit. (Laughter) Yeah, I'm being honest. I need to tell you this here. Really. And accidentally, I happened to even invent a new dance form which I didn't realize, and it became a rage. So if it's all right, and you've seen a bit of me, so I'm quite shameless, I'll show you. It was called the Lungi dance. So if it's all right, I'll just show you. I'm talented otherwise. (Cheers) So it went something like this. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi. That's it. It became a rage. (Cheers) It really did. Like you notice, nobody could make any sense of what was happening except me, and I didn't give a damn, really, because the whole world, and whole humanity, seemed as confused and lost as I was. I didn't give up then. I even tried to reconstruct my identity on the social media like everyone else does. I thought if I put on philosophical tweets out there people will think I'm with it, but some of the responses I got from those tweets were extremely confusing acronyms which I didn't understand. You know? ROFL, LOL. "Adidas," somebody wrote back to one of my more thought-provoking tweets and I was wondering why would you name a sneaker, I mean, why would you write back the name of a sneaker to me? And I asked my 16-year-old daughter, and she enlightened me. "Adidas" now means "All day I dream about sex." (Laughter) Really. I didn't know if you know that. So I wrote back, "WTF" in bold to Mr. Adidas, thanking secretly that some acronyms and things won't change at all. WTF. But here we are. I am 51 years old, like I told you, and mind-numbing acronyms notwithstanding, I just want to tell you if there has been a momentous time for humanity to exist, it is now, because the present you is brave. The present you is hopeful. The present you is innovative and resourceful, and of course, the present you is annoyingly indefinable. And in this spell-binding, imperfect moment of existence, feeling a little brave just before I came here, I decided to take a good, hard look at my face. And I realized that I'm beginning to look more and more like the wax statue of me at Madame Tussaud's. (Laughter) Yeah, and in that moment of realization, I asked the most central and pertinent question to humanity and me: Do I need to fix my face? Really. I'm an actor, like I told you, a modern expression of human creativity. The land I come from is the source of inexplicable but very simple spirituality. In its immense generosity, India decided somehow that I, the Muslim son of a broke freedom fighter who accidentally ventured into the business of selling dreams, should become its king of romance, the "Badhshah of Bollywood," the greatest lover the country has ever seen ... with this face. Yeah. (Laughter) Which has alternately been described as ugly, unconventional, and strangely, not chocolatey enough. (Laughter) The people of this ancient land embraced me in their limitless love, and I've learned from these people that neither power nor poverty can make your life more magical or less tortuous. I've learned from the people of my country that the dignity of a life, a human being, a culture, a religion, a country actually resides in its ability for grace and compassion. I've learned that whatever moves you, whatever urges you to create, to build, whatever keeps you from failing, whatever helps you survive, is perhaps the oldest and the simplest emotion known to mankind, and that is love. A mystic poet from my land famously wrote, (Recites poem in Hindi) (Poem ends) Which loosely translates into that whatever — yeah, if you know Hindi, please clap, yeah. (Applause) It's very difficult to remember. Which loosely translates into actually saying that all the books of knowledge that you might read and then go ahead and impart your knowledge through innovation, through creativity, through technology, but mankind will never be the wiser about its future unless it is coupled with a sense of love and compassion for their fellow beings. The two and a half alphabets which form the word "प्रेम," which means "love," if you are able to understand that and practice it, that itself is enough to enlighten mankind. So I truly believe the future "you" has to be a you that loves. Otherwise it will cease to flourish. It will perish in its own self-absorption. So you may use your power to build walls and keep people outside, or you may use it to break barriers and welcome them in. You may use your faith to make people afraid and terrify them into submission, or you can use it to give courage to people so they rise to the greatest heights of enlightenment. You can use your energy to build nuclear bombs and spread the darkness of destruction, or you can use it to spread the joy of light to millions. You may filthy up the oceans callously and cut down all the forests. You can destroy the ecology, or turn to them with love and regenerate life from the waters and trees. You may land on Mars and build armed citadels, or you may look for life-forms and species to learn from and respect. And you can use all the moneys we all have earned to wage futile wars and give guns in the hands of little children to kill each other with, or you can use it to make more food to fill their stomachs with. My country has taught me the capacity for a human being to love is akin to godliness. It shines forth in a world which civilization, I think, already has tampered too much with. In the last few days, the talks here, the wonderful people coming and showing their talent, talking about individual achievements, the innovation, the technology, the sciences, the knowledge we are gaining by being here in the presence of TED Talks and all of you are reasons enough for us to celebrate the future "us." But within that celebration the quest to cultivate our capacity for love and compassion has to assert itself, has to assert itself, just as equally. So I believe the future "you" is an infinite you. It's called a chakra in India, like a circle. It ends where it begins from to complete itself. A you that perceives time and space differently understands both your unimaginable and fantastic importance and your complete unimportance in the larger context of the universe. A you that returns back to the original innocence of humanity, which loves from the purity of heart, which sees from the eyes of truth, which dreams from the clarity of an untampered mind. The future "you" has to be like an aging movie star who has been made to believe that there is a possibility of a world which is completely, wholly, self-obsessively in love with itself. A world — really, it has to be a you to create a world which is its own best lover. That I believe, ladies and gentlemen, should be the future "you." Thank you very much. Shukriya. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How human noise affects ocean habitats | {0: "Kate Stafford's research examines migratory movements, geographic variation and physical drivers of marine mammals, particularly large whales."} | TEDxCERN | In 1956, a documentary by Jacques Cousteau won both the Palme d'Or and an Oscar award. This film was called, "Le Monde Du Silence," or, "The Silent World." The premise of the title was that the underwater world was a quiet world. We now know, 60 years later, that the underwater world is anything but silent. Although the sounds are inaudible above water depending on where you are and the time of year, the underwater soundscape can be as noisy as any jungle or rainforest. Invertebrates like snapping shrimp, fish and marine mammals all use sound. They use sound to study their habitat, to keep in communication with each other, to navigate, to detect predators and prey. They also use sound by listening to know something about their environment. Take, for an example, the Arctic. It's considered a vast, inhospitable place, sometimes described as a desert, because it is so cold and so remote and ice-covered for much of the year. And despite this, there is no place on Earth that I would rather be than the Arctic, especially as days lengthen and spring comes. To me, the Arctic really embodies this disconnect between what we see on the surface and what's going on underwater. You can look out across the ice — all white and blue and cold — and see nothing. But if you could hear underwater, the sounds you would hear would at first amaze and then delight you. And while your eyes are seeing nothing for kilometers but ice, your ears are telling you that out there are bowhead and beluga whales, walrus and bearded seals. The ice, too, makes sounds. It screeches and cracks and pops and groans, as it collides and rubs when temperature or currents or winds change. And under 100 percent sea ice in the dead of winter, bowhead whales are singing. And you would never expect that, because we humans, we tend to be very visual animals. For most of us, but not all, our sense of sight is how we navigate our world. For marine mammals that live underwater, where chemical cues and light transmit poorly, sound is the sense by which they see. And sound transmits very well underwater, much better than it does in air, so signals can be heard over great distances. In the Arctic, this is especially important, because not only do Arctic marine mammals have to hear each other, but they also have to listen for cues in the environment that might indicate heavy ice ahead or open water. Remember, although they spend most of their lives underwater, they are mammals, and so they have to surface to breathe. So they might listen for thin ice or no ice, or listen for echoes off nearby ice. Arctic marine mammals live in a rich and varied underwater soundscape. In the spring, it can be a cacophony of sound. (Marine mammal sounds) But when the ice is frozen solid, and there are no big temperature shifts or current changes, the underwater Arctic has some of the lowest ambient noise levels of the world's oceans. But this is changing. This is primarily due to a decrease in seasonal sea ice, which is a direct result of human greenhouse gas emissions. We are, in effect, with climate change, conducting a completely uncontrolled experiment with our planet. Over the past 30 years, areas of the Arctic have seen decreases in seasonal sea ice from anywhere from six weeks to four months. This decrease in sea ice is sometimes referred to as an increase in the open water season. That is the time of year when the Arctic is navigable to vessels. And not only is the extent of ice changing, but the age and the width of ice is, too. Now, you may well have heard that a decrease in seasonal sea ice is causing a loss of habitat for animals that rely on sea ice, such as ice seals, or walrus, or polar bears. Decreasing sea ice is also causing increased erosion along coastal villages, and changing prey availability for marine birds and mammals. Climate change and decreases in sea ice are also altering the underwater soundscape of the Arctic. What do I mean by soundscape? Those of us who eavesdrop on the oceans for a living use instruments called hydrophones, which are underwater microphones, and we record ambient noise — the noise all around us. And the soundscape describes the different contributors to this noise field. What we are hearing on our hydrophones are the very real sounds of climate change. We are hearing these changes from three fronts: from the air, from the water and from land. First: air. Wind on water creates waves. These waves make bubbles; the bubbles break, and when they do, they make noise. And this noise is like a hiss or a static in the background. In the Arctic, when it's ice-covered, most of the noise from wind doesn't make it into the water column, because the ice acts as a buffer between the atmosphere and the water. This is one of the reasons that the Arctic can have very low ambient noise levels. But with decreases in seasonal sea ice, not only is the Arctic now open to this wave noise, but the number of storms and the intensity of storms in the Arctic has been increasing. All of this is raising noise levels in a previously quiet ocean. Second: water. With less seasonal sea ice, subarctic species are moving north, and taking advantage of the new habitat that is created by more open water. Now, Arctic whales, like this bowhead, they have no dorsal fin, because they have evolved to live and swim in ice-covered waters, and having something sticking off of your back is not very conducive to migrating through ice, and may, in fact, be excluding animals from the ice. But now, everywhere we've listened, we're hearing the sounds of fin whales and humpback whales and killer whales, further and further north, and later and later in the season. We are hearing, in essence, an invasion of the Arctic by subarctic species. And we don't know what this means. Will there be competition for food between Arctic and subarctic animals? Might these subarctic species introduce diseases or parasites into the Arctic? And what are the new sounds that they are producing doing to the soundscape underwater? And third: land. And by land ... I mean people. More open water means increased human use of the Arctic. Just this past summer, a massive cruise ship made its way through the Northwest Passage — the once-mythical route between Europe and the Pacific. Decreases in sea ice have allowed humans to occupy the Arctic more often. It has allowed increases in oil and gas exploration and extraction, the potential for commercial shipping, as well as increased tourism. And we now know that ship noise increases levels of stress hormones in whales and can disrupt feeding behavior. Air guns, which produce loud, low-frequency "whoomps" every 10 to 20 seconds, changed the swimming and vocal behavior of whales. And all of these sound sources are decreasing the acoustic space over which Arctic marine mammals can communicate. Now, Arctic marine mammals are used to very high levels of noise at certain times of the year. But this is primarily from other animals or from sea ice, and these are the sounds with which they've evolved, and these are sounds that are vital to their very survival. These new sounds are loud and they're alien. They might impact the environment in ways that we think we understand, but also in ways that we don't. Remember, sound is the most important sense for these animals. And not only is the physical habitat of the Arctic changing rapidly, but the acoustic habitat is, too. It's as if we've plucked these animals up from the quiet countryside and dropped them into a big city in the middle of rush hour. And they can't escape it. So what can we do now? We can't decrease wind speeds or keep subarctic animals from migrating north, but we can work on local solutions to reducing human-caused underwater noise. One of these solutions is to slow down ships that traverse the Arctic, because a slower ship is a quieter ship. We can restrict access in seasons and regions that are important for mating or feeding or migrating. We can get smarter about quieting ships and find better ways to explore the ocean bottom. And the good news is, there are people working on this right now. But ultimately, we humans have to do the hard work of reversing or at the very least decelerating human-caused atmospheric changes. So, let's return to this idea of a silent world underwater. It's entirely possible that many of the whales swimming in the Arctic today, especially long-lived species like the bowhead whale that the Inuits say can live two human lives — it's possible that these whales were alive in 1956, when Jacques Cousteau made his film. And in retrospect, considering all the noise we are creating in the oceans today, perhaps it really was "The Silent World." Thank you. (Applause) |
3 principles for creating safer AI | {0: "Stuart Russell wrote the standard text on AI; now he thinks deeply on AI's future -- and the future of us humans, too."} | TED2017 | This is Lee Sedol. Lee Sedol is one of the world's greatest Go players, and he's having what my friends in Silicon Valley call a "Holy Cow" moment — (Laughter) a moment where we realize that AI is actually progressing a lot faster than we expected. So humans have lost on the Go board. What about the real world? Well, the real world is much bigger, much more complicated than the Go board. It's a lot less visible, but it's still a decision problem. And if we think about some of the technologies that are coming down the pike ... Noriko [Arai] mentioned that reading is not yet happening in machines, at least with understanding. But that will happen, and when that happens, very soon afterwards, machines will have read everything that the human race has ever written. And that will enable machines, along with the ability to look further ahead than humans can, as we've already seen in Go, if they also have access to more information, they'll be able to make better decisions in the real world than we can. So is that a good thing? Well, I hope so. Our entire civilization, everything that we value, is based on our intelligence. And if we had access to a lot more intelligence, then there's really no limit to what the human race can do. And I think this could be, as some people have described it, the biggest event in human history. So why are people saying things like this, that AI might spell the end of the human race? Is this a new thing? Is it just Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking? Actually, no. This idea has been around for a while. Here's a quotation: "Even if we could keep the machines in a subservient position, for instance, by turning off the power at strategic moments" — and I'll come back to that "turning off the power" idea later on — "we should, as a species, feel greatly humbled." So who said this? This is Alan Turing in 1951. Alan Turing, as you know, is the father of computer science and in many ways, the father of AI as well. So if we think about this problem, the problem of creating something more intelligent than your own species, we might call this "the gorilla problem," because gorillas' ancestors did this a few million years ago, and now we can ask the gorillas: Was this a good idea? So here they are having a meeting to discuss whether it was a good idea, and after a little while, they conclude, no, this was a terrible idea. Our species is in dire straits. In fact, you can see the existential sadness in their eyes. (Laughter) So this queasy feeling that making something smarter than your own species is maybe not a good idea — what can we do about that? Well, really nothing, except stop doing AI, and because of all the benefits that I mentioned and because I'm an AI researcher, I'm not having that. I actually want to be able to keep doing AI. So we actually need to nail down the problem a bit more. What exactly is the problem? Why is better AI possibly a catastrophe? So here's another quotation: "We had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire." This was said by Norbert Wiener in 1960, shortly after he watched one of the very early learning systems learn to play checkers better than its creator. But this could equally have been said by King Midas. King Midas said, "I want everything I touch to turn to gold," and he got exactly what he asked for. That was the purpose that he put into the machine, so to speak, and then his food and his drink and his relatives turned to gold and he died in misery and starvation. So we'll call this "the King Midas problem" of stating an objective which is not, in fact, truly aligned with what we want. In modern terms, we call this "the value alignment problem." Putting in the wrong objective is not the only part of the problem. There's another part. If you put an objective into a machine, even something as simple as, "Fetch the coffee," the machine says to itself, "Well, how might I fail to fetch the coffee? Someone might switch me off. OK, I have to take steps to prevent that. I will disable my 'off' switch. I will do anything to defend myself against interference with this objective that I have been given." So this single-minded pursuit in a very defensive mode of an objective that is, in fact, not aligned with the true objectives of the human race — that's the problem that we face. And in fact, that's the high-value takeaway from this talk. If you want to remember one thing, it's that you can't fetch the coffee if you're dead. (Laughter) It's very simple. Just remember that. Repeat it to yourself three times a day. (Laughter) And in fact, this is exactly the plot of "2001: [A Space Odyssey]" HAL has an objective, a mission, which is not aligned with the objectives of the humans, and that leads to this conflict. Now fortunately, HAL is not superintelligent. He's pretty smart, but eventually Dave outwits him and manages to switch him off. But we might not be so lucky. So what are we going to do? I'm trying to redefine AI to get away from this classical notion of machines that intelligently pursue objectives. There are three principles involved. The first one is a principle of altruism, if you like, that the robot's only objective is to maximize the realization of human objectives, of human values. And by values here I don't mean touchy-feely, goody-goody values. I just mean whatever it is that the human would prefer their life to be like. And so this actually violates Asimov's law that the robot has to protect its own existence. It has no interest in preserving its existence whatsoever. The second law is a law of humility, if you like. And this turns out to be really important to make robots safe. It says that the robot does not know what those human values are, so it has to maximize them, but it doesn't know what they are. And that avoids this problem of single-minded pursuit of an objective. This uncertainty turns out to be crucial. Now, in order to be useful to us, it has to have some idea of what we want. It obtains that information primarily by observation of human choices, so our own choices reveal information about what it is that we prefer our lives to be like. So those are the three principles. Let's see how that applies to this question of: "Can you switch the machine off?" as Turing suggested. So here's a PR2 robot. This is one that we have in our lab, and it has a big red "off" switch right on the back. The question is: Is it going to let you switch it off? If we do it the classical way, we give it the objective of, "Fetch the coffee, I must fetch the coffee, I can't fetch the coffee if I'm dead," so obviously the PR2 has been listening to my talk, and so it says, therefore, "I must disable my 'off' switch, and probably taser all the other people in Starbucks who might interfere with me." (Laughter) So this seems to be inevitable, right? This kind of failure mode seems to be inevitable, and it follows from having a concrete, definite objective. So what happens if the machine is uncertain about the objective? Well, it reasons in a different way. It says, "OK, the human might switch me off, but only if I'm doing something wrong. Well, I don't really know what wrong is, but I know that I don't want to do it." So that's the first and second principles right there. "So I should let the human switch me off." And in fact you can calculate the incentive that the robot has to allow the human to switch it off, and it's directly tied to the degree of uncertainty about the underlying objective. And then when the machine is switched off, that third principle comes into play. It learns something about the objectives it should be pursuing, because it learns that what it did wasn't right. In fact, we can, with suitable use of Greek symbols, as mathematicians usually do, we can actually prove a theorem that says that such a robot is provably beneficial to the human. You are provably better off with a machine that's designed in this way than without it. So this is a very simple example, but this is the first step in what we're trying to do with human-compatible AI. Now, this third principle, I think is the one that you're probably scratching your head over. You're probably thinking, "Well, you know, I behave badly. I don't want my robot to behave like me. I sneak down in the middle of the night and take stuff from the fridge. I do this and that." There's all kinds of things you don't want the robot doing. But in fact, it doesn't quite work that way. Just because you behave badly doesn't mean the robot is going to copy your behavior. It's going to understand your motivations and maybe help you resist them, if appropriate. But it's still difficult. What we're trying to do, in fact, is to allow machines to predict for any person and for any possible life that they could live, and the lives of everybody else: Which would they prefer? And there are many, many difficulties involved in doing this; I don't expect that this is going to get solved very quickly. The real difficulties, in fact, are us. As I have already mentioned, we behave badly. In fact, some of us are downright nasty. Now the robot, as I said, doesn't have to copy the behavior. The robot does not have any objective of its own. It's purely altruistic. And it's not designed just to satisfy the desires of one person, the user, but in fact it has to respect the preferences of everybody. So it can deal with a certain amount of nastiness, and it can even understand that your nastiness, for example, you may take bribes as a passport official because you need to feed your family and send your kids to school. It can understand that; it doesn't mean it's going to steal. In fact, it'll just help you send your kids to school. We are also computationally limited. Lee Sedol is a brilliant Go player, but he still lost. So if we look at his actions, he took an action that lost the game. That doesn't mean he wanted to lose. So to understand his behavior, we actually have to invert through a model of human cognition that includes our computational limitations — a very complicated model. But it's still something that we can work on understanding. Probably the most difficult part, from my point of view as an AI researcher, is the fact that there are lots of us, and so the machine has to somehow trade off, weigh up the preferences of many different people, and there are different ways to do that. Economists, sociologists, moral philosophers have understood that, and we are actively looking for collaboration. Let's have a look and see what happens when you get that wrong. So you can have a conversation, for example, with your intelligent personal assistant that might be available in a few years' time. Think of a Siri on steroids. So Siri says, "Your wife called to remind you about dinner tonight." And of course, you've forgotten. "What? What dinner? What are you talking about?" "Uh, your 20th anniversary at 7pm." "I can't do that. I'm meeting with the secretary-general at 7:30. How could this have happened?" "Well, I did warn you, but you overrode my recommendation." "Well, what am I going to do? I can't just tell him I'm too busy." "Don't worry. I arranged for his plane to be delayed." (Laughter) "Some kind of computer malfunction." (Laughter) "Really? You can do that?" "He sends his profound apologies and looks forward to meeting you for lunch tomorrow." (Laughter) So the values here — there's a slight mistake going on. This is clearly following my wife's values which is "Happy wife, happy life." (Laughter) It could go the other way. You could come home after a hard day's work, and the computer says, "Long day?" "Yes, I didn't even have time for lunch." "You must be very hungry." "Starving, yeah. Could you make some dinner?" "There's something I need to tell you." (Laughter) "There are humans in South Sudan who are in more urgent need than you." (Laughter) "So I'm leaving. Make your own dinner." (Laughter) So we have to solve these problems, and I'm looking forward to working on them. There are reasons for optimism. One reason is, there is a massive amount of data. Because remember — I said they're going to read everything the human race has ever written. Most of what we write about is human beings doing things and other people getting upset about it. So there's a massive amount of data to learn from. There's also a very strong economic incentive to get this right. So imagine your domestic robot's at home. You're late from work again and the robot has to feed the kids, and the kids are hungry and there's nothing in the fridge. And the robot sees the cat. (Laughter) And the robot hasn't quite learned the human value function properly, so it doesn't understand the sentimental value of the cat outweighs the nutritional value of the cat. (Laughter) So then what happens? Well, it happens like this: "Deranged robot cooks kitty for family dinner." That one incident would be the end of the domestic robot industry. So there's a huge incentive to get this right long before we reach superintelligent machines. So to summarize: I'm actually trying to change the definition of AI so that we have provably beneficial machines. And the principles are: machines that are altruistic, that want to achieve only our objectives, but that are uncertain about what those objectives are, and will watch all of us to learn more about what it is that we really want. And hopefully in the process, we will learn to be better people. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So interesting, Stuart. We're going to stand here a bit because I think they're setting up for our next speaker. A couple of questions. So the idea of programming in ignorance seems intuitively really powerful. As you get to superintelligence, what's going to stop a robot reading literature and discovering this idea that knowledge is actually better than ignorance and still just shifting its own goals and rewriting that programming? Stuart Russell: Yes, so we want it to learn more, as I said, about our objectives. It'll only become more certain as it becomes more correct, so the evidence is there and it's going to be designed to interpret it correctly. It will understand, for example, that books are very biased in the evidence they contain. They only talk about kings and princes and elite white male people doing stuff. So it's a complicated problem, but as it learns more about our objectives it will become more and more useful to us. CA: And you couldn't just boil it down to one law, you know, hardwired in: "if any human ever tries to switch me off, I comply. I comply." SR: Absolutely not. That would be a terrible idea. So imagine that you have a self-driving car and you want to send your five-year-old off to preschool. Do you want your five-year-old to be able to switch off the car while it's driving along? Probably not. So it needs to understand how rational and sensible the person is. The more rational the person, the more willing you are to be switched off. If the person is completely random or even malicious, then you're less willing to be switched off. CA: All right. Stuart, can I just say, I really, really hope you figure this out for us. Thank you so much for that talk. That was amazing. SR: Thank you. (Applause) |
What makes life worth living in the face of death | {0: 'Lucy Kalanithi is dedicated to helping others choose the health care and end-of-life experiences that best align with their values.'} | TEDMED 2016 | A few days after my husband Paul was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, we were lying in our bed at home, and Paul said, "It's going to be OK." And I remember answering back, "Yes. We just don't know what OK means yet." Paul and I had met as first-year medical students at Yale. He was smart and kind and super funny. He used to keep a gorilla suit in the trunk of his car, and he'd say, "It's for emergencies only." (Laughter) I fell in love with Paul as I watched the care he took with his patients. He stayed late talking with them, seeking to understand the experience of illness and not just its technicalities. He later told me he fell in love with me when he saw me cry over an EKG of a heart that had ceased beating. We didn't know it yet, but even in the heady days of young love, we were learning how to approach suffering together. We got married and became doctors. I was working as an internist and Paul was finishing his training as a neurosurgeon when he started to lose weight. He developed excruciating back pain and a cough that wouldn't go away. And when he was admitted to the hospital, a CT scan revealed tumors in Paul's lungs and in his bones. We had both cared for patients with devastating diagnoses; now it was our turn. We lived with Paul's illness for 22 months. He wrote a memoir about facing mortality. I gave birth to our daughter Cady, and we loved her and each other. We learned directly how to struggle through really tough medical decisions. The day we took Paul into the hospital for the last time was the most difficult day of my life. When he turned to me at the end and said, "I'm ready," I knew that wasn't just a brave decision. It was the right one. Paul didn't want a ventilator and CPR. In that moment, the most important thing to Paul was to hold our baby daughter. Nine hours later, Paul died. I've always thought of myself as a caregiver — most physicians do — and taking care of Paul deepened what that meant. Watching him reshape his identity during his illness, learning to witness and accept his pain, talking together through his choices — those experiences taught me that resilience does not mean bouncing back to where you were before, or pretending that the hard stuff isn't hard. It is so hard. It's painful, messy stuff. But it's the stuff. And I learned that when we approach it together, we get to decide what success looks like. One of the first things Paul said to me after his diagnosis was, "I want you to get remarried." And I was like, whoa, I guess we get to say anything out loud. (Laughter) It was so shocking and heartbreaking ... and generous, and really comforting because it was so starkly honest, and that honesty turned out to be exactly what we needed. Early in Paul's illness, we agreed we would just keep saying things out loud. Tasks like making a will, or completing our advance directives — tasks that I had always avoided — were not as daunting as they once seemed. I realized that completing an advance directive is an act of love — like a wedding vow. A pact to take care of someone, codifying the promise that til death do us part, I will be there. If needed, I will speak for you. I will honor your wishes. That paperwork became a tangible part of our love story. As physicians, Paul and I were in a good position to understand and even accept his diagnosis. We weren't angry about it, luckily, because we'd seen so many patients in devastating situations, and we knew that death is a part of life. But it's one thing to know that; it was a very different experience to actually live with the sadness and uncertainty of a serious illness. Huge strides are being made against lung cancer, but we knew that Paul likely had months to a few years left to live. During that time, Paul wrote about his transition from doctor to patient. He talked about feeling like he was suddenly at a crossroads, and how he would have thought he'd be able to see the path, that because he treated so many patients, maybe he could follow in their footsteps. But he was totally disoriented. Rather than a path, Paul wrote, "I saw instead only a harsh, vacant, gleaming white desert. As if a sandstorm had erased all familiarity. I had to face my mortality and try to understand what made my life worth living, and I needed my oncologist's help to do so." The clinicians taking care of Paul gave me an even deeper appreciation for my colleagues in health care. We have a tough job. We're responsible for helping patients have clarity around their prognoses and their treatment options, and that's never easy, but it's especially tough when you're dealing with potentially terminal illnesses like cancer. Some people don't want to know how long they have left, others do. Either way, we never have those answers. Sometimes we substitute hope by emphasizing the best-case scenario. In a survey of physicians, 55 percent said they painted a rosier picture than their honest opinion when describing a patient's prognosis. It's an instinct born out of kindness. But researchers have found that when people better understand the possible outcomes of an illness, they have less anxiety, greater ability to plan and less trauma for their families. Families can struggle with those conversations, but for us, we also found that information immensely helpful with big decisions. Most notably, whether to have a baby. Months to a few years meant Paul was not likely to see her grow up. But he had a good chance of being there for her birth and for the beginning of her life. I remember asking Paul if he thought having to say goodbye to a child would make dying even more painful. And his answer astounded me. He said, "Wouldn't it be great if it did?" And we did it. Not in order to spite cancer, but because we were learning that living fully means accepting suffering. Paul's oncologist tailored his chemo so he could continue working as a neurosurgeon, which initially we thought was totally impossible. When the cancer advanced and Paul shifted from surgery to writing, his palliative care doctor prescribed a stimulant medication so he could be more focused. They asked Paul about his priorities and his worries. They asked him what trade-offs he was willing to make. Those conversations are the best way to ensure that your health care matches your values. Paul joked that it's not like that "birds and bees" talk you have with your parents, where you all get it over with as quickly as possible, and then pretend it never happened. You revisit the conversation as things change. You keep saying things out loud. I'm forever grateful because Paul's clinicians felt that their job wasn't to try to give us answers they didn't have, or only to try to fix things for us, but to counsel Paul through painful choices ... when his body was failing but his will to live wasn't. Later, after Paul died, I received a dozen bouquets of flowers, but I sent just one ... to Paul's oncologist, because she supported his goals and she helped him weigh his choices. She knew that living means more than just staying alive. A few weeks ago, a patient came into my clinic. A woman dealing with a serious chronic disease. And while we were talking about her life and her health care, she said, "I love my palliative care team. They taught me that it's OK to say 'no'." Yeah, I thought, of course it is. But many patients don't feel that. Compassion and Choices did a study where they asked people about their health care preferences. And a lot of people started their answers with the words "Well, if I had a choice ..." If I had a choice. And when I read that "if," I understood better why one in four people receives excessive or unwanted medical treatment, or watches a family member receive excessive or unwanted medical treatment. It's not because doctors don't get it. We do. We understand the real psychological consequences on patients and their families. The things is, we deal with them, too. Half of critical care nurses and a quarter of ICU doctors have considered quitting their jobs because of distress over feeling that for some of their patients, they've provided care that didn't fit with the person's values. But doctors can't make sure your wishes are respected until they know what they are. Would you want to be on life support if it offered any chance of longer life? Are you most worried about the quality of that time, rather than quantity? Both of those choices are thoughtful and brave, but for all of us, it's our choice. That's true at the end of life and for medical care throughout our lives. If you're pregnant, do you want genetic screening? Is a knee replacement right or not? Do you want to do dialysis in a clinic or at home? The answer is: it depends. What medical care will help you live the way you want to? I hope you remember that question the next time you face a decision in your health care. Remember that you always have a choice, and it is OK to say no to a treatment that's not right for you. There's a poem by W.S. Merwin — it's just two sentences long — that captures how I feel now. "Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color." For me that poem evokes my love for Paul, and a new fortitude that came from loving and losing him. When Paul said, "It's going to be OK," that didn't mean that we could cure his illness. Instead, we learned to accept both joy and sadness at the same time; to uncover beauty and purpose both despite and because we are all born and we all die. And for all the sadness and sleepless nights, it turns out there is joy. I leave flowers on Paul's grave and watch our two-year-old run around on the grass. I build bonfires on the beach and watch the sunset with our friends. Exercise and mindfulness meditation have helped a lot. And someday, I hope I do get remarried. Most importantly, I get to watch our daughter grow. I've thought a lot about what I'm going to say to her when she's older. "Cady, engaging in the full range of experience — living and dying, love and loss — is what we get to do. Being human doesn't happen despite suffering. It happens within it. When we approach suffering together, when we choose not to hide from it, our lives don't diminish, they expand." I've learned that cancer isn't always a battle. Or if it is, maybe it's a fight for something different than we thought. Our job isn't to fight fate, but to help each other through. Not as soldiers but as shepherds. That's how we make it OK, even when it's not. By saying it out loud, by helping each other through ... and a gorilla suit never hurts, either. Thank you. (Applause) |
A climate solution where all sides can win | {0: 'Ted Halstead is breathing new life into US and global climate policy by mobilizing conservative leaders and CEOs around a breakthrough carbon dividends solution.'} | TED2017 | I have a two-year-old daughter named Naya who is under the mistaken impression that this conference is named in honor of her father. (Laughter) Who am I to contradict my baby girl? As many of you know, there's something about becoming a parent that concentrates the mind on long-term problems like climate change. It was the birth of my daughter that inspired me to launch this climate organization, in order to counteract the excessive polarization of this issue in the United States, and to find a conservative pathway forward. Yes, folks, a Republican climate solution is possible, and you know what? It may even be better. (Laughter) Let me try to prove that to you. What we really need is a killer app to climate policy. In the technology world, a killer app is an application so transformative that it creates its own market, like Uber. In the climate world, a killer app is a new solution so promising that it can break through the seemingly insurmountable barriers to progress. These include the psychological barrier. Climate advocates have long been encouraging their fellow citizens to make short-term sacrifices now for benefits that accrue to other people in other countries 30 or 40 years in the future. It just doesn't fly because it runs contrary to basic human nature. Next is the geopolitical barrier. Under the current rules of global trade, countries have a strong incentive to free ride off the emissions reductions of other nations, instead of strengthening their own programs. This has been the curse of every international climate negotiations, including Paris. Finally, we have the partisan barrier. Even the most committed countries — Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada — are nowhere near reducing emissions at the required scale and speed. Not even close. And the partisan climate divide is far more acute here in the United States. We are fundamentally stuck, and that is why we need a killer app of climate policy to break through each of these barriers. I'm convinced that the road to climate progress in the United States runs through the Republican Party and the business community. So in launching the Climate Leadership Council, I started by reaching out to a who's who of Republican elder statesmen and business leaders, including James Baker and George Schultz, the two most respected Republican elder statesmen in America; Martin Feldstein and Greg Mankiw, the two most respected conservative economists in the country; and Henry Paulson and Rob Walton, two of the most successful and admired business leaders. Together, we co-authored "The Conservative Case For Carbon Dividends." This represents the first time that Republican leaders put forth a concrete market-based climate solution. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) We presented our plan at the White House two weeks after President Trump moved in. Almost every leading editorial board in the country has since endorsed our plan, and Fortune 100 companies from a wide range of industries are now getting behind it. So by now you're probably wondering, what exactly is this plan? Well, our carbon dividends solution is based on four pillars. The first is a gradually rising carbon tax. Although capitalism is a wonderful system, like many operating systems, it's prone to bugs, which, in this case, are called "market failures." By far the largest is that market prices fail to take social and environmental costs into account. That means every market transaction is based on incorrect information. This fundamental bug of capitalism, more than any other single factor, is to blame for our climate predicament. Now in theory, this should be an easy problem to fix. Economists agree that the best solution is to put a price on the carbon content of fossil fuels, otherwise known as a carbon tax. This would discourage carbon emissions in every single economic transaction, every day of the year. However, a carbon tax by itself has proven to be unpopular and a political dead end. The answer is to return all the money raised directly to citizens, in the form of equal monthly dividends. This would transform an unpopular carbon tax into a popular and populist solution, and it would also solve the underlying psychological barrier that we discussed, by giving everyone a concrete benefit in the here and now. And these benefits would be significant. Assuming a carbon tax rate that starts at 40 dollars per ton, a family of four would receive 2,000 dollars per year from the get-go. According to the US Treasury Department, the bottom 70 percent of Americans would receive more in dividends than they would pay in increased energy prices. That means 223 million Americans would win economically from solving climate change. And that — (Applause) is revolutionary, and could fundamentally alter climate politics. But there's another revolutionary element here. The amount of the dividend would grow as the carbon tax rate increases. The more we protect our climate, the more our citizens benefit. This creates a positive feedback loop, which is crucial, because the only way we will reach our long-term emission-reduction goals is if the carbon tax rate goes up every year. The third pillar of our program is eliminating regulations that are no longer needed once a carbon dividends plan is enacted. This is a key selling point to Republicans and business leaders. So why should we trade climate regulations for a price on carbon? Well, let me show you. Our plan would achieve nearly twice the emissions reductions of all Obama-era climate regulations combined, and nearly three times the new baseline after President Trump repeals all of those regulations. That assumes a carbon tax starting at 40 dollars per ton, which translates into roughly an extra 36 cents per gallon of gas. Our plan by itself would meet the high end of America's commitment under the Paris Climate Agreement, and as you can see, the emissions reductions would continue over time. This illustrates the power of a conservative climate solution based on free markets and limited government. We would end up with less regulation and far less pollution at the same time, while helping working-class Americans get ahead. Doesn't that sound like something we could all support? (Applause) The fourth and final pillar of our program is a new climate domino effect, based on border carbon adjustments. Now that may sound complicated, but it, too, is revolutionary, because it provides us a whole new strategy to reach a global price on carbon, which is ultimately what we need. Let me show you an example. Suppose Country A adopts a carbon dividends plan, and Country B does not. Well, to level the playing field and protect the competitiveness of its industries, Country A would tax imports from Country B based on their carbon content. Fair enough. But here's where it gets really interesting, because the money raised at the border would increase the dividends going to the citizens of Country A. Well, how long do you think it would take the public in Country B to realize that that money should be going to them, and to push for a carbon dividends plan in their own land? Add a few more countries, and we get a new climate domino effect. Once one major country or region adopts carbon dividends with border carbon adjustments, other countries are compelled to follow suit. One by one the dominoes fall. And this domino effect could start anywhere. My preference, strongly, is the United States, but it could also start in the United Kingdom, in Germany or another European country, or even in China. Let's take China as an example. China is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but what its leaders care even more about is transitioning their economy to consumer-led economic development. Well, nothing could do more to hasten that transition than giving every Chinese citizen a monthly dividend. In fact, this is the only policy solution that would enable China to meet its environmental and economic goals at the same time. That's why this is the killer app of climate policy, because it would enable us to overcome each of the barriers we discussed earlier: the psychological barrier, the partisan barrier, and, as we've just seen, the geopolitical barrier. All we need is a country to lead the way. And one method of finding what you're looking for is to take out an ad. So let's read this one together. Wanted: country to pioneer carbon dividends plan. Cost to country: zero. Starting date: as soon as possible. Advantages: most effective climate solution, popular and populist, pro-growth and pro-business, shrinks government and helps the working class. Additional compensation: gratitude of current and future generations, including my daughter. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Just one question for you, Ted. I'm actually not sure I've seen a conservative get a standing O at TED before that. That's pretty cool. The logic seems really powerful, but some people you talk to in politics say it's hard to imagine this still getting through Congress. How are you feeling about momentum behind this? Ted Halstead: So I understand that many are very pessimistic about what's happening in the United States with President Trump. I'm less pessimistic; here's why. The actions of this White House, the early actions on climate, are just the first move in a complex game of climate chess. So far it's been a repeal-only strategy; the pressure is going to mount for a replacement program, which is where we come in. And there are three reasons why, which I'll go through real quickly. One, the business community is fundamentally parting ways with the White House on climate change. In fact, we're finding a number of Fortune 100 companies supporting our program. Within two months, we're going to be announcing some really surprising names coming out in favor of this program. Two, there is no issue in American politics where there's a more fundamental gap between the Republican base and the Republican leadership than climate change. And three, thinking of this analogy of chess, the big decision up ahead is: Does the administration stay in Paris? Well, let's pan it out both ways. If it stays in Paris, as many are pushing for in the administration, well then that begs a question: What's the plan? We have the plan. But if they don't stay in Paris, the international pressure will be overwhelming. Our Secretary of State will be asking other countries for NATO contributions, and they'll be saying, "No, give us our Paris commitment. Come through on your commitments, we'll come through on ours." So, international, business and even the Republican base will all be calling for a Republican replacement plan. And, hopefully, we've provided one. CA: Thank you so much, Ted. TH: Thank you, Chris. (Applause) |
Why school should start later for teens | {0: 'Wendy Troxel specializes in behavioral treatments for insomnia and other sleep disorders.'} | TEDxManhattanBeach | It's six o'clock in the morning, pitch black outside. My 14-year-old son is fast asleep in his bed, sleeping the reckless, deep sleep of a teenager. I flip on the light and physically shake the poor boy awake, because I know that, like ripping off a Band-Aid, it's better to get it over with quickly. (Laughter) I have a friend who yells "Fire!" just to rouse her sleeping teen. And another who got so fed up that she had to dump cold water on her son's head just to get him out of bed. Sound brutal ... but perhaps familiar? Every morning I ask myself, "How can I — knowing what I know and doing what I do for a living — be doing this to my own son?" You see, I'm a sleep researcher. (Laughter) So I know far too much about sleep and the consequences of sleep loss. I know that I'm depriving my son of the sleep he desperately needs as a rapidly growing teenager. I also know that by waking him up hours before his natural biological clock tells him he's ready, I'm literally robbing him of his dreams — the type of sleep most associated with learning, memory consolidation and emotional processing. But it's not just my kid that's being deprived of sleep. Sleep deprivation among American teenagers is an epidemic. Only about one in 10 gets the eight to 10 hours of sleep per night recommended by sleep scientists and pediatricians. Now, if you're thinking to yourself, "Phew, we're doing good, my kid's getting eight hours," remember, eight hours is the minimum recommendation. You're barely passing. Eight hours is kind of like getting a C on your report card. There are many factors contributing to this epidemic, but a major factor preventing teens from getting the sleep they need is actually a matter of public policy. Not hormones, social lives or Snapchat. Across the country, many schools are starting around 7:30am or earlier, despite the fact that major medical organizations recommend that middle and high school start no earlier than 8:30am. These early start policies have a direct effect on how much — or really how little sleep American teenagers are getting. They're also pitting teenagers and their parents in a fundamentally unwinnable fight against their own bodies. Around the time of puberty, teenagers experience a delay in their biological clock, which determines when we feel most awake and when we feel most sleepy. This is driven in part by a shift in the release of the hormone melatonin. Teenagers' bodies wait to start releasing melatonin until around 11pm, which is two hours later than what we see in adults or younger children. This means that waking a teenager up at 6am is the biological equivalent of waking an adult up at 4am. On the unfortunate days when I have to wake up at 4am, I'm a zombie. Functionally useless. I can't think straight, I'm irritable, and I probably shouldn't be driving a car. But this is how many American teenagers feel every single school day. In fact, many of the, shall we say, unpleasant characteristics that we chalk up to being a teenager — moodiness, irritability, laziness, depression — could be a product of chronic sleep deprivation. For many teens battling chronic sleep loss, their go-to strategy to compensate is consuming large quantities of caffeine in the form of venti frappuccinos, or energy drinks and shots. So essentially, we've got an entire population of tired but wired youth. Advocates of sleep-friendly start times know that adolescence is a period of dramatic brain development, particularly in the parts of the brain that are responsible for those higher order thinking processes, including reasoning, problem-solving and good judgment. In other words, the very type of brain activity that's responsible for reining in those impulsive and often risky behaviors that are so characteristic of adolescence and that are so terrifying to us parents of teenagers. They know that like the rest of us, when teenagers don't get the sleep they need, their brains, their bodies and behaviors suffer with both immediate and lasting effects. They can't concentrate, their attention plummets and many will even show behavioral signs that mimic ADHD. But the consequences of teen sleep loss go well beyond the classroom, sadly contributing to many of the mental health problems that skyrocket during adolescence, including substance use, depression and suicide. In our work with teens from LA Unified School District, we found that teens with sleep problems were 55 percent more likely to have used alcohol in the past month. In another study with over 30,000 high school students, they found that for each hour of lost sleep, there was a 38 percent increase in feeling sad or hopeless, and a 58 percent increase in teen suicide attempts. And if that's not enough, teens who skip out on sleep are at increased risk for a host of physical health problems that plague our country, including obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Then there's the risk of putting a sleep-deprived teen, with a newly minted driver's license, behind the wheel. Studies have shown that getting five hours or less of sleep per night is the equivalent of driving with a blood alcohol content above the legal limit. Advocates of sleep-friendly start times, and researchers in this area, have produced tremendous science showing the tremendous benefits of later start times. The findings are unequivocal, and as a sleep scientist, I rarely get to speak with that kind of certainty. Teens from districts with later start times get more sleep. To the naysayers who may think that if schools start later, teens will just stay up later, the truth is, their bedtimes stay the same, but their wake-up times get extended, resulting in more sleep. They're more likely to show up for school; school absences dropped by 25 percent in one district. And they're less likely to drop out. Not surprisingly, they do better academically. So this has real implications for reducing the achievement gap. Standardized test scores in math and reading go up by two to three percentage points. That's as powerful as reducing class sizes by one-third fewer students, or replacing a so-so teacher in the classroom with a truly outstanding one. Their mental and physical health improves, and even their families are happier. I mean, who wouldn't enjoy a little more pleasantness from our teens, and a little less crankiness? Even their communities are safer because car crash rates go down — a 70 percent reduction in one district. Given these tremendous benefits, you might think, well, this is a no-brainer, right? So why have we as a society failed to heed this call? Often the argument against later start times goes something like this: "Why should we delay start times for teenagers? We need to toughen them up so they're ready for the real world!" But that's like saying to the parent of a two-year-old, "Don't let Johnny nap, or he won't be ready for kindergarten." (Laughter) Delaying start times also presents many logistical challenges. Not just for students and their families, but for communities as a whole. Updating bus routes, increased transportation costs, impact on sports, care before or after school. These are the same concerns that come up in district after district, time and again around the country as school start times are debated. And they're legitimate concerns, but these are problems we have to work through. They are not valid excuses for failing to do the right thing for our children, which is to start middle and high schools no earlier than 8:30am. And in districts around the country, big and small, who have made this change, they found that these fears are often unfounded and far outweighed by the tremendous benefits for student health and performance, and our collective public safety. So tomorrow morning, when coincidentally we get to set our clocks back by an hour and you get that delicious extra hour of sleep, and the day seems a little longer, and a little more full of hope, think about the tremendous power of sleep. And think about what a gift it would be for our children to be able to wake up naturally, in harmony with their own biology. Thank you, and pleasant dreams. |
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